This very short story is an idea that I have been playing around with for the last 8 years or so, and comes directly from my own life. It is the sort of idea that I would love to include in a feature film, but given that I lack the budget and crew to make such a film, I felt it was important that I wrote it down while I still was able to remember it. I feel very much that this short should be the start of something bigger, but here it is, my first entry and the story for which this blog got its title - The Minute Hands.
The Minute Hands
by Donovan de Souza
In my mind, I often return to The Tree. It wasn’t a grand tree; not a karri, or a mighty redwood or an Ent or even Yggdrasil itself. It was just a simple...I don’t know. Something eucalypt surely. ‘Gum tree’ you could call it I suppose. Certainly not remotely old growth and, though towering to a 12-year old boy, diminutive compared to the elders that lived towards the end of that rectangular field colloquially dubbed ‘The Oval’. To its left: the grey of a cement lid obscuring the school water mains, to its right: a rust-speckled blue cage filled with compacted aluminium cylinders still reeking from the remnants of half-drunk beverages and the feasting of microorganisms. Behind it stood the perimeter of the grounds, on the other side of which walked older people - usually young men – carrying water skis under their arms and muttering larrikinisms in native Ocker, punctuated with the frequent “fuckin’” and the occasional “cunt”. And before it stood the gnarled and peeling skeleton of a cricket pitch that had obviously gone out of favor when basketball courts and play grounds stole its usual clientele.
The tree was the locus of activity in the area. Well, it wasn’t really I suppose, but for all intents and purposes, to us it was. Small, childish hands clung to its trunk and branches, their owners squealing in yet-to-be-cracked voices as they stealthily avoided being tagged. Tornado was the game; little more than a machismo-drenched (and violent) variation on the perennial classic Chasey, where ‘home’ was only safe if you were able to latch onto the four holes of the water main lid, or someone was kind enough to hold a linking hand out to you. As a teacher walked pass, the game would slyly take on a more sedate tone, only to return to its original intensity when surveillance was finally averted. We lived for this, and the midday classes were but a recess to this Most Important Game that we played.
There were five of us or ten of us… hell, some would say there were even twenty of us depending on the power plays in playground politics, and depending on whom you ask and how they reckon it. Perhaps it was like Mile’s band in the early 60s: Davis the constant in the trumpet chair with a metamorphosing roster of rotating players filling out the remaining cast. Or perhaps it was more a cline; with the key figures forming a loose core blending out into the nearly-theres and the hangers-on, fading into a periphery of occasional players for whom this nostalgia would have little or no meaning. I guess at the end of the day the number doesn’t matter; what was important was the tree was ours, and there was a feeling that we were somehow tied to that tree, and that its fate would be our fate too.
Summer and graduation came, and it brought with it the grand narrative of progress, armed with chainsaws and bulldozers and building planners. A bigger and better school hall, they said. Weakly but with an earnestness that would fade as our voices deepened and our hearts hardened, we spoke of saving the tree entirely or gathering cuttings so our friend could live in some way as a seedling in our respective gardens. Parents smiled at such idealism, before tactfully declining while we, fledgling teens standing on the brink, lacked neither the organization nor the drive to save that part of ourselves that was firmly rooted into the soil of that land. So as the playgrounds fell silent and as the saws whirred into life, our childhood story was cut down and us, its branches, were scattered into the wind with the sawdust of our tree’s fatal wound.
The tree was the locus of activity in the area. Well, it wasn’t really I suppose, but for all intents and purposes, to us it was. Small, childish hands clung to its trunk and branches, their owners squealing in yet-to-be-cracked voices as they stealthily avoided being tagged. Tornado was the game; little more than a machismo-drenched (and violent) variation on the perennial classic Chasey, where ‘home’ was only safe if you were able to latch onto the four holes of the water main lid, or someone was kind enough to hold a linking hand out to you. As a teacher walked pass, the game would slyly take on a more sedate tone, only to return to its original intensity when surveillance was finally averted. We lived for this, and the midday classes were but a recess to this Most Important Game that we played.
There were five of us or ten of us… hell, some would say there were even twenty of us depending on the power plays in playground politics, and depending on whom you ask and how they reckon it. Perhaps it was like Mile’s band in the early 60s: Davis the constant in the trumpet chair with a metamorphosing roster of rotating players filling out the remaining cast. Or perhaps it was more a cline; with the key figures forming a loose core blending out into the nearly-theres and the hangers-on, fading into a periphery of occasional players for whom this nostalgia would have little or no meaning. I guess at the end of the day the number doesn’t matter; what was important was the tree was ours, and there was a feeling that we were somehow tied to that tree, and that its fate would be our fate too.
Summer and graduation came, and it brought with it the grand narrative of progress, armed with chainsaws and bulldozers and building planners. A bigger and better school hall, they said. Weakly but with an earnestness that would fade as our voices deepened and our hearts hardened, we spoke of saving the tree entirely or gathering cuttings so our friend could live in some way as a seedling in our respective gardens. Parents smiled at such idealism, before tactfully declining while we, fledgling teens standing on the brink, lacked neither the organization nor the drive to save that part of ourselves that was firmly rooted into the soil of that land. So as the playgrounds fell silent and as the saws whirred into life, our childhood story was cut down and us, its branches, were scattered into the wind with the sawdust of our tree’s fatal wound.
