Martin had lived with the crack for nearly four years now. Likewise the crack. It ran the full length of the wall from the skirting board to the cornice. It had worsened as cracks generally do when not suitably addressed. There were others of course. This one he had named The Central Crack. Because it was central and clearly structural as the opposite cornice had a 30mm gap between it and the bricks and the tiled kitchen floor was also raised along its fault line.
On the 5th of March Martin had finally sent an email of demand to his Agent - Last Provincial Outhouse Letting Agency requesting in not as many words they extract their digitus primus manus from their mouth and fix it. He didn’t spit the dummy so much as simply spray a barrage of words from the Dictionary of the Language of the Oppressed that is literally growing second by second due to the less than formidable ubiquity of Large Language Models being tasked with writing resumes and cover letters. A final flourish of inane proportions was the sign off.
The aptly named Last Provincial Outhouse, entrusted with the management of his tenancy had demonstrated, across nearly four years of correspondence, a relationship with reality that could only be described as theoretical had, as to be expected once again ignored him. Of course.
It was also curious that their understanding of neighbourliness was as distant as an Oral Cavity Symposium being held in an earthquake laden city in a far off land that was structurally deteriorating quicker than tabouleh in a bain marie following a recent appearance by the 1980’s band The Human League as the headline act.
Or was it Take That?
Martin lived in apartment 1 of Agincourt Pedestrian Quarters - the name presumably a tribute to that legendary afternoon in 1415 when a vastly outnumbered, mud-soaked English force demonstrated with spectacular precision that the arrows of the exhausted and determined can, on occasion, pierce even the heaviest armour. The French had been warned by the ghosts of Crécy, yet they marched into the mud anyway, blinded by their own visors they lowered their heads and hoped for the best. It has been said the French did not see the arrows coming. Or had they? History, after all, is written by the victors - though it is worth noting that it is increasingly being rewritten by the losers, who have had considerably more time and resources to create spreadsheets and as it turns out, something more like under-specified over-documentation protocols that favour the word 'acknowledged' and 'management'.
One suspects the Agincourt analogy was not foremost in the mind of Miss Mango when the building acquired its name. Miss Mango was the representative of Agincourt Pedestrian Properties that boasted on its website the significant sales numbers of a particular emerging niche in the Carlingford property market. “Le Pied de terre McFritte”.
Mango was also managing the restaurant below Martins flat. Zaps Charcoal Birds. Martin had never met her but she came across as an entity of such exceptional sliminess that it was not personal but constitutional, a condition of excessive endosperm at her molecular core that no professional development course or cellular restructuring could meaningfully address. “Labotomy via Windows 95 is the likely culprit”, Martin concluded. “Almost certainly! If not there has clearly been some significant electrically induced interference in the mix, something in the range of a solar flare that knocks out the entirety of communications infrastructure since radar”.
A routine General Google LLM search reveals “The endosperm is not typically slimy in a healthy, ripe mango. Mangoes are generally non-endospermic, meaning the endosperm is absorbed by the cotyledon, and the seed has a dry, papery coating inside the hard shell. A slimy texture often indicates spoilage, overripeness, or a physiological condition”. Oh dear.
Below Martin's apartment, where the crack likely began its philosophical and hypothetical journey upward, was the restaurant. As has been touched on before, the restaurant used excessive amounts of air fresheners. This combination, Martin had concluded, was the olfactory equivalent of being hit by a bus driven by someone who had decided they were the perfect vehicle for olfactory barbarity.
This had happened at a significant time. The new tenants of “Zaps” had moved in the 20th of February 2025. The same day Martin and his Aunt had been to the local Gem and Fossil Museum nearby. A place Martin had been intending to go to since - forever. Well, since it opened at least. It housed the “Somerville Collection of fossils and minerals – the lifetime work of Warren Somerville AM – and features some of the finest and rarest specimens of mineral crystals and fossils from around the world”.
Martin had a history with these gems, crystals, fossils and rocks all now housed in the old Victorian School building in the centre of town and across the road from Agincourt Pedestrian Quarters. They were all once housed in a small white shed near the old Channel 8 building on the main drag near Lone Pine Avenue in Orange at Mr Somerville's residence.
A vast collection. An exceptional collection. Martin had always been interested in rocks, gems and crystals a bit like his Dad - a surveyor who spent much of his early career mapping much of the Central West of NSW with theodolites and associated instruments. He had found a few significant fossils and treasures during his time in the field that Martin had admired since he was a boy.
Martin’s mother - a physio, used to treat this man's wife as a home visit and on occasion Martin was left in the Ford Fairlane to wait. One day he was invited to go into this majestically humble place and have a look at the collection. The glass cabinets were just below his 8 or 9 year old eye height and thoughtfully had glass sides. Some of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. It was magnificent.
So the day Martin and his aunt went was the day the new restaurant tenants moved in. The first item off the truck. A Bain Marie from the 1960’s, Chipped and cracked glass that had been “fixed” with clear adhesive ribbon. “I wonder if they have a Glass Chip Combo Meal or maybe a Shard Special?”, Martin thought as he clocked the impending potential of this seemingly insignificant infraction.
They spent about a month doing minor renovations including carpet squares, a mural and a seemingly very out of place 1830’s printing press. The Grand Opening announcement was made that they would be opening on Good Friday. “I hope that is a good thing - For them”, Martin later journalled.
During this time Martin's electricity supply was turned off numerous times and the AC left on after 10pm. Unfortunately the unit was over 40 years old, was installed (I think I have mentioned) with the precision of a drunk throwing darts, was less than 1 metre from his bedroom window, clunked in and out about 6 times an hour and as it was bolted to the awning it created vibrations throughout the apartment that could be felt underfoot over ten metres away. He let these infractions slide for the time being to avoid getting off on the wrong one.
So the big day arrived. Martin wasn’t invited so didn’t go. So he didn’t. There were balloons, specials, thoughtfully written LLM blurbs for posts and of course... the menu. Martin had perused it online and recognised one of their "signature dishes" was a stock photo from Canva. Once he got through the tome, on the very last page was a disclaimer - something about images being “representative”. Just like a Happy Meal.
Martin had a quiet Easter, a complete non-event. Easter Monday arrived and at around 11am he was at his desk and got a whiff of acrid artificial apple scent with all the intensity of several hundred synthesised Granny Smiths with a candida infection.
Where was it coming from? Martin’s sensitivity to these artificial scents had been escalating recently and this was not good. He spent half an hour trying to locate it. The air purifiers were set to full throttle, the kitchen and bathroom extraction fans turned on and doors opened. It just got worse and worse and worse.
Martin hadn’t had a respiratory reaction like this for some time. The last time it was from mould. Oral corticosteroids and puffers were taken and a mask put on. The unfortunate thing with these reactions which Martin has experienced all his life is that if emergency prednisone is not administered it continues to get worse and lead to a very severe attack that inevitably would result in Emergency Department presentation.
So the sources were eventually located. The Central Crack - that he had not noticed had shifted considerably since he moved in (likely due to the vibrating floor), under the carpet, the skirting had shifted further from the wall. He put a towel over the gap to hopefully absorb much of it. Unfortunately, this abatement strategy was not effective - at all - so he got out the masking tape and set to work doing his best to seal the cracks and gaps where the smell hung in the air the most. An hour or so later he went down to speak to them. He took a photo of a particular spray that he is able to tolerate and showed it to the owner's son who was very receptive and said that he would get some of that and try to be more careful.
Unfortunately the symptoms (even with the prednisone) worsened so he decided the only thing was bed. Martin was terrified. This was different. It was new and felt sharp. He hadn't experienced this level of exacerbation for many years. He should have called an ambulance but Martin has to be one step from hell for this to occur and he had convinced himself at this time he was two.
Thoughts that he may not wake up and the solitary Easter compounded the anxiety associated with such an attack - even with company. A brain fighting for oxygen goes to some very surprising places, surprisingly quickly in this case - so the last thought he can remember was “If I am going to die, it may as well be on Easter Monday”, as he literally passed out and fell into a very deep 3 hour sleep. On waking (hoorah?) and sitting down for a water at his desk, his computer still on The Guardian homepage revealed it seemed Pope Francis had had the same thought too - except he did.
Martin had been secretly pleased when Pope Francis was announced as Pope, they shared a middle name and often such commonalities were enough for him to pay a little extra attention, Plus, St FrancIs was the first bird whisperer he had ever heard about.
So a week or so ago, Martin decided to contact Ms Mango as the restaurant was closed for a few weeks and thought it was the perfect time to have the matter of the AC and the crack addressed, plus there were two suspicious looking trades on his deck earlier in the day who said they were sent by “Diane - the Landlord”. After every attempt at being reasonable and MS Mango's abrupt and undeserved entitled manner (she had clearly just been dropped from some overpriced McFritte portfolio), she blurted out the old chestnut. “If you don’t like it, you should move” and then went on to say after Martin explained this was a serious health issue that required emergency steroid treatment and near emergency department presentation she stated "There is no such thing as Volatile Organic Compounds", then the line was disconnected. Of course there would be a weaponised incompetence defence to this. Martin called back and it went straight to voicemail so he sent an email about a Civil and Administrative Tribunal determination from around 2015 that determined that not only did VOC’s exist, it was the owners responsibility to ensure fumes from downstairs were not able to penetrate the unit above. BAM!
Ms Mango of Agincourt Pedestrian had also informed Martin, in the course of what could generously be described as a well practiced aural routine but was more accurately an encounter between an alternate reality that Last Provincial had referred the matter.
“There has to be an antidote to all of this nonsense", he concluded.
At precisely the 800th turn in the roundabout of Martin's ongoing correspondence with The Last Provincial Outhouse’s procedural negligence, the Great Western Highway - a most storied of colonial arteries (likely no longer as Great as a bunch of bureaucrats decided to shrink it) carved through the Blue Mountains by convict labour between 1814 and 1815 and maintained, in the Victorian tradition, through a combination of optimism and selective attention - was also cracking. Mitchell's Causeway at Victoria Pass, built in 1832, had developed what engineers were calling a "geotechnical failure" and what anyone watching from Martin's desk - from which exactly one car's length of the highway was visible, a detail the universe had arranged with its customary seemingly irrelevant subtlety - might simply call a crack.
It would be a very long bow to draw any connection to these completely separate events, apart from the incredibly specific timing and impeccable relatability of course.
Minister Spanner, the Lead Engineer who was assigned to assess the failure and whose shiftiness operated at the particular torque of a man who has prepared thoroughly for questions he has absolutely no intention of answering, confirmed there was no reopening date. The Blackheath and District Chamber of Commerce had written to warn the government about Victoria Pass for nearly twelve months. The road had cracked anyway. The Minister apologised to affected communities and announced extra bus services - the administrative equivalent of offering someone a cab-charge voucher after their house has fallen into a sinkhole.
I am compelled at this juncture to recall Mr Thomas Kite of Wiltshire, England, who helped build the road over the Blue Mountains. In January 1812, at the age of twenty-four, Thomas was sentenced to death by hanging for stealing £5 from his employer, a Mr Hugh Jones of the drapery trade - a crime so surgically tailored to the machinery of English class that it could only have occurred in a country that had systematised the punishment of poverty into something resembling civic virtue. The jury recommended leniency. Transportation for life was substituted, which was the Georgian system's elegant way of saying: we have decided not to kill you here. Thomas Kite arrived in New South Wales in 1813. He was granted 80 acres on the Bathurst Plains by Governor Macquarie. He named his property Woolstone. He died in 1876 worth an estimated £800,000. There is a street in Orange that bears his name. His will apparently ran to forty-nine pages.
The Victorian criminal justice system was, it transpires, simply an inefficient property development programme at least with an imaginative flair for the theatrical.
Martin, meanwhile, watching the highway news from his cracking apartment - the one with the VOCs that didn't exist, the air conditioner that technically violated four separate building codes, the handrail that remained, philosophically speaking, a future aspiration that his 87 year old year aunt recently ascended on all fours exclaiming, “You can’t even grab on to the fence because it’s barbed wire”, after Martin had offered to come down to assist. On her first visit she had said that she wanted to report them to Council. Martin asked her not to step in at this stage. “Likely later”, he placated.
Between a road that cracks and a building that cracks; between a government that was warned and chose not to act and a managing agent who was warned and chose not to act; between a convict sentenced for stealing £5 and a tenant effectively sentenced for breathing, Thomas Kite built an empire. Martin did everything but get on his hands and knees and beg.
The architecture of consequence, it turns out, is now, simply, a matter of who is holding the pen.