A Close Call
How I almost became responsible
By GARRY DAGG

The Windsor knot slips up to my neck like an express train jumping its tracks. As my hand tightens around it, jostling it into position with the top shirt button, I feel as though I'm administering a lifetime sedative.

December usually means snow and steeps, but not this year. Swinging the blazer around my shoulders, I look out at the glare I'm about to step into. The thermometer has just tipped a hundred for the third time this month, and inside my car it feels closer to two hundred. After years in the Alps I'm back in Australia, skis in the cupboard and a future requiring shades.

I drive to the interview listening to AM radio. It feels like my life's random, dodgem-car happenings have all led up to this moment. Knowledge, authenticity, balance, reason. I have 15 minutes in front of a panel of six to exhibit these qualities. Outside, even though it's baking the tarmac, snowflakes fall. I see them drop gently through the mirage shimmering on the road. I can feel my feet moving through them.

Suburban streets are a long way from powder, but now they seem another lifetime away. If I get the job, I get the ticket in. The foot in the door. The conveyor belt up. Only the conveyor belt is a decade in action. A decade of heat and flats.

On paper the job should be mine. It's a lifelong dream, writing for a bigshot paper. As I enter the building, the inanity of cubicle life sweeps over me. Kitschy Christmas decorations hang flaccidly over the elevator. I look back at the carpark. My car is drowning under a snowdrift.

The bing of the lift snaps me back to reality. A reality I have been threatened with for years. Knowledge, authenticity, balance, reason. Skiing has always given me the first three, but I've never been able to make it sound logical, reasonable.

The panel of six want reasons. They want to know what I think of the real world, what qualities I'll bring to their workforce, how I can raise their profits. Thankfully my back is to the window so I can't see the snowstorm outside, but a couple of times I hear it. It's a hundred degrees and there's a snowstorm calling me. I get through the interview and wonder how it went. The rest of my life waits for one phone call.

The call came yesterday and it was negative.

All I could hear was the storm.


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