The Big Issue Australia #568 - Fiction Edition 2018

$7

No 568 10 Aug 2018

HELPING PEOPLE HELP THEMSELVES $3.50 of the cover price goes to your vendor

NATIONAL OFFICE Chief Executive Officer Steven Persson Chief Operating Officer Sally Hines Editor Amy Hetherington Chief Financial Officer Jon Whitehead National Marketing and Partnerships Manager Louise Gray National Operations Manager Jeremy Urquhart

The Big Issue is Australia’s leading social enterprise. We are an independent, not-for-profit organisation that develops solutions to help homeless, disadvantaged and marginalised people positively change their lives.

The Big Issue magazine is published fortnightly and sold on the streets by vendors who purchase copies for $3.50 and sell them for $7, keeping the difference. Subscriptions are also available and provide employment for disadvantaged women as dispatch assistants.

For details on all our enterprises visit thebigissue.org.au.

Principal Partners

CONTACT US Tel (03) 9663 4533 Fax (03) 9639 4076 GPO Box 4911 Melbourne VIC 3001 hello@bigissue.org.au thebigissue.org.au WANT TO BECOME A VENDOR? If you’d like to become a vendor contact the vendor support team in your state.

ACT – (02) 6234 6814 Supported by Woden Community Service NSW – (02) 8332 7200 Chris Campbell NSW + ACT Operations Manager Qld – (07) 3221 3513 Susie Longman Qld Operations Manager SA – (08) 8359 3450 Matthew Stedman SA + NT Operations Manager Vic – (03) 9602 7600 Gemma Pidutti Vic + Tas Operations Manager WA – (08) 9225 7792 Andrew Joske WA Operations Manager

Major Partners Allens Linklaters, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Clayton Utz, Fluor Australia, Herbert Smith Freehills, Macquarie Group, MinterEllison, Mutual Trust Pty Ltd, NAB, PwC, Qantas, Realestate.com.au, Salesforce, The Ian Potter Foundation, William Buck Marketing/Media Partners Adstream, C2, Carat & Aegis Media, Chocolate Studios, Getty Images, Realview Digital, Res Publica, Roy Morgan Research, Town Square Distribution and Community Partners The Big Issue is grateful for all assistance received from our distribution and community partners. A full list of these partners can be found at thebigissue.org.au.

The Big Issue is a proud member of the INSP, which incorporates 122 street publications like The Big Issue in 41 countries.

CONTENT

S

#5 6 8 STO R I ES O N T H E B E AC H

08

by Marija Peričić

R OA D K I L L H O U R

12

by Dasha Maiorova

16

STO N E

by Melissa Manning

THE HUNT

20

by Eleanor Limprecht

24

A S H O RT- L I V E D T Y R A N N Y

by Melanie Cheng

28

N I G H T N E I T H E R DA R K , N O R Y E T STO R M Y

by Garth Nix

30

KO R E A N L ES S O N S

by James Hughes

36

T H E B LOW I ES

by Natasha Buzzacott

38

S H E R R I BA BY

by Laura Elvery

42

H U R R I CA N E S E AS O N

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

46

O CA R I N A

by Elizabeth Flux

50

S H A R M AV I L L E

by Atul Joshi

56

THE LIBRARIAN

by Tony Birch

R EG U L A R S 0 4 E D’S L E T T E R , YO U R SAY 0 5 M E E T YO U R V E N D O R 07 ST R E E TS H E E T 6 2 P U Z Z L ES

ED’S LETTER STORY TIME

IT BEGINS WITH a trickle of mail and

ends with a week-long deluge of Express Post packages. These piles of envelopes bring a wave of excitement each year, as we prepare for the Fiction Edition. It’s that belly-tickling feeling that comes with knowing you’re about to discover bold and fresh writing from around the country.

Over the past 13 years, these submissions have brought us stories from many writers on the brink of brilliance. In 2014 we featured a piece by future Miles Franklin-winner AS Patrić, and ran Jane Harper’s tale ‘Spiders and Flies’, before she went on to publish her best-selling novel The Dry. And 2017 contributor Emily O’Grady won this year’s Vogel Award for her novel The Yellow House.

I tell you this not only as a fist-bump to editors and judges past, but also to highlight the calibre of writing that awaits you – all beautifully illustrated by Paul Vizzari. The extra 16 pages are possible thanks to the generous support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

This year we received 400-plus submissions, judged “blind” by Books Editor Thuy On, and writer Nicola Redhouse. The final selection was debated by the editorial team, with help from guest judge, author Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project), offering his wisdom and insight. Read more at thebigissue.org.au.

And on top of all of this, we have stories from authors Tony Birch, Melanie Cheng, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Garth Nix and Marija Peričić. Happy reading!

Amy Hetherington, Editor

YOUR SAY REAL LIVING

media climate). And because I love it, our children gave me a subscription for I am writing to encourage you a Christmas present, and it adds a to keep the ‘Living Homeless’ LETTER special connection, with each issue, series of stories coming.

OF THE FORTNIGHT to see the names of the women It’s a national disgrace that who have packed it, and whose more and more jobs are employment it’s helped. But then, going offshore when our own I feel guilty each time I pass a vendor, governments cannot attend to this and mumble that I’m a subscriber. So, I country’s human plight of homelessness was wondering whether “I’m a Big Issue and employment first. I remember in the subscriber” badges could be produced 1960s when homelessness was classed that we could buy and wear, so they can as vagrancy and having no fixed abode. see we are big supporters.

I’ve been spoken to by police and had my Anne Ring, Coogee, NSW. name taken for giving money to rough Ed – Don’t feel guilty, Anne. Vendors sleepers so that they could be prosecuted. love hearing from people who love The We’ve moved on from then, but you Big Issue. Your smile and a chat as you cannot afford to delete the past or it will walk by can go a long way to making be repeated. someone’s day.

Warwick Kelly, Lake Munmorah, NSW. Bought my very first copy of The Big As winner of this edition’s Issue today [Ed#567]. This is a fabulous Letter of the Fortnight, non-profit organisation that helps people Warwick wins books from keep employment and develop a sense all five of the well-loved of self-esteem and pride in what they do. commissioned authors in this I love organisations that help people who edition: The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba are not in the mainstream. The vendor Clarke; Australia Day by Melanie Cheng; was absolutely gorgeous and said that he Common People by Tony Birch; The had sold a lot of magazines today, which Lost Pages by Marija Peričić; and Have he was very happy about.

Sword, Will Travel by Garth Nix and Sean Debra Kirk via Instagram Williams. Enjoy, Warwick!

I love The Big Issue, both for what it does (serving as a powerful vehicle with which people can turn their challenging lives around) and for what it is (an excellent read with high standards, quality writing and independent views – the latter getting to be increasingly rare in today’s

COVER #568

Paul Vizzari is an illustrator from Melbourne. His style is one of whimsy, storytelling and nostalgia. He has always been an avid lover of fiction and loves the process of taking a writer’s words and interpreting them visually.

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY PAUL VIZZARI

FIND OUT MORE AT PAULVIZZARI.COM OR AT INSTAGRAM @PAULVIZZARI.

@SWB @thebigissue sales guy at #Brisbane CS asked me if it was Janet Crawley him Bobwork Dylan thatstill made Loveor your guys, theme best decide to buy I said, man mag ever and the lovemag. chatting with you havewhen a wayI better beard! vendors buy my copy .

THE BIG ISSUE USES MACQUARIE DICTIONARY AS OUR REFERENCE. MACQUARIEDICTIONARY.COM.AU

» ‘Your Say’ submissions must be 100 words or less, contain the writer’s full name and home address, and may be edited for clarity or space.

MEET YOUR VENDOR NICK SELLS THE BIG ISSUE IN LYGON COURT AND OUTSIDE READINGS BOOKSHOP, CARLTON, MELBOURNE. I’VE BEEN SELLING The Big Issue for about four or five years. A

friend of a friend who is a CEO mentioned it to me – he did CEO selling with The Big Issue. I had a look and thought I could make some money out of it. The magazine sells well, which helps.

I had a happy childhood. I’ve lived my whole life in Melbourne. I grew up in Carlton. I went to private schools all the way through. I left part of the way through Year 12 because I wanted to work but I went back and finished. I’m still in touch with my family. I have a daughter, too.

I’ve always worked, been hardworking. When I was a kid, and even as an adult, I worked in the entertainment industry as an extra. I’ve done a few ads. I did a lot of Target and Myer catalogues when I was a kid; I started when I was about seven or eight. As an adult I did a bit of work in the remake of On the Beach with Armand Assante, Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward, as well as Neighbours and Home and Away.

I’ve done bits and pieces. It’s hard to remember all of them…

I wanted to be an actor but I had to focus on school, education had to take priority. Once you take a break it’s very hard to get back into it.

I’ve also dabbled with a bit of restaurant work. I started training to be a chef but I pulled out of it because I didn’t like it. Painting and decorating – I’ve done that. I owned a car wash. Everything is automated now so it’s not ideal anymore… I’ve done a bit of everything.

I sell The Big Issue at the top end of the city and Carlton; it’s my permanent pitch. I am very fortunate when it comes to sales. I’m very lucky, I have a lot of regulars from industries that I have worked in.

I like being in the Fiction Edition, it’s a big seller. Plus you can sell it for four, six, eight weeks alongside the next edition.

I also like the fact it gives young, budding authors a chance to get a foot in the door. Last year a friend of mine made it in there: her name is Fiona Hardy. She works at Readings Bookshop in Carlton, which is where one of my pitches is.

Selling The Big Issue can be a tough job – it slows down a lot in the winter. Sometimes you get a rude person, fortunately not many. Like any job you’re going to come across good and bad people.

I’m not saving for anything, I just like to work as much as I can.

I can work long hours and I get to choose my hours. Occasionally I’ll go to a restaurant, or watch a movie or catch up with friends but work really does take priority. I am doing it for the income. The more you work the more you make, like in any job. You get used to a certain comfort and lifestyle and you want to maintain that.

At this stage I’m going to continue selling The Big Issue. I’m happy where I am at the moment. It’s hard to find work that’s flexible and lets you be your own boss.

“I’VE ALWAYS WORKED, BEEN HARDWORKING.” – NICK

interview by Anastasia Safioleas photo by James Braund

THE BIG ISSUE 2018

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STREETSHEET Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends SUNSHINE STATE

I was born in Sunshine, Victoria, and my father was in the RAAF. We moved to Malaysia when I was three months old and lived there for three years. We then moved to Canberra for one year before moving to Ipswich, Queensland, when Dad retired – and where I have now lived for over 40 years. I’ve been selling The Big Issue for about four years now. I am a big Broncos fan and my mum gives me a season ticket to the Broncos every year. I also love to tenpin bowl and go twice a week. I was in hospital for seven months and had a skin graft on my neck and chest which has left my arm weak. I’ve had to learn to bowl with my right hand which has been hard – I don’t have as many good scores as I used to! I am the youngest of eight children – four sisters and three brothers – and I have lots of nieces and nephews. I live by myself as Mum said I’m too untidy to live with her!

Glenn sells The Big Issue at Medibank (cnr Adelaide and Albert Sts) and St Stephen’s Cathedral, Brisbane.

FOCUS ON HAPPINESS The Big Issue Ed#566 has inspired me to write about the black dog of depression. The Beyondblue organisation was founded to try to stop people committing suicide. One of the founders, Jeff Kennett, said a leading cause of suicide is depression.

So it is a serious topic. Even Winston Churchill battled depression and so do I. So when I talk about strategies for overcoming depression it’s not just theory – it’s from personal experience.

These things have helped me: Try to be positive, optimistic, enthusiastic – that’s the attitude to have. Be kind to

Even though I’m born and raised in WA, my name gives away my family’s Turkish heritage. My father is from the Turkish side of Cyprus. He came to Australia in 1967.

He and my mum named me after his father (my grandfather) Ibrahim. To top it all off, they also gave me my dad’s middle name, Olgun, as my own middle name. I like my Turkish heritage and my family have taken me to Turkey three times already. I love the people, the culture and most of all, the food. There is a fantastic Turkish restaurant in Victoria Park I go to every Wednesday.

They have a woodfired oven and make the best lahmacun in Australia. Lahmacun is a type of very thin Turkish pizza with minced meat, onions, parsley and tomatoes.

I love it!!! You should try it one day! It’s the highlight of my week, it reminds me of Turkey and makes me happy. I hope I can save up enough money one day to go and travel around Turkey a bit more. It’s a big dream but hopefully achievable. I would like to thank all my regular customers for supporting my dream.

Ibrahim sells The Big Issue at David Jones on Hay St and Murray St, Perth.

yourself, people can say brutal things to themselves like “I always stuff up” and it doesn’t help; it does the exact opposite. Be your own best friend.

There’s something really good about being grateful, even for the little things. For example, I have a warm comfortable bed to sleep in and a secure place to live. There are affirmations and uplifting phrases to meditate on, like “Challenges are opportunities to grow and improve”. I have motivational books that I keep re-reading. I find them to be therapeutic.

When depressed you can feel like not doing anything. I find if I force myself to do things, I feel better afterwards. It helps to stay active. I know it’s easy to do all this for one week – it’s hard to keep the discipline long-term. But ask yourself: what kind of life do you want?

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Lastly, some people when depressed can feel like isolating themselves. Again the

helpful thing, force yourself to mix with people. Find good supportive people, people who encourage you to move forward. Some advice: choose life!

Darrell sells The Big Issue in Ashfield, Sydney.

BIG FAREWELLS

Just a Big Issue magazine farewell to Kurt from the Brisbane vendor support office (sadly missed); and a big shout out to fellow Queensland vendor Cindy who has moved to South Australia (sadly missed); and a smile to all the lovely customers who buy The Big Issue Australia-wide. Love the support and what you do for us. Thank you!

Nathan C sells The Big Issue on the cnr of Adelaide and Creek Sts, Brisbane.

» All vendor contributors to Streetsheet are paid for their work.

THE BIG ISSUE 2018

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THE BIG ISSUE 2018

On the Beach M A R I JA P E R I Č I Ć

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his beach is a graveyard for me, a charnel-house of love. At night, in my dreams, I walk along it, my feet sinking and sinking further into the sand until I am wading through it and, finally, am smothered in the cold sticky darkness.

But now it is not night. It is a sunny morning in March and all the holidayers are back in the city, in their offices and apartments. The beach is empty, a smooth sweep of white, bitten in by blue. The sand, under my feet, feels the same as in my dreams, but now the sun is strong on my skin, a consolation.

I reach our usual place, in the lee of a little dune ridge, and I stand awhile looking at the sea. No boats. Some gulls only and white caps far out. I stand there, waiting to feel something awful. But there is nothing. Even when I look down at the little hollow at the base of the dune where we spent every sunny Sunday. I stare at the spot and conjure up the image of our two bodies reclining there, skin against skin, our mouths and eyes laughing at each other. I feel nothing, almost nothing, only a little sadness, very faint; no sadder than the soft suck and sigh of the waves. My beach. No longer ours. I say it out loud, to test myself. Nothing.

The wind is very strong and loud and pushes at my body, urging me towards the sea. I take off my clothes and go in.

It’s very cold and I’d forgotten how salty. I take in a lungful of air and dive under. I picture the waves smoothing over my head as I go down and, submerged, I let my limbs float up and hang in space. The cold enters through my skin, but it feels good. I feel very quiet inside, as though I were alone in a huge cathedral. When I look down at my pale body shining through the water it surprises me with its beauty, a frail and tender thing. Pearls of air leave my mouth and roll past my eyes and I let myself be carried with them to the surface. I float awhile, the sun on my closed eyelids. My lips taste of salt and I breathe air in and out, calm, quiet.

I listen to the water lapping at my ears and then the cry of a bird. I drowsily try to identify it. A tern? A cormorant? I scan the empty sky. And then the familiar beach, also without birds.

I see my little dune, hunching with its brothers, but now there is another feature, too. People. Two of them, sitting very close together. Laughing. A man and woman. Just on the seaward side of my little dune. I wipe the water from my eyes and look again. It’s him. Is it him? Can it be? Wavelets obscure my view, slapping me coldly in the face between unsatisfying glimpses.

The man is wearing a hat like his: a ratty Panama. The girl is in a blue one-piece, with blonde hair, like his new girl has. I had never concentrated on her enough to be able to recognise her.

A hot anger rises up in me. Alice, humiliating Alice, for FICTION EDITION

whom I was discarded. His assistant. His young assistant. His young heretofore gay assistant. Is she beautiful too? I can’t be sure. I dive under and swim five furious strokes, then shoot up out of the water like a jet. This time I get a good look. It’s them.

No question. They wave at me. I freeze and then slip under the sea again like a startled animal. How dare they wave! As if the beach were their private property and they were the Queen.

When I am the one with a house in this town. And this is my beach. My anger boils and spits within me.

This kind of thing is typical from him. The man is a narcissist. I picture his smiling face before me and my rage propels me as I surge up, breaking the surface with a wet yawp, arms raised, fists clenched, giving them the finger with both hands. I crash down again, remembering, too late, my exposed breasts. At least he is near-sighted, so he can’t make a direct comparison.

I begin to paddle in mindless circles, inwardly cursing him, both of them, telling him what I really think. All my calm is gone. Adulterer. Cad. Cheat. My breath has become short and jagged and my heart has started up a loud jerky rhythm. I picture myself marching up to them, dripping cold sea water over their clean clothes, watching their smiles fading from their hypocritical faces as I come near, my shadow blocking out the sun. I could do violence to him, to her. Easily. With pleasure. I stretch my neck up through the waves again: there they are still. This time it looks like they actually beckon to me. Unbelievable. But I can’t be sure. Perhaps it was only them giving me another wave.

Then I begin to notice that I am cold. I try to ignore it, but the tips of my fingers, when I look at them, are white, the nail-beds blue. But I can’t get out of the sea: I don’t want them to see me naked. They are so close to my clothes that there is no chance they wouldn’t see me as I came ashore. The thought of his eyes appraising me, his mind holding my tired body against her fresh one sickens me. Now my flesh feels withered, mean, barely enough to cover me. To have felt beautiful in it is ludicrous.

She is as plump as a young animal. Even from here I can admire her luxuriant figure. But for me, without the buoyancy of the salt water my breasts will hang like two empty sacks, my knees retreat under a canopy of fallen flesh. My teeth clench in an effort to stay warm, and my hot breath hisses though them. The only option is to swim further down the beach and approach my clothes from the leeward side of the dune.

I dive under again and scoop my numb hands through the water. I have grown unused to swimming: already my arms and legs are aching. On the surface again I glance with every head-turn of my crawl to the coast, which seems not to be THE BIG ISSUE 2018 9

moving at all, no matter how fast I churn my arms through the heavy water. Always the same dune with its same skimpy covering of sandwort. My breath hurts my throat but I swim on as through a nightmare. After what feels like hours the dunes slide slowly past and when I look back I can no longer see them. I swim for the shore and stay under the kind cover of the sea until the last possible moment, when my knees graze the sandy bottom. I lie for a moment in the shallows, glancing left and right. The coast is clear.

I rise into a kind of crouch, covering my breasts with one hand, and immediately start to run, knees bent and creaking, towards the line of dunes ahead. The wind is freezing and blasts me with painful sand as I run. I struggle up the slope of the dunes, sliding backwards with every step, praying that I will not be greeted by a beach-going family on the other side – but luck, for once, is on my side. I have swum further than I thought and I pass dune after unfamiliar dune without coming to my clothes.

I begin to panic. What if he has taken my things as a joke? That is precisely the kind of thing he would do. Leave me here with no clothes, forced to walk naked through the town. My heart is hammering and I hope that it won’t suddenly fail on me, here on this beach. I begin to count in my head – a nervous habit – in an effort to calm myself. My nakedness, so clean and comforting in the sea, is now like an unbearable disease. I snatch at a handful of beach-grass with the vague idea of using it to cover myself, but succeed only in cutting open my hand.

At last I can see my pile of clothes up ahead, but as soon as I catch sight of them I hear the clear sound of laughter from the other side of the dune. As I approach, I duck lower and slow my pace to a sloping walk and then finally drop to my knees, still clutching at my breasts. I hold my breath as I crawl the last metres and lie down flat in the sand to pull my dress over my head, not caring about the cold grains of sand that stick to my skin. I lie back, totally exhausted, but with an immense sense of achievement.

Their voices drift over the dune to me, but they are too far away for me to hear the words. The sound of his voice makes me gasp, makes my ears tighten with anger and pain. His voice had been so familiar, but now it is only the voice of a man I no longer know, a voice of the past. Now it is the voice beloved of Alice, and it utters honeyed words to her, speaks her name.

Alice. My heart beats with fury at the thought of her lying there in his arms, their skins pressing together. On my beach.

It really is too much. It is quite simply an act of provocation.

I picture walking over to where he smugly sits and telling him what I really think of him. About how well I am doing. How happy I am to have him and his selfishness out of my life. How he destroyed my life, but I have built it up again. Before my eyes every slight and disappointment of our time together, every argument, every compromise, rise up. Really I am much better to be rid of him, he was a curse, a dead weight on my life and I should be thanking Alice for taking him off my hands.

I should thank him for leaving me before he could do me any more harm. I should thank them both. Perhaps I will thank them. Why not? They are just over there, only a few metres away. Perhaps I will never get this chance again.

FICTION EDITION

I become aware that I am standing up. My body is totally outside of my control, but I feel wonderful: invincible, stronger than a Titan. I seem to rise up and up as I stand, my head grazing the blue canopy above. I am going to give him a piece of my mind and he will never forget it. As I stride up the dune my feet seem to float above the ground. All my fatigue is gone. I step onto the summit like some conquering emperor. He is going to regret ever daring to show his face here.

“Hey!” I yell from the top of dune. My voice rings through the air like a shot. I begin to slither down the seaward side.

Both of their heads turn towards me in slow motion, their faces like painted masks of surprise. Only it isn’t his face.

Or Alice’s. It is two strangers sitting there. I have got up a good bit of momentum on my slide down the dune and it is impossible to turn back.

“Hey?” says the woman, not Alice, turning to the man with a confused expression.

By now I have reached the bottom of the dune. I remember my wild yell from the sea, my giving them the finger. My face burns with shame.

“Uh, how’s the water?” asks the man. “We saw you out there.”

“Yes…uh, hello,” I say, my voice a bit squeaky now.

“The water? Oh…it’s fine, you know.”

“That’s good,” he says.

“Yes.” I stand awkwardly, my feet sunk in the sand. “Listen,” I say, “I’m sorry… I thought you were someone else.” I gesture to the heaving waves. “I’m sorry I gave you the finger before.”

“What? We just saw you wave. We thought you might be in trouble out there,” says the man. “I was thinking of coming in to make sure you were okay.” As if anyone could make sure I was okay.

Not-Alice gazes up at his face as he speaks and clings on to his heroic arm with a dreamy expression that makes the tears prick in my eyes. His body is muscular and compact and looks familiar, even though it isn’t him. I blink my tears away.

“I was okay. Only, I thought that you were someone else.”

“Who?” he asks.

“My ex, actually. And his new girlfriend. That’s why I came over just now.” I laugh, but my eyes start crying. “I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. To tell him what I thought of him.”

“Oh,” says the man. “And if I was him, what would you say?”

What would I say? You cad. You despoiler. You liar. You, who have broken me. Now my tears come in a storm. In my mind I see his face again, hear his voice telling me he’d found someone else, he loved someone else, the sadness in his eyes, the tears.

“I would say, ‘I still love you.’”

Marija Peričić is a writer based in Melbourne. Her first novel, The Lost Pages , won The Australian /Vogel’s Literary Award 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. Marija was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian novelist in 2018. She teaches English Language at Deakin University and is at work on her second novel.

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THE BIG ISSUE 2018

Roadkill Hour DAS H A M A I O R OVA

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he sought out her mother from objects she’d never been permitted to inspect when her mother was alive; forbidden things that stood in for her now.

Duly polished pairs of patent heels. A flesh-pink robe on a padded hanger, sash looped limp but not knotted (her mother scorned the fraying of elastic). Cotton underwear indicative of a woman of a certain age, arranged in rolled folds like the cocoons of mud wasps.

Everything meticulous. Near artful in its symmetry.

Angie yearned to see it awry.

There wasn’t enough space for secrets in the single-storey fibro house. Nowhere to hide. So what was she looking for?

Mario had urged her to go, to heal this unfinished business hanging over her – this relationship thing with her mother.

Well, it wasn’t going so well, was it?

She wanted, very badly, to discover some humiliation in her dead mother’s belongings. Crotchless PVC knickers tucked beneath the cottontails. Illicit images smudged with fingerprints in a compartment under loosened floorboards. But past the straight line of sensible footwear and the calculated arrangement of undergarments, she’d found nothing. Rather than the thrill of prohibited discovery, the aha moment, the indictment of her mother’s inescapable weakness, Angie found herself in reticent exploration, as if she could be caught like a guilty child, hand in the cookie jar, by the spectre of her stroke-stricken mother. It was her own pathetic need laid bare.

So great was her anticipation in exposing the prohibited contents of her mother’s living space that, when the fitness tracker buzzed on her wrist – gotta get movin’! –Angie ignored her Pavlovian response to the prompt, even as it sent her heart rate sputtering. Instead she continued the disassemblage of her mother by hauling open the pleated block-out curtains, exposing the bedroom to an affront of midday sun. Her mother had dreaded the risk to the carpet, the loathsome prospect of bleached fibres, the discolouration of the wall and the Berthe Morisot print hanging upon it.

It was a cropped rendition of The Cradle, the Morisot painting, which her mother insisted had been obtained in Paris – though when Angie’s mother had ever left the cul-de-sac suburb of Wattle Heights was a complete mystery. A wistful scene of a mother gazing at a sleeping infant, her expression weary.

Impressionist. More than a bit sentimental. Angie recognised her own mother’s distrustful scrutiny on the painted mother’s face. The baby, swathed in lace, dozed away in a contentment the mother would never again experience. It was, Angie decided, a depiction of maternal resentment. Strangely honest, then, for it to have been painted by a woman.

FICTION EDITION

The reproduction had hung on the otherwise bare wall for as long as Angie could remember. Surely it had cast its own shadow on the moon-pale paint over the years. When she tapped the frame aside with the uneven crescents of her fingernails, something shifted between the flat of the board backing and the wall, wedged under the lip of the frame. The roof of her mouth became woolly. She tried to resist the lap of excitement in her stomach. It might only be a loose slip of protective paper, or masking tape turned cracked and tough.

Flipping The Cradle over, Angie found the envelope she’d decorated and sealed at the age of thirteen. A letter never posted, and which should never have seen the light of day, let alone her mother’s handling. Yet there it was, a jagged slice along its belly like a gutted animal.

Running was anaesthesia, elixir, miracle cure. When Angie ran, she was following the inevitable current of her own veins, coursing oxygen-rich and iron-laden. She had to run, the trainer said, until there was nothing left in the tank. Until there was nothing left of the old Angie anymore.

The heat made the road waver like oil suspended on water.

Her trajectory was tunnel-visioned, of singular purpose. Then it was broken by a slash of colour on the road. Amber fur matted with melted bitumen and gut-string. It was a fox. Freshly hit and so definitely dead that it did not even invite the curious inkling of inspection.

It was just roadkill, nothing more. Reduced to a repulsive object – Angie wondered how long it would take the council to scoop it up. The thought shuddered behind her temples. And it brought back the letter she’d found hidden in her mother’s home. Thoughts about the shapes of death-altered bodies. She tried to shake them, letting her legs stretch underneath her body, looking down to see the muscle ripple under her skin. But she staggered, because she was still bound for the fox, the streak of auburn splayed as though in casual repose. Against the tar shine of the road, she – why did Angie think it was a she? – was a lava seam, luminescent.

The fox’s jaw was open in an unending shriek, but she could not be heard above the cacophony of cicadas, burst fresh from their shells and proclaiming Australian apocalypse.

As her foot caught the path and scuffed into dirt, the tunnelvision faded and the rest opened up. No longer was it just her and the road. It was townhouses with kids’ bikes strewn on the lawns, the cafe in the heritage post office. Pure assault: the demented chorus of cicadas, the rancid smell of chicken-shop grease, the dull marble of roadkill eyes on the roadside. All of THE BIG ISSUE 2018 13

it the same as when she was thirteen and tearing pages from a school notebook. The kind of book she’d written in under her mother’s guidance in primary-school days. Thin paper covered in light blue grid-maps, used to trace correct forms of cursive font. Over and over, Angie had outlined The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog… until the sight of the graphs was wrapped inexorably with tawny foxes and the image of her mother’s face in mimicry of the Morisot-print facial expression.

Angie – slow, large-boned, Angie – erred in her practice.

Making one mistake after another.

At the age of thirteen, Angie, snotty and sobbing, tore out two pages from the old notebooks and decorated an envelope with ankhs and geometric spirals and eyes-within-eyes. Her intention was to write more than a letter. It was to be a tribute, a plea for understanding with its recipient.

There was no denying its authorship. An impossible habit to break, Angie recognised those clumsy gs of hers. Now the loops strung between letters were rope to hang herself with.

Thirteen. When she wrote to a serial killer.

Nights later, black garbage bags crammed into the back of her tiny Honda, which she’d bought out of desperation even though it had already done 300,000 kilometres and the gearbox made rusty chortling sounds when she shifted. Her mother’s clothes, unsorted and unfolded, had been deposited straight into bags of flimsy plastic. She hadn’t hesitated or smelled the fabric with tear-filled eyes like people did in movies.

She heard the words of the letter echo from her youth.

Dear Mr Hitchings…

My name is Angela Wilson, and I live in Wattle Heights, just ten minutes down the road from where you lived in Blackhurst in 1990. I live with my mum. We don’t have any pets and I don’t have many friends. My dad drives trucks so he’s on the road a lot of the time.

A lie. Whose feelings was she protecting with it? It was an easy lie, already told to teachers and kids at school. A dad who was working was a better option than one who had… In any case, she didn’t want to invite pity or elicit reminders that it wasn’t her fault.

This night, seeing the flame of the fox’s tail caught in the headlights, Angie wondered at how the animal hadn’t been dragged to the undergrowth at the roadside. She had sagged into the road, the churn of her innards glossy against the dark. Though it was difficult to tell at this distance, she looked untouched by both burrowers and opportunists. Angie was surprised some P-plater hadn’t run over her for the sheer thrill of hearing the pop of the smooth skull underneath. Peak roadkill hour, a night shrouded nocturnal grey. A time to tempt all living things to their fate. Angie slowed her approach and without being fully aware of what she was doing, nudged the car toward the patch of fur. All it took was a gentle alignment of the tyres.

She’d found Hitchings online. At the school library on the weekend, with the only computer students could use for ostensibly researching assignments, teenage-Angie found Hitchings’ ID number on an online database comprising 14

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prisoners-of-note from all around the world. Men (for invariably they were men) jailed for horrendous acts. Serial killings. The site was “Killer Pen Pals”, a clunky, ill-formatted Geocities webpage that could have been created by anyone.

Each listing had a name, prison address, ID details and a tally.

For Hitchings it was the supermax in Goulburn. The tally was (confirmed) 3; suspected 7+.

The page’s creator included tips for contacting multiple murderers. It was more polite to call them that than serial killers. One should also ascertain whether prisons permitted supplies of stationery, or whether these were considered contraband. Requesting artwork or other souvenirs was considered poor form. She had no PO Box to give for a reply, as had been suggested, but she hadn’t wanted a response.

I don’t know if the dam was dry when you lived around here, but it’s been like a crater for as long as I can remember.

There are swings still hanging over the edge so I suppose in your day people went there for fun.

In addition to protocol regarding terminology, it was a faux pas to discuss crimes committed – either allegedly or those for which the gates were locked behind them. Better, “Killer Pen Pals” said, to discuss accessible topics, like the weather. All these years later, Angie remembered frowning at the thought. Wasn’t that a rather cold reminder – talking about the seasons to someone who might only ever experience them behind a fence?

I know you probably get lots of mail from people who say that they understood why you did what they say you did like [sic sic sic sic] The words had been marked out with a thick sludge of liquid paper. She could almost smell it. Teen-Angie had actually scrawled [sic] upon erroneous words; she must have thought that was how mistakes were corrected in professional writing.

But I have been where you have been I go there every day.

She tells me I should go and get exercised but she doesn’t know where it is that I end up and I wonder what she did that made you kill your mother.

And she turned clear of the fox, veering toward the empty car park with the charity bins.

The black garbage bags full of her mother’s clothing were strewn across her back seat like sacks of dismembered body parts.

Hitchings left women in garbage bags in the bush, mainly near bodies of water, like the dam, a few kilometres from Angie’s mother’s place. Pieces here and there, weighed down with rock from the dumping grounds and construction material from various job sites. Hitchings’ deeds had been linked to him because of the discovery of his mother. Her body left to the elements. Last found, first done.

Angie had searched the bush for traces of where the old lady was dumped but came up empty. Too many years had passed, though the story of Wattle Heights’ own Norman Bates continued to haunt the suburbs. Hitchings was the boogeyman who crept into cautions uttered by teachers, friends’ parents and strangers, directed to young women in particular. The main epithet: you are not safe alone. You (and your body) must

be made visible, for safety’s sake. And yet, for Angie, visibility was the very thing that shamed her. Made her a target. Made her mother cringe and scowl and declare her unfit for public consumption. Put on her Morisot-Cradle face.

Angie left the car idling in the landscape of waste.

A wheelless pram lay on its side among pieces of splintered pine furniture and dubious bags of trash. The Honda’s brake lights doused the plastic red. She crossed in front of the headlights with the first load of bags, stepping on the glistening spokes of an umbrella. Pulled open the hatch of the bin and hefted the load into the yawning mouth – THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION. The bags tumbled onto dull mass.

Hitchings hunted when Angie’s mother was a young woman herself, younger than Angie was now. He picked up women in the headlights of his truck at that magic, gauzy hour when lights against the dark night dazzle the senses. Some of the women would be forever unnamed after they were found, known only by their discovery location or tattoos. Ms Blue Sparrow. Ms Ferntree. Hitchhikers, it was supposed.

Had her mother feared him too? Angie wondered.

Empty‑handed, she stared at the inside of the car. The shape of the front seat suddenly seemed amorphous. It could have masked the shape of someone sitting there. Could have been Hitchings, grinning at her from the darkness. Could be her mother, full of stinging reproach.

“You’ll break the springs, standing like that, at your size.”

Angie tugged the bin open and threw all that she’d gathered into the hatch. A single sleeve dangled from the bin.

Angie, too old and too big for twirling scarves, shamed.

Wrote a letter later that day on torn pieces of note-paper: Dear Mr Hitchings…

How many times had her mother read it? Seen the childish [sic sic sic sic].

I understand because I often think I will kill my mother.

I hate her. I wish she would DIE. The words of a child’s nasty, impotent rage. Her mother had kept them, hidden them, rather than thrown them away.

Had she known that Angie would one day see them again?

Was it a final form of humiliation? Angie realised she couldn’t remember where she’d put the envelope after its discovery.

Clawing at memory, she searched the house, the space in the bedroom. Staring dumbfounded at the looming bins that spewed the remnants of her mother, she thought it might even have been caught in the tangle of her furious discarding.

Her mother’s house was hollowed out and put on the roadside.

Angie took only a few practical objects: a cast-iron skillet, a set of knives. She left the Morisot print stacked against a box of trash. There was a moment where she imagined herself

“The heat made the road waver like oil suspended on water.

Her trajectory was tunnel-visioned, of singular purpose. Then it was broken by a slash of colour on the road... It was a fox.”

With renewed urgency, Angie dragged out another pair of over-filled bags. She was puffed by the effort, as though she’d been running, but without the release. Propping one bag against the front tyre, she hauled the other up to the mouth of the bin. She managed to hitch open the wide-handled trap but a rusted edge snagged the plastic as Angie tried to cram it inside. Her mother’s clothes poured from the tear and only a small collection tumbled in.

Dropping to her knees, she scrambled to collect the remaining articles, seizing cottony dresses that she did not dare to remember. They’d become strange and unfamiliar objects, these clothes without a body in them. A woollen skirt grazed her arm, coarse as sandpaper. And silk – a scarf Angie enviously eyed as a child, desirous of its supple curves and the hypnosis of its downward drift when released from a height.

She remembered it all now. When she was still a kid, alone at home. Her mother out on errands. Angie had undressed and let the scarf fall over her bare skin, pimpled with goosebumps.

No mirrors to see her body in, it was just the delicate sensation of the smooth fabric sliding over. She’d stood on her bed, twirled the scarf and let it hover. Her mother had come home without Angie noticing and witnessed her standing on the edge of the bed. She could have pretended not to see her. Instead, it was the curled-down lip.

FICTION EDITION

changing her mind and retrieving it. In another world, another Angie saw the painting upended and interpreted it in a new way. Upside down, it was a painting about light. The mother in the dark garb took up so little space in it.

This Angie left it for the council cleanup.

It was a Sunday. The air was full of the vibrato drone of lawnmowers. By the car park charity bins, perturbed cockatoos squalled and lifted themselves away on meringue-white wings. Taking their cue from those bags of refuse left torn on the ground, the rest of Angie’s mother’s belongings had been scavenged overnight by locals seeking better wares from the bad. Rejected garments lay in heaps of unworthy cloth in the dust.

In her rear-view mirror Angie saw the fox. Her face was grotesquely flattened to the road and the sheen of amber was gone from the scorched fur. The eyes, dried to slits, squinted in euphoria. It was a look, near orgasmic. Like she was laughing.

Dasha Maiorova (@DashMaiorova) is a Belarus-born emerging writer and visual artist. She is currently working on her first novel, a contemporary Russian gothic set in St Petersburg.

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Stone M E L I S SA M A N N I N G

W

alde climbed out of the rivulet, stumbled, and dug his heels into claggy earth, mewling kid tucked tight under his arm. Its tiny hooves drummed the air, damp body warm against him.

He was barely at the ridge when Liesl knocked him sideways. He caught the ground with one hand, placed the kid down with the other and sat in the mud laughing as the kid scooted up under Liesl and began to suckle. Walde laid back and let the damp soak his flannel shirt to skin, like the first layer of papier-mâché to balloon. He listened to the sucks and tiny groans of the kid and watched the sky move from ash to the palest blue. It was the thing he liked most about duck eggs, the colour of their whites, which were really always blue. Like snow, if you looked at it properly.

Walde picked his way across the property, grass licking at his ankles, brushing away the muck that coated his woollen socks. He turned to look at the track he’d made, tall blades of grass flattened by the weight of his mud-laden boots.

Back near the house, the girls wove around his feet, a

If the dal were good, he’d lick the plate clean, out there in the open. He’d drag long lines with his tongue until he’d covered the entire surface, then he’d rinse the plate in the sink and lay down and wait for sleep to come and take him.

In the car on the way to the job he felt the darkness grow in his gut. He should have brought one of the girls, sat her on his lap to soak away the black, but the girls always shat everywhere and there was nowhere to put them once he arrived at a job. He pulled a lamb’s wool jumper from his bag and lifted it to his nose to breathe in the smell of lanolin, then he bunched the thing in his lap and pretended to himself that a heart beat within it. He pushed thoughts from his mind and began to whistle. It was a long time since the radio had worked, a long time since he’d tried to make it work. Instead he was winding his way through the songs from The Sound of Music. In the beginning he’d sung, but he could never remember the words, so he’d moved to whistling. It was slow progress, his range limited to a couple of unreliable octaves, but it passed the time and it felt like company.

The job was in Kettering. They were the kind of people

“He pulled a lamb’s wool jumper from his bag and lifted it to his nose to breathe in the smell of lanolin, then he bunched the thing in his lap and pretended to himself that a heart beat within it.” cacophony of appeals. Walde shook his head, reached into his pockets and threw chicken pellets in an arc, watched the girls dash as if their lives depended on it, as if he hadn’t only thrown pellets half an hour before.

Inside Walde warmed his fingers in the glow of the electric hotplate and imagined it was a fire. He made instant coffee, topped it with goat’s milk and sat at the small laminate table, let his mug make a fresh coffee stain on the latest bill from the electricity company. After this job, he’d have enough money for the solar.

He sipped his coffee and mapped the day in his mind. He’d have another cup of coffee, then give the girls the scraps; leave them to their day. On the drive over to the job, he’d rev the Holden hard whenever he had to stop, try to ease the gritty shift between first and second gear and hope the thing would get him there, get him back again. Later, when he got back home, he’d milk Heidi, then drag open the gate to the laying boxes and collect the eggs. For dinner he’d cook up a pot of dal and sit on the back step and talk to his girls, listen to them bleat, tok and kwak as he scraped a spoon across his plate.

FICTION EDITION

who made a lot of noise about it. Wanted to get involved – as though observing could teach them the skills and eye he’d spent twenty years acquiring. He preferred to work for the registered builders. Not that he had any time for paperwork or rules, but those blokes left you alone, didn’t need to observe every stone laid, didn’t ask why you’d chosen one stone over another. They just wanted the job done.

Walde liked it best when he was alone with the stone.

He liked to leave something of himself behind – a sliver of hangnail, a whisker, sometimes a piece of rolled up snot. It wasn’t for the people, mostly he didn’t think about them after he’d finished a job. It was for the works themselves. It was some kind of continuity, a way of being a part of them as much as they were a part of him.

Fireplaces were his favourite; there was something about the heating of a thing so solid and heavy. He imagined himself in the flames, in the smoke that would lift from the chimney or cling in soot to its walls. It was his way to remain.

“You should come for dinner.” Brian was standing too close.

Walde didn’t know how to respond. He dipped his trowel THE BIG ISSUE 2018 17

“Linh’s smile traversed the landscape of her face in a wide arc.

The effect was strange, almost a caricature, but her extended hand was small, smooth and firm, like the best kind of stone.” into the mortar bucket and spread the thick, grey slurry on the side of a stone and lifted the next stone in, pressed it into place, tapping and scraping until he was satisfied.

“How ’bout Thursday?” Brian continued.

Walde looked up, couldn’t think of an excuse. “Okay.”

Walde washed his hair, found the nailbrush in the laundry trough and scrubbed at his nails until the ends of his fingers felt raw. Pulled on a clean flannelette shirt and the least dirty pair of overalls he could find. He took some eggs and a pint of goat’s milk from the fridge.

“Glad you could come.”

Brian invited him in, handed him half a glass of beer.

“Linh’ll be back soon. She’s picking up Em.” Walde took a sip, wiped the froth from his beard and nodded.

“Bloody nice work you’re doing here. Really nice,” Brian said, gesturing towards the half-formed fireplace.

Walde felt the skin on his face prickle, like every hair in his beard was pulling away. He looked down, dragged his socks against the seagrass matting.

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“Thanks.”

Lights swept across the room, the sound of car doors slamming, the high-pitched voice of a child. Walde felt relieved for the distraction from scrutiny.

“Ah, you’re here already.” Linh’s smile traversed the landscape of her face in a wide arc. The effect was strange, almost a caricature, but her extended hand was small, smooth and firm, like the best kind of stone. Walde resisted the temptation to rub a finger across the top of it, trace its contours, search its textures through touch. Behind his ribs, emptiness evanesced.

“You’re making our fire.” A wiry girl looked up at him, hair pulled back in a ponytail, fuzz about her face and neck.

“I am.”

“When will you be finished?”

“Don’t be rude Em,” said Linh.

“I wasn’t.”

“It’s hard to tell. Sometimes you have to wait for the fireplace to tell you it’s done,” said Walde.

“That’s weird. You’re a bit weird,” said Em. Walde smiled.

“All the best people are weird,” said Linh running her hands across the stones Walde had laid earlier that day. He felt the seagrass matting shift like a wave beneath his feet.

“Hope you like curry, Brian’s made vindaloo.”

Brian pulled on oven gloves and carried a casserole dish across to the table.

“Please Walde, take a seat.” Linh hovered, placing cutlery and serving spoons around the crockery.

“Can I get you another drink Walde? We have wine or beer.”

“Yes. Thanks.” Walde scratched his fingers through his beard.

Linh laughed, a soft laugh like a sigh, came back with a longneck of beer and three fresh glasses.

“For curry, beer is the best.”

She flicked off the bottle top and poured their drinks. Walde noticed the easy way she’d made the head on each beer the exact same depth. He leaned back and ate his curry and they talked about country life, but mostly they talked about the fireplaces he’d made over the years. Walde rode the fuzz of the beer and for a while it felt like he was important in the world.

The road on the way home drove smooth, curvy, like the slow version of a roller-coaster. Walde cranked the heating up, pulled the lamb’s wool jumper across his legs while he waited for the air to warm. Skinny trees silhouetted against the charcoal undulations of the land, like paper-cut models he and his brother made as kids.

Dense fog hovered just ahead like an ever-retreating shroud.

It hid the road, obscured its margins and filled the crevice of the creek. When the moon snuck behind cloud, Walde almost missed the turn. His neighbours all complained about the mist, reckoned it was dangerous, hated the frost that came with it.

But Walde loved the way it snaked into the creases of the land, like a puff of smoke in a dragon’s throat, a wraith progeny of the Bridgewater Jerry fog that wound from New Norfolk down the Derwent River towards the Tasman Bridge.

He checked on the girls then made himself a mug of tea, sat on the back step and replayed the night in his head. You’re weird and the small gauge of Linh’s wrists, the way she tilted his glass. The perfect symmetry of their beers. Tomorrow he would rub his finger across the place on the stones where her pressure had been, check his chest for signs of the empty place.

Melissa Manning’s (@lissymanning) writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Award Winning Australian Writing, Best Small Fictions (US) , Overland and Tasmania 40°South . She won the 2015 Overland Story Wine Prize and is working on a short story collection with support from the Australian Society of Authors and a Wheeler Centre Hotdesk fellowship.

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The Hunt E L E A N O R L I M P R EC H T

“Y

ou know what my two biggest fears are?”

The kid wearing a Minecraft T-shirt turns to his friend standing next to him at the front of the queue.

“Nup.” His friend is skinny and short, a flat cap hides most of his scraggly blond hair.

“Smoke alarms and spa baths.”

I can’t help but grin as I walk past. It’s what I love about kids – how random they are – but I haven’t got time to stop and listen further. I’m patrolling the pack, five minutes until we let this horde into the cordoned-off section of the showground. Thousands of foil-wrapped eggs and buckteeth bunnies have been stashed in the grass, behind the stands, beneath cones, on top of rocks and on the edges of bushes.

All in the name of Easter.

At home, Easter was never about chocolate. It was Mum and Dad waking me for Salubong before dawn, stuffing a

than me. The wide smile she normally gives me is absent.

“Can you and Saint pass out the bags down the line? Only one per child. And tell ’em when the bag is full they need to leave so other children can find enough eggs.”

She gestures at the boxes of plastic bags beside the cordon. I pick one up and hand one to Saint, give him the same instructions. Rosamie is my mother’s sister, my Tita.

She rang last week and said she’d give me $100 to help out.

My cousin Pablo, her son, is getting $150 to be the bunny.

Like it’s any harder, but I guess it is sweatier. Plus, I don’t have to wear that creepy suit. The bunny has red eyes and a saggy face – I told Rosamie it was going to give kids nightmares. Pablo covered his embarrassment about being dressed like a giant bunny by making crass jokes about how much sex rabbits have. He’s got a full-on Aussie accent, which takes some getting used to.

“I’ll be rootin’ like a rabbit.”

“Get it out of your system,” Rosamie replied. “If I hear

“She says it in one of those loud, slow voices people use when they don’t think you speak English. I probably spell better than her, she’s probabaly got spelling errors in her tattoos.” pandesal in my fist as we hurried out to the street to join the procession at the Galilea. Dad and I followed the Christ statue and Mum and my little sister followed the Virgin, draped in a black veil. It’s about that moment when the veil is lifted and it flutters off in the pink-grey sky – once they even tied it to doves’ feet. Then we’d throw flowers and set off fireworks in the streets. The Virgin is Nuestra Señora de Alegría, Our Lady of Joy. Once a kid at school told me he found the lambong – the veil – with a dove still attached down by the fishing boats. Its foot was caught and he said he smashed its head with a stone.

The next year they didn’t use doves, but balloons, and I was glad. Even if they went into the sea and choked the turtles, it was better than the thought of the crushed bird’s skull, blood and brain staining the lambong as it lay in the sand with chip packets and fishing line.

Rosamie waves me over. She’s got her clipboard and a bluetooth on her ear, her hair in a high ponytail. She’s jumpy like she’s had three too many coffees. There’s a list of names on the clipboard and a bumbag stuffed to bursting with notes and change around her stocky waist. She’s a head shorter FICTION EDITION

you talking like that around the children you’ll be sorry you were born.”

Now Saint and I pass out the bags, repeating Rosamie’s instructions.

“Sure thing, mister,” the kid with the flat cap says, and his friend nods. Some of the parents seem a little miffed though. One lady with a snotty kid on her hip squints at me.

“Twelve dollars a head and they only fill up this bag?”

She says it in one of those loud, slow voices people use when they don’t think you speak English. I probably spell better than her, she’s probably got spelling errors in her tattoos, but I just shrug and deliver the same instructions to the next person in the queue. I hear the rumblings echo after me.

The sun’s already out and softening the eggs. We filled up the trolleys yesterday; Rosamie says the chocolate is good even though it’s cheap.

“It’s German – and Germans are like Swiss. They know how to make chocolate.”

The families all have that end-of-a-long-weekend look of exhaustion. I hear a dad snapping at his toddler to stop asking to be picked up and watch an older lady in thongs THE BIG ISSUE 2018 21

threaten to smack a kid who keeps stepping on her toes.

They probably can’t wait to get back to work on Tuesday.

I bet they’d work Monday if they had the chance.

Rosamie’s on the loudspeaker now, giving instructions about how only parents of kids who need help are allowed in, the rest can watch from outside the perimeter. She’s repeating that each kid can only fill one bag and then leave, so there’s enough eggs and bunnies for everyone.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Saint start running toward the field. A few kids have ducked under the cordon and I dash to help him. Other kids, even parents, start heaving forward. The queue disintegrates. Rosamie looks at us all panicked.

“Fuck,” I mutter, and I see Pablo run out from the toilets, pulling the bunny mittens back over the wristbands of his suit. At least he wasn’t touching his dick with them – maybe he’s worth the extra fifty dollars.

Rosamie’s voice is a high-pitched shriek now. “Three, two, one, GO! HAPPY EASTER! Enjoy the hunt!”

She goes to lift the rope, but it’s already been trampled – parents are shouting and kids are sprinting in every direction.

“Get the bunny over there, Jayden,” a mum shouts at the

Rosamie goes up to him. “You’ve got to take eggs off the kids who have too many. Otherwise some kids won’t get enough,” she says. She’s really freaking out.

“Mum,” he says. “Bunnies don’t take eggs from kids. They give kids eggs.”

“You do as I say.”

He hops off and I see him confront a little girl, holding out a bunny mitten. She gives him the eggs she’s holding in the skirt of her dress, then runs to her parents and starts to cry. The whole thing is chaos.

Rosamie looks like she’s going to burst into tears.

She’s the one who sponsored my visa to move here, who let me stay at her house until I got a place to live near the uni, who helped me find work and taught me the different words for things. How to get a Medicare card and read the bus schedule. How to queue up for everything. How to pay tax.

I start shouting at the kids hoarding eggs and their parents, too. “You’ve got to put them back. You can’t take more than your share!”

They’re not listening, though. They’re stuffing them down their shirts, tucking them in so their torsos are lumpy with chocolate.

I spot a little guy whose grandmother’s helping him, the

“There are eggs getting stomped, kids shoving and filling their shirts, their caps, passing full bags to their parents. Meanwhile Pablo’s just sort of hopping around, looking as stunned as I feel.” sidelines, pointing at the path. Another kid grabs it. “Oi! That was Jayden’s.” Jayden shoves him on the way past.

Rosamie is beside me. “I need you to make sure kids aren’t taking extra. These parents are crazy, huh?”

“For real.”

“Tell Pablo and Saint.”

I see a dad grab his daughter’s full bag and hand her a Coles shopping bag.

Rosamie sees too, and weaves towards them.

I see a kid eating a chocolate rabbit, stepping on another kid’s fingers as he swerves for an egg in the grass.

“C’mere, Benji, there’s heaps over here!”

“Look, under the tree there!”

“Cherise, don’t forget to check under the cones!”

“You’re not meant to eat the chocolate,” I tell the one eating the rabbit. “Put it in your bag.”

“Put it in your bag,” he mimics in a baby voice.

I try to get some kids with full bags to leave. I see Rosamie wrestling the Coles bag off the girl.

“You need to put some back,” I hear her say. “The Easter Bunny’s gonna get angry with you.”

There are eggs getting stomped, kids shoving and filling their shirts, their caps, passing full bags to their parents.

Meanwhile Pablo’s just sort of hopping around, looking as stunned as I feel.

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two of them must have come in last. They’re moving slow; he’s waiting for her. There won’t be much left for them by now.

Saint and Pablo are still telling kids to put eggs back, but they’re just met with nasty looks from parents. It’s not worth it, I want to say. Let’s give up.

I walk over to Rosamie, she’s pulled back the blanket on a pram and there’s armfuls of chocolate bunnies stuffed in there. The mother is holding her baby under her arm like a footy.

“You can’t take all those,” Rosamie says to the mum, who’s wearing a singlet that says I’M NOT DEAF I’M JUST IGNORING YOU. “You’ve got to put some back.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, you bitch,” the mum snaps.

Her son is pulling her arm. He looks like he wants to disappear.

“Bitch?” Rosamie starts muttering under her breath. She has a dirty mouth when she wants.

“Come on, Tita,” I say, pulling her arm. “Where’s your loudspeaker? Just tell them the hunt is over. Happy fucking Easter.”

I see Pablo and a kid tugging at either end of a chocolate bunny. Saint scrambling to hide the stash of spare bags that parents are raiding.

There is the static then screech of Rosamie’s loudspeaker.

“Attention, egg hunters. The hunt is officially over. Thank you for coming. Happy Easter.”

She’s saying all the right things but her voice is cracking like a real egg. I want her to hold it in. Don’t let them get you down.

We stay to clean up, take stock. We pick up their rubbish, the empty foil wrappers and soft drink cups and torn plastic bags littering the grounds.

“That was a shameful thing you did,” one mum says, storming past, dragging her kids by their little pink arms.

“Taking chocolate from children. Shame on you Easter Bunny.” She stomps off, thighs rubbing in fluoro capris.

“Like your kids need to eat any more fucking chocolate, you tub of lard,” Pablo mutters under his breath.

“Pablo,” Rosamie hisses, but when I look up she is trying to keep from smiling.

“Check the toilets, will you?” she asks me.

I knock on the ladies’ first, no answer. I do a quick sweep, flushing the toilets, clearing the rubbish out of the sink. Then the mens’. Flat cap and Minecraft are in there, counting their chocolates on the bench beside the sink.

“Time to go, kids,” I say. Do these two even have parents?

“That was a lame Easter egg hunt,” flat cap says, the sides of his mouth sticky with chocolate.

“Do you want to know what my two biggest fears are?”

I say.

“What?” Minecraft says, eyes wide.

I hold up two fingers.

“Parents worried their kids will miss out,” I fold a finger down. I can’t really think of a second but then I see Pablo walking towards us, still wearing that creepy suit.

“And giant killer zombie rabbits.” I fold the second finger down. My fist hangs in the air a moment. The kids shrug and turn around. They see Pablo and scream. He steps to the side as they run past.

“What was that about?” Pablo asks, once their screams have faded.

“Look in the mirror.”

“Yeah, fuck off.”

“Happy Easter to you, too.”

Eleanor Limprecht (@theneedtoread) is the author of three novels: The Passengers (2018), Long Bay (2015) and What Was Left (2013), which was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. She also writes short fiction, reviews and essays. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS, where she teaches creative writing.

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A Short-Lived Tyranny MELANIE CHENG

B

ecky stood before the full-length mirror in the walk-in wardrobe. She let her towel drop, turned side-on, sucked in her belly.

“It’s true what they say about breastfeeding,” she said to her husband Alan, who was sitting in bed replying to emails.

“What do they say about breastfeeding?”

“That it ruins your breasts.” To demonstrate, she walked to the bedroom naked and pointed to her chest.

“I’ve never heard anyone say that.” Alan’s eyes flicked up from the screen. “I’ve only ever heard them say breast is best,” he smiled a cheeky smile, “and I would have to agree.”

Becky glanced down at her sad-looking nipples. “I don’t mean people of my generation. I mean people like my Nonna. Women who wait until you’re pregnant to tell you that, after giving birth to five kids, their uterus is hanging between their knees.”

But Alan wasn’t listening, he was frowning at his laptop.

Becky pulled a nightie from a drawer in the dresser, slipped

Becky’s mum was in the middle of making gingerbread men when she arrived. Freddie was standing on a stepladder, applying the M&M buttons. Becky always felt ambivalent watching her mother bake with her son. On the one hand she was delighted to see them share such a strong bond – God knew it made her life easier – but on the other hand, she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful. Her mum had never baked with her as a child. Every year for the school fete she’d bought a packet of stale lamingtons, wrapped them in tinfoil and passed them off as her own.

“How was work?”

Becky threw her bag onto the dining table, kissed the top of Freddie’s head. “One of the receptionists made a complaint about a manager.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows. “What kind of complaint?”

“An unwanted-drunken-kiss-at-a-Friday-night-drinks kind of complaint.”

“As she hung up her towel, she suppressed a groan at the sight of Alan’s dirty socks on the carpet. If she said anything, she knew it would erupt into a fight.” it over her wet head. It was the same one she’d been wearing when she went into labour with Freddie. Never mind that she’d bought it at Kmart for ten dollars and it was probably made in Bangladesh, she couldn’t bear to part with the thing.

As she hung up her towel, she suppressed a groan at the sight of Alan’s dirty socks on the carpet. If she said anything, she knew it would erupt into a fight. Instead, she rolled the socks into little black balls and stuffed them down the front of her nightie.

“Maybe I’ll get a couple of implants,” she said, lounging before him on the bed.

“Seriously?”

“Maybe.”

Becky removed the socks. She threw them at the laundry basket in the corner, missed.

“I’d be okay with that. If that’s what you want.” Alan snapped his laptop shut and stared at her with wide eyes.

“I don’t know what I want.”

Becky looked down at the frayed straps of her nightdress, at its neckline, gaping wide where the dirty socks had been.

FICTION EDITION

Becky’s mother supressed a smile, she loved a scandal.

“Nowadays men have to be so careful.”

“It’s not about being careful,” Becky said, her voice loud and clipped. “It’s about not forcing your tongue into somebody else’s mouth.”

Her mother licked her finger. “Of course, dear,” she said in the same tone she used with Becky’s father.

Not wanting to look at each other, the women turned their attention to Freddie. He had been feasting on M&Ms and now his mouth was smeared with red. Becky remembered the tagline: melt in your mouth, not in your hand.

“I should read that book Raising Boys,” Becky said finally.

Becky’s mother opened the oven door, slid the neat rows of gingerbread men inside it. “In my day there weren’t any books about parenting.”

“That explains a lot.”

Becky’s mother wiped her hands on her apron, her eyes wide and daring. “Here we go again. Blame the Baby Boomers for everything.”

“Maybe not you, but look at Alan’s parents. You should have seen the way his face lit up when I talked about getting THE BIG ISSUE 2018 25

breast implants.”

Becky’s mother looked down at her sagging bosom. “Mine were never the same after I had you and Henry. Low-cut dresses suddenly looked terrible.”

“I was making a comment about men,” Becky mumbled.

“My friend, Liz, just had a skin cancer removed from behind her ear. She used a plastic surgeon in Malvern. Do you want me to get his name for you?”

Becky said nothing. She filled her mouth with rainbowcoloured candy.

From that day on, Becky took notice of women’s breasts.

In the change rooms after Freddie’s swimming class, she admired the impossibly perky pair on the aqua-aerobics instructor. When she was shopping, she marvelled at the long cleavage on the Italian woman who worked at the fruit store.

On Saturday mornings, she even examined the man-boobs on a couple of Middle-Aged Men in Lycra.

When Becky called the plastic surgeon’s rooms, the receptionist said she was in luck – they’d had a last-minute cancellation. She showered and shaved her legs and put on her brightest red lipstick. The tram was late, but she got there with plenty of time to spare.

In the waiting room there was a jug of sparkling water and a tank full of tropical fish. She sat down beneath a poster of an English garden and a quote from Rudyard Kipling: Gardens are not made from singing ‘Oh, so beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade. She picked up the latest Vogue magazine, flicked through its glossy pages.

She didn’t have to wait long. An elegant Chinese man in a navy suit and pointy shoes soon ushered her to his consulting room. He gestured for her to sit down before taking his position behind the glass-topped desk. Becky was nervous but she needn’t have been. The doctor had a casual way of speaking that quickly put her at ease.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” the surgeon said, “we’d like to take some 3D pictures.” As if by magic, a female assistant in a white coat appeared in the doorway. Becky followed her to a windowless room, empty except for an elaborate machine with three large flash bulbs.

“When you’re ready.”

Becky took off her top and bra, hung them on a hook behind the door. She stood inside the metallic limbs of the machine with her arms clamped by her sides. It was all over in three hot white flashes. By the time she’d dressed and walked back down the hall, the surgeon had a 3D image of her nude torso on his iPad. “With these pinching movements you can alter the size to your liking,” he said, moving his fingers apart to create impossibly gigantic balloons, and bringing his fingers close to return her breasts to their original size. He held out the tablet. “Have a play.”

Becky looked down at the photo. Something about the incongruity of her serious face and her inflatable chest made her giggle.

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“This technology has revolutionised the industry,” the surgeon said solemnly. “It allows patients to try before they buy.”

When Becky had finally settled on a preferred size, the plastic surgeon saved and printed the image. While he was collecting the photo from reception, Becky picked up one of the sample implants lying like chicken fillets across his desk.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her both the printed image and a detailed breakdown of the cost. “You’ll have to check with your insurance, but they don’t usually cover cosmetic surgery.”

Becky looked at the numbers. She dug her fingernails into the implant she still clasped in her hand.

On the way home, Becky resolved not to tell Alan about the appointment. She stopped in at the local butcher and bought three steaks for dinner. At the childcare centre, she found Freddie in the arms of a carer – a pretty thing with Angelina Jolie lips and a Spanish accent.

As Becky strapped Freddie into his car seat, he pulled at the neck of her jumper. “Mummy got boobies!” he said and laughed. Becky kissed his cheek, which tasted faintly of Vegemite. As she backed out of the childcare centre, she caught sight of some fresh graffiti on the underpass, in dripping crimson letters: Beauty is a shortlived tyranny.

Becky folded the image and kept it in her wallet. She pulled it out when she was waiting for a tram and when Freddie was napping. Now when she looked at herself in the mirror all she saw were her droopy breasts and oversized nipples.

She came across the ad by accident – flashing letters on the sidebar when she was checking her email. Breast surgery in a developing country for a tenth of the price. She was sceptical at first. But then she read the testimonials from dozens of happy women, and she did virtual tours of the impressively clean hospitals.

She put the picture, by now creased and dog-eared, underneath Alan’s coffee cup one Sunday morning. Freddie was playing with Duplo – building brightly coloured towers and then smashing them to pieces.

“What’s this?” Alan said, waving the piece of paper in the air.

Becky launched into her spiel. She reassured him that the doctors were qualified, and the clinics were world class. She explained that her mother would help with the drop-offs and pick-ups for the short time she was away. She said everything exactly as she had planned and practised. But Alan wasn’t listening. He was gawking at the photo.

The airport was air-conditioned, but many areas were open to the sky. Becky was wet with sweat by the time she reached the arrival hall. As promised, there was a person holding a tablet with her name on it. This impressed Becky – all the

There was a Western-styled cafe conveniently located next door to the clinic. The driver had told her that an Australian called Pete owned it. He had raved for ten minutes about the sweetness of the pavlova. This would be Becky’s last meal before the surgery – she wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight. She ordered a meat pie with salad and chips, and a slice of pavlova for dessert. As she waited, she watched a tourist with lips as thick as a grouper suck pumpkin soup through a curly straw.

At 7am a woman in a facemask collected Becky from her room. As the woman applied a name label to her wrist, Becky marvelled at her acrylic nails and false eyelashes.

She supposed gloves would prevent the nails from falling off during surgery, but she wondered what would stop the eyelashes from dropping inside a body cavity.

Becky followed the woman’s ghostly figure down the brightly lit corridor. Every few metres the woman turned around and smiled. Even though she wore a mask, Becky could tell she was smiling from the narrowing of her black eyes. At the end of the hallway, a man with a round face waited. Becky understood then that the woman was not so

“She sat down beneath a poster of an English garden and a quote from Rudyard Kipling: Gardens are not made from singing ‘Oh, so beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.’” other signs were handwritten. The man introduced himself as her driver. He wore a white coat with the name of the clinic embroidered on the pocket. Becky spotted a Rolex watch on his hairless brown wrist.

There were two Caucasian women in the van, waiting and perspiring. Becky exchanged shy smiles with them as she made her way to the back of the vehicle. They rode in silence.

The two women slept, while Becky looked out the window.

She frowned at the families piled onto motorbikes and the twenty-four hour massage parlours.

The clinic was in a multi-storied building with floor-toceiling windows. A woman in a white uniform greeted them in the foyer. The woman gave each patient a key with a large plastic key chain. Becky’s room was new and clean. In the bathroom, there were miniature bottles of whitening and anti-ageing creams. Becky tried a small amount on the back of her hand, but washed it off when her skin started to tingle.

She left the bathroom and collapsed onto the bed, watched the ceiling fan slowly spin.

An hour later she was roused by the vibration of her phone on the bedside table. An image of Alan and Freddie eating ice cream appeared across the screen. Below the photo, a blue speech bubble with the words: We love you. She pushed the phone face down into the bed.

FICTION EDITION

much a nurse as a human courier.

She lay down on the gurney like the man told her to. He left the room and returned minutes later wearing a gown and a pair of gloves. He asked Becky for her arm, which she promptly gave to him. She felt a pinch and remembered holding Freddie tight as the maternal child health nurse immunised him. The anticipation, the nurse had said in a soothing voice, was always worse than the reality.

“You feel sleepy soon,” the man – who Becky assumed was the anaesthetist – declared.

As she waited for the drugs to take effect, Becky watched a tiny fly hover, tauntingly, above her head. She went to move – to swat it away, to tear off her gown, to rip the cannula from her arm – but the drowsiness was overwhelming. It pinned her to the bed.

Melanie Cheng (@mslcheng) is a writer and GP based in Melbourne. Her debut short story collection, Australia Day , won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.

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Night Neither Dark, Nor Yet Stormy G A RT H N I X

I

t was night, but it was not dark, the moon being full and bright and all a-silver. Nor was it stormy, though on the horizon black thunderheads mustered in their ranks, the storm beginning, gathering its strength.

Will Gorringsson – new-made watchman, all of seventeen years old and not yet come into his full growth, perhaps never to do so – stood tall on the wall in his hand-medown helmet and over-large cuirass, blunt halberd too heavy even at rest on his shoulder. He looked at the moon, so full, so round and bright, the swathe of its cool light across the town, split by the shadow of the tower guard, the tower where Will would go betimes, but not until the clock in the town hall rang the change of watch. The tower where a quart mug of spiced ale and a quarter-loaf of yesterday’s bread with a slab of cheese awaited him, but not for an hour yet, or more, in the night-time, under the moon with the storm nearing and the scent of coming rain something just begun to sniff at.

“Don’t look too long,” warned Ned Nedsson, older by a dozen years, and warmer by virtue of a thick cloak woven by his sisters. One of them, the youngest, called Adana, loved by Will Gorringsson from afar, far afar, for reasons both to do with shyness and the heavy fists of Ned Nedsson, champion bareknuckle fighter of both Watch, Town and County.

“Why not?” asked Will, abating his staring not one whit, fear of Ned Nedsson momentarily forgot. The moon was so bright, the light cast a bridge through the night that he might step upon, to walk up into the sky and there perhaps gain some lunar pearl or treasure, some great gift to bestow upon Adana, a gift so beautiful and beyond price that even Ned Nedsson would gauge him worthy and place her hand in his and tie the ribbons round so they be wed…

“Moonstrike!” warned Ned Nedsson, reinforcing his wise advice with a slap on the back of Will’s helmet that sent it over his eyes and staggered him at the knees. “Look too long and who knows what might happen? Besides, it’s the wall and beyond we watch, not the night sky above, moon or not, stars or not, rain or not. Where would I be with you moonstruck and useless?”

“Sorry, Ned,” said Will, a blush bright as a rose blooming in his cheeks, and no darkness to cover it.

He pushed his helmet back to look up once again, to hide tears and blush, gaze meeting the moon. The light and colour were broken into shifting prisms by the wetness in his eyes but even then he saw her, the Silver Lady, coasting down a moonbeam, slim legs over it like a banister, her argent hair astream behind her, all five ells of it, with moon imps scampering behind with amber combs and ribbons of gold snatched at dusk from the sun, her father.

FICTION EDITION

“Moonstruck!” grunted Ned, seeing Will staring, but then the Silver Lady was on the wall and smiling, a smile too bright for mortals to endure, save when occluded by tears and youth and innocence. Ned, his eyes wide but blinded, stumbled backward and fell from the wall, bounced off the canopy of Yell the Draper, rolling across the canvas and straight into the Seventy-Foot Drain, drain being a polite word for sewer.

“Lady,” whispered Will, and bent his head, not a moment too soon, the tears in his eyes almost burned dry by her beauty.

“Come with me, Will,” said the Silver Lady. “Come with me to the unknown lands beyond the moon, come cavort among the stars and live forever, or at least as long as your youthful charm shall last.”

But all Will heard was, “Come with me, come with me”, and all he could see were the Silver Lady’s ever-so slender ankles, untrammelled by robe or gown, and he felt a new warmth inside him, reinforcing the blush upon his cheeks. As the Silver Lady beckoned, he stepped forward to take her hand, forgetting that he held a heavy halberd at rest, and as he moved, so the weighted weapon fell, striking the Silver Lady true and cleaving her in two.

A hellish shriek awoke the town as the silvered blade fell, followed by the shouts and alarums of Ned in the sewer down below, and Will coming to his senses scuttled back shouting, “To me, to me, to me, the Watch!” The Silver Lady restitched herself from moonbeams, a little too swiftly, so that her smile did not match across her face. Her arms grew narrower and pointed, till they became long spears of light, and she stalked after Will with her imps behind her, all a-growl.

Will, halberdless now, faced a thing, no lady now, composed of moonbeams and hot anger. But his heart, fully tested, proved truer than he had feared.

“Do your worst, moon-creature!” cried Will, and steeled himself for death. Ned heard him from his sewer below, and saw him stand against a brightness too awful to be anything but sorcery most terrible.

The Silver Lady smiled her mismatched smile and raised her hand to strike, just as the ranks of thunderheads marched across the moon and sent her home. Heavy raindrops began to fall, Ned grew more urgent in his search for steps, and Will Gorringsson blinked, eyes crinkling and squinting in the sudden blackness.

It was a dark and stormy night. And all was well.

Garth Nix (@garthnix) has written many books, including the Old Kingdom fantasy series, five Sabriel books, SF novels and novels for children. More than six million copies of his books have been sold, in 42 languages.

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Korean Lessons JA M ES H U G H ES

T

he dogs of Korea are delivered in daylight on the open roads. Shuffling, peering from the pen, residue trust glistens in their frightened eyes.

Every time the pen passes, your spirit takes a dive. Self-interest shepherds righteousness to an outside lane. If you are to save the money you came here to save, learn how to teach English, honour your contract, become a more evolved, experienced person etc, you’ll be seeing it again.

“Why does the West think we are bad for eating the dog?”

So asks Jeanie; Tuesday’s 6.15 regular.

How to verbalise the self-evident?

You hear yourself saying that dogs are important, loyal creatures, that they give what we call “unconditional love”

front paws, brutalised by boredom, by anguish that won’t be expelled in a cage. His partner in captivity – all ribs, streaks and spiky ears – habitually stands at attention. Somehow her pride rises above the life-sentence.

Two conditions are all they know: 1 Soul-destroying boredom 2 Rage You and your adopted terrier passing by incite the latter – Happy lives chain-, hunger- and abuse-free. Flea-free is pushing it. At the sight of her they mash seething snouts and discoloured fangs and gums between the grill. Happy keeps her distance with an untroubled step; a lucky-charm amid the blighted.

Only when she’s out of their sight will their fury abate. In their faraway silence, in fact, you detect something stunned, a perplexed awe.

“Like miniature clockwork she arrives at your thatched hut door as you’re eating lunch. She’s fond of Kraft Singles; partial to corn bread.” and “solace” to people who may not have much of either.

She makes notes, frowns. Asks why we cannot also eat them?

She presses. “Do you think the chicken and duck is cute?”

“Do I think ducks and chickens are cute? Well…” Tapping a gentle rhythm on the table with your pen.

“Cat holds your tongue!”

Part of you is agitated, part of you pleased by her stab at idiom.

“You are in a pickle!”

Feigning conciliation, you turn up both palms. “Maybe we both are… Anyway let’s do our revision… Choosing adjectives.”

“Why do you not object to eating the duck and chicken and cow but you object to eating the dog?”

“I’m not asking you to agree with me.”

“But why do you not wish to discuss my hot topic?”

“Choosing adjectives… Let’s make a start, page forty-nine.”

“I think the West is hypocrite on this,” she says, with the chagrin of one whose opponent has rolled over, legs akimbo.

Two watchdogs endure a cage outside a mechanics workshop. Their suffering couldn’t be more obvious, or more invisible. One is usually motionless, jaw resigned on FICTION EDITION

Happy follows you to the mountain for your midday hike. You are not sure who adopted whom.

Like miniature clockwork she arrives at your thatched hut door as you’re eating lunch. She’s fond of Kraft Singles; partial to corn bread. Tuna doesn’t exactly displease her.

She invites herself hiking. Along the trail, having lost yourself in thought, in song, you look over your shoulder, wondering how far behind she’s fallen, how deep into the woods she’s strayed. More often she’s up ahead, looking down, wagging, grinning as if to say, “Chop, chop.” Climbing to her own ever-ready beat, skirting an occasional snoozing snake, requesting a hoist only where nature sets the bar too high, she’s an elite power-to-weight wunderkind.

On top, on the rocky ledge, you fill a small concave with water and her parched pink tongue activates.

Up here, in concord with the sun and breeze, as you watch the starlings in the valley, and read, dream up lesson-plans, sunbake nude, Happy’s way is to hightail back to the woods.

You allow her these unsupervised forays.

Just in time to head down again she reappears, frazzled and alarmed – like a kid who strayed into the wrong street and met a bully.

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June. Extremely hot. Somewhere not far from your bungalow a dog warbles and wails incessantly. Confronting the owner is suddenly irresistible.

Outside, at the hoary cement wall dividing the bungalow from the alleys, you hoist over, taking out a chunk of wall, immediately ridiculous.

Eccentric street design and deficient sense of direction conspires; locating the culpable address proves far beyond your ability. Like a cryptic crossword, no matter which way you come at it, you finish where you started.

At 4am the racket returns redoubled. In four hours you have a class to teach.

You wait.

And wait.

And spring naked from bed to flatten your nose against the flywire. “What is WRONG with you PEOPLE???”

Late for class four hours later, nudging the speed limit, flyaway petite orange leaves gusting across the windscreen, it crosses your mind that last night may have been a bit impolite.

Driving your employer, as usual, home from his ailing English-language academy. You’ve done your best for six months, but you’ve not been the cash-cow he coveted. As an investment, you may even be a lemon.

He’s in the front passenger seat, stewing. In the back seat, his wife, a retired music teacher, hums, watching the night slide by – a woman of patience and harmony and generosity. How did he ever manage it? Then again he could swing anything – he operates the language school (Let’s All English), a tour company (Let’s Fun Japan) and the local high school hall after hours (last week, a troupe of little people doing cabaret to packed houses). While admiring his enterprise and verve (he’s sixty-three), you and he are not getting along of late. There have been disagreements over your hours. A month ago he even lost your passport. After you contacted the embassy and ordered a new one, he discovered the old one behind his couch and came to your door waving it like the winning lotto numbers.

It has also come to your attention he has some kind of oldschool organised-crime connections. You used to see him as an eccentric. Now he seems dangerous. What he thinks of you is another thing.

Tonight’s exchange goes like this: “Mr James, now is summertime…many Koreans eating traditional summer soup. Do you know?”

Nod in the key of feigned neutrality.

“Mr James…summertime I wanting you eating special soup. How about?”

“No, thank you.”

Pause.

“Why?” “Thank you for your offer.”

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“Why not want?”

You are being tested; again.

“Reason what?”

Stomach knots; again.

“Mr James…you are wanting to be writer, correct? I have for you idea giving. Charging not.” A joke. “For you I offer extreme experience. Much extreme. Do you wanting?”

Just quit. It’s not as if you haven’t given it endless consideration. Both of your lives would be far less acrimonious.

“Old colleague friend…long time knowing…much successful.” He makes a sweeping gesture. “Number one dogkilling business all Korea.” His eyes meet yours. “Jinju City, Mr James.”

You’re looking at the road again, blandly nodding to give the impression none of this bothers you.

“Tour giving to you. Guided tour. Extreme encounter.

Many dogs crying, many dogs fighting.”

Next pay, you’re quitting.

“Mr James if you are writer, you must accept invitation.

Contract say: Employee Co-operation. Number One Important.”

Your hackles are rising.

“Why you not wanting? Why do you decline my invitation?”

And you do not trust your tongue anymore.

“Sunday for you convenient, Mr James?”

The moment you turn to speak, his wife reproaches him in a pained tone. His response is terse. Then he adds something at length. She looks out her window in distaste. She has gone out on a limb for you. You feel like pulling over and kissing her. Red light! You accelerate. All stiffen. All draw breath.

The van purrs, as if considering what might’ve been.

You apologise.

Princess spends her days tied to a persimmon tree. Picture a Husky pup crossed with a dingo: compacted thighs, rippling Achilles tendons, fuzzy pelt a kind of auburn cum piss-yellow.

She is so convinced you are her liberator she’s almost sold you on the heroic idea.

Red-letter day arrives. You pin a note to the tree in pigeon Korean, informing her owner you have taken her hiking.

Teenagers ditch a soccer game to witness the spectacle. Much nervous laughter – these guys are sixteen and haven’t known the uplift of a dog at their side.

Half a mile from the mountain, in the charred postharvest fields, you unleash her. The boys’ reaction says it all. Crazy dog! Crazy dog! They have never seen a dog run this way. Neither have you. She scorches the grass stubble running in an arc, bounding and zigzagging, collapsing and writhing, flipping to her feet again, accelerating at unprecedented speeds.

On the mountain trail, at the rocky rise that leaves you scrambling gasping, she goes up on springs, bounds back down and repeats the scale.

She burrows into a thicket and ensnares herself, emerging in a pool of sun, rocking a pink-petals halo. She revels in the ashes of a two-day cold camp fire. She terrifies a snake; chases a flabbergasted wild turkey within an inch of its leisurely life; spies an eagle in the mast of a pine and leaps marlin-like, twisting, wringing every sinew, convinced she can access the great unmoved bird.

From the summit she views dwarfed, undulating fields and distant highway, glances up as if to say, “Where to now, boss?”

Just off the track leading to the mountain, shrouded in bamboo, is a business enterprise in the shape of two large sheds. In your first months, whenever you passed, you had the blinkers on. Then one morning you heard a man thrashing at something and muted cries.

A man in white overalls is often at the bottom of the drive, repairing wooden cages with a yellow, rubber-handled hammer and short sharp nails.

Something charges the space between you. With the same wordless certainty you reject his cruelty, he rejects your absurd cultural conceit.

Returning from the mountain one icy mid-morning, instead of passing him by, you stop. The dewy air reverberates

“They have never seen a dog run this way. Neither have you.

She scorches the grass stubble running in an arc, bounding and zigzagging, collapsing and writhing, flipping to her feet again...” with each hammer strike.

Turning your back to him you overlook the paddies, where two old women work, sharing a joke.

The hammering stops. He stands, brushes his overalls, goes to his truck, opens the creaky driver’s door and finds his cigarettes.

Six or seven feet away, he crouches on the dew and surveys the paddies. You wonder if he worked there as a teenager.

Maybe his parents had worked there. It wasn’t impossible they still did.

Silence stretches. Something like goodwill seems to bridge the space between the two of you.

Every few moments, pressing his top front teeth to his tongue and gently inhaling, he emits an odd little squeak. One moment the noise is grating and peculiar, and the next as blameless as a baby bird.

He spits on the grass, just a little too close to your feet.

Your eyes meet.

Your stomach knots.

Stand firm or turn and walk away? Murmur invective in your native tongue, or greet him in your best Korean?

Through the bamboo comes the sound of a dog nosing a plastic bowl or container around concrete, trying, by the sounds, to winkle a last morsel. Another dog butts in. A muffled fight breaks out, degenerates; garbled dogs rip at each other in muted uproar.

FICTION EDITION

He waits until they’ve exhausted themselves. He stands, goes to the truck, unhooks a bamboo rod from the panel, turns for the path.

And you, well-trained denizen, are on your way again.

Language-learning game time with your favourite high school class. Their mission, should they accept, is to offer suggestions in English about a scene you have sketched on the left side of the blackboard. On the right side you will write their explanations as spoken. Everybody will then attempt to improve the grammar. If all goes well you’ll follow up by advancing the vocabulary.

Today you do something self-defeating.

Of all the scenes you could invent for this game: a boy searching for his lost dog. For five long minutes, there’s silence most uncharacteristic. They have no interest in the game today and appear even to resent it. Nobody has any suggestions what might have happened to the dog. No “Dog going park play golf”. No “Dog go river for swimming with girlfriend dog”.

No high spirits today. Routed by their strange silence, you reach for the duster.

The willowy, spectacled extrovert has a hand raised.

“Teacher…may I offer suggestion?”

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“Suspense is killing me.”

“Maybe…boy look dog farm.”

All but the exceptionally merciful watch you in sudden distrust – they think you’re trying to embarrass them.

Crimson, you turn your back, rub the board a little too spotless, pick up the chalk and go blank.

You steal a glance at the clock and tell them, to their collective distress, to open Let’s All Sing, page twelve: ‘The Baseball & Hot Dogs Song’.

As if what just went down was their fault.

mysteriously, something unlocked. At last we have trust.

Last week she told you that her father cuts his toenails watching TV. Last night she told you that her mother is tight-fisted – even her mother’s best friend thinks so. You taught her “thrifty” and “pennywise”.

“So, tell me… What does your mother say when he asks her to cook dog? Do they argue about this?”

“Mother says… Mother says cooking dogs…” She sighs theatrically, pulls the Korean-English dictionary close.

She learns “unpleasant”, “medieval” and “dubious”.

Shin Ton Yang, Wednesday nights, soft-spoken but frank.

Lessons have never felt forced and you took a liking to each other right from the first.

Tonight you enquire about the supposed aphrodisiac properties of dog meat.

He says, after thought, that he does not believe in it but one of his brothers favours the theory. “He says it is very good for stamina.”

You ask if he thinks it could be true.

“Why not?” He shrugs a shoulder. “We are all very different, aren’t we?” Turning his pen over and over, he adds that his brother has been known to exaggerate his prowess at other pursuits – golf, hiking and reverse-parking, to name three.

Shin Ton Yang asks if you would like to try a bowl of dog soup with him after the lesson.

You tell him you would be delighted to go out for another kind of Korean dish.

He doesn’t appear to take offence. He’s pragmatic, but you wonder if he’s a little disappointed just the same.

You ask what his other, younger brother believes.

He says his younger brother is not interested in sex.

Questions queue. Both of you observe a moment of silence.

Beneath the window a half-hearted honk in the unhurried rush hour.

He touches the bridge of his glasses, says most of his friends agree that aphrodisiacs are probably all in our heads.

You teach him the term “placebo effect”. With customary mellow diligence, he jots it down.

Imagine you have lived a year at the foot of a mountain.

Imagine you have two dogs for hiking companions.

Imagine you are leaving the country in a few days, after which time the larger dog will be sold for slaughter. Let’s say you overheard her lawful owner telling someone, in the native tongue, of which you have acquired just enough.

You are hiking with the dog one last time. You are thinking of throwing stones at her; of terrorising and banishing her in the lean hope she emerges somewhere to safety.

If you offer to pay her owner the same sum he will fetch by selling her, he could accept your money, only to sell her off once you’re gone. Shouldn’t you at least give him the chance? Haven’t you been teaching yourself, these months, to put more faith in people? Or why not buy her from him yourself, and find a kindly owner in the next fortyeight hours?

The trail is ending. She’s galloping parallel. Six legs leap the lichen-coated log – your bound rising from hers, hers from yours.

On the stony ledge you have come to call yours, a boy and grandfather are finishing lunch. The dog veers left into the woods, for a wander. The boy is already standing, intrigued.

Already, you have it in your head he will adopt. Already, you have it in your head the old man will agree to the idea.

Letting your bag down, breathing hard, subsiding to frigid rock, you nod to the old timer, nod to the startled boy. You need to offer them the dog with gestures just as simple. You would like to do something, once, fit to round out a fable.

This is purest fantasy, of course.

This is far from the trail where a dog bounded free; leaping fallen trunks; pausing for native scents; bewildered at far-flung sounds.

“I think eating dog...very bad.” She rifles through her maroon pencil case. “Korean men...strange.” She pronounces it stranjee.

She makes a note of the correction and pronounces it afresh.

“I think…” Sharpening a purple pencil. “I think dogs… very loyal to owner. Not matter if you are rich or poor, they are always friends. Eating friends very…” she laughs awkwardly. She blushes. “Eating friends very not good.”

“Do you have to eat it at home?”

“Me not tasting.” Waving a palm. “Brother eating with father, but mother doesn’t like cooking dog.”

For months this girl wouldn’t look at you. Eventually, FICTION EDITION

James Hughes’ stories have won and been shortlisted in contests in Australia and overseas. A collection of stories, Understanding Almost Nothing of the World , will be on offer to publishers this year.

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 35

The Blowies N ATAS H A B U Z Z AC OT T

K

it had waited all day until, finally, they were gone. Waited through the dry summer heat under the bottlebrush tree, the leaves shading her from the sun’s slow burn but not from the baking, desiccating air itself. The soil and matter underfoot crisping and bone dry, an arsonist’s food for thought.

Kit had waited. Waited while she sweated, her skin taut in the hot easterly wind, passing the time inspecting her nails, picking at the dark moons of dirt trapped beneath them. Picked too at the scabs on her knees, revealing the fresh pink skin, the new Kit. Watched ants oblivious to the heat and to her as they beat their never-ending foraging paths. The birds came and went, beaks open, ruffled feathers, wheezing their bagpipe calls. Kit waited until the cooling draught of the sea breeze had whispered in, scuttling the easterly and coating the city in its soothing balm.

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They had come from upriver just before noon, heralded by the buzzing outboard, all shouts and laughter. Then just as swiftly unloaded tackle, eskies, buckets and booze onto the jetty, the moored tinnie silenced. Three men, young and loud, surfing T-shirts, shorts, thongs, tanned, blond: Kings of the World. Kit wasn’t sure if they had come for fishing or drinking, so closely were the two combined. Fishing and drinking.

Drinking and fishing. She watched them through the heat and the laughter, the cursing and the joking. Watched as the beer and heat lulled them, the occasional cheer of a catch still marking their presence.

Through the long, roasting afternoon Kit waited. She had waited before. Waiting was her thing. Waiting and dissolving.

Dissolving into the background was easy when you were just some small gawky kid with scuffed shoes and lanky hair, unremarkable in every way. No hidden beauty, no Cinderella.

Sometimes she wondered if she could disappear completely.

Dissolve. Cease to be. Did she, in fact, become invisible?

Really invisible. She wondered how she would know if she were invisible. Would she feel different? How would she know if people couldn’t see her, or if they were just ignoring her? Invisible. Ignored. Was there a difference? Kit knew there was, but maybe not for the person who was ignored or who was invisible.

Being ignored was something Kit didn’t like to think about.

It moved too close to that knot in her throat, that little piece of tension, of longing, of pain, that tightened, constricted, and wouldn’t let her talk, let her breathe. It just sat there. Day after day. Sometimes she could hardly feel it. If she got distracted by the TV, by lessons at school, when her cousins came to visit and they ran and hid and laughed. Those times, just for a while, the knot shrank and withered, and she forgot it was there. But then, every time her mother told her she was being stupid, or childish, that she had messed up her clean floor, that she didn’t have time to look at every piece of treasure that Kit brought home, the knot tightened. When her father missed her school play because his work meeting was important, or forgot to take her to the park, was too tired, too busy, too late, too something, the knot tightened. Tightened, so her words were lost, her breath was caught, her eyes prickling and moist. As the knot

tightened and grew, Kit shrank. Her needs became less, her wants unfulfilled. And so, she dissolved, and slowly slipped between the cracks of their lives.

The fierce heat of the day had gone as the sun dipped towards the horizon and the loud, laughing Kings of the World buzzed away in the tinnie. And then Kit, who had waited all day, slipped from the cover of the trees and made her way to the jetty. She could smell beer, the wasted contents of a spilled can drying on the deck, but there was little else to mark the presence of the young men on the day, just some tangled fishing line caught in a knot of wood.

But there were fish. Maybe a dozen. Small, with bodies like latex. Pale bellies and darker on top. Blowies. Mostly they were intact, a few with mouths damaged by hooks and rough handling. And then one moved. Its mouth opened. Gasping.

Kit nudged it with her shoe. Its fin moved. She nudged it again, gently, not wishing to cause the creature more harm, pushing it over. It gasped again. Kit pushed the fish, watched it move closer to the edge of the jetty until one final push sent it into the still water. And Kit watched as the fish slowly sank, glassy eyed and still, consigning it to its murky grave. But then it twitched and arched and breathed and swam off, slowly and slightly skewed, but alive and away until it disappeared into the darker reaches of the river. And was gone.

“She had waited before. Waiting was her thing. Waiting and dissolving.

Dissolving into the background was easy when you were just some small gawky kid with scuffed shoes and lanky hair...”

Kit smiled. She turned and saw another fish. Inert. Lifeless.

She nudged it to the end of the jetty and off into the water.

Hoping. Watching. Heart sinking with the body of the fish. And then twitching and lifting as this fish, too, gulped and inhaled and swam, stronger than the first, more sure of its course.

Kit gasped. And turned, and prodded, pushed, cajoled each fish into the water. Some did not move as they sank and were swallowed by the gloom. Some could not come back. But most did. Most of the fish revived, even the one whose mouth was ripped and flapped. Even that one. Even that one! Each movement and breath and flick a triumph over the Kings of the World. Until all the fish on the jetty were gone, back to their briny world.

And Kit laughed. Laughed and jumped. And clapped her hands. Kit raised her face to the sky and giggled. Kit stood tall and sighed, a smile on her face, the knot in her throat absent, taken with the little fish into the dark river depths. For here and now Kit was not invisible. Not today, not here, not now.

Natasha Buzzacott is a mum, partner, scientist, traveller, motorcycle race official and cat lover who has previously published online movie reviews. This is her first published fictional work.

FICTION EDITION

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 37

38

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Sherri Baby L AU R A E LV E RY

T

om pulls up to Isaac’s house – two storeys high, the street and driveway already crowded with cars for the party. This feels big. Important. Since Catie broke up with him, Tom has felt more alone, more surplus to the world than ever.

His neighbour Heather sits beside him in the front seat playing with her phone. She wears leggings and a midriff top and a giant parka with a bear embroidered in silver and black on the back. Tom thinks she looks good, knows she looks like all the girls in his grade, but he’s baffled by the whole thing. He’s aware that the parka cost $180, because Heather told him. He cricks his neck from side to side. He does some deep breathing. He wonders if Catie will be here.

In the front hallway Tom looks up at the sweeping staircase, a trio of girls he doesn’t know plonking down the steps in a single row. He digs his car keys into his palm. Heather gives him a smile, then mimes drinking from a cup. She heads towards the kitchen, where Tom hears the parade sounds of a drinking game: words are chanted like they’re being pushed up a hill, louder and louder, until they cascade down the other side.

He moves past a crush of bodies – one boy from his PE class nods at him – and then he settles, breathes again properly, when he gets to a dim, empty room off the hall. There’s a lamp in the corner and three walls of shelves. There are baskets inside the shelves. He tilts one out and sees fabric folded inside. He holds a grey square dotted with stars up to the light.

Tom hears a wahhhh coming from under a chair that is tucked into a table with a sewing machine on top. Crouching, he finds a puddle of pink blankets on the floor beside a plastic carrier. One of those babies from Health and Family class.

A baby all alone, emitting digital pain. He picks her up and jigs her up and down. Holding her, he ducks out to the hallway and sees no-one is concerned. Just the backs of tight jeans and hands tucked into pockets, the brightness of a phone screen swept down the hall. A roar erupts from the kitchen. A cry of “Isaac!”

Tom lowers the baby back into her carrier but she starts up again. He focuses on his watch, waiting till a minute is up and no-one has come. He shoulders the beige nappy bag and tucks the pink blankets around her then pushes past his schoolmates and out onto the front lawn. “Sorry, Heather,” he whispers towards the house. He looks at the grey star fabric balled in his hand. “Sorry, Isaac’s mum.” He tucks the fabric next to the baby’s head and places the carrier onto the back seat of the car and drives her home.

“Her name is Sherri,” Tom tells his family over the table at FICTION EDITION

breakfast the next morning. He expects a comment about the prettiness of the name, a name he’s liked since he read it in a book as a child.

“Is she yours now?” his younger sister, Tina, asks. She folds and re-folds a blanket around Sherri’s toes.

“For now,” Tom says. “She stopped crying when I picked her up. Someone had left her at Isaac’s party, all alone.”

“I’d call the cops,” Tina says, lifting Sherri’s purple T-shirt and tickling her hard plastic belly.

Sherri starts to fuss. It’s her burping sound, Tom knows.

He gathers her and stands. He must hold the baby upright for anywhere between four and eighteen minutes for the computer inside her torso to stop. Ten years between him and Tina, Tom remembers holding his sister like this. She was a reflux baby – she got called that a lot. Tom would hold her in his arms, tamping down on her berserk fury and singing ‘DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love’ by Usher over and over while his mum dozed fitfully in the rumpus room.

“Honey, you want me to take her?” Jocelyn opens her arms to her son but he stands and motions towards his bedroom door, mouthing I’d better go. His parents nod, a little too gratefully, Tom thinks. He holds Sherri just past the doorway, listening, watching.

“Where’s that baby’s mother?” Phil whispers. “That’s what I want to know.”

Jocelyn shakes her head.

Phil answers his own question. “Probably on ASOS, whatever that is.”

Jocelyn shushes him. “We don’t know her story, Phil.”

Phil looks like he might cry. He balls his hands into fists and kisses Tina fiercely on the top of her head. “Well, I’ll be damned if Tom does this alone.”

From the back of the linen cupboard Jocelyn digs out a set of bassinet sheets Tom slept on as a baby – pale blue with red and yellow balloons. In a plastic crate in the garage Phil finds an abacus, a stack of baby books, a pair of yellow floaties and a teething ring he vaguely remembers, or is it a sex toy?

He bundles them into his arms and leaves them outside his son’s room.

Early Sunday morning, Tom jolts awake to Sherri’s cries. The clock reads 3.48. He turns on the lamp and tries to adjust his eyes to her face. She doesn’t look upset. She has the same high, smooth forehead and wet-dark eyes. The same coo-shape of her mouth and a pink dusting along the top of her cheeks. She is saying hello, he thinks, in her own way.

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 39

“It’s very early, Sherri,” he whispers. But he can’t stay upset at her for long; he stands up to rock her because sitting is useless.

The kernel of Sherri’s brain that is hardly evolved at all believes she’s a monkey and Tom must become a tree so she can feel safe from the hyenas on the carpet. Something like that, is what he told Tina. Soon her crying slows. Tom’s mind turns supine towards the flat warmth of his bed. But she starts up again. It’s her nappy now, and then it’s time for a bottle. Tom’s eyes are dry and scratchy. His gut is nauseous with fatigue. He refuses to put her in bed with him for fear of crushing her to death so he sways for what seems like hours until, finally, her eyes gazing up at him with something like gratitude or resignation or gas, Sherri lets herself be tucked back in her bassinet.

At breakfast, Phil sits next to Tom. He pats his forearm gently.

“Long night?”

Tom nods and mushes his cereal with his spoon. Why isn’t anyone getting him coffee?

“You used to scream the house down. Boy oh boy I was ready to drive you to the service station and put you in one of those cages and sell you for five bucks like those rubber balls.”

“Sorry, Dad,” Tom says, deeply sorry.

“Anything I can do?”

Tom shakes his head, too weak to lift the spoon to his mouth.

“It’s what I signed up for, right? And this time goes so quickly.”

Jocelyn emerges from underneath the kitchen sink holding several plastic cylinders wrapped in an electrical cord. “Aha! Here. We’ll puree some pumpkin and squash and pear, then she’ll be sleeping through in no time.”

“Pear can loosen things up a bit too much, remember?” Phil asks, circling his hands above his large intestine.

“Good point. Forget the fruit.” Jocelyn says. “Son? Vegies, a bit of meat, she’ll feel fuller and give you some shut eye.”

“It’s a torture method,” Phil says, clapping a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Sleep deprivation.”

Tom takes the appliance from his mother. He lets the cord trail into his lap. Meat and vegetables so soon… It hardly seems possible.

After breakfast, Tom tucks the baby into a pouch against his chest. He moves around his bedroom, packing the nappy bag with Sherri’s three favourite Grug books, a spare beanie, a plastic chain-link toy she seems to favour lately. Outside, he waits on the driveway, talking to the baby in the backseat of his car till Heather arrives. He plays with Sherri’s fingers, which are curled tight in on themselves, but still countable, still kissable.

Tom and Heather grew up next door to each other. They became best friends early, by proximity and, to be honest, convenience: Tom has a car that Heather needs access to; she knows all about his break-up with Catie, how it broke his heart.

To help him heal, Heather copied out an Emily Dickinson poem and slipped it into Tom’s letterbox. She bought him a 700ml bottle of tequila and helped him drink it one night after Catie had not replied to his texts for 72 hours.

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And, in the end, he and Catie did break up because when she said she needed space and wanted to take a break, did Tom listen? Did he say, Oh, I agree, great idea, I love space? Space has always been my thing? Let me show you how far away from you I can get? Did he back right off? Did he throw his phone in the river so he wouldn’t be tempted to contact her? No. He saw that, what, forty minutes had passed since the Give Me Space text message and he pushed past his dad who was trying to reason with him and he got in the car and drove straight to her house like they do in Christmas films, except instead of his girlfriend answering the door in a lacy shirt, his girlfriend’s goddamn mother, who was quite simply the scariest woman he’d ever met, pulled open the door and said nothing for the longest time, till she finally reached out to cup the back of his head. But not in a mother kind of way, more in an Al Pacino sort of way.

“Tom,” Mrs Ericsson said. “It’s important not to get attached.

I think you have attachment issues.”

And he’d thought of his father who had said the same thing – though kindly – and he backed down the steps, realising that extremely frightening Mrs Ericsson with her high shiny forehead and puffy red cheeks had hit the nail on the head, articulating his fear and shame about how attached he had become to her beautiful but only half as scary daughter. The perfect word: attached. The perfect pair of words: attachment issues.

“Sorry I’m late.” Heather ducks her head into the backseat and waggles her index finger at Sherri. She climbs into the front.

They drive.

They find their way into the chapel of St Regina’s through a side door. Heather has brought a Tupperware container of oil and one of water that she tells Tom is “holy enough”. Heather insists on performing the rites. Tom holds Sherri, tilting her towards Heather’s hands as she gestures over the baptismal font. The baby’s computer is reverential, silent in the chapel.

Above them, a fat baby Jesus, flattened into stained glass, points at something beyond a flock of lambs. Sherri utters no sound.

Afterwards, Tom and Heather stop for burritos while the baby sleeps in the drive-through.

His parents head into town for Japanese. Tom can’t be sure, but Jocelyn and Phil seem to have gone out a lot this weekend, all these lunch and dinner dates. Taking the family’s exhausted blind kelpie for more walks than she’s had all year. And not a word about whether Tom might like some takeaway pork gyoza.

Whether he could do with a night out.

Tina’s in her bedroom playing Fantasy Wedding Cakery on her phone. She’s too young for a phone, too young for so many apps with in-app purchase options. But last summer Tina broke her collarbone doing a cartwheel to impress the mailman. Hours later, at a particularly dramatic high point in the middle of the night, Tina told her parents that she was “falling apart” and so Jocelyn and Phil felt guilty and let her have the phone.

Tom tucks Sherri into bed and shuts the bedroom door softly behind him. On the couch in the lounge room, he peels off his socks and massages his feet, remembering Catie and the two times they did it before she broke up with him. Catie gave

amazing massages. But who can think about sex when there’s a newborn in the house? Tom’s eyes droop. A foot rub, a hot shower and a lie down in a dark, silent room. To think he used to have energy for sex. Energy to read a bloody book.

There’s a knock at the front door. With a groan, Tom rolls onto his side and heaves himself up.

The knock again, so loud.

“Hey!” He yanks open the door. “There’s a baby sleep…”

Standing under the floodlight is Marina, Catie’s best friend.

Tom sees Marina’s car in the driveway. She is dressed like she’s just come from yoga, or maybe she’s been to a five-star restaurant, who can tell with girls these days.

“Marina.”

“Yeah, hi, Tom.” She smooths her eyebrows, one then the other. Her fingernails are painted black. Her whole face looks bright and polished, Tom thinks. So well rested.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’ve got my baby. From school? From Isaac’s party?”

Tiny fragments of Tom disintegrate with those words: my baby. No no no, he thinks. Sherri’s small mouth. Her perfect mop of brown hair. Tiny curls near her ears – just like Tom’s.

The rolling nightmare that comes from the computer in her belly.

“I’ve just got Sherri,” Tom says softly.

It’s cold. Marina is hugging herself, cupping an elbow with each hand. She leans in. “You named it? Is that what you said?”

Tom wills the baby not to wake up now. He clears his throat.

“She needed a parent.”

“Look, mate, I left it to sleep in its carrier in Isaac’s mother’s craft room. Where it was quiet and safe, while I got a drink.

One drink.”

“She was stuck under a chair.”

“Hardly,” Marina says. “So you just go around taking other people’s babies? Mrs Tribby’s going to have a fucking fit. I have her in period one tomorrow. They cost like two thousand dollars.”

“She was clearly being neglected while you got your vodka FICTION EDITION

Red Bull.”

“That is so judgemental.”

Maybe it is, Tom thinks, but why not? Sherri could have been trampled by teenagers or drenched in rum and coke. Or Isaac’s mother’s sewing machine could have fallen on her from a great height. “I couldn’t just leave her there,” he says.

“Yeah, well, I can’t just leave her here, can I? Unless you want Mrs Tribby to send you a bill for two grand?”

His heart breaks but he knows Marina is right. As much as his parents say they love Sherri, Tom suspects they would find a way to not give him two thousand dollars when they get home from dumplings.

Tom tries to slow his breathing. “Do you want to come in?”

Marina does not.

Tom heads back through the lounge room alone and upstairs to his room. He tiptoes in, although what does it matter now if she wakes up? What will she remember of this moment, this handover from one parent to another? Which words will tuck themselves around her only to later come loose as trauma, as delicious stories to recount about her deadbeat dad? An audience of university mates at an open-mic night, the incandescent condemnation of a studio audience on live TV. Sherri’s a bright little thing, that’s for sure.

He packs up. He checks in drawers. He fishes a tiny sock out from under his laptop. He lifts her out and kisses her cheeks.

Downstairs, when he goes to pass the baby and all her things to Marina, Tom is smacked with a searing emptiness. He cups the back of Sherri’s head one last time, in a mother kind of way.

Marina pulls a grey star pillow out of the plastic carrier. “Did you make this?” she asks.

Tom nods.

Marina’s face softens. “I wish I knew how to sew.” She holds the little pillow out to him. “Do you want to keep it?”

After a moment, Tom shakes his head. “Too painful.”

Marina stares at him. She strokes Sherri’s cheek with her finger. They both look down at the baby, sighing. Finally Marina pulls car keys from her pocket and unlocks her hatchback with a beep. She swings Sherri round in the baby carrier and takes off down the step, the nappy bag bumping against her hip.

“She likes it when you…” Tom starts.

Marina turns to face him and he stops. It’s dark out on his street. Above him, through the window to Tina’s room, Tom hears the electronic ding of the commercial oven on Fantasy Wedding Cakery. It’s time to sequester Tina’s phone and help her brush her teeth and read her some stories before bed. Tom waves at Marina and he releases the fingers of his other hand, the one Sherri used to nestle her palm in. Marina has a long night ahead of her.

“Nothing,” he says. “You’ll do great.”

Laura Elvery (@lauraelvery) is a writer from Brisbane. She has a PhD in creative writing from QUT and recently won the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Laura is the author of Trick of the Light (2018).

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 41

Kit had waited all day until finally they were gone. Waited through the dry summer heat, the sun glinting through the leaves of the bottle-brush tree, shading her from the sun’s slow burn but not from the baking, desiccating warmth of the air itself. The soil and matter underfoot crisping and bone dry, an arsonist’s food for thought.

Kit had waited. Waited while she sweated, her skin taut in the hot easterly wind, passing the time inspecting her nails, picking at the dark moons of dirt trapped beneath them.

Picked too at the scabs on her knees, revealing the fresh pink skin, the new Kit. Watched ants oblivious to the heat and to her as they beat their never-ending foraging paths. The birds came and went, beaks open, ruffled feathers, wheezing their bagpipe calls. Kit waited until the cooling draught of the sea breeze had whispered in, scuttling the easterly, and coating the city in its soothing balm.

They had come from upriver just before noon heralded by the buzzing outboard, all shouts and laughter, and then just as swiftly unloaded tackle, eskies, buckets and booze onto the jetty, the moored tinny then silenced. Three men, young and loud, all surfing T-shirts, shorts, thongs, tanned, blond: Kings of the World. Kit wasn’t sure if they had come for fishing or drinking, so closely were the two combined.

Fishing and drinking. Drinking and fishing. She watched them through the heat and the laughter, the cursing and the joking. Watched as the beer and heat lulled them, the occasional cheer of a catch still marking their presence.

Through the long, roasting afternoon Kit waited. She had waited before. Waiting was her thing. Waiting and dissolving. Dissolving into the background was easy when you were just some small gawky kid with scuffed shoes and lanky hair, unremarkable in every way. No hidden beauty, no Cinderella. Sometimes she wondered if she could disappear completely. Dissolve. Cease to be. Did she, in fact, become invisible? Really invisible. She wondered how she would know if she was invisible? Would she feel different? How would she know if it was that people didn’t see her, or if they were just ignoring her? Invisible. Ignored. Was there a difference? Kit knew there was a difference, but maybe not for the person who was ignored or who was invisible.

Being ignored was something Kit didn’t like to think about. It moved too close to that knot in her throat, that little piece of tension, of longing, of pain, that tightened, constricted, and wouldn’t let her talk, let her breathe. It just sat there. Day after day. The knot in her throat. Sometimes she could hardly feel it. If she got distracted by the TV, or by lessons at school, when her cousins came to visit and they ran and hid and laughed. Those times, just for a while, the knot shrank and withered, and she forgot it was there. But then, every time her mother told her she was being stupid, or childish, that she had messed up her clean floor, that she didn’t have time to look at every piece of treasure that Kit brought home, the knot tightened. When her father missed her school play, missed because his work meeting was important, or forgot to take her to the park, was too tired, too busy, too late, too something, the knot 42

THE BIG ISSUE 2018

tightened. Tightened, so her words were lost, her breath was caught, her eyes sometimes prickling and moist. As the knot tightened and grew, Kit shrank. Her needs became less, her wants unfulfilled. And so, she dissolved, and slowly slipped between the cracks of their lives. Faded. Forgotten.

Unwanted. Invisible.

The fierce heat of the day had gone as the sun dipped towards the horizon and the loud, laughing Kings of the World buzzed away in the tinny. And then Kit, who had waited all day, slipped from the cover of the trees and made her way to the jetty. She could smell beer, the wasted contents of a spilt can drying on the deck, but there was little else to mark the presence of the young men on the day, just some tangled fishing line caught in a knot of wood. But there were fish. Several, maybe a dozen. Small with bodies like latex. Pale bellies and darker on top. Blowies. Mostly they were intact, a few with mouths damaged by hooks and rough handling. And then one moved. Its mouth opened. Gasping.

Kit nudged it with her shoe. Its fin moved. She nudged it again, gently, not wishing to cause the creature more harm, pushing it over. It gasped again. Kit pushed the fish, watched it move closer to the edge of the jetty until one final push sent it into the still water. And Kit watched as the fish gently sank, glassy eyed and still, consigning it to its murky grave.

But then it twitched and arched and breathed and swam off, slowly and slightly skewed, but alive and away until it disappeared into the darker reaches of the river. And was gone.

Kit smiled. She turned and saw another fish. Inert.

Lifeless. She nudged it to the end of the jetty and off into the water. Hoping. Watching. Heart sinking with the body of the fish. And then twitching and lifting as this fish too gulped and inhaled and swam, stronger than the first, more sure of its course.

Kit gasped. And turned, and prodded, pushed, cajoled each fish, in turn into the water. Some did not move as they sank and were swallowed by the gloom. Some could not come back. But most did. Most of the fish revived, even the one whose mouth was ripped and flapped. Even that one. Even that one! Each movement and breath and flick a triumph over the Kings of the World. Until all the fish on the jetty were gone, back to their briny world.

And Kit laughed. Laughed and jumped. And clapped her hands. Kit raised her face to the sun and giggled. Kit stood tall and sighed, a smile on her face, the knot in her throat absent, taken with the little fish into the dark river depths.

Maybe not for always, but certainly for now. For here and now Kit was not invisible. Not today, not here, not now.

Hurricane Season M A X I N E B E N E BA C L A R K E

N

ico tucks his long dreads into his navy cap.

The Melbourne summer heat itches his scalp.

Getting too old for locks. Too old for a lot of things, really. Say forty’s the new thirty, but Nico’s tired: mind, body and bones. He tears the top off a hot chocolate sachet. Tumbles the fine brown powder into the mug. Tosses the crumpled packet into the plastic bin under the table.

Nico lifts the lever on the large silver urn, careful not to burn his knuckles again. Think they could afford an upgrade. Same urn’s been in the meals room since the day he started driving.

Nearly ten years. Been that long. That long.

Taxi depot’s almost empty. Nico’s late this morning, because the dream came at him again. Dominica. Weeks now, he’s been dreaming of home. When Nico woke an hour ago, he could feel the weather in the room with him, could smell the wet earth.

Super-photosynthesis. Breadfruit and banana, fermenting wild on the branch. Luscious rot. Bounty. Decay. That foreboding something’s-about-to-happen stillness he remembers so clearly

down towards the spice factory in Elms Hills where Gracie worked, on Nico’s day off from studying. Nico and Elias, perched on a wooden chair in the factory corner, watching Gracie dance the bean. One-two. Two-two. Her bare mahogany legs wrapped to the knees in plastic as she stands on the prefermenting racks. Dancing-dancing the cocoa. Swaying this way, swaying that. Laughing-laughing as she works. And Lord, the smell. Ginger-cinnamon. Nutmeg. Home.

Nico takes another scalding gulp. Got to get out on the road soon. His mate Ahmed’s sitting near the window: shoulders slouched, grey beard almost touching the table.

“Ye okay man?” Nico stops by him, on his way to the car.

Ahmed glances up, eyes so moist they look loose in their sockets, hands clasped.

“Little Brother.”

Ahmed’s called Nico that since the moment they met. More than nine years ago now. Twenty-nine he was, but Nico had still felt like a kid. He’d just arrived here with Elias: Gracie already gone, and him still wrecked with grieving. Black and righteous

“The smell of hot chocolate is Nico, Grace and Elias: bumping along towards town in the red open-air truck. Gracie’s clutching Elias tight on her lap. Her hair’s cornrowed down, in that zigzag way she liked to do.” from before the ground swallowed his Gracie. The ominous gathering of hurricane breath.

Nico scans the meals room. Old timers: hunched over drinks, or staring out windows. Slow-to-starts. World wearies.

All swore they’d only be in the taxi game for a few years, like Nico did. Till they got their qualifications sorted to do whatever they used to do at home, or whatever they wanted to do here in Australia. Academics’ minds. Carpenters’ hands. Teachers’ hearts. Their light-blue cabbie shirts have faded to off-white now. Threadbare collars browned from decade-long wear no bleach can brighten.

Nico wraps his long brown fingers around the mug. Drink’s making him sweat even more. Pulls out a vinyl-covered chair.

Rocks precariously back on its pock-rusted metal legs. Cocoa.

Mama Dominica. Home. Blushing khaki pods hanging unripe from roadside trees, the giant rough-skinned, teardrop shape of them. Their slow-darkening to raisin brown.

The smell of the hot chocolate is Nico, Gracie and Elias: bumping along towards town in the red open-air truck. Gracie’s clutching Elias tight on her lap. Her hair’s cornrowed down, in that zigzag way she liked to do. The three of them, rambling FICTION EDITION

as Nico true-believed God was, he still couldn’t figure why His Almighty would conjure a hurricane to send Gracie’s way.

Driving was something Nico could fast-do to pay his rent on arrival. He’d been grateful for the job, but the Little Brother that Ahmed had whispered during his first shift had felt like a fist-bump in the darkness, an arm slung round his shoulder.

“I pick up a fare out to Belgrave last night.”

Fifteen years in Australia, and Ahmed’s accent still sings Somalia. Same way Nico and Elias have somehow never picked up the local twang.

“Belgrave. Cha! In de country. Past de Dandenongs? Good fare, ole man.”

Ahmed grunts. Stares down at the table. “Decent bloke. Suit.

Tie and everything.”

“Nice work, if it come te ye.” Nico discreetly glances at his watch.

“Did the runner.”

“No way. Ye chase him down?”

Ahmed’s hands are shaking slightly. “I call the police on him.”

“Ahmed…”

“The man rob me! I got a right to call.” Ahmed rubs his THE BIG ISSUE 2018 43

palms together, as if his anger can be contained by the friction.

“Policemen come. Two of them. White. Chewing their gum.”

“Dem get ye money?” Nico already knows the answer.

“Say I’m trespassing. Told me get moving. Way they look at me, Little Brother. Down and up. You know how the way I mean,” Ahmed’s voice is all shake and anger.

“Motherfucker!”

“Watch that mouth, Little Brother.”

Ahmed’s rebuke is like a friendly clip to the back of Nico’s head. Like Nico used to do, back when Elias was small; deft at peeling back the stumps of Gracie’s still-growing sugarcane, chewing off the tops before they’d ripened.

“Brother. You regret coming to here? Australia?”

Nico braces against his friend’s question. Anchors.

“We never going to be like them. And they never going to like us.” Ahmed is looking so deep into Nico’s eyes that the pull feels inevitable.

“Sometimes. But den mi think of Elias, ye know. Young an cocky, like all-a dem brown boys. But dem is dis place. Dem kids: yours an mine. Australia dem home. An dem kids wid opportunity. Striving te make sometin of demselves. Is hard, my friend. But is dem why we come. We doing okay Ahmed.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child, they say back home. Nico hasn’t the hard heart or hands for that kind of fathering.”

Doing good.” Nico rests his hand on his friend’s shoulder, leaning as much as comforting.

“Yeah.”

Nico feels relief surge through Ahmed’s body.

Nico’s not sure if it’s true, or if he just wants it to be true.

Been hard to raise Eli alone. Spare the rod, spoil the child, they say back home. Nico hasn’t the hard heart or hands for that kind of fathering. Gracie would have known what to do with the boy at every turn. But he’s raised the boy straight, Elias. Shoelaces always half untied. Natty afro hidden under dark hoodie. But chin raised. Proud. Like Nico was at seventeen. Not a bad thing. Straight As last term. Kid left the report on Nico’s bedside table a few weeks ago, when school let out. Praise don’t come easy to Nico, so he never mentioned it, but it had filled his heart up. Took Elias to the pub for steak that night.

Nico starts his taxi shift down near the station. Habit so ingrained it’s blood-ritual. This time of a Saturday morning Footscray wakes. Stretches. Launches itself bang into the weekend.

The smell of the fruit markets: plantain, okra, cantaloupe.

The sour rot of fish guts, washing into street drains. Kids not that much older than Elias, rolling home clutching hangover pork-buns. Shiny BBQ duck hanging in the windows: whole glazed birds, beaks, eyes and all. Ethiopian coffee houses 44

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colourful with morning clientele, kitchens already herbing the air with Doro and Misr Wat on the boil.

The Sudanese men in the paved street mall are dressed a day early in Sunday best. Are always dressed in Sunday best.

Scrubbed up king-fine. For home. For work. For the bottle. For church. Gliding aubergine-tall, history hovering in their walks.

Nico steers slowly into Paisley Street. The rank is empty of other cabs. But there’s a woman, waiting. Neat bobbed haircut.

Modest grey pencil skirt. Cream work blouse. Hot pink shoes clutched in hand, ridiculously heeled. She climbs in: bare feet blackened by concrete-wanderings. Something lacy’s poking out of her small black handbag. Knickers, maybe. Unsteady on her feet. Furry bunny-ears headband. Nico can’t quite pin a story to her. She looks familiar, somehow.

He sets the taxi meter, glances in the rear-view mirror as she lists the address. Been accused of looking too long before.

Sometimes he can smell their fear – women riding alone.

Specially at night. Eyes darting to check if the door’s been deadlocked. Pretending to be on the phone.

The woman’s gaze meets Nico’s. She laughs at his expression. Tucks liquorice-black hair behind her ear. Smooths her crinkled blouse. “Bridal shower. Mine. Last night, after work. Could have done without it, to be honest. More for my sister than me.”

Nico laughs too. The shake of his shoulders feels good.

“Can’t lie. Was wondering what-all was goin on.” He brakes carefully at the intersection of Barkly Street and Geelong Road.

“You from Dominica?” Woman’s staring back at him in the mirror now.

“Matter of fact, yes.” Nico can’t keep the surprise from his voice.“You de firs passenger get dat right bang on. Most de time dem say Jamaica.” Nico’s curious. “How ye know?”

“I went there once. Hiker’s trip. Breathtaking. The green.

Bags of sugarcane by the side of the road. Rum and coconut by the side of the road.”

Nico laughs, louder this time. “Dem boys jus flag down de tourist, crack de coconut open in front-a dem an pour in a shot-a rum. Cheeky. Nobody on God’s own earth can refuse dat!”

Her smile is tipsy-wide as the taxi barrels past the new Bunnings hardware store. Nico squints against the vicious morning light.

The woman stares out the window. “I teach. At the high school. Footscray City. Had a kid from Dominica. Came here when he was young, but that accent was still there. Good kid, but…” She sighs. “Must be hard. Coming here.”

“What ye mean?” Nico can feel the heat, bouncing up off the black tar, reaching in at him through the open taxi window.

He pushes the button to wind the window up. Presses the air-con on.

“I don’t know,” the woman rubs her eyes. “This kid. Smart.

Everything seemed good. Just stopped coming to school.”

Her speech is still a little slurred. “Sometimes I think there’s something missing in these boys. Who can say what it does to a person? Home is your heart, and all that. And this country is…hostile. You would know...” Her eyes suddenly meet his,

in the rear-view mirror. “God! I knew I recognised you from somewhere. Mr Dawson? You’re Eli’s Dad?” Nico wants to give the teacher a piece of his mind, let his thoughts rip. But the taste of wet earth is weighting his tongue.

Something missing in these boys. You would know. Eli’s neon shoelaces, undone and dragging. Afro hidden under hoodie.

Chin raised. Proud. Like Nico. A good boy. Straight As, just five weeks ago. Nico held the report with his own hands. Nico takes several deep breaths in.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m just… I’m gonna be quiet now, okay?” She pulls a ridiculously lacy bra from her purse, waggles it around, laughing. “Fricken hen’s night.”

The white lines on the road dance in front of Nico’s eyes.

First they sway this way, then they sway that. Laughinglaughing as he drives. Humidity rising. Black volcano grit flicking up in his eyes.

Nico can hear Gracie screaming. “Get inside! What ye staring at, Elias? Hurricane ain’t no pretty picture. Stare right into its eye like dat, it gwan come up an eat ye alive. Come! Come!”

Elias. Seven years old. Running. Hiding behind her bright, smelling-of-nutmeg skirts.

“Are you okay? Sir! Pull over! Pull over!”

Nico’s hands are shaky on the wheel. “I can’t. I can’t breathe.”

“What?!”

FICTION EDITION

“I can’t…”

The taxi is slowly swerving into the next lane. The woman frantically unbuckles her seatbelt. Squeezes her body through the gap. Climbs clumsily into the front passenger seat. Leans over and grabs the wheel.

“You okay?” She steers the car wonkily into the side street.

Pulls hard on the handbrake. “Should I call an ambulance. I don’t… What happened?”

The pull inside Nico’s chest feels like a landslide. Like Morne aux Diables volcano, dropping away to uncertain ground. He can feel the weather in the taxi car with him, can smell the wet earth, that foreboding stillness he remembers so clearly from before the ground swallowed his Gracie.

The gathering of hurricane breath.

Black and righteous as Nico true-believes God is, he still can’t figure why His Mighty would conjure this trouble his way.

Maxine Beneba Clarke (@slamup) is the author of the ABIA-award winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil , the critically acclaimed memoir The Hate Race , the award-winning poetry collection Carrying the World and the kids picture books The Patchwork Bike and Wide Big World . Poetry is her first love.

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Ocarina E L I Z A B E T H F LU X

O

ther than being a bit tight across the shoulders, it was a perfect fit. On the desk in front of me lay a pill box, a brightly coloured pamphlet and a prescription for salve. I wriggled in my seat, readjusting my shoulder blades as though my taut skin were a slightly-too-small jacket.

I’d been in the facility for three weeks. The procedure itself was surprisingly quick and simple – it was the preparation that took all the time. I was surprised at how dry I felt and worried that I would crack along every crease on my body. I flexed my arm cautiously.

Before the facility, I could barely tolerate anything foreign on my hands. Even on a good day I would wash them at least twelve times. Soap felt like it clung between every whorl, every arch, and I’d scrub and dry, scrub and dry, until I felt smooth again.

My teacher believed that calluses negatively impacted the music and so from a young age I had learned to moisturise my fingertips after every lesson and rehearsal. By the age of eleven my wrist had started to click; our bodies are not designed to

shoulders and down my spine. I didn’t respond and they didn’t seem bothered as we worked together to leave the worst parts of me behind.

As I waited for the final discharge forms to be brought into the office, I ran my left index finger along my right forearm.

Dry. I applied some more pressure and was met with a stronger resistance than I was used to. Bone, despite its hardness, is still springy – organic and almost cartilaginous. My new core was harder. It pushed back.

I turned the key of my apartment and for a split second worried that the torsion would cause my hand to shatter – the inside turning to shards, sharp edges cutting their way into the real world. It was a rare side effect, and only happened to the careless; those who ignored the temperature rules, wasting their second chance, allowing their new self to grow brittle.

The team had come in during my stay to adapt the place for my changed needs. Coloured tape lined the floor in front

“Too old to be a prodigy, as my teacher had once hoped, but young enough that all the articles led with descriptions of my fingers, my lips, my lashes, before – grudgingly – mentioning my music.” hold an instrument to our lips for hours at a time. I added hand exercises and stretches to my day, and they helped break the stored tension. As a result, my movements remained light, fingers skipping along the flute as though it were an extension of myself, as if it weren’t an obscene breakdown in human evolution to reassign air from keeping oneself alive to sending curated noise out into the world.

When they admitted me, the first thing they did was an oil submersion. To separate me from the vacuum within they needed to make my skin malleable. I was lucky, they said – I fell into the golden window of time: post-puberty, pre-decline. Too old to be a prodigy, as my teacher had once hoped, but young enough that all the articles led with descriptions of my fingers, my lips, my lashes, before – grudgingly – mentioning my music.

The oil was warm and as it slicked and enveloped me from the neck down I felt as though I were melting. Lucky, my mind echoed in imitation of the head clinician, to have skin that is supple. That responds well. That doesn’t pucker and bunch. The women talked to me as they worked, massaging my hands, my FICTION EDITION

of each window, clear numbers letting me know exactly how close I could stand at any given time of day. All the taps had temperature regulators on them; no more high highs, no more low lows. A dull, constant hum came from my bedroom, the electric blanket perfectly calibrated against the night’s temperature to make sure I neither melted nor cracked.

I was to stay indoors for the first month to acclimatise.

Routine was important. In the morning a harsh alarm would sound, and I had one minute before the bed would start slowly but firmly tipping up, forcing me out. Before I left the room I would take the first pill, then make my way to the kitchen where I could prepare myself a meal from a list of approved breakfasts.

As I moved through the kitchen, gathering muesli, yoghurt and berries, the ghost of my former self lived the day in parallel.

At this point she was usually still in bed – our old one, not the facility’s patented model, which remained stubbornly at a fortyfive degree angle until bedtime to prevent napping. Sometimes though, she was up, her fingers clasped around a mug, staring blankly at a screen, out the window, at a wall.

Sometimes I would bend down to get a bowl, and she would be sitting on the kitchen floor, back against the cupboard, knees THE BIG ISSUE 2018 47

to her chest. I’d pull the door open, and it would swing straight through her, through the bones she and I no longer had.

Every so often she’d be gone; echoes of being out in the world. She always left the same way – bag on shoulder, pause, then a slight wriggle of the shoulders, just like in the facility, before purposefully striding for the door. The slump would be left at the threshold – now marked by a thick line of red tape – to be collected upon her return. As I slowly spooned oats into my mouth I remembered, or maybe imagined, seeing the same coloured lines from my apartment inside shops, at cafes, in libraries – there were enough of us now to warrant it. Too hot in the morning. In direct stream of air conditioning. Safe if spending less than ten minutes. She could ignore all of them, if she wanted.

Over the weeks the time between her trips grew longer and their duration became shorter. She’d clatter through the door exhausted, stripping off her outside clothes and leaving them in a trail to the couch we no longer had. Usually she would then put on the same pyjamas from the day before and curl into a ball. No matter what, though, every day she would return to the case – opening its lid and pulling out the sections of flute one by one. She cleaned them carefully, fresh cloth draped over a metal rod, round and round, back and forth.

In every orchestra and ensemble there were stories of a friend of a friend who didn’t take care of their instrument well enough, the heat of breath creating the perfect environment for bacteria, for mould, changing the timbre of their music, and leading them to breathe toxins into their lungs. I would pause on my treadmill, knowing this would anger the machine that kept a strict eye on my recovery schedule, and watch her clean it mechanically, muscle memory and fear ensuring not one millimetre would be missed.

I could see into our mind’s eye, the image of an ugly green coating the inside, poisoning us, while the outside remained 48

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gleaming, the disease hidden. She hadn’t played in months – the metal was essentially a dead thing – but nonetheless she cleaned, then packed it away. Afterwards she would go to the tap and scrub and scrub and I could almost feel the soap sticking to our fingers.

When I’m on the treadmill, I can’t help but run my thumb along my fingertips. I’m still not used to the holes. They’re for the pressure. Paired with the one on the back of my neck, they stop the air from building up too much in the hollow.

Glass is neither truly liquid nor solid, making it the perfect scaffold when properly maintained. Too cold and the patient shatters. Too warm and they’ll warp, folding in on themselves.

I take my afternoon pill as the alarm demands, wondering how it keeps my skin from screaming about its displacement.

My shoulders are still tight and as I let the hot water run over me I feel the back of my neck, like always. The valve is one way but I still wonder if somehow I’ll end up filling with liquid, and the prospect doesn’t sound so bad.

Sometimes, when I see her lying catatonic on the couch that is no longer there, I can still feel the heat and force of the blood running through our wrists. The more she tries to ignore it, the stronger it feels, its desire for escape almost as strong as hers.

On the worst days, she stands over the bathtub, her fingers dithering over the tap.

I watch. I want to want to hurl something at her, for doing this to us, but at the same time I don’t care. It’s as though part of me is trapped in the layer between the old skin and my new core, the three of us not sure what the sum of our parts really mean.

Once a week someone from the facility calls, their face bright on the monitor. In front of them lies a printout of my daily routine and I am praised for sticking so closely to what has been prescribed. I’m doing all the right things. Today I am

only chastised for pausing on the treadmill. As the counsellor explains the importance of my strict regimen, behind me I can sense the flute case being opened, the cleaning ritual starting again. He’s reminding me, like every session, to keep my hands and neck uncovered at all times. Scarves and turtlenecks are completely banned. I hesitate before voicing the concern that has been growing since my second week at the facility, when I first felt my skin separate from what lies beneath. The man pulls a sympathetic expression and reassures me that nothing can grow in the hollow. His speech is well practised, almost a wordfor-word match with the pamphlet: the glass is imbued with antibiotics, the valves act as a filter, cleaning the air that comes through. The holes in my fingers and neck prevent stagnation.

Two days before my first major audition, I dropped my flute in front of my teacher. She gasped, and snatched at the air, but it had already clattered onto the hard floor. There was only the smallest of dents, and as I brushed off the dust and tentatively blew into it, we were both relieved to find that the sound remained unchanged. Metal is a bit like bone in that way: softer than you think, making damage unpredictable.

around my body. An alarm went off, causing me to pull the plug in shock and fall to the ground. For a moment I was worried that I’d shatter and in that moment remembered the noise of the flute hitting the floor. But I am glass, not metal. I’d been doing all the right things. I remained intact and, for a moment, was disappointed.

Outside the door, she was cleaning the flute. The cloths came out clean, like always. After washing her hands, she moved over to the record player, choosing a track I couldn’t hear through the muteness of memory. Lying on the floor her tears formed a small lake in the smooth of her neck. I paused before stepping through her, then moved into the next room to begin my afternoon routine.

Each day I get one hour of self-directed activity and usually find myself at a loss. Most of the time I just repeat something from the schedule; perhaps the treadmill again or preparing food from the approved list. Today I forgot the afternoon pill again, and so put on a record for the first time since the procedure. Music is emotion and memory and as it surrounds me and passes through my skin I can almost hear it bounce off the glass.

The part of me trapped in the layer between relishes this

“Glass is neither truly liquid nor solid, making it the perfect scaffold when properly maintained. Too cold and the patient shatters. Too warm and they’ll warp, folding in on themselves.”

The sheet music and general detritus had been cleared in my absence; the flute case that my ghost remains so tethered to is, in reality, now kept in a storage locker some distance away. I watch her make a cup of tea and wonder where she is, exactly. Parts of her were pulled away in the oil, the rest, dissected ephemera scattered throughout the facility. After ten years in operation the place has to be littered with undesirable traits stripped from people like me. I imagine them dancing and intertwining, creating patchwork people. Scarred and undesirable, even to themselves.

Some of her, I’m convinced, still lives in the skin. I can remember her thoughts, but the new scaffolding that holds me in shape is an impenetrable wall, stopping thoughts from converting into feeling. Nothing can survive in the hollow.

In my first week home I forgot to take the afternoon pill and a spike of curiosity drove me to the bathroom. I pulled out a hairdryer and plugged it in. With my right arm stretched out in front of me, I directed the jet of air across the back of my neck. I hadn’t really expected it to work – music is something humans add to themselves, not what they become – so it was a surprise to me when an almost painfully plaintive and sweet note escaped from my fingertips, rising and falling with every experimental flexion and extension. The warmth reverberated FICTION EDITION

moment of our old life, but as the music turns back, denied passage, things change. She screams as the notes turn to knives, shredding her already flimsy existence.

Sometimes, when the water is running over me, I imagine the steam getting through the valves. Even though I know that nothing can survive in the hollow, the image won’t leave me alone. I see it spreading inwards, from my neck, my fingertips. It’s like breath – the fog snakes and bends, exploring the vacated spaces, leaving pieces of itself behind, making everything warm, turning my insides green, creating the wrong kind of life.

The water drowns out the alarms, the dings – all the noises that keep me on track. My hand dithers over the tap every time; pointlessly, because everything’s on a timer. When the water shuts off, I absent-mindedly blow across my fingertips, and a discordant whistle weaves its way through the fog.

Elizabeth Flux (@ElizabethFlux) is a writer and editor whose work has featured in The Guardian , The Saturday Paper, Best Australian Stories and others. She won the inaugural Feminartsy Fiction Prize, is a past Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship recipient and is an editor for Melbourne City of Literature’s Reading Victoria series.

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Sharmaville AT U L J O S H I

“I

t’s not working.”

For the next hour I sobbed on the pub’s terrace as Raj chain-smoked, sipping beer. Pedestrians gawked, drinkers moved away. The bartender hovered, clearing tables. Soon there was a sun-lit circle of emptiness around us.

Seated on a banquette of his eponymous restaurant, Mr Sharma’s bejewelled fingers set the yellow laddu spinning.

Decorative gold leaves fluttered onto the plate before sticky syrup slowed the sweet’s orbit.

“What the hell jhalla?” he yelled into the phone, smashing his fist on the table, squashing the ball and shattering the delicate plate. “No-one’s going to stop them. Who’s going to make my famous sweets?”

She smiled at me, beautiful in a delicate sari of blue and gold. Holding up an exquisitely hennaed hand, fingers extended, she tilted her head from side to side – indicating the wait for our meeting could be another five minutes, or fifty. Or maybe her smile was telling me the ways of Mr Sharma were just as much a mystery to her.

I messaged Raj. I’m in the restaurant. Need to talk.

It joined a list of unanswered texts.

“Visa, schmisa,” Sharma said into the handset. “Listen chut.

Tell them I’d rather kiss arse than employ a pimply apprentice.”

He slapped the flip-phone shut, muttering “soower ke bachche”. Taking a swig of whisky, he leaned back, spread out along the banquette and looked up at me.

Soon Raj was a regular visitor, being fed by Mum, having his shirts ironed, enjoying sleepovers after blu-ray marathons. My guess, she wanted the IT to rub off on me. I was more interested

“Soon Raj was a regular visitor, being fed by Mum, having his shirts ironed, enjoying sleepovers after blu-ray marathons.

My guess, she wanted the IT to rub off on me.”

I’d met Raj the first time we ate at Sharmaville. Mum took us to celebrate my baccalaureate. I almost flunked it, caught with ecstasy at a music festival. Between my parents’ tears, threats of curfew and frozen allowances, I threw tantrum after tantrum.

Standing beside the barrister at the Magistrate’s Court, I hung my head and agreed to SWOT Camp and counselling.

While he waited on us, Mum charmed Raj with flattery.

“Mmm these puris are delicious! Aren’t you missing home?

Where is it anyway? Oh, this bhindi is so soft! Don’t your parents miss you? And what do they do? What are you studying? So good looking, could be a hero nahin hai? Software engineering, arre waah…” she said, having extracted all she needed to place Raj and his dynastic history back three generations. “You’ll be the Steve Jobs of Bengaluru. Don’t let Sharmaji work you too hard!”

All she’d asked me was “How will you feed yourself?” when I told her I wanted to be a writer.

Sweat glistened on Sharma’s face as his eyes flicked from the flattened sweet to his assistant standing next to me then back again. I realised he wanted to eat it, his third, while we waited for him to finish the call.

FICTION EDITION

in rubbing him off, kissing the stubble on his cheeks, licking the chest hair peeking out from the V-necks he liked to wear, stroking the hair on his butt that I glimpsed as he changed into his kurta pyjama. Up until then, I’d been theoretically gay. Surfing for porn, masturbating into the sheets afterwards, reading Genet, all the while convincing myself I must be bi by taking girls on chaste dates. The regular presence of Raj in our home turned the hypothetical into the empirical.

“Those poor boys,” Sharma said, expanding his arms to embrace the staff clearing up after the last diners. “What am I going to tell them? How can I send them home when their visas expire? What will their families say?”

His assistant took advantage of the rhetorical pause to call a waiter, who quickly brushed the sticky shards off the table.

“Back home, they work twelve-hour days, seven days a week,” Mr Sharma continued. “Schooled by their mothers in the food every Indian loves. Here they work eight hours, get minimum wage, even a bed to sleep in.”

“Arre yaar,” his assistant interrupted, straightening the pleats on her sari’s pallu. “You charge them so THE BIG ISSUE 2018 51

much rent, makes it hard for them to see a new Hindi film at Westfield, nahin hai?”

“See,” Mr Sharma perked up with his own benevolence.

“Here they shop, enjoy movies.”

He hobbled over to the entrance.

It was only then I saw his bare legs extending from the traditional dhoti, thin brown sticks wrapped in hand spun cotton fluttering under the vent of the massive suit jacket.

We trundled a fold-up bed into my room the nights Raj stayed. After the light was out, I’d inhale the smell of him; the cocktail of his sweat mixed with a celebrity aftershave.

One night, emboldened by the rhythmic sound of breathing, I reached for his singlet, dropped by the side of his bed, and instead found myself pressed up against the side of his rollaway. For what seemed like an hour, my hand cautiously made its way under the blanket, slowly loosening the drawstring, inching its way inside his pyjamas. Savouring the increasing density of hair as the fingers reached their goal. Their reward was a hot stiffness followed by a warm hand pressing mine further into that black forest.

After that, he stayed over every night he could. My mother beamed as Raj pretended to teach me HTML 101, unaware the laptop was loaded with a Bond marathon, waiting to drown out the squeaking of the bed with the famous 007 theme. When my Auntie Parvati visited, she’d bring in plates of pakoras. Sitting between us, she’d tell us her old war stories while we sent dirty Snaps to each other.

We got audacious, kissing and groping in public, never caught. Well, once.

“Fuck,” Raj said after we exchanged a nicotine-flavoured kiss in the alley behind Sharmaville. Opening my eyes, I saw Mr Sharma’s assistant looking at us from the doorway. Adjusting his bow tie, Raj followed her inside.

“Look, let me explain…” Raj said.

“Fuck off,” I said, swiping his glass and ashtray off the table just as a bartender walked up to clear them.

“Oi,” he said grabbing me by the shoulder. “We don’t want any trouble here.”

“It’s okay,” Raj said getting up. “He’s upset.”

“Take me home,” I said to Raj, shaking myself free.

Sharmaville was the first and largest of Sharma’s chain of Indian restaurants. After the Chef’s Hat award, when the judges declared it fine dining’s answer to a meal in your favourite Delhi auntie’s kitchen, it now fed tout à la mode. Sharma2 and Sharmfarm soon followed. Crowds flocked, queues stretched from each restaurant’s sweets counter. The glistening pyramids of those famous laddus were archaeological rubble at the end of each day. Not least because Mr Sharma tasted every batch produced. As a result, he was a large man. A very large man, and the whisky hadn’t stopped his sweating. I watched him unbutton his double-breasted suit, and, extracting a handkerchief monogrammed with a large cursive S, wipe his face down.

“What’s his name again?”

“Sanjay Patel, Sharmaji,” the assistant answered. “You know, Parvati’s nephew.”

“Ah yes! The journalist.”

“Writer,” I corrected.

“Doing something for Good Food, right?”

“Um, no,” I said. “An assignment for uni. I have to write a profile.”

“You’re in for a treat tonight,” his assistant said, as Sharma turned away, his attention caught by the first guests.

52

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Sharma’s assistant motioned me to follow her as she walked into the kitchens.

“Kumarji,” she called out. “Don’t forget, new batch of chai for the guests and put out the laddus. Make sure they’re presented properly, the rose ones at the front. Don’t be cheap with the gold leaf tonight.”

Opening the back door, she spoke into the smoking alley, blocking my view.

“Raj, put the cushions and carpets out. And brush your teeth.”

She slammed the door before I could look out. Something on a bench caught her eye.

“This hasn’t been cleaned properly. See to it.”

“Kaali kutti,” someone said as she slapped a kitchen hand’s head.

Inside the office she motioned me to sit at the desk.

“Did you hear what he said?” I asked. Black bitch in any language was an insult.

“Yes,” she said, “I get worse.”

“But you run the place.”

“I don’t own it, there’s a difference,” she laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s actually a compliment.”

“Gauri,” she introduced herself, before lifting the fall of her sari and slipping it into her waist. Reaching up between her legs, she adjusted the bulge at her crotch.

I stared.

“I don’t know why I bother to do this,” she said. “It’s not like anyone can see anything behind the silk. At least I don’t have balls to deal with any more.”

“What... Why?” I asked.

“Why show you? Because you’re going to cause trouble.”

“Trouble?” I asked.

“It’s a busy night,” she said. “I have to see it all goes right.

We have investors in for Sharmaria.”

“Is that why you brought me here?” I asked. “Lock me in so Raj can work in peace?”

“Not exactly to lock you in,” she said.

“I’m not here to cause trouble…”

“That’s right, you’re not. But trouble follows you.”

“I haven’t spoken to him, I don’t even want to see him.”

apartment, he paid for the op and enrolled me in an accounting course. He made me his assistant, then his business took off and I turned into his second in charge. Since I got citizenship here I’ve never dressed as a boy again.”

She smiled at me. I realised she could be an ally.

“Gauri,” I said. “Can you help me? Please. I don’t know what to do to get him back. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I don’t want anyone else.”

“Listen, he’s not worth it,” she replied. “Me and Sharmaji?

Yaar, he puts me on a pedestal. But even after our first night, he went home to his wife. Raj is an Indian boy on gay-fari. One day he’ll get married, do what his parents ask. And you’ll be the one he leaves each night. You deserve more than that chota bhai. Leave him be.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

“It’s okay, I won’t cause trouble,” I said, handing the passport back.

As I left the office, I heard her humming a popular Hindi song.

“Love is madness, I should know/Like a storm it passes, leaving you broken-hearted.”

Back in the restaurant I checked my phone and messaged again.

“When my Auntie Parvati visited, she’d bring in plates of pakoras.

Sitting between us, she’d tell us her old war stories while we sent dirty Snaps to each other.”

“Right. That’s why you were craning your head to look out the back door.”

“I’m here with my Auntie, she doesn’t like to come alone,” I said.

“Stupid boy. You think I believe that? And pretending to do a uni assignment?” she laughed. “I thought it’d make you listen if I showed you we’re alike. No, not like that. I mean outsiders.

Both of us second-in-line for love. They’ll never understand, but we can understand each other.”

She opened a drawer in the desk, reached in and pulled out a tattered booklet, flicking through before handing it to me.

“Go ahead, open it,” she said.

The Indian passport showed a picture of a young man: thick, short, buffed hair; studious black-framed glasses; wispy moustache. I looked from the photo back at her. She sat retying the long thick plait she’d pulled over her shoulder, nose and ear rings shining against her brown skin, thick kohl popping her almond eyes. A complete transformation. “‘I don’t care what you are,’ Sharmaji told me when we first met,” Gauri said. “‘You’re beautiful.’ That was when our troupe of hijras went to play at his wedding. I was almost twenty; I’d been kicked out of home when I was much younger. A few days after Sharmaji’s honeymoon, I saw his car waiting for me. His chauffeur handed a paper bag to my guru. The bitch didn’t even kiss me goodbye. I became his mistress in a new Juhu FICTION EDITION

I’m going to come find you if you don’t reply.

I looked across the room. Long rugs and large cushions lay across the floor. Men in silk kurtas shook hands, ladies in saris bowed namastes, trading gossip before taking their places.

At one end a platform for the performers was covered with carpets; flowers and fruits set in front of a small altar to one side. Incense perfumed the air.

The musicians arrived, the chatter in the room underscored by the tap of the tablaji tuning the drums, the drone of the tanpura strings. Cooks and waiters emerged and took their places at the rear. I scoured their faces for Raj before sitting next to my aunt.

“So many people,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me Auntie, I never knew about these concerts.”

“Well, I don’t know how long they’ll go on,” she said.

“Sharmaji does so much for us oldies. They’ll disappear when we do.”

“I’m sure they’ll keep going, he’s a big success.”

“Wasn’t always. He started off frying vada on the streets of Mumbai you know,” she said. “Arre waah. They were so good,” she paused, relishing her memory of those savoury doughnuts.

“People flocked to Nepean Road to eat them.”

“Where’s his family?” I asked. “Doesn’t he have wife and kids?”

“Shh,” she answered. “We don’t talk about that here.”

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The vocalist tapped her microphone.

“Raag Shivaranjani,” she announced.

A murmur of appreciation rose from the audience.

“Ah, a special treat,” Auntie Parvati said. “A raag of longing.

A night raag.”

For the next hour, the music evoked infinite yearning and sadness. The rising pentatonic scale ached each time the leading note approached its tonic, teasing out the resolution. Descending, it flew liked a wounded bird, unable to soar.

The audience showed its appreciation with waahs of pleasure, punctuating the end of a melodic or rhythmic improvisation with appreciative applause. A collective outtake of breath followed each section. An unspoken dialogue between performers and audience bewitched the room.

Mr Sharma sat to one side near the food table, on a little cushioned dais of his own, a dish of sweets in front of him.

Gauri sat by his side, hand resting on his. Slowness and heaviness gone, Sharmaji’s eyes darted from musician to musician, head bobbing from side to side. His face lit up as his hands described graceful arcs in the air, tracing the melodic lines, the jewelled rings catching glints of light, leading the audience with particularly enthusiastic vocalisations and rhythmic thigh slapping.

Behind him I saw the kitchen door open and Raj step out, carrying a fresh tray of laddus to replenish the depleted pile.

“I have to go to the toilet Auntie,” I said. “Too much chai.”

I crossed the room quickly, avoiding Gauri’s eyes as I passed their platform. I reached the sweets table seconds after Raj. “Why aren’t you returning my texts?” I asked.

“Sanju, not here, not now,” he said. He held the tray in one hand, the other selecting individual yellow balls, placing them gently on the table to rebuild the pyramid display.

“You were going to tell me why. I need to know.”

“Afterwards, okay?” he said without looking up.

“Yes sure, I bet you’re going to run off to fuck someone else.”

As the raag approached its climax, the vocalist performing near impossible arabesques, competing with the tablas’ ferocious rhythmic talas, Sharmaji swept up a laddu from his dish. As it touched his lips, his hand froze. The sweet rolled off the fingers and the golden ball floated, twirling momentarily mid-air. The laddu hit the floor and smashed apart. As applause burst out, Sharmaji teetered towards Gauri, toppling onto her.

“You really want to know?” Raj said. “I’m not looking for a clingy princess.”

“Fuck you,” I said, shoving him as he placed a final ball on the apex.

Gauri screamed. Later she’d tell me that an oncologist, a cardiologist, two neurosurgeons, one obstetrician, three radiologists, two anaesthetists and five GPs leapt to their feet.

The cardiologist looked into Sharmaji’s face.

“He’s having a stroke,” he yelled. “Call an ambulance.”

Raj lost his balance, falling onto the trestle table. Its legs gave way and the newly built pyramid of laddus tumbled. We crashed onto the floor in front of Sharmaji in a mess of rosescented sugary pulp. Fifteen medical heads turned to stare at FICTION EDITION

us. The chefs not having skimped tonight, gold leaf fluttered into the air in a cloud around their faces.

It was close to two in the morning before the restaurant cleared.

I sat drinking lukewarm chai with Gauri.

“Told you trouble followed you,” she said. “Just not the kind I expected.”

“The concert was amazing,” I said. “Sorry about…the incident.”

“Listen, if you write one bad word about Sharmaji or this place, I will hound you like Kali Maa. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Raj?” I asked.

“I sent him home.”

Auntie Parvati hobbled over from the ladies room with her walking stick.

“Sharmaji thik hai?” she asked Gauri.

“I don’t know yet Auntie, but thank you for asking.” She pressed a box of rose laddus into Auntie Parvati’s hand.

“You’re not at the hospital?”

“Wife’s place is there,” Gauri replied. “Mine is here.”

“Time to go. Take me home beta,” Auntie said, turning to me.

Before I could take her hand, Gauri leapt up and embraced her, burying her face into her neck.

“Auntieji, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.

If he dies...”

“Chee pagali,” Auntie said, pushing Gauri away in disgust.

“Don’t touch me.”

Clutching the sweets in front of Sharmaville, we waited for the crossing lights to change.

My phone vibrated.

I’m out the back alley. Come.

“Auntie, just cross over when the lights change,” I said, dropping her arm. “I’ll be a few minutes. Meet you on the other side. Just wait over there.”

“Beta, beta?” she called behind me. “Don’t leave me. I can’t cross on my own. It’s too dark. I don’t like it. I’ll fall over.”

“Just wait over there Auntie,” I said over my shoulder.

“I can’t see anything, is the light green?”

I heard her walking stick tap on the asphalt behind me as I tore open the little bag of mukhwas in my pocket and swallowed its contents. Chewing on the candied fennel seeds I felt my mouth freshen as I hurried towards the alleyway behind Sharmaville.

Atul Joshi is in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at UTS. He’s had short fiction published in Seizure Online Australia and Ricepaper Magazine Canada .

Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, Atul migrated to Australia in 1971. A former classical musician, writing has become his re-connection with his creative roots.

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 55

56

THE BIG ISSUE 2018

The Librarian TO N Y B I R C H

T

he new school year of 1972, and girls returned from the summer holidays singing Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ word for word. I’d been ordered to sit in the front row in the first day of classes, next to Spider Miller, who was also being punished. Spider lived in the same block of commission flats, directly above us. Anytime my little sister, Nelly, complained about not having a dad, Mum reminded her to be careful what she wished for.

“Really, Nelly? And end up with a father like him upstairs?

A dad is the last trouble you need.”

Spider should have been expelled at the end of the previous school year. He was saved because he was yet to turn fifteen and the school was legally bound to keep him. Late in the year his father poured kerosene over the couch in their living room and set it alight. The fire would have spread through the flat except for the heroics of old Mr Ronson, who lives alone in the flat across the landing from the Millers. Spider’s older sister, Geraldine, lying on the floor in front of the TV watching Get

“Hey, Spider,” I asked, “can I have your Levi’s jacket? And your record collection?”

“If it fits, you can have the jacket. But not the records. My sister’s mad on The Rolling Stones. My albums are going to her.”

Miss McGuire, looking over her shoulder, ordered us to join the group.

I pulled on the sleeve of Spider’s school jumper. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

“No-one.”

“Why are you telling me then?”

“Because when this is over and I’m gone, they’ll interview my classmates. You can tell them why I did it.”

“And what will I say? That it was your old man’s fault?”

He lifted his head. “That could be the reason, but don’t say so.”

“What will I tell them, then?”

“Tell them I never got over Jim Morrison’s death last year.”

“I didn’t know you were a Jim Morrison fan.”

“I’m not. But there’s a headline in it. I could end up famous.”

“Anytime my little sister, Nelly, complained about not having a dad, Mum reminded her to be careful what she wished for.”

Smart, jumped up screaming Fire! Fire! Her father sat across the room in an armchair, watching the rising flames, nodding his head in approval of his work.

Spider’s response to his father’s crime was to consider a transgression of his own. He decided to burn the school down, whispered his plan to me during an end-of-year school excursion to the National Art Gallery. I was standing in the foyer staring absent-mindedly at the glass water-wall when he sidled up to me and whispered in my ear.

“I’m going to break into the science lab, open all the Bunsen burners, wait for the room to fill with gas and light a match.

Bang! The school will go up.”

I looked across at Miss McGuire, honey-blonde hair down the middle of her back, floral dress and red shoes. Although she resembled a Woodstock festival flower-child and the girls in school loved her, when she couldn’t get you to do what she wanted you to, Miss McGuire turned as strict as a Catholic nun.

“Bang, Spider? Blow the lab up and you’ll take yourself with it.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” he shrugged. There was no doubt he meant it.

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Spider Miller didn’t go through with his threat to blow up the science lab. The week after the gallery visit his father threw the family’s television set through the lounge window. It crashed to the ground three floors below and created an explosion of its own. He was arrested and ended up locked away in a mental hospital. Spider did set fire to a paddock of dry grass in the park across the street from the school, out of boredom. It was after the fire that the headmaster tried to expel him. It was also the reason he found himself in the front row of the class, alongside me, on the first day of the new school year.

I found myself seated next to him after I committed a crime of my own on the last day of the school year. I’d enrolled myself in Home Economics at half-year. The Eco class was dominated by girls. It was the place to be. While I was no chef, I miraculously managed to bake a decent Christmas cake. In order to take it home and show it off to the family I had to pay two dollars for my own cake, an injustice in a supposedly free education system. I snuck into the school kitchen at lunchtime on the last day of the year and was caught red-handed by the THE BIG ISSUE 2018 57

Eco teacher, Mrs Arnold, with the Christmas cake tucked under my jumper.

On the first day of the school year I looked across at Spider and smiled. The arsonist and the cake thief.

An additional punishment required me to attend lunch-hour detention during the first term, in the school library shelving books. The librarian, Miss Costa, dressed entirely in black and wore her silver hair in a tight bun. She also displayed a gold tooth when she smiled. It was rumoured that Miss Costa was exotic. On my first day of detention she explained how the numbering system on the spine of each book related to various subjects and categories. Although distracted by her glimmering tooth, I followed her instructions and shelved for the hour while enviously listening to the shouts of kids running wild in the grounds outside the library window.

Miss Costa sat at her desk eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. She occasionally looked over the top of the newspaper, keeping an eye on me. When the bell sounded for the end of lunch hour she called me over to her desk.

“When will you be eating your own lunch?” she asked.

“I’m not having lunch today,” I shrugged.

I saw no need to explain that I never ate lunch. I was usually busy puffing on a cigarette in the park, with Spider and the other smokers.

“You have to eat lunch,” she said. I shrugged again and said nothing.

steal a book? Before I left the library, she stopped me again and asked me if I enjoyed reading.

I loved reading books. “Sometimes,” I said, feigning a lack of interest.

She picked up a paperback novel from the desktop and held it in her hand. “Have you read this book?” she asked.

I looked down at a copy of Tom Sawyer.

“Yep. I’ve read it.”

She put Tom Sawyer down and picked up a second book.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “Well, you might enjoy this one.”

“I’ve read that as well.”

Miss Costa picked up a third book. To Kill a Mockingbird.

“And this one.”

I nodded my head. “That one too.”

The school bell rang. I turned to leave the room.

“Please wait,” she said. “Who was your favourite character?” She lifted the book a little higher. “In the novel?”

Miss Costa was testing me. I presumed she didn’t believe I’d read any of the books she’d suggested. When I didn’t answer the question, she prompted me further.

“Would it be Jem or Scout?”

I could have said nothing, held my tongue and let her think the obvious – that I was not only a liar, but that I was stupid too. I couldn’t help myself but set her straight.

“Neither of them,” I answered.

She looked surprised. “Is it Atticus then?”

“Nah. It’s not Atticus.”

“I could have said nothing, held my tongue and let her think the obvious – that I was not only a liar, but that I was stupid too.

I couldn’t help myself but set her straight.”

“You’re being punished because you stole your own Christmas cake?” she smiled.

“I did.”

“Why was that?” she asked.

“Because mine was the best cake,” I joked. “I would have stolen Rita Broad’s but she put too much fruit in hers. I heard the cake fell apart on Christmas Day soon as her mum cut into it.”

I noticed the corners of Miss Costa’s mouth lift slightly.

“You couldn’t afford to pay for it?” she asked.

The headmaster had asked me the same question, hoping to take pity on a poor kid off the housing commission estate.

My mother couldn’t afford the cake, it was true, but I never wanted to be pitied.

“Oh, I could pay for it,” I lied. “My mum gave me the money to collect it. I bought a packet of cigarettes and a milkshake instead.”

I looked defiantly at Miss Costa until she turned away.

I expect she was disappointed in me but I couldn’t be sure.

During the next detention, I noticed that Miss Costa again watched me closely. Maybe she thought I was planning to 58

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“Who then?”

“Boo Radley.”

She leaned forward in her chair. Curious. “Boo Radley?

Tell me why.”

“Well, he really says nothing much at all during the story.

And you hardly see him, but he’s always there. My Pop, when he was alive, he told me that sometimes those who say the least know the most. And those who talk a lot, well, they talk too much. When I read that book, I thought of my Pop. Boo Radley was just like he said. He was the quiet one who knew more than others did. If it wasn’t for Boo Radley, Jem for sure, and maybe Scout, would have been killed by that drunk.”

I rolled back on the heels of my scuffed school shoes, feeling pleased with myself. I looked down at Miss Costa, searching her face for a frown or flushed cheeks. She smiled to herself and put the book down on the desk.

“I’ve never thought of him that way,” she said. “I suppose I’ve always felt too sorry for Boo to see him that way. You must read quite a lot?” she said.

The hall cupboard in our flat was full of the books my Pop

left behind when he died, paperbacks and hardbacks. I’d read most of them.

“I do.”

“I looked up your library card,” she said. “You haven’t borrowed a book in a while.”

She’d been snooping on me. She picked up another book, a slim Penguin paperback. “You might like this. It’s a French translation.” She offered me the book. I looked down at it without taking it from her. “The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature,” she added.

The polish on her fingernails was badly chipped. I took the offering and left the room.

I didn’t see out the term at school. Miss McGuire did all she could to humiliate me and Spider except force us to wear a dunce cap each. The end came the day she performed a Jekyll and Hyde act in the one maths class. She ordered Spider to the headmaster’s office for whistling in class. As soon as he’d left the room she picked up a guitar she kept by her desk, strummed a few notes and sang Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ while smiling like a sunbeam. Spider bypassed the headmaster’s office and left the schoolyard.

He knocked at my door later that night. We sat on the front step of the block of flats sharing a cigarette.

“I’m not going back to school,” he said.

“What will you do?”

“My uncle is a union rep at the meatworks. He’ll get me FICTION EDITION

on the chain.”

“If you’re not going back to school, neither am I.” “You want me to see if I can get you work as well?”

Walking by the meatworks of a morning and hearing the cries of the pigs waiting to be slaughtered was enough to put me off wanting to head through the front gates for work.

“Nah. I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know how my mum will take it, but I know she’ll have me working if I’m not at school. It won’t be at the meatworks.”

Spider got the job, but didn’t have to start until the following week. Fearful of explaining to my mum that I wasn’t going back to school, I put on my uniform each morning and left the flat with my bag slung over my shoulder. I’d meet Spider at the pool room opposite the tram-stop and sit at a table drinking Coca-Cola, smoking a cigarette and reading a book while Spider played pool for money. Our lazy, enjoyable week ended when two policemen from the Gaming Squad walked into the shop one morning and accused the owner, Manny, of running a card game in the back room, which he did, most nights of the week.

Leaving the shop after interrogating poor Manny, one of the police looked over at me and stopped.

“What are you doing in here this time of day?”

I looked down at the floor. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, my arse,” he snarled. He turned to Spider. “And you? You two should be in school.”

“I don’t go to school,” Spider answered. “I’ve got a job.”

The policeman looked around the room. “Some fucking job.”

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He grabbed me by the shoulder. “Outside. Both of you.”

They marched us along a side lane next to the shop and told us to face a brick wall. The second policeman elbowed me in the kidneys and told me to spread my legs. We were both searched. Spider lost his packet of cigarettes, six dollars he’d won at the pool game and a flick-knife he kept in the side of one gym shoe. Patting me down, the policeman felt something in my back pocket.

“What’s this?” he asked.

I turned my head towards him. “Not sure. But it looks like a book to me.”

He slapped me across the back of the head with the novel.

“Don’t be a smart-arse.”

He read the title of the book, The Outsider, and showed it to his colleague, who was enjoying one of Spider’s Marlboro Reds. “These two are fucking outsiders. Must be an autobiography.”

We were put in the back of a police car, driven to the local station and locked in an empty room, where we were to wait until our parents were contacted. Spider would be in the clear but I knew that my mum would be angry, being called up by the police at the factory where she worked testing spark plugs.

“I’m bored,” Spider said after an hour of staring at a police force recruiting poster – We Care. “Where’s your book?”

“He took it off me. The copper who searched me.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about this fella who doesn’t care about anything. His mum dies and he doesn’t cry or anything. And then he kills another fella on the beach and he doesn’t care about that either. Even when they catch him and lock him up.”

“Is that it? Is that all that happens?”

“Pretty much. Except I think what it’s really about is that he really does care, but he doesn’t want to believe that. He doesn’t want to think too much either, because he’ll work out he’s bullshitting to himself.”

Spider stood up and paced the room, looking at me the whole time. He eventually stopped and stood under a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Have you ever done that?” he asked. “Bullshitted to yourself about something. Like you didn’t care or you tried to believe something that wasn’t true?”

I hesitated. Not because I didn’t have an answer for Spider, but because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear the words coming out of my own mouth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have.”

“Like what?”

“Like I say I hate school and I never want to be there.”

He looked shocked. “But you do want to be there? Fuck.”

“Well, not all the time. But some of it, the reading, talking about books and writing stories. I could be good at that if I tried.”

He craned his neck and stared at a crack in the ceiling.

“What about you, Spider. Do you bullshit to yourself?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “About my dad.”

“Tell me.”

FICTION EDITION

“Well,” he said, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. “I tell myself that I hate him and I want him dead. But I don’t.

He’s a prick, for sure. But when I see him in the hospital, dribbling from his mouth and forgetting who we are, I want him to get better. And I want him to come home.”

Spider wiped tears from his eyes just as the door opened.

A copper stood in the doorway, looked at Spider and laughed.

“You can stop being a crybaby, son. Your mother’s here.” He looked at me. “Yours too, genius. And she’s pissed off.”

I never went back to school. I never had a choice. When it was reported to the school that I’d been picked up by the police, I was expelled. My mother knew someone who knew someone else who got me a job in the cafe at Coles in the city, picking up dishes from the tables and taking out the rubbish.

It was no career, but at least it wasn’t the meatworks.

I was carrying a stack of dirty plates one lunchtime when I spotted the school librarian, Miss Costa, seated at one of the tables. She was with a woman around her own age. They sat close, rubbed shoulders and smiled at each other. Before I could turn away, Miss Costa spotted me and smiled, her gold tooth on full display.

“Daniel,” she said. “How are you?”

My cheeks reddened. “It wasn’t like the Christmas cake,” I blurted. “I didn’t steal it.”

She had no idea what I was talking about. “Steal? What do you mean?”

“The book you loaned me. The Outsider. I didn’t steal it from you. A policeman, he stole it from me.”

She raised her eyebrows. I told her about the morning Spider and I were picked up by the police and how one of them had whacked me over the head with the book and then confiscated it.

When I’d finished the story, she laughed. “Oh, Mr Camus would love that.” She leaned across the table. “You should consider applying for another school, Daniel.”

Although the idea appealed to me, I knew it was too late to turn back. “I couldn’t do that. My boss here says I’m the best dishwasher he’s ever had. He says I have a future,” I laughed.

Miss Costa and her companion stood up. “Well, if you ever change your mind, let me know. I could write a reference for you. You’re a bit of a wild boy, Daniel,” she winked. “But it beats being dull.”

I stood and watched as Miss Costa left the cafe.

She reached out and lightly brushed the back of her friend’s hand with a fingertip.

Tony Birch is a Melbourne-based writer. His books include Shadowboxing (2006), Father’s Day (2009), Blood (2011), The Promise (2014), Ghost River (2015) and Common People (2017).

THE BIG ISSUE 2018 61

PUZZLES CROSSWORD » by Chris Black (@cjrblack) 1

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CRYPTIC CLUES

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The answers for the cryptic and quick clues are the same.

ACROSS 1. Make money here? (5,2,4) 7. Laurence Olivier has top suit (3) 9. Condition for Armstrong perhaps (5) 10. Outrage vicar and Gene Wilder (9) 11. Playing tennis, it’s decided (9) 12. Stole card from gangster (5) 13. Cut then blend tropical fruit (7) 15. Unusual range of Sierra redwoods (4) 18. Shy actors (4) 20. American DJ gets degree and certificate? (7) 23. Expels leader from mediaeval sporting contests (5) 24. See you cooking old pot pie (6-3) 26. Plants acres of it all over the place (9) 27. Leaders of Lowlands of Scotland excuse royal failure (5) 28. First Lady backtracks to no avail? (3) 29. Minor scrape affected soldiers (6,5)

62 THE BIG ISSUE 2018

DOWN 1. Prejudiced Italian smuggled art (8) 2. Go after Asian flower trade (8) 3. Regularly ignored their meaningless, empty words (5) 4. Fancy gift men ruined (7) 5. Flyer for David Satori Unlimited (7) 6. Sea proved stormy for spy (9) 7. Study terrific discussion (6) 8. Result of red card: it won’t happen again (3-3) 14. Wanting the new schoolmaster here (9) 16. Waste-conscious gardener has no time for glass? (8) 17. Lots of Americans fish on boats (3,5) 19. Row about AT&T in worse condition (7) 20. Visits popular Falls first (5,2) 21. Spooner’s flat, flat white? (6) 22. Spy stumbled on revolutionary’s identity (6) 25. Optical illusion conceals colour (5)

QUICK CLUES ACROSS 1. Place to buy (5,2,4) 7. Boardroom bigwig (3) 9. Equestrian (5) 10. Injustice (9) 11. Demanding (9) 12. Winter accessory (5) 13. Fruit (7) 15. Scant; not well done (4) 18. Actors (4) 20. Degree (7) 23. Boots (5) 24. Goodbye (6-3) 26. Places of manufacturing (9) 27. Dud (5) 28. The night before (3) 29. Branch of US armed forces (6,5) DOWN 1. Biased (8) 2. Hard work (8) 3. Standing (5) 4. Academic periods (7) 5. Pilot (7) 6. Listen in (9) 7. Discussion (6) 8. Not to be repeated (3-3) 14. Teaching location (9) 16. Songwriter (8) 17. Places to leave vehicles (3,5) 19. In worse condition (7) 20. Visits (5,2) 21. Stimulating drink (6) 22. Spirit; inner self (6) 25. Flower (5)

EDITORIAL Editor Amy Hetherington Deputy Editor Katherine Smyrk Contributing Editor Michael Epis Contributing Editor Anastasia Safioleas Editorial Coordinator Lorraine Pink Art Direction & Design Gozer (gozer.com.au) CONTRIBUTORS Film Editor Annabel Brady-Brown Small Screens Editor Aimee Knight Music Editor Sarah Smith Books Editor Thuy On Cartoonist Andrew Weldon ENQUIRIES Advertising Jenny La Brooy on (03) 9663 4533 jlabrooy@bigissue.org.au Subscriptions (03) 9663 4533 subscribe@bigissue.org.au Editorial Tel (03) 9663 4522 editorial@bigissue.org.au The Big Issue, GPO Box 4911, Melbourne, VIC 3001 thebigissue.org.au © 2018 Big Issue In Australia Ltd All rights reserved.

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PMP Limited 8 Priddle St Warwick Farm NSW 2170 CROSSWORD SOLUTIONS #567 ACROSS: 1 Hearthrug 6 Digit 9 Often 10 Drop

scone 11 Stonehenge 12 Sync 14 Chariot 15 Athlete 17 Antwerp 19 Summary 20 Tape 22 Contravene 25 Ring a bell 26 Zilch 27 Dregs 28 Bartender; DOWN: 1 Hoops 2 Astronaut 3 Tangerines 4 Red meat 5 Georgia 6 Dish 7 Goofy 8 Treachery 13 Chimpanzee 14 Chartered 16 Enamelled 18 Proverb 19 Settler 21 Penne 23 Ether 24 Pass The solution to Adder’s Coil Ed#567 and a brand new Adder’s Coil will appear in Ed#569.