BAR

At around midnight I heard a screaming and carrying on.

At around midnight I heard a screaming and carrying on, which raised my interest because of how quiet the night normally was, and because of my mental association between screaming and ill fortune for our little community, and as a result I panicked as I leapt out of bed and bonked my head on the cash register drawer that had unclicked again, and as I stumbled through the shop I also nearly KO’d my nuts on the mannequin legs bolted to the floor in the place the window used to be and which we couldn't get rid of. When I finally made it out to the street I was ready to fight. But there was nobody to fight, just cold, still air and a hubbub from the old hotel.

Usually when someone screamed in the night it was because a gang of raiders had shown up in town and were in the process of carting off someone’s food if they were lucky or kids if they weren’t, but I couldn’t hear any yodelling, which was the other thing raiders usually did, so I jogged instead of running down the street towards the hotel. I took a shortcut through the crater where the petrol station had been and as I crested the slope I pretty much right there saw it. There was the hotel window, and in the window was a sign: "BAR". Which actually wasn’t normal, although at another time it might have been deeply normal, because it was made from glass and neon gas and powered by electricity, which was something that had run dry 40 years ago. It was bright red and blue and made Suzanne and Nick look like vampires, which pa would have said was apt, given how much he objected to the title of “mayor” and Nick’s after dark habits respectively. Well, he would have before he stuffed two bricks into the stomach pouch of his overalls and pitched himself into the old quarry. He couldn’t call anything except quarry water apt anymore.

It was surprising that Suzanne was there because it wasn’t easy to get Suzanne to shake a leg, and also surprising that Nick was there, given that he and Suzanne were not exactly bosom buddies. Suzanne was the mayor. She used to be the secretary of the local Alliance Francaise, which she had successfully argued made her fit for higher office. Nick was a sickly little creep. They were having a powwow by this point and when they saw me they stopped and started the commotion up again. Stuff like "oh, my gracious," and "what on earth", and intermittent pointing and turning around on the spot and whatnot. Pretty boilerplate stuff but I could tell they thought they were pretty clever about it. I could tell they thought I was some kind of civic-minded rube who was going to get worked up about the sign and ignore their sneaking around.

Well, I did get worked up about the sign, in the end, and I ended up thinking that their sneaking around was a daytime problem and stood there gaping at the sign until my eyes started feeling chalky and I started to think that maybe I’d breathed in some chemicals the day before and I was imagining the whole thing. Then I staggered back to the shop where ma was sitting up on her mattress. "What is it?" she whispered. And I said, "nothing. A storm."

Well, maybe it was to start with. Who knows. In the morning Suzanne made everyone stand around and look at it. "Think about it," she said. "This could be what turns this town around. What, you want to be growing carrots and waiting to be murdered by bandits for your whole lives? This is our ticket."

No one wanted to be growing carrots or waiting to be murdered for longer than necessary. Everyone looked around to see if there was anyone who was thinking that that might be actually what they did want, as boring and frightening as it was, and when they were satisfied we were all on the same page we looked back to Suzanne. There was the Kosnjeks, Peter, Janie and little Carl; the teenaged siblings Agam and Chaha who had quietly moved into the old laundromat last year without asking, but were too polite to evict; Ian the 83 year old former cop who was kind and generous except towards those who broke the mysterious rules he believed we had all made an unspoken pact to uphold, which we hadn't. Kristen the hard working 12 year old who loved agriculture and the town and tried to bring us all together with musical nights. Adam the handyman. There was my ma. Ma didn't say a whole lot. Whenever things got too hectic she shuffled on down to the quarry and pelted rocks with other rocks.

"Is it still on?" Janie asked about the sign. It was hard to see in daylight.

Suzanne stepped forward and inspected it. Yes, it was on, she declared. Murmuring followed. Once the murmuring was done there was silence, instead of a clamour, which is what I might have expected to follow a murmur, but I guess everyone was too busy imagining what it meant. The crows up on the awnings went bonkers. Then the bell tolled.

We looked over to the bell tree. It was a great big eucalypt that had grown up out of the old plant shop. About ten years ago Tracey, who was dead now, had shimmied up in it and tied a bell to one of the branches. We only rang the bell when something big was happening.

It was Nick. He was holding onto the bell rope with a stupid grin on his face.

"BAR", he said. "The age of "BAR" is here."

No one knew what to say. Everyone hated Nick. Eventually Peter Kosnjek got it together. "What are you on about, Nick," he snapped.

"It's a sign," he said dramatically. As he looked around he realised the double meaning. It WAS a sign. "It's a message," he clarified. "It's a miracle for us to interpret."

It wasn't the first time that Nick had tried to drum up enthusiasm for a little post-societal collapse cultism with him as the leader. We were used to it. We knew him too well. He was doomed to failure with us because he had an annoying personality and we thought he was a joke. If he ever wanted to be taken seriously as a mystic he'd need to take it down the road. We'd seen that kind of thing before. Wandering men with wild beards who crept into town with some kind of portable show and tried to pull off the magic trick of convincing a quorum of townspeople to drop everything and devote their lives to them. 

Usually Suzanne was the first one to take Nick down a peg or two but this time she just waited quietly until everyone had finished jeering at him and just kept going with what he had been saying, basically. “I want everyone to see this as an opportunity,” she said. “What does this sign mean to us?”

Well, that did stir up a little optimism, it must be said. It had been so long that we’d been traipsing down to the lagoon to bring back buckets of filthy lagoon water to strain and boil and strain again that we’d forgotten what clean drinking water tasted like. Maybe the sign would bring new people to town. Maybe they’d dig a well. Maybe some pilgrim would arrive with a pocketful of orange seeds and ma would get the grove she’d dreamed of before she shuffled off. 

After Suzanne’s pep talk we all dispersed to get on with our tasks. I was on hoeing with Kristen. We had to hoe the soil for the carrot seeds to go into. Kristen was a fantastic tragedy. She came to the town with her little sister Katherine when she was 8 and Katherine was 9. Katherine had leukemia. These days you only found out you had cancer when you were pretty much all cancer. Katherine was bright and sweet and tired. She bled all the time, and all Kristen could do was be positive and bandage her up, so that’s what she did. Then one day while Kristen was working Katherine disappeared from the bed she spent every hour of every day in. She left a note that said “gone for a walk see you tonight.” Night fell and Katherine didn’t come back. Kristen came to the shop where me and ma were eating our carrots with a little cloth bag and a torch. “Can you help me find her?” She asked us. “She needs her pyjamas.” 

“What about that sign?” I asked Kristen. She stopped hoeing and leant on her hoe and stared pensively at the rows of unhoed soil. “Well,” she said slowly. “I guess it’s good. But I don’t know how it’ll help with my hoeing.”

Half an hour later everyone came trickling back to the sign. We knew what a "BAR" was, of course, although there were none left, but that didn't help with the mystery. It ran on electrical currents that we had learned to replace, for most things, with animals and people. Ian knew a little bit about electricity and he took Adam into the hotel with the sign and they looked at the sign and traced its cables back to the floor. They found a trap door underneath the carpet of leaves and dust that had collected on the disintegrating plastic carpet and with the help of some of the others they prised it up. Dusty wooden steps led down into complete darkness.

Someone fetched a thick beeswax candle. Ian trudged down apprehensively. By the time he reached the bottom the little flame was a yellow speck. "Boy," he called up, "sure is dark down here."

We clustered around the trapdoor, 8 or 9 of us, lying on the ground with our faces poked over the edge. I was lying next to Chaha, which was no small treat for me, and I snuck a few glances at her hair and cheek. Really nice. I would have told her but the moment wasn't right.

Ian wasn't saying anything, which was frankly unnerving given the circumstances. Suzanne called out to him, "Ian, love, tell us what you're seeing down there."

"Well, it's hard to say," he replied from the gloom, which was a cop out of an answer but we breathed a sigh of relief anyway. About 10 minutes later he reappeared. Well, we asked, Ian, what's the simple and logical explanation for this event which we are so far refraining from describing as a miracle, but he just shook his head and disappeared. We were unsatisfied. Adam was next in the pecking order of technical expertise so he went down for a look. We heard him bumping around down there, swearing softly each time he bonked himself on a joist, and then there was a buzz and the BAR light dimmed for a second. "Adam?" we called down. "Adam?" But Adam didn't reply. I didn't want to go down there, not at all, truth be told, but truth be told I was getting a vibe from Suzanne and the others like I should maybe be feeling an obligation of some sort to do my bit for the town. And then I thought if I got to do that in front of Chaha hell that weren’t so bad. Not bad at all. So I went down the ladder and looked around. It was so dark I couldn't see anything at first. After a while I saw the dim yellow speck of the candle. It was on the ground. "Candle's on the ground," I called.

They let me come back up. We closed the trapdoor. "Let me tell the others," Suzanne said, and that was fine because none of us wanted to. That evening Suzanne gathered everyone around the bell tree, which wasn't easy because people had already settled in front of the BAR sign and only got up and came over when Suzanne started making harsh promises about extra tasks for those who didn't. "I have an announcement," she said. "Today Ian and Adam went searching for the source of the electrical sign's power. Unfortunately, they did not find it. During that search Adam was injured and we, uh, think he died."

There was a murmuring in the crowd. "Why didn't someone go looking for him, for God's sake?" Peter Kosnjek said. His voice had a lot of accusations in it. You could tell what he thought, that was for sure. He didn't think Suzanne was up to being the mayor.

"It's dangerous, Peter," said Suzanne. "There's electricity involved, and Ian's the only one with experience with electricity. The main thing is that the electrical source was unharmed and the sign is still on."

There was a fair bit of arguing about that, between the various things that people disagreed with about what Suzanne had said, like that the fact that the sign was on was the main thing. "Why isn't Ian back down there?" Peter shouted. It was a good point. Why wasn't he, anyway? Our friend was down there, dead, maybe, or perhaps not dead. Maybe just horribly injured, "fried", as Ian had sometimes said would happen when we tried to climb over the fence of the old substation even though it had been quiet for a generation. But then it was good that there was electricity in town, even if we didn’t know how or what to do with it, but then also Adam could be down there lying there in the dark, red raw and burnt and desperate for a glass of water whispering "help me" and we couldn't hear because friggin Suzanne hadn't thought to send Ian back down there. And then there was the thought that we were all starting to think a bit which was maybe it was a miracle after all. And where was Ian, anyway? And why hadn't Suzanne got him back down there?