We crossed the half-buried railway line and the crazy man known as Treadly Tim turned a corner around the van park on Simeon Street and came toward us on his Malvern Star bicycle. Tim rode all day long around our square mile hometown with school kids throwing things at him while he let loose a stream of invective in no particular direction. He had Tourette’s syndrome – the coprolalia version – and more often than not he was cursing something his mind had conjured up for him, though, at other times, all environmental factors being balanced, he was as pleasant as a man could be.

 “G’day, Tim,” I said.

“Hello, young men,” Tim said, very civilly to both me and Erskine. He skidded his bike to a halt. “How would you two like to buy some dope off me?” he asked with theatrical courtesy.

“No thanks, Tim.”

“Well, how would you like to sell me some?”

“Don’t have any, Tim.”

“Don’t have any, hey? I see. Mmm. Well, if you don’t have any I suppose we can’t do any business then. Well – if that’s the way you little f*@# smart arse f*&% hell if ever I why the c%!# who …”

“Bye Tim,” we said.

In the afternoon I found Treadly Tim in the ‘Fruit & Flowers’ shop. The girl who worked the counter was nineteen and bored with living in a small town. She wished she could move to the city. Treadly Tim did not understand this. He was, perhaps, trying to explain to her how singularly beautiful she was, or, perhaps, that life is life whether it’s in a big or small place and the proper thing to do is to find what’s good in the place you live and give it space.

Certainly, judging by the pained expression on his face, it was not “Screw this f*#&! always trying to f*&^% watch over my stupid shoulder miserable bloody no heart bitch f@#! for f*#% bitch for love God my head hurts!” which was what he said.

The girl began dialling the number for the town’s one policeman, though the policeman was only two doors down the street and would have heard her shout.

“I’ll take him,” I told her.

I led him by the arm to the park and a bench beneath a hoop pine to cool down.

In the evening Treadly Tim sat on the stairs of the Scotsman’s Hotel where they brought him free light beer at hourly intervals and he was allowed to sit on the back stairs so long as he behaved.

I had just finished mowing the grass in the beer garden with a reel mower for a dollar.

After two beers Tim quietened down considerably. With his head sinking towards his knees, he only mumbled. The mumbling was flavoured by the occasional curse, the likes of which in the morning was let fly like a bellicose dragon unto an unjust city, but now was loosened like the unbridling of a knackered horse into an overgrown longyard with rotten fence posts and sagging wires. Eventually, I knew, Tim would go to sleep on those stairs and the publican would carry him home to the half-fallen timber lean-to where he and his ancient mother lived. In the morning it would all begin again. Tim would forget his tiredness now and attack the day with renewed faith in his craziness.

A star fell overhead.

“Look, Tim,” I called. “A falling star.”

Tim raised his head a moment too late. He picked himself up from the hotel’s back stairs. I sat against the wooden-slat fence, watching as Tim walked immensely into the centre of the yard of the public bar in our town, into relief against the firmament. He was looking for that vanished fallen star, no longer explaining anything to anyone, as though it were a pilot-fish marking the way to some long lost home – a home where everything he said made perfect sense, even unto a house in the winter and a wife of the girl at the flower shop, red wine stew that she had cooked simmering on a potbelly stove and a child whom he sang to sleep while winter sleet fell without the window and the year 1993, which was now, could not enter. He scoured the sky sadly, as though he had been cheated, tilted his head too far, swung through the constellations, and thudded to the ground.

Image: Ken Cheung