Getting Out of Here
written by: Sarah Kelleher
Jocelyn takes a moment to hate her hand as it grasps the dull-gold doorknob. So she is aging. One day her giraffe-like stature will give way to frailty, like every bonkers old woman she ever served in this place. It’s okay. She’ll be cashed up and out of here, soon.
She walks her painful knee through the door and smiles with joy at the smell of her early retirement being made: stale air stinking of acid-malt, decades-old beer mixed with varnished wood. Unlike Dinah clinking glasses behind the bar, Jocelyn’s days of wearing that apron are over. Now, she’s all about business instead of beer. Strategies instead of spirits. She’s getting up early and staying late, she’s wearing the risk, she’s putting in the mind-wrecking hours. She’s going-and-getting. She’s getting her family out of this town.
As she passes through the forest of empty leaners, she barks at Dinah, ‘Who did the mopping last night?’
‘What?’ says the girl.
‘Who did the mopping last night?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ll get right onto that, Jocelyn,’ says Ivan, the new crease-eyed manager, and his fatherly smile provokes a flood of warmth in Jocelyn. He’s short, but he carries himself like a movie star, and she likes that. He’s good at managing rowdy patrons. She just hates his nosiness, his offers to have a ‘sit down,’ squawking about his high school Economics certificate. Did they teach vision, imagination, hope in those classes? While both staff disappear to start dragging out kegs, Jocelyn thinks of this, and rounds her shoulders, lifts her chin.
Her flimsy beach jandals stick to the floor. She becomes a ticking clock that falls silent only when she steps onto carpet, flapping through the curtain that hides the pokie machines until the gambling license comes into effect each day. Her thin leg slips between the machines to flick on the power switch with the foam toe of her footwear. They burst into gaudy life with unsynchronised jingles. The manager clatters out the mop and bucket, and she feels his gaze as she tick, tick, ticks across the floor and behind the bar, to her office.
There, she shoulders around the box-towers of warm Coke and ginger beer. Hunches to work the tumbler of the safe. Unpeels paper from rolls of coins.
Her jandals tick, tick, tick as she flaps back through the curtain and perches on her favourite stool. The first coin clatters deep into the machine, into its perfect place. In a practiced finger-flash, she selects five lines per bet, two cents per line, and thumbs the flashing BET key. The screen flickers in joyful reels; each reel lands one at a time, in silent thuds, on a sphynx, two crowns, a wooden-standing Cleopatra, the point-eared Anubis; She thumbs BET again. Four pharaoh masks! She’s up five dollars! The masks do a synchronised boogie, amazed for her, in cahoots. She thumbs BET and the reels flicker. She thumbs BET and the reels flicker. She thumbs BET and the reels flicker.
Five dollars, already! It’s a sign. Today’s the day she’s getting out of here.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
Many writers will relate to the delusion shown by this frustrated but hopeful main character! I wrote ‘Getting Out of Here’ the morning after I ended a year-long journey querying agents and publishers with my first novel. Despite grueling months of research, revisions and rejection, I found myself addicted to the process, forever feeling that one more submission could be ‘the one.’ All the while, I had little time to put toward new creative work.
In the end, I decided to set an impossibly high submissions target, and to quit when I either ran out of steam or hit that number. The impossible number came first. Boy, was it hard stepping away from the machine.
In a subjective field in which odds of success are low, we must always stop to pat ourselves on the back for what we’ve completed. No writing is ever wasted and we get better with every deleted paragraph, every discarded story. I might not be popping champagne, but I’ll pour a glass of sparkling water and tip my glass at each of you. Writing is hard. Many people spend their lives telling themselves they’ll give it a go. Fewer actually do. Cheers, fellow writers.
- Getting Out of Here - November 7, 2024
- Moccona With Two Sugars - March 10, 2024
