"I was never imagining this, see" showing Dr. Whitmore a photo of the nail on his phone. "I believed you were experiencing real pain" she replied carefully. He didn’t bother to show her his foot, nor did she ask. “Well, I will leave it at that”, he said while getting up.
As he was opening the door to leave her room Martin turned to her, now slumped over in her chair in a way he had never seen before, “Did you literally just tell me to rub salt into the wound?”
No response - her head dropped even closer to the desk. He closed the door softly.
He ignored the receptionist and while steeling himself for the stairs remembered that before his misdiagnosed wobbly boot syndrome he would often think playfully before his descent - ”L’esprit d’escalier”.
But then he noticed something, just laying there on the very first step.
It wasn’t!
A nail? Another nail? Another old nail? The identical nail?
He bent over, holding the handrail, his balance wavering slightly still, and picked it up. The worn carpet edge nearby showed where others had been, holding down a runner that was no longer there. It was a nail - perhaps a carpet nail, the same one in every way. He turned it over in his fingers: the irregular head, the tip, the same strange shininess. He gently wrapped it in a tissue and placed it in his top pocket.
The nail was the thing the stairs had given back. The shoes were what they had taken away.
And the shoes were apparently irreplaceable. This was something Martin had established through the ordinary method of trying to replace them and failing. Uncharacteristically, in a desperate attempt to source another pair 6 months prior, he had thoughtlessly entered his credit card details into a phishing site. Fortunately no damage was done, the payment didn't go through and once it twigged he contacted the actual company that had been making them for 90 years who confirmed the site had nothing to do with them and also that his size, his style, were not available.
Martin had finally decided to say farewell to the last pair he had owned for 3 years. They were too damaged by the steps. They had required repair three times because they could not be replaced. They had a nail in one of them for months that multiple doctors had not found, that he had not found, that had been there all along under his foot while offered anti-psychotic drugs with the absurd name of "Abilify" but now with twenty percent more.
So he bought two different pairs of Volleys instead. The nearest closest thing as well as the shoes he wore prior to finding the French originals (est 1936) - Volleys (est 1939). The Volleys lasted less than five minutes.
This is what you do. You find the thing that is not the thing and you wear it anyway because at least it is not the original that gets damaged on the treacherous steps with no handrail, barbed wire fencing and illegal lip. The steps that had taken three pairs of soles already, the ones that caught his toes on the way up and his heel on the way down. "They are only shoes" he thought one evening taking down the bins as though the building itself had opinions about his footwear.
The Volleys have a pull tab. On the heel. Where tabs go. Martin used it to pull the shoe on for the first time, because that is what tabs are for.
The tab tore immediately.
Martin emailed Volley soon after. "It is going to be one of those routine ineffectual low-value testing protocol kinda days". The Volley Product Team (as though they were waiting for it) promptly confirmed that this was not a manufacturing fault. The tab was aesthetic. Decorative. A suggestion of function rather than function itself. A flag planted in the territory of usefulness without any of the obligations that usefulness entails. A word repurposed, with the flippancy of a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law, to mean tabs cannot be dual function and it was 80% unreasonable to expect them to be.
They offered him a twenty percent credit on his next order. He declined, in the register of a man who has not run out of patience for theatre performed by people who believe he has not noticed it is theatre but with oblique force and a dash of dry. "I may as well make this as fun as I can".
He wrote. "Dear Robot, The offer of 20% credit is beyond insulting.... This is not the Volley ethic... This is not a legally defensible position and is literally an out you have created for yourselves for poor/cheap design. The founders would be turning in their graves..." Martin considered the use of an idiom at this point to be an apt descriptor as the style name of the show = "Heritage".
They offered him a full refund.
"These losses will resolve" Martin muttered. Perhaps the originals were back? Martin had decided a week earlier that as his birthday was approaching and with the inevitable turfing of the old ones it was worth another look. And there they were the Spring Court G2's in Black, in his size, no loop and less than a packet of state-approved cigarettes to have two pairs shipped from Paris. The Joy.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
The Last Provincial Outhouse (Martin's Real Estate Agent) had been silent since the 6th of March. This is not nothing. Silence, professionally maintained in the presence of documented health and safety risks, is a posture. Martin had given them nearly everything ebrything they required at this stage at least - all catalogued, timestamped, submitted. They had given him the particular quality of silence that only institutions achieve: not the silence of having nothing to say, but the silence of having calculated that saying nothing costs less than saying something. They also share a wall. Their half of the building has been gentrified with the design flourish of a mid-level penny pinching bean counter. The other has not been touched since the 1970s. Martin lives in the 'other' half.
Somewhere in this calculation again was Miss Mango. Ms Mango appeared on the lease as the contact point dor the owner and also the reason her agency "Agincourt's Mire" had been handed the drip by Last Provincial (apparently). The theory was imaginatively elegant: below a certain cost threshold, you act. Above it, you refer. Referring is not acting. Referring is a corridor with no exit that has been dressed to look like a corridor with an exit.
Martin had been in corridors before. Quite a few.
Martin had also lodged an NCAT application on the evening of the seventeenth. Last Provincial received notification on the morning of the eighteenth. Their first communication in twelve days — their first acknowledgment that Martin existed and occupied a property they were obligated to maintain who had expressed less than a handful of neighbourly considerations in four years without being pressed. Perhaps the NCAT notification had improved the acoustics. It was a job request assigned to Jules Bellbottom to attend to a broken spring in his kitchen light switch. Not the mould. Not the mains. Not the building envelope. Not the handrail. Not any of the matters that constituted, in plain language, a health and safety hazard to a human being attempting to live inside their rental. This was now beyond serious.
Clearly they got the NCAT conciliation notification, he wrote to his advocate, "and yet again another minor job". Literally the replacement of a 5mm spring in a switch that had failed months ago that he had essentially fixed anyway by installing a smart bulb that (mostly) responded to a verbal command. "Lucky it got stuck in the ON position".
This is the manufactured mountain technique. Each molehill is presented as though it requires the full apparatus of institutional response — the assigned contractor, the formal notification, the courteous sign-off — so that the institution appears to be functioning at capacity. Clearly, it is functioning at incapacity. Clawing to avoid the appearance of total negligence while achieving, in practice, total negligence.
During all this he was trying to get medication compounded. Service NSW had sent an alert at 11:35am and while on the phone to the pharmacy Volley had replied at 11.11am and agreed, "This is not the experience my supervisor and I want you to have with Volley". "But I've had it" he deduced. At this very moment his faithful rendition of his circa 27,000 BP Pavlovian stylised owl figurine toppled from its perch from his shadow box. This is not Pavlovian in the conditioning sense. It is Pavlovian in the Geographical sense.
The chamber is not quite as inconspicuous. This is the point the chamber makes. Each molehill is presented to you as a mountain — treated with the same regard as signing a treaty for the Geneva Convention without the accountability. "Please don't hesitate" — so that you cannot claim nothing is being done and cannot claim it is being done either. You are expected to address them one at a time, in the manner of someone who has nothing else to do, who is not also compounding medication, who has not already addressed this, who does not notice that the molehills are being generated faster than they are being flattened."And who's idea was any of this?"
There is also mud, not literal, not yet. Agincourt's Mire had a distinct observable smectite quality - a bog of an Agency that holds the shape of anything that presses into it. No imagination required. Longbows drawn elsewhere beyond their invisible line, the imprint hardening slowly into the record. Martin is the other kind. Thixotropic mud. The kind that momentarily takes the shape before self-levelling, the surface closing back in on itself as though nothing had crossed it at all.
The mould was still there. The mains was still in the restaurant. The account with Service NSW he did not have yet had been recently modified. Jules Bellbottom would be in contact shortly to arrange access and replace the spring.
The Spring Court's arrived, An email was sent to the Mayor, The Land Title for The Last Provincial Outhouse was confirmed - Two separate Lots. "Of Course" Martin twigged and clocked, "There is certainly no incentive to outlay significant expense on half the outhouse you share a wall with to maintain it when the likelihood of the half you don't own yet is going to cost more to purchase in the long run or the like. Best let the long-drop bottom out".
Martin had his medication compunded. He had no choice, because the system that was supposed to help was far too busy being obstructive to provide an option of coming up with something that may help. A quagmire of a system that was supposed to house him safely, had decided that silence followed by a minor electrical job was a defensible position and silence was not violence. A system that had sold him shoes had decided shoe pulls were decorative. All of these systems had one thing in common, which was that none of them expected him to be able to pay enough attention.
Martin noticed. He had also been trained to knock on doors. His repertoire and practice was considerably more versatile than the routine for current operatives patently mimicked off some US true crime type nonsense. Ratta-tat-tat!
"Consider The Notice Served".
Ding!