- Author Biography - 

P.M. Smith was born in Melbourne and is married with two adult sons. Duality is his first published novel. 

The author has a fascination for delving into the machinations of the human mind. In Duality, he has created a ‘thinking person’s’ psychological thriller.

Be careful what you speak

As much as that you seek

For answers that you thirst

May well find you out first  

- 1 - (part sample)

It occurred to me just how bizarre the thoughts were feeding through my mind as I stood there transfixed, eyes burning this nightmare image onto my brain. I so wanted to look away, but for some inexorable reason I couldn’t. A foggy vagueness had overcome me and there was a peculiar ringing, or buzzing, all around me, a familiar noise akin to when lightning had once struck my house, creating a deep reverberating sound. I would’ve envisaged disgorging my last meal, or at least to dry wretch as a consequence of this unexpected assault on my senses. But I didn’t. I felt light-headedness, queasiness in the pit of my stomach, rapid breathing and an accelerating pulse, but no need to puke. Perhaps my body was yet to physically react to this sickening visual bombardment.

Truth be told, I didn’t know what I was feeling at present. It seemed as if, in the blink of an eye, my past forty-five years of existence had been swiftly and irrevocably changed forever. A mere forty minutes earlier, I’d left my office, arriving here for my five o’clock appointment, only to be greeted by this visualisation from Hell.

It made no sense at all. Why would he have done such a terrible thing?

Harold W. McIntosh was, well he was just Harry McIntosh, your typical, be-speckled, balding, sixty-year-old CPA. His wife, Mary, worked out front between nine and five, Mondays to Fridays. His poky little office was one of five dilapidated shop fronts, three of them empty, the other sporadically occupied by a local politician. I recalled Harry often commenting on the “cheapest rent in the Eastern suburbs”, displaying his incredulity at me for not entertaining a move from my fifteen-grand-a-year digs, to the vacant premises next to his own. He would squint through his thick-rimmed glasses; beseeching me to consider the “lousy six hundred bucks a month” it would cost me in rent. It was funny I could never bring my self to tell him the truth, to give him the legitimate reason for my reluctance to join him. I preferred side-stepping the issue each time he had brought it up, deftly changing the subject. It was not so much the lack of prestige and outer suburban location concerning me, more so the intolerable thought of having Harry “motor-mouth” McIntosh invading my business premises several times a day, just to “chew the fat”. Harry in small doses was, at a stretch, tolerable, but to potentially encounter him thrice or more times a day, well that was just beyond anything a normal human being could endure.

I had occasionally pondered over what it must have been like for poor old Harry, spending the majority of his waking hours in the presence of his dowdy wife. Across the years it must have become a stifling reality, no matter how affable their long-term relationship might have been. Then again, there was one undeniable truth. Mary McIntosh was far from an agreeable type, always abrupt, seldom choosing to engage you in any more than the absolute minimum necessary conversation. I could in no way envision her fulfilling Harry’s daily tête-à-tête requirements, nor did I want to be the one filling this gap in his life!

How incredibly asinine my initial thoughts had been. What the hell had I been thinking standing, head spinning, confused, drowning in my own conflicting emotions? For crying out loud, he could still be alive! I should be calling “000”. Oh no, for me to do that meant I had to determine if he was breathing or not. Cognisant of the fact I’d been biting down hard on my upper lip, I felt no resultant pain; my body had become almost numb. Reluctantly, I forced myself forward, accompanied by the sensation I was not actually walking, but kind of gliding across the carpeted floor, finally stopping at the side of Harry’s tarnished desk. His right arm was sprawled across the adjoining credenza, body positioned on a peculiar sloping angle. His left hand lay palm up on the desktop, fingers wrapped around a semi-automatic pistol.

I fleetingly pondered the rectitude of Harry’s positioning and the small circular wound in his left temple, up and across from one of his thick meandering eyebrows. I figured there should’ve been a tell-tale trickle of blood tracing a thin line down his cheek, but there wasn’t. The wound was also blackish in colour rather than blood red. Was that right? I also postulated that there should have been a gaping wound on the right side of his head, presumably where the bullet had escaped the confines of his fragile skull, but there was no such evidence, no indication the bullet had actually exited from his body. Harry’s eyes were closed, his thin lips slightly ajar. You would have expected a dramatic trail of blood leading out from his mouth, down his chin and onto his crumpled business shirt, his brain inevitably bleeding out, lungs filling with blood, or did that not happen in real life when someone was shot through the head? The remaining curiosity for me was his facial expression, kind of unremarkable, almost serene.

I asked myself the question once more - Is he dead? His complexion appeared very ashen; mind you he’d always been pale-skinned. Was it possible his present facial colour was in fact his normal skin pigmentation? I inquisitively studied his torso, detecting no chest movement, before realizing the pounding sound in my ears was coming from my own rapidly-beating heart, not his. I found it increasingly difficult to breathe, my anxiety levels reaching fever pitch.

Eventually, I surrendered to the inevitability of my predicament, cautiously reaching across toward his limp right wrist, simultaneously calling to mind a car accident I’d had ten years before, remembering those few brief seconds as the vehicles impacted and I spun out of control; everything had been so vivid at the time. There was also an instant of immense clarity, as if I’d just stepped outside of my own body to take a look at the events unfolding before me. This was so like that. In real time, it probably only took a second to grab hold of his thin bony wrist, yet so many things had traversed my mind in painful slow motion. His tell-tale crooked smile, flaccid handshake, the grumpy wife placing a milky cup of tea in front of you, his incessant chortle, followed by a guttural snorting sound. And, there was always a kind of sadness behind those beady eyes, particularly each time I had expressed the need to get going. What could have happened in this man’s torpid life that was so extraordinarily significant as to drive him to perform this ultimate act of release?

Shit. That was so damned real. Stumbling back, head spinning, I violently shivered. Harry McIntosh had absolutely no hint of a pulse. If that was the case, how in hell did he just take hold of my hand? I think I screamed, but there was no actual sound coming out of my mouth…

I hung on for grim life, fighting desperately with the high-powered vehicle as it shook violently in response to my every effort to steer it out of the gravel siding, back onto the bitumen surface. The driver-side tyres screeched as the rubber struggled to grip the asphalt beneath them; the passenger-side wheels left gaping wounds in the unsealed shoulder of the highway. After what had felt like an eternity, I managed to straighten the car up, regaining control of the fish-tailing monster.

‘You bloody idiot!’ I cursed out loud. My heart had been beating a hundred miles an hour, perspiration wetting my panicked face. Did I just nod off then? I couldn’t believe it. I had only been driving for two-and-a-bit hours. Admittedly, it was a dull overcast day with cool winds keeping the temperature well below the forecast top of eighteen degrees. All the same, nodding off like that was totally out of character for me. I stretched my face, widening my eyes in an attempt to snap out of my unexpected lethargy.

Occasionally, the sun would make an attempt to break through, inevitably failing in its efforts, the clouds puffing up their stalwart resistance, any momentary warming rays quickly absorbed by the car’s tinted windows. The eight-cylinder engine had been making light work of the wending roads, cresting one nondescript hill after another, before a signpost rose up informing me I was driving through ‘Baker’s Cutting’. Clearing the cutting, a roadside marker displayed ‘M70’. The ‘M’ stood for Mervale, a regional metropolis of some ten thousand people. Although a copious number of years had flowed under life’s bridge, the warm memories had stayed with me, a quarter of a century failing to dim them. One of Mervale’s hotels, the Old England Arms, conjured up some cheerful recollections. Nonetheless, Mervale was not my impulsively chosen destination.

More than two decades had elapsed since I last made this road trip. It didn’t matter though; I instinctively knew in a minute or two, I would arrive at Turrendippen Road, turning right to drive the twenty odd kilometres in search of another epoch, a part of my life so shrouded in the past it made me feel like a stranger to myself.

It’s distressing how life’s very existence can all of a sudden mount up on you, wave after wave of pressure and expectation often exaggerated by your own levels of insecurity. I figured Twenty-first Century life was far more intense than The Eagles could ever have envisaged when writing Hotel California. If in the seventies life was spent in the fast lane, now it was in hyper-drive. But then again, when I considered the pitiable fate of poor old Harry McIntosh, was my lot really all that burdensome to bear? There was one undeniable statistic favouring me - I was alive and he was most assuredly dead!

At last, there it was the inanimate objective my tiring eyes had so eagerly sought, in all its discoloured glory, a single faded strip of timber pointing eastward declaring “Turrendippen Road’’. A more recently installed metal sign implored me to continue on to Mervale, but that was not my yearning; my subconscious want lay in the alternate direction. Underneath the old wooden road marker sat two small indicators. The first affirmed, “Kueyup 8km”; the second, “Bromadoon 24km”.

I turned into Turrendippen Road, a nervous anticipation growing inside me. I was next greeted by an old-style, non-fluorescent marker indicating another three kilometres to Kueyup, a further nineteen to Bromadoon. The trees thickened appreciably along this part of the road. It was a hilly stretch with little grazing or agriculture undertaken within the immediate area. Both sides of the carriageway were, in the main, the original bushland, no doubt present when explorer William Birmingham came through the valley in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds. The loggers never seemed to take to this side of the small mountain. It was not until you went past the miniscule township of Kueyup that the logging operations had commenced in the early part of the twentieth century.

Once more my mind began to wander. When I was in my mid-twenties, chasing obscure budgets and targets to earn a bonus here or a trip there, a wise man once told me, “You know what, Phil, money can’t buy you happiness, but then again, who wants to be a happy bum anyway?” In reality, this judicious confidant was a balding, chain-smoking, twice divorced, womanising sales manager. Yes, Alex “could sell a fridge to an Eskimo” McCready had been a hard-drinking man who later dropped dead of a massive heart attack, barely two days shy of his sixtieth birthday. Nevertheless, he sure did fit a hell of a lot of living into those fifty-nine years eleven months and twenty-nine days. Perchance, maturity and Father Time had long dispensed with any desire on my part to seek an endless supply of wine, women and song. All the same, there was something desperately missing from my life. More to the point, I wanted to rediscover a part of me that was just a vague distracting memory, something possibly lost in the annals of time.

On occasions, some choices are not ours to make; we are denied the opportunity to turn away, our rights denuded by forces and circumstances beyond our individual control. Sure, there had been an ever-present need for me to find a solution to a number of issues affecting my life right now, but did that have to take absolute precedence over one fleeting moment of freedom, a brief desire to escape the incessant pressures that life constantly manages to throw-up at you? Was it really so wrong to crave just a handful of hours away from everything and everyone?

I had accomplished all that I could within the financial services industry; at least, that was the conclusion I had reached. Within the last decade, I’d earned good levels of commissions and fees, delivering me a million-dollar house, flash car, a heated swimming pool, platinum credit cards, sporting and exclusive club memberships. Yet for some reason, Alex McCready’s words kept reverberating around my head: Who wants to be a happy bum anyway? Strangely, I couldn’t muster the obvious answer to that timeless question. Perhaps only when life throws one damn big spanner in the works do you ever really appreciate what you have.

Did it still play heavily on my mind, the tragic death of Harry McIntosh, especially the way he had so violently taken his own life? Was I experiencing some form of guilt for not having made a greater effort to be his friend, rather than just a business acquaintance? I probably shared in common with him, although hopefully to a far lesser extent, the same kind of underlying emptiness and self doubts, a sort of difficult to explain melancholy. And, what of the fast-talking born-again sales manager, Alex McCready; what really had lain beneath his outwardly affable exterior? In reality, probably a lonely tortured man, hugely successful in every enterprise he had ever targeted, except for the one aspect of his life that was continuously denied him - never finding his one true soul-mate. As diverse as the two causal effects were, nonetheless they had delivered an identical ending to both men’s lives, premature death! That was where I definitely needed to rule the line on my analogous cogitations.

Admittedly, I’d always envisaged my business successes and the money accompanying my accomplishments, would finally and permanently encapsulate me within a new-found idealistic way of life. With blinkers firmly affixed, my sole intent had been to build a bogus persona, stamping my authority on all those around me. So important did that become, that I had forgotten to fill my gold-encrusted façade with anything even resembling deference. Perhaps therein lay my greatest torment, this enduring vacuum in my life but, unlike Alex McCready, I didn’t want to fill it with an excess of alcohol and illicit sexual dalliances. To me, that was like punching a hole in the wall, then hiding it with a picture. No matter how many times you looked at that same damn picture, you always knew the hole was still there in the wall! I most definitely did not want to be driven into some unfathomable darkness, plumbing the depths of hopelessness, as had been the case with poor old Harry McIntosh.

The township of Kueyup was one of those tiny dots on a map that took you by surprise, rounding a sharp bend on the ever-degrading shoulders of the narrow secondary road. By the time your eyes managed to focus on the 80 speed sign, quickly followed by “Welcome to Kueyup”, the next thing you saw was an encircled “100” symbol and a departing metal plaque, inviting you to “Please come back again to the historic township of Kueyup”.

Continuing with my mental wanderings, I revisited the decades-old utterance my wife’s conceited mother had apparently made to her daughter, upon hearing for the first time of our intended nuptials. Her spoken words had only recently been told to me as part of a heated exchange with my wife – “When the day arrives, Shelley, and you come to your senses, I will be here, not to say ‘I told you so’, but to welcome you back with open arms.” If, for no other reason, her mother’s stinging putdown, from all those years ago, had reinforced my justification in not sharing every truth with Shelley. Anyway, it was all going to prove to be just a transitory setback; everything would come together, sooner or later. Admittedly, it was happening more slowly than I would have liked, but it would all be okay, of that I was certain. I remained determined about one thing though - the fervent desire to make Shelley’s mother eat every single one of her twenty-year-old words, even if it proved to be the last thing I did in this life.

I jiggled my head. Surely, I couldn’t be dozing off again. Having briefly rubbed the cobwebs from my eyes, I caught sight of a small clearing to my right. A dilapidated timber structure sat there inevitably surrendering to Mother Nature, the wooden veranda collapsing under its own weight, a fading sign announcing; ‘Milda’s General Store’. I could remember this very shop being boarded over after its elderly owner had passed on. That was twenty-nine years ago! I reckon the old lady only kept the doors open as a means of extending her own existence. Townsfolk would drive from nearby Kueyup, or up from Bromadoon to buy groceries from her store, just to help keep old Ms Milda going. She was well into her nineties when someone had come across her, slumped on the floor behind the store counter. According to rural legend, she’d been found holding tightly onto a can of sardines, with several more scattered around her as she lay on the floor. Despite this fact, the local police had concluded there was nothing fishy in connection with her death.

Old Milda’s store was approximately fourteen kilometres outside of Bromadoon, about a kilometre beyond the dot that was Kueyup. The road further narrowed after the old tumbledown structure, its shoulders tightening as the native trees reached out, enveloping you beneath their generous canopies. I called to mind that Kueyup sat atop the highest part of the surrounding valley. It was two hundred metres above sea level, the dense forest keeping the entire district several degrees cooler than the two major towns of Mervale to the North and Warranack to the South. At some point during the nineteen-forties, the loggers ceased their lumber cutting activities taking place on the sloping valley walls between Kueyup and Bromadoon, never to return. A couple of decades after that, our bewildered young blokes were suddenly firing bullets at an invisible enemy, thousands of kilometres away across the Indian Ocean in Vietnam. As they did so, an unconventional lifestyle developed all around the globe, producing an array of weird-looking creatures, literally emerging from out of nowhere, each with long scraggy hair, beads and psychedelic everything, not forgetting the promise of “free love”. Some of those utopian dreamers had led another army of yesterday’s youth, this time not to war, but into the countryside to seek out an alternative lifestyle. The sleepy hamlet of Bromadoon had suddenly come to life with the arrival of the Hippies.

During the sixties the State Government had built a new dam, flooding thousands of hectares of low-lying land, the upsurge of water eventually creeping into parts of the valley to the North-West of Bromadoon. This undertaking inevitably attracted the “boaties”. By the end of that decade, the developers had arrived, starting on stage one of a sizable rural sub-division. From there, a menagerie of people began to frequent their newly-constructed weekenders and farmlets. In summer, with the much cooler temperatures, city dwellers would make the three-hour trek to the valley region, escaping the thirty-five and sometimes forty degree days oppressing the urban sprawl. During the months of February and March, Bromadoon’s permanent population of 500 would swell into thousands, thanks to the Southern Summer exodus.

I sighed, wondering why we sometimes do things even after reflecting on our actions with the value of hindsight. Take this morning for example. I had opened the connecting door to the garage, having performed that function every weekday of every month for the past five years, before walking down the steps across to my silver chariot. It had just gone nine o’clock on this overcast Wednesday morning. I’d thrown my briefcase onto the floor behind the driver’s seat, dropping into my soft leather throne. All eight cylinders fired into life, as Stevie Nicks began to caress my ears with her sexy rasping voice. As was my usual practice, I had driven out the cul-de-sac, down Century Drive until reaching Manning Road. My office, as it had been for half a decade, was less than twenty minutes away, if I turned right. On my left, about three hours drive, sat the insignificant hamlet of Bromadoon. So why did I do it? With everything else that had happened to me in recent times, why on this particular Wednesday morning did the persistent embers smouldering deep down inside of me suddenly erupt into rampant flames, filling me with an inexplicable need to break free from life’s overpowering shackles? I really didn’t know the answer, or may be I did; all the same it didn’t seem to matter, so I turned left!

Over time, I’d successfully pushed the revolting images and thoughts from my mind, from that terrible afternoon, six months ago at Harry McIntosh’s office. Shelley had wanted me to go see the bloody shrink again; maybe that was what had started things off between us last night. Just the thought of having to sit there in that quack’s rooms sent a shudder down my spine. I sniggered. Apart from owning a small percentage of the guy’s new Mercedes, courtesy of his exorbitant consultation fees, what else would be achieved by me revisiting him? I recalled the endless diatribe spewing forth from my mouth, sitting in front of that damned psychiatrist, only telling the bastard what I wanted him to hear. There was no way in hell I would’ve risked revealing to him my real feelings and the resultant consequences from that one terrible day, six months ago. Patient confidentiality; yeah right, pigs fly too! I knew I would only repeat the lies if I went back to him. Talk is cheap. Then again it’s not so inexpensive when it’s at an hourly rate of $200. And the tripe he would come up with, wanting to hypnotize me, regress me back to something, or some place, that supposedly held the key to all my “issues”, the primary catalyst for what I was mentally going through. What a load of crap! If you ask me, it’s more like witchcraft than proper medicine.

Rubbing at my irritated eyes, I focused my attention onto a roadside marker informing me Bromadoon was five kilometres away. I remembered back to the first time I had driven along this very road; that is to say, at twelve years of age, I wasn’t the one actually doing the driving. My father had been a successful businessman; we had plenty of money; the family didn’t want for anything, anything material at least. The one thing my father could never spare was his time. His life revolved around the ongoing growth and success of his business, any time spent with either or both of his sons appeared to be under sufferance; there was always something else more important he had to get to. As the years went by, I slowly grew to understand why, at the time, we were not high on his “must do” list. To him, delivering financial security to his family had been his one great mission in life.

It was with my father’s brother, Jack, that I’d made my first sojourn to the township of Bromadoon, more than thirty years ago. My uncle was a real character, the antithesis of my father, a knockabout kind of bloke, Fitter and Turner by trade. I could vaguely recall asking him once, when I was quite young, what exactly a Fitter and Turner did. My uncle had smiled his trademark crooked grin, drawing back on a ‘Craven A’, exhaling loudly informing me… “I fit things then I turn them”. Well, that explained everything didn’t it! Strolling away none the wiser, on a warm January day, the laughter had rung loud in my ears emanating from the assembled adults, a combination of family members and friends, all enjoying my Uncle Jack’s renowned mateship and hospitality. The tantalising smell rising up from the smouldering BBQ, the relentless blowflies buzzing all around, my little cousins running through a hose held up by their aunty. Yeah, they were special times from a simpler era when cholesterol, cigarettes and grog were not the mortal enemies of mankind. Come to think of it, my older brother had managed to only further complicate things for me, later on that afternoon, by telling me a Fitter and Turner was really a male prostitute. It wasn’t until he’d added the obligatory bodily gestures that it dawned on me what he was actually implying. I never really felt that we were cut from the same mould, my brother and I!

Uncle Jack had this bomb of a station wagon, always smelling of petrol, with balding tyres, the old-style column shift and no synchronization in first gear. You were supposed to come to a complete stop before changing down to first. My uncle never seemed to worry too much about that. We’d grit our teeth, listening to the gears crunching mercilessly when forced into first, whilst still moving along the roadway. Failing that, we’d kangaroo-hop down the road as my uncle tried to take off in second gear. Of course, that was after the car had come to a virtual stop. Either way, it was never a dull ride.

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