The Big Issue Australia - Fiction Edition 2020

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$9 FOURTEEN SHORT STORIES SIXTEEN EXTRA PAGES 02 OCT 2020

621 Ed.

FE AT UR IN G Bruce Pascoe Claire G Coleman Alice Bishop Millie Baylis Nina Cullen Michael McGirr Jennie Del Mastro Rebecca Varcoe Brooke Dunnell Ferne Merrylees Anna Kate Blair Jodie Kewley Colin Varney Angharad Hampshire

ILLUSTR AT IO NS BY Janelle Barone

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Contents 08

Bioluminescent

12

Boxing Day

16

Someplace Else

20

Unconscious Woman Nods

22

by Millie Baylis

by Nina Cullen

by Michael McGirr

by Bruce Pascoe

Journey of the Pioneer

by Jennie Del Mastro

26

A Place for My Head

30

Saving Face

34

Glassmaking

38

Wordless

42

Albertine, Vaguely

46

Rocky

by Rebecca Varcoe

EDITION

621

50 Solo Colin Varney by

Lines 54 Heart Alice Bishop by

Last 58 The Angharad Hampshire by

THE REGULARS

04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor

06 Streetsheet 62 Crossword

illustrations by Janelle Barone

Janelle Barone is a commercial and editorial illustrator currently working in Melbourne. Her work aims to tell stories, create atmosphere and cause contemplation. She is inspired by comic art, traditional Japanese printmaking and cinematography.

by Claire G Coleman

by Brooke Dunnell

by Ferne Merrylees

by Anna Kate Blair

by Jodie Kewley

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Ed’s Letter

Your Say E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

Stories to Live By

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor

I

n her essay ‘The White Album’, Joan Didion famously wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”. When bad things happen, there needs to be a reason. We forge a narrative line through everything we experience – it’s how we make sense of the world.

And in 2020 – this brutal, lonely year – we’ve never needed a good story more.

We are proud to present the 16th annual Fiction Edition, made possible thanks to the generous support of The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Across 64 pages you will find musings – sometimes tender, sometimes raucous, always searching – on life in catastrophic times. Musings on love, loss and survival in the throes of environmental wreckage, a global pandemic and psychic noise.

From magical thinking in a hospital room, to the mechanical pulse of a daughter’s V8 Commodore, from a quarantine hotel room to an iso affair,

from a stilted exchange in a Venetian giftshop to yearning nights in a freezing Gippsland Airbnb, these pages shimmer with life, with empathy and with hope.

So what is the story, here? This edition is about reaching – for meaning, yes, but also for each other. This reaching is ripe on every page, but perhaps no more so than in the number of submissions we received this year: a whopping 871.

These stories were blind judged by books editor and poet Thuy On and writer and editor Katherine Smyrk. Their longlist of 31 entries was read by the editorial team and whittled down to the stories you see here. On top of this, we are thrilled to publish new pieces by Bruce Pascoe, Claire G Coleman and Alice Bishop. We thank Janelle Barone for her stellar illustrations.

And we thank you. For your continued support in an extraordinary time. We hope these stories bring you levity and connection. We hope they help you imagine what’s possible.

04

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia.

It was created as a social enterprise 24 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

I didn’t realise how much I missed the people behind the Women’s Subscription Enterprise until the Briggs edition [Ed#618] arrived with Janine’s name written on the purple sticker, and Karen’s name written on the mailing address insert. To Janine and Karen, and all of the other women behind the WSE for SA, welcome back!

I love my subscription to The Big Issue, including the experience of reading your names each time the magazine arrives in my letterbox. Thank you.

Stay well and keep up the good work!

LOUISE SIMMONS GOLDEN GROVE I SA

Thank you for the ‘Secret World of Tenet’! I purchased my copy [Ed#618] from a most gracious man in George Street, Sydney, and read this article after seeing the film and being left battered and bruised by it. Michael Sun’s lucid description of the film, and his interview with John David Washington, brought insight and appreciation for what we saw. So thank you again, and many thanks to your vendor for his grace. He thanked me when I declined to purchase at first.

I went back and am pleased that I did!

JILL ELLEN ASHFIELD I NSW

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work.

• The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 19 locations around the country.

• The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales.

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Louise wins a copy of Claire G Coleman’s book The Old Lie. We share her new short fiction on p30. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

interview by Matt Stedman photo by Nat Rogers

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

02 OCT 2020

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT EUROPCAR, BUPA DENTAL AND THE BODY SHOP IN ADELAIDE CBD

05

Chris C

I was born in Hamilton, New Zealand. I lived there until I was about 10. Dad was a truck driver, so Mum mostly looked after my two brothers, my sister and me. New Zealand’s a beautiful country, with a lot of sheep and snow. I do get homesick. I don’t have any family in NZ anymore.

There were some complications with my birth and I’ve been in a wheelchair pretty much my whole life. I’ve had polio, and my balance is poor. For a while, I had to wear a helmet.

For me, school wasn’t very good. I had a disability and had to go to special school, by taxi. I found it very difficult. I didn’t start talking until I was seven, and I can’t read. One day I hid in the cupboard at school. I hid there for the whole night while teachers and the police looked for me.

My parents split when I was 11. Later on, I was put in a boys’ home. Once I turned 18, I moved to Adelaide, and, after my dad passed away when I was 20, the rest of my family moved over here.

In 2014, I lost Mum to cancer. My siblings are no longer with me.

I was living in a caravan. Disability SA gave me support and help, but that was my life for a while. Then I spent 30 or so years moving between different supported residences through the Housing Trust.

I have a lot of issues that people don’t understand: mental health, depression and anxiety. Diabetes, brain damage, blindness and polio. I’ve had a stroke. Some people don’t really know how to treat me sometimes.

The way I got to selling is I knew a few Big Issue vendors from around. I spoke to vendor Ron a few times about The Big Issue and he was especially encouraging. I love the job – I enjoy meeting people, and I’m great at calling out to people. The staff love me.

You get regulars and sometimes different people too. Digital payments have been great. It’s great to be around others and share support and help other people too.

I met my fiancée about seven years ago, at the units where I was living. She has mental illness as well, so it’s nice to click with someone who understands what I’m going through. It’s hard sometimes to express how I feel. That’s what I’m hoping for; I want people to read this story and understand. I have to calm myself down a lot.

In my spare time I like watching DVDs – Batman is my favourite. I’m a Crows supporter, too, though I’ve never been to a game. Hopefully I will, one day. I like to share food with my housemate – me and him seem to click, and he’s happy with me.

I appreciate all the help and support I get from Disability SA. There are some lovely bosses and I appreciate all the staff at Park Holme on Marion Road. They help me get on the train to the city.

COVID has been tough, being stuck at home. I was bored and upset, short on money, and it was hard not working. I’m really excited to be back.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

Safety First VENDOR SPOTLIGHT

STACY

STA CY IS ONE SIE OF A KIND !

With my brother being in hospital I haven’t been able to get out as much as I usually do, so I thought I’d say that you are all great people to buy your magazines off me. I know with this coronavirus it hasn’t been a good time for us all, but we can still hold our heads high and say, “Well, at least I’m trying to stay safe.”

Anyway, I look forward to seeing you all in the future and keep smiling.

STEW SANDGATE & THE NUNDAH MARKETS | BRISBANE

Office Business

The Best Medicine

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

t’s so awesome to see you all safe and happy again.

I am always asked, “Why do you wear the onesie and the fun hats?” The answer is: to spread joy and laughter. Not just recently, but for years, there has been too much darkness in the world, and I can’t feel happy myself without others being happy. So, I decided to bring joy and laughter to the people. Yes, especially now through this pandemic. We all need to have a laugh and share every laugh with others. After all, it’s the only “contagious” thing that’s really safe to share. I am always thinking of others, so I encourage you to laugh and thank those on our frontlines as well as those essential workers. Peace, love and rainbows to you all from the rainbow unicorn with the bunny ears.

STACY ROYAL PERTH HOSPITAL | PERTH

Setting up my home office has been a really cool project for me. The main reason I did the office is to set it up for The Big Issue, so I can go out and sell it on the street. I store signs, magazines and bits and pieces. I also do my own personal paperwork on my computers, then I use the room for entertainment – playing games on my computer, drinking coffee and iced coffee and watching TV. And I watch a lot of YouTube videos here. It took me over six months to reset the office and put more bits and pieces in it – buying a TV and computer, putting pictures up and setting it up for Zoom meetings and Webex with my iPad and my computer. And then, I put a couch in. I’ve got a little bar fridge with all my teas and coffees set up. So, the office is now set – all I’ve got to do is little bits and pieces for the future.

PHIL RICHMOND MARKET | MELBOURNE

Green Light I got a call from my support worker at GreenLight Housing, telling me that my accommodation has been extended until the end of March 2021. When she told me, I thought she was joking – I couldn’t believe it was being extended that long. Before

Royalty Is it relevant anymore?

TUKUF MELBOURNE

Are kings, queens

Ronnie’s Funnies

and politicians, judges, lawyers

Q Do you want to hear a COVID-19 pick-up line?

A You can’t have quarantine without u & I.

and people of privilege any better than common men and women?

RONNIE CNR CREEK & EAGLE STS |

Who’s to say?

BRISBANE

I hope I live

Helping Myself First, I’d like to say thank you to The Big Issue for the amazing start to 2020 I’ve been given. From being homeless since 2011, I decided to help myself. I found a place to live and I have money in my pocket and, being a people person, I can make all genders, old or young, laugh – with or without a purchase of The Big Issue.

in a world where people of privilege or royalty will help out the battler especially in these COVID-19 times We can only hope things will get better DANIEL K HUTT ST & WAYMOUTH ST | ADELAIDE

CASPA TRAM SHEDS, MAXWELL ST | SYDNEY

In the Frame I’m Jacob from Sydney. Photography is one of my hobbies and I want to get more into it. I went to Art School from Year 7 to 12 and, while I work at The Big Issue, I like to take pictures of some of the things I see from day to day. I especially like nature and flowers with textures, shades and different effects. Even on photos of Sydney you can see the different patterns with sizes, distances, proportions and heights – the beauty of it all! Taking photos gives me a way to get away from normal life and look outside the square.

JACOB CNR PITT & BATHURST STS | SYDNEY

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

02 OCT 2020

TA K E S J A C O B T P H OTO !

A E R G A

on my tablet, but more importantly, it’s given me a sense of escape, which helps, given everything that’s happening right now.

07

that, I thought I’d be homeless once again, back at Flagstaff Gardens.

Since then, my support worker has got the ball rolling with a potential job, delivering food packages for people during lockdown. It’s certainly given me a sense of security. It feels really good. Previously, I had a bad case of cramp in my leg – I’d feel it every time I woke up, and it’d linger for four or five hours at a time. But in all the time I’ve been in housing, I’ve only felt it rear its head on a few occasions. There have been some nice benefits in other ways: I’ve bought myself brand-new shoes.

Usually, it’s hard to get shoes that fit – I take a size 14 – but now I’ve got two pairs, and I’ve got some new tracksuits and shirts, too. There are a lot of things I no longer have to think about. Before, I was wearing all of my coats and I’d still be cold – freezing sometimes – and I’d always be worried about whether it was going to rain. When I was homeless, I was always bored. Now I can play games

8

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Bioluminescent atalie had been missing for three weeks when I packed the car one night and drove the three hours to the Airbnb in Gippsland alone. I remembered her driving in the dark last time we were here; her hair brushing the ceiling in my tiny car as she tried to make sense of the black shapes. When I reached the white-painted wooden sign at the gravel road, my heart started. I imagined her shivering out the front in a puffer jacket, looking up and smiling as I finally approached, and I wondered how long she might have been there waiting for me. I drove down the driveway with my lips pressed together and pulled right up to the entrance of the house, washing the deck with light. Of course, no-one was there.

Inside, the small house looked as I’d remembered. Flakes of rust-coloured paint hung off the walls, and the furniture was old in a fashionable way. I took my boots off and dropped them with my bag in the small kitchen by the pot‑bellied stove. My limbs felt filled with ice. There was firewood by the fireplace but I didn’t know what I was meant to do with it. Were you supposed to put newspaper in before or after?

I thought to call Natalie to ask.

W

e’d found the house online together one night in bed, looking for a place to go for the long weekend. I thought it was too isolated, but Natalie liked it for that.

“Rhi,” she said, “we could walk around naked, have sex in every room if we wanted to.”

We were two young women living in a share house; we were used to making ourselves small and quiet. I lay my head on her shoulder as she clicked through photos of kangaroos and echidnas on the property, murmuring about how beautiful they were. She’d grown up in the suburbs and hadn’t seen much wildlife before. I’d always found the presence of animals generally boring, but I didn’t tell her this in case it made me a bad person.

T

he kettle whistled through the rooms when it boiled, and I poured its water into the running bath that took forever to fill. I undressed and eased myself in, letting the water burn my skin – it almost felt like pleasure. My skin adjusted to the water, then to the quiet. I drank from a longneck and watched the pale ceramic tiles, the dirty light bulb. I wondered where Natalie was. I remembered shaving her legs in the bath at

home on our first Christmas Eve together. Her long legs were muscular from bike-riding and covered in black hairs, and I kissed them indulgently all the way up to her thighs between razor strokes. She had sat on the edge of the bath in her undies, her face pulled in concentration, examining my work. She asked me how I could be fucked doing this all the time. I told her I liked it, found it meditative. After Christmas lunch, we both stood in the doorway to leave, with our cotton dresses and soft bare legs, and my mum snuck a Christmas card in Natalie’s bag that read “Welcome to the family!” with a wonky smiley face. I remembered how much Natalie had beamed when she saw it, how despite my embarrassment she displayed the card on our dresser. I tried to find clues in these flashes of memory. I looked for them in the singlets and receipts and bobby pins left behind. The bobby pins might have been mine, but I chose to believe they were hers and that she’d need to come back for them.

I

n the morning her brother called, but he didn’t have any news. He just spoke to me about an SBS program he’d seen, how much he hated everyone he worked with, how stupid it felt to go to work at all. I stood on the deck facing the wetlands – damp green and brown earth under sheets of mist. The reception was terrible. I held the phone to my ear loosely so sometimes I heard his voice and sometimes the wind carried it on. I can’t remember what I might have said back to him. Maybe, “That sounds nice, yes, no of course I’ll tell you.” I might have said some of those things. I don’t think he’d stopped believing I knew something he didn’t.

Maybe he thought I was hiding Natalie somewhere so I could have her all to myself. Well, he wouldn’t be completely wrong – I’d booked the house in case she came here, in case she only wanted me to find her, after I’d exhausted every other place I could think to look. The initial clarity of purpose that often comes with crisis had faded, and I scrambled trying to make myself useful, trying to keep myself as far away from the possibility that she could actually be gone.

I

’d brought a suitcase of her notebooks, drawings and missing posters, and I sat at the kitchen table with them spread out in front of me like a good detective. I knew the statistics got worse each day she was still missing.

They wouldn’t say it, but you could tell the police were already fatiguing. You could tell they’d already decided what had happened. She didn’t leave a note, but she’d packed a bag

02 OCT 2020

N

Millie Baylis

09

BY

and left her phone. When they came and took her toothbrush, I went to the bedroom and stuffed my face in one of Natalie’s jumpers to cry. There seemed to be a stain left in the air after they left. I thought about how much she would have hated that I’d ever spoken to them about her at all. I scrubbed the house with hot water and eucalyptus oil but it was no use.

I couldn’t think straight, so I put my boots on and walked the perimeter of the property. It opened up before me like a painting, and I tried to take it all in: the rainwater tank, the shivering trees, the flooded grass, the wattle, banksia and bottlebrush. I didn’t see any kangaroos or echidnas.

I walked around with my phone high in the air like a fool, trying to get a signal. I’d spent the last three weeks compulsively checking and refreshing Natalie’s Twitter looking for any sign of new activity, but the last posted and liked tweet remained the same.

S

he’d disappeared before. One night, I found her in the tunnel under Kensington station. After hours of calling and texting, she finally sent me her pin location. I used my phone light to search through the darkness and found her balled up and shaking against the graffitied wall with her headphones in. I walked up to her slowly, the way you’re supposed to do with a wild animal to let them know it’s safe. I put my arm out to touch her shoulder and she flinched as if she expected it to hurt.

“Nat,” I said, “it’s me.”

She looked up and stared at me for a long time, and when she finally seemed to register me she started to sob. I tried to remain calm. I asked her what she was feeling.

“I don’t know how to explain it. Nothing feels real,” she said. “I just don’t know how to be here.”

I wanted to take her to Emergency but she said she just wanted to rest, and we agreed, Emergency was the worst place for rest. We went to McDonald’s on the way home instead and sat in the artificial light eating fries.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying. “This isn’t your job.”

One night, she declared we had cured mental illness.

We were watching something on Netflix, giggling in that can’t‑breathe way when she said, “Look at us; we’re actually the happiest people I know,” and I agreed.

10

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

went into town to stick up some of the posters that her brother had made with a photo of her that I’d taken.

I went to the corner cafe by the ocean and with its white tables and chairs it reminded me of a school canteen or a hospital. I thought of the cafe Natalie had worked at in Coburg. Some mornings I would visit her and sit in one of the booths, annotating research for my thesis. She’d bring out a plate of eggs, asparagus and potato, and set it on my table with a wink and a mouthed “love you”. I’d watch her walk away wearing my jeans – her bum filling them out much better than mine ever did.

The woman who served me now wore her black and silver hair in a braid down her back.

“Enjoying Golden?” she asked.

I nodded.

She looked bored. It had only been a couple of months

since Natalie and I had spent New Year’s Day hungover on the couch, watching the live news of the bushfires across the continent, including Gippsland – the scenes of blood‑red light, of melted fire-truck metal, of small children being evacuated on boats wearing masks. For weeks afterwards, when the whole city was swallowed in smoke, and the summer sky was dishwater-grey, we couldn’t stop watching the news like everyone else. Natalie showed me the video going around of a bird singing the fire-engine siren song.

I wanted to ask the waitress what it was like for her, to keep going after a crisis like that. Instead, I asked her where the best place was in town to get reception. She said the beach, then went back behind the counter.

S

ometimes Natalie had seen me so much it overwhelmed me, and other times she went so deep into herself I felt invisible. We’d had an argument in the car after I picked her up from the cafe, but I can’t remember what about. It was hard sometimes, not knowing what words or gestures of hers or mine would accidentally needle and puncture the other and bring up some deep, buried, painful thing. I told her I was going to leave so she would tell me not to, but she didn’t.

So I got out of the car, and hadn’t seen her since.

I

walked to the one supermarket in town for something to do in the evening. People filled their baskets with groceries mechanically. A woman picked five of the best-looking oranges. Others joined a neat line to the cash register. I watched them going on with such simple purpose, a list to complete – they knew what they had to do. I walked back along the main road to the house. Once or twice I thought, suddenly, of jumping in front of a speeding truck. Not to die, but for someone else to have to decide what to do next. By the time I got back, it was dark, and the small house was lit up amber by all the lamps. Rain pelted down on the plastic cover outside over the decking. I couldn’t bring myself to go into any of the bedrooms, so I camped out on the couch with blankets and booze.

The last time we were here we’d put on a CD from the owner’s shelf and danced around the edges of the room together with a manic energy, then fell into each other exhausted, panting and laughing into each other’s sweaty bodies. Natalie said we should move here, live the quiet life.

We had a whole plan: the walls of our house would be lined with CDs like here, and the kids we’d have would think that we were cool because by then CDs would be like records now.

And the only way we’d damage our kids would be by loving them too much. Natalie wondered if it was even ethical to have kids in a world that was ending; a conversation that I tired of quickly. That’s when we saw the kangaroo, right outside the panes of the glass door, and Natalie gasped and said, “Hey little mate.”

Now, I sat on the floor opening and closing every one of the owner’s CD cases from the tall wooden shelf. I don’t know what I expected to find.

“Nat,” I said, out loud. I told her about the supermarket and the rain. I read out tweets that she might find amusing.

L

ight spread across the sky, turning it a pale lilac.

My hands shook around my phone. I automatically checked and refreshed her Twitter again and again for two hours in the car, waiting. The wind made everything seem violent. I watched the ocean slapping the wet grey sand and was thinking of calling the police to get them to trace the calls when my phone rang again. I jumped so hard I almost dropped it.

“Hello?” I might have shouted.

“Good afternoon, miss,” the voice said. “My name is Andy.

I’m calling from IBM Research—” I hung up and stared through the windscreen. Then I got out of the car and the cold, briny air burned my cheeks and whipped my hair. I pulled my sleeves over my hands and walked down the rotting wooden stairs to the beach. There were three older men on the sand dunes, all in windcheaters, beanies and service-station sunnies. One was crouched with a bucket by long beachgrass moving in the wind. The other two stood by a huge shark fishing rod with their arms crossed, laughing with their heads back. I must have looked a mess.

I heard them all go very quiet as I approached, but my body barely registered the fear that I normally felt alone with groups of men. I walked to the pier. There was no-one else around and when I looked back to the men, they were laughing in conversation again.

I was trying not to think about the statistics, or the phone calls, or the bodies I’d read about that had been found in water tanks or shallow graves or forests, or how I still hadn’t seen a kangaroo. I tried to think instead of the way Natalie often laughed in her sleep while a podcast still played in her headphones; of the morning sunlight streaming in through the venetians at home making shapes over our bodies

Millie Baylis (@MillieBaylis) is a writer living in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. In 2019 she was a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk fellow and in 2020 she is a Moreland Writer in Residence and the Program Coordinator of the Emerging Writers’ Festival. She writes essays, memoir and short stories – largely about living with disability and chronic illness, and her work has recently appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Overland and The Victorian Writer.

02 OCT 2020

W

hen my phone rang in the morning, it was still dark, and I was still heavy with Ambien.

I heaved myself up and stumbled over the rug and the firewood. I didn’t make it in time.

There were four missed calls, all from a private number. My cells started spinning like mad. I pulled my phone from the charger and stared at it, willing it to light up again. The signal dropped out. I searched for my car keys and got my jumper, parka, and boots at the door to put on over the dress I’d slept in. I turned the car on and reversed out.

The roads to the ocean were blurred with fog. I could just make out the telephone wires, the thick trees. I tried to focus on where the roads curved, but I kept glancing down at my phone checking for reception. I swerved on and off the asphalt, the wheels grumbling beneath me. A man in a passing panel wagon beeped as he went past and I swore at him. When I saw the phone had full bars, I parked the car next to a bush at the entrance to the beach and waited.

together, over the warm nest of us; and the way we often slept facing each other, gulping each other in.

The ocean looked less mean up close. At the end of the pier, I could now see all the colours of blue in the deep water; the sun sparkling off it. I wanted to dive in and swim to the horizon, to find out what separated the earth from the sky.

White sea foam stirred and crashed beneath me. It rose, then thrashed over the legs of the pier. I imagined the waves rising high enough to devour the pier, the beach, everything that stretched beyond. I could never imagine that before, not really, not like she could. I stood on the edge of the pier on tiptoes. I imagined the ice water flooding my lungs and shocking my system. Then I imagined her, underwater. If I swam down far enough, further and further to the sea’s floor beyond the reach of any atmospheric light, she would be there, her light like a jellyfish, bioluminescent, spreading through the midnight waters. And if I could just reach that place, we would still be together, and we would both be okay.

There was a pounding of steps on the pier. I looked up and saw one of the men was jogging towards me in a disorientating blur. He called out something. When he reached the end of the pier, puffing slightly, his arm was outstretched towards me.

“Looked like you were gonna fall in,” he said. “You dropped this on the sand. Keeps ringing.” He put my phone in my hand, and its vibrations buzzed down my wrist. I eyed him, then my phone, and answered it, lifting it to my ear without saying anything.

“Rhi? Are you there?” Even through the wind, I could hear it was Nat’s brother.

“Tom?” “Bloody hell. We’ve been calling and calling.” The line crackled. “Come home.”

“What?” The waves hit the legs of the pier, over and over.

“Can you hear me? I said, come home, Rhi. They’ve found her.” His voice broke, and he sounded very young.

“She’s okay. I mean, they’ve got her in this hospital now and I mean, she’s okay.”

The man took his sunglasses off and watched me. I tried to catch my breath.

11

I might have looked mad but there was no-one to see me.

“I still haven’t seen any animals,” I said. “I wonder if you’re near any?” The room was still. I looked at the walls, at the tacky framed beach sunset print hung up.

“Nat?” I said, again, louder, and something turned in my throat. When there was no answer, I felt pathetic.

12

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Boxing Day ottie was a precocious seven. She was clever anyway but there was something animal in her instinct. She could sniff out taboo and transgression, awkwardness and anxiety. She pressed on and on until someone ended up crying. It was mostly Josie, even though she was three years older, but I was sometimes on the other end of it too. My adolescent stretch marks and secrets also suffered her comments and scrutiny.

There’s a lot you want to keep to yourself when you’re twelve and Lottie would overhear my conversations with friends or catch a few words in my diary by looking quietly over my shoulder. Her real talent was in putting the pieces together. She was probably just making it up, but her declarations were close enough to the real thing to make Josie and I feel embarrassed or horrified.

“You know Josie has public hair,” Lottie declared during a lull in conversation one lunchtime. Of course, Josie ran off mortified and stayed in her bedroom for the rest of the afternoon. Mum talked to Lottie about privacy and appropriate table topics and Dad set her straight on the semantics.

“Pubic hair. Pubic. The word could easily be confused with public but it’s pubic hair and we all have it. You will too one day.”

That made Lottie cry and run off to her room too, which left me sitting opposite Dad with the word “pubic” hanging in the air. Thanks Lottie.

I

t had been hot since October and once school broke up, we were in the pool every day. I was in and out. Josie spent a little longer in there and Lottie only got out to grab a sandwich through the fence. I can’t even say she got out to go to the toilet. I’m pretty sure she just wee’d on the edge of the pool and splashed it away. Terrible habit. She learned it from watching Josie and me. It was supposed to be something you did so subtly that no-one noticed but when you’re playing Marco Polo with three people and one of them pauses the game to casually “sit” on the sidelines and have a splash, there’s nowhere to hide.

Christmas Day was something we celebrated at home just the five of us but Boxing Day was a barbeque. Aunty Vee and Uncle George came with little Noah. Leah came with whoever she was with. She was our cool aunty and calling her just by first name was definitely part of it.

When the doorbell rang, it was just Mum and me inside.

I was old enough to be roped into preparations and found myself in the land of women in kitchens at functions. It was

a whole new world of salad dressings, plating up, finding napkins and finding a place in the fridge for whatever the guests had just arrived with.

“Can you get it?” Mum was juicing a lemon.

It was Leah. She was a pink and blue Impressionist painting through the glass. When I opened the door, she was rifling through her handbag and looked surprised to see me there.

“Oh, Pipkin. Look at you!” She held out her arms for a hug.

I could smell her perfume, what I know now is regarded as woody oriental, but also cigarettes. She was the only person who used that nickname anymore and I actually loved it.

It made me feel like I was going to be tucked in and told a bedtime story and that everything was going to be alright.

“How’s my beautiful girl?”

She shooed me in front of her down the hall and when I turned around, I saw her wipe her eye under her sunnies.

“Leah!” Mum came down the hallway holding her arms out.

“Baby, can you just shake the dressing in the jar and put it on the green salad? We’ll be back in a tic.” She opened the door to her bedroom and Leah went in.

“What’s wrong?” It was muffled but I knew that you could hear enough through shut doors in our house. I could hear Leah crying but not what she said in between. Mum was clearer. “When? Just now?” Some more mumbling.

“What a prick!”

W

e thought Leah was the best of our relatives.

She wasn’t married, didn’t have any kids, believed in extravagances and seemed to be a lot more fun than any of the others. She was the youngest and Mum and Uncle George were still her protective older siblings.

“Poor Leah” was a common refrain when Mum got off the phone with her. From what I could gather when Mum and Dad talked about it in hushed tones there was always something going on: flats she was evicted from, jobs she lost, health scares and men who had left her.

There hadn’t been any recent drama that I’d heard but Mum was being more subtle than usual.

“You can’t talk about that stuff with Big Ears around,” Dad had said after one of her “Poor Leah” declarations.

“Big Ears?”

“He means me.” Lottie sat up and smiled at them from the couch. “He means I listen to everything.”

Mum sighed but has definitely been more discreet since then.

02 OCT 2020

L

Nina Cullen

13

BY

“S

ausages!” Dad shouted down the hallway and snapped his barbeque tongs. “Where’s your Mum?” “Just with Leah.”

“Oh. Anyway, come on, meat’s ready. What’s going on with the salads?”

We took Aunty Vee’s potato salad out of the fridge. I put the dressing on the green salad and told Dad to take the plate of cheese and dips.

The girls were still in the pool and Aunty Vee was drying Noah with a towel and trying to get him out of his wet swim‑nappy. Uncle George transferred sausages and skewers onto a tray.

I took one with prawns and started eating before Dad could tell me there weren’t enough for everyone and that the sausages were for the kids.

“Aarf. Aarf!” Lottie played seal at the pool fence trying to get fed for her efforts.

“No. Not today Missy. No-one is sliding you your meal today. This is a family lunch. Come on. Out you get.

Josie, you too.”

Josie, Lottie and I shared a bench. Aunty Vee made up two plates and put one in front of Uncle George who had Noah sitting in his lap. She noticed the two empty chairs where Mum and Leah would sit.

“Should I have waited?” She looked up.

“God no,” said Uncle George.

She looked to Dad. “They’ll be out in a minute. Tuck in. It’ll get cold.”

L

eah stepped through the screen door and held a bottle of champagne aloft. She pushed her sunnies up her nose. “Well you came prepared.” Dad stood up and took the bottle, ushering her and Mum into their chairs. “And it seems we certainly need to make a toast!

But that’s not my news to tell. George? Vee? Any takers?”

Mum sat forward and smiled. Leah looked down at her cutlery and then back up again making sure she was smiling.

George reached out to hold Vee’s hand and then kissed it.

“We’re…”

“I’m…pregnant again.”

Mum was up and clapping and hugging and looking at Dad. “We thought something was up. Didn’t we? I had a hunch but you don’t want to say anything until people are ready to say it. Oh, that’s wonderful. How many weeks?”

“Thirteen tomorrow.”

Mum counted forward on her fingers. “Hmm, winter baby.

That’ll be a few cold nights.”

“Ange, what a thing to say!” Dad shook his head. “I’m sure what she meant to say was, ‘That’s great news, congratulations.’”

“I did. I already said that.”

“No, you said—” “It’s fine.” Vee held up her hand. “Of course, we all dream of spring babies but it doesn’t always work out that way does it?” She laughed and looked to Mum and Leah for solidarity.

I noticed that she had soda water instead of wine. No wonder Mum had a hunch.

“Let me get the glasses.” Leah stood up quickly and went inside.

each other.

“Maybe a quick dip and then we’ve got to head off. This one isn’t going to last much longer.” In Uncle George’s lap, Noah clapped his hands. He bounced up and down trying to launch himself further forward every time.

The adults started a one-handed clean-up, expertly holding onto their champagne while stacking plates, covering salad bowls and putting foil over meat.

“I can do it,” Leah said. “I’m not going in. I don’t have any swimmers.”

“Come on,” Lottie moaned. “Everyone in!”

“Sorry sweet pea. I didn’t bring any swimmers. I’ll be right here to witness your glory though.”

“Mum has swimmers. Don’t you Mum?” “Of course, I do.”

Nina Cullen (@ninakcullen) is a Sydney-based writer.

Her work has appeared in publications including Sleepers Almanac, Island, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. She blogs at ninacullen.com and is finishing an anthology of short stories.

02 OCT 2020

“L

et’s have a swim!” Josie pushed her plate away and got up. “A game of Marco Polo.

Everyone playing.”

Uncle George and Aunty Vee looked at

“No, really. It’s fine.” Leah held her hand up. “I don’t feel like a swim anyway.”

“It’s thirty-nine degrees. You definitely feel like a swim!”

“Come on Lee,” Uncle George joined in. “All in!”

“No, really. I don’t feel like it.”

“Swi-im! Swi-im! Swi-im!” We all chanted louder and louder.

Josie, Lottie and I were already in. We started splashing too.

“Come with me.” Mum held her hand out to Leah. “We’ll get you a pair of swimmers.” Leah reluctantly let herself be led inside by Mum. Dad beat me to my blow-up slice of watermelon. Josie was already lounging on her doughnut but Lottie’s flamingo lay deflated on the bricks. Sometime between unwrapping it yesterday morning and now, it got a hole. She tried to tip Dad off my watermelon instead, so I joined in.

Mum re-emerged from the house in the floral bikini Josie, Lottie and I had bought her for Christmas. She dived in before any of us could notice and splash. She hated being splashed before getting in the water, so naturally we loved doing it.

“Lookin’ good Ange!” It was gross when Mum and Dad spoke to each other in that tone but he was still looking at her and distracted, so I gave him a final push and reclaimed my watermelon.

Aunty Vee did gentle laps of breaststroke, trying not to get her hair wet, and Uncle George sat with Noah on the step.

Leah came outside wrapped in a towel. She slowly opened the pool gate and stepped inside. Her shoulders were rounded forward as if maybe we wouldn’t notice she was there and her hands clenched the front of the towel. Lottie noticed her and started to splash. Leah held up her hands and the towel started to slip down. She wore an old yellow one‑piece of Mum’s. The lycra sagged rather than snapped into its rightful places.

“No splashing. I’m coming in but if you splash me, I won’t.” She tried to grab at the towel but it had already fallen down around her feet. She hunched further into herself and held her arms in front of her chest.

“You’re as bad as Angela!” Dad shook his head and gave Leah a little splash. Josie, Lottie and I followed his lead.

Mum, Noah and Uncle George joined in, slapping their hands forward and getting everyone. Even Aunty Vee stopped her laps and started splashing. Leah flinched. She looked down with closed eyes, tense and waiting for it to end. We only stopped splashing when Mum and Dad did.

Leah stood still at the edge of the pool. The afternoon sun was in our eyes and she was haloed by it but we could still see clearly: everything. The wet swimmers were completely see‑through. Leah hadn’t realised it yet. She dropped her arms in surrender and moved closer to the edge of the pool.

“Look,” Lottie said, loud and proud. “I can see her public hair!”

15

During the hugging and kissing, Noah had picked up Uncle George’s fork and was stabbing it at the pieces of cut-up sausage.

“Fuk,” he said. He looked up proudly and stabbed some more. “Fuk. Fuk. Fuk.” Josie, Lottie and I were sniggering.

“It’s fork,” Uncle George said. “He’s just saying fork.”

“Good boy!” Lottie said and clapped for him. “Say it again!”

“Charlotte Frances.” Mum was embarrassed.

“That’s enough.”

“What? He’s a clever little thing.”

“Is Leah okay?” Josie changed the subject.

“Yes, she’s fine.” Mum, too self-conscious, too quick to answer. “Why? Why wouldn’t she be fine?”

“No reason.” Josie reached for another piece of garlic bread. “Just seems a bit quiet and—” “She does seem unusually quiet,” Dad agreed. “Not her usual silly-season sparkle.”

“A lot of people are sad at Christmas,” Lottie agreed.

“No, they’re not.” Josie sighed impatiently. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do. There’s always ads on about Christmas appeals and lonely old people.”

“Leah’s not a lonely old person.” Josie rolled her eyes.

“Enough,” Mum hissed. “We’ve had enough of both of your speculations. It’s very rude to talk about someone when they’re not here.”

Leah knocked on the inside of the sliding door with her elbow. Her hands were full with the glasses. Dad got up and opened the door.

“Now that she’s here can we talk about her?”

Mum looked like she was about to hit Lottie.

“You talking about me?”

“Josie thought you looked a bit tired.” Uncle George took the three glasses from Leah’s right hand while she put down the other two.

She leaned over Josie and gave her a cuddle from behind.

She stayed there. “I am tired.”

FICTION EDITION

Someplace Else e were herded from the plane, held for seventy-five minutes in a gate lounge and then marched onto a bus. All done politely, of course. Two people had to stand up for the length of the freeway. I got the last seat, at the front.

“I thought we were supposed to be in isolation,” said the woman beside me, clutching her bag to her chest with two hands the way my mother did when she was anxious.

“At least we’re in business class,” I said, trying to be funny.

“I mean, up the front.”

She opened her bag, looked inside and then closed it.

Mum did that too. It may as well have been empty; it was her way of looking into space.

I

had been alone before, the walls moving in on me, my ears pinned to the sound of stale air.

After Tamar found the bank statement, she asked me to leave. Her tone was decisive. I’d seen her angry in the early days, when the issue of the payments first came up, and I had sunk my head in a book, avoiding the issue.

Anger holds out a hope for change, I suppose, but she was beyond that this time. She had asked me to stop sending money to Dad yet it was still going out of the account. We’d had fireworks before and now there was nothing left. She was going for a walk and, when she got back, she imagined I would have found someplace else and taken my books and Bible with me.

I took the only room available at the James Cook Motor Inn not far away because Tamar had laughed about the name, saying she’d start looking for the Lewis Hamilton Marina. We always wondered who would stay there. It was like an afterthought stuck behind the James Cook Tavern, the biggest gaming venue east of the city. I said it would be a great place to make a music video because it looked so unloved, a contrast to the giant homeware superstore behind it where you could buy a house-full of happy stuff. I stayed for four days and three nights. It felt longer.

A

s the bus pulled out, I remembered I had left my phone on the plane. It had fallen between the seats in economy as we came into land and the attendant told me to take my place. Someone would help me later, she said. It was too dangerous to be reaching between seats on my own. We were asked to follow instructions as we disembarked and, with confusion in the air,

the phone was the last thing that anyone wanted to hear about.

“They’ll get it to you,” the driver said.

I

was alone the day I got stuck in the lift as I was leaving Mum’s lawyer. I’d been asked to make a statement about Dad while Mum waited in the reception area, clutching her bag. She wanted him out of her life, drink or no drink, cancer or no cancer. We had never talked much and I hoped the time with the lawyer might be a chance for us to start, but we gave our statements separately and were asked if we wanted to swear on a Bible that had never been opened.

“It was a lonely marriage,” Mum told the lawyer when she brought us together for a few minutes. “Lonely when he was away all the time.”

“Not easy for me either,” I added.

“Even lonelier when he was there,” Mum went on.

This is as much as she’d ever said. I suggested we have a sandwich afterwards and went down first because she needed to find the bathroom. The lift jammed and she was stuck on the eighteenth floor, looking at the view she was paying for, another one of Dad’s expenses, I suppose. I sat on the floor of the lift for two-and-a-half hours, with nothing to read but a sheaf of papers. Dad had a story about getting stuck with the newspaper in an elevator (he always preferred the American expression) and picking every winner for the Saturday races.

He’d had time to examine the form guide and make objective judgements. It was all about applying the intellect in which he never stopped believing. Yet mostly he backed losers, especially at the track. Mum paid for that too. I looked at Dad’s signature, which he had left the previous day, a tangled ball of ink going nowhere.

E

ven after the divorce, he kept asking for money.

I preferred to give it to him than see him go after Mum. When Tamar and I got together, we invited Mum for Christmas.

“I’m just as happy to be on my own at the moment,” she said.

She sent us a voucher for half the cost of a meal at an expensive place in the city, which we stuck to the fridge and never used. We were saving for a place of our own, someplace else, where the walls would not be full of holes. It wasn’t easy on the salary of two teachers but we were inching towards a small apartment in the inner west, surrounded by cafes.

Perhaps it was the project that kept us together so long, the thought of putting bricks around our relationship.

02 OCT 2020

W

Michael McGirr

17

BY

“It makes me sick that we’ve been working to pay for grog for your father,” said Tamar, when she asked me to leave.

“I’ve been trying to keep him away from Mum,” I said.

“Help with his medication.”

It wasn’t the right thing to say. There was plenty of time to think about that as I stewed in my grief at the James Cook Motor Inn, reading fat books, watching couples return to the carpark with new microwaves and coffee machines.

Social security used to park people here when there was no other emergency accommodation; there wasn’t much love in the air.

T

he bus made rapid progress from the airport to the city. There was no traffic. The virus was keeping everyone at home.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked the woman beside me, persevering. She reminded me too much of Mum. I was determined to get her to say something.

“Peru. You?” “Same.”

18

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

F

It was exactly forty hours since we’d left Peru, which appealed to me. The word quarantine comes from the Latin for forty. It is a kind of magical number in the history of isolation.

rom my room at the James Cook Motor Inn I watched people coming and going, wondering who they were and what they were doing. Better than thinking about myself. I walked around to the megastore and found a notebook with a map of the world on the front. It was called “Small World” and, in small letters, “A little book for a big trip”. Every page had a different colour paper to add to the excitement of going places. It was reduced to a dollar. I offered to buy a pen from the woman at the cash desk but she gave me hers for free. I sat in my room and looked into the carpark that the Motor Inn shared with the James Cook Tavern. I thought I’d be able to make something out of the stories of gamblers as they arrived and left, some of them with children. One of the gamblers had an argument with a couple pushing a trolley from the megastore. They were trying to balance a vacuum cleaner and a TV when they lost control and scraped the man’s car. There wasn’t much damage but he was angry anyway. Gamblers always are. The couple tried to make peace and then pushed their trolley away for another load. Once they were gone, the man pissed on their rear window.

I

“Where am I being taken?” the woman beside me asked the driver when we were the only two left.

“Someplace else,” he said. He was talking on his phone; it seemed there was a shortage of rooms.

“What took you to Peru?” I asked, fishing for a mere sardine of comradeship. She looked in her bag for the answer but said nothing.

I’d been on a professional study tour for school, the lucky one to be chosen from a list of applicants. The principal knew that Tamar and I had gone our separate ways and she was being generous, giving me something else to think about.

“You need to stop stewing in your own juice,” she said.

School paid $2500 for the charter ticket home and the principal sent a text to say that it wasn’t worth the risk of me being there with the virus spreading.

“Get home before you miss the last chance.”

I wondered what the word home meant now. The day before the flight was my last at Fe y Alegría, the school in Lima where I had been placed, near the end of the metro line in San Juan de Lurigancho. God knows what $2500 could have bought there, let alone the money I’d sent Dad.

t took a long time to find quarantine hotels for everyone on the bus. The people from the back seats were accommodated first, so I was among the last, and, as we went along, it looked as if the hotels were getting shabbier.

Lima is short of water. As dry as the bottom of a birdcage, Dad would say when you asked him how he was on sober days. As dry as a bookmaker’s kiss. As dry as a doctor’s wit.

At Fe y Alegría, the students got house points for bringing in the water from last night’s washing up at home. With this, they were raising a small vegetable garden, the only patch of green in the place. The yard was baked hard, the soccer field packed like concrete.

I

was billeted with the family of one of the staff, Lena, who worked in the library where there were books sent from our school, ones we didn’t want, none in Spanish. I felt embarrassed. We’d made ourselves feel good by dumping rubbish. No computers.

Lena’s family lived in a squatter settlement high on the range behind the school, five hundred rocky steps above the soccer pitch. I had to rest on the way up while Lena skipped ahead, laughing. Her mother spent hours sitting over a barrel, shelling beans on her own, her eyes closed. For this she was paid five American dollars a day. Sometimes she sang to herself. When Lena walked through the door, she hardly looked up. Lena explained that her mother understood solitude and didn’t fight it. There were other things to fight – too many of them. Any day, the bulldozers could arrive and move the squatters on yet again – they’d have to find someplace else to throw up a shack. Quiet was the only security she had.

F

T

O

T

inally, I was given a room at the Ibis overlooking the peace park and, beyond that, another hotel, possibly the Mercure. As I fumbled with the key and my bag, I saw the woman who’d been beside me on the bus as she found her room at the end of the corridor.

She nodded curtly. That would be my last human contact for fourteen days and nights. I looked at my watch. It was exactly forty hours since we’d left Peru, which appealed to me. The word quarantine comes from the Latin for forty. It is a kind of magical number in the history of isolation. Moses led the Israelites in their solitude in the desert for forty years; Christ was in the wilderness for forty days; Muhammad was forty when he entered his cave in the holy month of Ramadan. In all these stories, isolation helped someone see the world more clearly. The point was not lost on me. When I was a kid at high school, we used to do a forty-hour famine. That was how I met Tamar. She was the first person to tell me that the world wasn’t right. Twelve years later, she told me I wasn’t right.

By that stage, she didn’t talk about the world much anymore, as if I had blocked her view of it. I had become a wall that enclosed her, along with my books and Bible. I can see that now thanks to Jude. n my last night in Peru, Tamar texted me an invitation to her wedding, which was only two weeks away. It was pretty sudden, she admitted, but she knew it was the right thing to do. I was surprised the text was so long and forced myself to find a note of apology in it. She was marrying a real estate agent she’d met “on the hunt”, which I presumed meant the hunt for a place. She knew I’d be surprised but it wasn’t clear if she meant surprised about the marriage or surprised to be invited.

I wondered if I would get her something from the megastore.

Maybe a voucher for the James Cook Motor Inn. I didn’t reply.

That night I slept with Lena. Her bed was made from the packing crates in which beans arrived for her mother. Next day, I went to say goodbye to her in the library but Lena was not at work. I never felt more alone in my life.

here was strange comfort in quarantine for me after that. It was unusual to have all my problems in one room. It was like having all your stuff in one bag: not very exciting but at least you knew where everything was. Every day, I did a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups. I watched people doing tai chi in the peace park and copied what they did, enjoying the slow rhythm. I imagined names for the dogs that brought their owners there. I expected the walls to start moving in on me, but they stayed where they were.

After four days, the hotel phone rang. A woman three floors above was dialling room numbers at random just to chat. Soon there was a network of us. That was how I met Jude and there isn’t a day I am not grateful for that. I asked her if she had a mobile phone and she asked in a mock American accent if I meant a cell. I laughed.

“My first laugh for ages,” I confessed “You can owe me for that one, mister.”

We both laughed this time.

She rang Tamar and explained that I’d be in quarantine for the wedding. She also rang Lena for me.

“They both said the same thing,” she said.

“Oh, really.”

“Yes, they both said your mind was always someplace else.” he day before the end of quarantine, my phone appeared at the door. The charger was missing.

I asked Jude if I could borrow hers. She said the cord wasn’t long enough to go down three floors.

Michael McGirr is an essayist, short-fiction writer and regular reviewer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. His books include Things You Get for Free, Bypass: The Story of a Road and Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep. His most recent is Books That Saved My Life.

He is working on a book about philosophy. He buys The Big Issue outside Readings in Hawthorn.

19

I

wanted to reply to Tamar’s invitation but didn’t know how. The woman at reception had stopped being polite and told me she didn’t want to hear any more about my phone.

02 OCT 2020

T

here was a knock at the door of my hotel room at the Ibis. I opened it, hoping my phone had been found. Looking down, someone had left two dozen bottles of water, wrapped in plastic.

I didn’t need them. There was plenty of water in the tap. They just took up space. The phone in the room only worked as an intercom, not for outgoing calls.

I had stupidly left my books in Peru and had nothing to read but the Bible in the drawer and a guide to city tours, so I began to imagine a literary comparison between the two works. In the evening, I watched the shadows in the Mercure opposite, also being used for quarantine. Mostly people were on their phones. By day, I watched people exercising on their own in the peace park.

20

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Unconscious Woman Nods BY

I

Bruce Pascoe

t’s been a long night of chemicals and stiff sheets.

A woman’s narrowed face is flared by a hectic flame of spoiled silver.

The watcher looks and wonders, weighted beyond appropriation, aghast with affiliation.

The rim of the water glass has a rime of white powder, the face cloth folded and cold for the forehead is cast aside, no match for the task of care.

The pink flannel of hospitalised women creeps at the chest: a sigh, life, dim light. She would call it a nightie, but it is not hers. She would never have chosen embossed kittens, even on special at Dimmeys. But being blind they can foist anything on her.

And then she nods. Nods again. A hand rises uncertainly following tubes straddling her cheeks, crawling into her nose.

She nods. Ah yes, imprisoned.

But then watches the back, settle, relax.

“Mum,” the watcher says again, and imagines a quick squeeze of his fingers, but hers are gathered in a claw beside her whereas his are extended towards her, yearning.

It cannot be, despite the cup of tea or twinkling stream.

She pulls the sheet across herself, always neat, curling like a rescued ringtail in hand.

The watcher watches.

Looks from cold tea to cool face.

He watches the chest, imagines a rise, checks for breath with the back of the hand. He says words close to her ear; one of them is his name for her. Tells a story of time long gone, watches her face for…anything.

He waits, watches.

And then he stands. Looks at the bed for a moment that becomes many minutes and then walks down the corridor and

He watches the chest, imagines a rise, checks for breath with the back of the hand. He says words close to her ear; one of them is his name for her.

Bruce Pascoe is the author of Night Animals, Fox, Ruby-eyed Coucal, Shark, Ocean, Earth, Bloke, Cape Otway, Convincing Ground, Little Red Yellow and Black Book, Fog a Dox, Dark Emu and Young Dark Emu. He published and edited Australian Short Stories (19821999), and is the winner of the Australian Literature Award 1999, Radio National Short Story Award 1998, FAW Short Story 2010, Prime Minister’s Award for Literature (Young Adult) 2013, NSW Premier’s Book of the Year 2016 (Dark Emu), ABA Children’s Book of the Year 2020 (Young Dark Emu), and is shortlisted for The CBCA Eve Pownall Award 2020 (Young Dark Emu).

He is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and lives in far east Gippsland.

02 OCT 2020

says something to someone looking up at him from a desk.

Another person arrives to confer and he watches that person walk the corridor and enter the room he just left. Watcher watches the space where the person disappeared. Waits. The person returns to the corridor, looks at him and nods.

That’s two women who have nodded this night.

21

The watcher sees the nod, the searching fingers and is amazed. The acuity, the acceptance.

Does time pass? Whatever, the watcher feels a shift in the sheets as the woman swings like a tired athlete from the bed and gropes, as the blind do, to the toilet. The watcher hears the runnel of relief, the sibilation of life’s water, and she returns, swings back into bed.

“Mum,” the watcher says.

She registers and says a name in that old voice of love.

She says the name again and then, unbelievably, “I’d like a cup of tea.”

“They told me you were dying,” the watcher says.

“Oh yes, they say that all the time.”

And then she slept, the cold tea beside her, the joke still like a folded paper serviette between them. Seventy years of shared quip and wit.

A corner of the watcher’s mouth crimps like a crease in old leather, so ready to assume an old seam.

The watcher takes up the abandoned face cloth, dampens it and passes it across the forehead, presses it to the bridge of the acute nose, and imagines a creep of spine arching into the pressure.

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FICTION EDITION

Journey of the Pioneer here was a new flaw in the window. Leo was sure it hadn’t been there that morning. Now there was a total of four: still not enough to worry about, though. He took the red marker out of his pocket and spun it in his fingers, thinking.

After months of watching the old flaws, he knew them well. He knew exactly how the stars would change as they passed behind them. But the new flaw stretched the stars in an unfamiliar way. He thought he might cross this one instead of circling it.

“Got everything?” asked Louise.

Leo crossed the flaw, and then went to collect his things.

His pyjamas were under his pillow; other clothes, books and his bear were in the cupboard; and his toothbrush was in the bathroom. Everything was in its usual place, and he wondered why it all looked wrong. A shiver went down his spine, and he hurried out the door.

As they walked through the ship, Leo touched the wall once for each section of corridor, feeling the faint hum under his fingers. The Pioneer was gliding across space: another lightyear from Earth, another lightyear closer to its destination.

When they reached Louise’s quarters, Leo looked around curiously. There was a main room with two seats, a bench and drawers, a tiny bathroom with a foldaway showerhead, and two bunks in the narrow hall: just the same, but not exactly. Two frames hung on the wall. One held a cross-stitch that said “Carry each other’s burdens”, the other was around a picture of a boy Leo didn’t know. He was very young and wore a Hulk costume.

The two windows in the main room had several flaws.

Louise nodded as Leo crossed them.

“That’s right. If the windows weaken…explosive decompression! We get sucked out into the vacuum of space!”

She laughed. “I always forget to check. Too much to do.”

Leo laughed too, but he didn’t think it was funny. Lucky he was here.

“You can have the top bunk,” said Louise. “It’s got another window. Keep an eye on it if you like.”

Leo climbed up on the bunk, and crossed two flaws. Louise whipped up a quick dinner. She put dried herbs in her mashed potatoes instead of salt. Leo forced himself to eat them. She made a few gentle jokes. Leo forced himself to laugh.

The next day people started bringing food: the special extra bits of their rations, the bits they could spare, like cookies and popcorn. Food was really the only thing you could offer on the Pioneer. None of the people stayed. They

murmured to Louise at the door, and then raised their voices, saying “If you need anything, anything at all…”

Nobody came in, and Leo and Louise didn’t go out. And in spite of the continual offers, they didn’t seem to need anything.

They ate food, watched funny videos and played card games, modifying the rules however they wanted, just for fun. Leo had always liked Louise the best, almost, of all the adults he knew.

Louise helped Leo check all the windows each day. He tried to accept her assurance that it was fine for her to stay home. “I’m not missing work, and more importantly, it’s not missing me!”

In the middle of a game of Chubby Bunny, both of them dribbling half-dissolved marshmallow down their chins and trying not to giggle, Leo realised something: he hadn’t had so much fun since he stepped onto the Pioneer. Or, to be accurate, not since the day three months after he stepped onto the Pioneer…

His mind went blank, and he stopped laughing.

“Arm mu mo may?” said Louise. She swallowed all her marshmallows at once. “Are you okay?”

Leo swallowed his marshmallows too. The sweet clag sank heavily in his stomach. “I’m fine.” She had spent five days completely focused on him. He knew it couldn’t go on forever.

“You should go back to work tomorrow,” he said.

She eyed him carefully. “Only if you can go to school.”

He did. It felt almost normal being back there. Thirty kids went to the school, all with family members who worked on the ship. Some families had chosen to divide for a few years, with kids staying behind on Earth until the next ship went. Leo used to be proud he hadn’t been left behind.

“Good to see you, Leo,” said Mr Craig warmly, and everyone smiled, but Leo heard the whispers in the background.

Their class worked on maths in the morning, and planted seeds in the nursery after lunch. Mr Craig said they needed to stay connected to natural things.

“Because Earth II will be wilderness like you’ve never seen before, like nobody’s seen on Earth for centuries. No buildings, roads, cars or computers. No infrastructure to rely on. A brand‑new world.”

Leo planted three seeds and then looked at the windows.

There were five flaws altogether. He crossed them, and rechecked each pane methodically, listening with half an ear to Mr Craig. He was talking about Overshoot Day, which marked how long it took humans to use a year’s worth of a planet’s resources. Leo remembered it coming as early as June on Earth, and people protesting, saying the Earth could never recover.

02 OCT 2020

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Jennie Del Mastro

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“Overshoot Day won’t exist for a while on Earth II,” said Mr Craig, “with such a low population. But we still need to keep our footprint as small as possible.”

After school Leo walked alone through the corridors. The artificial lights made his head ache. They brightened in the “morning” and dimmed in the “evening”, but there was no real day or night.

He passed a dozen closed doors, hiding windows he couldn’t check. He hovered, waiting for one to open so he could at least take a glance at a window as he passed. But none opened. It wasn’t the right time – adults were still at work, and kids were playing around the ship somewhere. He hoped someone was checking for flaws. If there were ten flaws in one window, it had to be replaced. Every window in the ship was creeping towards that number, one flaw at a time. It could happen before you knew it. The only thing keeping them all safe was this fragile shell, and what if Leo was the only one making sure the shell stayed whole?

The lights were dimming. It was late. Leo realised he’d wandered past the living quarters and was in the work corridors. The doors slid open automatically as he passed, but he forgot to look for windows. He knew these corridors. He’d been here before, with…

His mind suddenly went blank again. It was like stepping back from a cliff-edge. The corridor disappeared to a pinpoint in front of him. Frightened, he walked half-blind towards the nearest door. It opened and a voice said loudly, “We’ve got a visual!” There was a trill of beeps, and the sound of footsteps hurrying.

Leo turned and ran. He found himself outside Louise’s door, head pounding, stomach churning, wondering how he’d managed to find it.

Inside, the humming of the ship stopped the silence from being peaceful. The Pioneer never let anyone forget where they were going, how important it was. He got out his marker, but his head ached too much to see. He lay down on his bunk and tried to sleep.

Later Louise came in, smiling and bouncy. “Leo, why are you in bed? Have you had dinner? Are you okay?”

He nodded.

“Did you hear the news?” she asked. “We’ve seen Earth II!” He nodded again, and she went away, only to reappear a moment later, startling him just as he was trying to relax.

“I’m here if you need anything!”

But she wasn’t there. She stayed far away in the main room, until the middle of the night when Leo, still awake, rolled over and threw up over the side of the bunk. Then she came.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said, patting him.

It wasn’t okay. It was the worst thing in the world. He felt like someone had squeezed his head in a clamp. His stomach was squirming.

Leo stayed in bed for three days. The second morning he woke feeling better. He watched his window, and marked every tiny speck he saw or imagined, just in case. The third day he spent lying with his eyes closed and his back to the window.

That evening he opened his eyes and saw Dr Carla. She was smiling but dabbed the corner of her eye with her sleeve. It reminded him of last time, and he turned away. She took blood

Jennie Del Mastro (@JennieDelMastro) writes between caring for her four boys, her kelpie and a very froggy garden in central Gippsland. Currently, she misses faraway family, prays a lot and has the intermittent thousand-mile stare of the novel plotter.

02 OCT 2020

whether it was a weekend, or if Louise would come and get him soon. He decided to let himself fall back to sleep anyway.

Just as he was floating on the verge of a dream, she tiptoed past in a rush. Memory began to come back to him. He’d heard noises in his sleep: hurrying footsteps and voices in the corridors, strange clunks and shifts as the Pioneer settled on its landing gear for the first time in months; then a sudden silence, as the humming stopped.

His stomach churned. They were on Earth II. “Louise?” There was no answer. “Louise?” Maybe she was gone already.

“Leo?” Her head appeared at his bunk. She looked at him carefully. “You’re sick, aren’t you?”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

“Stay there,” she said.

Leo heard her talking softly. “Can you take over? I know it’s our busiest day but you understand, don’t you?”

He wished he hadn’t said anything. How would the crew be able to function without her, today of all days? But when she returned, she smiled at him, unworried. She gave him buttery toast and a drink of soda water and helped him get dressed.

Later, people lined up in their hundreds to leave the ship. Leo watched them stream down the ramp, spreading out freely as they stepped onto the ground for the first time in a year.

Everyone was carrying bags. He had a backpack himself, containing everything he’d brought on board when they left Earth. But Louise carried nothing except Leo, in a piggyback.

“And what did he like to do?” she was asking.

“He always read books. Old sci-fi books, like Isaac Asimov and John Wyndham. He bought them in op shops. He read me bits out of them.” Leo was crying down the back of Louise’s shirt.

“Go ahead,” she said cheerfully. “Blow your nose. I can be a hanky.”

Leo laughed but then kept crying. “He should be here.”

“It sucks, doesn’t it?”

“It’s the worst.” He sobbed a bit more. The sick feeling was going away. “Who’s got your stuff?”

“I divided it between a few friends. Mike, Cath, Claire and… who else?…oh, Matt.”

Leo nodded. They were all parents of kids he knew at school. They were nice and would look after Louise’s stuff well. “You’re the most important thing for me to carry today,” she said.

When they filed down the ramp, Leo looked up over Louise’s shoulder. He saw a sky with clouds sailing across it, and a sun too bright to look at. The sky was blue but not like Earth’s sky.

Maybe it had a bit more purple in it. Maybe it was just cleaner.

The clouds were a different shape to any he’d seen before.

Leo gave his face a last wipe on Louise’s shirt, and slid down off her back. His feet were standing firm on Earth II at last. It was time to stop finding flaws. There would be plenty of other work to do in this brand-new world.

25

from his arm, scanned him, then spoke softly to Louise. “High levels,” Leo heard. “Related to emotion…stress…quite likely…”

And Louise said, even more softly, “Ohhhh. I am such an idiot.” She came over and leaned her elbows on the bunk.

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

He scrunched his eyes closed and covered his face with his arm. “I’m fine. You can go back to work.”

But she didn’t go. He felt her breath gently stirring the hair on the other side of his arm. “Leo, can we talk?”

“No. You should go back to work. We have to make sure this succeeds. It’s more important than anything, and everyone has their job. Do you understand?” He rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. But Louise still didn’t go away. He felt her stroking his back.

“Did your Dad say that?” she asked.

Leo didn’t lift his head. It was getting hard to breathe. “Yes. Just before he…” There was a lump in his throat, growing fast.

He tried to swallow it, but it was too big. It was going to swallow him. He gave up, and let the tears rush out onto the pillow.

Louise stroked his back for a long time while he sobbed.

“Poor Leo,” she said. “You haven’t cried yet, have you?”

“Doctor Carla did, and you did, but not me.” His voice rose, out of control, but muffled in the pillow. “I don’t get it! Why did he bring me here and then go? Why didn’t he leave me at home? It’s not okay. It’s not fair!” He peeled his face off the wet pillowcase and lay down again on his front, staring out the window with tears rolling sideways down his cheeks and over his nose. There were the stars, stretching out of shape behind the flaws. The red crosses almost covered the change, but not quite. He could still see it was happening.

“He didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Louise.

“He didn’t want you to be alone. And you’re not alone.”

“I am alone,” he said.

There was a long silence, and, surprised, he rolled over to look at Louise. There were tears in her eyes, too.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No. No. It’s not your fault.” She blew her nose on a hanky from her pocket. “How are you feeling now?”

“A bit better,” he said. His headache was gone and his stomach was calmer.

“It changes your world when someone you love dies,” said Louise. “It takes a long time to get used to.”

Leo knew what she was saying. They needed to talk about it. About him. But he’d had enough for now. He lay back, thinking. What was his world? Once it had been Earth. Now, he supposed, it was the Pioneer. But soon he’d have to leave that behind too. “What’s Earth II like?”

“I don’t know,” said Louise. “I know we can breathe without assistance, and that it’ll be like a Perth summer where we’re landing, and that its ozone layer is so healthy we won’t need sunscreen.”

“Weird,” said Leo. “And I’ve seen photos – you have too, haven’t you, at school?

But we won’t really know until we get there.”

Days passed. Leo managed to go to school, and even check the windows sometimes. That made him feel good. He didn’t want anything to go wrong, so close to the end.

One morning he woke feeling comfortable. He wondered

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FICTION EDITION

A Place for My Head he cafe has served her cake with the napkin underneath it, so she has to pull the napkin out, and then the napkin is covered in cake, but she needs the napkin to clean her cake-covered fingers, not to put more cake onto her fingers. She pulls her phone out – she’s trying to get the cake off her fingers because she wants to send a text, and it’s a new year and she’s trying to do things like keep her phone clean and not have grainy icing smeared across its screen. She is pulling her phone out because she needs to send a text to him about how everyone in this cafe sounds like a presenter on public radio. He’s the one who likes Ira Glass – she doesn’t mind him, but they all sound the same on those types of shows.

Instead, she shoots off: “I have no respect for adults completing any part of their commute on Razor scooters.”

“Are you at work?” he replies. “I thought you were working from home today.”

“I’m at that cafe near the house!” she texts back. “But I was just thinking about it. I saw 2 guys at the station yesterday with scooters and helmets on with their backpacks.” A third text, now: “It made me SO MAD!” “It is a bit silly, isn’t it? How’s working from home going?” he replies.

S T

he’s back in the cafe, and it’s Thursday. There is a man in a business suit seated at a two‑person table, eating toast with a knife and fork. Across from him in the other seat are two closed briefcases sitting upright, stacked neatly. What business is he in? she wonders.

What’s in the two cases? And how does he carry them? hat night, they go to the cinema, she and him. It’s still forty-two degrees at 7pm, so everyone else in the city also thinks it’s a good idea to go to the cinema. They have air conditioning at home now, since they’d moved into their unit together, but eight litres of Coke and a choc‑dipped cone of powdery ice cream feels the right thing to seek out.

They’re sitting in the middle of the row, even though she hates it, because he likes it that way and he’s the one who’s had a bad day. She booked the tickets as a treat. When he sees their seats he beams, “You picked the middle seats?” and her eyes prickle and she says, “Yes, you had a bad day; of course we’re in the middle seats.” And so they’re sitting in the middle seats and they both think maybe the seats to

their left will be empty, because the previews, having run for thirty minutes already, are almost over. But then just as the last ad is playing, this girl sits down next to him and she’s carrying a box and he says, quietly, “Has she brought nachos into the cinema?”

At the candy bar, there was a sign saying that due to the extreme weather, the air conditioners are under a lot of stress, and that the cinemas may not be as cold as they usually are.

One time, at a different cinema, they had sat for an hour, drizzling the contents of their water bottles down the backs of each other’s shirts, because the cinema was so hot, even with their cuffs rolled up and legs splayed out. Eventually,

There is a man in a business suit seated at a two‑person table, eating toast with a knife and fork. she’d approached the attendant, who fixed the issue, and back in her seat in the dark he mouthed to her, “You fixed it!

You’re the hero of the cinema!” and she mouthed back, “I’m the hero! I’m the hero!” and her eyes were prickling then too, because he celebrated everything, all the time.

But this time, the sign at the candy bar said that if you can’t stand the heat, you can get a full refund after forty‑five minutes. They’d pledged, arms full of candy-bar items, that they’d give it their best shot, but now, seated next to this girl with her box, they think well, things may have changed.

People who bring hot food items into confined public spaces, like train carriages or poorly cooled suburban movie theatres, are a breed so far removed from them that, well, maybe they’ll have to leave after all.

Ten minutes into the film, it isn’t that hot after all, and she sees the girl with the box reach down to grab the box and open it up. When she opens it up she reveals a hot dog – she has a hot dog in the box – and she starts chowing down on this hot dog, in the dark, on a forty-two degree day. And he whispers, “It’s a hot dog?!” and she giggles back into his ear “It’s a HOT DOG. We’ve got chocolate and popcorn and she’s deep throating A HOT DOG.” On the drive home they keep

02 OCT 2020

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Rebecca Varcoe

27

BY

saying, “Why would you want to eat a hot dog in the dark during a movie?” and she’s so pleased that he is laughing, because he thinks it’s silly too. He knows it’s funny and if she were to tell the story again, he would laugh and nod.

S

he wonders about the lives of the man with the briefcases and the girl with the hot dog, and she thinks, I have to remember to tell him about the man with the briefcases. But then she tells him and he’s chopping carrots at the time and he doesn’t look up; he just goes, “Huh! How funny!” and she knows it mustn’t be, because you don’t say “How funny” if something is funny – you laugh. And she thinks for a second that she might be annoyed that he doesn’t care about this, that she’s the only person who thinks these things are worth mentioning, and then she remembers she’s got a brain that’s not to be trusted and stomps up the stairs to stand in the shower and think about everything else she should never have said.

S

itting on the couch, him up one end, she the other, their legs all bent to accommodate each other’s, she says: “I just read in the Herald Sun about a man who got mauled to death by his son’s pit bull. He was on crutches and the dog didn’t flinch when the cops came and shot at it.”

A

fter the kiwi is eaten and the juice that had run down her arm is cleaned off and her hair has been brushed and the dishes have been put away, she crawls across the bed and lays flat across his belly, her face turned up towards his chin. His head is covered by a book, and one hand is gingerly tented over the mouth of his cup of tea. She says, “I love you so much, and I’m sorry I didn’t listen to the story about the metal straw.”

He doesn’t move his hand from his tea; he just laughs and says, “Oh darling, it was a joke. I don’t care!”

But she doesn’t move and after he hears her sniff, he lowers his book and he sees that she’s crying. She says, “I’m sorry that I’m like this!” and he says, “You’re not like anything. It’s okay. There’s nothing to be sad about!”

But she knows there is nothing to be sad about and that is the problem.

I

t’s Friday night again. It’s 7pm and it’s absolutely pissing down outside but they have to go grocery shopping. So they go grocery shopping and they talk the whole time and they’re in the baking aisle, among the flours and the sugars, and she’s telling him about the train ride home. She says, “On the train tonight I was sitting next to a guy talking on the phone, and I paused the music in my headphones so I could hear him, and it was actually

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She becomes hurt easily from minor disagreements.

Sometimes she suspects she is not smart enough to understand anything beyond her own hurt feelings.

“Wow,” he says, “What do you think of pit bulls?”

And she says, “Well, what can I say? My aunty had a good one but even it didn’t like other dogs. But when you see things like this, well...”

Later, while she’s reading a book in bed, he calls out from the kitchen even though she hates it when he calls out from the kitchen: “I saw a lady on the news died from a metal straw,” which she takes to mean he is putting the clean dishes away, a job she hates, and he has seen the solitary metal reusable straw she bought in the hopes of becoming a better person. The kind who stays pleasant even when angry, is never jealous of her friends, never takes days off work to eat cinnamon sugar on toast and watch bad films from the early 2000s.

“Yeah, she was drinking out of it, and she tripped and it went in her eyeball and pierced her brain.”

She thinks maybe he’s joking but she’s in the middle of a paragraph in her book so she just says, “Wow, that’s crazy” and continues to read, only really registering what he said as she stood, hours later, gouging the flesh out of a kiwi fruit she held in her hand.

really sweet, like a poem almost, maybe? All he said was: ‘Hello gorgeous! What have you got planned for dinner?

Wanna do Maccas? I’m easy, just putting it out there. Work was good – I finally feel like I’m getting on top of things!’

“And you know what, I actually almost got a bit teary because it reminded me of you! You’re the only one who calls me on the phone for no reason, just to see how I am. And now I get to live with you and we go grocery shopping and…”

She trails off as she chokes up because she’s in a grocery store and this story has nowhere to go, and why would it mean so much anyway? It’s not as if he’s dead or something; he’s right there, and he’s going to think she’s crazy.

He pulls the trolley up next to her and grabs her head gently, kissing her on her crown and he whispers, “I love you very much” as she shoves a box of bread flour on top of his bananas.

When they get home she goes upstairs and stares at her face and her boobs and her belly in the mirror, and he calls out so she walks to the stairs, and he’s poked his head around the stairwell and she says, “Yes?” and he says, “Chamomile or English Breakfast?”

H

e is standing at the sink doing dishes and she has wrapped her arms around his body and her cheek is rested on his back, and she wants to say, Touching you is medicine, everything is quieter in my brain when I am pressed against you. But what she actually says is, “It’s going to be really hot again on Friday; maybe instead of the pie you were going to bake, we could just get a roast chook from Coles and some salad?”

He half turns around out of the hug and says, “You’re the only person I know who isn’t a mum who calls them chooks!”

They are planning their meals, she and him, and kissing in the kitchen.

T

here are things they say to each other every day and every night. He says, “Do you want the fan on or are you too cold?” and she says, “What time are you getting up tomorrow?”

He says, “Do you know this song that goes like this?” and mumbles something completely unintelligible.

She says, “I have told you this one thousand times already,” and he is sure she absolutely has not.

S

he becomes hurt easily from minor disagreements.

Sometimes she suspects she is not smart enough to understand anything beyond her own hurt feelings, which further isolates her from her friends – friends she secretly suspects are barely tolerating her.

She thinks about this when she makes fun of a movie he likes and he snaps back with a joke she thinks is meaner.

They are walking across a car park and she hands him the green bags and storms off into the public toilets to sit on a dirty toilet seat and scroll through her phone and hope that he texts her to say he’s sorry. He doesn’t, and she considers driving home without him. She remembers the time he said, “I’m just used to things always kind of working out for me,” and she got so mad she physically shook because she couldn’t relate. She remembers that she told him so, though, and he thought about it and he said sorry. And well, he always means it when he says sorry. He might be the only one who means it, she thinks.

S

he’s in bed while he reads a book downstairs. It’s 10am on a Saturday morning. She is watching a video on Facebook of a TV show called Just the Tattoo of Us, where people get to choose their friend’s or partner’s tattoos without the person having a say in what the tattoo is going to be.

She rushes down the stairs to him, still reading his book, and she says, “Oh my God, I’m watching this show, and this boy got a tattoo of a MUTE button done on his girlfriend’s back! And she says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And he goes, ‘Because you talk so bloody much I can’t get a word in edgewise!’ and then the girlfriend goes, ‘Well you shouldn’t be such a boring fucken twat then, should you Kyle?’”

And he laughs. He laughs a lot like she is laughing. He doesn’t just say, “That’s funny.”

And she smiles and puts her arms around his neck and says, “Should we go for a walk to get coffee then?”

Rebecca Varcoe is a writer whose work has appeared in places like Meanjin, The Guardian and Kill Your Darlings, but all she really wants is for you to tell her that she’s funny. She tweets at @becca_varcoe and posts pictures on Instagram at @becca_v.

02 OCT 2020

“Y

ou look like Colonel Sanders,” he says, standing holding the laundry in the bathroom doorway as she stands naked in the shower, toothpaste foam around her mouth as she speaks through minty suds: “I bought new face wash if you want to try that for your blackheads.”

They are getting ready for bed, she and him, and talking about toiletries.

S

he’s standing at the stove and he is setting their places for dinner and he is telling a story. He says, “I was at a gallery talk on counterculture and the speaker asked someone in the room, ‘What was the first record you ever bought?’ And then, because there were only fifteen or twenty people there, he went around the room and was asking everyone what their favourite record was. And everyone was saying things like The Clash and The Ramones—” “They’re all fucking liars though!” she interrupts.

“Yeah, I know,” he continues. “But I could feel it coming up to my turn and the first record I bought was Delta Goodrem, but I wasn’t going to say that was I? So I panicked and I said John Farnham and the guy just said, ‘Sure, okay,’ with a blank face and moved on and I just felt so embarrassed.”

And she laughs and laughs and says, “DELTA GOODREM?” And he laughs back, “Well, what was yours?!”

And she says, “Not bloody Delta GOODREM!” And he dances over and tickles her sides and says, “What’s wrong with Delta Goodrem? What was yourrrrs then? The Clash I suppose? I thought people who said The Clash were fucking liars?” and she keeps laughing because he loves her very much and they are in their house together and they’re doing the washing up and it’s not boring, actually.

29

“Y

ou’re getting too ahead of yourself,” he says, pausing between your and self to leave room for her burp, which she waves away with the hand that isn’t holding a forkful of chicken schnitzel.

They are eating dinner, she and him, and talking about a new job.

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FICTION EDITION

Saving Face he security gate on the bridge between the north and the south of the city is fast approaching and I am as ready as I will ever be; my first bribe of the day is folded up in my papers. My ID, my medical reports, an entry permit and a good reason to enter will hopefully be enough, again, to pass.

There’s a thin body lying face up in the water; a faint halo of redness around them a stark statement on how little time they have been there adrift. A Quarantine Police barge is approaching, a diver in scuba gear ready to slide into the water.

A helicopter over the river hammers the air with its rotors.

I know someone is watching, scanning the water and the bridge for who knows what. Hopefully not for me.

A delivery driver stares at me through the glass of their van window and I am starkly aware of my electric bike, the only one on the bridge today.

The bribes are higher than usual. Through the gate, I look for a safe place to lock my bike, chain it to the steel-pipe bannister of a set of concrete stairs, click my helmet lock to the frame. Someone passes by and stares at my mask, a sneer of disgust on their bare face. I let none of the hatred I feel for them, none of the stomach-churning horror their face fills me with, show in my eyes.

They pass.

I remove my mask, printed with Van Gogh’s Starry Night, roll it up and put it in my pocket.

There’s no way to avoid the cafe strip along the river entirely, so I mentally map out a path that will bypass as many people as possible. People brush against me, bump into me, breathe on me. Their faces are jarring and unpleasant – glistening skin, lips wet and painted.

Their breath reeks.

Naked faces meet each other on the pavement and hug.

Men shake unclean hands. A couple on a park bench are locked in a passionate germ-trading embrace; a woman kisses another on the filthy cheek in greeting. I can’t bear to see any of it.

There’s a fug, a miasma in the air that is absent in the rest of the city, in this closed-off area where I am not supposed to be. I shoulder my pack more carefully, walk briskly through the crowds, duck into a narrow alleyway. Someone’s coming the other way, a young man with a beard like the history books, like a bushranger from an old story, like a hipster from 2010’s television.

The alley is too narrow for both of us. I get a glimpse of a T-shirt covered with a huge letter “Q” as he brushes past me. He stinks of sweat, alcohol, bad food and poor hygiene.

I shudder at his touch as I exit the alley and force myself not to run, not to draw more attention to myself, as I cross the road and enter my mum’s building.

Thankfully there is nobody in the hall when I enter.

I push the elevator button with my thumb inside the sleeve of my hoodie and wait. The rest of the building is

02 OCT 2020

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Claire G Coleman

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as rundown as the hall around me; paint is peeling from the ceiling and a strong smell of mould spores chokes the air.

With a whoosh of air conditioning the elevator arrives.

Motors whirr, the doors open, someone steps out and I realise I am standing too close. They almost knock me over.

I recoil involuntarily from their touch. I feel naked. I can’t breathe. The elevator doors start to close on me, but whirr open again after hitting my arms hard enough to bruise.

Inside, the lift is filthy. I hesitate to use even my hoodie to touch the button to my mother’s floor; in the end I decide to use the aluminium stick hanging from my keys. There’s no way to guess how many hands have touched the buttons.

I feel ill; I hold back a compulsive cough.

The hall to Mum’s apartment is even worse than the hall in the ground floor – the carpet and the lower walls marbled with black mould. Mum’s door is cracked and warping; the wrinkles in the wood and the missing flakes on the cheap door remind me of an overripe camembert. My key turns stiffly in the lock; the click is muted and sick. The door forces me to shove it; I enter.

Mum’s small apartment is cleaner than any of the public areas in the building; at least the money I spend on a cleaner isn’t wasted. She’s lying on her couch, asleep with her iPad

control.” Her voice is shrill. Her tone makes me sicker than her words; I know she’s just regurgitating what she’s read and watched on social media.

“Mum,” I say shaking my head, “please don’t.”

We sit in silence as my tea slowly cools. Mum tries to engage me with what she’s read on social media, tries to explain the word salad she’s heard on a video produced and presented by a froth-mouthed nutbar. I know what it’s going to say from every other visit: “adult humans” she says; “out to get us” she says; “deep-state-cannibal-lizard-menworshipping-aliens” she says; “plandemic” she says. I reply with grunts. The light of the silent television, now tuned to some bullshit reality show, is reflected in the wrinkled sweaty skin of Mum’s face.

“Mum!” I roar. “None of what you are reading on social media is true. The pandemics – COVID, bird flu, the mutant measles – are all real. You are locked up here because you refuse to accept that. If you wear a mask like the rest of the world they will let you out.”

She shrugs and lies back, holding up her tablet. I’m dismissed. Another failure. She will not be masking up and walking out through the gate with me this time either.

I leave, to bribe my way back through the gate and

We sit in silence as my tea slowly cools. Mum tries to engage me with what she’s read on social media, tries to explain the word salad she’s heard on a video produced and presented by a froth-mouthed nutbar. to the city before nightfall. Before I even make it out of Mum’s building my face is safe under my mask. If I were religious I would pray nobody breathes on me on my way to the gate…

02 OCT 2020

Claire G Coleman (@clairegcoleman) is a Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Born in Perth, she has spent most of her life in Naarm. She writes poetry, short fiction and essays and is the author of two novels, Terra Nullius and The Old Lie.

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face down on her chest; the television is silently streaming YouTube. I take the medications out of my backpack and put them on the table, go to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on before waking her.

“Why don’t you come more often?” Mum whines. “Why can’t I see you more than once a fortnight if I’m lucky?” Over a cuppa, we return to the same subject as last time.

I feel my shoulders rising. “It costs me more than your pension in bribes every time I go through the gate! Not to mention the fact that I need a fresh medical and a battery of antibody tests every time.”

“Just don’t do the tests – they can’t make you. I’m not as young as I used to be, not as well either.” Her voice is like the inevitability of time. “I need more medical help than I can get in this locked camp, in this dump.”

“I bought you this dump,” I snap, “so you would have somewhere to live when they corralled people into this place! I could have let them put you in state housing. I don’t know why I keep helping you when I don’t agree with your decision to stay here.”

“The virus isn’t real,” she says. “They can’t make me wear a mask – it’s creeping sharia! It doesn’t work; it makes you sick. I have a right not to wear a mask. They are abusing our human rights. I’m a human person, not something they can

34

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Glassmaking he first morning in Venice you wake disoriented.

It’s early January, winter in the northern hemisphere, but the cocoon of the hotel doona has trapped you in stifling warmth. Beside you, your partner sleeps on, mouth agape, snoring like a summer wind rushing through trees. The room smells of your bodies, so you go and stand in the shower, where a digital panel in the wall sets the water temperature. You dial it to forty and feel your muscles wake and expand, alive with the heat.

Yesterday you arrived by train from Rome, where you’d spent New Year. Getting ready each day, your partner would turn on CNN in the hotel room and watch footage of the bushfires back home. The entire southeastern corner of the country is burning like a scrap of paper held to a lit candle. The day you left for Europe the temperature passed forty degrees in every state in Australia, but you peeled away from the warming earth into a haze-free sky.

When you come out your partner is sitting up in bed, forehead tight, reading text messages sent by family. An uncle in Victoria has had to evacuate the farm due to a wind change. He drove into town with animals packed in the tray of his ute, embers spitting down like rain. “S’okay,” your partner says at last, reading the texts in chronological order.

“The wind changed back. He’s safe.”

While your partner gets ready you look out the window, seeing the back of the adjacent building and a square of milk‑coloured sky. You’re on the second floor and the glass doesn’t open. You crave the fresh, moist air.

You exit the hotel to a breeze that is cool but not cold.

Tight alleys and arrowed signs lead to Piazza San Marco, which in November had flooded so badly that news sites at home ran pictures of gumbooted tourists wading past the basilica. In the end the acqua alta had risen taller than you are to the second-highest level in history. The tide has since receded, but stacks of boards and metal struts wait in public spaces, ready to create catwalks over the encroaching lagoon. Climate change is the culprit, just like the fires, but you have managed to avoid both extremes.

At a cafe near the Doge’s Palace the two of you order breakfast, coffee and toast, and when the waitress arrives you thank her in your bogan Italian.

“Australia?” she asks in English. “Very hot, yes?”

“Yes, it’s summer,” your partner says.

The waitress nods gravely. “And fire. So sad.”

You’re surprised she’s heard about it, on the other side of the world. “Si,” you say. “Very sad.”

A fog blows in from the south as you eat, and for a while the world is rendered cool and still. It passes as quickly as it arrived and you rise from your chairs, leaving a tip for the waitress who knew about the fires. Walking towards the Grand Canal, you enjoy the light burn at the edge of your ears. “It’s so nice to need a jacket,” you say guiltily. Your partner squeezes your hand.

On the Rialto Bridge you take selfies with your heads tilted towards one another, squinting into the weak sun. Later, waiting for the ferry, you go to upload the images to social media but get caught in the scroll of red-and-black scenes, kangaroos bounding from tsunamis of flame, burned-out cars and insets of the dead. One resident in the fire zone waited it out in the family pool, clad in full scuba gear. You decide not to make a post.

Disembarking the boat at Murano, there’s a six-foot display outlining the process behind the island’s renowned glassmaking. Grainy black-and-white images accompany the text. You gaze back towards Venice as your partner reads the English translation: “Glass is made from silica, soda and calcium oxide, mixed and melted in a furnace. Additives are included to change the colour of the final product.

Though powdered quartz can be used, the silica is most often derived from sand.”

You have a memory of being in the schoolyard one lunchtime, smelling smoke and hearing the wail of sirens. The other kids had worked themselves up, saying that climbing up the play equipment was the only way to survive. None of you were older than seven. “Shouldn’t we wait for the teachers?” you’d asked, dubious. “They’ve run away,” your friend decided, which sparked enough fear in you to join the others.

Looking at the smudge of distant smoke from the monkey bars, you felt relief, because surely the sand below you would not burn. “It doesn’t burn,” another, smarter friend said. “It turns to glass.” Your heart had hammered as you imagined being mummified in clear thick glass, the teachers finding you in the morning after the flames went out.

“The temperatures required to create glass,” your partner continues, “are between 1500 and 1700 degrees Celsius.”

When your mother picked you up from school that day, she told you someone had set the fire in a nearby park.

“The eucalypts lit up like torches,” she said. “It was really quite spectacular.”

You and your partner walk along the promenade, viewing

02 OCT 2020

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Brooke Dunnell

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Brooke Dunnell (@thespinelabel) is a Perth writer whose short fiction has been published in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Westerly and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been recognised in a range of competitions.

02 OCT 2020

The woman says something in Italian and the man’s expression turns solemn. “Very hot in Australia now,” he says.

“We see news of the fire.”

You’re surprised again that people this far away are aware of the situation, that they care enough to commiserate with you.

You shift uncomfortably and let your partner speak. “My uncle was evacuated. Told to leave the farm. He’s okay now, though.”

The man clucks his tongue and writes KOALA. They are almost finished. The female shopkeeper has your gumleaf in her hand and is admiring it, holding it up to the light. The rays that filter through are tinged orange from something unseen in the glass.

“The acqua alta,” you say. The man raises his eyebrows.

“Was it bad for you?”

He shrugs. “We’re used to this.”

“Yes,” you say. Something lurches in your stomach. “But it was worse this time, wasn’t it?”

He nods contemplatively. The woman passes over the bubble-wrapped gumleaf and he starts folding tissue paper around it, sealing the edges with tape. “You are having fires before.”

“These are worse as well.”

Sighing, he slides the last bundle into a bag and writes LEAF on the outside. Along the counter the female shopkeeper is tallying up the price with your partner. The man holds out your leaf and you take it gently.

“These things will keep changing,” he says. He puts his hands flat on the counter in a sign of defeat. “What can we do?”

“Wouldn’t it be great,” you begin, knowing it sounds stupid as you say it, “if we could divert your floods all the way to the southern hemisphere and put the fires out?”

The man turns behind him and reaches for something on a high shelf. Your cheeks are hot. Facing you again, he hands over a slim pamphlet. “You can watch this glass being made,” he tells you. “The tour is very educational. Free entry with your receipt.”

Your partner is waiting by the door. “Thank you,” you say to both shopkeepers. “Arrivederci.”

Back outside, you carry the canvas bag while your partner reads the brochure. “Glass-making demonstrations and one‑off classes. Learn to shape your own glass and figurines.”

Your partner glances up at the closest street sign. “Looks like it’s on the next block. Do you want to see?”

Your heart pounds like it did the day smoke drifted over the playground. You imagine the sweltering space, the noise, the closeness of the air. Some instructor shouting over the din.

Protective gear weighing you down, chemicals filtering into your bloodstream. The heat, enough to make beauty out of sand.

“Let’s just enjoy the view,” you say, taking your partner’s arm.

Together you walk back to the waterfront and suck the air in deep. Today you saw a picture taken from a tinnie that an evacuating family had rowed out to sea. It showed a world alight, the air orange, and you try to imagine what the breath in their lungs must have felt like.

37

the wares in the glass shops’ windows. There’s a wide variety of objects, from very small figurines to ornate vases to grand sculptures. The happy colours, the gently variegating patterns, the overall smoothness and opacity is soothing.

Your favourite displays have a narrative behind them: a couple getting married, a snake sleeping along the branch of a tree, a tiny glass family sitting down to eat.

One storefront features a variety of Australian fauna, including kangaroos, koalas and a frill-necked lizard with a blended red-and-orange ruff. Enthralled, you follow your partner inside. There are two shopkeepers behind the counter, a man and woman with faces so alike they must either be siblings or spouses of many years. They wait, smiling, while the two of you inspect the animals on the shelves. As you stroke the small curved back of a koala, pressure rises in your throat.

Your partner starts selecting gifts for those back home, saying, “Get it done now, then it’s out of the way.” Two kangaroos with tiny joeys for your respective mothers, an array of koalas and lizards for siblings and mates. Your partner wants something for the Victorian uncle, a distant relation you wouldn’t usually get a souvenir for, and you nod. As another koala is lifted down, you wonder what would happen if a bushfire razed the uncle’s farmhouse with the figurine inside it.

Would the glass explode in the searing heat or melt intractably into its surroundings? Or would it be reinforced, harder than ever, indestructible? How hot is the epicentre of a bushfire?

On a nearby shelf there’s flora to match the fauna.

You laugh with surprise at a kangaroo paw and fat red bottlebrush, then are drawn to a single gumleaf. You nudge your partner. “For your uncle?”

“It’s a bit on the nose, for him.”

“For us, then.” You can’t resist the gently curved shape.

The sellers ring up the figurines methodically, winding each into bubble wrap and tissue paper before sliding it into a paper bag with the contents labelled. The male shopkeeper has shaky penmanship but good English. “You must be from Australia, yes?” Your partner is counting euros, so you confirm that you are. “A very long way to Venezia.”

“Oh, it’s worth it,” you say. “It’s so beautiful.”

“This time of year, good,” he continues. “Not so crowded.”

“Summer!” the female shopkeeper says, turning one of the kangaroos in the bubble wrap. “Summer, many, many.”

“Many people in summer,” her companion agrees, nodding. He pauses to write KANGAROO, the tip of his tongue emerging between his teeth. Satisfied, he places the package in a canvas bag. “Tourists, everywhere!” He winks at you cheekily. “But the money is good.”

You smile. “It would be very hot, though.” Your partner has been to Rome in August and tells of packed, sweaty bodies in the soaring temperatures, jostling before the Trevi Fountain and slipping down the Spanish Steps. Waiting in the queue to enter St Peter’s Basilica, tourists dropped and splayed on the cobblestones in the shape of the cross, overcome by either religious fervour or heatstroke.

“Ah, yes, too hot.” The shopkeeper mimes fanning air at his face and panting. You and your partner laugh. Your partner is holding a stack of euros, running a finger along one corner like a flip book.

38

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Wordless gift my first word on the way to work. You would be proud of me. It’s raining heavily here, on the other side of the planet to you, and the bus to the office is packed with grumpy, wet commuters swinging equally wet umbrellas. The impatience has spread to other drivers, voiced through the blaring of horns and the sharp squeal of sudden brakes. The stop-start motion of the bus makes me regret breakfast.

The windscreen wipers sweep so forcefully, I half expect them to churn through the glass as if it’s made of butter.

You’d be delighted by the rain, drawing funny shapes and backwards letters across the fogged glass. I’m just happy I haven’t been stabbed by an umbrella yet.

I almost miss my stop because I’m doing my best to avoid an older woman’s rain jacket from pressing up against my silk shirt, the one I bought you for your last birthday yet you “accidentally” left behind. The bus driver waits an extra moment for me to recognise my stop. I push to the front as gently as I can and, after tapping off, meet the driver’s eyes, think of you, and clearly enunciate, “Thanks.”

The driver beams at me, as if I’ve brought a little bit of sunshine to his day. It may well be the only remark he hears today besides his own truncated allowance.

One word down. Two hundred and seventy-nine left to go.

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he rest of my day is full of hectic silence. Emails are flung back and forth between departments.

Sal from HR elbows me nastily on her way to the coffee pot in the kitchen, while Boss Tennison expresses his disappointment in our KPIs with the rapid

tapping of his pen. A memo arrives in my inbox, a reminder that the first anniversary of Word-loss Day is next Tuesday and the company is having a remembrance morning tea.

When I text you about it later, you’ll complain how W-Day isn’t the sort of thing one celebrates. But it is a time to reflect on what we lost, even though I guess it technically didn’t happen all in one day. I hear it’s only just reached the more isolated villages in Brazil.

God, I feel sick just thinking about that morning. Thursday the 10th of May. I was checking my Twitter account, half asleep, and you were part-way through telling me about this weird dream you had involving wizard ducks when you…stopped.

The sentence hung there. Unfinished. The pause growing longer and longer until I looked up to see if you were okay.

You weren’t.

One hand clutching your neck, the other cradling your phone in your lap, and your lips moving as they shaped silent letters. I thought you were fooling around. Two hundred and eighty words later, it felt like I’d swallowed a golf ball of ice. Strange to think how quickly we’ve grown used to the sensation, but that first twenty-four hours before our limit reset was the longest I’ve ever experienced.

I wonder, sometimes, what would’ve happened if we hadn’t swiped open our phones before we’d even said good morning to each other. It would’ve only been delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later, we would’ve seen that stupid meme.

I still can’t believe how quickly it went viral. Did you read the article I forwarded you about the top-secret government program to restrict communications in foreign countries?

02 OCT 2020

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Ferne Merrylees

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I still don’t understand the science: how does a seemingly innocuous image reduce a person to two hundred and eighty words a day? You’re convinced they’ll have a cure for it soon enough, but maybe it’s not a bad idea to register for those sign language classes when you get home. Anyway, I sometimes find I don’t mind the quiet.

The only words I hear at work all day are from the tech support, who gleefully swears out her daily allowance during a system upgrade, until she’s abruptly silenced. Her curse words bring a sense of relief, as if I’m uttering them. I haven’t sworn since words became so precious.

I

don’t thank the checkout assistant at the grocery store one bus stop from home. Today’s been too miserable – the weather, work, missing you – and I hesitate too long for it to be sincere. I enjoy the brief respite from the rain to walk home. When I arrive, I’m calm enough to offer Mr Weizenbaum from next door – you know the one, he wastes all his words on his cat – a smile and a “Good evening”. The words want to cling to my throat, but the release helps me enter the empty apartment without screaming.

you’ll be finished sooner. I like to think you’re just as keen to hear from me.

“Can I call?” I text, adding one more comment to a mile‑long message thread, and watch in anticipation as the little icon of your face pops up as you read it. The image was taken when we were enduring an uncomfortable train ride from Hanoi to Phong Nha a year before W-Day, the handmade nón lá on your head like a bamboo roof.

“Yeah,” you type back.

My throat clenches in delicious anticipation as I tap on the camera icon at the top of the screen. You answer on the first ring, your face lit by the cityscape outside your window. You offer a soft sigh of delight and regret. I knew you would’ve used up all your words. You probably ran out before lunchtime. It’s just who you are. You’ve never gotten used to hoarding – you give your words away freely instead.

So I listen to you softly breathe, almost humming your love for me, and I drop one word at a time, leaving long gaps between each so they sink in, wrapped in meaning.

The loneliness I feel with you so far away. The need to hold you close. To whisper my first words to you in the morning

You will bestow them on the doorman, the cat on the windowsill, the child in the park. You’ll leave sunshine in your wake, spilling out into the world, and I can’t begrudge you that.

Ferne Merrylees has a PhD in English from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and has had short stories published in multiple online magazines. She writes a blog that reviews young adult literature and speculative fiction books at fernemerrylees.com, and she has a growing Twitter following @fernemerrylees.

02 OCT 2020

and keep the rest until I lie again beside you at night.

Bookending our days with words of love.

I count each one, stretching them out over an hour, until finally our yawns trigger a never-ceasing cycle and we quietly huff with sleepy laughter. I worry I’ve forgotten the sound of your voice.

“Tomorrow,” I whisper. A promise, and I know your answering sigh is a promise, too. To keep some words for me. A promise you’ll break. You will bestow them on the doorman, the cat on the windowsill, the child in the park.

You’ll leave sunshine in your wake, spilling out into the world, and I can’t begrudge you that.

I have three left, a whole sentence that sums up “Goodbye” and “I miss you” and “Please come home soon”.

“I love you.”

I listen to the tone after you hang up, to keep hold of you for that little bit longer.

41

It’s still too early to call you, so I cook dinner. I even set the table and pour myself a large glass of red, though it’s Tuesday. Yes, I know I promised you I’d only drink on weekends, but I’m finding it hard to keep my thoughts locked up inside my head.

I watch some news, and I still can’t get used to these pieced-together sound bites from people who are paid a premium for their words. There’s an item on an educational reform going through parliament mandating children are only taught sign language in schools. I wonder if future generations will even know how to talk?

I don’t bother to change the channel when the news ends and a new silent film starts, subtitles flashing across the screen. It’s hard to keep my eyes open, the minutes dragging on, until finally it’s an hour before midnight and you will have just gotten back to your room. The time difference is slowly wearing me down. I feel like a shadow.

You’ve been away so long; the hotel must be starting to feel like home.

You’ll have kicked off your shoes without undoing the laces and slipped off your jacket, leaving them to puddle in a heap by the door. Your bag will be left just as carelessly on a chair as you single-mindedly head for the kitchen. I can imagine the routine dance of uncapping a bottle of water, and the long pondering of the fridge contents.

Today there will be leftovers from the weekend, so you’ll reheat and dish up, barely waiting to sit before digging in so

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Albertine, Vaguely made friends with the new girl because I was tired of the old girls. I was tired of all of it, actually: of the southern hemisphere, of suburbia, of pulling my socks up to my knees every time they fell to my ankles, so as to avoid detention. The new girl wore a uniform, but with the wrong shoes, the wrong bag; the school made an exception because she was staying for only two months.

“We stopped in San Diego,” she said, when we asked about her flight.

“That’s where Some Like It Hot was filmed,” I said.

“Ignore her,” said Ruby. “She’s always talking about films that nobody’s seen.”

“I’ve seen Some Like It Hot,” said the new girl.

The new girl wore heavy black shoes with yellow stitching, shoes that I hadn’t seen in Australia but which were, she said, commonplace in London. She seemed to think that we were all strange, dowdy, dull – and I agreed. I asked her if she wanted to go to the beach with me on the weekend. She couldn’t, she said, but did I want to come to the theatre with her?

and suddenly we were surrounded by people, talking and dressing. They crowded around a mirror, their faces leaning together, applying powder and lipstick, talking.

“And who played the angel?”

“Jenny?”

“Of course! Jenny played the angel. She was so good in that part.”

“And Ralph was—” “That was a great production—” “Were you in it?”

They were all half-dressed, changing for rehearsal. I’d never seen bodies like this before; they were not those of the girls at school, crop tops covering flat chests, but nor were they those of the older women at the swimming pool, round and rough as unbaked clay. These were bodies that were meant for the theatre, lithe enough to slip from one character to another, to be in one time and then another, to seduce and deceive. These bodies were alert, waiting to perform.

“Come on,” said the new girl. “There’s a computer in the office.”

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e met in the city, where she was staying, where the other girls rarely bothered to go. She was wearing tight-knit fishnets and a purple skirt. I felt plain in my jeans.

We walked towards the university, where her mother was directing a play in a new theatre, still under construction.

“It’s based on a really long book,” said the new girl.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“I haven’t read it,” she said. “It’s French. It’s famous because the main character eats a madeleine and then he starts remembering his childhood.”

I didn’t really understand. I couldn’t imagine this on a stage.

I pictured a small table, a cup of tea with steam rising from it, and a man sipping, staring into space. I couldn’t picture the madeleine; I wasn’t sure what it looked like. Was it a cake or a biscuit? Or something else? I tried to remember. I didn’t want to ask the new girl; I was always asking her questions, while she never asked me any. She was worldly. I felt provincial.

“Mum’s version is more about Albertine, his mistress, though,” she said. t was noisy at the university, with hammers hitting and drills whirring behind walls; it seemed everybody was rushing to finish building the theatre while the play rehearsed. I followed the new girl through a door

or a long time I went to bed early; I wasn’t allowed to watch anything after ten. In the office, the new girl and a woman, perhaps in her early twenties, talked about a television show I’d never seen.

The new girl hadn’t introduced me to anybody. She swivelled on a black chair, near the computer; I perched nervously on a blue exercise ball behind her. I felt as if I were her shadow.

“Which character did you get?” she asked the woman.

“Can I do the quiz?” I asked the new girl.

“You haven’t even seen Queer as Folk,” she said.

I wanted to inhale the new girl’s confidence, her ease in the adult world. She didn’t look at everything, flattening herself against the wall, enthralled and awkward, as I did.

She spoke easily in the office; she was unafraid of occupying space. She seemed to belong here, in the theatre, as she didn’t belong in school. I had no idea of my own place; Hollywood was far away and my favourite films had fallen out of fashion. did the same things as the other girls at school; I wanted to belong. I had enrolled in dancing classes at the local community hall, so that I would know what everybody else was talking about on Thursday mornings. I hadn’t known any boys before dancing class, and I felt, after meeting those ones, that I wasn’t missing anything. I suspected that

02 OCT 2020

I

Anna Kate Blair

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S

oon, those who were late returned to the stage, and I turned back, still coursing with adrenaline, to my seat in the darkened stalls. I learned the names of the characters and their lines as the scene played and paused, repeated, echoing, for two hours.

“They dance very well together, don’t they, girls?” said Marcel, from a corner of the stage, to Doctor Cottard, beside him.

I

n theatre and in adolescence, silences have meaning, hold tension.

I wanted to see the play, when it was performed, and yet I never did. I wonder if I was afraid of what my desire might mean, afraid to ask for tickets. I wonder if it was simply that it was performed on a weeknight, that I had to go to bed too early. I kept thinking, anyway, of the scene in rehearsal, of all those nameless girls, dancing in a circle, stopping and starting, of one phrase repeated on the piano, of that leering doctor, almost blind and without his glasses, advising Marcel that the girls’ breasts were touching.

S

he wasn’t the new girl, anymore, though she was still the newest. She said that she would give me her email address before she left. On her last day, though, she didn’t come to school, didn’t

I

didn’t dream as often, after that, of Los Angeles, of the Hollywood Bowl and Schwab’s Pharmacy. I dreamed, instead, of London. I dreamed of mirrors where men applied makeup, of costumes strewn across floors, of doors that led to layers of dark curtains holding characters about to step on stage, of a world in which composers were quotidian. It faded, gradually, to an indistinct lust for red bricks and Rimmel mascara.

I

found the novel and read it, slowly. I had felt, while searching for it, that if I could grasp it then I might grasp everything beyond that, might return to the theatre, see the play in its entirety and understand myself. I felt my pulse quicken as I read, but by the time I reached the scene where the narrator watches the girls dancing, sees Albertine pressed against Andrée and is simultaneously attracted and alarmed, my memories were disintegrating.

“One pursues the inaccessible,” I read. “One only loves what one does not possess.”

I

remember only fragments, but growing up is a collecting of fragments, finding scraps scattered across strangers, suburbs, books and theatres, gathering pieces of oneself and arranging them, rearranging them, until adaptation and collage create something new. It is the same, I think, when a novel becomes a play; interpretation is individual. We reveal who we are in what we remember or select. We reveal who we are in the things, the people, that we long to grasp.

I do not know which of the girls on that stage was Albertine; perhaps I was Albertine, was dancing with Albertine, in that scene. She resists possession; she remains a mystery. In the novel, we never know Albertine; we see her always through the eyes of another, through Doctor Cottard’s fading vision, through Marcel’s jealousy and desire. I wonder if I am writing this, now, because I want a proximity that I never had. I want her hand on my waist and our fingers entwined. Albertine was embodied on the stage and then, through memory, dissolved into words again.

I

thought of the new girl often, long after she left.

I wondered what she was doing, if she ever thought of me or of Australia. I tried to remember her surname, wanting to search for her on the internet.

I thought of her, three years later, when I applied to study theatre at university.

“Do you remember that British girl who was here briefly, in Year Nine?” I asked Ruby.

“No,” she said, then reconsidered. “Vaguely?”

Anna Kate Blair (@annakblair) is a writer from Aotearoa/New Zealand living in Naarm/Melbourne.

Her work has appeared in Reckoning, Meanjin, Landfall and The Lifted Brow.

02 OCT 2020

T

he new girl and I sat in the auditorium, watching the cast gather after lunch. It wasn’t a dress rehearsal; everybody was wearing black. They stood, tall, in little groups, talking and waiting.

“We’re missing two,” said the new girl’s mother. “Where are they?”

Nobody seemed to know.

“We need them for the dance scene,” she said. “We really can’t wait for them.”

She turned and looked at us.

“Could you two fill in?” she asked.

“Sure,” said the new girl, unfazed.

I nodded and followed her to the stage, let somebody push me into the right position, opposite a dark-haired girl who was, like all of them, tall and slender – an actress.

I was terrified by the thought of holding that older girl’s hands, of dancing with her on the stage, but I wanted it, too.

I was so afraid, at fifteen, of blurting out the wrong words, of saying something I hadn’t even been thinking, that I muttered silent incantations before speaking. I was afraid that something instinctual, uncontrollable, might bubble to the surface. I felt the same fear, standing there, as if in taking her hands or looking into her eyes I might reveal something I hadn’t yet admitted to myself. I was afraid that I might, if set in motion, trip over and find myself unable to halt the fall.

leave her contact details or say goodbye. She disappeared, abruptly, into memory.

45

we were all disappointed, but trying to conceal it; a crush, after all, was something to whisper into another girl’s ear.

None of these boys, though, made believable love objects; they couldn’t be cast in those roles. I hated dancing with them, having to take their clammy hands.

46

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Rocky teve was in the yard playing tug-of-war with Rocky when Belinda called out to him to hurry up.

“Coming.”

The dog was pulling hard on the rope, his brindly haunches taut, legs anchored to the patchy grass like tent pegs. Steve had read somewhere that you should never let a dog win a game of tug-of-war, but that didn’t seem fair.

Rocky was putting his heart and soul into it. The strain on his jaw must have been tremendous. When Steve let go, Rocky staggered comically backwards. But he recovered quickly enough. Now, with the rope all to himself, he seemed intent on killing it, whacking it against the ground first one way, then the other.

Inside, Daisy was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen bench, a white tutu frothing out beneath her while Belinda fixed her hair into a bun.

“Well, look at you!” said Steve.

Daisy squirmed with pleasure.

“Hold still,” muttered Belinda, through a mouthful of hairpins.

Steve got out his phone and took a photo. Who would have thought he’d feel so proud and so protective of someone else’s kid?

“What should I wear?” He’d never been to a ballet concert before.

Belinda wedged in the last of the pins. “Just wear what you had on last night.”

His clothes were on the floor in the bedroom – black jeans and a denim short-sleeved shirt that smelled of fried pub food and deodorant. He could see Rocky from the bedroom window. He was lying under the clothesline, gnawing at the rope.

“Rocky’s getting fat,” said Steve, buckling his belt.

“What’s that?” Belinda sat down on the bed to put on her sandals.

“Rocky,” said Steve. “He needs exercise.”

“He’s not my dog.”

“He’s not mine either.”

“H

ow’s Rocky?”

Steve made the five-hour round trip to visit Ray once a month and it was always the first thing Ray asked him.

“He’s good. Great.”

Perversely, prison seemed to suit Ray. He’d filled out a

little. The tracksuit brought out the green in his grey-green eyes. They’d nabbed the corner table closest to the window.

It overlooked a walled gravel courtyard featuring a tree made out of corrugated iron.

“He’s not fretting?”

“He’s fine. He’s okay.”

“You still feeding him fresh meat?”

Steve nodded. Belinda had put a stop to that after a week, saying, “Who does he think we are? Millionaires?”

“Cos the canned stuff gives him the trots.”

Steve tried to ignore the way Ray’s knee bounced up and down. Medication, he guessed, or lack of medication. He wasn’t the only man in the room with jittery knees.

They gazed at the iron tree.

“You know, some of the guys in here have no-one at all,” said Ray. “I know,” said Steve. Ray had told him that plenty of times “No family. No friends. No visitors. It’s so sad, Steve.”

Steve hoped Ray wouldn’t cry here, where people could see. Ray had always been sensitive.

“They don’t even have a dog to go home to. I’m one of the lucky ones.”

“I know.”

One of the guards strolled past. Ray gave him a quick salute. “He’s one of the better ones, that bloke,” he whispered to Steve. “Spent time in the navy. Couldn’t wait to get out.”

Steve went to give him a respectful nod. He wanted him to know that at heart Ray was a decent man who came from a respectable family, but the man had already moved on.

“How is everyone?” asked Ray. “I haven’t spoken to Dad for ages. He okay?”

Ernie’d had a stroke eight weeks ago. His speech was slurred. The whole left side of his body was pretty well shot.

Steve thought Ray should know, but their mother was dead against it: “What’s the point? He’ll just be upset. Let him find out when he gets out.”

“Oh, you know what Dad’s like,” said Steve.

“Busy, yeah? With Probus and stuff? Still bossing people round at the Men’s Shed?”

Steve looked away, towards the canteen. “Hey, there’s not much of a queue. You want something to eat?”

Ray glanced that way too. “Nah, not yet.”

An announcement cut through the talk in the room.

“The following prisoners need to report to the medical centre: Simpson, Kasumi…”

02 OCT 2020

S

Jodie Kewley

47

BY

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

48

They waited for it to finish.

“Tell you what,” said Ray, shaking his head, “I won’t miss those. Every second fucken minute. So, what you been up to?”

Steve dragged his chair in a little. “Went to the ballet the other day.”

“You serious?”

“Daisy’s ballet concert.”

“Is that right?”

Steve told him how Daisy had been sick in the car on the way there, which Belinda put down to nerves, and how clammy his hands got when it was Daisy’s turn to appear on stage, and how Daisy wanted to sleep with her tutu on when they got home. But he could tell that Ray wasn’t really interested. And why should he be? He hadn’t met Daisy, or Belinda. He hadn’t seen the ex-display home they rented through Belinda’s father’s estate agency or the cubbyhouse he’d built in the yard. He’d never even been to Clyde.

“You seen Kimmy lately?” Ray asked, after a moment or two.

“Ray, we split four years ago.”

“I know, I know. But you’re friends still, right?”

“Mmm, maybe, maybe not.”

Ray had been his best man at their wedding. He’d just come out of rehab then. Seemed he’d swung his life around.

He and Kim got on well. She didn’t turn her back on him the way most people had after he’d lied to them, stolen from them and worse. The way she saw it, life hadn’t been kind to him, what with a turned eye and dyslexia and his first girlfriend suiciding. It was Kim who’d given Ray Rocky, a dog who’d spent more of his life in the animal shelter than outside it on account of his square head and slitty eyes and bark. Best thing that ever happened to him, he told anyone who cared to listen.

“Actually, it’s funny you should ask, because I did see her, last week, on the train. Belinda had to work, so I took Daisy to the zoo. I felt bad, you know, sitting there with Daisy when Kim—” “Wanted kids so bad?”

“Yeah, it seemed – I don’t know – wrong. I mean, I never really understood what she felt she was missing out on, but I do now. Even though Daisy’s not mine, I feel like she is. I feel like a dad. She calls me Dad. Sometimes she calls me Daddy.

She takes my hand without thinking.”

“What does her real dad feel about that?”

“Clayton?” Steve snorted. “That useless piece of junk? He only ever sees her when it suits him, and that’s once in a blue moon. So I couldn’t give a rat’s what he thinks.”

“Yeah,” said Ray, shrugging. His knee shook even when he crossed his legs. “Poor Kimmy.”

“Enough about Kimmy. You know we spent over fifty grand on IVF?” “Shit, really?”

“We would’ve spent more if she’d had her way. She wanted to try again but I couldn’t do it. There had to be an end to it, to the money and the heartache.”

He could still remember telling her enough was enough, that he couldn’t sleep nights worrying about their debts. How quiet she became. No tears, no argument, just a steely kind of silence that she carried all the way to the bedroom. She

wouldn’t sleep with him after that. She couldn’t see the point.

Didn’t even want him to kiss her. He might have been the one to move out in the end – which is what everyone remembered – but she’d left the relationship in every other way years before that.

He missed her.

“Maybe she should get a dog?”

“Oh, Ray.” “I’m just saying.”

Steve went over and joined the canteen queue. The bloke behind the counter had tatts on the backs of his hands and on his neck right up to his chin, but he was cheerful enough.

When it was his turn, Steve ordered a coffee for himself, and a Coke, a hamburger, a bag of hot chips and a chocolate muffin for Ray, which he carried back on a tray.

“Know what I’m gonna do when I get out?” said Ray, pulling out a chip and blowing on it.

“What?”

“I’m gonna get myself some fish’n’chips and a cold beer – at that place in Mordialloc, maybe – and take them down the beach. Remember those times Dad took us?”

Steve could only recall one occasion, after Ray’s first eye operation, when even hot chips wouldn’t stop Ray’s blubbering.

“And know what I’m gonna do then?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna stay there till it gets dark. I miss that, Steve, more than anything. Seeing the moon and the stars, space all round.” He clapped the salt off his fingers. “I’m done with drugs, Steve.”

“I should bloody well hope so.”

He leaned forward. “The other guys here? That’s all they want to do. Go straight back out and score. But not me. I’m never coming back here.”

“Damn right you’re not.” And because Ray seemed close to tears, Steve said, “I mean, come on, we can’t keep Rocky forever.”

S

teve called his mother, as promised, on the way home.

“He’s good, Mum. Doing well.”

There was a pause in which he could feel her weighing his words for truth the way she used to with Ray. Never did do her much good. “You didn’t tell him about—” “Dad? No. How is he?”

“He’s a little better today,” she said. She always said that.

“Good to know.”

When he called Belinda, she didn’t ask how the visit went or how Ray was. Something about him going to visit Ray made her cranky. It was as if he’d gone off to the pub for the day.

“How long are you going to be?” she asked.

“Shouldn’t be too long. Why?” “No reason. I’m tired, that’s all.”

“What’ve you been doing?”

“I worked this morning, in case you didn’t remember.”

“I remember.”

“We saw Mum. I cleaned the house. Someone had to.”

He could hear cicadas in the background.

“What’s Daisy doing?”

“She’s playing in the cubbyhouse.”

“Really?” He’d been disappointed. She’d hardly used it since he’d built it for her.

“She’s taken all her teddies out there.”

“Tell her I’ll be there soon. Two hours, tops.”

It was a warm evening. Steve opened the windows to let the air in. He slid a Stones CD into the player, set cruise control to one hundred and settled back in his seat. He liked driving, especially by himself when he could sing aloud. He felt pretty good. Ray was getting out soon; Daisy was playing in the cubbyhouse he’d built. With any luck, Belinda would set aside some roast dinner for him (she always did a roast on Sundays). He had an RDO tomorrow.

He could sleep in. Belinda had the day off too. If Daisy didn’t get up too early, he might get lucky. He even got to thinking that maybe his mother was right, that Ernie was making progress. He was a fighter, after all, his dad.

It wasn’t impossible.

When the CD had finished, he put on Oasis, which took him straight back to his teenage years, to practising bass in the garage, with his mate Rory on drums and Jack and Eddie on guitar. They’d called their band Purple Lightswitch (God

“Where is she?” he cried before he’d even reached the counter. “Daisy. Daisy McKenna.”

A knot of nurses exchanged looks. One of them, a sharp‑faced woman, stepped towards him.

“Are you a family member?”

“I’m her dad.”

The woman tapped at the computer and frowned.

“As I understand it, her father, Clayton, is with her.”

“You’ve got to be fucking joking. Okay, I’m not her dad.

I’m her stepdad, Steve. Steve Hopwell.”

More frowning, more examination of the file. “Well, Steve, you’re not listed here, but if you could just take a seat over there—” “Just tell me how she is.”

“If you could just sit down please.”

“Not until you tell me how she is.”

“If you don’t calm down, I’m going to have to call security.”

But he couldn’t calm down. His legs were still shaking, his fists clenched. He had to shove his hands in the pockets of his shorts to stop himself from lashing out at her, or at the TV on the wall that was showing their next-door neighbour, Renata, standing outside their house saying something he couldn’t hear because there was too much noise in the room.

He could still remember telling her enough was enough, that he couldn’t sleep nights worrying about their debts. How quiet she became. No tears, no argument, just a steely kind of silence that she carried all the way to the bedroom.

Jodie Kewley’s stories have appeared in many short story publications, including Australian Short Stories, Imago, Southern Review, Australian Multicultural Book Review, Ulitarra, Aurealis, Storyfire and Going Down Swinging. Jodie lives on the Mornington Peninsula with her husband, her sheltie and her chooks.

02 OCT 2020

S

teve called Belinda three times. Each time it went to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message. He swung the car around and headed back towards the city.

He knew how to get to The Alfred. It’s where his father had been taken after the stroke, where he and his mother had taken it in turns to spend six virtually sleepless nights. It felt like yesterday.

His foot shook as it pressed against the accelerator and the car was filled with the sound of his own ragged breathing, but he drove carefully, a cold, tight, white feeling in his head. When he got there, he left the car in the zone marked Emergencies Only and the key in the ignition and lurched towards the entrance.

His phone rang.

“Belinda?”

“No, it’s me.” Ray’s voice was all squeezed up.

Steve looked back up at the TV where the face of a staffy appeared.

“Steve? What’s happening? Is Rocky going to be okay?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Ray—” He felt a hand reach under his armpit, another grip his arm. The security guard was a giant of a man. “What say we go outside?”

People were staring, including the nurses. There was cricket showing on the TV now.

“You don’t understand,” he said, only half-resisting the man’s efforts to bundle him out of the waiting room.

“What say you explain it to me outside?”

“Steve?” he could hear Ray bawling as the doors opened to the starry evening. “Steve, you still there?”

49

knows why), and they were going to be famous. He’d lost touch with them over time, even Rory. He made a mental note to look them up, see what they were up to.

He wasn’t far from home when Ray called. He often phoned after Steve had visited, to make sure he got back safely and to say thanks for making the long journey.

“I’m not quite there yet,” Steve told him.

“Is it true?” Ray sounded like he was crying or choking, and Steve wondered how he could have found out about Ernie.

“What?”

“About Rocky. It’s on the news.”

50

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Solo uring lockdown a trumpeter commenced a regimen of practice somewhere in our hive of apartments. It seemed a lengthy piece – a concerto, a rock opera – but when I timed it, watching the second hand twitch petulantly around the clockface, it came in at just over four minutes. The horn didn’t carry the melody but provided accompaniment, an iteration of burps and wails: a banshee with hiccups. I don’t know if the musician was practising solo or engaged in an online band rehearsal. Possibly both. In the absence of the other instruments I was unable to define a tune. The conglomeration of snorts and gastric burbles became my personal soundtrack to COVID-19, worming into my dreams at night. My pulse became the trumpeter’s metronome, my temples thudding in time. There was one lament at the conclusion, an undulating coloratura intended to signal emotional release but which, due to the practitioner’s inability, invariably resembled an ageing diva being clubbed to death. I spent the entire unreeling of the syncopated sequence dreading this culmination. I willed the musician to achieve the final money note, only to hear it collapse into choking malaise. Then the tune would repeat.

In the same way that I became ultra-conscious of the intrusive blurts and moans of the horn, so I became sensitive to the tics and habits of my husband, Oliver. I grew to resent the way his crossed leg bounced on the fulcrum of his knee while engrossed in a novel. It rankled me when he regressed to infantile baby-speak while watering the house plants (“Who’s a thirsty critter, then?”). He hoarded the TV remote, switching channels during commercial breaks without consultation.

Normally I could shrug off this catalogue of insignificant irritants, but each was magnified by being confined within a two-room prison with ensuite. His continual entreaties for me to wash my hands infuriated me to the point where I snapped back, rebuking him for being mumsy. In retrospect, I realise I was convicting him of concern, of loving too much, and the downside of constant bathroom hand scrubbing is that you spend a lot more time confronted by your own reflection.

I offer all this as mitigating evidence. Because I embarked on an office affair. Not easy when you’re working from home.

I

t began via a conference call. We in the Vice Chancellor’s department were liaising with Finance to attenuate the damage wrought by the pandemic. We were investigating ways to divert funds, depleted by the dearth of international students, into online learning, while bolstering

IT capabilities to support staff working remotely. It was a logistical tangle. At the same time I was finding it difficult to concentrate because the tiny lozenge representing my video feed was broadcasting the breaking news that my husband had, in the absence of my regular hairdresser, botched the simple job of trimming my fringe. As fiscal manipulations became increasingly involuted, I felt my mouth contracting to the thinness of a garrotte. Stress bunched in my gut. Troy from Finance remained patient and reassuring, constantly recalibrating and redistributing capital, looking for ways to keep the university viable. As the call concluded Oliver had the misfortune to pass behind me and I leapt up, upbraiding him for my serrated fringe. He was in the throes of a bad day himself and we sniped bitterly before he beat a retreat to his “office”, the bedroom. When I sank back down I noticed Troy still on my screen, abashed and apologetic, frantically indicating his keyboard.

“Eleanor, you…um…you need to log out of the meeting.

The red button.”

At work I manifest dispassionate composure. I revel in a reputation for sangfroid. But in my video feed I saw a frazzled cartoon with imprecise hair and a mottled complexion. I sensed Troy’s eagerness to log out, to flee, but needed to reset my default.

“Apologies for the unseemliness.” My polite smile allowed a scintilla of warmth. “Uncertain times.”

“S’okay. I didn’t have record on.” His broad grin reconfigured his features like a film set, shifting him into handsomeness.

“Besides, it’s almost beer o’clock. The defences crumble.”

“Yes. I can almost smell the mojito.” What the fuck? Too chummy. I hit the red button.

Two hours later the intercom peeled. A waitress from Rio, a local bar, hovered at the entrance to the building. Since lockdown, Rio had instituted an entrepreneurial cocktail delivery service. A mojito was awaiting me. Oliver examined my bemusement. “Did you order that?”

“No.” I recovered swiftly. “I ordered two, obviously. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

D

uring the next conference call I studied the segment of screen framing Troy. He maintained a professional mien, a faint frown marring diffidence. On the wall behind him I recognised a slice of a Tretchikoff print. I hoped he regarded the artist with the same collision of irony and genuine admiration that I did.

02 OCT 2020

D

Colin Varney

51

BY

The room he’d requisitioned was comfortably disordered.

Homely. There were scattered toys. Our tiny apartment reduced us to asceticism: clutter would crowd us out. At one point a rambunctious toddler thundered behind Troy and he glanced back. That grin again, dispensing handsomeness.

Then something larger loomed. A shadow of spouse. I heard her tuneless whistling.

I dispatched an email. “Thx 4 mojito. Lifesaver.”

I saw his eyes flick as he registered the message. His mask remained blank as he typed. “A pleasure. You deserved it.”

I tapped back: “How’d u get address?”

Troy: “Contacts in HR.” Me: “Sackable offence.”

Troy: “Nah. Warning at most .”

Me: “Only 1 drink. Made hubby jealous.”

I watched his frown deepen as he wrote. “Hope I didn’t cause prob.”

“One more prob wouldn’t matter.”

Why did I send that?

I saw him type then physically blanche from his keyboard, uncertainty loosening his features. He stabbed send with a convulsive lunge.

“No failed hairdresser can make you look less than gorgeous.”

I saw his trepidation but returned nothing.

That evening the intercom trilled again. The waitress had a mojito and a gin and soda. Oliver tutted at his drink. “No expense spared,” he muttered.

J

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

erking into wakefulness in the depths of the night I believed I could hear the trumpeter practising.

Shrouded in bedclothes, interred in darkness, I listened as each phantom chord embodied an ugly notion. One brassy diminuendo represented a global economy in freefall, an omen of depression. A sorrowful keen became an elegy for the escalating coronavirus death toll. A teetering blast of dissonance conjured a vision of Dad, bewildered and afraid in the care home, bamboozled by Alzheimer’s.

The bedroom lacked oxygen. I panted. Swallowing compulsively, I detected the simmer of a nascent sore throat.

No, all imagination. I struggled from the sheets. Disabled by darkness, I fumbled in a drawer for the bag of pot I kept stashed beneath a bundle of knickers. Where was it? Where?

Oliver’s arms encircled me. He hauled me to his chest, voice rumbling reassuringly.

“It’s okay, Eleanor. Breathe.”

His bed musk. I sucked it in.

“Code red,” I gasped. “I panicked.”

T

roy and I entertained ourselves during group calls by indulging in coded flirting. I watched his eyes flash as he said: “I could massage the figures. Is that what you’d like me to do, Eleanor? Massaging?”

Once, while discussing reallocation of resources to Finance I gambled with: “I’m sure your requirements are pressing and urgent, Troy. I never stop thinking about them.” I craned towards the screen, battling a smile as I witnessed his blush.

He texted verse he’d composed for me. Clumsy confections, but their awkwardness charmed. I returned film clips of

love songs, many of them racy. We risked one-on-one Zoom assignations. Wearing noise-cancelling headphones, I visually monitored the bedroom door to ensure Oliver was safely ensconced, bundled in his own tasks. I could tell Troy revelled in the huskiness of my lowered tones. One afternoon we took a virtual tour of the Musée d’Orsay together. Our first date.

I pictured us ambling through the City of Love, moonlight shimmering off the Seine. At the time, COVID deaths were spiralling out of control in Paris. The smoggy environs of Sydney were a haven by comparison.

Except the smog was clearing. The air was newly polished and flavourless. On our evening walks, Oliver and I were able to amble across previously impassable roads as traffic became a novelty. Fewer planes rent our conversations with their surly bellowing. The suburbs were healing around us.

One afternoon Troy typed: “At last! Something meaty to divulge during online confession .” I was taken aback. I didn’t know he was Catholic. I realised I knew very little about him at all. I found this both thrilling and dangerous.

The unseen presence of his wife haunted his end of the feed. She could be heard bustling and bumping, her idle whistling monotonous as an eerie wind. He rarely spoke of her but was effusive about Billie, his daughter. He described how she’d sobbed in a playground with its equipment cordoned off by tape like a crime scene. Fun outlawed. Then her delight as she’d explored the neighbourhood on bear hunts. Residents had strategically placed stuffed toys in their windows and front yards so children could spot them. He showed me the obese teddy, the size of a terrier, pressed against his own pane, arms eagerly spread to embrace any passing stranger.

One afternoon when the air was free of whistling, his wife busy elsewhere, he demonstrated on the bear what he would like to do to me, tenderly smooching the loosely sewn snout while his hands caressed the chubby torso. When he nuzzled between its legs I was forced to temper my harsh exhalations.

Over his shoulder, I saw Billie enter the room, incomprehension writ large in her saucer eyes and loosely hinged jaw.

W

e plotted. Neither of us could shake off our limpet families, but we arranged to exercise in the same park at the same hour. It took sustained effort to convince Oliver to cycle to a distant location, situated partway between our residences.

We chained the bikes and strolled in the waning evening light, Oliver complaining about the prospect of pedalling home in the dark. I peered around, heart plunging, unable to locate Troy.

Perhaps he’d been unsuccessful in persuading his wife to make the trip: it was a difficult thing to wrangle a toddler. Then I saw them on the far side of an oval, the parents sauntering while the child circled, a restless electron. Thankfully, a wide-brimmed hat shadowed his wife’s face, but her skirt emphasised her trim waist and lithe frame. Troy’s homing gaze was avid as a sniper.

Even at a distance I recognised his longing. Lagging behind, he risked a wave. When his wife turned he transformed the gesture into the shooing of an insect. Too soon, we were heading in opposite directions, Troy yearning over his shoulder. Such a fleeting and timorous venture, yet my chest fluttered with the stuttering beat of a faulty fan.

W

alls encroached. The balcony offered a promise of freedom, although the air of Sydney seemed bogus without its toxic tang.

Abandoned projects littered the apartment: discarded crochet and bundles of wool, cookbooks lying open but unstained, a wardrobe door half lacquered with undercoat.

Even the trumpet player no longer practised. I suspected my fling was a half-hearted project also: only attractive while impossible to consummate. There was safety in our inability to commit. The notion dismayed me, so I decided to test it.

I refused Troy’s Zoom invites and left texts unanswered, insisting that our next tryst should be physical. We would arrange a further encounter in the park, but this time meet in person, in the romantic nook of the women’s conveniences beside the oval. It needn’t be for long: just enough for a kiss or hurried fumble. Sure, it would be tricky to escape his clinging kin, but if he was serious about us he’d find a way.

I’d rationed my supply of weed, hoarding it for when auguries of apocalypse proliferated or nightmares of Dad lost in the lonely corridors of the care home intruded. But before we saddled up the bikes I lingered on the balcony for a quick toke to settle jangling nerves. I regretted it. The smoke corroded my airways and backed up my nasal passages. While pedalling up hills, panting, my throat felt parched and polluted. As we

O

n the ride home, I mentioned to Oliver that his congested hawks during our stroll reminded me of the honks and haws of our old friend the trumpeter.

“Are you telling me that I can cough out a convincing accompaniment to ‘Empty Fairground’?” he said.

“Is that what it was?”

But I didn’t need confirmation. The squawking earwormed in my head, perfectly slotting into the swing of the 90s hit.

At the conclusion, my mind corrected the imperfections of the final coloratura.

Colin Varney’s debut novel, Earworm, is a tragi‑comedy narrated by a love song. His short fiction has featured in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Island, while satirical pieces have appeared in Points in Case and Slackjaw. He completed a Masters in creative writing at the University of Tasmania. The music world mourns his decision to cease drumming in pub bands.

02 OCT 2020

N

ext morning, Oliver paused beside me, nostrils quivering. “Are you wearing scent?”

Did he wonder why I was paying more attention to my dress and hair while simultaneously becoming careless concerning the top buttons of my shirt? Why I devoted myself to exercise, running every day and hefting weights at home? I was throwing myself into sit-ups, trying to flatten the curve of my gut.

ambled towards the oval I issued a gentle, muffled cough, yet passers-by gawped in alarm and a father hauled his children away. I felt I should be tolling a bell, chanting: “Unclean!”

Oliver, noticing the reaction, barked an impressive series of comic hacks into the crook of his elbow. As the expressions of dread switched to him, he flashed an amused sideways glance.

It was an inopportune moment to succumb to affection.

Troy and family hovered by the oval. His wife was arm‑in‑arm with an elderly woman, possibly her mother. His nervousness was an indictment: damning evidence; exhibit A. I pulled the joint I’d half-consumed from my pocket and told Oliver I was heading off for a sneaky smoke. He grimaced in disapproval, but I cited tension and a creeping headache and he relented. As I approached the amenities block I saw Troy peel away from his family. He loped towards the gents’, then swiftly diverted into the ladies’.

We squeezed into a cubicle. Our smiles looked endangered.

I felt unaccountably bashful and my upper palate smacked of pot. Troy was shorter than I remembered. We weren’t touching, which wasn’t easy in the cramped confines. “So much for social distancing,” he joked. Then his uneasy grin was infiltrated by desire. His voice hitched as he said: “You’re so beautiful.”

We kind of waddled towards each other, but before we could complete the clinch we heard the main door wheeze open. There was tuneless whistling – the familiar backing track to so many of Troy’s Zoom meetings – and the lock slid home in the neighbouring cubicle. We froze, fixed on the other’s apprehension, aware of the rustling of trousers being loosened and the soft protest of the toilet seat as a body settled onto it. We should have been reddening, or suppressing giggles like schoolchildren. The plash and trickle sounded private and achingly vulnerable. We endured the flush, the snapping back of the lock, the hand washing which was, of course, over-thorough. When the door creaked shut behind her, we were left inspecting the other’s uncertainty.

I found myself wondering what his wife’s name was.

Troy inched tentatively forward but I held up a forbidding palm.

53

M

y feet, in heels, scuffed carpet as I sashayed to a lazy bossa nova, the laptop cradled in my arms.

Troy, lost in dream, trembled on the display as he waltzed around his own lounge, cuddling his PC. His wife was tucked away, sacrificing herself to online yoga, while Oliver was trapped in the bedroom, committed to a scheduled appointment. I surrendered to the seductive plumes of sinuous sax wreathing from my headphones. The walls yawned away; the floorspace expanded. I was in a ballroom somewhere, softened by mood lighting, spangled by mirror ball. The sweetness of perfume vied against the spice of cologne and the waft of exquisite booze. There’s a taxi idling at the curb, waiting to spirit us away. We’ll canoodle in the backseat.

Troy leaned in, heavy lidded. His features distorted as he crowded the lens. His tender expression fractured and juddered as he planted the kiss, the failings of wi-fi censoring intimacy. I pressed close too, smearing lipstick on the screen.

Abruptly, the bedroom door swung wide, framing Oliver, clutching a coffee cup. I started, then countered his bafflement with an exasperated sigh, as if already unjustly accused.

“Just some silliness with a work colleague,” I deadpanned.

“You know, cabin fever.”

He gave me a wide berth as he made for the kettle.

Troy logged out.

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

Heart Lines BY

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Alice Bishop

nly the best goes in her now – that white Commodore: Unleaded 98, the thicker-type oil, some of those nice little cardboard vanilla trees. My disappeared daughter’s lip balms still rest in the glove box, along with a couple of strawberryflavoured condoms and a lighter filled with liquid glitter.

Those things will stay in this car as long as I’m living – as long as I’m here. See my gone-girl Sidney’s perfect halfhandprints in dashboard dust, the spearmint chewie in the console and some stray bobby pins, glinting silver from that old car’s worn-through floor.

in the bath. I think of her every day, about how she loved to feed the chooks seed from a tiny hand.

My youngest, Else, she’s shining and still here. She’s seventeen. I could never get her to sit in that Commodore though, her sister’s, after everything. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with that car, Mum. It’s weird.”

“Come along, just for a little bit… Just down the street?”

“Please don’t do this, Mum,” she’d say, her shaved hair glowing gold as she stood in once-white Nikes.

But I can’t keep track of what I can’t control anymore.

It’s been so many white-noise years. Driving soothes;

But I can’t keep track of what I can’t control anymore.

It’s been so many white-noise years. Driving soothes; I want to just be on the highway to somewhere...

02 OCT 2020

I want to just be on the highway to somewhere, to feel close to Sidney again. To smell her vanilla perfume and the canola oil of the emptied chip cartons she’d shoved under the seat. To be near. I wanted Else to remember her older sister too, not just through Facebook messages, kikki.K cards and flowers wrapped in too much clear cellophane.

“I’m just going for a spin, Hon,” I said – the April afternoon I left. “Be back soon.”

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My daughter’s 2009 V8 hums warmth from underneath as I take the Hume, away from the place I once called home – mostly out of habit, not need. The engine drone calms something in me when I’m lonely for her, now forever eighteen. There’s a mechanical warmth in place of a bodily one – some kind of consistency – as I hold the pink sheepskin wheel. I think of her on my knee – my baby girl in 2002 – small chubby arms cocooned in second-hand knits, pearly blue. Her eyelashes, how they clumped together

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hat do I remember of leaving that day: the weight of my foot on the accelerator? The wind cooling the pearly sweat on my face?

Do I remember the group of white-winged choughs, scrambling as I drove along dirt road – those loyal red-eyed birds? No, there was just my remaining daughter yelling at me: spit and tears and gravel. “You should’ve been better, Mum. Protected her from them. You should have done it, everything – more.”

“Else, baby,” I said. “I’m so sorry,” I said. Or is that all in my head? Maybe my clip-haired youngest just calmly leaned down to pat the restless blue heeler and didn’t say anything at all. Maybe there was just radio drone.

I

dream of sleeping in this cream-coloured Commodore, the heater on low and the embroidered seats lowered all the way back. Ordinary birds – rainbownecked bush pigeons, currawongs – would wake me up at dawn. But the police are everywhere at the moment now, with everything going on. People over oceans have started panicking about an invisible virus,

has the same thing in her basket: two litres of milk and some Cadbury, a honeycomb block. That was her favourite; I could never buy enough.

I tap her on the back, my first girl, in these moments of her reappearing. “Stay away from those men,” I say, leaning in to smell the familiar peppermint oil of her neck. This time I tell her to move away from the pull of that back-paddock bonfire glow, to put something warm on, a lambswool jacket and a pair of soft leather boots. I take my daughter – still alive and a foot taller than me – by the shoulder and usher her into the ute.

“Sorry, you got the wrong person,” my daughter says in the milk and yoghurt section of Coles. “I don’t know who you are,” she says. But I know she’s just protecting me, keeping me safe. So, I smile – nod – and get back on the Hume.

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he highway rolls out ahead of me like some plain country song. I’ll check the car soon – change her oil, test the tyre wear, pay for a fuel filter check. Maybe this is all just a long-

People over oceans have started panicking about an invisible virus, shaped like tiny crowns... The symptoms sound a little like grief – that crackling of breath, tightening of chest.

S

ometimes I spot her – Sidney – in parked cars at the IGA or driving the highway in someone else’s mud-marked car. I see my gone girl from behind in the dairy aisle – her hair long and the colour of condensed milk. She’s in leggings and an oversized windcheater, as always, stretched at the neck. She always

Alice Bishop was named The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist for 2020.

Her debut, A Constant Hum, is out now through Text.

Find her @BishopAlice.

02 OCT 2020

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ace curtains and a little circle of wrapped-up soap by the sink: it’s a motel room for me this week. I’ll wash the last of the make-up from my face. Fill my pockets with free Kooka’s Country Cookies, the kind with the crystalline jam. I’ll taste the weight of beef fat which, when scanning the ingredients list, I’ll pretend not to see. Maybe there’ll be someone to share a paper tube of Nescafe Blend with, the following morning – his wide rough hands having been all night on me.

“Where do you want to go today, Cheryl babe?” my hotel guest might even say. He won’t ask to take my photo. He’ll know it’s against everything I’ve learned – my fifty-two years. He’ll hold my face, gently, in his hands.

needed holiday. A getaway, like that old Channel Nine show I used to love. But that was back when the Barrier Reef still had colour, when half the country hadn’t already burned. Flecks of petrol-station pastry dust my seatbelt but I don’t brush anything off.

“Be back soon” I text Else from the road again. I know I shouldn’t – but I do.

“I love you.”

57

shaped like tiny crowns. It makes me think of grass burrs, attaching themselves to the soft pink of sleeping lungs.

The symptoms sound a little like grief – that crackling of breath, tightening of chest.

58

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION

The Last he vessel that has carried her is a fifth its original size when it reaches the shore. She too has diminished; her chest is a ladder of ribs. She slips exhausted off the ice and paddles ashore, heaving herself up onto land that is flat but soon sweeps uphill towards mountain peaks, sharded with rock. Clouds fold around her, licking the land.

Nanortalik. It is older than glaciers. The humans took this place as their own but first it belonged to the bears.

Behind her, the icy hulk groans as it splices in two, sending shockwaves through the dark water onto the bank. Sheets of corrugated iron, once used as roofing, lie scattered, rainwater pooled in their ruts.

She smells him long before she sees him: the pungent mix of wood smoke, hair grease and dried sweat. Her body tenses.

Hunger gouges her stomach, pushing her on. She searches for him, sniffing round the remnants of houses, picked apart long ago by the men of before.

There is not much to go on. In a tumble-down church, she knocks over a pew then pauses to prod at a melted candle.

Outside the church, gravestones lean this way and that, carving shadows through sunlight. Crowberry shrubs obscure names etched over centuries while soft ears of dwarf willow grow in cracks between broken paving stones, their tiny leaves parting round plump crimson buds.

She heads back to the coastline; her paws spread on the dry ground. She scours the shore, shanks shifting slowly as she noses through kelp. She drags it out by the roots and gulps it down in hungry mouthfuls, then heads into the sea to half-submerged rocks, where she prises off mussels, careful not to cut her tongue on the razor-sharp shells.

Further down the coast, she comes across an old rotten pier. Its wooden struts rise from the sea, gnarled and covered with a thick fur of lichen. It is here that she spots the snare, its wire wound tight round the leg of an Arctic hare. The creature pulls hard, wide-eyed with panic, thrashing its limb, fur dyed red along the line of the wire. She lifts it tenderly into her mouth then crunches down; its bones splinter between her huge teeth.

Little remains of the time of great plenty, when whales arched their backs and slapped down tails like thunder in a sea full of fish. Days ripe with seals, before the happening, when one thousand reduced to five hundred then dwindled to fifty, shrinking in curious symmetry with her own kind, until there were none. But one must remain because she can smell him.

Sated now but debilitated by tiredness, she lumbers back to the church and lies down on what’s left of the porch. She will find him but first she must rest. Dusk rides in from the ocean and the sky turns to darkness. Her chest heaves and falls.

Above her, the Arsarnerit spreads out luminous tentacles into the blackness. The aurora twist and curve, opalescent and shimmering, refracting round the mountain tops until the whole sky is dancing. Her fur catches the light.

It glimmers green then red then pink.

T

wo miles to the north, a man with long, matted hair wakes in the darkness. He shakes off his blanket, yawns and stretches his back with an audible crack. His shelter smells den-like, mammalian and peaty; it is musky and damp, like an Arctic fox lair. He dug it himself in the foot of the mountain, hacking away with a pickaxe and spade.

He gropes in the darkness, feeling past objects, until he finds what he’s looking for: two lengths of string. One piece threads easily through the loops in his trousers; the other section coils round his hair, securing it in place at the back of his head.

The man pulls on a lopapeysa. It is scratchy and thick and incredibly warm. The wool’s earthy brownness brings back faraway memories: coffee and cocoa; dark chocolate and nuts. If someone were to call him, they would say his name, Oqi, but no-one has been here in a very long time. He hears his name whispered at unexpected moments: in the stream’s running water, from his reflection in the bay. It calls to him softly when he looks at the pictures that he keeps, fading, at the foot of his bed.

By the time he emerges, dawn is just breaking; sun rakes the land with a soft yellow light. He sits on grass mounded in tussocks and pulls on old boots that are wrapped round with cloth.

The bag he has with him contains his necessities: an old metal cup, penknife, catapult and some stones. A short distance away, a stream descends the mountain, skipping through stones, carving moss-lined banks. He goes to it as he does every morning and splashes his face, then takes out his cup. He drinks then refills it and returns to his shelter, where he flicks drops of water over the peat of the roof. This act is part ritual, but it also has purpose: the fires that pass through wreak total destruction; he is fastidious now about keeping it damp.

02 OCT 2020

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Angharad Hampshire

59

BY

This shelter has lasted much longer than the last. He wishes his brother could examine his handiwork. He would run through each detail, each swing of the axe. He’d show him the timber frames from the schoolhouse he used as a buttress, shoring the side to prevent a collapse. He’d run his brother’s hand along the smooth joins of the table he carved from the post-office counter, the chairs crafted from driftwood, the bed built from old crates. He’d turn to him squarely and tell him he loved him and that his biggest regret is not getting on the boat.

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he muscles on her hind leg twitch, sending ripples undulating down the fur of her thigh.

A dream has taken her back to her homeland, thousands of miles away on the northeast of the island, a land that glistens with snow crystals and ice. Her muzzle moves. She is masticating figments; her teeth grind at the memory of seals, succulent and laden with fat.

The dream transports her south, searching for prey. The sea ice is not as it should be; it is patchy at best. She reaches an alluvial delta. It fans out brown ridges of silt and sediment towards the water, in the shape of a clam. As she picks her way across it, the clag clings to her paws, darkening them and weighing her down. There are no seals here, only mud, gravel and rocks.

Just north of the deserted settlement of Daneborg, she comes across the remnants of a dogsled patrol. Harnesses and sledges lie piled in a heap. She sniffs at them gently, then moves on to a pile of dry scat, where she picks up the faintest trace of animal musk. Snow begins to fall from the sky in huge flakes. It rests on her back, ears and nose. She extends her tongue and probes at a nostril.

Her journey takes her onwards to the steep-sided gully that is Kangertittivak fjord. Clouds fold over the mountains on the far side, catching the sun’s fading light and turning the sky a soft salmon pink. The reflection below is so perfect that it is almost impossible to tell where the firmament ends and the water begins. She looks out into the middle of the harbour. An iceberg rises from the depths like a crown in the gloam. She slips into the water and paddles out towards it, her legs sweeping rhythmically through the brine. Beneath her, the ocean drops into a dark gaping mouth. It is black as an orca and deeper than whales.

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

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he man heads out to check the traps. As he walks down from the mountain, mosquitoes ravage his arms into an itching mass. He scratches at the bumps and mounds until they bleed. Though the traps are usually empty, occasionally they yield a stoat or a hare. These smaller mammals have not yet been wiped out.

The first snare is next to the old schoolhouse, which is now a ruin of crumbled walls. He is not surprised when he finds the trap empty. He picks through the debris. Old desks lie on their sides, their lids half open and stained from the leaching of disused inkpots. He finds what he is looking for – his name, Oqi Nielsen, carved into a desk. Underneath it is another inscription, that of Palu, his brother. His heart swells and contracts as he traces the familiar grooves.

The two of them had been inseparable. Palu was three years younger, and from the day he was born they shared a bedroom. For as long as he could remember, Palu climbed into his bed each night and curled up against him for comfort and warmth. They spent their childhoods swimming, fishing and hunting together, reading, laughing and crying. They talked about everything. Palu was thirteen when he left with their parents on the boat.

The night before their departure, they lay together in the yard behind this schoolhouse looking up into the sky. He pointed out the familiar constellations, each surrounded by comforting myth. Lacerta, the lizard, zigzagged in the east as the top half of Andromeda appeared in the west.

Andromeda’s vain mother, Cassiopeia, whose boasting nearly consigned her daughter to death, twinkled high above, chained in punishment to her celestial throne. Palu held his hand tightly, his breathing uneven. He could tell that his brother was trying not to cry.

“Please come with us, Oqi,” he begged.

The sky spun above them in ethereal rotation. Perseus arrived, holding the head of Medusa, sword in hand, slicing the heavens, ready to save Andromeda from the sea monster, Cetus, and make her his wife. He squeezed Palu’s hand, unable to look at him. How could he go with these adults who had ignored all the signs and let this happen? Though he loved his parents, they were as bad as everyone else. He had trusted them when they said a solution would come, that technology would solve it. The adults had lied to them, ignoring scientific advice. They had clung onto everything: coal, mass farming, deforestation, the unremitting desire for flight. He felt nothing except anger but he could not tell this to his brother; he needed him to go because he could not guarantee his survival here. And just maybe it would be better in Denmark.

At last, he said, “Someone needs to stay. I can protect Nanortalik from invaders and looters.”

They both knew this was ridiculous. He was not strong; he was placid and kind.

“But how do you know Denmark will be any better?” his brother implored him. “How do we know the great migration hasn’t wiped it out? Is there enough food there? What if there’s war?”

Nobody knew the answer to Palu’s questions. There had been no communication for a very long time. None of the boats had ever returned.

High above them, Auriga rode through the heavens in his chariot, cradling the suckling goat, Amalthea, on his way to give milk to the infant Zeus. Legends and stars. Ending and unending.

His brother lay silent. After some time, he said, “I love you, Oqi.” He could feel Palu’s pulse in his hand.

All that remains of him now is his name, engraved in this desk.

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he Nordic air blows around her softly, catching her breath in small icy clouds. It has started to drizzle. Once, this would have been snow. She stirs and her mouth opens into a cavernous

yawn. She opens her eyes and shakes off a thin film of water; it sprays outwards like rain. Her nostrils flare. She smells him instantly and her stomach awakes. Hunger guides her across land that passes quickly under her bulk.

Soon, she is at the foot of the mountain. She reaches the shelter, where his scent is the strongest, and pushes her snout under the crack of the doorway, prising it up. The shelter is strong but she breaks the door quickly, pushing at it with all that’s left of her weight. Her head wedges inwards and grabs at the scraps of food left on the table – dried fish and whelks, then tears down strips of kelp that hang drying against the far wall. She climbs onto his bed and paws at the bedding; her claws shred his blanket as she takes in his scent.

H

e is just past the pier when he sees the splinters of bone scattered beneath him. They lie on the ground, interlocking and spattered with blood. His body fills with adrenaline and his ears ring with a deafening buzz. He scans the horizon for whoever is here.

His only other encounter had nearly killed him. He came across the man, one of the very last hunters, trying to steal his kayak. He too wore ragged clothing and had a rope tied round his waist. The man was knee deep in the water, unknotting the rope. He ran at the other man screaming to get off his boat, but the man carried on. When he got near him, the man pulled out a knife and waved it towards him.

clothing and skin. He let out a yowl, and then brought down the rock on the other man’s skull; it split with a crack.

He lay on the kayak next to the body for a very long time.

Then he removed the man’s shirt and padded his wound, wrapping it tight with the man’s rope belt.

By the time he next looked up, the kayak had drifted well out into the bay and dark clouds loomed overhead, portending rain. He reached for the paddle and dipped it into the water, his wound stinging with each new stroke.

When he got back to shore, he heaved the kayak out and lay down next to it, then turned his head sideways and looked at the land. An ant scuttled across a small grassy knoll, carrying a tiny slice of leaf. How was it that some things continued to thrive?

From then on, he dragged the kayak back and forth from the mountain, until one day, he lost it to a peat fire. The loss was devastating but it brought him some peace.

Then he sees them – huge paw prints that run along the shore in the mud. His throat dries to a cinder as his palms drench with sweat. His heart is pounding so fiercely, he thinks he is going to collapse.

A nanoq!

He thought they had all died out long ago. This is much worse. The top predator. By the time you are aware one is near, it is already tracking you. He turns in blind panic. He must get back to his shelter and block himself in. He sprints, rocks catching at his feet.

Then he sees them – huge paw prints that run along the shore in the mud. His throat dries to a cinder as his palms drench with sweat. His heart is pounding.

S

Angharad Hampshire is a British journalist who is studying for a Doctorate of Arts at the University of Sydney. She worked for many years for the BBC in London before moving to Hong Kong, where she taught journalism at the University of Hong Kong and wrote feature articles for The South China Morning Post. She lives in Sydney with her family and is writing her first novel.

02 OCT 2020

he is lying hunkered down outside his shelter, pressed low to the earth. Her back and her ears are flattened; her breathing is soft. Tiny vibrations in the earth announce he is near.

She can see him now, the man running towards her. She rises to her feet then rears up onto her hind legs. She is double his height.

When he sees her, he stops. He knows he cannot outrun her. There is only one choice. He grabs at the ground for rocks; his fingers pinching a large stone. His body is pulsating; the rock in his hand is a beating heart. He pulls out the slingshot.

She is running at him now, upright, paws outstretched.

She is running at him with phenomenal speed.

He takes aim at her forehead, then releases the catapult.

A shout curdles out from the pit of his belly. It is loud and primeval: “My name is Oqi and I am the last!”

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“Don’t come near me!” the man shouted. “I’ll slit your fucking throat!”

“You cannot take my kayak,” he replied. “I need it. My name is Oqi. There’s no-one else left here. They all left last year on the boat to Denmark. My parents, my brother.

I’m waiting for them here until they return. You can wait with me.”

The other man laughed with a snort. It was guttural, throaty, unpleasant.

“There is nothing left in Denmark,” the man said.

“They are not coming back.”

His heart cleaved.

The man put a leg into the kayak and hauled himself in. The water at the shore’s edge was remarkably clear.

He could see the seabed – sand, rocks, a few empty shells.

“That boat is mine,” he said to the man and reached for a rock.

He snapped it into his catapult and slung it at the other man’s forehead. It slammed the man’s skull and he slumped forward in the canoe, dazed. He grabbed another rock and ran at the man, splashing through the sea; droplets of spray hit his face and entered his mouth. The other man had pulled himself upright. Though his head was bleeding, somehow the man managed to swing his knife into his side, slicing through

Crossword

by Siobhan Linde

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME.

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Cryptic Clues

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

1 Muffled (5) 4 Worked out (9) 9 Suspect (5,1,3) 10 Range (5) 11 Lessen (6) 12 Intersection (8) 14 Direct opposite (10) 16 Phoned (4) 19 Fish (4) 20 Antipasto (10) 22 Of theatre (8) 23 Ornamental tree (6) 26 Willow (5) 27 Clumsy (9) 28 Widespread (9) 29 Mocking smile (5)

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Offender’s crimes hurt insect (9) 2 Interpreted after the first step (5) 3 Dainty fruit full of lice? Gross! (8) 4 Get through learning (4) 5 Medical specialist seething at sushi fan (10) 6 Risk broadcasting songs (6) 7 It’s party time after Disney Princess gets caffeine,

9 Suspect lets alarm go off (5,1,3) 10 Arrange in a row, we hear! (5) 11 Deviant cured by extremely capable shrink (6) 12 Juliet and Pierce quietly slipped out for a joint (8) 14 Is hesitant about becoming the opposite thing (10) 16 Called 10-across briefly (4) 19 Fish stabbed, unfortunately (4) 20 Butcher sat down for antipasto (10) 22 Actor first starred in The Piano , not The Ring (8) 23 Snob returned healthy ornamental tree (6) 26 Willow tree, wild rose and inky cap (5) 27 Clumsy gent dancing with alien (9) 28 Ordinary parent ignored a hearty farewell? (9) 29 Son born with red face and mocking smile (5)

1 Criminal (9) 2 Step (5) 3 Fragile (8) 4 Make (4) 5 Fan (10) 6 Opportunity (6) 7 Upper (9) 8 Thick (5) 13 Change (10) 15 Soften (9) 17 Ancient Roman fighter (9) 18 Goal scorers (8) 21 Ancient Greek city-state (6) 22 Soldiers (5) 24 Ray (5) 25 Rhythm (4)

Solutions

1 Soft tulle skirts covered in mud (5) 4 Used English and Latin, so king went back

to get education (9)

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Quick Clues

DOWN

22 1

8

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for example (9)

8 Needs liquid to become thick (5) 13 Are regions going to change? (10) 15 Make less tough resident confused when taking drug (9) 17 Fighter happy to sit above me atop a hill (9) 18 Perhaps hunters find small owls (8) 21 Fight, finally, against a city-state in Ancient Greece (6) 22 Soldiers have bad time heading north (5) 24 Ray takes off (5) 25 Beatles released the French hit (4)

ACROSS 1 Muted 4 Exercised 9 Smell a rat 10 Align 11 Reduce 12 Juncture 14 Antithesis 16 Rang 19 Tuna 20 Bruschetta 22 Thespian 23 Bonsai 26 Osier 27 Inelegant 28 Prevalent 29 Sneer

2

DOWN 1 Miscreant 2 Tread 3 Delicate 4 Earn 5 Enthusiast 6 Chance 7 Stimulant 8 Dense 13 Reorganise 15 Tenderise 17 Gladiator 18 Shooters 21 Sparta 22 Troop 24 Skate 25 Beat

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