Time After Time

“Welcome to Australia, Sir.”

“…Thanks.”

A man on his late twenties received his passport back. He replied the immigration officer behind the desk’s smile with a blank one and strutted forward, missing the offended look the officer tried to shot him because of his rude manner. What an atypical visitor, the officer thought, watching the man in long-sleeved black jacket with his hood on disappeared among thousands of other people who just arrived in Kingsford-Smith Airport in Sydney.

The hooded man only made his other contact with another once he decided to change his money in moneychanger, glaring angrily when the lady shot him suspicious look after he slapped a couple of hundred pounds in front of her. She didn’t question anything and simply pushed another pile of Australian dollars towards the pale blue-eyed male, who didn’t even bother to thank her when his business was done. The lady resisted to shout “You’re very welcome, Pom!” wrathfully to her latest customer and simply concentrated her thought to new pounds on her hand.

The man made his way outside the airport and took a cab.

“Where to?” grunted the driver, a large-sized man in her early forties.

“Wherever this much take you.” His passenger, his unfriendly passenger who didn't sit next to him and being a good mate, waved him a considerable amount of money and the driver gulped, and then drove without asking much.

“To hotel or something, Sir?” the balding man inquired carefully.

“Backpacker inn, maybe.”

“Absolutely, Sir.”

Gustav Wood sat in silence for the rest of the journey.


Gustav, who kept wishing he had more common name, had now lived for two weeks in a small backpacker inn on the centre of a small town with population around two hundred thousand people after his arrival in Australia. He started his day with trashy breakfast in walking-distance McDonald’s- the Australian called them Maccas- and spent the majority of it trying to find cheap place to simply avoiding the flooded amount of people who feel adventurous in this summer on the Southern hemisphere. Sometimes the hair on his neck stood at the sound of British accent belonged to the inn’s other guest. He then increased his effort in finding place until finally he found one on the hilly area, at the foot of Mount Keira on the South of Sydney.

Once he started to live alone, his time stopped.

The world seemed to keep moving out there, but he had resigned from trying to walk into the future like any other people do. He had stopped participating. He just lied there on his sofa in his terrible, terrible gloomy and hot living room of a granny flat and drowned himself in cheap beers and canned food. He rarely spoke or showed any emotion. The only emotion he showed was when there were people singing in the telly, amidst unusual accent of Australian he could simply ignore. He would squeezed his eyes shut and tried to not cry, because he had decided that once he stopped take part in life, he had refused to let any of that feeling hurt him anymore.

But when the darkness came, he was left alone with his nightmare. He remembered the doctor’s face and his words that sounded like death sentence. ‘Mr Wood, you are no longer able to sing- unless you plan to lose your voice completely and permanently.’ And then he saw the faces of his friends- his best friends. They were just as agitated as he were, but less furious. ‘’S okay, Gus. We’ll figure something out.’ But there was nothing to figure out. There was nothing at all to figure out and what was left for him was a mountain of guilt because he had destroyed their career, Young Guns’ career, with this stupid throat of his.

And the darkness always left him to weep on his own, sobbing uncontrollably in his sleep, alone.