Grip - A Short Story

Harold looked at the sign. He had made that sign. He had painted on it the beautiful 'give way', and lined the words in red, bold and obtrusive, like lipstick. He had been tender with that sign, more tender than he had ever been with a woman, a million times more tender than any woman had ever been with him. He had welded the sign to its post, grounding it, keeping it safe in one place and away from the big, wide, world. This was the world that had snapped him up and rolled him around its gargantuan mouth until it no longer liked the taste, before spitting him out like unsavoury gum. All this gargling had ruined the skin on his hands - or maybe it was years of being too tender to signposts - so that his knuckles blushed like fat, old milkmaids when he gripped things he needed to grip. Metal, where it used to feel meldable, mouldable and full of sleek possibility, now struck his tired hands and battled with him. When he had made the signposts for the Old Bridge, he had seen himself reflected in the steel: a powerful young man, powerful because he was young. His hands could move mountains. That was many years ago. Now, the metal resisted him just like everybody else.



Harold made all the signs in Downey Point. There were only 198 people there, and none of them were sign-makers. They hadn't let him at first, they'd insisted that the council take care of it, that his craft, his skill, really wasn't necessary at all, Harold, mate. But the council had never responded to their polite letters, and roads needed to be built in Downey Point, people needed to get to work. The fourteen children of Downey Point needed to get to school. Simply put, signs needed to be made. And so, eventually Harold leaked into the town's consciousness, until the ones who made the rules told him fine, he could make the signs, but they'd have to be approved, and he couldn't go wild on this one, he couldn't ad lib. Harold insisted that he only wanted to make the signs, and that was it.



And it was a nice sign, that one. One of the best he'd made. Beautiful, really. Give way, it declared, perhaps in a literal sense - yes, one should give way at a T-junction - but Harold liked to think his signs superseded the physical and made their way into the metaphorical. Give way in life, the sign said. Give way to yourself, give way to others, give way to emotion, give way to love, and, while you're at it, give way to the Honda coming from the right. Harold often thought that if he had not made signs, he would have made manifestos. He was a great philosopher at heart, was Harold.



He took a secret joy in the illegality of his signs. They were not properly council approved. They had looked the way signs were meant to look, and so the citizens of Downey Point did not feel the need to confirm their legitimacy, but they were still rebellious signs. Nowhere on their beautiful steel bodies did they say, in miniscule print, "courtesy of the Australian Government". They didn't even say, "courtesy of Harold, who lives in Downey Point", although Harold thought this might have been a nice touch. They remained clean; Harold's hands shook too much to write properly, anyway.



Downey Point was empty now, the emptiest it had been for seventy years. All 197 people, who, for years, had sworn to have no family, nobody "tying them down", nowhere to go other than dry, dusty and constant Downey Point, suddenly had shipped themselves off to long-lost cousins and sisters and family friends. Aunts and nephews and mothers-in-law had sprung up like seedlings in plantation season, and all 197 people had excused themselves and scurried away. Scurried away, Harold thought, before they'd even seen the worst. They had packed their bags too quickly to think of their betrayal, and Downey Point had become sad and silent, like the girl no-one chooses to dance with, standing with her back against the wall.



The only ones left were Harold and the boat-man, Peter, who operated the tiny tin boat that took people up and down the creek. Peter's occupation had been a joke for years; the distinct lack of rain in Downey Point had long since dried up the little creek, and Peter spent his days at the pub, drinking and whistling one long, slow note at a time. Yet, when the rain came - and it came like no author could describe - Peter had ventured to his shed, saved his little tin boat, and moved it temporarily to the upstairs floor of the bar. The heavens opened and some great and angry deity tore a great rip in the sky and emptied all its foul and tragic bowels onto the earth, where the water gathered in pools and ditches, rolled down hills in great waves and finally, when it came to the flat, dull landscape of Downey Point, began to rise. It climbed higher and higher, like an adventurous mountaineer, until Peter sailed his boat out of the upstairs window of the pub, and picked up Harold, who had been sitting on the roof of his house, watching the spectacle with awe and fear and satisfaction. Peter had silently driven Harold around the town; they ventured through windows and chimneys, like cartoon men who floated around many meters above where they should have been. The water had wiped out every trace of the achingly dry dirt and dust that had so characterised the land before, one great miracle of nature erasing another.



The only guiding lights were the signs that stood proudly up in the water, some almost entirely submerged, some straight-backed and visible from the waist up. Peter had brought Harold to this sign, the "give way" bold and unashamedly protruding from the murky depths. Harold asked Peter to make something, hang something on the sign, anything to show that they, those two great men, had been there when no-one else had, had seen what others had not, had braved the world of water. And Peter, his great, ruddy face crumpled in concentration, tore a page from the Health and Safety leaflet kept in the container of the boat, and folded it, his clumpish hands like bunches of grapes, until it resembled a boat, a little tin boat just like his. He finished it, examining it for unpressed creases and wilting edges, before handing it ceremoniously to Harold, and sitting back in his seat at the back of the boat. Harold leant over the side of the boat, comically far, until his body was bent double, then he placed the paper boat upon the water and watched it float away, bobbing and quivering as much as his own two hands.