The Old Mechanics

With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not entirely sure I had the nicest childhood. Not that I’m being a negative Nancy or anything…I count my blessings where they fall. My parents gave me a roof over my head (the roof of the cupboard under the stairs), they gave me a ton of different skills in all those areas (because of all the labour) and I wouldn’t be half the person I am if they had just tossed me out on my ear. True, they told me often, and loudly, that they sincerely wished I had never been born, and that my continued existence was due to them needing someone to fix the car and mow the lawn, but one learns to shrug off these things.

Now, when I get a car service in Malvern, I know all my stuff. Not that the mechanics near me are vindictive, unlike the ones down near the coast of Sydney who get tourists passing by with their rental cars who’ve learned to be conniving and squeeze every last penny out of their clientele. Melbourne mechanics, on the whole, are decent sorts. In fact, it was when I was ordered to call them on the phone because my parents had broken something during one of their nightly jaunts that I realised that mechanics really are a decent sort. Maybe because they do honest work with their hands, and machines do not lie. Well, not THAT kind of machine…advanced machines ones that can think and have a consciences, the ones that my father was working on in the basement of that mansion before he vanished? Those lie. But I digress.

Mechanics. Car servicing. Perhaps my only link to the outside world. Perhaps that’s why, when I walk past my local Elwood car servicing garage, I feel…something. Something beyond my scant few years.

I should put up more posters. Father may never have wanted to see me again, but I would at least like to know where he went.

-Baz