The Big Issue Australia #593 - Fiction Edition 2019

$9

No 593 9 Aug 2019

HELPING PEOPLE HELP THEMSELVES $4.50 of the cover price goes to your vendor

16 EXTRA PAGES

14 SHORT STORIES MICHAEL MOHAMMEDÂ AHMAD HEATHER ROSE MARK BRANDI ELLEN VAN NEERVEN ALISON EVANS MIRANDI RIWOE BEN WALTER ALICIA SOMETIMES CHLOE WILSON SIMON CASTLES LISA WALKER KW GEORGE GREG FOYSTER ALICE ROBINSON

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 Emma O’Halloran

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 $4.50 and sell them for $9, 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

National Operations Manager Jeremy Urquhart 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) 6181 2801 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, 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, Yarra Trams 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.

CONTENTS

#

593 STORIES

08 THE HIGH TOWER BY

34 CLOUD BRAWLS

Simon Castles

BY

12 BETSY NUMBER FOUR BY

40 BRIGHT OBJECTS

Mark Brandi

KW George

BY

Ben Walter

50 JOYRIDERS

24 TAKE HEART

BY

Alison Evans

26 HOW TO NAVIGATE A DINNER PARTY WITH POETRY Alicia Sometimes

30 GULL SONG BY

Alice Robinson

46 THE SLIDE

BY Michael Mohammed Ahmad

BY

42 TO BEAT DOWN BY

20 LEARNING TO BE LEB

BY

Mirandi Riwoe

BY

16 MAKING STUFF UP BY

Greg Foyster

Chloe Wilson

54 EVEN GOLDFISH GET THE BLUES BY

Lisa Walker

58 KAY’S LAW BY

Heather Rose

Ellen van Neerven

REGULARS ED’S LETTER & YOUR SAY 05 MEET YOUR VENDOR 07 STREETSHEET 62 CROSSWORD

04

ED’S LETTER WHAT’S ON OUR MINDS?

THERE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL about the

Fiction Edition. Obviously, there’s the glorious stories that take you on a journey outside of yourself. There’s the striking illustrations throughout, this year by Michelle Pereira, that turn this magazine into a work of art. And there’s the 16 extra pages, made possible with the support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Something else that’s special is what these stories tell us about the world around us – what people are musing on and grappling with to such an extent they are compelled to write it down.

Our Books Editor Thuy On and author Nicola Redhouse read every submission – 424 this year – then planed them into a shortlist read by the editorial team.

Last year, the judges noticed a vast number of the stories tapped into themes of gender relations and “reckoning with power” that emerged post #MeToo. This year, it would seem the theme on many writerly minds was the climate crisis. This manifested in a slew of tales that, as Thuy comments, “depict the world itself in crisis and humans flailing to understand what to do in the end of days”.

“Many stories had the feel of a world in peril,” adds Nicola. “It’s like it has eked into the group writer-unconscious.”

You will find some of those tales in our 15th annual Fiction Edition, alongside five specially commissioned pieces from well‑known authors. You will find stories of hope, love, loss and even the world’s longest slide. A special edition indeed.

Katherine Smyrk, Deputy Editor

$9

No 593 9 Aug 2019

HELPING PEOPLE HELP THEMSELVES $4.50 of the cover price goes to your vendor

16 EXTRA PAGES

14 SHORT STORIES MICHAEL MOHAMMED AHMAD HEATHER ROSE MARK BRANDI ELLEN VAN NEERVEN ALISON EVANS MIRANDI RIWOE BEN WALTER ALICIA SOMETIMES CHLOE WILSON

COVER #593

SIMON CASTLES LISA WALKER KW GEORGE GREG FOYSTER ALICE ROBINSON

FICTION EDITION ILLUSTRATED BY MICHELLE PEREIRA

YOUR SAY OVER THE MOON

Grabbed a copy of your 50th anniversary moon landing special (Ed#591) from Perth railway station. The Apollo 11 landing and moon walk was a day to remember for me – we had eight inches of snow in my childhood town of Burra, South Australia! The school buses couldn’t go out to collect the farm kids so our local primary school was somewhat deserted, only a handful of us “townies” were in attendance. And because my folks lived on a hill and could get Channel 9, we had almost the entire school there from 2pm to watch the live broadcast – then back to class for the last hour or so. Cold feet and snowballs were the order of the day and the moon landing walk was icing on our daily cake!

Dennis Thamm, Perth, WA All Your Say writers published in this edition win a double pass to see Danger Close: Battle of Long Tan. Simply send your thoughts, feedback and stories to submissions@bigissue.org.au.

My good friend of more than 50 years, and Big Issue seller Alan is a person who has gone through some ups and downs. Following some years of overseas work, he settled in inner Sydney. The Big Issue group came to his rescue, as did Big Issue customers, with whom he became friendly. He has been able to stay engaged in his local community of Michelle Pereira is an editorial and commercial illustrator and artist with a Bachelor of Communication and Design from Monash University. In her work, she explores everyday life and human connection, and champions the strength and resilience of women. Michelle has also exhibited her artwork in galleries around Melbourne.

INSTAGRAM @YOUNGPAPADUM

Redfern. In the last three years or so, his health has deteriorated, his mobility has been reduced and he travels by motorised scooter or wheelchair. In his support of The Big Issue work, Alan is going to do the City2Surf fun run. My partner Di and I will also be competing with Alan on Sunday 11 August. I urge people to support Alan with your generous donations.

Keith Ligtermoet, Perth, WA Ed – If you’d like to sponsor Alan and The Big Issue team, even after the event, visit thebigissue.org.au.

Well done. Your moon landing edition is a collection item. It’s a great way to help people become aware of who you are and what you do, and to remind us of how America united the world on one day.

Shame that spirit is hard to keep up.

This mag is going to live with my original “man on moon” book so maybe in future my kids or whoever can see the achievement and struggle of man.

Jamie Quick, Bentleigh, Vic

The winner of next edition’s Letter of the Fortnight will win a collection of books from five of the well-loved authors in this edition: The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad; The Rip by Mark Brandi; Highway Bodies by Alison Evans; Bruny by Heather Rose; Comfort Food

by Ellen van Neerven. Simply send your thoughts, feedback and stories to submissions@bigissue.org.au.

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 CYRIL SELLS THE BIG ISSUE IN FOOTSCRAY AND SEDDON, MELBOURNE.

WHEN I WAS born, the doctor came out and told my parents:

“I’M A PRETTY HAPPY, FUN-LOVING TYPE OF GUY.” – CYRIL

“Mr and Mrs W, your son is dead.” But then the nurse came out, and announced, “Mr and Mrs W, you’ve got a fine young baby boy!”

My parents were devastated, then elated. The doctor shouldn’t have done what he done.

I am the baby of the family. Five boys, including me, and one girl.

I was never home as a kid, always out having a ball with everybody, seeing this, seeing that. My mum, she passed away when I was 17, my dad passed away when I was 39. My brothers and sisters, we all split up; they went this way, that way, and every other way.

I was a bit of a joker at school in Melbourne. I left when I was 17, after Form 3. I said, I’ve had enough, go out and get a job. My first job was working at Dunlop Tyres as a tyre fitter, changing tyres, having fun.

A bloke came in, he had a puncture on his truck. He told me there were jobs going at the stables. Horses are the best thing... When I was a little youngster, I used to go horse-riding down by the river with my mates. So I was a jockey there for a while, riding. I went to school and everything like that, learned all about horses.

After that I was making filing cabinets and lockers for 12 months. Then I was working at the Victorian Railways for nine years. Later, I worked in the cellars and mowed lawns for people.

I’m a pretty happy, fun-loving type of guy. I used to go ballroom dancing way before I had my knee issues – I had a pushbike accident. And I played golf, but I’ve given it away for a while now.

Now I go up the Footscray Club, spend time with the boys, have a lime and soda water. I don’t drink any more. I hadn’t been working for a long time, and I was on the pension. I started talking to Russell about it at the club, and he said, “Why don’t you start selling The Big Issue?”

And now I’ve been selling The Big Issue on and off since 2015.

I had some time out after my accident.

The pain in my knee wouldn’t go away, and I accidentally overdosed on Panadol tablets.

My stomach “burst”. I was rushed into intensive care, and had a stoma bag for a little bit. Oh shemozzle! I am alright now.

I’m back working. I enjoy it, you know.

You meet people, good company. I like working outside. I have a ball, have fun.

Photo by

interview by Amy Hetherington photo by James Braund

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STREETSHEET Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends LIVE WELL

Thank you to BUPA for coming into The Big Issue and giving me a flu shot.

I have wanted to get it for a while, and I hope it means I don’t get sick this year. They gave me a lollipop, even though I’m not a kid – I gave it to Sam instead.

Joseph T sells The Big Issue outside David Jones in Market St, Sydney.

FUN TO COME

I am looking forward to the Brisbane fun run on 25 August. I’ve been training every day. I’m always happy selling The Big Issue – it makes the day go quickly. I love sharing stories with my customers and the other vendors.

They touch my heart. I was happy that Collingwood beat Essendon on Anzac Day – my partner supports Essendon and I love Collingwood.

Dom sells The Big Issue outside the Commonwealth Bank on Edward St, Brisbane.

It is with heavy hearts that we farewell much-loved vendor Malcolm, who has passed away. Mal was a vendor since 2013. He was the heart and soul of our Perth community.

Mal valued friendship above all else. He attended every vendor breakfast and coffee club with a story to share and a helping hand. His work ethic was second to none and he worked pitches in Nedlands, Fremantle, Joondalup and Perth. He would have a bad day selling and be back at work the next day. Mal made us laugh and was quick to joke. It’s hard to imagine The Big Issue without him. We will miss his entertaining daily updates, his wacky outfits, his stories of his rich inner life and his smile. We are all the richer for being able to call him our friend and we will miss him dearly. Go Eagles, Go Lions, Go the Wild Cats and Go Malcolm. Send us a postcard from the moon and rest in peace brother.

Andrew Joske, Perth Operations Manager

I am looking forward to doing the Brisbane to Bridge 5km walk in August.

I have been selling The Big Issue since 2014. I love listening to all music from the 1950s to the present day. I’d like to say thank you to all my customers for their support. I love it when my customers invite me for a coffee.

Stephen sells The Big Issue in Brisbane.

Ed – you can sponsor Dom, Stephen and the team via thebigissue.org.au.

for 32 years. I had a business before.

My business was in small-goods manufacturing: salami, fish and chips and other food. I went for treatment for my eyes in Germany when I lost my vision. I have a bachelor’s degree in social work. I worked in a mental hospital in Egypt. I could work here in social work, but when my eyes went it was hard. I’ve been at The Big Issue for two months. Sometimes I sell in different spots. We all help and support each other here.

Samuel Z sells The Big Issue in Melbourne CBD.

SWEET ENOUGH

RONNIE’S FUNNIES

WALKING ON SUNSHINE

I am 70 years old. I love every dessert.

The Big Issue is suitable for me. Most people are very kind, and I have made lots of friends. I have been in Australia

Q: Why did the tomato blush?

A: Because he saw the salad dressing.

Ronnie sells The Big Issue cnr Creek and Eagle Sts, Brisbane.

BOOK SMARTS

What is a bibliophile you may ask?

You might find one at Mostly Books or Dymocks The people who collect books Or have a love of reading.

I love to read.

My favourite bookstore is Mostly Books I don’t just love the books there, But the people who work there too.

Someday I hope you buy a book or read a book Everyone, I believe, should read It would make us a smarter nation And just think what we could achieve!

Daniel K sells The Big Issue at Waymouth St, Adelaide.

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

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FICTION EDITION

THE HIGH TOWER BY

Simon Castles

N

icko is at my shoulder again, water beading on his skin, laughing that I haven’t moved.

“I’m going to,” I say. “In a minute.”

Nicko shakes his head to dry himself, like a happy dog, and a few drops of water fly onto my back.

I shiver even though it’s thirty degrees and not even midday.

“She’s looking, you know,” Nicko says, and slaps his shorts with his hands. It makes a deep, dank sound like a wet towel hitting the floor.

I look over to the grass area by the pool before I think about it, and then pretend I’m not. I swing my eyes to the sky, which is a high, cloudless blue, and I reckon it makes sense why I’d be looking at a sky like that.

“Girls don’t care about that stuff anymore,” I say, still looking up, my eyes aching from the glare. “Never did probably.”

There are other boys on the high tower like Nicko. You can tell them because they walk funny. With all the shorts on, they are too padded and soggy around the middle.

I wear just one pair of shorts. They go to my knees and are made up of squares in different colours. Nicko reckons they make me look like I’m wearing a patchwork quilt.

Nicko stops drumming on his body, takes two big steps and leaps into the air. He swings backwards and into a full spin. His arms come in tight across his body, and he hits the water arse first, one leg out straight and the other tucked to his chest. The splash shoots straight up, nearly as high as the tower, and the top drops seem to hang a moment, as if thinking of never coming down. Water is still falling as Nicko comes to the surface and kicks towards the pool’s edge.

I don’t know when Nicko learned to do this, or when he

“If girls didn’t care, what was I doing up here? Why had I followed when Nicko asked who’s coming and led the way to the high tower? What was the point if not girls?”

But I’m not sure I believe it. If girls didn’t care, what was I doing up here? Why had I followed when Nicko asked who’s coming and led the way to the high tower? What was the point if not girls?

“We used to say only mental cases jumped off here,” I say.

Nicko laughs but doesn’t say anything. When we were kids me and Nicko would point out the high tower from miles away.

We loved the way it rose from the flat nothing of our town and seemed to scrape the sky. We would say we could see bodies going off it, even when the tower was tiny on the horizon, but I don’t know if we could see this or just imagined it.

Nicko slaps his shorts again, doing something like a drum fill that starts on his thighs and moves up his body.

He’s always been this way, always moving, like he’s keeping rhythm to a beat that never ends and only he can hear.

He wears more than one pair of shorts. This is usual for him now. He has four or five pairs on, one on top of the other.

He does this so he can jump off the high tower all day, and as one pair comes apart from the force of his arse hitting the water over and over, there’s another pair underneath.

He’s like a lizard shedding skin.

started jumping off the high tower. Last summer we had been the same. And the summers before that, stretching back to some point neither of us can remember but had seen in photos, our mums in big round sunglasses and floppy hats, swinging us around in the toddler pool.

We still look like each other, me and Nicko. Tanned, thin as pelican shit, sandy hair that shoots up at the front as if reaching for the sun. People often think we’re twins.

But now it’s like Nicko has leapt ahead and is older than me, even though he isn’t.

I step again to the edge of the platform and look down.

The water below is deep blue and crowded with bodies.

Waves slap against each other and run over the sides, turning the white concrete a dark brown. Radio blares from a speaker, and an announcer is talking over the top of ‘Eye of the Tiger’, the sound rising and falling with shifts in the breeze. I reach for the rail that runs along the side of the platform, my fingers and toes tingling.

I look down at Nicko, who now sits on the edge of the pool, feet dangling in the water. He is with two girls I haven’t seen before. One of the girls wears a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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knotted at the front. She takes Burger Rings from a pack and tosses them at Nicko, who tries to catch them in his mouth.

A Burger Ring bounces off his face and into the water, and they all laugh.

Me and Nicko always had Burger Rings when we came to the pool as kids. We’d put them on our fingers, joke they were diamond rings and act all posh. We used to wonder why Burger Rings tasted better at the pool than if you bought them at the shops. We called it pool magic. It became something we said a lot for a summer or two because we thought it was funny for some reason. Pool magic. We said it about everything.

N

icko is beside me, puffed from climbing the ladder that zigzags to the top. I ask him who the girls are.

“I dunno,” he says, sucking in the air. “They just started talking to me. They asked about my shorts.

Wanted to know what happens when all the pairs are ripped and my arse is hanging half out.”

I look over to the kiosk. I’m still thinking about Burger Rings. The kiosk is at the other end of the pool from the high tower, across a stretch of concrete that bakes in the sun and is often too hot to stand on. I think of me and Nicko in the kiosk queue as kids, pocket money in our hands, hopping from foot to foot, looking up at a menu board that is all faded except where new prices have been stickered over the old.

Nicko is doing repair work on his shorts. A split has opened up in the outer pair, exposing a bright orange pair underneath. A piece of material flaps freely, and he lifts it one way and then the other, as if wondering whether to tie it up or tuck it in somewhere. He yanks and the piece of material comes away in his hand.

I look down at my shorts and wonder how they would go if I jumped. I imagine the coloured squares scattered over the length of the pool as if I’ve exploded on impact.

Nicko takes two big steps and leaps into the air.

I

look over to where Hannah is. She is sitting on the lawn that stretches away from the side of the pool. She is with a group of our friends, but off to one side. She has been at the school only a few weeks, and I think still feels on the edge of things; like she still belongs at her old school and in her old town.

She has a book in her hand and sunglasses on, but it’s hard to tell if she’s reading or where she’s looking. The book is The Bell Jar, which we’re doing in English. I wave, but she doesn’t wave back.

“I don’t think she can see us,” I say to Nicko. “She can’t see far without her glasses.”

Hannah sits up the front in English so she can see the board better. I sit a few seats behind her. Last week during a class discussion about Sylvia Plath’s life, I said Plath was too good for Ted Hughes and that Hughes was a lying, cheating turd. Our teacher, Ms Hooper, said it was good I had expressed an opinion, but that I shouldn’t have used a word like turd. But I hardly heard what Ms Hooper was saying,

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because at that moment Hannah turned around in her seat, held her fist up and mouthed the words “lying, cheating turd”.

I had played the scene over in my head a few thousand times since then. So many I worried the vision would lose clarity or disappear entirely. But it hasn’t yet. I actually think I see more now. Such as the way Hannah’s dark hair fell over her eyes when she held her fist up, and how the silver bangle she wore caught the sun from the window and threw a pocket of light around the room.

I look over now to see if Hannah is wearing the bangle, but it’s too far to tell. She is lying on her back, propped on her elbows, her book open on her tummy. She has taken off her sunglasses and is squinting into the sun, a blue cloth hat pulled low on her forehead. Maybe she is looking at me like Nicko said.

“I

can’t do it,” I say.

Nicko is working on his shorts again. He rips a piece free and throws it. The material catches a breeze and takes off. It twirls as if happy, or like it’s writing messages in the air. It dips and glides, finds a fresh current and floats up again. It flies towards the kiosk, and over the lawn, high above where Hannah lies on her towel. It comes back over the pool, and drifts down, lazy as an autumn leaf. It lands at the shallow end next to a bald dad in a rashie.

“I can’t do it,” I say again. I tell Nicko to swap shorts with me. I tell him to put on my patchwork quilt shorts, and I’ll put on one of his pairs. I say Hannah can’t see far without her glasses and from where she is we’ll look the same. I say all she’ll see is a blur of colour and tan skin. I tell him that with his new shorts on, he should give a wave in Hannah’s direction and jump, and while he did so I would duck down the ladder and slip secretly into the pool, where we’d swap shorts again.

I look at Nicko and bite my bottom lip. “That’s a stupid plan,” he says, and agrees to it immediately. He does a drum roll on his shorts.

We move to the back of the platform, behind about a dozen people who hang out on the high tower for the sun and smokes. Nicko takes off his ripped shorts, and the orange pair underneath. He gives me the orange pair and puts the ripped shorts back on. I have nothing under my patchwork quilt shorts, so I grab a towel from the rail and wrap it around my waist. I slide off my shorts and hold them out to Nicko.

“Hang on,” he says. “I don’t think these are colourful enough for me.”

We keep low on the platform and get into our new shorts.

Nicko pulls the patchwork quilt shorts over the top of his other shorts, which are wet and cause a drag. He inches the new shorts over his hips, doing little jumps on the spot to move them up. He sucks in his stomach as he fastens the press-stud button. “It’ll be fine if I don’t breathe,” he says.

My new shorts are loose because they had gone over the top of Nicko’s other pairs. I push out my gut, but there’s still a gap at the front. I bunch the excess material in my hand

and hold it up, like a kid playing dress-ups.

I look over Nicko’s shoulder and past the bodies on the high tower. I can just make out Hannah on the grass. She is still lying back on her elbows, knees bent, an ankle resting on her other leg.

“Okay, go now,” I say. “And remember to jump like I would.”

“I’ll be sure to jump like a wuss,” Nicko says.

He holds out his arm for a fist bump, but steps away before I get my hand out, and I wave my arm after him in the air as he slips between the smokers and sunbakers towards the edge of the platform.

I put my hand on the curved rail at the top of the ladder, ready to move. I look over the heads to Nicko, then towards Hannah. A voice crackles over the loud speaker saying a boy has lost his mum and is waiting at the lifeguard station.

When the radio breaks back in, sounding somehow louder than before, Nicko gives a wave in the direction of the grass area and jumps.

He is not used to jumping this way. He spins his arms forward, but his body wheels backwards, until he’s almost horizontal. He stops his arms and becomes very still, like he hopes no movement will help where rapid movement didn’t. But this only seems to increase the speed at which he’s moving. He windmills his arms in the other direction, as if in a final wish to rewind and start over. Metres from the water his arms and legs are kicking in all directions, like someone tangled in a sleeping bag.

He hits the water with a crack that seems to shake the trees. Children look up from their play. There is a moment of terrible silence that is broken only by groans from the high tower.

I lean over the side rail and look down. I can see my patchwork quilt shorts. Nicko is in them, but he is hardly moving. He is floating face down, and the skin on his back is red from where he hit the water.

I start fast down the ladder, skipping rungs, one hand sliding down the rail, the other holding my shorts up. But before I reach the first landing I back into a bunch of girls coming up. I climb over the handrail, and try to edge past them. But there’s no way down. The girls are tight together, and they keep coming, all of them turning to each other and laughing and making sure everyone behind is still with them and not chickening out.

I bolt back up the ladder, and on the platform I shout for the girls to hurry. But my voice comes out soft and croaky and disappears beneath the song from the speakers.

I turn towards the edge of the platform. The sun is suddenly brighter and I shield my eyes. The bodies around me become like silhouettes and the noise of the pool seems to drop away. An image comes into my head of me and Nicko in the toddler pool, our mums standing over us in those big round sunglasses and floppy hats, blocking out a sun that radiates all around them.

And then I am pushing past the bodies on the high tower.

And then I am jumping into the air. And then I am falling,

and falling, and falling, and the water is rushing towards me.

And then I am under water and everything is quiet except the sound of air racing through my body.

I

come up swinging my arms, pushing to get higher out of the water. My chest aches and my lungs scream. Water slaps into my face, stinging my eyes. I gulp for air, and swallow a mouthful of water. The taste of chlorine burns at the back of my throat.

I spin around, unsure where the side of the pool is.

My vision is blurry, a swirl of blues. I rub my eyes and turn around again. And then I see Nicko. His mouth is below the waterline, but his eyes are smiling. He rises fully out of the water.

“Hey Davy,” he says, and shakes his head, water flying from his hair in a perfect arc that catches the sun. He puts a hand on his shoulder and grimaces. “Shit that hurt.”

We swim to the side of the pool, and rest our arms on the edge, both of us sucking in big breaths. Our legs sway and kick gently in the water.

“Thanks for coming for me,” Nicko says.

I cough and can hear water sloshing around inside me.

I shake my head to one side and then the other. My ears clear and suddenly everything sounds loud and tinny.

I think of asking Nicko if he did it all on purpose – the jump, the hitting the water, the floating face down. But I don’t. And in the silence that follows maybe Nicko guesses what I’m thinking.

“Put it down to pool magic, Davy,” he says.

I look over to Hannah on the grass. She has her sunglasses on. She is reading The Bell Jar. The radio is playing ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’, but she doesn’t seem to notice the noise or anything else much around her. She just reads her book.

“Nicko,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says.

“I lost my shorts somewhere.”

We both look down into the water. My skin shimmers beneath the surface, tanned mostly, but in other parts a glowing white. Nicko cracks up.

“My shorts are still on me, unfortunately,” he says.

The patchwork quilt pattern gleams against the white of the pool wall.

Nicko turns around and faces the middle of the pool.

“I’ll find your shorts, Davy,” he says. He pushes off the edge, swims a few strokes, and dives under, his feet kicking a moment at the surface before they disappear.

Simon Castles (@simoncastles) is an editor and journalist at The Age, and a former editor of The Big Issue. His writing has also appeared in a range of publications, including Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Dazed & Confused.

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FICTION EDITION

BETSY NUMBER FOUR BY

K

Mark Brandi

eith felt happy with his work. Maybe happy wasn’t the right word. Satisfied – that was more like it.

Had he gone deep enough? Hard to be sure. No time now for self-doubt.

Started before the sun rose – sweet spot around 4am. Too late for the neighbours to be awake, too early to have risen.

So he thinks. One can’t ever be sure of such things. Can’t be certain, not a hundred per cent.

The morning light edges into the sky, deep blue at the horizon, and he smooths the dirt as best as he can. It isn’t perfect – doesn’t need to be, he reckons. Just pleased he’s gotten the job done. Enough, he figures, to withstand a fleeting glance, or someone looking over the fence. Mainly that.

Closer inspection would be trickier. If anyone came into the yard, it’d look suspicious – the fresh patch of earth in the lawn, soil dark and newly dug. If anyone came into the yard, they’d be coming for a reason – it wouldn’t be good.

He loved her, or something near to it. Maybe love blinds you from reality. From imperfection. From truth.

And he’d been careful, mostly – a moment’s distraction, that’s all it took.

He didn’t know much about her background, her past. She couldn’t tell him what made her this way, what happened before they met. No point asking. Still, he’d known what she was capable of – come to excuse it, explain it away.

Can’t worry about such things now.

Try to stay in the present – what the counsellor said.

Twelve fortnightly sessions – parole condition.

Take life one moment at a time.

Don’t catastrophise.

The word the counsellor used – catastrophise. Never heard it before in his life.

Looked it up once he got home, and it meant what he figured, what it sounded like – to view or present a situation as considerably worse than it actually is.

True of him, he thought. But born of experience, too. Life experience.

Sometimes, it makes sense to catastrophise. Sometimes, it’s best to prepare for the worst. After all, this isn’t the first time.

Probably not the last.

Thing is, in the six months since he got out, she’s never shown him anything but affection – the only one, if he’s honest. Unconditional. Still, it can’t go on like this. Things have to change.

But that can wait till later. For now, he needs a beer.

The birds in the fig tree start their morning chorus, and he wonders what they’re thinking. If they’ve been watching through the gloom, dead-eyed witnesses to his dirty work.

“Too old for this,” he says, under his breath.

Neighbours will be up soon enough, so he moves quietly across the yard, leans the shovel against the wall near the step.

He carefully opens the back door, conscious of the usual whine.

Meant to oil the hinges, never got round to it – no time to worry about that now.

He steps into the darkness, kicks off his boots, and walks slowly down the hallway. Outside the bedroom, he can hear her snoring. Best she sleep, stay quiet. No need to wake her. Last thing he needs is for her to go out there, to see what’s done.

In the kitchen, there’s enough light through the window to make his way to the fridge. He opens the door, and the fluoro within stings his eyes. Three ancient gherkins in a jar, a tub of margarine, half-bag of carrots.

Just two cans left – have to go out later anyway.

Eases his weight onto a chair, drinks the first one quickly.

How long till she’ll notice? Hard to say. Few hours? A day?

Maybe two? Got a bit of time.

How long to decompose? Weeks? And what about bones?

Months? Years? No idea. Without a casket, in the warm soil, it surely would happen pretty fast.

He drinks the second beer almost as quickly as the first, his head pleasantly swimming. Goes to crush the can, thinks better of it. Yawns and stretches.

He stands up, slowly, heads for the bedroom – best to get some sleep now, he decides. Better if he’s rested. Need a clear head to answer any questions. Knows from experience. Lessons learned the hard way. Catastrophes.

Opens the door, steps lightly on the floorboards, avoiding all remembered creaks. She snores happily.

She’s relaxed, more so than normal – always like this afterwards.

He climbs in beside her, under the covers. Feels her warmth.

Closes his eyes and waits for sleep.

A

knock at the door wakes him. For a brief, blissful moment, his mind is empty of thought, of memory.

The light shines inside the room around the curtains. Must be late morning.

She stirs beside him and is quickly out of bed.

Shit.

He sits up. Whoever’s there will have heard her in the THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

13

hallway – they’ll know they’re home. No point trying to hide.

Knocking, harder this time.

“Coming!”

Searches for his socks and shoes near the bed, gives up.

Goes to the door.

She’s standing there, waiting, eyes bright. Meets his gaze.

He wonders if she can tell what he’s thinking.

He stands at the door a moment, takes a deep breath, collects his thoughts – opens it.

Jenny from next door.

“Morning, Keith.”

Tries his best poker-face.

Your facial expressions belie your words – what the lawyer said to him, just before he went inside. Something he should’ve been told a long time before – might’ve saved a lot of trouble.

Clears his throat.

“Jenny. What’s up?”

Jenny seems thinner each time he sees her. Her husband’s dementia etched deeply in her face – the long, painful goodbye.

She puts on her glasses, eyes straining.

“You want to put some pants on?”

He looks down at his boxers, shrugs.

She sighs. “Wondering if you’ve seen Betsy?”

“Who?” “Betsy.”

Keith shakes his head. Forgets to blink.

“Went out last night,” she frowns, scratches her chin.

“At least I think it was last night.”

He swallows drily. “Ah, that’s no good.”

Words came out wrong. Wrong rhythm. Could she tell?

She eyes him – heat rises up his chest, his neck.

“No, it isn’t, Keith.” She looks past him now, down the hallway. “Sure you haven’t seen her?”

He shakes his head, face flushed now. Hopes she doesn’t notice “Nah, haven’t in a while actually. Not since last time.”

Don’t add too much detail. Important part of any lie. Keep it brief – another thing the lawyer told him. Also too late.

“Well, let me know if you see her around. You know it’s hard for me to look, eyes aren’t so good.”

“Will do.”

Keith closes the door, turns and slows his breathing. He looks down the hallway – no sight or sound. Must be out in the yard.

Remembers something he read while inside.

There’s no point in punishment unless it’s right after a misdeed. And it’s better to reward positive behaviour, than punish bad.

Good advice. Makes perfect sense. Useless now.

B

y the time the paperwork is done, and money exchanged, it’s almost dusk.

He goes to his car, sits a while in silence.

Takes a few deep breaths in and out. What the counsellor suggested.

Drives the quiet roads back home, and light rain begins to fall. On the radio, ‘Baker Street’ comes on. Gerry Rafferty.

Never liked that song.

As he turns into his street, the rain becomes heavier. Cuts the engine out front. He walks quickly up the driveway to the porch, climbs the few steps to her door. Lights on inside, presses the doorbell. The beers are waiting in the car.

Footsteps come slowly. She opens the door, slightly.

“Yes?” “It’s me. Keith. From next door.”

She unhooks the latch. In her dressing gown, slippers.

Matching aqua.

She squints at him.

“Found her,” he says.

He lifts the cage from his feet.

Jenny clasps her hands, eyes alight.

“Betsy!”

The cat lets out a soft mewl.

Keith passes her the cage. “She was underneath the house.

Same as last time.”

Jenny wags her finger, “You naughty girl!”

The cat scratches at the side of the cage. Her name’s Meg, but that isn’t important. More importantly, she’s a Burmese.

Same as the original Betsy. And the two that followed.

Keith smiles. “Lucky I found her. But make sure you keep her indoors this time.”

Jenny nods. “Of course, Keith, of course. Thank you.”

The sun has completely disappeared now – sky dark, a chill in the air. He turns and heads back down the driveway through the rain, quickly ’round the fence, and into his front yard. Suddenly remembers the beers, goes to his car.

“Might get the fire on,” he says, under his breath.

Crosses the porch to his front door, hears the thump as she leaps from the couch. She’ll be waiting in the hallway, like always.

How long can he keep this up? Can’t keep replacing them – can’t afford it. But let her go?

You need to be in touch with your emotions to make decisions – something else the counsellor said.

For now, there’s more important things to deal with. For now, he needs a beer. He tucks the six-pack under his arm, fumbles with the keys, and opens the door. She leaps up – eyes ablaze, tail a blur. Happy to see him.

Better to reward positive behaviour.

“Good girl,” he says. “Good girl.”

Mark Brandi’s (@mb_randi) bestselling novel, Wimmera (2017), won the UK Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger, and was named Best Debut at the Australian Indie Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year, and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year.

His second novel, The Rip, is out now.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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FICTION EDITION

MAKING STUFF UP BY

M

KW George

y writing friend, Lisa, sends through the link to the article about FJ Aden. I have read his book, of course. Devoured it. Granted, the author had an annoying habit of repeating himself, saying the same thing using different words, as I have just done.

Did you even notice?

The article explains that FJ Aden is a pen-name. For a man, as it happens, who is not nice. We discuss it at length in emails, back and forth, in our writing group, hitting Reply All. Except for Ellie, who has a proper job. Who said what on Twitter. Should one read books written by awful people. Why the writer of the article had the compulsion to pen it in the first place. We agree it is a long-winded piece, vindictive and repetitive, much like the subject.

Having talked up the novel at the time of its release, Althea says she feels sick. Lisa says she hasn’t read the book, but loves a good con, and adds the clapping hands emoji.

She wants to know if anyone saw that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio as an airline pilot? Catch Me If You Can? What about Helen Demidenko and The Hand That Signed the Paper? I ask, but it was so long ago nobody can remember and it is different to what FJ Aden has done. My writing group finds it intriguing. I can’t remember when last we talked so long about a topic that’s actually writing-related without one of them going off at a tangent about their kids. Always awkward for me.

FJ Aden is good-looking, Althea says. And why should that matter? Mandy wants to know. It just does, Althea says. He’s written from a woman’s point of view, Mandy states. Isn’t that appropriation of the female voice? I don’t know if she’s being serious. These things are hard to tell when she won’t use emojis. FJ Aden is laughing all the way to the bank, Lisa reminds us. He’s getting mileage out of all this. Lisa goes on for several sentences, talking about “playing the victim” and “being several people at different times”. Then Mandy says she has to go; she has to collect the littlies from school. To be continued, she writes. Byeee.

I don’t really get what all the fuss is about. FJ Aden is a writer. A successful one. He was on The New York Times bestseller list for two weeks straight. He makes up cracking stories about imaginary people and puts them into books that readers inhale. He also makes up cracking stories about himself – but doesn’t put them into books. Various people don’t like this. They are offended. Why, I want to know.

How is it different?

I

am so entangled by the story of deceit and finagling that I haven’t begun dinner by the time Paul comes home from the office. I arch my stiff back then bend forward and try to reach my toes, pulling at the tendons at the backs of my knees. I need to do this more regularly, my personal trainer says, but I forget. In the kitchen, I pull out the wok and grab the ingredients for a green curry from the pantry and fridge.

“Pick me some ‘k’ lime leaves, please?” I ask Paul when he comes downstairs wearing the tropical shirt with pineapples, surfboards and Kombis I gave him for Christmas.

The surfboards are pale blue and match his eyes. “‘K’ lime?” he questions. But he’s teasing. I cannot say the word kaffir.

Because back where I come from this is not a nice word and I cannot bring myself to use it in everyday speech. Google it.

You’ll see.

“Did you write today?” Paul wants to know when he returns.

I take the leaves from him. There are four altogether. Two by two, adjoined, like twins, like babies, and I snip the leaves into thin slivers with the scissors, releasing the pungent aroma.

“Oh, yes,” I say airily. “I wrote. That’s why I’m late. I just got so involved.”

“Good,” Paul says, ruffling my hair. “You’re always happier when you’re writing.”

“Always happier,” I murmur.

I throw chopped shallots and capsicums into the wok where they begin to sizzle gently. “How was your day?” I say.

“Hectic. We’re still turning away work. And guess what?

Jaime said ‘fuck’ today.”

“Really?” I laugh, shaking the pan, vegies jiggling and sliding around in a medley of colours. Jaime is a numbers person and pretty straitlaced. I can’t imagine her saying that word.

“Yes, really. She said, excuse my French, and Liam said but fuck’s not even French, which made her madder.

It’s the stress,” Paul says. “We’re all stretched.” And as if to illustrate he raises his arms to try to touch the ceiling with his fingers. If he stands on tippy-toes he can…just.

Behind my back he opens the fridge and peers in.

“I’d kill for a beer,” he says.

“You know we can’t.”

“How many days into this booze-free month are we?

It feels like a year.”

“Only four,” I tell him. “Twenty-four to go.”

“Frozen frisbees,” he says quietly, closing the door again.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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“Where’re we eating?”

I’m stirring curry paste into the wok and prising open the fish sauce at the same time. “On the moon?” I suggest.

Where does he think?

“Right,” he says. “I’ll go organise an Uber.”

“They do Ubers to the moon?”

“It won’t be long,” he tells me.

P

A

aul returns with a half-dozen of the ultra-light beers.

He throws a couple into the freezer and pours another into the elegant glass he got that time he did the brewery tour at De Halve Maan in Bruges. I did churches. Walking the cobbled streets with the dirty crusted snow pushed to the verge, my gloved hands sunk into my pockets. A man wearing spiked boots tiptoed out onto the frozen canal to chip the ice open for some swans. He was roped to a bridge abutment so that if he slipped and fell, he could be hauled to safety. Lucky man, I remember thinking.

“Sacrilege,” Paul mutters, adding ice cubes to his drink.

“And?” I ask from where I’m washing the wok.

“It’s okay,” he says, licking his lips. “In fact, it’s not bad.”

He sniffs, and wipes the flat of his palm on the front of his shirt. “Where’s my dinner?”

“In the bin.”

“What? Why?” “Well, you weren’t going to eat it.”

“Hmm,” he says, and goes out onto the deck, clutching his beer.

A

ecause of the wine, I fall asleep straightaway. But I wake at some point to hear the fan vibrating gently above my head. I have thrown the sheets off and wafts of cool air drift over me. Paul has his back to me. Fighting the need to pee, I listen to the possums nibbling on the new shoots of the weeping lilly pilly, the fruit bats bickering in the mango tree, and the struts of the old wooden Queenslander sighing.

I perch on the loo in the gloom, stare at the stripes on the wall made by the venetians, the toothbrushes leaning into one another in the tumbler like old mates at the bar, and think about FJ Aden. I wonder what he thinks about when he wakes in the night and can’t get back to sleep. Does he gloat over how many people he has fooled, and how rich he is? I doubt it. I reckon he’d think about plots, or his next book. At least he has one. His forthcoming novel is apparently about a female crime writer à la Patricia Highsmith, and revenge. I won’t be reading it. Will he call it The Talented Mr Aden? I wonder, tugging at the toilet paper and unspooling a metre onto the floor.

t dinner, which we eat out on the deck, Paul plays with his food. Then he fiddles with the candle, breaking off pieces of wax and feeding them to the flame.

“You’ll make it go out,” I tell him.

“So?” he says. “I can easily light it again.”

“Not hungry?”

He shakes his head.

“Did you go to lunch?”

“No. Of course not,” he says. “I would’ve told you.”

He sips from his glass of water. “Bleh,” he says, sticking out his tongue. Then he slaps at a mosquito hovering above his arm with such vengeance he leaves red marks on his skin.

“You know you can get very low alcohol beers?” I say.

“Where?”

“I saw them at Coles. They’re called Ultra Lights. Point five per cent alcohol.”

“Why didn’t you say?”

He pushes his chair back so rapidly it almost falls, and glances at his watch. “What time does the supermarket close?” fter the garage door rolls closed, I go into my darkened study. From a carefully closed Reflex carton in the corner of my workspace, I pull out a bottle of sauvignon blanc, unscrew the cap, and take a big swig. I stand at the window, looking out to the street. The neighbours’ rambling double-storeyed house is lit up like a department store. They have teenagers, gorgeous girls who used to babysit for us, and I hear someone singing. That’d be Bella. She has a voice like the tide ebbing at beach pebbles.

The wine is warm but rewarding, the fruity tones lapping at my palate. Not fizzy, not sweet. I move to my desk, hold the bottle on my knee, accidentally bumping the mouse. The last thing I’ve been looking at on my screen flares into life.

I lean forward and read another sentence about that writer – that not very nice man. His mother, who he claimed was dying, had been bombarded with chemotherapy, he said, and had lain for days in the fetal position. Fetal, because it’s an American article. I sit back and slide my fingers between my shirt buttons and under my bra and rub at the place where I have a diagonal scar. Sometimes it’s itchy. The breast is itchy. But there is no breast, and scratching at the scar doesn’t help because the nerve endings are dead. It’s like the itch is coming from deep within. I wonder if that’s also a lie from FJ Aden. I mean, I have had chemotherapy and yes, it is debilitating, but lying for days in the foetal position? Come on. I don’t think so.

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B

I

n the morning, after my precious coffee and after I have tidied the kitchen and taken out the garbage and put on a load of washing and there seems very little else I can do to delay it any longer, I put Twitter to sleep and settle in to write. But not before I think about FJ Aden and his shenanigans. I mean, be honest: who hasn’t thought about manipulating the truth?

I open my Word document, my work in progress. It’s a short story called Untitled because I have trouble with titles.

My writing friend, Lisa, who sent the link, doesn’t. She usually picks something out of the writing, a couple of words, like Please Log-In. She prefers to use active voice. She says it engages the reader, as in, Read This. She’s clever like that.

The page is blank. I could’ve sworn I typed something

yesterday afternoon before we started all those emails about FJ Aden. But no matter how many times I close and re-open the document, and scroll up and down – in case there’s a sentence lurking somewhere – it remains blank.

The level in the sauvignon blanc bottle is low. So low, I may as well clobber the lot. This is a first for me, I think, as I take the bottle out to the recycling bin, squinting in the morning sun and running the gauntlet of the flies orbiting the garbage.

It’s the prawn heads from the weekend. Last summer, the Brisbane City Council’s Environment and Waste Department issued a directive: keep prawn heads and other shellfish in your freezer until the day before bin collection. As if you’d ever remember to hoick them out. Paul once put a live cane toad wrapped in a plastic bag into the freezer – the most humane way of killing them, apparently – and forgot about it for more than a year, and I nearly grilled it thinking it was a steak medallion.

I jam the wine bottle under the newspapers, and the cardboard from the Miffy lamp we bought on the weekend.

Every now and then, we buy something childish. Something we might have bought Morgan had she still been with us.

She’d be eight now. Running and laughing and filling the house with light and noise. A happy child.

T

he story I could’ve sworn I had begun to type up is about a married couple who’ve recently made the decision not to have children. But no sooner have they put their choice into words than their marriage starts unravelling. She begins drinking in earnest. She’s always had a glass or two, but now she’s finishing a bottle a night. She hides it well – sneakily refilling her glass, maintaining the level, while he’s occupied clicking the remote at the telly. He’s a beer man, so he never checks how empty or full the bottle is, or how many bottles there are, or what they’re spending on alcohol. Why does she drink? Good question. She drinks because she feels inadequate. He, you see, is smart. She, not so much, but bright enough to know she has to work hard at being his equal. I want to call this character Katherine... Or maybe Lara. And, quite frankly, Lara’s tired of working hard. Of always trying to appear witty and dazzling.

And perhaps because she has lost that sparkle, Nico – did I say his name is Nico, he has Dutch heritage – begins an affair: a woman he meets when he takes the lift to his office.

They both reach for the button at the same time, accidentally touch, and suddenly it’s a situation. “Sorry,” she says, because her nails are long, “did I hurt you?” Nico shakes his head. But you will, he thinks. They avoid looking at one another, but Nico knows that she knows that he knows that she knows. One Friday, she gets in the lift on the floor below his. It’s late. He’s stayed to finish a report that should’ve gone out at noon. Nico can’t keep his eyes off her. She’s wearing stilettos and a necklace made of paperclips and he wonders if she has a kid. He wants to bail her up, but he’s not sure if he wants to fuck her or tell her about his moon landing theory.

Meanwhile, Lara feels uneasy. Something’s afoot, but she doesn’t know what. Nico misses her mouth when he bends to kiss her hello after work. He’s always asleep first, with his back to her, curled up like a question mark. Nico can smell alcohol on Lara’s breath pretty much every evening, but she’s still steady on her feet and rational. So they play a sort of cat and mouse game, where everything they do or say can be interpreted two ways.

Sitting at my desk I wonder where the best possible place to start this story is – the one I thought I’d already started – when my phone rings. In the other room. Rising, I go to answer it because I think I know who it is.

It’s my mother. I don’t ignore the call, even though I am meant to be working. Mum lives alone and needs me because I’m an only child. And I love her.

“What’re you doing?” she asks. She always starts out like this when she has nothing to say but needs a voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m writing.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Shall I call back later?” (This, also, is predictable.)

“It’s okay,” I say. “At the end of the day I’m just, you know, making stuff up.”

Mum pauses as if invention on my part has not occurred to her, and I imagine her frowning.

“What’ve you been doing?” I ask.

“I watched a doco on telly last night,” she says, launching into it. “This guy, his name is Mark Evans, is obsessed with the yeti. That mythical creature. He’s done truckloads of research and interviews an explorer who has footage of a yeti’s actual footprints in some obscure and remote area in Bhutan. In the snow. Did you know they walk one foot directly in front of the other? Odd, I think. Why don’t they lose their balance? Another explorer, a man who lost toes to frostbite – which I think gives him credibility – says they make a strange noise like they’re whistling a tune.”

“Seriously?” I ask.

“Seriously,” she says.

When I return to my desk, I start typing. The interruption has given me an idea. My Lara character needs to have a mum. A mum who’s always there for her. A mum who confirms that it’s bizarre to find not only a handful of paperclips in your husband’s suit pocket, but a Lego Space Cadet too.

KW George is a Brisbane-based writer. Believe it or not, she has a creative writing degree from QUT and has been published in numerous literary journals.

She has been making stuff up for many years and is working on a novel set in Brisbane.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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I THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19

FICTION EDITION

LEARNING TO BE LEB BY

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

“D

on’t eat shit.” Dad’s words. “There’s plenty of food at home.” Mum’s words. She has made kefta and rice, and beans and rice, and zucchini stuffed with rice, and vine leaves wrapped in rice. There is also manoush, shanglish, haloumi, hummus, labni, olives, and Leb bread, which we just call “bread”, in contrast to bread, which we call “Aussie bread”. “The fruit rots beneath you,” Dad says. He’s trying to get rid of a box of mandarins that has been sitting on our kitchen benchtop for over a week.

Zuzu, Zain and I nod in unison as Dad jiggles his keys like a pimp, instructing my mum to get into the car. They’re going to my cousin’s cousin’s second wedding, not because they like him – they’re still angry that he seated them in the back row at his first wedding – but because they’re hunting

extending year after year, until suddenly we are stuck with six different kinds of tiles.

The living room is where we spend most of our time as teenagers, watching Van Damme, Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies. There is a fifty-inch flat screen in front of the lounges and above the television hangs a picture of Baby Jesus, sleeping in a crib with a halo over his head.

Jesus was a gift my mum received from Em Shady, the Lebanese Maronite Christian woman who lives next door.

We keep the picture hanging out of respect for our neighbour, but as Muslims, we know it’s a sin to display images of God, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses or any other prophets. Firstly, because the Prophet Muhammad taught us that such images would result in the worship of false Gods and idols, and secondly, because even if it was okay to have pictures of God

“There is also manoush, shanglish, haloumi, hummus, labni, olives, and Leb bread, which we just call ‘bread’, in contrast to bread, which we call ‘Aussie bread’.” for a husband for my younger sister, Zuzu. After Zuzu, they’ll marry off my older brother, Zain. I was born between them – so there’s no handpicked bride for me to worry about just yet.

My siblings and I debate about what we’ll have for dinner as soon as Dad’s ute rattles out of the driveway. We all agree that it is either going to be KFC, Hungry Jack’s or Macca’s.

Just up past the main drag in Lakemba, along Canterbury Road, the three fast food giants are lined up. Zain drives off to get dinner. He is the first and only one of us to have a licence. He got his Ps first go when he was sixteen in Dad’s manual column-shift van – typical Lakemba Wog, could drive a car before he could read the words in the Learner Driver Handbook. I, on the other hand, read the handbook for fun, even though I had no interest in driving. It was during that interim between finishing high school and starting university.

Romeo and Juliet were dead, Hamlet was dead, Desdemona was dead, King Lear was dead, and I had nothing else to read.

Zain returns fifteen minutes later. His exhaust is so huge Zuzu and I can hear his Skyline as soon as he enters our street. Ice rattles in paper cups. He makes his way from the front door to the living room, which is up at the back of the house. We live in an old terrace that my dad has been

and the prophets, these particular images of Jesus always misrepresent the 2000-year-old Middle Eastern Hebrew as white-skinned with blond hair and blue eyes, which is evidence of the first reason.

“Yulla come eat!” Zain announces as he enters the room, Coke cups in front of his small head, Macca’s bags in his veiny hands.

Zuzu and I slide up the coffee tables and we all sit together facing the TV. Zain eats McChickens and my sister eats McNuggets and I eat McCheeseburgers and we all eat McChips. We are unwrapping burgers and sucking on the Cokes when an episode of Daria starts playing on MTV. Daria is an animated show about a middle-class suburban white girl named Daria who is intentionally depressed, emo, liberal, miserable and cynical – everything a self-aware, self‑hating Leb like me aspires to be. While the opening credits roll, and the theme song squawks, “you’re standing on my head”, I slowly begin to unwrap my cheeseburger.

I lift the top bun and start laying my chips over the cheese and pickles. Then I cover it and while the theme song goes, “nah nah nah nah”, I pick up the burger in both hands, look at the screen, and take my first bite. The bun and the tomato THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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sauce are sweet and the mustard and the pickles and the chips and the onions are salty. “This is the shit, bro!”

My love affair with McDonald’s started when I was five years old. Dad was running two camping stalls at Paddy’s Markets. He kept all his stock in a vast warehouse in Redfern: three mountains of factory-second sleeping-bags and secondhand backpacks and second-hand shoes and cast-iron stoves.

On Friday afternoons Dad would take Zain and me to the warehouse to load his ute for the market. This took about three hours. Zain and I asked what we would get if we did the work. “I’ll buy you Macca’s,” my dad said, “but only if you sweat.” The thing about it was, no matter how hard and fast I worked, I remained totally dry. And it made matters worse that Zain looked like he’d been wandering the Sahara. As soon as Dad disappeared to the bathroom, Zain came over and swiped his fingers across my forehead to see if I’d begun to sweat. “Amid a-uu-nak,” he whispered in Arabic, which meant, “Close your eyes.” Then he stepped back a metre, hocked up a wad of phlegm, and spat in my face. “Quick, smear it across your forehead.” When Dad returned, he smeared his hand across my forehead too, and said to me with a smile, “Yes, just…” Trust me, you haven’t tasted McDonald’s until you’ve taken a booger for it.

Zain, Zuzu and I eat fast and watch quietly. In this episode of Daria there is an art competition running at the school and

bottom of the painting is a caption that Jane Lane reads out to her class: She’s so much prettier, she’s so much thinner.

She goes to the bathroom, to spew up her dinner. Zuzu and I start laughing. Then I notice Zain staring at both of us, and then back at the TV, and then back at us. “What’s so funny?” he asks. Zuzu and I turn and look at him. “What?” he repeats, his jaw hanging open like a troll. “Isn’t that supposed to be bad?”

Zuzu is still giggling when she mumbles, “You’re so dumb man.”

Suddenly Zain’s lips close and tighten. He slams down his burger and pierces Zuzu with his black gaze. “What’d you fucken say to me?” His burger falls to pieces across the floor and Zuzu goes down to pick it up – a combination of feeling bad because she’s insulted her older brother and a cleaning reflex that is the trademark of every domesticated Lebo in Western Sydney. “Sorry,” Zuzu says back sharply.

“Disrespectful little shit,” Zain grumbles, mouth full of Coke and McChicken. “Yulla, get out of my face.”

Zuzu quickly places the scraps of burger back on Zain’s table, stands up from her knees and walks out of the living room. I stay quiet, going to the kitchen, which overlooks the television, and bringing back the garbage bin. I start putting away the Macca’s cups and Macca’s bags, left-over chips and burger wrappers. Zain returns to the TV screen as I return to the kitchen. Mum’s food is waiting patiently for us on the

“I am going to become a controversial writer who exposes the sins of my own people.”

Daria’s best friend, Jane Lane, has been encouraged to enter.

“What’s this show called?” asks Zain. “Diarrhoea?” He lets his comment linger in the air a moment and then, after he’s accepted that Zuzu and I are not going to reply, he adds, “This show is fucked.” I cock my head at him. He’s sitting with his legs apart, elbows on his knees, McChicken clenched in both hands. As his hands move to and from his mouth his biceps flex, like he’s doing curls at Fitness First.

“Just watch it, bro,” Zuzu says to him. She calls him “bro”, but not because he’s her brother, rather because she’s a typical Bankstown chick who calls every guy “bro”. Zuzu’s long black hair is tied up in a bun, exposing her tight face. She is sipping from her Macca’s straw, and each time she sucks her neck muscles spasm. I feel sorry for her. Ever since she turned fifteen, which was six months ago, my parents have been pushing her to get married. The only guys who have been coming along are imports from Lebanon and Syria desperate for a visa. Zuzu rejects them one after the other. “Can I at least have someone who speaks English? And no cousins.”

“But seriously, what’s wrong with the people in this show?”

Zain continues. “It’s like they’re all retarded.”

My sister and I maintain our focus on the television.

Jane Lane is giving a class presentation about her most recent artwork. She’s painted a picture of a skinny, fair-skinned, blonde-haired girl frowning at herself in the mirror. At the

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breakfast bar, covered in gladwrap and alfoil. Also on the benchtop is the box of mandarins that has been here all week.

From the kitchen, I catch Zain baring a frown, his thick black eyebrows caving in, TV remote in his hand. He flicks for about three seconds, looking for something he likes, and then he stops on an episode of Two and a Half Men, a show that is predicated on the idea that women will fuck you if you treat them like shit – everything an ignorant, self-loving Leb like my brother embraces. Are you serious, bro? You picked a fight with your sister just so you could change the channel?

Beyond the living room and the kitchen is a small corridor with a bathroom on one side and a laundry on the other.

There is a picture rail all the way down the corridor and hanging along it in wooden frames are verses from the Qur’an. At the front of the corridor are the three bedrooms.

Zuzu has the bedroom on the left-hand side and Zain and I share the one on the right-hand side. Our parents’ room overlooks the verandah. I go into my room and switch on our PC. It belongs to the whole family but we keep it in my room because I am the only one in the house who is studying at university. I keep telling myself I’m not a normal Leb. I’m not going to end up a gym junkie beef-head like my brother and I’m not going to end up married to one person for the rest of my life before I’m eighteen like my sister. I am going to complete my Bachelor of Arts degree, become a controversial

writer who exposes the sins of my own people, and then I’ll fall in love with a tall woman of youth and skin and bone, just like Salman Rushdie.

As I wait for the computer to load, I hear Zain’s heavy footsteps trudge through the house toward my sister’s room.

The computer screen flickers white code and Zain’s voice reverberates into the corridor. “Dis-res-pect,” he starts at Zuzu. “You’ll see when your father’s home, I’m gonna get him to slap ya.”

Maybe it’s the Lebo in me – I’m full of contradictions that way – but straight up, Zain is being a gronk. First, he tells Zuzu to leave, which she does, just so he can watch Charlie Sheen coerce women into bed, then he gets bored and follows her to her room. “Alright bro, leave her alone,” I shout out.

“What’d you say, you little poof?”

As soon as the words pop from his mouth, I spring up out of my room and tumble into the corridor. Zain is flanking the doorway to Zuzu’s room. “What’d you call me?”

“Pooftah, you and all your university mates.” This is a popular theory among Lebs – if you’re into reading, you’re into cock. But what Lebs don’t understand is that words can be as straight as any image – if you are a man into reading, then Jane Austen is your porn star. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

I pounce forward and shove at Zain, his broad chest expanding against my palms. “Come on,” he screeches, “kalb!” I throw a fast left jab that hits him in the temple with a brassy thud. Of all the people I have ever fought, going back to my last punch-up, which was in Year 7 with a Vietnamese kid named Frank, I always find it easiest to fight my older brother. I know there will be no serious consequences attacking him, he’s not going to tell the principal I head-butt him for calling me a sand nigger and, more importantly, because I secretly respect the fact that my older brother is so physically powerful he can easily absorb a punch from me.

The fact that Zain is so much stronger than me means I can rely on him if I ever get into a fight with the skips at Cronulla, who hate us for being us. “That’s all you got, little bitch?” Zain spits at me as his jaw snaps back. I dig my arms and head around his torso, heaving him into the living room. I scream, “Fucken hit me!”

“Stop,” calls Zuzu. She’s tugging on the back of my singlet, trying to pull me away from our brother. Zain’s body begins to seethe before me, his arms, shoulders and chest throbbing, his veins popping, and I know, I know I know I know, he is restraining every urge to punch me out. “Eaaahh!” Zain squeals as I dig my head into him again and back him toward the kitchen. He grabs onto me, locking us together, Zuzu pulling at my neck, shouting, “Allah, let go.” Zain wrenches me toward him and throws me off in one huge swing. Zuzu and I smack into the ground as Zain bashes his arms against his chest. In his rage, he grabs the box of mandarins on the kitchen bench and hurls it into the air. The mandarins splatter around me and Zuzu, flattening and unpeeling, juice covering two different kinds of tile.

“I said sorry,” Zuzu sobs, her tight voice piercing. She still thinks it’s her fault – Jane Austen is rolling in her grave.

Salman Rushdie is pointing his finger at Lebanon.

Zain steps back into the corridor and punches the toilet door, so hard it blows open, leaving a hole in its centre. Tap turning. Water running. Hands scrubbing. “B-ismi-llāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīmi,” he wails, “In the name Allah, most gracious, most merciful.”

My brother retreats to our bedroom while Zuzu and I collect as many half-decent mandarins as possible and put them back into the box. Each of the mandarins is soft and squishy, their skins loose. They remind me of a boxing story my father once told me – a fighter named Frankie Campbell was struck so hard by Max Baer that his brain detached from his skull. Zuzu mops down the floor and I vacuum the debris from the toilet door. Like a true Arab, I am overcome with numbing feelings of denial: Humdulilaah, there is no gaping hole in the centre of the door. Inshallah, the wood will grow back all on its own before Maama and Baaba get home.

Finally, Zuzu and I turn off all the lights in the house and, without saying anything to one another, we both go to bed.

I lay silently in the darkness for the next two hours, my brother breathing heavily in the bed beside me, asking myself how McDonald’s turned to diarrhoea. I should have stayed calm instead of going Othello on my family like every other man of colour throughout history. What’s the point of a university education if I’m just gonna act like another desert coon? I must have fallen asleep after that thought because the next thing I remember is my dad shouting out in the late hours of the night. Zain, Zuzu and I all spring out of our beds and stumble into the living room at the same time. My father is standing in front of the kitchen bench. “Tell me what happened to the door!” he yells. Mum stands quietly behind him, draped in a purple dress that is covered in diamantes.

Zuzu and I lock gazes. I can feel her making a pact with me through our eyes to cover for our brother. I am about to say something like, “we were playing cricket in the house”, when suddenly Zain begins to cry and mutters, “It was my fault, I punched it.”

Immediately our father’s lips tighten, the hairs on his goatee flicker, his hands clench and his veins start to bubble just below his cufflinks. “Where do you learn this fucken shit?” he screams and then he shoots his head sideways, looking around for something to destroy. He sees a box of mandarins on the kitchen bench. He grabs onto it with both hands and throws it into the air. The mandarins are in pieces before they hit the ground. And our father doesn’t understand why.

Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad (@sweatshopws) is the founder and director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. His debut novel, The Tribe, received The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist of the Year Award. His latest novel, The Lebs, won the 2019 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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FICTION EDITION

TAKE HEART BY

Alison Evans

I

was never supposed to be here. My life sprawled out in the dirt, tending the plants and the animals under the sun, through the rain. The wind, the fires.

The station hums. My shuttle to Rebus isn’t until 1535. It will take me to my new job. I’ve only caught trains in my life, and then only a few times. Mostly we just use the cars or walk, on the farm. There’s not a lot of reason to leave.

But soil is the reason I have to.

They need me on the new station, Rebus, the one that orbits alongside Luna. The one we all will have to move to once the Earth kicks us off, shaking us up with a fever so we all die or leave.

They need me to look after the soil.

This is the kind of thing I don’t know how to say no to.

The planet is boiling up, and it’s time to go.

I’ve read about growing things in space, it’s mostly done

The gardens are in a big greenhouse, they told me.

I’ll be working with a team. It may not be possible for me to come back to Earth for at least a year. I put a jar of soil in my luggage, but customs took it away. Nothing can contaminate the new station, they said.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes and pretend I’m not wearing shoes, pretend I’m not sitting in a big concrete and metal station, but I’m outside, feet in the dust. I know we can have soil like this on the station, I know I can do it.

But I don’t know if my heart will be in it.

I stay like that for a while, pretending that the hum of the station and the people is just the noise from the road at the edge of the farm. There’s a loud whooshing sound, and alarms start to go off. I open my eyes, and I watch my shuttle land. Staff scurry around in hi-vis gear, make sure the shuttle is magnetised to the floor.

“How will it feel, knowing that there is no Earth under me, that her molten core won’t be warming me? How will it feel to be away from her care, as hostile as she can be?” through hydroponics. They have bees and beekeepers there, ladybugs, butterflies. I wonder about the ecosystem in these places. Who are the predators? Do the keepers punish the caterpillars for eating the crops? But then where do the butterflies come from?

I sit opposite the small garden they’ve planted on my platform, filled with sansevierias, devil’s ivy, monsteras of a few varieties.

Tiny flowers shine out, hugging the soil. They’re all white or pink, with tiny petals.

They want me to make them healthy soil on the station.

I can do it, I know I can. But how will it feel, knowing that there is no Earth under me, that her molten core won’t be warming me? How will it feel to be away from her care, as hostile as she can be?

A line begins to form, but I stay sitting and watch the garden. I wonder who looks after the plants.

When there are only a couple of people waiting to get on the shuttle, I join the queue. The inspector scans my screen and nods me along.

I take one last look at the garden bed behind me, and I see now that there’s a butterfly flitting around the flowers.

I nod, and then take my seat.

Alison Evans (@_budgie) is the award-winning author of queer speculative fiction whose first novel, Ida, won People’s Choice at the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Their second novel, Highway Bodies, is out now.

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HOW TO

FICTION EDITION

NAVIGATE A DINNER PARTY WITH POETRY BY

P

Alicia Sometimes

erfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

– Voltaire

You’ve just placed the tomato and cheese crackers carefully on the formica table. You have set the fan squarely on a comfortable five. A trim glass of gin is hastily being consumed as you put on some vinyl for pre-dinner party atmosphere. Some Leonard Cohen? Billie Holiday? It doesn’t matter because you’re a little tipsy and besides, you’re sure you have great taste in music. You close your eyes and run your fingers across all your records’ spines and choose randomly. Sesame Street Disco? Perfect.

All the windows will need to be opened to let out the afternoon swelter. Your friend Tony – who loves cricket and ballet but can’t stand the thought of touching his own knees because it makes him hyper aware of his kneecaps – calls you.

“I’ve invited a scientist to your soirée,” he says.

You last took science in high school. You only know π to its fourth decimal point and the periodic table loses you after calcium (you can’t remember the rhyme that goes with the whole table of elements, but you think it might have been a hit by They Might Be Giants). You have travelled to more than three countries and can list all the species of penguin, but when you get nervous you always fall back on poetry. You love poetry.

You must remember some potent ones before she comes over so you can add some poetic flare to the conversation. Or quickly study up on some random scientific facts. You’re not sure, it could go either way. The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs. Was that Voltaire or was it something Beyoncé said?

In this heat, you really can’t remember.

You take another large sip of gin.

You notice your poster from the Astor theatre is falling off the fridge, the sticky tape is unfurling as you take out the white wine. Even the cat is coming apart, folded flat like

“You have travelled to more than three countries and can list all the species of penguin, but when you get nervous you always fall back on poetry.”

“Oh,” you say, sounding Sunday casual despite the fact that last-minute dinner guests give you a moment of anxiety.

You’ve met some very cool scientists in your time. There was the astronomer who told you the Earth is not spherical but is actually an oblate spheroid, just a bit squished at the poles and bulgy at the equator due to its rotation. That was an informative evening. You adore a good planetarium. You’ve read (and probably misunderstood) A Brief History of Time

by Stephen Hawking. You think you know what a parabola is. Tony says she’s really amazing, so whip-smart and funny.

“She makes a really great black-cherry rum punch.” He says this with an accent you’re sure was not meant to be Scottish.

Black-cherry? This is welcome news. But truth be told you were sold with whip-smart. Because you’ve always wanted to ask someone how smart a whip could possibly be.

A scientist would know.

“Make sure there’s enough food,” he says. “See you at eight.” Tony hangs up.

origami, cooling down near the pot plants. You stick your head in the freezer for that fresh, vibrant look just as the doorbell rings. Great, everyone arrives at once.

Y

ou offer to take your guests’ coats even though they all have short sleeves and sweaty hair that looks like they only just showered. Tony must have told everyone you don’t have air-conditioning. You smile as you notice his “Swingers go bowling” T-shirt, gently flicking him on the arm as they all slowly enter and look around.

You tell your guests to relax, enjoy the setting sun over the balcony. You tell everyone to be free and flowing with conversation but to be a bit careful because you were once talking on the phone about your friend’s medical condition a little too loudly and Geoff next door had remarked “ewww” so you knew he could hear a little too clearly.

Everyone takes a seat.

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more of the left side of your brain. You read somewhere that it’s the practical side. Even as you are saying this to yourself, you know it doesn’t sound quite right. Then you hope you haven’t said it out loud. But you have. She smiles and takes a bigger sip of wine. You pull out an Andrei Voznesensky poem from the bookshelf off to the side of the lounge room and say something about curves always kissing the lines. You know you’ve not captured the poem accurately and deflect by asking if anyone read The New Yorker piece on reaching that sweet spot of conversation at a dinner party?

You know you will have to amp this up and pull out some more poems that rock you to your core. She’s admiring the new woodlands motif on the kitchen table so you add, “I think there’s a documentary where physicists climb Mount Washington in lumber-jackets to count mu-meson.”

“Do they?” She asks this as she desperately looks for the butter even though there’s no sign of any bread. “Yes, this was in a stellar Judith Baumel poem called ‘Einstein’s Curse’,” you say, “and maybe the scientists are still doing it, maybe they aren’t, but the lumber-jacket gives the poem some real detail, don’t you think?”

There is a lone cough. You can’t recognise who it was with your eyes closed. “Dorothy Porter’s ‘Comets’ is beautiful,” you say, “she lassos metaphor and weaves it precisely into her poetry.” You know all this talk is working on some level. The Scientist’s eyes are wide open and you know poetry is bridging both your worlds. You think maybe she might want some facts, so you begin by reading lines from a poem on time dilation.

You mention that the poet deftly talks about the conservation of momentum and how you think it’s about time-travelling through generations and leaving a mark on every one of us.

Or it’s about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Or Newton.

You’re uncertain yourself. You pause. It’s about something ethereal too. You look Tony’s way and comment that you once had a “Don’t do drugs” T-shirt in the early 90s.

The Scientist says it was impressive that you sound out all the plus symbols and brackets and the equals sign in the poem. She thinks it shows your memory must be solid.

You offer her some more chickpea salad when you ask if she knows that Richard Brautigan always wanted to write a book that ended with the word “mayonnaise”? “He wrote poems about stars. Isn’t it amazing that galaxies can be called ‘Sombrero’ or ‘Cigar’ or ‘Tadpole’?” you ask. “Do all these stars look like these things or are the scientists taking liberty with language?” She’s not certain, but you’re sure they make great posters. “You can name a star after yourself,” you add.

You must have read it in Rolling Stone or New Scientist or maybe one of those magazines you saw at your Aunt Gertrude’s under her oversized maroon coffee table.

You ask if quantum strings can be closed like a loop or remain open. You ask if electrons and quarks do indeed appear as tiny dots. The Scientist then responds with one of your most cherished and poignant quotes from Carl Sagan that reflects on why we should all listen to each other carefully. “Carl Sagan is wonderful,” you say, “so many wise words, such a brilliant understanding of human nature.

He was a pioneer.” Also, you think he wears the most serene shirts in Cosmos. Really wide lapels too. Neil deGrasse Tyson was sonorous and expressive, but he didn’t have the same wide lapels.

You ask as you hand out dessert: “If you’re stranded on a tropical island with any four scientists, who would they be? Would it be Michio Kaku, Jane Lubchenco, Lisa Randall, Brian Schmidt?” You accidently get too much chocolate on The Scientist’s jacket but you calmly wipe it off while continuing. You recite some of Mario Petrucci’s poem ‘Plutonium’ in a rich, deep voice, but realise you can’t follow up your lopsided mud cake with a verse on a transuranic radioactive chemical element so you stop mid stanza. You then want to launch into a Back to the Future joke but think better of it.

It’s getting late and you tell everyone that the rooster down below your bedroom window wakes you early in the summer.

You tell them that you agree that sometimes you need to start the day early, to make sure you give your tasks enough time and respect. Like soaking the lentils. You then ask Tony if he could fill the wine glasses back up.

Before making a toast to the night sky you remind everyone that in 2002 the UK writer Valerie Laws received grant money to spray-paint random poems on sheep. You mention there’s probably more to the story, but you can’t recall why you brought it up. You wonder whether Danish physicist Niels Bohr said something fascinating about poets and sheep as he had a sharp way of connecting things. You search for this possible relationship on your phone and remind yourself to email her the results later. You notice everyone else is now meandering near the front door.

You are certain the night is a success. Tony agrees as he tips his fez hat your way. As The Scientist leaves she leans in closer to you and says, “You know I’m a Food Science Technician.” For a second you are embarrassed.

Maybe the tofu was overcooked? Maybe the quinoa was too watery? But then you shout out as she reaches the bottom of the steps: “I know so many more poems about food, especially beetroot!”

This is where you would go back into your room and write something for yourself.

At this moment, the streets of St Kilda are silent, the tar is far too tired from shifting all day under the weight of the cars.

The trees are bending over to tuck the road in for the night.

The stars look slightly off-white, shaded by the high clouds.

You know there’s only one word to describe their colour.

Mayonnaise.

Alicia Sometimes (@aliciasometimes) is a writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and more. She is director and co-writer of the science-poetry planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave.

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GULL SONG BY

Ellen van Neerven

I

went for a swim at the pool at Musgrave and the pool owner said there used to be three Aboriginal boys that used to swim here. I wondered if they still live there.

I didn’t say they were my brothers. I didn’t say anything.

“I think I got a job for them,” the man said.

“Some driving. I am thinking about them lately.

Since that boy at the school. There’s been all this violence with the Aboriginal people here. It’s worrying.”

I opened my hand to accept his change, fifty cents.

I

got home and started on my walk. I wasn’t sure if the gulls were there. I could see the ferry platform but not hear them. I knew I had to walk to that spot anyway, just to watch them. I heard the sound like an upset cat. It got louder. Just one gull, not a chorus. And then I heard more, but they were much quieter, less busy. I walked further as I sometimes did, to see them on the reverse angle. All was wet because of the rain. I went past the abandoned ferry terminal, all closed off by an old security gate. And to a little point where I would be out of the way of the occasional runner. They were shrilling. And I saw something in the water, some animal, but it didn’t really appear to be moving. I tried to see what it was. I knelt, I crouched, I couldn’t get a better look. I doubted myself at this time of night, you even saw the mangroves’ arms move, reach out of the water, the

bin behind me rattled in the wind and started a steady rhythm, the old tin jetty too made a noise like dragging a table and chairs across the floor. Old raindrops moving down my arm startled me, I had clearly got into a deep mental zone.

The thing in the water just moved up and down, floating. The object should be moving, like the other debris that crossed its path – in a west direction. It wasn’t going with the current. It hadn’t moved past its spot, just kept bowing.

The sound of motorbike from the distant street, and the gulls coming over. Like always, I never saw them clearly until they were in a group. There was a little seagull that was dying or dead. I watched their ceremony, marvelling at my allowed access. I put yellow leaves from the tree on my head. And then I went. I left to try and beat the ferry home.

Those on the ferry would not know anything of the sacred animal and bird life on the river.

The seagulls had found a haven from predators.

But not really.

T

he water was like a lake today and the lightning distant. The gulls stood very still and were a chorus again. Their noise a familiar friend. Trees move on. Repetition made us human. These acts instil some sort of calmness like walking home. Walking home can be anxious too. The Cup was on today. The drunk white people in their hats and suits stumbling across the road in traffic and the poor blackfellas in the pub, the

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betting site just scrambling, looking for a winning horse. I sat next to Aunty Bet, the form guide was all too tempting like reading my star sign in a magazine.

There was guilt on Aunty’s face when she told me about the young fella, Phoenix. “I should have seen it coming,” she said. “That boy must’ve thought it was the only option.

I understand that. The system’s let him down. Some hatefuelled man has been able to knock off his mother. And no protection or justice for that. And then, every day, he’s been pushed a little more by whiteness. These white boys, they are men, or at least symbolise men. They symbolise the man who killed his mother. And the teachers are not going to protect him. And the system’s not going to protect him. I don’t blame him for wanting to take matters into his own hands.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Well the boy he stabbed is going to make a full recovery, I heard. Which is better for Phoenix, that he lives. But we’re still talking years, he’s going to be locked up for a long time. What’s more disturbing is that he could be taken to the facility in Alice.

I’ve seen it happen. They take the black boys there, because it has such a tough reputation, think that would sort ’em out.”

I shake my head. The race is halfway through. Only another minute to go. I watch it already knowing we won’t have a horse come through, and Aunty would be taking us on a sad journey back to the car.

first time some of his teammates had figured out black people were treated differently was drinking with him at this pub.

Suma and Sara’s elbows were in front of me, their posture mirrored. Without wanting to disturb the flirtation, I got up and walked to the quiet of the street. I felt the strong pain again. I called Aunty Bet. The hospital was the one they took Phoenix’s mother to. Aunty Bet stayed with me until they called my name. I read half of a book. Emergency dental procedure was bottom of the list that night. The sleep doctor introduced herself to me.

She had been at the basketball game too, she told me. She had seen me with my sister. She said my sister was very pretty.

She pushed the needle into my hand and I squirmed.

“I could tell that was hard for you,” she said. “Well done.

You should always acknowledge and congratulate yourself for doing things you find difficult.”

“I don’t need to keep my mouth open? The surgeon is going to open my mouth for me when I fall asleep?”

“Yes, that’s right.” She put another blanket on me and she and the nurse wheeled me into the theatre.

When I woke up there was a space where I had been left.

My motions shuddered. I wasn’t quite there. Someone had been put in place of me. My Aunty was looking at this replacement me, she was gripping the bed sheets. As much as I tried to put myself in my place I couldn’t fit. I was data without a body. I

“As much as I tried to put myself in my place I couldn’t fit. I was data without a body.”

“Talked to Dunk lately?” Aunty said.

“Yeah! Of course.”

“You heard from Sara?” She saw my face change.

“Yeah. She was just on the radio yesterday.”

“Actually talked to her?”

I don’t know whether to say I’ve been busy or she’s been busy. Both feel untrue.

The frangipanis cling to the steps when it rains. The road is well lit but there is no drainage. Aunty Bet grew up on the streets as a child who was taken away and ran away until she was picked up by my grandparents, her Aunt and Uncle. I had an easy childhood. I should work on being kind and more patient and following rain and braving strong winds and weather and getting wet for pleasure. People are to be enjoyed, Alice Walker says, who Aunty Bet reads.

And animals, loved. There are those you wish to follow.

Make sure they don’t lead you down the wrong path.

I

found myself at a pub at a table between two people – my sister Sara, and her friend, Suma – both smoking – the smoke coming to me on both sides like a V. Feeling like I was obliged to stay in this formation.

I had four glasses of wine and empty pockets and was ready to go home. But it was hard to get Sara’s attention. I didn’t think I’d be leaving with her. Kenny hadn’t come and James and Dunk were with their mates on the table. Dunk told me that the

tried to find other spaces that would host me. I pushed myself into Twitter and went down my sister’s thread, diving down, down, down. Trying to find out where she was. Facebook says active fifteen hours ago. WhatsApp said fourteen. She wasn’t at the radio station. She wasn’t over at the Gardens Point uni. She wasn’t at home, and her favourite coffee mug was sitting on the left side of the sink like a clean question mark.

I moved myself over the river. I plunged down under the surface, went all the way down and asked for her before I knew she was gone.

I saw young Phoenix pushed into the car, clutching the shock watch his mother gave him for his thirteenth birthday in his sweaty palm. His mother was watching him. Her cheeks flushed with worry.

I felt shooting pains up my arms and my heart coughed over the words I could not speak, words that no-one in my family had ever spoke. Alone with the gulls on this platform I had no voice or paper or a way to capture this, but I knew someone must be listening. A ferry’s path bumped us off balance, and we flew over to the other side. Bulimba shone in the moonlight and the people shuffled off the footpath to get out of our way.

We glided into a bar and no-one blinked until we sang.

Ellen van Neerven is the award-winning author of Heat and Light and Comfort Food.

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FICTION EDITION

CLOUD BRAWLS BY

K

Greg Foyster

en spits over the barbed wire to the other side – one more drop for the thieving bastards next door. He feels the strong south-easterly as a push in the back.

It pushes him towards the fence and it pushes the rainclouds further north, drumming life into someone else’s soil.

They’d known. He spits again. They’d known exactly when this was coming.

Driving out, he’d seen their planes buzzing overhead.

The gall of it. His airspace, but the clouds seeded downwind and the rain missed his own parched paddocks by a few hundred metres.

He turns and crunches across the cracked clay to his ute. He slams the door and drives fast, curses souring in his cheeks. It was no use complaining. He and Linda had passed up their chance for a permit when the price was low, gambling on nature to fill their dams. Through the window he can see the bluff, jutting into the sky like the end of a ramp.

The cool change whooshes up the other side and lobs right over the top of his land. The summer storm season was nearly finished, and all they’d gotten were buckets of humidity.

Back at home he stomps his boots on the doormat but there’s no mud to dislodge, only little eddies of dust.

“Well?” says Linda, as the screen door clatters behind him. “Anything?”

“Nup. Fell on the MacArthur’s place again.” He sighs.

“Might be time to give in, buy some clouds ourselves.”

He hears the rattle of a cake tin. Her head appears round the kitchen doorway, flour on one cheek.

“You sure?”

“No harm asking the price.”

“No harm,” she agrees.

T

he bloke’s four-wheel drive has mud spray covering the door panel, partially obscuring the logo, but Ken can still make out the words WATER MODIFICATION LTD. He greets the man with a handshake. “Fella on the phone had a South African accent?”

“Head office,” explains the salesman. “I’m the local rep.

From Tamworth.”

They get down to business in the dining room, the man spreading out his papers on the table and helping himself to Linda’s lamingtons. He does most of the talking. He’s obliged to inform them that the permit allows for up to three cloudseeding attempts per cold front and it isn’t a sure thing – they should know that – but they’ve had plenty of success in the New England region and the mountains behind Ken and Linda’s place should send up the right sort of clouds.

Linda interrupts. “They said fifteen. On the phone.”

“That was the quote from head office? Earlier this week?”

Linda nods.

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“We’ve had some late reservations,” says the salesman.

“Some of the blokes downwind have booked out the next eight cold fronts, so you’ll have to let those ones pass over.”

“That could take all summer,” says Ken. “Course, you could make them an offer, transfer the permit to your name,” says the salesman. “But they’ll want a premium at this late notice.”

“What are we talking?”

“I’m only guessing…but sixty, seventy. At least.”

“Seventy thousand bucks?” shouts Ken. “And that’s if they’re willing to sell. Tight market these days.”

Ken shakes his head, chewing on nothing. Linda sees the little vein on his neck throbbing.

“Honey,” she warns.

They see the man out, and both of them notice his calling card on the doormat – compacted mud in the shape of a shoe print.

T

he winds blow from the west and the heat is like a constant roar behind their ears. The kiln of inland Australia blasts red dust across the plains and there’s no point hanging out the washing; everything comes back dirtier. The dust sifts through their flyscreen and leaves a fine powder on the kitchen floor.

Out in the far paddock, Ken hoists himself up onto the back of his ute. The tray’s metal sides sear his palms, and it’s not even nine in the morning.

“Foreign mercenaries,” he says to Bruce, his nearest neighbour to the south, who is standing behind the ute.

Ken passes him a hay bale to help with the hand-feeding.

“Thought you said this bloke was from Tamworth?” says Bruce, undoing the string holding the bale together and letting flakes of hay fall to the ground. The herd starts wandering over, hunger winning out over exhaustion.

“Yeah but the South Africans own it. Or the Chinese.

Never us.”

“Sally and I are considering giving it a go,” says Bruce, turning to catch the next bale. He shrugs. “But it hardly stacks up. It’s not guaranteed you know.”

“Yeah,” says Ken. “But what can you do?”

B

y late January, animals are seeking refuge in their house. Thirsty ants invade their toilet cistern, tiny corpses floating in the bowl after each flush.

A snake slithers into the household water tank and drowns. The smothering heat settles in their bedroom, making sleep difficult.

The routine keeps them going. Ken gets up at four, sponge‑baths with water from the squealing tap, then heads out to unload hay for the cattle with Bruce. Meanwhile Linda tends to the dying garden, and feeds the chickens, dogs and goats. By 10am it’s too hot and they’re back in the house, sitting directly underneath the thwop-thwopping kitchen fan, ordering more supplies. Linda gets up to change the frozen water bottles in the chicken coop and Ken sits there reloading the weather forecast page on his tablet: ten sun symbols lined

up, one after the other, like a volley of incoming enemy fire.

He closes the tab when she comes back, pretending to have been reading the news.

In the late afternoon he goes to check on the dead. As the dam water recedes it exposes steep muddy banks. Cows wander down for a drink and get trapped in the rapidly drying clay. Too weak to free themselves, they can’t escape the crows that land on their heads to peck out the precious moisture still left in their eyes. All Ken can do is drag the carcass away to stop it contaminating the remaining water.

One afternoon he decides to cut his losses and cull some cattle for meat. But their freezer isn’t big enough and he’ll need to fill up the eskies. He wonders if it’d keep longer with dry ice. That gives him a strange and hopeful idea, and the sudden desire to buy lots of balloons.

“H

aving a party?” says the council worker in line at the Gunnedah general store, flicking his head towards the items in Ken’s basket.

“Yeah, fifth anniversary of the drought,” says Ken. “Big fucking celebration.”

He pays up, walks to the ute, chucks the balloons in the passenger seat and drives south-east to scout the mountain range.

O

ver the next two weeks, when Linda is outside, Ken finds himself whispering to his new weather forecasting app, “C’mon, c’mon!”

“I know what you’re doing, darl,” she says to him one time when she returns.

“What? Just watching the racing. Not placing any money down.”

“Well, don’t get your hopes up,” is all she says.

I

n the morning he drives to the mountain pass, the helium-filled balloons jostling and squeaking under the ute’s tray cover. Reading the blogs, he’d been shocked at how simple it was. The forums said to use about 120 grams of dry ice per balloon, wrapped in cheesecloth and dangling from a string. It would freeze the air around it, making a little trail of ice crystals as it rose.

He walks up the hill, wondering how he would explain himself if anyone saw. Near the top he stands on a sandstone outcrop and releases his payload into the rising wind. Mist curls off the dry ice as the balloons recede into small multicoloured dots, like confetti. For a moment he imagines it might actually work, then quashes the thought and heads back down. In the ute he turns on his tablet, loads the rain radar app, and waits.

T

hey got a sprinkle. Bruce did too, he says, catching a hay bale next morning. “But we’ll need much more where that came from.” Ken doesn’t think, just blurts it all out: the blogs, the dry ice, the balloons, everything.

“What, this rain just gone?” asks Bruce.

“All I’m doing is starting the rain a little earlier, bringing it a little closer,” says Ken, now considering the risk, the fines.

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His voice turns high and whiny. “It was going to rain anyway.”

“Fair enough, mate. Not judging. Anyone suss?”

Ken exhales. “Council bloke, what’s his name? Tim. Saw me buying the balloons, told him they were for a big party.”

Bruce laughs. “Probably should get them somewhere else next time.”

“Actually, I’ve got a better idea,” says Ken.

U

p, up it goes, into the darkening sky. Dry ice pellets drop out of the drone’s carrybag and mist back to earth, sketching a smudgy flight trajectory, but it’s still hard to spot the machine’s exact location among the clouds. Ken turns his attention to the drone’s live camera feed on his tablet, and now he is the one shrinking from view.

He makes a video call to Bruce, who is sitting in the driver’s seat of his ute parked at the main turnoff.

Bruce’s face appears. “Well?”

“She’s up,” answers Ken. “Bit shaky though. Any traffic?”

“Nup… Hang on, wait.”

Ken holds his breath, watching the tablet. On the screen, Bruce is looking over his shoulder. A car passes without slowing. “False alarm,” says Bruce.

Relaxing again, Ken returns to the drone’s live camera feed, which shows a crinkled mountain range enveloped in mist. He needs to fly much higher and then northwest, dropping the dry ice pellets in a tight circle over

much paint thinner, plus chemicals to develop photographs, he says “the future is black and white photography”. But when the council bloke Tim sees him buying a big tank of propane, Ken freezes, forearms prickling, and doesn’t know what to say. He just stands there.

“Another party?” asks the council worker.

“Oh yeah, yeah,” says Ken, hurrying to collect his items and exit the store. “Real big one this time.”

T

he February heat seeps into March, a contamination of high thirties. Ken obsesses over the forecast, his contraption ready to go with an hour’s notice – but there are sun symbols all the way down the Bureau’s webpage. He worries they’ve missed the summer storms and will skip straight to the clear, blue skies of autumn. A mixed blessing: the temperature would plummet, but so would the chance of big rains. Tired from the manual labour and monotony, he starts surfing the horseracing sites instead.

At least they’re upfront about the odds.

So when Bruce calls one Saturday, Ken takes a while to cotton on.

“Strong southerly,” says Bruce, before the line crackles out.

“Six hours…coming up the Hunter.”

“What?” says Ken. “You’re breaking up.”

“I’m just driving…from Tamworth…get ready.”

Understanding jolts through Ken like whiplash, and he rushes off to load the ute.

“The February heat seeps into March, a contamination of high thirties. Ken obsesses over the forecast...but there are sun symbols all the way down the Bureau’s webpage.” his and Bruce’s properties. But he can tell the machine is struggling. The view swings violently to show an angled horizon. He feels a wet sensation, as if he were the one floating among the moist clouds, and then realises it’s rain hitting his cheek. He stops for a second to put on the hood of his raincoat. By the time he returns to the tablet the screen is black, reading “no connection”. He jerks his head up. Lightning illuminates the heavens, and he thinks of what the drone might be seeing: a tiny man on a huge mountain, playing with a toy.

T

hey got more than a sprinkle this time, enough to steady their dam levels, but Ken lost the drone.

He can’t risk the cost of another one, so he does more research, fretting late into the night, and in the blue glow of the computer monitor he discovers something even better.

“There’s another way,” he tells Bruce the next morning. “But what we really need is a dark room.

And a bloody big barbecue.”

When Bruce asks what he’s on about, he just smiles and says “you’ll see”. When his wife asks why’s he’s ordered so

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I

t takes both of them to carry all the gear up the mountain: the propane tank, furnace chamber, tripod and chemicals. The track isn’t well-maintained and long strips of stringybark collect in the crooks of their ankles. The air is cooling rapidly and a gale has picked up, but they still arrive at the rocky outcrop feeling hot and sweaty. Soon they’ve set up the burner, attached the drip lines to Ken’s special solution, and are sitting on fold-out chairs to watch.

“Smells a bit nasty,” says Ken, as the liquid sprays into the flame and sizzles. “But it’s just acetone paint thinner with a bit of silver iodide in it – and you don’t need much.”

“Silver what?” says Bruce.

“Iodide. Amazing stuff. Few hundred grams of this will do the same job as a few kilos of dry ice. Easy to make, they used to use it in dark rooms.”

“Bugger me,” says Bruce. “And those Water Mod pricks charge an arm and leg for it.”

“Yeah, mainly for the pilot’s time. But the Chinese, see, they just burn this stuff in the right spot, let the updraft do the work. The silver smoke rises, gets to the top of the cloud, and becomes a little seed for the ice to form around,” says

Ken, feeling full with all the information he’s consumed.

“The ice melts, becomes rain.”

Now disgorged, Ken settles into a comfortable silence, rubbing his hands together as he watches the black smoke rise from the propane furnace. The wind whooshes up, and the gums around them rustle and creak. It feels like the last night of a big camping trip. His right leg trembles with excitement. The air smells of ferns and rotting leaves and nail polish.

When night falls, the dark smoke from the furnace blots out the stars. In his mind Ken can see the silver iodide molecules rising, little hexagons like in the diagrams, and they’re seeding perfect snowflakes high above. The cloud is billowing upwards, doubling, tripling in size, a dark column of suspended water, and now here comes God’s thumb, the opposable thumb of man, to press it down.

O

n the drive back down, when the rain starts its steady drumroll on the roof of the ute, Bruce yells out the window. “You beauty!”

Ken is quieter, but he feels the warm contentment of a job well done. “Knock off drinks?” he asks.

At the pub, they duck under the dripping verandah and push through the crowd to the bar. Everyone’s pumped.

“Forty mils, they reckon,” shouts Bruce over the noise of Aussie rock and rumbling laughter. “A good soaking!”

They clink glasses and the first sip is glorious.

Settling into a bar stool, Ken looks around. Smiles bounce from face to face, and he smiles too. The future is swinging his way after all. He takes another big gulp.

A numbness at the back of his skull keeps pushing him forward, towards the next drink, and he rolls with the momentum. Bruce is off his head now. He must have let it slip because strangers are coming up to congratulate them.

“To the rainmakers!” they cheer.

A man staggers towards Ken, beer sloshing over the sides of his glass. “Hear you blokes did some DIY cloud seeding up the pass?”

Ken swivels in the bar stool to face the man, a lopsided grin forming. “Yeah. You buying?”

“I’m from up north,” says the man. “Downwind of the mountains. Been waiting for decent rain all year.” He squints with concentration as he places his beer on the counter. “We had our planes loaded up, ready to fly.” He starts swaying backwards. “Paid for a permit. Bloke told us this cold front was ours to seed, but then some prick seeded it first.”

Too late, Ken sees the man’s right hand is curled into a fist.

Greg Foyster (gregfoyster.com) is a journalist, cartoonist and author of the memoir Changing Gears (2013). His writing has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, ABC and elsewhere.

He is currently working on a comedic novel.

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FICTION EDITION

BRIGHT OBJECTS BY

T

Mirandi Riwoe

he gardener crouches low, his khaki-clad bottom protruding from the bushes. The afternoon sun flickers through the top branches of the apple tree, dapples the skin on the back of his legs. Treading across the thick grass, Heather wonders what he’s up to. The pink azaleas droop, tired from the excesses of spring, but the hydrangeas are spruce, skirting the fibro shed. Cicadas hum high in the trees and her mum’s canary chirrups from the patio. But she can also hear another sound. A whirring, almost. Intermittent. She approaches him, leans low, and whispers, “Matt, what are you doing?”

He half backs out, his finger to his lips. Gestures for her to join him.

Finding a gap in the branches, Heather inches her way in.

Twigs comb her hair, leaves brush her cheeks. Her right knee creaks a little, and her trousers are so tight it’s difficult to kneel. She must get back into yoga. Into the gym. Anything.

She pauses, mid-crawl – in the clearing before her, in the shade of the acacia’s branches, is a mosaic of blue. Shards of clothes pegs, water bottle lids, half-a-dozen Rosella tail feathers, triangles of plastic that make her think of the packet of Oreos in her desk drawer, blue straws like the ones from the cafe on Thomas Street where she sometimes treats herself to a decaf iced coffee. Skim milk, of course, but with a dollop of vanilla ice cream.

She glances over at Matt. His heavy cheeks are ruddy, and there is a peppering of sweat under the curl of dark hair that falls across his brow. She wants to slick her finger across his forehead, wipe the cool moisture into his flushed skin.

But of course she doesn’t.

A bird picks his way through the treasures. His plumage has an inky sheen. His bright eyes match the blue of the lid he clasps in his beak. He bobs back and forth, and Heather realises the buzzing is coming from him. A rather drab, brown bird perches nearby, her head to the side, contemplating his efforts. His rhythmic trill becomes louder, more insistent.

His satin wing sweeps high, an avian flamenco dancer.

Matt grins at her. When his face is relaxed she can see the grit that has made its way into his laugh lines.

She follows his cue and crawls out from the bushes.

“What a beautiful bird. What is it?” she asks, as she wipes grass from her knees.

“Bowerbird.” His eyebrows lift in surprise. They’re bushy, and make him seem stern when he’s digging in the red dirt or planting the rows of cabbage. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?

All that prancing around was to lure the hen into his bower.”

“And all the blue things?”

He gives a lopsided shrug. “Proof that he’s a good catch, maybe?”

They walk across the garden towards the house.

“How’s your mum?” he asks.

Heather thinks of the savage line that jags across the marbled skin of her mother’s hip. The toilet seat on a stand.

The compression socks.

“She’s doing well. The operation went well.” She shades her eyes against the sun. “It’s lucky you could fit her into your schedule. I don’t think she’ll be up to gardening again.”

“You can take over,” he teases.

She laughs. That won’t be happening.

“So, back to Sydney when she’s better?” he asks.

She places her hand on the back door handle. Feels the ridges in the brass. “No. I’m thinking of staying on.” Skittish.

Heat rises to her face. “I’ve found a bit of work in town.”

Her phone rings from the living room.

“You’d better get that,” he says, walking back to the spade he’s left lying near the vegetable patch. “I’ll catch you next Wednesday.”

She wonders how old he is. Not young. But not old.

Definitely older than she is, although he doesn’t seem to have greys launching surprise attacks along his hairline like she does.

It’s her sister on the phone. After discussing their mother, Heather finishes the dishes. The suds slide from her wrist, drip from her flushed fingers. The skin on Matt’s fingers is rough, like on a knob of ginger. But she likes the look of them.

You could depend on them. She wipes her own damp hands down her pants.

Taking a basket to collect the dry clothes from the line, she opens the back door. She swerves to avoid stepping on the petals strewn across the top step. She stoops, dabs at a blue hydrangea petal. It’s dewy, and curls against the warmth of her fingertip. Looking up, she can just see the tail end of Matt’s truck, bumping its way down the driveway.

Mirandi Riwoe’s (@m_riwoe) novella The Fish Girl (2017) won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V and was shortlisted for The Stella Prize. She is the author of two crime novels and is prose editor for Peril magazine. Her work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction and Griffith Review.

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FICTION EDITION

TO BEAT DOWN BY

Alice Robinson

Y

ou wake first to pull your boots on in the dark. Your breasts ache like bruises even though there is no milk. Céline sleeps with her plump little thumb in her mouth. You scoop her from the single bed you have been sharing and carry her out to the car, the nappy bag digging into your shoulder. It’s a full moon – so bright some magpies are warbling. Wind stirs dry grass, eddying dust in sheaves. Weak yellow streetlamps shoot spangles across broken windows.

You are right on the edge of town, beyond which are only dry paddocks. For a moment, you pause to appraise the clarity of the stars, the absence of human voices. It’s as if you and Céline are alone on this earth. But there’s music in the distance, you realise, a faint electronic heartbeat. Someone’s having a party and you wonder if you know them. You still look about thirteen, with the skinny wrists and ankles that Simmo had admired.

with “Allons-y!” and are flooded with relief. The simple phrase is like a square of melting chocolate on your tongue.

This is something you can give Céline beyond her beautiful name, a noun that conjures smoky bars and movie stars and novels; a gift beyond the grow-suits carefully ironed in the laundromat late at night; beyond the healthy meals you try to make. This is a proper inheritance.

There are thoughts you can have in French that you simply can’t construct in English. Ideas and ways of looking at the world that no-one in this town could access in a million years.

God knows that their command of their own bloody language isn’t all that shit-hot. Every time someone in this town says Céline, blunting the antique lace of the word with their ugly accent, you want to wallop them. You want something else for Céline, the expansiveness that comes with being bilingual.

“You are beyond glad now that you never spoke that particular dream out loud. You couldn’t have coped with everyone knowing the precise magnitude of your mistake...”

“I could pick you up with one hand!” he said. “Like a tiny doll.” But regardless of what you look like, having Céline has aged you, dragging you into a new and foreign stage of life and leaving you stranded there.

D

isgruntled and cold, Céline kicks her bare feet.

Even grumpy as she is in the gloom of predawn, she is still the most beautiful thing you have seen.

The sight of her never fails to give you a pinch, like a thread pulled tight in your chest. It’s love, and something else that you can’t put into words: the sense that you are responsible for a person whose potential you can’t hope to make good on. Not having known any babies until now, you always thought of them as lumps of clay waiting to be moulded. Now you see that it’s the other way around: we are all born into perfection, only to be marred by our parents, however well-meaning they are.

You murmur soothingly as you buckle Céline into her capsule, stroking her velvet cheek.

“Let’s get you off to Nanna’s, sweetheart.” You hesitate for a split second longer than normal, the cogs in your brain turning slowly, dulled by exhaustion. Finally you come up

But the words are already sliding to the edge of your brain, rolling away like water over glass, and this makes you desperate. You will have to work harder, study longer between Céline’s bedtime and your own, to preserve what you have learned. Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid, as Madame Albert was fond of saying. Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

You think of the other Year 11 students chosen for the French exchange scholarship. They would be long returned from their year abroad by now. Some of them might even be studying languages at university, their grammar fresh and hot and sparking, as it had been once for you. Madame Albert reckoned you had a natural aptitude for French, but then there hadn’t been much competition around here. Even so, you had coveted the idea of going off to university yourself and maybe even living in Paris permanently when you were older. You are beyond glad now that you never spoke that particular dream out loud. You couldn’t have coped with everyone knowing the precise magnitude of your mistake; by what margin you missed getting what you wanted.

Céline grizzles, screwing up her face. You can feel the disposable nappy warm and heavy through her flannel onesie, but there isn’t time for a change; you can’t be late for work THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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again. Your street is deserted beyond the unit car park.

Off-street parking, the real estate agent had boasted, but in a country town like this – arse end of nowhere, Simmo had said, brushing the dust off his nice city trousers and zipping them up – what need is there? There’s hardly anyone driving on the road, let alone cluttering it up with parked cars. You would be happier with a dishwasher, or a yard for Céline to play in. A small courtyard for the blue plastic clam pool you bought on sale at Bunnings would do. You wonder what Simmo is doing now, whether he found a French girlfriend over there to replace you. In any case, this place is what you can afford. You hung a framed poster of Le Chat Noir above the old brocade couch from the op shop. When you lie curled around Céline at night, looking at Simmo’s lips on her face, you are floored by how much can change in a year. Maybe one day you’ll go back to finish your schooling, but you won’t hold your breath. You wonder if Céline can smell blood on you. It breaks your heart to think of her coming to associate you with that rich iron reek.

W

hen you pull up outside the flats, the sun is rising and your mum is on the front step having her first cigarette of the day. When they asked about Céline’s father, you said you didn’t know who it was. Your mum called you stupid; she was just shocked.

“I’ve never had to worry about you!” she wailed, as if a contract had been broken. You understood what she meant, but her logic was flawed. She thought that a person being quiet was the same as being tame. Not that it mattered; Simmo was long gone by then. The sharp shock of his rejection has closed over now, a healed wound, and you feel foolish for half-believing he ever loved you. You often flick through the photos of him on Facebook, the ten best at French in the state and their host families all sitting around a table at a cafe in Montmartre. He’s truly gorgeous, with his blonde curls and long lashes. That hasn’t changed.

You told yourself that there was nothing to be gained by wrecking his life too, but the truth was something else. It’s a thing that you’ve only just begun to look at face on. That you don’t want him in the picture. That if Céline is a thing you must have, a gift you didn’t ask for but must keep forever, then you don’t want to share her with anyone, however hard things get.

I

t’s terrible to leave her. Even when she’s happy enough to say goodbye, even when she’s with your own mum, you feel like that bloke in the canyon with his arm stuck between rocks. It’s like Céline is a part of your body you’re being forced to amputate to get to work. As you walk briskly down the steps to the car, hearing her sweet little voice at your back calling ta-ta, you’re wrenched. You can’t turn around, or else you risk the impulse to snatch her up and make a run for it. But cuddles aren’t going to pay your rent or put food on the table for Céline. Your mum can’t help you out, beyond babysitting until a place comes up at the

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local creche. She did say that you could live with her for a few months after you had the baby, but you want to show Céline a way of being in the world that you were never shown yourself. Madame Albert sneered when the other kids in class asked if she was married. You still recall the look on her beautiful face, like she smelled poo. Now you clutch close the idea that independence won’t be a lesson Céline has to learn the hard way, but something so integral that she will take it for granted. You want her to know in her bones the value in committing to doing what you must.

When you made the decision to keep Céline you learned another new thing about yourself. Underneath all the normal teenaged shit, the angst and small worries that you believed were worth your time, there was a glittering, hard strand of self-reliance, a vein of gold that was just waiting to be uncovered.

Y

ou can hear live pigs crying as you crunch up the path to go in. Eventually you had to stop feeding Céline because the pitch of the animals made your breasts leak – they sound that much like babies.

You had thought you were immune to the place, but your body was still listening to what the rest of you blocked out.

Even worse than the sound is the smell, and it’s harder to get used to. Sometimes when you get home at night you have to close the blinds and sit quietly on your couch in the dark, just to cope with the onslaught of sensory information you get each day. Even after showering, the stench of the place haunts your dreams. More than once, you’ve woken in a sweat and lurched out of bed to lean your forehead on the cool brickwork outside your unit. In the night air, your sense of smell is heightened. You drag the plain, ordinary freshness deep inside of you. The damp earth and petrol tang of the driveway becomes a salve, quashing sensememory of offal.

A

s you work, you conjugate verbs. Something to focus on, taking your mind away. Je survis, tu survis, il survit, elle survit. Up the line, a knocker stuns the pigs. They are still breathing when they get to you. Avoiding the dark accusation of their gaze, you glance into the rafters, your only breathing space. But you’re not like some of the blokes who still vomit a bit in their mouths. Of the 800 here, there are only a handful of women and none as young as you are. At first, the others gave you shit, and then they tried it on. Now you stand in an isolation chamber of their grudging respect, working fast and in silence. The ones who can’t hack it here feel sorry for the pigs. They tend to leave after a day or two, alarmingly white in the face. A lifetime ago, last year, you might have felt the same way. But a mother retains some DNA from each child she makes in her body, or so you’ve read online. It’s this cellular alteration that’s responsible for your change of heart, or it’s that there are no other jobs in town on offer.

Either way, a pig is just a body to you now. You’ll do with it what you’re asked.

Y

our knife slices the main veins, carotid and jugular, getting the bleeding going. The blood is darker than you would expect, the colour of treacle and bathwater-warm. People say that pigs are as smart as dogs and even as some three-year-old children. Sometimes you mistake Céline’s plump cheek for a pig’s in the half-wit of dreaming. Pigskin slides open easily under your blade, making the scar between your hipbones twang. You were hallucinating from the pain by the time they wheeled you into theatre, so your recollection of birth is nightmarishly dim. Only a few details surface with any clarity, disturbingly disjointed: an ice block held to your thigh; your arms chattering against the silver table in reaction to the drugs; a nurse passing a roll of bloody gauze over the blue partition bisecting your chest. Later, your mum explained that the gauze, like the guy line on a tent, was helping to hold the lips of skin apart, keeping the wound in your abdomen open as they laboured Céline out. From where you were lying, scared and numb, the lower half of your body was hidden. You couldn’t see the gash and had to take it on good faith that a real child was coming through it. You can imagine it all easily enough now though, what they did to you. Layers of skin and fat would have parted fast under pressure of the scalpel, as though your body was a snakeskin Céline needed to shed.

S

immo called it a gash when he put his fingers inside of you. Not trying to be vulgar, it was just what all boys said. Even as you cringed at the word, ill-fitting for something that small and wet and private, you gasped in pleasure, murmuring Tu sais que je t’aime so quietly it was like breathing.

“What’s that?” he panted, his mouth hot on your neck.

“Nothing,” you said. “Don’t stop.” The school bus was parked outside the shed, waiting to take him back to the Grammar school for the last time before the big trip.

The shed smelled of rubber and gasoline, the sticky-slick surface of the vinyl gym mats underneath your bare thighs.

You hardly knew which part of him to touch, wanting it all so badly: the broad brown shoulders, twin verticals of muscle down his back. Then as he was coming, you understood like a knock to the temple that he would be going soon and you gripped him harder, crossing your ankles over his arse like you could stop time and keep him there.

The ceiling of the shed was threaded with cobwebs, the light coming green through a single window clogged with leaves. Afterwards, Simmo lay on top of you, full bodyweight crushing your ribs. His tongue found yours and for a moment you thought he might go again, before he heaved off. You started crying then and couldn’t tell him what it was, that you were gripped by a sudden foreboding. He smoothed back your hair from your face and told you not to worry.

“Catch you at the airport,” he said. What else was there but to shrug up your undies and kiss him goodbye? He had spent every summer of his life in Bordeaux; had read Camus in French and said it was better.

You sat in the gloom on the sticky mat and waited for the bus to pull out, feeling tender in places you hadn’t known existed. He didn’t call, but then, why would he? For all he knew, you would arrive in Paris, too.

T

he cut you must make, time after time, is a mere red line at first, drawn across the throat of the animal as if in red biro. But the blood blooms quickly. As it drains, the pig is transformed into pork.

“I can’t take it,” a young bloke, still green, sobbed just last week, ripping off his gloves and sending a chain of rubies flying across the factory floor. “I can’t stand being around all this death every day!” You knew what he meant but you’re cold to the notion. You take from the pigs so you can give to Céline.

W

hen you cradle Céline’s little body, experiencing the perfect, warm weight of her, you can’t help but think how flimsy we all are, mere tissue-paper bags of blood. It’s a wonder that any of us make it to adulthood, given our poor design.

Knowing this, how can you send Céline out into the world with any confidence as she grows? Your mum asked if you were raped, half hoping, it seemed, so that she could feel you weren’t to blame. It irked you at first, but now you understand. Bringing a child into the world is such a reckless act. A show of faith in the future, or just plain dumb.

Either way, you feel sorry for your mum.

The word abattoir derives from the French abattre, meaning to beat down. You looked it up in the big EnglishFrench dictionary you keep alongside the stove, marvelling at how many everyday words originate somewhere else. On the first day of school as you walked in to class, your mum stood at the fence chain-smoking. You waved and waved and waved, but she never lifted a hand in return. Still, there was something about learning, like a key in the lock it was made for, and you took to it right away. Now you think that, if evolution is just each generation improving on the last, then Céline will be okay. Madame Albert said a thing you don’t like to recall – Quel dommage. Such a shame! – that having Céline would ruin everything. But you’re not beaten, far from it. You’ve got the knife in your hand.

Alice Robinson (@critrature) has published two novels, Anchor Point (2015) and The Glad Shout (2019).

In 2016 she was long-listed for The Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards. She has a PhD in creative writing and her stories and essays have been published widely in literary journals.

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FICTION EDITION

THE SLIDE BY

Ben Walter

J

ulie Rose has the longest slide in the world.

The theme park people sweat in queues outside her door, counting the bricks in the footpath as the doorbell echoes through the hallway. Sometimes Julie shoos them away; more often she asks me to do it while she strolls over to the slide. Every theme park wants the slide as a featured attraction, and their people offer ridiculous sums of money, but they really want the slide for themselves.

They’ll slip away to the South Pacific as soon as the contract has been signed. Julie knows this because I told her.

“Don’t trust them,” I yelled behind me as we rode down the slide one windy afternoon. “Those fucks will be away with this slippery beauty,” and Julie had reached for the edges to sense the warmth of nearly-friction hurtling beneath her hands, the burning air fleeing; as though she were cupping a plasma ball and feeling all of that energy just about ready to burst.

I also want the slide.

When I saw it standing in her yard like a towering fast food pillar, I began following Julie to her work at the primary school. Chanced upon her in the pub. We sat next to each other at the bar and when she ordered her drink, I turned to her and complimented her on her vowels.

Her eyebrows got caught up in her hair.

“Your vowels,” I repeated. “They’re stunning. Could you say ‘beer’?”

Elocution. Try it. Years ago, my friend Kevin and I split over consonants and vowels, but vowels have always been triumphant.

“Beer?” said Julie with an upturned note in her voice like she was asking a question, pouring the rising tones into the space between us.

“Beautiful,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

Soon I was sleeping at her place. Every morning we would get up early and shoot down the slide.

T

he slide takes a full five minutes. You could start poaching an egg at the top and it would be overdone by the time your feet slapped the pinebark. You could recite ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ if you spoke quickly and skipped over the slow bits. You could clean out your microwave, consolidate your super funds, see an osteopath. Julie and I have done all of these things and more.

“How does it work?” she is asked.

It is a small suburban block. There are roses, a birdbath.

A canapé yard offering tidbits of flower and stem. The

jealous kids next door watch grimly, barely bouncing on their thinning, unprotected trampoline.

“Why don’t you invite them over?” I once suggested.

“They throw rocks,” Julie replied, “at cats.”

Julie loves animals. She is always picking up small dogs and insects and giving them a turn on the slide.

“Could you throw rocks at cats?” she asks.

I think back to rocks and cats.

“No,” I say. “Of course not.”

T

he theme park people keep coming. Kevin is the most persistent.

“Fuck off Kevin,” I yell when he bothers the door with his briefcase. “We don’t want you here.”

“Barney,” he says calmly, “we both know it’s not your slide.

It’s Julie’s. So why don’t you let me speak to her?”

Kevin and I used to play Call of Duty after school. Now we blank each other in the street and only speak at Julie’s door. I look across at her, peeking from behind a curtain.

She shakes her head. “Julie doesn’t want to speak to you just now,” I say. “She’s getting sick of you hassling her.”

“I can see you, Julie!” says Kevin, looking at the other window. “I know you’re there. Anytime you want to talk, you’ve got my number.” He turns and walks back down the path, nods to the queue of theme park guys at the gate, standing there like a series of princes who have failed in their quests.

I

don’t like to say that the slide will be mine, but the slide will be mine. Where I grew up, in the poorer suburbs, nobody made much of an effort with parks. A square of grass, a fence and a sign – we would ride around on our bikes, splashing up mud and skidding. That was it. Where were the swings? Where was the slide?

The first slide I remember sat in a park near the centre of the city. We were there for something dental and afterwards I couldn’t talk, so Dad had taken me to a park and I had stood at the top of its beautiful red spiral. It seemed fast and certain.

A girl half my size in a blue hoodie squeezed in beside me.

“Well, are you going to go?” she asked.

I couldn’t say anything.

“Do you mind if I go?” she asked.

Still, I couldn’t speak.

Later, I gritted my numb teeth and slid down the curves, but by then the girl had gone and my Dad was sitting on a bench staring at joggers.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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J

ulie trusts me. This is a good thing. But I have to wait till she leaves me alone with the slide. It’s not a matter of twenty minutes to just pack it in its case and heave it into the back of the car. Plus there are the theme park people. Once, Julie asked me to tighten a bolt in the corkscrew section. There was pandemonium outside.

Kevin was shouting at the top of his lungs. “Julie! Wrench!

Barney’s got a wrench!” I climbed the ladder, slid down to the offending bolt and tightened it, very slowly, while staring them down. The street chorus grew quiet. I gave it one final tighten and then slipped down the rest of the slide, staring, as they came into view around each corner. At the bottom, I tossed the wrench near the fuchsias and strolled inside.

A good dry run. The chance will come.

It’s helpful that Julie and I spend so little time together.

She goes off to teach at school, I head to the office. After work, I catch the bus and then wait on the porch till she gets home to unlock the door. One day she will forget and this will be my chance. One night she will sleep soundly and neglect to turn off the alarm. One day there will be a perfect chance to get her and the others away from the house.

A party. I will throw a party in honour of Julie and the slide and invite all the theme park people.

makes me laugh. The slide makes me cry. The slide reaches up to heaven.

They built a huge slide over at BigWorld™, but it was nowhere near the size of Julie’s. The designers were fired and they got new designers to try to stretch it out.

Not even close.

The slide is getting bigger; now it takes a good twelve minutes. Soon, we’ll be able to slide all day and it will be the same as having the slide for myself.

It will not be the same as having the slide for myself.

I proceed with my plans.

W

e hold the party upstairs at the local pub.

I make sure there are banners. “Hooray for Julie! And Also for the Slide!” The balloons and streamers look wonderful. Someone has brought a Christmas tree, which feels incongruous, and I see Kevin sniggering. He looks at me across the table, lifts a slice of fairy bread to his mouth. Winks.

We do speeches early so that everyone can get smashed.

I stand before the crowd, explaining how wonderful Julie is, and how much we enjoy riding on the slide. Everyone claps a little bit. Julie says how grateful she is for the party, that she is always surprised by how much everyone loves

“You can see the slide from space. You can see it from the moon. The slide makes its presence felt in weather patterns... The slide makes me laugh. The slide makes me cry. The slide reaches up to heaven.”

“H

ow lovely!” says Julie. “Barney, you’re so kind.”

“Well Julie,” I say. “I loooooveee youuuu.” I really let my vowels show.

“What are you up to?” asks Kevin at the gate, fingering his invitation as I head out to buy balloons and streamers and hundreds and thousands for fairy bread.

“A party,” I say. “I’m up to a party. Are you coming?

Or don’t you care about Julie?”

“Oh, I’m coming,” he says, shoving the invitation back into his pocket.

Y

ou can see the slide from space. You can see it from the moon. The slide makes its presence felt in weather patterns. Scientists can detect gravity waves from the slide. Free-climbers have failed to summit the slide. There are rainbows; we swoosh through them and feel their reds, yellows and greens against our faces. We are constantly refusing tower requests from broadcasters and mobile phone companies. Flight-paths have changed.

Sometimes there is snow at the top of the slide. The slide contains rare minerals and we stand at the bottom when it is raining to filter them from the pouring stream. The slide

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the slide, but that she loves the slide too, so perhaps she isn’t really that surprised. She sits down as everyone cheers and whistles, then stands up again. “Oh yes, and thanks Barney,” she says.

One of the theme park people stands up, pulls a few notes from his pocket. He coughs. Everyone refills their glasses for the toasts, and then they just refill their glasses. Julie is over the other side of the room, whispering to Kevin.

This is my chance.

T

he best story I have heard about the slide: it is a vision we can all see. When we are zooming down the slide, we are living in our own vision; an old vision, maybe, that has started speaking to us again.

Well, it’s not a story so much as something one of the theme park people said down the pub, but it spoke to me in a sad way, because most visions we have, we aren’t a part of them.

So, I guess maybe I am not so much sad as quite happy.

The second-best story I heard about the slide was something about dinosaurs and Beyoncé but I don’t remember that one.

It was good though.

I

leap the fence into Julie’s yard and find the wrench by the fuschias. The slide is like a mountain rising up above me. I climb the ladder – the slide has to be dismantled from above – and sit at the top, staring at the view across the suburbs, the town, the fields, farms and other mountains rubbing up against the sky. Then I reach for the first bolt and start to twist it. The wrench is heavy in my hand. I loosen the bolt, take it out, hold it in my palm. It is grey like a cloud.

I put it in my pocket, take it out again.

What am I going to do with this bolt?

I put it back in its slot and tighten it.

For a long time I sit with the view, but when I finally push off, watching as the stars swirl down like the storming rain, I think of Julie, of taking her away to the South Pacific.

We could sit on the beaches and drink cocktails and slide all the way from volcanic heights into clear blue water. We could take time to cuddle in bed and then slide all day till we are weary with climbing. I could propose! Now I wish that I had brought the bolt with me. On the way down, I could have shaped it into a ring.

Finally, the slide peters out. At the bottom, Julie is standing with Kevin.

“Got a report about a loose bolt,” I say, showing them the wrench. “All fixed. How’s the party going?”

Julie breathes in. “Barney,” she says, “You’re going to have to collect your things.”

“What?” I say.

The wrench slips from my fingers.

“You’re going to have to collect your things.”

Kevin looks triumphant.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Kevin is going to be staying with me for a while. There won’t be room for you both. You’re going to have to go.”

“Yeah, fuck off Barney,” says Kevin.

“But why?” I ask as the tears glisten in my eyes.

There is a silence.

It feels like something has begun sliding from a great height all the way down to the lowest depths.

I can’t speak.

“Oh Barney,” says Julie. “He loves my ‘b’s. He loves my ‘c’s and ‘d’s! He even loves my ‘k’s. Especially when I say his name.”

Ben Walter (@ben_walter) has been widely published in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and The Lifted Brow. His debut novel manuscript won the people’s choice component of the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. His latest book is Conglomerate (2017), published as part of the Lost Rocks series.

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FICTION EDITION

JOYRIDERS BY

Chloe Wilson

M

aybe it stuck in my mind because I heard there were two boys and a girl and my work crew was the same: two boys, including me, and one girl. Erica.

Erica was drinking a 7-Eleven cappuccino when we first heard about the joyriders. We were at the depot waiting for the day’s work order. I watched her pour three packets of white sugar into her coffee, one after the other, and stir it with a plastic straw.

“That stuff will kill you,” I said.

She didn’t even look up.

Two boys, one girl, all under eighteen. That’s what they told us. They had tied scarves around their faces and worn baseball caps and sunglasses and robbed three service stations using weapons that looked like they could have been found in someone’s kitchen, someone’s garage: a knife, a box cutter, a screwdriver with a pink handle. One of them always sat at the wheel of their stolen, plate-less car, revving the engine, waiting to scream off down the highway.

On the way out of one petrol station, they had sideswiped another car and sent it rolling onto the verge.

They hadn’t stopped to see what damage they’d done.

My crew’s job was to clean up their mess.

W

e live on an island that most people try to leave. It is bisected by a single, nearly-straight highway, which connects two towns that call themselves cities. You can go a while without passing anyone on that highway. When it’s dark, people drive with their high beams on. They only turn them down at the last second, when they’re about to pass you. Sometimes they don’t turn them down at all, and the night goes blind-white for a moment as they flash past.

We left the depot and drove a couple of hours up the highway to where the crash had taken place. The mood in the truck was cheerful. Not because the driver in the other car hadn’t died, although he hadn’t. The airbags had deployed and soon enough we’d all be sneezing out the fine powder that spent airbags leave over everything.

No – we were excited because petrol stations are where people tend to lose things. Things left on top of a car, things that slide off the dash and out an open window. Wallets, phones, cash, sunglasses. We’d found a prosthetic leg, once, wearing a white sneaker that looked brand new.

The agreement we have – me, Erica, Curtis – is that whatever we find, we split evenly. Pirate’s rules: that’s what

Erica calls them. One man, one share. It means that when someone accidentally rides the mower over a loose $20 note and the fragments shoot out in a bright orange burst, we all lose $6.70, or thereabouts.

Sometimes we talk about how we might strike it rich one day; find a suitcase full of cash, or diamonds, or bars of gold bullion.

“You never know,” I say. “It could happen.”

“How good would that be,” says Curtis.

I snap my fingers. “I’d be out of here like that.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” says Erica.

B

y the time we reached the scene of the accident, the cops were gone, the ambulances were gone, the driver was gone. But the car hadn’t been towed away. We didn’t find much worth keeping: a few coins, a packet of cigarettes with two stale ones left rolling around inside.

Other than that, there were the usual things. Tyre marks bending and stuttering across the white lines of the road, bluish glass that turned to crumbs rather than shattering.

A hubcap, a mirror.

It wasn’t the worst I’d seen, not by a long shot. Even so, I had to hose the blood off the road and into the weeds that line the highway.

“You’re fertilising them, you know,” Erica said. She nodded towards the foaming blood-water mixture, and the tangled spread of gorse and boneseed and Spanish heath that was already soaking it up.

I wasn’t sure if she was joking. But it made me imagine all those weeds by the side of the road shooting up and thickening and flowering. It made me think of something we’d been taught: a weed is any plant that grows where it isn’t wanted.

K

eeping the grass on the verge short is one of our regular jobs. So is weeding. So is scooping up the flung and flattened bodies of kangaroos and wombats, and the myna birds and magpies and crows whose wings still catch the wind, though their bodies have been pasted into the bitumen.

We’re supposed to check the pouches of the native animals we find. It’s always Curtis who does this, putting on a pair of gloves and stretching out the pouches while Erica and I stand by making dirty jokes. Sometimes he finds something still alive.

We call the wildlife service, who sends a carer to pick them up.

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Curtis doesn’t have to sit with those animals, but he does.

He wraps them in the towels he keeps in the truck.

“Most of them won’t make it,” Erica says.

“I know,” Curtis replies, but he does it anyway.

T

hat day, after cleaning up the accident, we were sent further north. There are plantations of opium poppies up there. The seed pods are turned into drugs for people deemed sick enough to deserve them. They look pretty in the springtime, the poppies – the flowers bloom so white and so thick they look like frost.

We’d been sent to mow the grass along a section of road that had poppy fields rolling out on either side. There’s a lot of security around those poppies. Cameras, barbed wire, dogs. Electric fences surround them.

Before the mower started up, we could hear the fences.

A low, busy, warning hum, like a hive of metallic wasps.

Curtis claims to have eaten the resin that comes from the poppies. He says he managed to get in once, to get away with a whole bunch of the seed pods rolled in his shirt, to escape before the Doberman pinschers could knock him down and shake him by the neck.

I haven’t told him that I don’t believe him.

He says what you do is make cuts in the pod and wait for the latex to ooze out. And when it does, you keep waiting,

But none of us complained. We just rolled the windows down and drove home in silence.

I

wasn’t being entirely truthful when I said we didn’t find anything at the crash site. It was while I was hosing near the weeds that I saw it. A wallet. Yellow, almost as yellow as the gorse, and with grime worked into the texture of the leather. I checked – the others weren’t watching. I picked it up and slipped it into the waistband of my pants.

I didn’t mention it to anyone, and when I got home that night I pulled everything out of the wallet and examined it.

It was all intact: credit cards, black and red and platinum. Health insurance. Gym membership. Driver’s licence. Frequent flyer memberships for the three airlines that flew people off this island. Perfume sample cards, their scent faded.

And in the folds at the back: $865.

The licence belonged to a woman born in the same year as me. She looked both younger and older than I did.

Older, because her hair was neat and smooth and she wore diamonds in her ears. But younger, because even in that hazy photo you could tell she had soft, indoor skin; her face didn’t have the windburned, thickened look that it gets when you work outside.

I went to bed, and when I slipped my hand into my

“They weren’t the type of beers that got thrown at us from car windows. They were good beers.” wait until it turns thick and brown-black, and then you roll a little bit into a ball between your fingertips and eat it.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“It’s like being dead,” he said. “In a good way.”

Curtis told me that when he’d finally come down he realised he’d been lying still on his unmade bed for sixteen hours. He’d heard his housemates calling, but hadn’t been able to answer. He’d been too far away, drifting outside his own mind, his own body. He said he’d never been happier.

But that day he ignored the poppies. We all did. That day, like most of our days, was spent mowing, and picking up rubbish: crushed cans, chip packets, used condoms, wads of gum. Sometimes people would scream things at us from moving cars. This was typical. Usually they were going too fast to be understood. Sometimes, though, you’d hear a word: fucken, loser, shit. Or, if they’d seen Erica: bitch, fat, slut.

Sometimes they threw things: beer bottles, burgers that would release a pale green spray of shredded lettuce.

Once a guy threw a carton of strawberry milk at Erica.

It hit her square in the back. She barely reacted. She speared the container and put it into a garbage bag. The milk had soaked into the lengths of her hair. By the end of the day her hair had dried and frizzed and there was a stink rolling off her: sweet fake strawberry mixed with the sour-udder smell of the milk, which had turned sometime in the afternoon.

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boxer shorts my palm had the smell of her wallet on it: leather, perfume, crisp notes fresh from the ATM. The next day was my day off. I drove to her house, which was in a nice suburb. I’d made an effort. I wore my nice jeans, a clean T-shirt. I rang the bell.

When she opened the door, she kept the security screen locked.

“Can I help you?”

“Hi,” I said. I knew instantly – from the way she backed up, the look on her face – that I’d made a mistake. “I think I found your wallet.”

I held it out to the mesh of the screen door. She waited for a moment before opening it.

“Thank you.”

“You can check,” I said. “Everything’s there.”

I didn’t think she’d do it. But I stood and watched as she examined all her cards and counted the notes.

“Thank you,” the woman said again. She cleared her throat.

“I hope you haven’t gone too far out of your way.”

“No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

I turned to go, but she said, “Hang on a second.”

She padded down the polished floorboards in her hallway, and came back holding a six-pack of beer that had two bottles missing. She handed it to me.

“For your trouble,” she said.

Maybe I should have had some pride and waved them

away, but before I knew it the icy brown glass was pressing into my abdomen, and I was holding them the way Curtis held those baby animals.

I opened one as soon as I got home. They weren’t the type of beers that got thrown at us from car windows. They were good beers. They tasted of something more than the sour tang of alcohol. I drank them one after the other until all of them were gone.

S

ometimes I think it’s inevitable that I will end up with Erica. If that happened I don’t know which of us would be more disappointed.

Maybe it’s better to be like Curtis, to believe that one day we’ll find a duffel bag full of cash and all our problems will vanish, the way a car vanishes when it turns its headlights off.

Perhaps that’s what they did, those kids who’d gone tearing up and down the highway that runs like an old scar down the centre of this island. Perhaps they turned the headlights off and that’s why things ended how they ended.

At least, I assumed it was them. It was the morning after I’d returned the wallet and still so dark and cold it may as well have been the middle of the night. We’d gotten our work order. A car had hit a truck, thrown two of its passengers, wrapped itself around a tree.

Had anyone survived? No-one knew.

On the way to the site of the accident, we stopped to clear a wallaby from the middle of the road. I turned the headlights down and kept the truck running while Curtis got out and knelt on the asphalt. He felt around inside its pouch.

We didn’t make any jokes.

He walked back to the truck wiping one gloved hand on his trousers. He’d dragged the wallaby to the side of the road.

We do that to protect the scavengers – eagles, quolls, devils – that come to eat the dead and become roadkill in turn.

“Anything?” Erica said after he got into the back seat and slammed the door.

He shook his head. If there had been something in there, it wasn’t something he could save.

I put the truck into gear and switched on our high beams.

All the invisible trees were suddenly there, white and panicked, waving their arms. We ignored them. I put my foot down and kept on driving.

Chloe Wilson (@chloe_m_wilson) is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem (2010) and Not Fox Nor Axe (2015), which was shortlisted for the NSW and QLD Premier’s Awards. She won the 2019 Iowa Review Award in Fiction, received second prize in the 2018 Bristol Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

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FICTION EDITION

EVEN GOLDFISH GET THE BLUES BY

E

Lisa Walker

than is out in the shed trying to patch up his dinged‑up old surfboard when I come in. There’s a long summer ahead, so he needs to be ready. Ethan has his headphones on. He’s probably listening to Troye Sivan.

I like Troye Sivan too, but my twin brother really likes him.

“Hey Ethan,” I say.

“Hey Dani.” He keeps rubbing the board with sandpaper and doesn’t turn down his music.

“I’ve got something important to say.”

He nods but keeps rubbing his board. He probably thinks I want to update him on the latest news about climate change.

That’s what I normally do. Yesterday I told him that they saw sperm whales in the Arctic for only the second time ever.

How thousands of spectacled flying foxes have died from the heat in north Queensland.

Sometimes Ethan prefers not to hear about it. He says it makes him depressed.

I’ve never thought this was a good reason not to stay informed. Until today.

Ethan and I have just graduated high school and now something has changed. It’s like leaving school has set off a chain of events that stretches across the world. But I know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, so perhaps it’s just that I’ve started noticing. There have been signs.

Corellas have come to drink at our creek for the first time.

Every afternoon, yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly over. And Indian mynas have arrived. They drive off native birds, so this is a problem. Birds aren’t my main issue, though. They can move to better places.

As of today, it’s been a week since I’ve heard the Booroolong frog go craw craw craw. It’s been six months since I heard the Olongburra frog. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Three months since I heard the Wallum froglet. Tching, tching, tching. But it’s the Booroolong frog I’m most concerned about. It doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

I’ve been frog-hunting every night for two years. I send my results to the Australian Museum, to add to their database.

I am Australia’s most consistent amateur frog watcher, my contact at the museum tells me. I’m kind of someone, out there in frog-land. Only Ethan knows that about me though.

Last night on my survey, I only heard cane toads. This gave me a strange feeling in my stomach. Like when our sister Ava

left us to go and study in America for six months. There was a hole inside me until she came back. If the frogs aren’t going to come back, I need to move on. I need a plan.

“Have you turned off your music?” I ask.

Ethan fiddles with his phone, then nods again. He wipes off the fibreglass dust and starts rubbing again.

“Turn off your music Ethan, this is important.”

He sighs and takes the headphones off.

“Do you remember Midas?” I ask.

M

idas was the grinch of goldfish. He’d hide out in his plastic castle whenever we appeared and wouldn’t eat if he was watched. When he wasn’t in his castle, he’d lie on the bottom of the tank sulking.

After observing him for several days, I came up with a diagnosis. He was suffering from depression. I’d looked it up.

Goldfish depression is a thing. They even use goldfish to test antidepressants. With the right dose of antidepressant, a sad goldfish will cheer up and explore its tank.

Animal depression, it turns out, is quite common.

Dolphins can commit suicide by holding their breath. A duck drowned itself after losing its mate. Dogs can drown or starve themselves after their owners die. I asked Mum, but she said we couldn’t afford to take Midas to the vet for antidepressants.

“We are rich in love and homegrown vegies,” Mum always says. This is true, but it doesn’t compensate for having a car that is off the road more than on and a bedroom roof that leaks in every storm.

I introduced more toys and plants to Midas’ fish tank.

Did some tank-side concerts on the keyboard. Developed a comedy routine with goldfish hand puppets that I made myself.

None of it helped.

At last I convinced Mum that Midas needed a friend. When I brought home Precious, Midas shed his hermit-like ways. He swam exuberantly around the tank. It’s funny how it was me, who manages fine without any friends, who saw that Midas was lonely. I do have Ethan though.

“D

o you think frogs get depression too?”

I ask Ethan.

“Probably. Why wouldn’t they?”

“What if there is only one Booroolong frog THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19 I

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left? What if it’s so sad it won’t call anymore? I googled frog depression, but I only found stuff about using frog poison to treat human depression.”

“Humans are so self-centred,” says Ethan.

“I’ve decided I want to be an astronomer.”

“What? Why?” Ethan puts down his sandpaper. “I thought you wanted to study frogs.”

I used to think I wanted to study frogs at Sydney University, but now I’m not so sure. “I did. But I feel like I need to get more perspective. Frogs are depressing me.” I gaze out over Ethan’s shoulder. I wonder where the Booroolong frogs have gone.

Outside the window, I can see the swimming hole with the turtles where we all learned to swim. I can see the old gum tree that the koalas visit. The big hollow where the owls nest. The garage roof where the python sleeps. The jungle at the bottom of the garden where we used to play lions and tigers.

We’ve lived in this house our whole lives. It’s a falling down shack on the side of a creek that floods every year, cutting us off from the rest of the world. But it’s my world, the only place I belong. I don’t like the way it’s changing.

I run my hand over Ethan’s surfboard. “You know that old guy who just moved in next door?” Ethan nods.

“He’s an astronomer.”

“How do you know?”

Last night on my frog survey, I saw something unusual, though not frog-related. In the cleared paddock between the house next door and the creek stood a shadowy figure. I sneaked over towards the big fig tree and, from its shelter, peered out.

The old man was looking through a telescope up at the night sky.

I looked up at the sky too. Stars twinkled everywhere I looked. I don’t know much about stars. I’ve been so focused on frogs there hasn’t been room for anything else. Looking up at the sky, at all those stars, made me dizzy. I sat down.

Once I was sitting, it seemed like a good idea to lie down.

I stared up at the sky and my chest fluttered with an epiphany. Yes, an epiphany. It struck me like a surge of electricity. Those stars weren’t going anywhere. Not in my lifetime. They might be the only permanent thing left in my world. If the frogs aren’t coming back, maybe it’s time to move on. Looking at the stars made me feel less lonely.

I lean against Ethan’s work bench, next to his surfboard.

“I want him to teach me. I need you to help me develop a plan.”

Ethan and I go down to our thinking bench next to the creek. It’s cool here under the fig tree and the sound of water is conducive to brainstorming. The butcherbird comes and sits on the bench next to me as he always does. We think for a while, Ethan and me and the bird.

“Why don’t you go over there and knock on his door?

Tell him you’d like to learn about astronomy,” says Ethan.

“Oh. Right. Okay.” Ethan is so much better at this stuff than I am.

T 56

he astronomer comes to the door when I knock the next morning. He looks ancient, pale and lined.

He seems to find it hard to focus on my face, looking over my shoulder at the trees.

I THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU 20 19

I sometimes have trouble looking at faces too. Maybe he’s like me. Or maybe he’s spent too much time looking at stars.

“Why do you want to be an astronomer?” he asks.

I should have anticipated this question, but I haven’t.

I’ve brought over my school report. I thought I’d show him my “first in physics” and my project on Kepler’s Third Law. I thought that would impress him. But, why do I want to be an astronomer? I blink. “Because...I like stars,” I mumble then blush furiously. Stupid. Stupid.

But the astronomer smiles. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. I like stars too.” He sits on the bench outside his house and pats the seat next to him. “Tell me about your favourite stars.”

My favourites? I frown as I sit down. I spent most of yesterday studying up on stars. There are so many, how can I choose?

He folds his hands on his lap and waits.

“Wezen, in the constellation of Canis Major...”

He nods.

“Because it’s a supergiant and one of the largest stars we can see. It’s 50,000 times as bright as our sun and 200 times as wide.” Once I start, I have no trouble going on.

“Then there’s Delta Velorum. It’s supposedly the brightest star in the False Cross, but really it’s a triple star system.

And Serpent’s Head in the constellation of Draco...”

Several stars later I stop to draw breath.

He is gazing out at the bush. Is he even listening?

“Tonight should be good viewing,” he says. “If that suits you.”

I nod. “Yes, that suits me.”

We start work at eight, after dinner. We go out to the paddock and the astronomer shows me how to adjust the controls for the telescope. I put my eye to the viewer and gasp at the whirl of stars.

“Every star you can see is brighter than our sun,” he says.

I step aside and the astronomer peers into the telescope, adjusts it, then gestures for me to take a look. “This is the Crab Nebula. It was...”

“Produced by a supernova explosion in 1054. It was so bright that you could see it in daylight.”

He smiles. “You’re going to make a good astronomer, Dani.”

The astronomer teaches me the night sky. Star clusters, galaxies and nebulae. We look at the moons of Jupiter and the shadowy craters on our own moon. It’s a wilderness out there.

Untouched by human hands.

At midnight we go inside to drink tea and eat cake filled with raspberry jam, which he baked himself.

The astronomer surveys his slice of cake. “Did you know, Dani, the Galactic Centre has a cloud of dust containing ethyl formate, the chemical that makes the flavour of raspberries?”

Mouth full of cake, I shake my head.

“Just think,” he sips his dark, tannic tea. “You, me, the cake... We are all made of stardust.”

This makes me dizzy. I plant my feet on the kitchen floor and swallow my stardust cake. I feel like I am teetering on the edge of a new world.

Dawn is breaking as I walk home. The stars vanish, one by one, blotted out by the glare of the sun. Mars glows red on the horizon. Saturn isn’t far behind. And then they are all gone. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t even notice that the frogs weren’t calling.

“H

ow did it go last night?” Mum’s face is crumpled from sleep. She yawns as she joins me at the kitchen table.

“Fine.” I sip my tea. It would be like explaining the sea to someone who has never been there.

“You’re quiet Dani,” she says.

I look at her.

She smiles. “Quieter than normal.”

I’m not good at chitchat. Dani is quiet, my school reports used to say. I’m not sure why this was a bad thing. I can talk fine when I’ve got something to say. Right now, my head is so full of stars, I don’t have space for anything else. “I’m thinking of giving up frogs,” I say.

Mum glances up at me. “What? Why?” She looks pleased at this news.

She wouldn’t look so pleased if she knew that I plan to replace frogs with stars. Mum says it’s fine to have interests, but it’s good to have lots of interests, not just one. That doesn’t work so well for me.

I shrug. “It’s just an idea.”

Mum has strong views about what I should do now I’ve finished school. We’re all about stability here. Mum thinks I should study law or medicine. Something that will earn good money. “I just want you to be comfortable,” she says. Unlike her, she means. I’ve applied to law and medicine, as well as zoology. It’s still months away, so I try not to think about it.

I sleep all day, then go back to see the astronomer at night.

This becomes our routine. Every night that it’s clear, the astronomer and I scan the sky. I see white dwarfs, black holes and asteroids. We eat peppermint cake from the Tadpole Galaxy. Chocolate cake from the Cartwheel Galaxy. Orange cake from the Black Eye Galaxy. I feel like I am being initiated into a secret society.

“You’re looking pale, Dani,” says Mum each morning.

Perhaps I am metamorphosing. Filling up with galactic particles. Becoming a star woman.

“Is there another planet out there we could live on?” I ask the astronomer one night as I gaze through the lens.

“Possibly. It would have to be in the Goldilocks Zone.”

I turn to look at him. “Huh?” “Not too hot, not too cold. It needs to be made of rock, not gas. Have an atmosphere. Water.”

“Right.” The bush rustles behind us, and I can hear the creek chuckle. No frogs.

“There is one planet that could be a possibility.”

“How far away?”

“Forty-one light years.”

I consider this. “Is it nice there?”

“It’s probably covered by a cold tundra. Like Alaska.

Not as nice as here.”

The astronomer and I watch stars all summer. I hardly

notice that more coral has bleached on the reef and half of Australia seems to be burning.

I find my favourite place in the sky, but it isn’t a star. It’s the Great Celestial Emu – a black shape formed by dust clouds in the Milky Way. I can only see its head, but the astronomer tells me that as the nights get cooler its body will emerge. Its long legs.

“There’s an engraving of the Celestial Emu on the sea cliffs in Sydney. It lines up with the dark emu in the sky when emus are laying their eggs. Europeans call that area the Coalsack,” he says, “but I prefer the Aboriginal name.”

“Me too.”

“Aboriginal astronomy focuses on the dark spaces, as well as the stars themselves,” he says.

The more I look at the sky, the more dark spaces I see. How have I gone my whole life without knowing the emu was there?

One night, when I turn up for star-gazing, a young guy with floppy hair comes to the door. He seems to know who I am.

“I’m sorry, but Roy’s had a stroke,” he says.

It takes me a moment to realise who he means.

Mum drives me to visit the astronomer in the hospital. He is asleep, upright in his bed. I sit next to him for ten minutes, twenty. Eventually his eyes flutter open. He focuses on me and smiles, but I don’t think he recognises me.

That night, Saturn is rising on the horizon when I look out the window. I press my hand to the window, watching the planet turn from orange to yellow to white as it climbs. My breath fogs the glass.

A week later, when I go over to the astronomer’s house, the young guy tells me that he’s been moved to a home.

“Somewhere he can be looked after,” he says.

It’s too far away for me to visit.

I sit out in the paddock that night and look at the sky, but it isn’t the same. I can see the Celestial Emu’s neck now, but the astronomer has gone. Everything changes.

O

n Saturday morning, Ethan and I go down to the swimming hole and climb the tree. I stand on the branch next to him. We hang on to the rope swing we put up on the old tree three summers ago.

“One, two, three, go!” he shouts.

We jump, swinging out across the river. As we reach the highest point, we let go. Ethan and I look into each other’s eyes as we fall. We are like astronauts. Unmoored from our spaceship. Flying out into space. Then we land.

The water splashes up around us and we slice into the water.

I keep my eyes open. It is black down there. But I see a flash out of the corner of my eye. A frog? My lungs burn and I surge upwards. Burst from the water. Take a deep gasp of air.

And then I hear it. Craw, craw, craw. The Booroolong frog.

It’s come back.

Lisa Walker (@LisaWalkerTweet) writes novels for adults and young adults, and has also written an ABC Radio National play. Her next young adult novel, The Girl with the Gold Bikini, will be published in 2020.

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KAY’S LAW BY

A

Heather Rose

t three o’clock the winter sun is low in the sky.

He wouldn’t normally be on the road at this time of day, but he’d been to the funeral of a work colleague. Always mystifying and sobering, the things discovered at funerals about people he’d worked alongside for years. The music they had liked and the children, grandchildren and friends who spoke for them.

The coffin, the flowers, the photos. How impossible it was to know, he thought, the true sum of a person, their inner and outer lives. How distant the work years felt too, another life he had lived.

He is almost home when the girl runs straight out from behind a bus in front of his car. She is in a checked blue uniform with a dark backpack. The light catches on clouds and her white socks. She must be nine or ten.

He sees it register on her face, the car coming at her. His granddaughters are long past her age now. He has a grandson who is thirty-five and lives in Berlin. He has a granddaughter in Hong Kong. He senses, rather than sees, a woman at the side of the road raising her hand as she takes in the girl, the car, the inevitable.

Time is the universal factor of synchronisation. His foot is moving to the brake, his hands are tightening on the wheel.

He feels time running backwards, running back to when he lingered to say goodbye to Jim Schofield at the funeral and

how, as he pulled out of the funeral home, the mountain was mauve in the afternoon light.

Newton’s first law of motion: an object will remain at rest or in a state of uniform motion unless that state is changed by an external force. The girl on the road in front of him will keep moving, his car will keep moving, until they collide. He wills the girl to move faster, the car to go slower. He knows his own timeline is almost at an end but this girl has her life like a ripe apple in her hand.

He has his own funeral planned and detailed in a manila folder for his children. His daughters would talk of his devotion. He was sure about that. He had been devoted to their mother, Olive, and to the girls and John – a less successful relationship, that one with his son, but he’d never understood why.

At the funeral, he’d been thinking about Hannah. She came at him in the poignant moments when his heart was not his own, or more his own. He had re-read The Age of Innocence recently. He had been a version of Newland Archer with a love that nearly ended his marriage. Hannah, who had come into his world when he was fifty, when he had been settled with Olive for twenty-five years. Every marriage is challenged by one great love. Gabriel García Márquez had written that.

The universe was always moving towards chaos, but she hadn’t felt like chaos, Hannah. She had felt like peace.

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They had been at the mercy of the law of gravitation.

Two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart. Put simply, things were attracted to one another and it was a mystery of mathematical proportions. A mystery, in the case of Hannah, of memory over time and, as he got older, time over memory.

He wondered if that was a poetic distance.

Law number two: force equals mass times acceleration.

The girl in the uniform would be hit by a formula of the car’s weight and his speed. She would fly through the air or disappear under the chassis.

He had been fourteen years old when Kay Turnbull was ten. He wondered whether it had been that accident, all those years ago, that had put him into a paralysis of momentum. He didn’t want to think about Kay but it was impossible not to.

Was there a universe of alternate possibilities? The life of Kay Turnbull. The love of Hannah Hill.

two years ago and he wonders why he didn’t die before her, so he wouldn’t have had to live in the house without her.

He and Olive were married in 1957. In 1982 he’d met Hannah Hill. Fallen headlong in love with her without warning or reason. She had been unsettlingly familiar, beautiful, clever, full of ideas. They had one weekend together, the only time he’d strayed. He’d done his fair share of flirting before then, but he had never been unfaithful to Olive.

For weeks afterwards, he’d planned how to leave. But when he looked at the home Olive had made, ate the food she’d cooked, observed the disappointment and hope about life, about him, that she’d crafted for herself, the weight of the wreckage he would cause was too much for him. So he’d let Hannah go. The grief of it was so big that the emptiness almost swallowed him whole. But he knuckled down and loved Olive anew, committed himself faithfully to staying until death.

“The universe was always moving towards chaos, but she hadn’t felt like chaos, Hannah. She had felt like peace.”

T

hey were in the same classroom in that area school back in 1946, he and Kay. Mr Glover, the headmaster, Mr Glover who had a Military Cross, had come into the classroom just before three o’clock and asked for a volunteer to take a letter to Mrs Wilson. Kay’s hand went up fast. Pick me! Pick me! She’d had a patch over one lens of her glasses, Kay, just like his son John had as a child. Roger Bentley was chosen for the errand. Kay slumped back in her chair, disappointed, deflated.

Rule number three: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Roger Bentley took the letter and Kay got on the first school bus. He had been on the second. Both buses stopped where Kay and a few other children lived. It was all small farms up there.

He heard Coral Bradburn scream. She was two seats behind the driver, he was three. What had Kay been thinking? When you’re ten, when there is sunshine, when the war is over, when there’s the promise of afternoon tea and the swing in the backyard, all this might have beckoned her thoughts. But not the thought of traffic as she emerged between the buses, running across the narrow road into the path of a fully laden four-tonne Bedford truck coming down the hill. It hit her hard, swallowing her in, dragging her down under its weight.

The truck went past, slowing, shuddering to a stop. Kay was on the road. He didn’t look again. There was a lot of blood. A keening noise was coming from the children all around him.

This single memory has come back to him almost every day of his life. He is eighty-seven. His children tell him he’s aged well, but he feels his age every day. More so since Olive died

When Hannah died just two years after their affair, he’d mourned her all over again. Raged against time and space and the infinite variables of collision. She left a particular solitude.

It was a story no-one would tell at his funeral.

Now here was this girl, nameless on the road ahead of him, just after three o’clock in the afternoon. She had turned completely to face him. This Kay of the future, this little Kay who is blonde, not brunette like the Kay of the past.

All his driving life he has entered school zones slowly.

He senses time having circled round to meet him. A boy on a bus powerless to stop a truck, and a man, an old man now, with another chance.

His car comes to a halt a length away from her. He is close enough to see that she has blue eyes. Life, life smiles at him as she waves, as if secretly they are old friends. Then she runs to the other side of the road and is swept into the arms of a woman standing there holding a baby. He feels ridiculously happy and terribly sad.

There is a poetic distance calculated by the weight of memory over the momentum of time, he thinks, as he drives on. Kay’s Law. Hannah’s Law. There is a poetic distance.

Heather Rose (@Rose_HMD) is the author of eight novels, including The Museum of Modern Love.

Her new novel, Bruny, will be published in October.

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PUZ ZLES 1

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3

4

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11

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14 15

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20 21

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CRYPTIC CLUES

The answers for the cryptic and quick clues are the same.

ACROSS 1. Plant works by single throttle (9) 6. Jelly back or heavyweight? (5) 9. Web from tarantula initially spun here in tent (3,8) 10. Phoebe’s oddly retro dance (3) 11. Cup of tea left with ice (7) 12. Swing in bunker with ease, they say (7) 13. Bad idea to recruit Liverpool’s wingers for United (6) 14. Occasionally admits models make scraps (8) 16. Refined US oil not a panacea (8) 18. Scrapped agent due to come back in (6) 21. Appropriate sign of piercing?

(7) 22. Penny leaves underwear by the speaker in the dark (7) 24. Dwarf fish thrown back (3) 25. In brief, one guy is keen (11) 26. Way up in the sky? (5) 27. Players from Roar fouled outside the box (9)

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DOWN 1. Socks I can’t put on (5) 2. It grows on the foot of Spooner’s Manx (7) 3. NATO in field manoeuvres infiltrating city in secrecy (15) 4. Hope nerves contained – she’s first in to bat (6) 5. Nineties medley is genius (8) 6. Ice cream then a meat pie?

Hmm… (15) 7. Bible missing a book doesn’t work (7) 8. Ironed again and hung up (9) 13. City Road blanketed by morning mist (9) 15. Cook taco mixture for Aussie bird (8) 17. Cyril’s review of Jolson is expressive (7) 19. Tongue, face, muscles etc (7) 20. Known boozer left in charge (6) 23. Tear off wrapping around Times supplement (5)

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QUICK CLUES ACROSS 1. Plant used as a vegetable (9) 6. Significant (5) 9. Global system of computer networks (3,8) 10. Dance (3) 11. Goblet (7) 12. Circus swing (7) 13. United (6) 14. Throws out (8) 16. Answer (8) 18. Fought (6) 21. Designate for a specific purpose (7) 22. Oblivious (7) 24. Fictional dwarf (3) 25. Smart (11) 26. White or pale in appearance (5) 27. Group of musicians (9) DOWN 1. Prank (5) 2. Protective growth on the foot (7) 3. Privacy of information (15) 4. First in to bat (6) 5. Noted genius (8) 6. Dangerous drug (15) 7. Unemployed (7) 8. Stifled (9) 13. European city (9) 15. Australian parrot (8) 17. Melodic (7) 19. Vernacular (7) 20. Communal (6) 23. Added (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 Fiction Judges Thuy On, Nicola Redhouse Books Editor Thuy On Film Editor Annabel Brady-Brown Small Screens Editor Aimee Knight Music Editor Sarah Smith Cartoonist Andrew Weldon ENQUIRIES Advertising Simone Busija on (03) 9663 4533 sbusija@bigissue.org.au Subscriptions (03) 9663 4533 subscribe@bigissue.org.au Editorial (03) 9663 4522 editorial@bigissue.org.au The Big Issue, GPO Box 4911, Melbourne, VIC 3001 thebigissue.org.au © 2019 Big Issue In Australia Ltd All rights reserved.

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