Every town has that one legend that permeates the gaggle of free-range kids that roams the neighbourhoods on their pushies. I was one of those kids. We had The Jangling Man.
The legend was that he was a regular guy riding his bike home until he was hit by a car that had it’s headlights off and caused him to slide across the gravel in such a way that he was forever disfigured. He was so ugly that his peers did not want to be friends with him and his parents made him leave home. After that, he vowed to stop kids getting hit by cars by making them disappear instead of having to live the tortured, painful, lonely life that he had to face each day.
It sounded sympathetic at first, but there were other versions with varying motives. Some said he was jealous of the children who still got a childhood and played in the dark without consequences. Some said if you got jangled he would actually take you to his home, never let you leave, and force you to be his friend.
Whatever it was, the consensus was that he would get you if you stayed out after dark. If you ran too fast, he would stalk you. He would leave bottle caps for you. Once he knew about you, he would follow you. If the last street light turned on and you weren’t home, you should hold your breath lest you start hearing the jangling noise getting closer. The jangling man would stalk the streets, throwing beer bottle caps on the ground so he could remember which direction he came from. The country can get a little disorienting, even if you explore the streets every day.
Sometimes if I got home a little later than my parents wanted, they’d find a flimsy reason to take me on a “Family drive”. I guess mum called one of the other parents in the neighbourhood while dad warmed up the car, because these family drives would always eventuate in coincidentally slowing down near bottle caps scattered across the road. They’d point them out in the headlights and act surprised, gasping and saying “Uht! Looks like someone got jangled!”
My parents didn’t do a good job of keeping up the charade. I guess that was comforting.
Our house was right near the street and one day I was sick. I was miserable spending my days looking out the lounge room window on the second floor, watching all my friends get turned away in the morning and zoom by through the day. I can still remember that orange sunset through the security bars on the window as my dad walked over to me with a sneaky smile and crouched on the couch beside me so only the tops of our heads were able to be seen from the road below.
“Want to see Murphy shit himself?” he asked, looking like a little kid, as he watched the neighbour kid walk his bike home. Dad shot up and pegged 3 caps out the window before crouching back down at an alarming speed. I ducked too, trying to stifle my laughter as we heard his shriek get fainter as he hauled ass home.
As I got older, my curfew got lengthened. We’d go to one of the many abandoned farm houses near the old sugar cane stations and smoke cigarettes. The old places were dilapidated and cool to explore.
There was one house we never went into. It was this brick two-storey place surrounded by mandarin trees, and I always had this weird sense of deja vu when we drove past it and I saw it from the backroad. I’d dreamed of being inside there, but of course, I had never actually stepped foot inside.
It was boarded up with plywood. Sprayed with “If u come in, I will get u” and variations of the sort. Of course, the legend goes, that’s where The Jangling Man lived.
Some senior kids I knew in high school reckoned they went in there once and the floor was littered with bottle caps and dried mandarin peels. There was actually a man inside who chased them out… Actually, I think one of those kids actually did go missing a few years later come to think of it. Lost touch with the others. That’s the thing with small towns - If you don’t go no-contact, everyone will know your business no matter how far you run.
The fact that they said they actually saw a man really messed with me. A few nights later I’d stayed out too late and the streetlights were flickering on. It was a pretty windy night and my hair-tie had snapped, so I’d given up on riding my bike due to having to constantly be battling with my hair in order to see. At first I thought I heard wind chimes, then I heard the distinct noise of a cap falling to the ground.
I froze. I don’t know how to explain the visceral fear in that moment, but it was as if my sternum had turned to stone. I wanted to run but I couldn’t. Another cap fell… Another.
It was then I was able to run home. I didn’t turn around. I thought I heard a voice yell out, but with my blood pumping in my ears I couldn’t make out what was said.
I didn’t sleep that night. I moved from my room that faced the backyard to the lounge room that couldn’t be seen into if I was sleeping on the sofa. I made my mum separate all her keys from her horrendous keychain that jangled whenever she moved her handbag, started the car, or gestured while talking to another parent. I couldn’t handle it.
A few weeks later I was helping dad with some landscaping in the backyard until I noticed something glistening in the sun. Something under my window. Bottle caps… Bottle caps and a note being weighed down with a rock that simply read “I did not forget about u.”
You might say “Call the Police!” but that’s not really how Australians roll in small towns. When it comes to messed up situations and getting too involved, even if you’re already involved, well… We have a simple piece of wisdom in Australia, “Fuck that.”
I stopped going out immediately. I almost exclusively went out with my mum or dad. At first I thought my dad was just pranking me, but he was adamant it wasn’t him. He was not the kind of guy that would let someone else take credit for his bamboozles, so I was inclined to believe him.
Some time after that, dad chased a man away from our house. He didn’t get a good look at him, but he left mandarin peels. Just standing out the front, watching our house, eating citrus fruit. It’s not like we could call the cops even if we wanted to. It was dark, but dad reckons he was wearing a button up cardigan. Never saw his face.
Apart from the odd bottle cap in the letter box, tapping on the windows at night only to find mandarin peels in the morning, and one time when a small smiley face was drawn on my window in permanent marker, the rest of high school went well.
I copped to Murphy that my dad messed with him that time and long story short, he’s my husband now. Turns out that being shit scared of now being forever followed by The Jangling Man until he had an opportunity to pounce made us pretty good students when the rest of the cohort were getting drunk in farm houses, huffing spray paint, and generally partying like it was 1999 (because it was). We both got decent OPs (these are basically the final grades for high school that decide what you can do at uni) and decided to skip town and go to uni together in the capital city.
He did engineering and I did nursing. I figured that together we’d be able to make some good cash to pop out a couple of kids in a nice suburban block, and within a few years of graduating and getting decent enough jobs, we did. I’d totally forgotten about The Jangling Man.
I only remembered today, as I watched my kid pedal her little pink and white bike down the street of the cul-de-sac where we’d set up a little gathering with our neighbours. She’d been with the big kids, who followed behind her like a royal guard. The kids didn’t usually come home this early on their own.
“Elkie made a new friend at the park.” My eldest said, very unimpressed.
“There is a nice man who lives in The Big Dark!” Elissa told me, with her eyes growing large. The Big Dark is what she calls the storm drain pipes near our house, “He said we could watch the sunset together, but Riley made me come home!”
I was mortified, “I had one rule. Didn’t I have one rule? Those pipes might be human-sized, but you could slip and fall! Only grouches live in trash cans and no one nice will ever live in a drain!” I tried to calm myself, “If you were older, I’d have a movie to show you about what you can find at the end of storm drains…” I muttered.
“But he is your friend already, Mum! He gave me this present for you!” From her small backpack she pulled a mandarin and a crude necklace made from string and bottle caps that had a hole punctured into the centre of them. Each bottle cap had a letter on it, spelling out my name.
My husband and I exchanged a glance.
Her little voice piped up again, “He said he’d visit real soon.”
We immediately went out to purchase security cameras for our home.
And that’s all well and good…
But walking from the hospital to my car when I finish the night shift has left me holding my keys between my fingers. I know I read that it’s actually poor self defense, but it makes me feel safer.
At least it stops them jangling.