The Big Issue Australia #544 - Fiction Edition 2017

PAULO COELHO

MATTHEW REILLY

ELLIOT PERLMAN

TONI JORDAN

HELEN RICHARDSON

NICOLA REDHOUSE

ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ

ALEKSANDRA STAPMANNS

FIONA HARDY

ALLISON BROWNING

NINA CULLEN

ROMY ASH

EMILY O’GRADY ANNA SPARGO-RYAN

$7

No 544 25 Aug 2017

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

20 EXTRA PAGES

with guest judge NICK EARLS

NATIONAL OFFICE Chief Executive Officer Steven Persson Chief Operating Officer Sally Hines Editor Amy Hetherington Chief Financial Officer Damian Atkins National Marketing and Partnerships Manager Emma O’Halloran National Operations Manager Jeremy Urquhart

The Big Issue is Australia’s leading social enterprise.

We are an independent, not-for-profit organisation that develops solutions to help homeless, disadvantaged and marginalised people positively change their lives.

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

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

Principal Partners

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

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

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Contents

#

544

FICTION SPECIAL

STORIES

08 MAKING ROOM

by Aleksandra Stapmanns

12 POISON ROOTS

by Nicola Redhouse

16 THE MOVING MONUMENT

by Paulo Coelho

18 SWIMMING WITH SHARKS

by Rochelle Siemienowicz

22 BREATHE

by Nina Cullen

26 HERE’S THE THING

by Elliot Perlman

28 UNRAVELLING

by Helen Richardson

32 BLUE INDIA

by Emily O’Grady

36 I BOUGHT THESE DOGS TO SHOW HIM HOW TO LOVE

by Romy Ash

40 THE ABANDONED CIRCUS

by Matthew Reilly

48 SOUND IS A PRESSURE WAVE

by Toni Jordan

52 AMERICA’S SEVENTH-RICHEST MUSICIAN

by Fiona Hardy

58 USEFUL TIPS FOR A BROKEN HEART

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

62 CONCESSIONS

by Allison Browning

REGULARS 04 EDITORIAL & YOUR SAY 05 VENDOR PROFILE 07 STREETSHEET 66 PUZZLES

EDITORIAL

YOUR SAY

READ IS GOOD

BIG FAN

HANGING ON A wall in my apartment is a

short story. The type is small and I have to lean across an armchair to read it properly.

But occasionally I’ll spot a sentence, a phrase, that makes me stop. The story is ‘Good Morning, Again’, by Elliot Perlman.

It was published in Ed#244, the second ever Big Issue Fiction Edition.

Now, we are sending off our 13th Fiction Edition and, in one of those delicious coincidences some like to call fate, it also features a story by Perlman (p26). To make it more tasty again, this edition features a piece from mega-selling author Matthew Reilly (p40), who also had a story in Ed#244.

There are gems in every Fiction Edition; stories that compel you to pull a page from its binding and stick it on your wall. You might not read it often, but you want to remember how it made you feel.

This year we had a record number of submissions, shortlisted by our Books Editor Thuy On, and former Books Editor Jo Case. The final 14 were stirringly debated by them and Amy Hetherington, Anastasia Safioleas, Michael Epis, Lorraine Pink and me, with special help from our guest judge, Nick Earls, who offered wise words and kept us on our best behaviour. We also have 20 extra pages in this edition to showcase more of this bold, exciting, moving writing – all made possible by the generous support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

I’m not quite sure I have enough wall space to accommodate all of these stories, but I will sure try. We hope you enjoy it.

Katherine Smyrk, Deputy Editor

COVER #544 ILLUSTRATION

BY DANIEL GRAY-BARNETT

around the country of both vendors and their customers – made my day. Thank I have been a long-time lover and you, keep up the good work. supporter of The Big Issue.

LETTER Marylou Broun, Working in Brisbane City, I OF THE FORTNIGHT Mount Waverley, Vic. have a plethora of vendors that I get to choose from and love I want to express our sincere thanks the impact you are having on to The Big Issue crew from Brisbane. For everyone who is involved – from many years police in Brisbane City have vendors to customers to the community! been working hard to show empathy and All the contributions and stories are support vulnerable people by being more brilliant, but by far my favourite is Lorin accessible and authentic. Susie Longman Clarke’s Public Service Announcement.

[Qld Operations Manager] picked up on I’ve often torn out the page and kept it the opportunity and invited us to spend to read again. Today, I re-read ‘Welcome some time selling The Big Issue with the to Yikes’ [Ed#537]. Thank you, Lorin. vendors we all knew well around the CBD. My condolences for your father. He We’ve been doing this for a few years was a great man with words and your now, and the experience is humbling for observations show that maybe brilliance the police who have had the opportunity. with words is genetically inherent. Keep Standing with vendors, feeling what up the great work one and all! courage it takes to engage the masses Sonia, Lutwyche, Qld. who do not always see you, there is no As this edition’s Letter doubt the police have been left with of the Fortnight a lasting impression. I have moved writer, Sonia wins postings now out of the Police a copy of Toni Academy, but I want to say thank Jordan’s acclaimed you to the sellers and The Big Issue novel, Our Tiny, Useless Hearts. community for making us welcome.

Read her short story, ‘Sound Is A Corey Allen, Acting Pressure Wave’ on p48.

Superintendent, Queensland Police Service Academy.

I would like to congratulate The Big Embarrassed to admit this is my Issue for their magazine. I receive first time reading @bigissueaustralia the mag fortnightly through the [Ed#541]. If you’ve never bought a copy, Women’s Subscription Enterprise, and go find a vendor, have a chat, and spare always look forward to a great read. I $7. Not only is this social enterprise particularly like the Vendor Profile piece improving lives, but there are some and want to say how much I enjoyed damn good pieces such as @jamilarizvi the recent article in the 21st anniversary and Gillian Triggs edition [Ed#539] ‘With a Little Help . from Our Friends’, telling stories from Maddy Paradise via Instagram.

Daniel Gray-Barnett is an illustrator from Sydney. Reading fiction alone in a very quiet room is his idea of bliss, especially if the story is a little bit dark and twisty.

Not only did he illustrate the cover of our Fiction Edition, but his warm and heartfelt illustrations accompany all the stories inside.

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

Have Your Say about The Big Issue: • email submissions@bigissue.org.au • post The Big Issue, GPO Box 4911, Melbourne, Victoria 3001 • facebook The Big Issue Australia • twitter @thebigissue • website thebigissue.org.au/your-say/

The Big Issue uses Macquarie Dictionary as our reference.

macquariedictionary.com.au

VENDOR PROFILE I LEFT SCHOOL when I was halfway through Year 10 to do a plumbing

apprenticeship with my dad. I didn’t mind school; I liked maths but I wasn’t good at writing essays like English, but I tried my best.

You know when you grow up and you have arguments with your old man? It didn’t work. I was just one of those people that likes to be by myself, so I argued with my parents and we went our separate ways. I haven’t seen them since. It’s been about 20 years now. I didn’t leave because it was a violent situation, I just wanted to go my own way. I have a younger brother and a younger sister. As far as I know they are in Melbourne.

I never became a registered plumber so I drove taxis. I did it for three years off and on. Then I worked in agencies like Drake and for Pura doing Big M stuff, that was really good. I worked in a factory on air-conditioners.

Other than that, I’ve been unemployed for a really long time.

I first heard about The Big Issue in 2002 – when I was 29. I was in a rooming house, in St Kilda, I think. I have slept rough on and off for a long time. Since November last year I’ve been living in Flagstaff Gardens on a bench. There are a few vendors living in the park.

It’s a challenge. It is cold, but I’ve got myself a good coat. I don’t mind. Down at Queen Victoria Market there’s a soup van that comes every night and you get free food. They give you heaps and you can have it for breakfast the next day.

I like selling The Big Issue. Lately I have been working at Parliament Station on Lonsdale Street, usually in the afternoon. What I love best about The Big Issue is you can come to work when you want, you can change your pitch, and you can go home early if you are having a bad day. I must admit though, after a while you get sore feet. But you have days where you sell a lot of magazines and you get tips. It makes you feel good when you have some money.

In my spare time I like playing computer games.

I bought myself a Nintendo – a little hand-held computer. I like Luigi’s Mansion and I have a carracing game. I charge it up when I come into The Big Issue. And I follow St Kilda. I’ve followed them for years and they haven’t won a grand final yet!

I listen to the games on a radio at the park.

I don’t have my name on any lists for housing at the moment but I have spoken to someone at Flagstaff Crisis Accommodation… I’m one of those that don’t ask for much. I say no to most things. Maybe it’s how I was brought up. Maybe it’s bad, I don’t know… I like being by myself, but I don’t like living by myself in a park. Eventually I would like to get some accommodation.

TUKUF SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN THE MELBOURNE CBD.

interview by Anastasia Safioleas photo by James Braund

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STREETSHEET Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends FRIENDLY VISITS

I have been with The Big Issue since April 2013 and I’m really enjoying meeting and talking to new people. I am going to Sydney in November for five days and then flying on to Melbourne for six days. I was going to drive, but changed my mind as it’s a long drive to do by yourself. It will be so great to catch up with my friends in Sydney and Melbourne. I haven’t been to Melbourne since October 2013.

Alfred L sells The Big Issue in the West End, Brisbane.

THE BIG SHIFT

I had my first experience of public speaking at the Women’s Subscription Enterprise Big Shift. When Chris [NSW office manager] asked me to do this, I thought, “Cool! Thanks for asking!”

I didn’t think it would be hard. As the time drew nearer to speak my anxiety went through the roof! Sweaty palms, heart rate up, blushing with fear, sitting there thinking, “I can’t do this! Back out!” But something inside me dug deep and I said, “Don’t let the team down, you can do this!” I did it in front of many faces – all kind, friendly, warm-hearted – and that helped me get through. A big thank you to all our Big Issue supporters and buyers, and also to the lovely staff at The Big Issue I call my family.

AnneMarie sells The Big Issue at Museum St, Sydney, and works as a dispatch assistant for the Women’s Subscription Enterprise.

MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Yes, it’s seven years I’ve been with The Big Issue now, and it’s been a great job.

I have made heaps of friends and many customers who come back to me in my

ROB’S TRIP TO JAPAN!

I always wanted to go to Japan because it’s always fascinated me and I love Japanese food. I went for my 70th and I took a carer with me. We flew into Tokyo, and decided to go for a walk. We went to a temple on top of a hill. It was drizzling with rain. The temple was really peaceful and quiet. On the way down the hill, the path was wet and my wheelchair skidded all the way down and crashed into a brick wall! I tipped over and cut myself. People came running and called an ambulance.

I was lucky that I only had a couple of grazes. Next morning, we went to Kyoto on the bullet train, which was really fast. The mountains surrounding the city were amazing. We saw more temples and lots of cherry blossoms. The next day we went to Tokyo Disneyland. I couldn’t go on any rides because they didn’t cater for me, but we saw Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The next day we went to Hiroshima.

That was pretty amazing because half the buildings are still standing after WWII. In the Tokyo suburbs people ride bikes and they don’t lock them up because noone steals them. Overall, I found Japan good to go to.

Rob sells The Big Issue outside Myer on Bourke St and Causeway Lane, Melbourne. different working spots throughout Adelaide city, such as The Body Shop, Adelaide Arcade, Hilton Hotel, Zuma Caffe, Bupa Dental. Sometimes I do the suburbs: Hollywood Plaza, Parafield Gardens, Northpark Shopping Centre, Prospect. And in summertime, when Adelaide comes alive, we have WOMADelaide festival, Fringe festival and Adelaide 500 car racing on. I get to work WOMADelaide, because I enjoy working those few days, and you get to meet all different people from all around Australia and the world. I have a four-year-old son Charlie and a lot of my normal customers know about him and always ask how he is doing.

Well, he is at kindy and loving it. He has made a few friends and he has even talked about what Mum does for a living selling The Big Issue to his friends and to the workers and carers that are there.

Kerry Anne sells The Big Issue at The Body Shop, Hilton and Zuma Caffe near the Adelaide Central Market, Adelaide.

All contributors to Streetsheet are paid for their work.

For the latest Big Issue news visit thebigissue.org.au or find us on: • facebook The Big Issue Australia • twitter @thebigissue

THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Making Room

by ALEKSANDRA STAPMANNS STEPPING OUT FROM THE SHADE OF TREES TO FACE SOMETHING ALTOGETHER MORE TERRIFYING.

T

he dirt road wound around the hills, clinging bravely to the cliffside. Across the bridge it dropped down sharply and as it turned a gully fell away to its left. Shallow at first, then deeper, wider, a trench in the earth. The gums strode out of it, tall, ferns too. Sun barely filtered through their dusty leaves. The soil far below was always damp, buried in the shedded bark, rich while the trees remained dry and lithe. The trickle of a creek was buried too, until the next storm would surge through, washing everything away.

Bugs burrowed in the bracken and moss at the bottom of the gully, appreciating the blanket of foliage. Larger animals hunkered down in its bank, opposite the roadside, digging around strong roots for stability.

The road was not well worn, and the rumble of tyres was long drowned out by the burbling of magpies once the dust had settled.

The road twisted again, the shade of the gums thinning, the ferns dropping out of view. The canopy broadened and wide patches of sunlight struck the gravel. To the right, wilderness briefly gave way to grass. Trees making their last assault at the fence line, bark and leaves toppling over but the occasional branch dragged away for firewood. Blackberry thorns stretched the length of the boundary.

Here a barely visible metal gate hung eternally open between two straining fence posts, almost swallowed by the bushland, invisible among the greys and browns. An empty gas bottle crudely drilled to a rotting post served as the marker, 5. It was up to the visitor to have predetermined the street name.

They would turn then, four tyres hugging the two tracks already made out for them, allowing strokes of grass to peek through between. It was a driveway not often used, aside from Bill Wagner himself.

W

hen the boy was born, Wagner stood shaky in the hall of the hospital. It had been an urgent hour’s drive.

The girl was with the neighbours across the way, but the cows would need to be brought in soon. They would need hay and bedding down. They were expecting in a few weeks, too. This is what Wagner was thinking about,

Fiction Special

watching the shadows in the hall grow longer as the sun, at the far end of the lino and out behind the sliding glass doors, dipped behind the hills he had come from.

He was not thinking about Mary having her belly sliced open. He was not thinking about how he had been handballed between rushing nurses to be placed on a hard plastic chair that was nailed to the wall. He was not thinking about the uncomfortable white chair or why it and its partners were so scuffed. Nor why it would need to be bolted down in the first place. What kind of sad sack would steal a hospital chair? He was also not thinking about the little, very little, boy who was yet to find a name.

“New parent?” a pamphlet cheerily enquired from across the rubber-streaked lino. No, he thought, no. The girl would be having tea by now with Garth and Rosie. The dog would lie on her feet under the sturdy oak table.

She would pester him about getting a dog when he got back.

“You’ll have a brother,” was Mary’s reply last time the girl brought it up.

Wagner sighed. If she were here the girl would crawl her soft fingers into his callused ones, hers like pillows his could barely feel. She would wriggle her body across one or two of the plastic seats and nuzzle her head into his lap. And she would stay there while he would not breathe lest his breath blow her away, down the starched hall, past beeping machines from buried rooms and sinks full of antibacterial soaps, out the doors and up into the hills, scattering like dust on the backs of his Friesians.

But then slowly, ever so slowly, he would lower his hand onto her wisp of golden hair and tuck it behind her ears.

He would stroke it softly at the base of her neck, watch her eyelids flutter in almost sleep, see her fingers curl under her chin and her mouth fall into a little smile. He would watch her breathe. Little chest rising and falling against his dirty jeans, little hand still lost in his. And he would watch her forever before he breathed again, before he thought again. Of the dam that needed digging, the fence posts that needed replacing and the rolls of wire that needed collecting.

He would just watch her breathe and everything else would fall away.

But the girl wasn’t with him.

“You don’t need her getting in the way,” Rosie had said.

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His sandpaper fingers clenched and unclenched with nothing to hold them. They ran up through his hair and down across his chin, prickles the girl would have complained about. They gripped the hard white armrests too tight and then released.

He stood again, briskly, at the appearance of a nurse, then paced a while, releasing dust everywhere. Then he collapsed into the torture chair again. Rinse and repeat.

And thinking about the girl eating too many Tim Tams.

Lying across his cattle-scented legs, wheedling her way into his flannel-crossed arms, never-minding the dirt caked into the lines of his skin. Thinking about the girl he wondered where it came from, this love, this fear. Did he have enough?

Was there more for the boy? Was there a boy?

He shook his head, stood up and paced.

T

here was, it turns out, a boy. And there was Mary, too. And Wagner’s hands stopped clenching when he saw them together, two red faces swathed in mountains of scratchy white cotton. Both sweaty.

Both quiet. But both breathing.

He stood awkwardly, presiding over the foot of the bed as his wife beamed at the boy, their boy. The last of the afternoon sun kissed their heads, let motes of dust dance in the light. Wagner could breathe but he was breathless.

The nurse, pale blue scrubs rustling, bustled around the frozen three. She bent over baby, scooped him up, counted his toes, weighed him, wrapped bands around his wrists,

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THE BIG ISSUE 2017

poked things into his ears, unwrapped and re-wrapped him.

The parents stayed still, watching only with their eyes, every movement. When the nurse was finished, she placed the boy in Wagner’s unsuspecting arms, rearranging him to support the head, though he already moved with instinct.

She flipped out the last of the sunlight with a snap of the blinds, bringing them back to life as the dust motes dropped.

Pushing energy into the room now as the boy wriggled, his mother shifted her bulk in the bed sheets and his father hefted his weight from one foot to the other.

Wagner didn’t know what to think about the wriggly ball of life in his arms, eyes squinted closed. He thought of dropping him, not on purpose but in fear. He thought of his brave wife. He thought of the other blokes in Marysville playing footy with their sons. He thought of cows’ hooves and how deadly they were. But as he pulled back the rough cotton from the little boy’s face and fingers his only thought was, perfect. The wrinkles, the squinty eyes, the cherry cheeks, the dollop nose, the tiny delicate lattice of black hair, the miniature fingernails, all ten.

Perfect. There was room.

Aleksandra Stapmanns (@Alekstap) is a student of RMIT’s associate degree in Professional Writing and Editing.

‘Making Room’ is her first published fiction piece. When Aleks is not studying she can be found writing, reading or stress-baking. She owns more books than shoes and is inspired by the weird and wonderful.

Poison Roots

by NICOLA REDHOUSE AMSTERDAM, PARIS, THE SUBURBS.

S

hops are equipped with DNA spray. This is what the sign outside the metro says, according to Google Translate. Nina walks past it on her way home through Amsterdam’s Ganzenhoef, with its bleak Soviet-style apartments, its overgrown grass tennis courts. The old rusted washing machine that marks her halfway point. It makes no sense: wasn’t DNA useful if left at a crime scene, not if taken away from it?

The conference has saturated her thoughts. Symbols, semiotics, parameters, relations. It’s all an elaborate academic earworm. Travel anyway made her skittish with ordinary facts: the way doors opened, the design of ATMs. These clues to living that exhausted her senses.

The clues here had been unexpected. She knew of the canals and the thin buildings – which it turns out are the result of taxation measures rather than the skewed aesthetic of traditionally tall people – but not the expanse of stark, utilitarian apartment buildings in this part of town. Row upon row of imposing modernist blocks, like a Lego city. And that she is among only a few white people in this suburb.

Her whiteness glares. Back home she doesn’t notice it, just goes to the shops, looks like the bank tellers, smiles at the butcher. It’s a backfoot feeling, this awareness, and the impact of it surprises her, given how many papers she has written on otherness. This is knowing – this, in her body, which is holding itself alert; not in a carefully constructed essay.

The house in the Lego city is because of a deal with a woman called Jannie in the cultural studies department who is away for a week. It’s an anomaly among the uniform estates in the area: one of a cluster of freestanding residences dotted around a lake.

She’s at the front door and still working the key in the strange lock – a Dutch design thing, or a quirk of Jannie’s to have a lock that requires a doctorate? – when her phone rings.

“Gabe, what’s wrong?”

The children are in the background clamouring to speak to her: “Tell Mum…” “You little shit!” “Lara, be quiet.” She holds the phone away from her ear for a moment, enjoying the power of removing herself. When she brings it back, Gabe is midway through a sentence: “…and we’ve been up since three, anyway. Bloody storm.”

“You’re all okay?” she asks.

Fiction Special

“Yep, a branch from that dead gum has come down on the trampoline. Ripped a huge hole in it.” They talk for a few more minutes, Gabe managing to get in some jibes about Nina’s holiday, assuring her that the kids are doing okay, but in his voice there’s the kind of tiredness she feels when it’s all on her plate.

She’s only half-listening. The stillness of the street is making her paranoid: no children playing, no cars moving in and out of driveways; just houses with their blinds drawn, bicycles tethered to fences. What was going on with her?

She reminded herself of her mother when they’d taken her out to Victoria Street for Theo’s birthday, clutching at the glass-eye charm around her neck as they made their way past Vietnamese grocery stores and Malaysian restaurants.

The call keeps dropping out so she ends it, sending kisses down the line to the kids. And then the lock gives and she is inside.

From the fridge she takes out the cheese and wine from Albert Heijn. She’d been overwhelmed by the choices and unfamiliar brands, so she’d watched a woman who seemed her vintage, with a similar beaten messenger bag, select a paper-wrapped brie, and she’d taken one for herself. That’s how you had to shop as a foreigner. Look for signifiers. For the wine, she’d chosen the most expensive. Gabe wasn’t there to override her.

She sits out on the deck by the lake, wedging off bits of the brie, drinking straight from the bottle. The view is sublime: a stretch of water taut as glass, wild grasses and elderflower in full bloom framing the lake. Away from the family something feels released in her, but is quickly reined in. She thinks of the neighbour’s tree. The trampoline sitting back home with a gash through it. The kids could have been there when it fell. They could be dead. She feels a surge of rage: twice in the past few months, since the tree had begun to pale and split, she’d tried to let them know. The second time, someone at last answered the door – a woman, Chinese, she’d realised, noting the Mandarin newspapers piled on the doorstep, who just shook her head.

As though she didn’t hear or didn’t understand.

She turns the cheese knife around and around, admiring the burnished bee symbol at the joint of its steel and onyx handle.

Out on the water near the other side of the bank, in front of a space that has been cleared in the bushes for picnicking THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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and playing, a boy has launched himself from a small jetty. It is difficult to make him out at first: the water is brown from silt and he is dark against it. But she sees him splashing, the red peak of his cap coming in and out of view. It will be light outside for hours still in this European summer but she can’t get a clear view of his face. She watches him pull himself back onto the jetty and sees he is tall, wearing a shabby T-shirt and ripped shorts; the kind that could be years old and kept for swimming or the kind that a boy might wear if he had nothing else and was forced to wash himself in a lake. God, that was straight out of some awful white colonial narrative. A Rudyard Kipling poem. These were thoughts from the wine gone to her head, thoughts unmoored. Still, she clutches the knife handle.

W

hen the conference is over she is glad to have the extra day to explore. The last time she was alone like this was before she and Gabe were married, when she’d taken herself off to Tasmania and holed herself up in a hotel with the laptop to churn out the last of her thesis. Hardly enjoyable.

She heads to Vondelpark, where the rain falls lightly enough to dampen everything, stopping for a sandwich at a cafe amid a tangle of paths, where she takes a pamphlet of an exhibition on Amsterdam’s structural expansion. The city, it explains, has bloomed outwards along its canal lines in response to rapid population growth.

On the metro home the young guy next to her sees the pamphlet, and they strike up a conversation. He is studying architecture, he tells her, and Nina asks him about the honeycombs of building that stretch out to the city’s southeast.

“A design experiment; they wanted a middle-class utopia,” he says. “High-rise living but with parkland and a sense of community.”

But the overgrown lawns, the yellowing sheets billowing from a balcony, the junkie she saw slipping down a park bench by the lake come to her. And the group of men standing outside the supermarket in tight huddles, men full of an energy she couldn’t translate, doing things she couldn’t quite see. And how the not seeing made her fearful. But how could she put it? She is ashamed to acknowledge even to herself that she feared them because she is a woman, a pale, Anglo woman, so different to them.

“The area by the metro seems a little rough,” she says.

He takes a while to answer, as though he too is finding the right words. “It failed. The money isn’t there. They lowered the rents in the 70s and it accommodated a rush of migrants – people from the Dutch Caribbean, all the decolonised places.

A lot of people think the buildings are no good; that they’ve segregated people.”

And that idea of segregation raises for her the fortune of their single-dwelling home in Melbourne. Lord knew she was happy for separation from the neighbours’ house on the left, where the Australia flag flies. Walls could be structures of privilege or structures of exclusion, and she was on the right side of it all in the Lucky Country.

They jostle along for a few minutes and then the young 14

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guy points to a cluster of apartment blocks beside a mosque: “About twenty-five years ago, a cargo plane crashed into these buildings,” he says. “They reported fifty dead, but there were many more. The building was full of illegal migrants. There’s the memorial tree. They call it The Tree That Saw Everything.”

She looks out toward the site, aware of her desire to turn away.

A

nd then the trip to Amsterdam is over, life is back to routine, to the school run and car logistics and deadlines. But she thinks about the building next to the mosque more than she would like to. It is the muddle of too little sleep or some delayed release of anxiety from having kept at bay the missing of the children. The aeroplane crashing into a building full of people is wiring into her synapses.

She is supposed to be writing up her notes from the conference, so she goes to her study but once she’s there she puts her head down on the desk and drifts into the sort of sleep that feels like a rollercoaster.

When she has had enough of that she distracts herself with researching what to do about the dead tree that looms over their garden. There is no legal remedy, other than through a costly injunction, but that seemed drastic. She types the neighbours a letter, polite but firm, offering options for the tree’s removal, signing off more effusively than necessary.

Many thanks.

Later that day, en route to delivering the letter, she stops

by Lenny and Pat’s house, the neighbours with the flag, over whose garden the dead gum also stands. Power in numbers, wasn’t it? The couple had been on the block for forty years, they’d told Nina and Gabe on first meeting. Dropped into the conversation about schools and parks that it’s a pretty good suburb but it’s changed a lot. Nina kept a cordial relationship with them, though what on earth would they say about her peasant European origins, her evil-eye-bearing ancestors.

She tells Pat about the branch and her letter.

“Good luck with that. Bloody half the tree is over our roof.

They won’t answer the door. Wouldn’t spit on ’em if they were on fire.” Pat is grinning.

What freedom there must be in such unequivocal feeling.

Nina almost says something, a rebuke, but an old cowardly timidity kicks in and she only walks back up the driveway, marvelling at Pat’s vitriol.

And in the end Pat is right about them answering the door. Beyond the flyscreen and the wood comes the ordinary banging of pots and pans, the tinkle of a radio. Nina leaves the letter on the doormat.

There is no response. The children agree to stay away from the far end of the garden, over which much of the tree hangs.

Every few days, with wind or rain, another small branch drops.

Nina is taking Theo to the park one Saturday morning when she passes the house and sees a woman crouched in the driveway, planting a bulb. She is younger than the other woman who once answered. The shock of it – a real person in front of the property. She shouts out brightly, “Hi! Hello!”

The woman turns and stands, and Nina, now worried she will lose her chance, virtually sings at her, “I’m the neighbour, Nina…”

The woman looks hesitant, but smiles. She says, “I’m Grace; I got your letter, yes. Thank you. We got a quote but no-one come; they forget…”

Nina interrupts her, suddenly out of patience: “The children can’t play outside; it’s not safe.”

Grace seems nervous, but then her body rises and she says, angrily, waving her trowel at Lenny and Pat’s house, “They put poison, you know?”

For a moment, Nina thinks the woman might not be okay, might be unhinged, but then she understands: Grace thinks that Lenny and Pat have poisoned the tree. “Oh, no, Grace.

Why would they do that?”

“They hate us because we are yellow,” Grace says, and Nina is shocked at the word; the cliché of it. She feels a pang of such shame for it even existing, for people like Pat and Lenny, with their assertion of nationhood flapping in the front-lawn breeze.

For people like herself, with her fear of foreign men outside foreign shopping centres.

Theo pulls Nina’s hand, and she gives in, glad for an ending to this awkward conversation. “Grace, just let us know what’s happening, okay?” But Grace is back at the earth, working the trowel into the dark mess of something that has failed to bloom.

R

ight before summer, just as the city braces itself for its first dose of relentless heat, there are the terror attacks in Paris. Nina watches on the news and is cold with the enormity of the events. The newspapers respond with a flood of slogans and accusations: Open our doors! Close our borders! Be kind! Be vigilant! Lefty apologists! Right-wing nutters!

Nina feels hopeless at the horror on all sides, and again that shame. It was entirely disingenuous of her to have been arming the children with a morality of inclusiveness and racial harmony when she had chosen a life in a whitewashed suburb where the closest she came to confronting difference was in deciding how to sign-off a letter to her Chinese neighbour.

She flits between feeling safe and feeling defensive. Though she hasn’t done anything remotely religious for years, the weekend of the attacks she digs out the oil vigil lamp from her grandmother and sets it up in the corner of her study. She can’t bring herself to stick up the icons; the symbolism of the lamp is enough. It feels comforting, as the world splinters into alliances, to show solidarity with her forebears. But the next day, in a moment of paranoia, she packs it away again. Better not to identify as anything at all.

And the building next to the mosque is back in force. It comes each dawn as night lifts. In the moment after rousing slightly from the bird calls – that’s when it creeps in. The aeroplane crashing, and the instant extinguishing of lives. She finds herself crying in the car after dropping the children at school.

Some mornings she paces the lounge room, creeps in to Lara’s and Theo’s rooms to feel for the rise and fall of their breathing, recognising this as mad.

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As the clock ticks closer to sunrise, as the panic of the chance of sleep sets in, she settles on knowing that she cannot care for everyone in the world. It’s the only way she can calm herself. The people in the building were not her children. They were the boy swimming across the lake, eager to enter her window with a knife. They were Grace.

I

t’s the last week of school and Theo comes home with a sore throat. He won’t eat so Nina gives him some tea with honey, makes him go to bed early. By nine pm he is calling out, boiling with fever.

She gets Gabe to carry him out to the lounge, where she tries to cool him down with a damp cloth. He has a rash: raised red, on his face, his shoulders. She tries to keep her mind on the practical task of lowering his temperature. Why did the ominous symptoms always have to appear at night?

The rash spreads to his chest.

She rings for the locum, and is told the wait time is five hours.

“Take him to emergency if the rash becomes purple or his neck gets stiff,” the operator instructs her.

Nina tells Theo to move his neck, but he’s so listless he does nothing. She tries not to think of the worst but for the next hour, as night sets in to the barren hours of home shopping shows and obscure foreign serials, the fantasies come: measles, meningitis.

Through the lounge-room window she can see the tree; it seems to shake its skeleton limbs at her, taunt her over all the dangers, invisible and tangible, that Nina will never be able to anticipate.

Her heart beats crazily, her mouth is dry. She strokes Theo’s leg, crying quietly at the feeling of its dead weight on her own. She remembers the time when he was only a few months old and she waited in the pitch dark of the street, listening to his wheeze get tighter and tighter, desperate for the next car lights to be the locum.

When the doctor finally arrives, Gabe sits Theo up and lifts his pyjama top, and the doctor pushes at his skin and shines a light on it. “Okay, this is a typical viral rash; nothing serious…”

Nina doesn’t hear the rest. She notes that the doctor’s lips move, watches Gabe show her out and carry Theo to his room.

At some point she hears Gabe ask her if she is alright, and she answers, yes.

The moon is behind cloud and in the bruised light it is hard to see, though she gets the garage door open and the gasoline tin out and down the path without falling over rocks and shrubs; but once the flames are licking their way up the tree she can see quite clearly, and when the crowds gather and the firetruck whine can be heard she notes with some remove that Grace, standing by the front path in her pyjamas, has quite a pretty face.

Nicola Redhouse (@peezlered) has been published in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Rebellious Daughters, among other places. She is writing a book funded

by Creative Victoria and Australia Council grants.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

The Moving Monument

by PAULO COELHO A LITTLE BOY, AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM AND LOVE. have visited many monuments in this world that try to immortalise the cities that erect them in prominent places.

Imposing men whose names have already been forgotten but who still pose mounted on their beautiful horses.

Women who hold crowns or swords to the sky, symbols of victories that no longer even appear in school books. Solitary, nameless children engraved in stone, their innocence forever lost during the hours and days they were obliged to pose for some sculptor that history has also forgotten.

And when all is said and done, with very rare exceptions (Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro is one of them), it is not the statues that mark the city, but the least expected things. When Eiffel built a steel tower for an exposition, he could not have dreamed that this would end up being the symbol of Paris, despite the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, and the impressive gardens. An apple represents New York. A notmuch-visited bridge is the symbol of San Francisco. A bridge over the Tagus is on the postcards of Lisbon. Barcelona, a city full of unresolved things, has an unfinished cathedral

lake produced a very strong current, a hydro-electric dam was built there. But when the workers returned home and closed the valves, the pressure was very strong and the turbines eventually burst. Until an engineer had the idea of putting a fountain on the spot where the excess water could escape.

With the passing of time, engineering solved the problem and the fountain became unnecessary. But, perhaps reminded of the legend of the little boy, the inhabitants decided to keep it.

The city already had many fountains, and this one would be in the middle of a lake, so what could be done to make it visible?

And that is how the moving monument came to be.

Powerful pumps were installed, and today a very strong jet of water spouts 500 litres per second vertically at 200 kilometres per hour. It can be seen from a plane flying at 10,000 meters.

It has no special name, just “Water Fountain”, the symbol of the city of Geneva (where there is no lack of statues of men on horses, heroic women and solitary children).

Once I asked Denise, a Swiss scientist, what she thought of the Water Fountain.

“And when all is said and done, with very rare exceptions, it is not the statues that mark the city, but the least expected things.”

(La Sagrada Família) as its most emblematic monument. In Moscow, a square surrounded by buildings and a name that no longer represents the present (Red Square, in memory of communism) is the main reference. And so on and so forth.

Perhaps thinking about this, a city decided to create a monument that would never remain the same, one that could disappear every night and re-appear the next morning and would change at each and every moment of the day, depending on the strength of the wind and the rays of the sun. Legend has it that a child had the idea just as he was…taking a pee. When he finished his business, he told his father that the place where they lived would be protected from invaders if it had a sculpture capable of vanishing before they drew near. His father went to talk to the town councillors, who, even though they had adopted Protestantism as the official religion and considered everything that escaped logic as superstition, decided to follow the advice.

Another story tells us that, because a river pouring into a

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“Our body is almost completely made of water through which electric discharges pass to convey information.

One such piece of information is called Love, and this can interfere in the entire organism. Love changes all the time.

I think that the symbol of Geneva is the most beautiful monument to Love yet conceived by any artist.”

I don’t know how the little boy in the legend would feel about it, but I think that Denise is absolutely right.

Paulo Coelho (@paulocoelho) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and the recipient of numerous international awards. He is best known for his novel The Alchemist, which has been translated into at least 70 languages. In 2014 he created the Paulo Coelho Institute, which uses royalties to help underprivileged Brazilians. © Translated by James Mulholland THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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Swimming With Sharks

by ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ DRINKS BEFORE THE AFTERPARTY.

O

n the night Anna met Jeremy they talked about sharks. She said she was afraid of them, but she loved the ocean and being scared was just the price of entry.

“It’s a good idea not to get too close to them,” Jeremy said evenly, smiling that smile that seemed to say yes, and also no, and Anna had to remind herself not to flirt with him.

No more affairs. She was too old for it. Too happy. It had taken three years to mend from the last one. She was healthy again now, just weaned off the antidepressants and feeling her libido return like a tide that had been out too long.

Anyway, Jeremy seemed like a good man, a nice man.

Maybe a little bit lonely. She wasn’t going to let him think she was available when she wasn’t, for his sake as well as her own.

She’d been sure to mention her husband Michael and her son Luca, inserting them into the conversation soon after she’d introduced herself.

They’d been filing out of the back row of a seminar on scriptwriting. She’d noticed he’d been sitting alone all day, and she’d liked his face. A handsome, thoughtful face. And so, in the final session of the afternoon, she’d sat in the same row, two seats away from him, as if following some faint scent she couldn’t identify, an instinct she wouldn’t admit. As soon as she’d smiled at him the conversation had flowed easily and quickly as they took the escalator out into the dim Friday night light, and stood in the cobbled courtyard of Federation Square.

He’d mentioned his own daughters then, and the fact that he lived with them every second week. For some reason this made Anna feel safer, made him a person of substance and seriousness. He was a divorced father, so he’d understand consequences and responsibilities; the fact that not every attractive opportunity had to be explored.

But still, she was sure she’d seen a flicker of disappointment when she’d mentioned her husband.

Now they were at the pub across the courtyard, with ten other people from the seminar, a loose group of Anna’s friends and colleagues, bunched around rustic benches and tables, drinking wine and eating expensive crumbed fingerfood. They were there to fill in the two hours before the closing-night party of the writers festival. As a presenter for one of the sessions, Anna was invited to the party later, and Jeremy wasn’t, so this would be a quick drink and she’d never see him again.

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But she liked the quiet way he listened to her with his full attention as she described her last family holiday on the Great Barrier Reef, the turtles and stingrays, the clownfish darting in and out of the succulent anemones, just like in Finding Nemo.

“Oh yeah, so beautiful,” he said, pronouncing the “t” in “beautiful” quite distinctly so that she wondered if he was from somewhere else. “That film got it right – in so many ways.

Apart from the talking fish and stoner turtles of course!”

“Have you ever seen a shark then?” she asked, because suddenly it seemed possible that Jeremy – solid, wideshouldered and maybe sunburned – was the kind of man who might surf, or dive, or fish. Not the kind of bookish, witty, lanky-legged man she liked. Not her type at all.

“Lots of them,” he said, without a hint of a boast. “I shot a feeding frenzy for a documentary last year in the Coral Sea.” So he was a filmmaker then, a live one. Anna loved to meet real filmmakers, though she was tired of interviewing them and hearing them whine about how hard it was to make films in Australia. She was sick of low-paid film journalism too, selling other people’s creative work when all she wanted to do was write her own books and make her own films. But the people who held the actual cameras and took the actual pictures continued to fascinate her. And she never tired of shark stories.

“A frenzy? How close did you have to get? Were you in a cage?”

He grinned at her flurry of questions. She noticed his teeth, so straight, so white. A mouth as clean as a cat’s. Or was that Sylvia Plath’s description of her baby in some poem or other?

And why was she looking at his mouth?

“We gave them great big dripping tuna heads,” he said, biting into a fat, crisp chip dipped in sour cream and chili sauce, yet managing to look tidy as he did it. “I had to get pretty close and wave the bait around to attract them. There wasn’t a cage, but they weren’t really interested in me. You do have to keep your wits about you.”

He drained his glass of red wine and poured another from the bottle he’d bought for the table, topping up her glass and several others at the same time. He had a host’s politeness even though he knew nobody else there.

From first glance she might have predicted he’d drink beer, but what did she know? Nothing, except that he wore shoes THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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that looked like they were made for skateboarding, and jeans and a hoodie and a leather jacket that made it hard to work out how old he was or what his body might be like underneath, though she suspected it was good. There was grey in his short beard but his skin was smooth. Was he younger than her, or older? What did it matter? Anyway, she didn’t like beards.

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Not really.” His eyes were warm. Were they grey or blue?

She couldn’t tell in this light. “They were only reef sharks. Big, but not great whites or hammerheads or bronze whalers.”

“You know your sharks.”

“They’re interesting. I’d like to see more of them. And some whales. I’ve never even been close to a whale.” He held her gaze a moment. He was really seeing her, really interested.

Amused at her enthusiasm and possibly charmed by the way she’d taken him under her sociable wing. He leaned towards her when she talked. But there was no heat coming off him, no palpable desire. His eyes never strayed to the space between the tops of her tall boots and the hem of her mini skirt. He wasn’t checking her out.

“Do you dive?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just snorkelling. But my son wants us to learn. He already knows more about fish than I do and he’s only twelve.”

“I wish my kids liked the water,” he said, a little sadly. “It’s something I have to do on my own, and I’d love to share it.”

Anna imagined him in the ocean then, and she wondered what it would be like to swim with him in the green waves, or to dive beneath them and have him point out the live things he saw. She remembered the day Luca had discovered that he too loved the sea, the warm West Australian sea of her own childhood, and she’d felt the greatest pleasure of her life

that somebody so lovely, so decent, should be alone. She wished she could introduce him to somebody nice. Somebody single. Somebody else.

She’d been talking to him longer than she should. It wasn’t right. Two glasses of wine on an empty stomach and she was starting to feel dangerously free. This was the feeling her counsellor had told her to watch out for: the moment when she started glowing too brightly, growing expansive and affectionate and prone to kissing people she liked. A loving drunk was still a drunk. This was the moment she’d been told to pause and take stock. So she looked around for another conversation they could join.

Ellen, one of the conference organisers, was telling the table about her online dating disasters, each more horrifying than the previous one. She too was getting drunk fast, starting to slur her words. Her top had slipped down so low that the scalloped lace of her pink bra was showing. Anna looked sideways at Jeremy and noticed that he was listening to Ellen and maintaining admirable eye contact. Even Anna wanted to look at those breasts some more.

“So two hours later, he texted me and said he only liked thin Asians, not plump ones like me, and that I shouldn’t take it personally. It was just his thing,” Ellen said.

She wasn’t plump at all, just juicy, bursting and ripe, thought Anna, who suddenly felt skinny and withered in comparison. She wondered how young Ellen was.

Twenty-six at most. A child of the 90s and already on the way to running the world. Or the small world of Melbourne’s literary festivals, anyway.

“Get this,” said Jeremy, joining in, “I went on this first date with a woman who took one look at me as she came into the bar and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to be honest, I’m just not

“Two glasses of wine on an empty stomach and she was starting to feel dangerously free. This was the feeling her counsellor had told her to watch out for.” knowing this was something they could love together.

Dear Luca, what was he doing now? Sitting in front of a David Attenborough video with Michael, eating pizza on the couch. Her two precious people at home together, while she was having a much-craved night out. She felt a stab of guilt that she hadn’t thought of them all day, hadn’t even checked in with a text message to make sure Luca had arrived home from school.

But now Jeremy was talking about his own children, and how his eldest daughter loved animals so much she’d become a vegetarian, and how it taxed his recipe repertoire. He found himself cooking beans far more often than he cared for them.

Anna said she wished her husband cooked at all, and Jeremy said his wife – when they’d been together – had been such a terrible cook that he’d wished she hadn’t. Anna had laughed then, and asked him how long he’d been divorced.

“About three years. Three and a half in December.” He didn’t look sad when he said it, but she thought it was a crime 20

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attracted to you.’ And then she left. Didn’t even stay to help me drink the wine I’d ordered.”

“That’s harsh!” Anna said, gasping at the brutality of the rejection. It was a brave tale for him to tell strangers.

“I know, right?” said Jeremy. “But you’ve got to admire her.

At least she wasn’t playing games.”

“A bit of game-playing would have let you down gently,” said Ellen, reaching over to pat Jeremy’s hand clumsily. Her fingernails were stubby and painted in chipped navy blue polish, but she made it look like the latest fashion. He didn’t flinch, but Anna noticed he moved his hand away as soon as he could, pouring water from a carafe into Ellen’s glass, then Anna’s and his own, as if to say they could all use some extra hydration.

“When you’ve been doing Tinder for a while you get so efficient. It makes you cold. You have to be.” This was Jonathan, a television screenwriter who’d admitted to the audience earlier in the day that watching porn was one of his

favourite procrastination techniques, a hazard of working from home. He advised downloading an app that showed your computer screen to the world so you felt under surveillance and were thus forced to be productive.

“You don’t have to be cold,” said Jeremy, “but you have to be thick-skinned. It’s a tricky balance.”

“I’m so glad I’m not single,” sighed Anna, thinking of Michael, who’d be warm in their bed when she got home.

She’d curl herself into him until all the cold had leached out of her. He smelled so good with a sixteen-hour fade on his aftershave, mixed in with the smell of that secret cigarette he thought she didn’t know about, and she’d breathe it in and then exhale into a deep, drunken sleep. In the morning, he’d get up and bring her coffee and Panadol for her hangover, and they’d unwrap the newspapers together, lazing in bed until midday, reading and making fun of the pretentious travel and lifestyle segments. Luca would hear their laughter and come in from the television room, bringing the cat and trying to find space for them all in the bed. It was Anna’s favourite time of the week and she wondered if Jeremy missed those kinds of family moments.

“Being single is not all bad,” he said, as if resisting her pity.

“I’m in no hurry to find someone,” said Ellen. “Anway, I have to take a break from dating sometimes to cleanse the palate. At least until I get curious again. Or horny enough!

Sometimes a wank just won’t do.”

Jeremy gave a short stifled laugh, looking away from Ellen as if she’d made him shy. Was he the kind of man who was still shocked by a woman publicly admitting she got horny?

There was something reticent, old-fashioned about him.

What would he think of Anna’s dirty mind? Of the explicit memoir she was writing? He’d be appalled, surely. Just another reason he was wrong for her.

“It is kind of exciting not knowing what might be round the corner every time you log in,” he said gently, as if intent on returning the conversation to tamer territory, and suddenly Anna felt jealous of the next woman he would click on; the next woman he’d meet in a bar. The next woman who’d try to work out the enigma of his quiet, unsleazy charm.

But she let the sour pang of jealousy dissolve like a lolly on her tongue. Acceptance was her new mantra. No desire, no fear, no pain, she thought, channeling Eckhart Tolle. No past, no future, only present. Sometimes she missed the buccaneering days before she’d discovered enlightenment, the days when she’d meet a new person and decide on a whim that they were a world worth exploring, and to hell with the danger it might bring.

“Hey gorgeous, can I sit here?” said Mel, sliding onto the bench, squeezing between Anna and Jeremy without waiting for an answer. Mel was an old mate of Anna’s from the little film magazine in the 1990s, the one that didn’t exist anymore but had spawned so many friendships and part-time careers.

She was blunt and outspoken. Tough like a real journalist, unlike Anna, who felt she might break if someone told her “no” or to mind her own business.

“You’ve been having a pretty intense conversation over

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here,” said Mel, turning her shoulder to Jeremy to make it clear she was talking to Anna now. “You haven’t spoken to me all night. What’s Michael up to this evening?”

“Home with the kid,” said Anna, realising immediately that this question was Mel’s unsubtle way of telling her to be careful.

Mel had been the DJ at their wedding fifteen years ago, so she owned the right to be protective of the marriage, but it was annoying, especially when Anna had already decided to be good. She didn’t need a cop rounding her up.

“I guess we should leave for that party soon,” she said reluctantly, pushing a strand of Mel’s dark curly hair behind her ear and straightening the twisted collar of her button-down shirt. Mel was always a mess and Anna liked to mother her.

“Yeah, we really should. We’ve still got to walk across town,” Mel said, pulling away and fiddling with her phone, opening up Google Maps to find the location of the back-alley warehouse that was so exclusive nobody had been there before.

Anna leaned back behind Mel, reaching over to Jeremy to catch his attention with a hand on his arm. He turned quickly, seemed pleased to be in contact again.

“Hey, I’ve got to go,” she said. “But it was so nice talking to you.” She didn’t want to stop talking to him, but what else was there to say? “Watch out for those sharks, okay,” she said, wishing she could stay for one more underwater story.

“I will,” he laughed. “Yeah, I should go too. I’m meant to be meeting my girlfriend for dinner.”

He drained his glass with a gulp, and in that instant he seemed to change shape before her eyes, turning from complex to complicated, from single to partnered. There was a girlfriend.

Anna felt winded. She stood up, gathering her handbag and laptop and wrapping her long scarf around her neck.

“Don’t forget this,” said Jeremy, retrieving her bulky parka from where it had slipped under the table. He stood up and held it open for her to shrug on. There was a moment of awkwardness as she tried to find the first inside-out armhole, and then the other. And then, as he helped her and they were turned away from the table, he passed something small and flat into her hand.

His card.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said very softly. “Alone.”

She looked at him, bewildered. “But I thought… I thought you were so good.”

“I’m as good as you are,” he said, with the first naughty smile she’d seen all night.

And she knew she was caught.

Rochelle Siemienowicz (@milan2Pinsk) is a film critic, journalist, editor and columnist. Her work has appeared in The Age, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue and SBS Movies.

Her first book, Fallen – a memoir about sex, religion and marrying too young – is published by Affirm Press and she is currently working on a novel.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Breathe

by NINA CULLEN KEEP CALM AND JUST RELAX…

J

“

esus Mum, you’ve gotta check your blind spot!”

“And you should check your…” Helen needed the right word, “tone.”

They were just out of the airport and she was jumping lanes fast and loose. She straightened up in her seat and flicked the indicator with a deliberate flourish.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. You don’t know what’s been happening here for me.”

“Sorry. You never mentioned it.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Simon didn’t say anything.”

Helen sniffed, “That’s because Simon doesn’t think there’s anything to worry about. And when I tell him quite specifically what’s on my mind, he tells me not to worry!

Anyway, this is for another time, darling.” Helen reached across to squeeze Lara’s hand. “It’s so good to have you back again. And we don’t want to ruin your homecoming with my old worries.”

After Cloud had circled and sniffed Lara in a frenzy of delight, after she had left her bag in her old bedroom, after the kettle went on, it came out. They had created a new role at Helen’s work.

“It was supposed to ‘complement’ my position. That’s what the job description said and that’s what I was told. So we are essentially equals, give or take a certificate or two. But do you think she sees it that way? No. She is a law unto herself.”

Helen turned the teapot clockwise as it steeped. “She makes personal calls all morning and then eats lunch at her desk, just to show up those of us who actually take a lunch hour.

And I can hear her chewing. It’s disgusting.”

“How long has she worked there?”

“Two weeks. Two very long weeks.” Helen shook her head and poured the tea. “Maybe I should just get a new job, but what am I going to do? It took your brother a year to find work and he was a prize-winning graduate!”

Lara nodded and looked out the window. It was her first homecoming. She didn’t realise it would be so underwhelming. Everything was all just the same; the saggy washing line, the tangle of bougainvillea, the lawn that never looked as neat as it should. In the kitchen there was the same old hum of the fridge, the creak of floorboards as Cloud padded the perimeter, and the regular sighs of her mum.

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L

ara pushed the coffee table against the wall and stepped back to see if there was enough room. She tilted the venetians against the morning sun. She’d forgotten how bright a blue morning could be, how the cicadas and heat started their working day before she started hers. Cloud’s tail thumped the wooden floor as he waited for a little more love. Lara was sparing with her affection. She had a rash on her forearms and thought it could be dog- or heat-related. They were the two new equations in her life, not including her mum.

Helen wiped the back of her hand against her sweaty forehead and hung her hat on the back of the door. She could hear Lara muttering in the lounge room.

“You know the lounge room is just fine the way it is,” Helen looked around and frowned.

“Oh, you gave me a shock. I thought you were in the garden.”

“I was,” she pointed along the wall. “So I’m wondering what my coffee table is doing over there and what my books are doing pushed into the corner and what you’re thinking of moving next?”

Lara took a deep breath. This was temporary. She was going to find herself a place and a job and then she would visit her mum on weekends.

Two years in London. An adult relationship. A full-time job. Total independence – financial and emotional. Lara was a different person now. She was reflective. She was mindful. She was assertive and organised and capable. And yet here she was back at home. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. There was still sleep in her eyes and her shirt was damp with sweat. She’d moved one piece of furniture and her mum was ready to start. A tide of exasperation gathered its forces. If Lara didn’t do something about it, she was going to fall right back into old habits.

“I was just making a bit more space.” Lara nodded to where the coffee table had been. “I’m going to have a meditate.”

“Oh?” Helen had thought Lara was going to start decluttering the lounge room. Incredible, the rights your children assumed over your life and possessions. Lara had already started to sort out and box up her old bedroom – after arriving home, rather than before leaving mind you – but yesterday she’d made a few comments about things around the house. Did Helen use them? Did she even like them?

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forward to having a guest room minus her children’s obsolete clutter. She liked getting the space back, but nobody had any business making changes without asking first.

“Oh yes meditation and mindfulness. Everyone’s into that now. You know, they wouldn’t need it if they just stopped to have a cup of tea and a little think every now and then. They seem to think it’s a recent invention for CEOs to perform better. I doubt they do it in a horsehair shirt though. I think Simon put something on my phone, some app.”

“I think you may be getting it mixed up with personal suffering.”

“Hmm?” “The horsehair. I don’t think people have ever mediated in horsehair shirts. I think wearing horsehair is about flagellation and personal suffering.”

“Anyway, Simon put an app on my phone.”

“Any good?”

“You know I just send my messages and make my calls.

I don’t need any of the other jazzy stuff.”

Lara sat cross-legged on the floor, punctuating the end of the conversation.

“So you’re doing it right now?” Helen leaned farther forward in the doorway, checking if anything else had been moved.

“Yep.” “Maybe I’ll join you?”

“Sure,” Lara took a deep breath and gestured to the floor.

“Can I do it lying down?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well I think that I might lie on the couch because my hip’s been playing up a bit. I’ll just pop into something more comfortable. You’re supposed to be comfortable aren’t you?”

Lara nodded.

Helen found a pair of light tracksuit pants and called from the bedroom, “Do I keep my bra on?”

Lara clenched her fists. All she wanted was a fifteen-minute meditation to set her up for the day. Her mum seemed to think she was about to get a massage. She probably needed one.

Right now, Lara just wanted a few minutes of quiet reflection.

“You just need to be comfortable. A T-shirt and bra is fine.”

Both of them settled into their positions. Helen lay on the couch, moving around a bit trying to find a straight spine, while Lara sat on the floor with her palms resting upon her thighs.

“Is it going to be a man or a woman?” Helen asked.

“What?”

“The meditation, is it a man or a woman talking?”

“A woman. Why?” “I just wondered if the CEOs listen to a man or a woman.

You know how they say that in the car men change the navigator’s voice to male because they can’t take directions from a woman? Imagine them being told to take a deep breath and calm down by one,” Helen chuckled. Lara wasn’t going to encourage any further conversation on the subject.

Take a moment to get comfortable. You can sit or lie down, just make sure that you’re comfortable.

Lara couldn’t see it, but she could feel that her mum was nodding on the couch. She concentrated on her own breath.

I’d like you to begin by thinking about your breath.

Just notice the breath in and out. In and out. In and out.

“Too fast. Way too fast. I’m still breathing in when she’s telling me to breathe out.”

Helen’s commentary was hard to block out and Lara was still a novice. Instead, she tried to encourage with her own silence.

Imagine that you’re standing in a white room. White walls.

White floor. White ceiling.

“Do you think there are any windows? It’s not very relaxing being in a room without windows.”

“Mum!” Just imagine that you’re sending energy out to the wall in front of you.

“Am I looking from the outside, seeing myself doing this, or am I looking from my own eyes?”

“Just whatever is easier for you.”

Helen really tried with this. But she couldn’t see it. Was she sending out a warm energy or a ball of something or just a colour? She settled on energy that was yellow and warm. It looked like a comet trailing a wake.

And now imagine that you are sending the energy down to the floor.

“Are we still in the white room?”

“Yes, we’re still in the room.”

Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet. Lara tried to breathe the mantra away. She went back to her own white room, but it felt like there were two of them in there now.

I’d like you to imagine that you’re floating on a stream…

“Just floating? Not on a blow-up?”

Lara wasn’t going to answer. She was just going to float down her own stream.

“If it’s a mountain stream, they’re cold, even in summer.”

“Mum, just keep it internal.”

“Yes, yes.” Helen didn’t realise that she’d said it aloud. But it was still a valid point. “I’m not doing a stream. We don’t really have streams do we? I’m doing a creek. The Colo Creek.”

“Shh.” “It was just in case you had trouble thinking of a stream. I know we never really took you kids to much bushland when you were growing up.” Why hadn’t they? Both she and Stephen grew up outside the city. She hoped it wasn’t something that Lara and Simon had missed out on.

“Mum!” “I’m being quiet now.”

Just saying that was not being quiet, and it meant Lara wasn’t in the stream anymore, so she left her logic and returned to the slow current that was carrying her weight.

“It sounds a bit more like the bath being emptied than a creek though doesn’t it?” Helen waited for a response, “Makes me want to go to the toilet.”

“Shhhh!”

Now imagine there is a tree above you. Its branches hang over the stream and you grab hold of one.

“My arms are getting tired.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Aren’t yours? I’m holding on tight.”

Fiction Special

“Then don’t hold on so tight.” Lara wasn’t holding on to anything anymore. Scraps of her patience perhaps? Her pointer and thumb were pressed together. She held them apart, shook her wrists and rolled her neck around for a little reset.

“But the current is quite strong.”

“Don’t make it strong. It’s supposed to be a gentle current.”

“She never said that.”

“It’s implied. You’re not going to get into rapids for a relaxing drift, are you?”

Helen nodded. Yes, a gentle little creek current would be better, but it didn’t matter. If her arms were held above her head for any amount of time, they would still get tired.

“Can I do this without holding on?”

“Just listen.”

The branch is your thoughts trying to keep you from the natural flow of the stream. You choose to let go and keep floating. You choose to let go of those thoughts and distractions.

“Thank god!”

Lara wasn’t going to comment. She wasn’t going to be exasperated. She was going to have generous thoughts and do exactly as suggested…

Remember this every time there is a thought or a distraction trying to take you away from your stream and its feeling of peace. You just let it go like you let the branch go.

You just release it and continue.

Helen floated down her creek. It was warm and sunny. She worried about suncream, with her face exposed to the day like that. And Lara, she had fair skin and no business floating face up in streams on sunny days. Then Helen thought of the branch. Her daughter could look after her own skin. She let the branch go and enjoyed the peace of being in the current again.

I’m going to count down from five to one, and when I reach one you will open your eyes. Five. Slowly bring your awareness back to the room you are in…

Lara’s jaw was tense. They were already counting down and she still had tension in her body. She could try to get rid of it by working on her own breathing, but then she’d have to ignore the voice and miss the end of the meditation. The deliberate stages of a guided meditation were an important part of the relaxation. Now she was really behind. Her mum was already shifting on the couch, knuckles cracking as she wriggled everything back to life as instructed.

Two. Your muscles are relaxed but your body is energised.

Your mind is calm and your emotions are balanced.

One. Now open your eyes. You are wide awake and ready to take on the rest of your day.

Helen stood and stretched her arms up above her head. She put her hands on her hips and did a brief lean to each side, then grabbed her daughter and gave her a big kiss on the forehead.

“I can see why people like it. It’s very effective, isn’t it? I had so many other things to consider that I didn’t think about work once!” She was delighted. “It’s so good to have you home.”

Nina Cullen is a Sydney writer whose fiction and non-fiction has been published in Australia and abroad. She is working on a novel and an anthology of short stories.

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Here’s the Thing

by ELLIOT PERLMAN WHEN DOES INTENTION BECOME DETENTION?

I

know that smell, that disinfectant smell. It splits your skull and corrodes the soft tissue inside your nose. Strips it away. Nobody would use it in their house. So this means I’m either in prison or in some kind of psych ward.

In the end what’s the difference, right? Different degrees of pretence as to rehabilitation. Ooh. Just the word, no, just the thought of the word “rehabilitation” makes the thud in my head louder than all the thuds at a red light at a King Street intersection on a hot summer’s Saturday night. So I won’t use it any more. I hope you’ll forgive me. I didn’t mean to use it.

I mean, this was not my intention in so far as I formed one.

Which I didn’t, not really. That’s what I said to the magistrate.

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THE BIG ISSUE 2017

If they make me get up, it’s prison. If they let me lie around a bit longer, it’s a psych ward. Simple as that. It’s not infallible, but I’ve used this method before and it rarely ever fails me. What’s more, I don’t have to get up to invoke it. I’m able to get some sense of my surroundings from a horizontal position and with the door closed, a door with bars on the window, a high window too. And that smell. Jesus, that disinfectant smell!

Since when did drinking become a crime, anyway? I know they’ll say it’s not the drinking, but whatever I said or did as a result of the drinking. But here’s the thing. I mean if you’re looking for the thing, here it is. In the criminal law,

don’t you need to form the requisite intention, the requisite reprehensible state of mind, to be found guilty of some or other crime? It’s not enough to do the act. You have to have formed the intention to do it. Well, if I’m right about that – and I think I am – I had the state of mind to get drunk. I mean that this, getting drunk, was my intention. It was my sole intention. Why this was my intention we can go into later or maybe never but – and this is the thing. Did I mention that?

Well, anyway, Your Honour, I told the magistrate, whatever I did after I was well and truly drunk was not my intention.

“Who knows what you’re going to do once you’re completely wasted?” I put to her. She looked like she was following my argument. Even if you think you know, you’re wrong. You might have certain hopes or expectations that you nurture, hopes as to doing something that you have always wanted to do sober but didn’t have the guts to do. So you get drunk hoping that, finally, this purer drunk version of you will be able to represent and momentarily displace the pathetic timid you, the one that hides behind the cringing cowardly you that trumpets sobriety like a little bitch, like an arse-licking school prefect. You know these people. You see them on trains. They screw up their face at you. They’ve got some kind of half-arsed job that they swim about in. They’ve got to be there at a certain time every day or else somebody’s going to yell at them or take away their privileges. This is the bastard that has the temerity to look down on you on the train.

He, this useless piece of protoplasmic conformity, looks down on you when you’re the one who had the courage to get so off your face that you didn’t know what you’d be capable of. And in this state you did something that other people, your fellow citizens, people who saw it; these people will be talking about what you did for years, maybe for the rest of their lives.

Sure, you got arrested or otherwise locked up but damn if you didn’t make art out of your life. Why do you think people come to Flinders Street Station, anyway? It’s not for the chilled sandwiches. Christ, they can spoil a sandwich there. Frosty ciabatta; what the hell kind of special needs culinary amateurs do they parade for the council or whoever gives out these licences? Someone’s on the take. You can be sure of it. One mouthful and you know. It’s like chilled sand. But I digress.

Anyone who says they know in advance what they’re going to do when they have got off their face to a state of numbness that’s positively other-worldly, this person is so comfortable in a bath of their own dishonesty that they deserve to drown in it.

Well, since no-one knows what they’re going to do once they’re completely wasted, you can’t form the requisite intent to do the criminal act and therefore you should never be found guilty for something that happened once you were drunk.

Never. It stands to reason. It’s just a matter of logic. I’d like to claim credit for this defence, because of its elegance, and because I thought of it. It is elegant. And it’s not just me who thought so. That’s the word the magistrate used and I had to agree with her. It might have been its very elegance that made her smile that way, a way that I wished, and, frankly, still wish, was directed at me. But since you do get arrested again and again, over and over throughout your life, what else is there left to conclude but that the system’s rigged? It just makes you sick. It’s not the drinking that makes you sick. It’s this. I think I was sick earlier from this…

I told the magistrate that me and Willoughby were friends, told her I liked to call him “Willow” and that he enjoyed that name when used by certain confidants of similar mindset and lifestyle and with shared history, and that my only intention was to get off my face and not to stab him. That’s when she

“Sure, you got arrested or otherwise locked up but damn if you didn’t make art out of your life.” described my defence as elegant but said that I chose to get drunk, I formed the intention to get drunk, and that I knew that in that state of intoxication I could harm someone. And she said I did harm someone, Willoughby, or “Willow” as I still call him, with his own screwdriver. Now, I’m not sure she’s right about the provenance of the screwdriver. But be that as it may, the weight of her logic comes crushing down on me even now as I lie here looking for patterns of a temporal or spatial nature. Nothing earth-shattering, really just trying to gain some perspective. And that’s when clarity touches down briefly, just visiting, and I know that smell. It’s prison.

Elliot Perlman is the bestselling author of The Street Sweeper, Seven Types of Ambiguity, The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming and Three Dollars. His work has been translated into numerous languages and published to international acclaim.

The French literary journal Lire named him one of the “fifty most important writers in the world”.

Fiction Special

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Unravelling

by HELEN RICHARDSON SOME THINGS ARE MORE THAN SKIN DEEP.

T

he black, writhing scales look fleshy against the flaccid skin. Jamille imagines him once young, well built, when the snake that wraps around his arm was a symbol of his virility. Now the arm is shrunken with a purple hue: a sign the atrophy is advanced. Mostly, the men come to her in the later stages after they’ve tried the official channels; when the cost and the waiting lists prove too much.

The women come earlier. They’ve seen the results the medical services have meted out to their friends – radical treatments of massive skin grafts, even amputations.

She can tell he’s nervous. “Just relax, Daniel.” He’s lying down on the physiotherapy bed she uses. “Think of before you got the tattoo. Maybe of when you were a kid. It helps the process.”

She’s got the clove oil burning, the Japanese flute recording playing. Daniel would think it a joke. Or at least would have before all this happened. Now they are all desperate, cutting in to their own flesh or taking up religion.

Daniel is clutching his hand. It’s red, swollen.

“How’s this happening, do you know?” He’s not looking at her: just staring at the ceiling. They all come around to this. The official explanation is bacterial, a superbug that causes a wound that doesn’t heal. The other things they attribute to neurological damage, or mass hysteria as the tabloids would have it.

“Just relax,” she says and touches his tight, burning hand.

The fingers unfurl, his eyes close. She angles his arm into the light; even this small movement pains him. The stylus nib touches the tip of the tail. She closes her eyes and visualises the snake, its knotted body curled and twisted around itself. She starts moving the stylus along the outline and a groan comes from Daniel. It is like unstitching embroidery – as she works along the scales the tight body begins to loosen.

She washes her hands after Daniel leaves. He was happy, but she is less sanguine. The circulation in his arm had been restricted for a long time; his prognosis isn’t bright. She thinks about all those snakes – thick and strong, strangling arms, necks, chests – and the reason for many of the amputations.

In the early days thousands of snakes turned up dead. It was assumed to be a bout of revenge killings, but no-one was actually caught in the act, and the scientists plumbed for some kind of environmental change. Now such mass die-offs are common, unremarkable. Species extinction is somewhat down on our list of worries.

Fiction Special

She does a rose on a woman’s hip next. Roses didn’t appear to be a problem in the beginning, but as the epidemic continued, the roses started to cause intense pain. The thorns, she suspects, were pressing inwards. People were referred for reversals but by that stage the government-funded clinics were overrun by more serious cases, leaving many to resort to unregulated practitioners, and healers like Jamille. She does a lot of roses and they are among her favourites; she much prefers plants to animals.

Afterwards she tidies her treatment room: puts the towels in the basket, a fresh paper protector on the bed, a few more drops of oil in the diffuser, then she lights some leaves in a dish and holds her stylus over the smoke. Making her mind blank, she imagines a line of ink flying off from the nib, dissolving and dissipating.

A clang of the brass bell at her side door. The next appointment, another male. She’s getting more than her usual number today. He smiles at her when she opens the door.

“Sebastian Thomas, I believe you’re expecting me.”

She ushers him in. He looks healthy, and younger than her usual clients. He’ll have one of the hipper, less elaborate tattoos.

She guesses he is below the age range for those who sport the worst, full body excesses – they’re mostly middle-aged now.

They’re the ones who are blamed for all this, for providing an abundant habitat for the bacterium. Exactly who is to blame for squandering the last-line-of-defence antibiotics and leaving no effective drug treatment is, of course, another matter.

“If you’d like to go behind the screen,” she tells him, “and take off your things.”

But he doesn’t move. “I wonder if I could see some photos, some before and after things before I go ahead?”

Before and after? An alarm bell rings. “Do you want a list of my treatments?” She goes to get the brochure that outlines the aromatherapy, the Reiki, the acupressure.

“A friend of mine told me you could help me.” There’s a firmness, an impatience. “It’s in a delicate place,” he says. “So, you understand, I want to make sure it will be done properly.

If you could just show me some proof...”

People don’t usually ask for proof. They either come to her because they already believe, or they come to her at a stage when they are desperate to try anything.

“These are my treatments.” She hands him the sheet. She THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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still calls herself a natural therapist, and would love to continue to practise, if the demand for the other wasn’t overwhelming her.

“I’m here for a reversal.” He looks her in the eye.

“I’m sorry but I don’t do that.”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “Really?” He walks around the room, looking at the burner, the towels, the oils. Picks up one of the round massage stones. Then he stares into her jar of styluses, pokes through them. “What are these for?”

“Birch rods, they stimulate blood flow.”

“Yes, sure.” He turns to her. “Look, I know what you’re doing. I’d just have to get someone coming out of here to sign a statement, and you’re gone. I have to give you one warning.

This is it.” He opens his bag and takes out a form. With a thick pen he scribbles a name and thrusts the paper at Jamille.

She doesn’t say anything.

“You know,” he says, with a straightforwardness like he thinks he might actually be able to convince her. “You’re exploiting people. They come to you and put off getting proper treatment. By the time they come to the clinics, it’s too late. Do you really think you can fight infection with these?” He holds a stone in one hand and her jar of styluses in the other. Jamille takes them from him as he outlines the new regulations. It used to only be fines, but now they’re locking people up.

She cancels the rest of her appointments for the day. She does two hours of yoga and takes a warm bath. By the time she dresses and makes a pot of mint tea, it’s early evening. She’s waiting for the tea to brew when there’s a rap at the window. It makes her start. The light from the kitchen shows the face of a

middle-aged man, with a woman next to him. He raps again and points to the courtyard door. Jamille walks through the treatment room to open it.

“Yes?” Jamille says.

“Please,” the man says. “My wife’s in a lot of pain.”

The woman looks pale and thin, one arm cradling her chest.

“Come in,” she says reluctantly.

Jamille asks the woman to undress behind the screen.

“I’ve received a warning,” she tells the husband.

“It’s pretty bad, you’ll see,” he replies.

The woman comes out from behind the screen and her husband rushes over to help her to the treatment bed. Jamille turns on the lamp and studies the damage. The woman should have had a mastectomy months ago, it must be excruciating.

But, as Jamille knows, the more personal the tattoo, the longer the sufferer endures it. The woman’s breast is red and distended. The cause is obvious: a ring of cursive writing above and below the breast. Circles, Jamille reflects, were used so much because they follow the natural curves of the human body. And they represent something nice, like completion, full circle. But it’s also a coming back to face yourself: all you’ve done, all we have done. They inflict a cruel revenge.

“What is the writing?” Jamille asks.

“My children,” the woman whispers tearfully. The husband hands her a tissue.

“Two of them,” the man says. “A son and a daughter.”

Names are tricky. Like the dead snakes, she can’t help thinking that removing them is linked in some way to the

eruption of disappearances. Or maybe these people, as the police argue, are just part of the big migrations – trying to escape the problem by moving on.

The children’s names are long and easily circle the mother’s breast. Jamille takes her stylus and looks for the beginning and end of a name. Charlotte, she can make out. Jamille empties her mind, thinking of a winding road amid green pastures – green as they have not been for years. Gently, she unlinks the “C” of Charlotte that rises above the breast at the place where it joins the son’s names running below.

“Will she feel anything?” the father asks.

“Your wife?”

“No, our daughter.”

“Just a jolt; a letting go. I’ll try just unlinking the names and dates. That will stop the constriction. I might not need to erase the whole lot of it.”

She cuts between the end of Charlotte and the beginning of the daughter’s middle name – Elizabeth – and then between the day, month and year of the date of birth. There is a visible loosening of the skin above the breast, but the whole is still distended and painfully red. When she lifts it to work on the names underneath the woman stiffens.

“Sorry. I need to find the right place,” she says. “Where is your daughter?” she asks to take the woman’s mind off the pain.

“At university.”

“And your son?” Jamille makes out the “S” of the beginning of the son’s name: the ink of the writing is blurred purple against the red of the infection.

There’s a silence between the parents and Jamille looks up. Her heart lifts. Perhaps the son is dead and she’ll be able to remove the whole name and improve the mother’s chances without any fear of a disappearance.

“We don’t see him anymore,” the man says.

“Oh, sorry.”

“He’s with the government. He wouldn’t approve of this.”

“Oh,” Jamille hesitates.

“Don’t worry. Do what you have to.”

“It won’t hurt him, will it?” The woman asks her husband.

“It will just be a feeling of loss like the lady says. He’ll have to deny it, though, won’t he? He doesn’t believe in any of this.”

Jamille hovers her stylus. She tries to find the end of the long name, but the swelling and difficulty in lifting the breast makes it hard to see.

“What’s your son’s name?” she asks.

“Sebastian. Sebastian Alexander,” the woman whispers.

“Thanks, I can see the join,” and Jamille cuts.

“Oh,” the woman moans, more tears of relief.

Jamille looks up to the husband. “It’s more infected underneath the breast. I should do more here.” He gives a slight nod. She places the stylus as lightly as she can on the words.

“What does your son do in the government?” she asks quietly.

There is a touch on her shoulder, and the husband bends down close to her ear: “Just do whatever you have to...”

The woman is shaking now, sobbing silently. The husband presses her down against the bed, keeping her still and, perhaps, also to shield her from what Jamille is doing. It’s very precise,

Fiction Special

unwriting. She must concentrate as she works along the cursive writing, the stylus following the curves, the turns, the backtracks, not stopping. She goes on unravelling, reeling in the long, curled line of ink. Soon it is just the daughter’s names that remain, unlinked and running in a gentle curve above her mother’s breast.

T

here is a knock on the front door. Jamille is disturbed when she hears it. She had hoped to have some peace, to think about her future. She opens the door slowly, and is not as surprised as she should be to see Sebastian standing there.

“Ah,” he says, and runs his hands through his short dark hair, looks to the left where a hibiscus bush is shedding its leaves. “Um, do I know you?” He even blushes.

“I don’t know, do you?” Jamille counters. She won’t commit herself, but she can tell immediately this is not the same man.

The sharpness, the self-confidence, is gone – a certain weight of life is missing. He looks much younger.

“It’s just… I feel I know this place. This probably sounds crazy – I thought it might be my home.”

Jamille opens the door wider and invites him in. He looks around carefully at things, stares at himself in the hall mirror and turns away.

“This is a nice house.” He places a hand on the striped rug that covers the back of the sofa. “I’m sorry,” he shrugs, shakes his head. “I really thought this might help me… Sorry.”

“Sit down, I’ll make some tea,” she says and, like a child, he does as he’s told.

The water boils and her mind whirls. He has unerringly come here to her. She pours the water in the pot and sets out two cups on a tray. She looks out the window to where the couple had stood the night before. She believed the father knew, that he had sanctioned what she had done. But she had wielded the stylus. How this had happened she did not know – she had obviously not cut the line entirely free and it had drawn him here.

She takes the tea in. “So you have some form of amnesia?”

“I don’t even know my own name,” he says.

She kneels down near the table, pours the pale amber tea.

“I’m what they call an unraveller. Do you know what that is?”

“I think so. Something to do with the epidemic. I saw a lot of sick people on the streets last night.”

She offers him a teacup and he takes it in both hands, watching the blue fish on the inside of the cup ripple as the tea laps against them.

“I’m trying to help,” she says. “I may take on an apprentice, if you’re interested. I’ve got to move on, the authorities caught up with me so it would be a new practice somewhere else.”

He shrugs. “I’ve got no ties. What do I have to do?”

“For a start, you have to be able to empty your mind. To be a blank slate, so to speak.”

Helen Richardson (@bookwoods) is a writer and editor from the Blue Mountains, NSW. Her work has appeared in Sleepers Almanac, Little Fictions and The Great Unknown. See her book reviews at bookwoods.com.au.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Blue India

by EMILY O’GRADY WELL THEN, IT’S CHRISTMAS.

W

hen we reach the end of the winding driveway lined with Mooloolaba pines, Dad leaves the engine running. The air tastes salty. I follow him inside. Grandad’s already waiting in reception, sitting on a lounge chair too low to the ground with his hands curled over his knees. Stud in one ear. He’s wearing dress pants and an unironed button-down, even though Dad and I are both in thongs and board shorts.

Dad signs a form and the nurse tells him they haven’t served breakfast yet so Grandad will have to be fed, nothing milky or eggy because he had an upset tummy the night before.

“If you didn’t feed me infant food I wouldn’t shit like an infant,” Grandad says.

Tinsel is strung from the front desk, shedding silver leaves onto the lino. Dad slides the form back to the nurse, turns to Grandad and says, “Well then.”

Grandad’s bag sits on the chair next him, solid and black.

T

he first time we went to visit Grandad at Shady Hills it was his birthday. I’d expected him to be miserable; a nurse spooning him mushed vegetables, bib tucked under his chin. He had a private room though, with all his things brought over from the flat: his own bathroom and kitchenette where he could microwave sausage rolls, make cups of tea. He was waiting for us in reception, took us straight to his room and gave us the tour. He opened his fridge and showed us his pots of yoghurt, the IKEA cabinet beside his bed where he stored his record player. Beside his bed was a picture of Aunt Kel and Dad nude in the bathtub, Grandma leaning towards the tap. Her face turned away from the camera, soapy water turning her wrists to stumps.

“Bit out of the way, isn’t it?” Dad had said. “Lord knows why Kel chose this place.”

“I always wanted to retire on the coast,” Grandad said.

“Kel knew that.”

“This isn’t retiring though, is it?”

“Dad was always wandering off whenever Grandad was around.”

I go to pick it up, Dad already out the door. “I can bloody well do it,” Grandad says, batting my hand away. He grabs the bag and follows Dad, ignoring the nurse as she wishes him merry Christmas.

In the car, Dad switches on talkback radio. Grandad winds down his window so that when we go fast on the highway the wind stings my eyes. “Kelly here yet?” he says, shouting over the sound of the road and the wind.

“She’s staying in Sydney,” Dad says. “I told you that on the phone.”

“Right, right, right,” Grandad says. He lets out a wet cough and fiddles with the bag propped on his lap. He pulls out a stack of envelopes from the front zipper. “Stop at a mail box, would you?” he says. “So I can post this down to Kel Belle.”

He turns the top envelope over in his hands, over and over.

Dad doesn’t stop, and by the time we pull into the driveway the corners of the envelope are crinkled, damp marks on the paper from Grandad’s fingertips.

Fiction Special

“Looks just like home,” Mum said, her voice high and bright. “With all your pictures up. Nice and cosy.”

“All thanks to Kel,” Grandad said. “She’s good to me, that girl is.” Grandad sat down on the bed, tested the springs with his fists.

“She’ll have to come up and see it soon,” Mum said.

“Said she’ll try and come up for my birthday. Maybe bring Billy with her.”

“Mmm,” Mum said, turning to peer at a picture on the wall. “She’s got a lot on her plate. Work and planning the wedding, and all that.”

Dad had wandered into the courtyard, which you could see from Grandad’s window. It had plastic ferns hanging from the rafters, and along one wall, an aviary full of squeaking budgies.

The astroturf made Dad’s skin glow green, like a Martian.

He walked up to the cage and stuck his finger through the bars. I could see his lips purse to make them whistle. Dad was always wandering off whenever Grandad was around.

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We moved into the common room where the high-care residents were stationed in armchairs in front of the telly, crochet blankets over their laps. Their heads bobbled as though held up by pipe cleaners and they all seemed to be about fifty years older than Grandad. There was a woman next to the aquarium with hair like fairy floss. Each time a nurse walked past she raised her papery hand to get their attention.

I counted her arm going up and down five times before we cut the cake and had orange cordial.

When Grandad decided to have a lie-down we shuffled back to the car. “Kelly bloody indulges him,” Dad said, as he jammed the keys into the door. “And it’s us who’ll have to drive all this way to see him. Not her.”

“I think it’s depressing,” Mum said. “This is the kind of place people go to die.”

“He’s not going to die,” Dad said, turning on the engine.

“The amount of junk he’s pumped into his body over a lifetime, he’s bloody invincible. He’ll outlive us all.”

M

um told me it was Aunt Kel who got all of Grandad’s talent. When Dad was in high school he learned to play on one of Grandad’s Telecasters, but he was never any good and gave it up when Grandad hocked all of his guitars and all of Grandma’s jewellery. Kel doesn’t play anything either, but she was on a show a few years ago, where celebrities sing duets with other celebrities, except she was the first celebrity eliminated even though Mum and I voted five times each. Now she’s on all the ads for a home-decorating chain and reads the weather on the morning news program on the weekends.

Whenever Mum talks about how well Kel has done for herself, Dad says it’s all down to something called nepotism.

“Why aren’t you out there on the telly then?” Mum says.

“It doesn’t take a great deal of skill to look pretty and read the forecast off a teleprompter,” Dad says. “I’ll tell you that much.”

“It’s the charm, Malcolm,” Mum says. “The charisma. Not a lot of people have that.”

Kel moved back down to Sydney when she finished uni so we hardly ever see her, except when she’s on the telly. Her fiancé plays for the Sea Eagles and every Christmas she goes to see his family in Manly where they eat prawns and probably mud crabs and lobsters on the beach. Kel always sends me up a card with a hundred bucks inside, and when I flap it around Dad tries to shoot Mum a look because that’s almost double what he and Mum spend on my Christmas present.

Kel’s only half my aunt, really. Grandad had her when Dad was still a little boy, with a girl he met when he was recording in Sydney. Kel’s real mum was only fifteen when she got pregnant, but that wasn’t against the law at the time according to Mum, even though she was still in school and Grandad was nearly twice her age. Grandad posted Kel’s mum money in secret for years, and Grandma knew nothing about it, until she showed up when Kel was a toddler and left Kel with Grandad for the weekend and never came back, not for a few years anyway. Dad looks nothing like Grandad, but apparently everyone knew who Kel belonged to right away.

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Dad always says that Grandma was a Good Woman because she looked after Kel like she was her own kid, made her birthday cakes and enrolled her in tap classes at the church hall. When Grandma was alive she used to invite Kel up to Queensland every Christmas, even after she and Grandad got divorced. One year Dad and Kel got into a big fight about something stupid and Dad called her Tic Tac teeth, and the next time we saw her she had a brand new smile and a job with Channel 7. But then Grandma died and she and Billy got together and she hasn’t come round for Christmas since.

W

hen we get home from Shady Palms, Mum meets us on the driveway. She’s sweaty from cooking the roast in the sweaty kitchen, wipes her face with her shoulder. She kisses Grandad on the cheek and his face crinkles up for the first time all morning. Mum’s wearing a scrunchie with plastic holly leaves glued to the elastic, and Grandad tells her he likes her hair pinned up like that, that she looks like a picture. Mum smiles and takes Grandad’s bag. He puts his hand around her waist and follows her lead inside.

It’s just the four of us for lunch. Mum puts out a plate of grapes and cabana and cubes of yellow cheese. Even though Mum always has wine when she gets home from work, she opens a bottle of Pasito and pours four glasses. When she hands Grandad his soft drink he looks at the champagne flute and asks for a scotch instead.

“Do you think you should, Glen?” Mum says.

“Allow me one bloody vice,” he says. His voice goes soft.

“Please, love.”

“Well, we don’t have any scotch,” Mum says, tells me to get a stubby from the fridge.

When the chook’s ready Mum spoons Gravox over the meat and veg and I carry the plates out to the table. We pull the bonbons and put on our paper crowns. A key ring with a pink dolphin on the end comes out of Dad’s bonbon and he spins it around on his pinkie.

“What do you call a snowman in summer?” I say.

Everyone looks at me and I pause for a second, like Dad taught me to do when you tell a joke. “A puddle.”

Grandad doesn’t laugh. He holds his knife and fork as though he’s holding hammers. The metal scrapes along the plate when he cuts into his potatoes. “What year are you in now? Three? Four?” Grandad says to me. There’s a speck of grey on his chin, gravy or a piece of fatty chicken.

“He’s starting Grade Six,” Dad says.

“Bit short, aren’t you?” Grandad says. I shrug, take a gulp of Pasito. “Got yourself a girlfriend then?”

“He’s too young for that, Glen,” Mum says.

I feel my face go red, try to change the subject. “I’m in the choir at school,” I say.

“Good man,” Grandad says. “Must skip a generation.”

“I’m not very good though.”

“He’s the best of the lot,” Dad says. I look up at Dad to make sure I’ve heard him right, but his head is down, concentrating on his chicken leg.

“Malcolm got a promotion,” Mum says, nodding towards Dad. “He’s second in charge of his department.”

“Stimulating work, is it?” Grandad says.

“Pays the bills,” Dad says.

“Could never have done it myself,” Grandad says. “That kind of lifestyle was never for me.” Grandad finishes his beer and goes to the fridge for another. When he comes back he tries to open the screw cap with the tablecloth but he can’t seem to twist it hard enough.

“Here,” Mum says, taking the bottle from him. “Tricky buggers, these are.”

“Cheers, love,” Grandad says. “My hands just don’t do what they’re supposed to sometimes.”

W

e used to see Grandad all the time when he lived in his flat. Mum and I would drive round after school, and Mum would wash his clothes and bring him containers of bolognese that he could heat up for his tea. The framed cover of Blue India hung from a nail above the futon, surrounded by pictures of Grandad with people he says are all dead – back when his hair was long and shaggy, before his teeth had rotted from his mouth and been fixed up without the gaps. If he was having a good day he’d play us records, tell Mum and me about the time he went on tour to England when Dad was a baby. How when he flew back into Sydney there were nearly a dozen girls waiting for him at the airport. Grandad said he used to be so famous he couldn’t walk down the street without someone wanting to shake his hand or have him autograph a serviette.

Dad told me that Grandad used to be sharp as a tack, but after Dad left school and Grandma left Grandad, he checked himself into a hospital where the doctor gave him so much medicine it put him in a coma for weeks. The medicine and everything else ended up frying Grandad’s brain, so now he doesn’t understand most jokes and gets into bad moods for no reason, and can’t get his fingers to press down on frets properly.

He’d been in his flat for years – since he came out of hospital – but then he tripped over the vacuum cleaner and lay on the carpet with a broken leg for three days. Mum said he shouldn’t have been living alone in the first place, but Dad said a fall like that could have happened to anyone. He said it wasn’t his fault that Grandad thought he was too good to make friends with his neighbours. He said that Grandad got what he deserved.

B

y the time we have presents Grandad’s all fizzy. When he opens the box of Mint Thins I bought him, he gapes as though he’s just been given a million bucks. “Bloody beauty,” he says, rattling the box above his head.

When Dad goes to the kitchen to start the washing-up, Grandad pours himself some more beer and flicks through Mum’s CD wallet. He stops the carols halfway through a song. “You’ve always had taste, love,” Grandad says, slipping a CD into the stereo. I don’t know the song playing, and for a second Grandad closes his eyes, a small smile on his face, like he’s remembering something good from deep in his brain. When the first verse starts Grandad stands and begins

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shuffling around the room, one hand in the air as though levitating. He grabs Mum’s hand and pulls her onto the carpet, spins her around. He twirls her back in and sings into her ear.

Mum laughs, and her hair falls out of her scrunchie.

The song ends and Mum covers her mouth with her hand.

“Now that’s enough,” she says, sitting back down, giggling, still and out of breath.

Grandad reaches for her. He grabs her by the wrists and pulls her up. Mum smiles, dances with him for another minute, and when she goes to sit back down, he pulls her in close to him, one hand clasped around her wrist and the other on the back of her neck.

“That’s enough dancing for one day,” Mum says. And when I look at her face, she’s stopped laughing. “Let me go, Glen,” she says. “Please let me go.”

Grandad’s face is twisted into something I don’t recognise.

His knuckles are white where he’s squeezing Mum’s wrist, and I think I should stand up, but I’m frozen to my spot. I try and call out to Dad but my voice doesn’t work.

The song stops, the sudden quiet a punch in the ear, and the pause must do something to Grandad’s brain, because he lets go of Mum, steps backwards and clenches his hands into rocks, looks down at his fists. “Sorry love,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you. My hands don’t do what they’re supposed to.”

W

hen Dad comes back into the lounge room he grabs the keys off the table. “Let’s hit the road then,” he says. He’s still in his crown, as though he’s grown used to the feel of tissue paper against his skull.

“Just give me a minute,” Grandad says. He’s sat back down; eyes closed and face towards the ceiling.

“It’s a long drive, Dad. Say your goodbyes and let’s go.”

“What’s the rush?” Grandad says. “Surely there’s no harm in staying the night?”

Mum takes the scrunches of wrapping paper from the table, walks into the kitchen. Dad grabs his keys and heads to the door.

Grandad opens his eyes, puts his bag in his lap and picks up the presents stacked beside him in a tidy pile. “Best to be back for when Kel calls, I suppose,” Grandad says. He opens his bag and his fingers fumble with the zipper, knobbly hands shaking as he concentrates.

Mum comes back from the kitchen with a container stuffed with chicken and potato and peas. She nestles the leftovers and presents into Grandad’s bag, closes the zipper for him. Grandad touches her on the wrist and she lets him.

He heaves himself out of his chair, holds his bag close to his chest so as not to leak any gravy.

Emily O’Grady is a writer from Brisbane. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Review of Australian Fiction, Westerly, The Lifted Brow, Mascara Literary Review and Award Winning Australian Writing. In 2017 she was long listed for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and placed second in the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction.

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I Bought These Dogs to Show Him How to Love

by ROMY ASH WHAT WILL BECOME OF US?

W

hen Charlie slid out of her, she cried. The tears slipped over her face and pooled in her ears. Now, they aren’t touching, but her skin still sweats the shape of him. The sheets are cool. Aya feels strange. It’s like grief, but sweet too. She can’t shake the vibe. It’s why they’d fucked. It still hung about her like someone else’s perfume. They are looking to buy a service station in middle-of-fuck-off-nowhere. It’s a beautiful building, from the 1950s, strung with thin metal supports, like its skeleton is on the outside. Even the real estate agent seemed to sense it, Beautiful bones, this one, he had said earlier that day, shaking his head at the wonder of it all. His hair, slicked into place, didn’t move. He adjusted his tie and Aya wondered at the short sleeves on his white shirt. She just didn’t think it was done, short sleeves and a tie. It made him look like a schoolboy. Charlie had leaned over her shoulders, encasing her in a hug and whispered, That’s a euphemism for “it needs a shitload of work”.

Two sausage dogs, one with long hair like a shaggy blanket had been thrown over it, and the other sleek, with a brushed velvet rump. She plays it back in her head as she pisses.

“Three-thousand-dollar dogs,” the husband said, pointing his chin at the sausages.

“It’s the colour,” the wife said. “It’s a very expensive colour.” They were the colour of a saddle.

“Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee.” “King and Kong. Their names are King and Kong,” the wife said.

Charlie gave Aya a look. He was measuring. He flicked the tape and it hurtled across the room and sucked back into his hand. Why was it her job to make the small talk?

It’s not like she was good at it. She wasn’t. She had the sort of personality that got better with time, like a stew, her mum said. Actually, he was much better at being friendly.

He grew up in the country. He didn’t have that thing in him that meant you looked away when someone met your eye.

“They weren’t married, but Aya liked to wear her rings on her left hand, because that’s where they fit best.”

She looks up at the motel ceiling, at the rings of water damage circling a bare bulb. It’s her life she’s grieving, the life they haven’t yet given up.

“Do you think we’ll become like them?” she says.

“Who?” says Charlie.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she says, rolling onto her side. Her body, which she liked when she lay flat, pools onto the sheet. When he still doesn’t say anything she says, “The old couple, from the servo, the owners.”

“I don’t think we’ll become like them,” he says, but he sounds sleepy, happy. She harrumphs and he turns to look at her. “Have you been crying?” he says.

“No,” she says and gets up, walks the two steps to the ensuite, turns back to him. “You know, when you went outside she whispered to me, I bought these dogs to show him how to love. He doesn’t know how to love.”

She can hear their claws now, the clack clack on the floor.

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The wife had the dyed hair of a teenager, blue with purple streaks, and her legs were tanned, wrinkled and skinny. She had a bit of tropical bird about her. The man looked like all the men around here did – board shorts and a beer belly that hung over the top of them.

Wearing a big shirt to compensate for the belly. He had a face that should have known sunscreen.

“Where’d you meet your hubby?” the wife asked.

“This guy?” Aya said looking at her boyfriend. There was a pencil behind his ear. The tape measure, out again, was held in front of him like a diving rod. The wife looked at her like, Yeah, who the hell do you think I mean? They weren’t married, but Aya liked to wear her rings on her left hand, because that’s where they fit best. Aya just laughed. And then after a while, thought it could help things if she gave a little.

“We met in a cafe. I was waitressing, he was the chef.”

She had a vision of him, long black hair tied in a ponytail, THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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and a hangdog face, crying over an unraised loaf. He would say, I wasn’t crying, and she would say, I know. It made him mad when she turned things into stories for her own amusement.

“You’re a chef!” the wife said turning on her heel and fluttering over to Charlie. “I watch all of those shows.”

“Uh-huh,” Charlie said.

The husband rolled his eyes and threw a chip into his mouth. The wife had a tall, cool drink that dripped.

Charlie didn’t chef anymore. He barely made her a sandwich. But he could show an onion who’s boss. Maybe he was like a TV show.

“So you want to be a shopkeeper?” the woman asked.

Aya laughed uncomfortably. She looked around for the real estate agent. She saw the shape of him through the glass, heard his salesman voice, mobile at his ear. She felt abandoned. A shopkeeper, Aya thought, of all the things she had imagined she might become, this was not one of them.

“If you buy this place, don’t you judge the people that come in here, don’t you judge. If you sell fuel you’ll get everyone. It’s just an old woman’s opinion,” the wife said.

Aya got to wondering what the old woman thought she’d seen. “I’ve seen my share of roughnuts, don’t worry,” Aya said.

“That’s what I’m talking about: roughnuts,” said the wife.

“They are roughnuts, some of them,” said the husband, throwing another chip.

“They’re just people,” said the wife.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Aya said.

“Sure love, I know,” said the wife.

The sound of the dogs’ claws on the tiles. She felt their fur against her bare calves, and then the licking started.

She used cocoa butter, it was cheap and it smelled like chocolate.

“Shoo,” Aya said, “shoo.” Trying to shake them off. But they started up with short sharp barks and a squealing in their throats. The licking became more frenzied and the hairy one nipped her. She stepped back into a Twisties stand, knocking it to the ground. The dogs, frightened now, ran to the wife. She scooped them up in her arms and looked at the younger woman. The husband was trying to swallow a smile, and when she turned to her own boyfriend, crushing a packet of Twisties under her sandal, he had the same swallowed smile face.

The real estate agent flung the heavy plastic fly strips out of his way as he entered, a face that said, anything I miss?

In the parking lot, the real estate agent talked to them very quietly. “It says on the website, quick sale due to illness, but it’s not illness. He’s been unfaithful, for a long time, if you know what I mean. ‘Sex romps’ was the phrase she used, and I’m not telling you both this to be crude, I’m telling you because these folks really need to sell, and it’s an opportunity you can’t miss. Once in a life time, round here, it’s about to boom.”

People always say it’s women who gossip, Aya thought, but every woman she’d ever known kept secrets.

beer, and the barfly who has his spot up from them, glued to the stool, who doesn’t even ever piss, says to her: “Slow and steady wins the race,” and salutes her with his pot.

“What do you do if someone’s had too much to drink?”

Charlie yells over to the barman, who has a beard he could tuck into his belt.

“Someone come pick you up?” he says, running a rotten cloth over a clean glass.

Her boyfriend laughs too loud, “Nope.” Heady with it, with the knowing no-one.

The barman shrugs. If they hit a tree they’d just be transformed into two of those white crosses she saw by the roadside, plastic roses stabbed into the earth beside them.

What did he care?

“You’re an idiot,” she says as she opens the driver’s side door. She is looking for a fight, but he just laughs, so happy all the time. She sprays dust as they leave. She winds the window right down and feels the cool night air on

“People always say it’s women who gossip, Aya thought, but every woman she’d ever known kept secrets.”

“Sure thing mate, thanks for the info,” said Charlie, like he’d been telling us about the asbestos in ceilings. “I’ll talk to the missus and get back to you.” Aya wondered if they moved out here, would he start talking like this full time?

“Don’t you snooze,” said the agent, “I’ve got other buyers, there’s a lot of interest.” The men shook hands and Aya looked across the road, a dairy farm. She watched the cows lumbering towards the milking shed, their teats brushing against green pasture.

F

“

uck it’s hot,” her boyfriend says, rolling his body from the bed. “I’m starving.”

He gets up and gives her a kiss. She can’t remember what made her love him, just that now she does.

“Let’s go to the pub, they’ll have something,” she says.

“Like a beer?” he says.

“Yeah, like a beer,” she says. They are in one of those motels with the close ceilings. She doesn’t mind it. There is comfort in claustrophobia. It’s the opening the motel door and looking out over paddocks to the blue of the surrounding hills that makes her feel funny.

D

“

o we drive home?” Charlie says.

“Why is it always the woman who’s the designated driver?” Aya says.

“Because you don’t like drinking as much as me.”

“But I mean generally, on a world wide scale, why is it always the woman?”

“It’s not. You just don’t like drinking that much.”

“I do like it. I like it right now.”

They both keep drinking, and she matches him beer for

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her face. The high beams light a tunnel ahead. The road cuts through the cane, and she can smell it. The dusty sweetness in the air. She listens to the rush of the dry leaves as they pass.

“What will become of us?” she says.

“Us?” he says. He answers with a squeeze of her upper thigh.

“Yeah, us.”

“From the outside we’ll seem like a real steady couple.

But I’ll start going on wild sex romps, leaving for weeks at a time. Then I’ll just pretend like nothing’s happened. I’ll get diagnosed with bipolar disorder, because they don’t have a name for what I’ve got. You’ll buy two sausage dogs, and we’ll have to sell up for a huge loss.”

She rolls her eyes in the dark. “Poor woman,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says and with the cane rushing past, he laughs. “When I first got my licence, we used to turn the lights off,” he says, “and just barrel down the straight for as long as we were brave. A lifetime in just a couple of seconds.”

Aya hears the warmth in his belly, how the beer’s made him round and soft. She touches his thigh and switches the headlights off, flooding them with black. It comes sudden, cool and weightless like the moment on a trampoline before you fall.

Romy Ash (@romyash) is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Floundering, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and many others. Her non-fiction can be found regularly in The Saturday Paper. Her writing has appeared in both The Best Australian Stories and The Best Australian Essays.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

The Abandoned Circus

by MATTHEW REILLY THE SWAMP, THE FOREST, THE HORROR. Hickam’s Swamp, Louisiana 9.55pm

T

he dirty sign on the old gate read “BY ORDER OF THE COUNTY – DO NOT ENTER – CONTAMINATED LAND” but Chad just vaulted casually over it.

“Are you sure we should do this?” Gordy said, pausing in front of the gate.

Chad just shook his head and nodded at the two girls a short distance behind them. “Dude, come on. Sandy is hot to trot for you and Amber let me get to third base last night. After they see this place, they are gonna love us.

Trust me, I used to come here when I was a kid growing up in these parts. It was worth driving two hours for.”

Gordy wasn’t convinced.

It was dark in Hickam’s Swamp. There wasn’t a house or farm within five miles and cell-phone reception was non-

On the way here, they had stopped for gas at a shitty truckstop. A gang of four local redneck youths – all wearing torn jeans and checked shirts – had tried to get fresh with Amber.

Chad, ever confident, had stepped right in front of their leader, “Listen, you inbred redneck loser. Wouldn’t you rather kiss your sister? Fuck off.”

There had been too many other travellers at the truckstop for the rednecks to make a scene, but Gordy had seen their angry stares as his group had got back into Chad’s Mustang and peeled off.

Chad waved the thought away. “They’re not going to come after us.”

“Is it in there?” Amber said, stepping up to the rusty gate. Sandy lingered behind her, smaller, shyer, more cautious.

“Sure is,” Chad said with a smile. He helped Amber over the gate, making sure to grip her ass in her tiny denim

“It was grim, eerie, spooky.

But then that was exactly why they had brought the girls here.” existent. Insects buzzed. Birds squawked. Occasionally, an alligator grunted from somewhere in the darkness.

The only evidence of civilisation was the giant smokestack of the Blue Ridge Petrochemical Plant on the distant horizon. Illuminated by orange security lights, its giant chimney belched a constant plume of smoke that slithered across the face of the moon.

It was grim, eerie, spooky. But then that was exactly why they had brought the girls here.

Chad – tall, blond and effortlessly handsome – had already got hot and heavy with Amber. And Sandy had been making eyes at Gordy.

Gordy sighed. With his big nose and glasses, he wasn’t the high school Casanova that Chad was, so he figured coming here – and looking brave in front of the girls amid the ruins of the old circus – could only help his chances.

“What about those rednecks at the truck stop?” he said to Chad.

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shorts. Gordy helped Sandy, but in a more gentlemanly way.

“We’re not going to get cancer, are we?” Sandy asked.

Chad said, “We’ll be fine. What? Not scared, are you?”

Ten yards beyond the rusty gate sign was a six-foot-wide and seven-foot-deep muddy creek.

Gordy saw a long plank of wood lying on their side of it.

The creek stretched away in curving arcs to the left and right.

“This creek runs in a wide semicircle,” Chad said. “It meets the river on the other side of the ruins, creating a kind of island that the abandoned circus stands on.”

Gordy nodded, peering down into the muddy trench. To him, it looked like a protective moat.

Then he screwed up his nose. “Whoa, what is that smell?”

The creek wasn’t exactly wide, but to keep intruders out – human or animal – it didn’t have to be. The fetid smell it gave off was one defence. Another was its nearvertical muddy walls. A third was whatever chemicals had infused its stagnant water. In the beams of their flashlights, THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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the water glinted with a rainbow effect, like oil on water.

Only this was effluent from the petrochemical plant: over seventy years’ worth of the stuff.

“Gordy, give me a hand.” Chad grabbed one side of the wooden plank while Gordy grabbed the other. They laid it over the foul creek.

Chad grinned at the girls. “You ready to see something freaky?”

Using the plank as a bridge, the four teenagers crossed the foul-smelling gully. A narrow dirt path flanked by skeletal trees stretched away from them, disappearing into darkness. Led by Chad, they headed down it. A short way along the path, Amber stopped.

“Ew…what is that?” She jerked her chin at the skinny tree in front of her.

The tree had a scaly kind of bark that looked like plated armour. Embedded in its “plates” was, of all things, a rat.

The bark of the tree had somehow wrapped itself around

“The ruins of a 1940s-era travelling circus stood before them, lit by moonlight.” the rat’s midsection.

Gordy recoiled. It was as if the tree had somehow grabbed the rat.

“Well, that’s creepy,” Sandy said. She turned to Chad.

“Was that here when you were a kid?”

“Not that I recall,” Chad said.

He and the two girls pressed on. Gordy lingered at the tree, peering closely at the rat…when the rat moved, squirming painfully. Gordy sprang back, horrified. He could have sworn he saw the bark gripping the poor rat tighten ever so slightly.

Gordy blinked. He held his flashlight closer. But nothing happened. The rat lay still. He figured his eyes were playing tricks on him. He hurried down the path after the others.

He caught up with them just as they all emerged in a wide circular space. The ruins of a 1940s-era travelling circus stood before them, lit by moonlight.

Its once-colourful rides and stalls were weathered and worn, twisted and askew: battered by seventy years of Gulf hurricanes and tropical storms.

A banner that had once spanned the entryway hung loose from a tree, dangling from a single bracket: ADMIRAL LINKLATER’S TRAVELLING CIRCUS & CARNIVAL! A LOUISIANA TRADITION Beside the words was painted a fat, broad-smiling man wearing a white peaked US Navy hat.

“Well, hey there, Admiral Linklater,” Chad said, saluting the banner. “Good to see you again.”

A small Ferris wheel had sunk into a mud pond, so that half of it was embedded in the brown bog.

The rails of a Ghost Train miniature rollercoaster

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plunged into a tunnel, the mouth of which was a giant yawning skull. Over the years, the skull had sloughed off most of its paint, giving it a haunting, derelict appearance that was probably more unnerving than it had originally been.

All the stalls – “Hit the Bull’s Eye!” “Swing the Hammer and Ring the Bell!” – had once been decorated with candy-cane red-and-white stripes, but their paint had also long since faded. Now, the red stripes looked like dripping blood.

Chad said, “My grandfather told me about this travelling circus. He used to go to it when he was a kid. A crazy old Navy dude named Linklater used to take it all around the Southern states, renting cheap land and setting up his circus for the summer. He certainly wasn’t an Admiral, but he always wore that white peaked hat.

“When he arrived here in 1946, he was getting pretty old.

The county offered him a cheap deal on the land because of the petrochemical plant, so he bought it and set up his circus here permanently.”

Gordy gazed around at the deserted circus site. “How did it all end? Did he just abandon it?”

Chad shrugged. “No-one knows. Sometime in 1949, Linklater and his family just vanished. They were kinda weird to begin with – loners – so it took almost a year before anyone discovered they were gone. The place was empty. They’d just upped and left. Anyway, the county inspectors did some tests on the water and found elevated chromium levels in it, so they closed off the whole property.

Apart from the odd group of kids, hardly anybody’s been here since.”

“Hey! Look at this!” Sandy said from beside one roofless dilapidated hut.

She was pointing at a poster on it, half-peeled off the wall: WELCOME TO THE FREAK SHOW! BEHOLD THE TREE-MAN! AN ABOMINATION OF NATURE! HALF MAN, HALF TREE! RECOIL FROM THE GOAT-MAN! A GHASTLY HYBRID! CAREFUL! HE BITES! Chad put his hand to his mouth mockingly. “Oooh! An abomination. Aaah! A ghastly hybrid!”

“Christ, they were lame back then,” Amber agreed.

Gordy peered at the old poster. With its comic book-like drawings, it was, he thought, a genuine 1940s work of art.

But for modern teens accustomed to movies like the Saw series it seemed very quaint in its attempt to frighten.

Gordy gazed at the two monsters depicted in the poster.

The tree-man was man-shaped but tall and skinny, with a head shaped like an inverted triangle, black slits for eyes and elongated arms at the end of which were unnaturally THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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path, crashing through the undergrowth before dashing into the Ghost Train rollercoaster.

Then a third goat-man bounded out of the treeline on his knuckles and dived into one of the Ferris wheel’s tubs.

The tub’s hinges squealed loudly as it swung with the thing’s weight.

“Let’s get out of here!” Gordy yelled.

The four teens bolted for the dirt path…only to find a fourth goat-man standing there, legs planted wide, blocking the way.

They all skidded to a halt. Gordy put out a protective arm in front of Sandy. Chad, his eyes wide and wild, spun, searching for an exit in the old circus site, but there was nothing there. They were effectively on an island in the vast swamp and the only exit was blocked.

Cackling laughter cut the air.

The goat-man blocking the path spoke. “Inbred redneck losers, huh?”

The figure took off his goat mask. It was one of the four locals who had accosted them at the truckstop, the leader.

Gordy released the breath he’d been holding. Somehow this felt better than being attacked by some bizarre goatman hybrids. The other three rednecks emerged from their hiding places – the Ferris wheel tub, the bushes, the Ghost Train – pulling off their goat masks. The lead youth, still blocking the path, grinned malevolently.

“Now,” he said, stepping forward. “We’re gonna beat the shit out of you city boys.”

He casually snapped a twig off the tree beside him, bent it in half, and used it to pick at his teeth.

As he did this, Gordy could have sworn he heard a faint shriek from somewhere nearby. A primal shriek of agony and rage.

But he didn’t have a chance to consider it further. The redneck youth cracked his knuckles. “Teach you some manners.”

Gordy took a step back.

They were surrounded.

The four rednecks moved in…when the youth closest to the bushes was violently yanked from view.

He screamed before – craaaack! – the scream cut off.

Gordy whirled. So did Chad. So did the redneck leader.

“Clarence?” he said, stepping cautiously toward the undergrowth.

Gordy watched him. And then, to his horror, he saw it.

Saw one of the tall spindly trees behind the redneck leader spread two of its branches wide like arms, the smaller twigs at the ends of the arms becoming clawed fingers.

Then, with a sudden lunge, the tree reached out and grabbed the redneck leader from behind, wrapping its elongated wooden fingers around his face and pulling him back into the darkness with incredible force.

Gordy’s mind raced.

Was this for real? No way…

But he couldn’t deny what he was seeing.

ILLUSTRATION ADAPTED FROM AN ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY MATTHEW REILLY

long, talon-like claws. It looked like a tree in winter: skeletal and dry, all bark, no leaves. Gordy guessed the circus owners had dressed up a tall but very thin man in make-up and a bark-covered mask and suit.

The goat-man was smaller and looked essentially like a hairy, nuggety muscle-bound man with a horned goat head. The goat-man in the poster walked on his knuckles like an ape…

A crack made them all spin.

“What was that?” Sandy whispered.

“Is someone out there?” Amber shone her flashlight into the darkness, back in the direction of the path heading to the plank-bridge.

The others did the same, but in the glare of their flashlight beams, the path was empty.

Chad snorted. “It’s nothing. Just your imagina…”

A figure leapt across the path, dashing into the undergrowth.

“Fuck!” Amber gasped.

“Was that a deer?” Gordy said, quickly, his pulse racing.

“It wasn’t a deer,” Sandy said. “It had two legs. It was a man…”

Chad aimed his flashlight at the bushes behind one of the old circus stalls, playing its beam over the branches.

Nothing. Just leaves and dirt and a goat-headed man, crouched on his knuckles in the bushes, peering out, looking directly at them!

Gordy froze in terror.

“What the…” Chad breathed.

It was a goat-man.

Just like in the poster. Curled horns, hairy muscular arms, mud-smeared bare chest.

And then a second goat-headed figure leapt across the

He spun to run away from the bushes at the edge of the clearing…only to see, right in the middle of the clearing at the centre of the circus ruins, a lone tree.

It was maybe fifteen feet tall, with a thin trunk, long skinny branches and no leaves, and it hadn’t been there before. It loomed in the middle of the clearing, tall, dark and still.

Then its “head” lifted slowly from its trunk – a sharp inverted triangle of wood with deep black eyeholes – just as two of the thicker branches on its sides lowered to become arms.

“Jesus Christ…” Sandy gasped.

“The tree-men…” Amber whispered.

Chad said, “I don’t believe this…” just as the tree in the middle of the clearing reached out and grabbed him with both of its claws, lifted him off the ground and with immense strength, folded him in half!

With a sickening crack, Chad’s backbone snapped and he dropped to the muddy ground, his eyes lifeless, dead.

Amber screamed. Sandy started hyperventilating.

The tall skinny tree standing over Chad’s corpse glared into their eyes.

“Run!” Gordy grabbed Sandy by the hand and with Amber behind them, dashed for the exit path as the trees ringing the clearing came alive and, amazingly, stepped out into it.

The two remaining rednecks were a few steps ahead of Gordy and the girls. They were also bolting for the path. As he ran, Gordy eyed the tree-men: there were six of them, all about fifteen feet tall, and while their arms seemed capable of reaching out with speed, they moved slowly, in an odd lumbering way. With each step, their rooted “feet” seemed

Gordy burst into the Ghost Train and stopped dead in his tracks.

A big fat tree had grown up through the rails of the rollercoaster, bending them, distorting them. It just stood there, wide, fat and strong, twenty feet tall.

Something at its base caught Gordy’s eye.

Something white.

Gordy squinted to see it better. Wrapped in the bark of the fat tree’s trunk, just like the rat they had seen earlier – its shape twisted by the slow pressure of the tree’s grip, its peak covered in decades of grime – was an old white Navy hat.

Admiral Linklater’s hat.

Gordy’s eyes widened. His mind whirled. Chad had said Linklater and his family had mysteriously vanished. Had this tree – or the other tree-men – killed them?

Gordy looked at the chunky tree. It was fatter and broader than the more skeletal ones outside. A few feet taller, too. But it didn’t move, at all.

It’s just a tree, Gordy told himself.

Then, as he looked at the great thing, he caught sight of something at its base, a box of some kind, half-covered by decaying leaves and mud. It was a 1940s cigar tin…

Gordy edged forward and grabbed the tin. It came out of the mud with a suction-like squelch. Written across the tin’s front cover was a handwritten scrawl: God is wreaking His vengeance on me.

We found them here in the swamp, these treemen, and we abused them. Kept them in squalor and chains, made them a part of our freak show.

Now they have risen up against us.

They killed my family and now I’m caught in the

“Gordy could have sworn he heard a faint shriek from somewhere nearby.

A primal shriek of agony and rage.” to have to connect with the muddy ground before being able to make another step. They were big long steps, but they were slow.

We might be able to outrun them, Gordy thought.

At that moment, the two rednecks reached the path – just as a seventh tree stepped out into the path, blocking their way and grabbing the first youth by the throat.

Without a pause, it cracked his neck.

Shocked at his friend’s fate, the second youth skidded to a halt, sliding into the mud on his butt. He scrabbled with his hands, trying to get to his feet, when the tree blocking the path reached out and grabbed one of his boots with a vice-like claw and sucked him on his belly, screaming, back into the shadows.

“This way,” Gordy urged leading the girls away from the path and toward the Ghost Train.

The tree-men in the clearing all pivoted, watching them go before taking off with great slow strides in pursuit.

Fiction Special

grip of the big one. I cannot escape. It has crushed my legs and now it is slowly eating me alive.

Please God, save me.

Or at least forgive me.

As Gordy read the seventy-year-old message, he suddenly saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

Slowly, very slowly, as if woken from a long slumber, the fat tree’s head – bigger and wider than those of the trees outside – rose up from its trunk and looked right at Gordy.

“Out! Out!” Gordy yelled as one of its arms lashed out at him, but Gordy ducked and it missed. He and the girls turned tail and ran out of the Ghost Train’s tunnel.

Through the circus ruins they fled.

The tree-men took long slow strides after them.

The three kids dashed past the Ferris wheel half-sunk in the mud.

The tree-men moved through the forest, shadows in the moonlight, slow but relentless.

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Gordy and the girls reached the creek perhaps sixty yards from their plank-bridge and leapt down into it just as a claw lashed out from the forest, missing their heads by inches.

They ran down the sunken trench, their feet splashing in the mud, not caring about the chemical stench now.

A thump from behind made them turn.

One of the skinny trees stood on the rim of the highwalled gully, looming above them, blotting out the moon like a demon from hell. In the pale light, Gordy saw its rough bark skin, its faceless triangular head, its long arms and grasping claws.

They sprinted down the gully. It followed them, striding with long slow steps along the rim of the muddy trench.

But for some reason, it wouldn’t step down into the trench. Gordy smelled the rank odour again and guessed that the chemical effluent in the water was the one thing keeping the tree-men on the island.

This moat wasn’t keeping people out, he realised. It was

“With their dark-barked skin, long limbs and faceless heads, they looked alien, otherworldly.” keeping the tree-men in.

The three kids came to the plank spanning the creek bed, and Gordy gasped: “Quickly, now. I’ll boost you two up and then you lift me out of here.”

The tree behind them kept lumbering along the trenchrim with slow purposeful steps.

Amber shoved in front of Sandy. “Me first!”

She thrust her foot into Gordy’s waiting hands and, not wanting to waste time protesting, Gordy boosted her up.

Propelled by his boost, Amber slid up onto the plank above him.

“Okay, Sandy, your turn,” he said as Sandy placed her foot in his interlocked hands. He looked up. “Amber! Grab Sandy’s hand and pull her up!”

“I’m not staying here!” Amber said. “You take care of yourselves!” Then she bolted away.

Gordy barely had time to register her betrayal, for just then a wooden claw reached out from the circus-side of the gully, snatched Amber by the hair and pulled her violently out of his sight.

Gordy’s jaw dropped. “Jesus!”

He boosted Sandy up closer to the outer end of the plank and she clambered out of the trench. Then, just as the tree-man behind them was almost on Gordy, Sandy reached down and, with all her strength, helped him up onto the plank.

They both stood up on the outer rim of the creek – in time to see one of the tree-men on the circus-side of the plank hold Amber up in its mighty claws and bend her in half, just like the other one had done with Chad – and just like the redneck leader had done when he’d snapped the twig off the tree earlier.

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“They’re doing to us what we do to them…” Gordy breathed.

Amber wailed as she was bent backwards at an obscene angle. Then, with a cruel snap, her back broke, and her cry stopped and she went limp. Dead.

“Grab the plank!” Gordy yelled to Sandy. “We can’t let them get across!”

He and Sandy grabbed hold of the plank and hauled it back onto their side of the deep muddy trench.

Chests heaving, lungs burning, they dropped to the muddy ground, safe.

The seven tree-men came to the other side of the trench and just stood there, deathly still, eerily still, watching them.

Gordy gazed back at them in awe. With their darkbarked skin, long limbs and faceless heads, they looked alien, otherworldly. Yet they had a nobility to them, an intelligence, pride.

“Gordy, what do we do?” Sandy asked, her face smeared with dirt, mud and sweat. “Who do we tell? Who’s going to believe us about these evil things?”

“They aren’t evil,” Gordy said, reaching into his pocket.

“They must’ve lived in this swamp for years, centuries even, without being disturbed. But then a sleazy circus barged into their territory, enslaved them and turned them into sideshow freaks for profit. Then the trees turned the tables on their captors – Linklater and his cruel family – and freed themselves, only to be trapped here by this contaminated creek.”

“What about killing Chad and Amber and those redneck thugs?”

“After what happened in the circus, why wouldn’t they hate humans?”

Gordy looked at the tree-men closely. Then he raised the cell phone he’d taken from his pocket and snapped off a bunch of photos of the things, the camera’s flash strobing in the night.

“Proof,” he said. “For what it’s worth.”

Then he took Sandy by the hand. “Let’s go. We have to tell someone.”

The two kids headed back to Chad’s Mustang and drove away.

As they did, a long bark-skinned claw reached across the creek and, with the tips of its elongated fingers, grabbed the plank and pulled it into place across the muddy trench.

By the time Gordy and Sandy returned with the cops, the seven trees – and the bigger one inside the Ghost Train – were gone.

Matthew Reilly (@Matthew_Reilly) is the international bestselling author of ten novels. His books have been published in more than twenty countries, and eight million copies of his books have been sold around the world. © Copyright 2017 Karanadon Entertainment Pty Limited

48

THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Sound Is A Pressure Wave

by TONI JORDAN TRAPPED IN THE HEADLIGHTS.

A

fter half-a-dozen sharp corners and one hairpin turn where the back left tyre spun on gravel for a full five seconds before she managed to straighten up, the rain began to ease and the fog lifted and for a moment Anna and Carter thought they were through the worst of it.

“Just up here,” Carter said. “Just pull up. Easy. Easy. Slide her over and put your hazards on.”

“I’m fine,” Anna said.

“Did I say you weren’t fine?” Carter said. “Just under this tree. Just up here. Here. Here. You don’t even have to get out.

I’ll get out, you can scoot over. You won’t even get wet.”

The tree and the space to pull over came, and went. The road, which had surely been due to head down the mountain by now, which was certainly beyond ready for widening and growing lighter and opening into the plains below, instead twisted up again through a thicket of trees so dense that it would have been dark even without the rain and the fog, even in the daytime.

scope, the whole bit. We called him Elmer Fudd.”

“So easy to kill things,” Anna said. “Making things, that’s the hard part.” She pressed down on the accelerator and the car leapt.

“Around the next bend,” said Carter. “There’s a driveway, I remember. You can pull over there.”

His right foot pumped invisible pedals in the space on the passenger side. His whole leg stretched and contracted with the effort, his body rocking back in the hollow of the seat and forward again toward the windscreen.

“There,” Carter said. “Back there. You went right past it.”

“My pills are in my handbag,” Anna said. “Help yourself.”

“Funny.”

As they climbed higher and farther, the headlights picked out close swirls in the fog as it danced above the surface of the road a metre or two ahead. The rain came in sheets now, in dense falls as though they were driving through a perspex screen. The branches overhead reached down for them in the

“So easy to kill things,” Anna said. “Making things, that’s the hard part.”

“We should have waited until the morning,” Carter said.

“At this rate we won’t be home before two, if we make it at all.

Didn’t I say?”

Anna said nothing.

“I said, didn’t I?” Her body angled away from the seat; alert, erect, peering over the dash. “I couldn’t take one more night.”

She was concentrating on a sharp bend in front of them, a steep bank of ferns that looked prehistoric in the sweep of the headlights, and a dirty great ditch beside the road filled with water running like a stream. Out the window they saw a road sign swaying in the wind: that yellow diamond with the flailing car leaving impossibly twisted tread-marks behind it. It said WHEN FROSTY. The sign was gouged with bullet holes.

“I used to know a guy who came out here every spring,” he said. “It’s state forest, but you can get a licence. There’s a forestry road on the other side of the ridge, a ute’ll make it half way down. This guy, he was a maniac. Camo gear, rifle with

Fiction Special

wild wind, outstretched stick arms spearing toward the roof.

Then another noise began: sharp tinkles like the sound of a wine glass shattered in the dishwasher, each shard hitting the rotating arm.

“Shit,” said Carter. “Will you pull over?”

“Under one of these trees with the overhanging branches, on one of these blind corners?” Anna said. The tendons of her forearms were wires.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I’m fine.”

“Christ, not everything is a test.”

“If I can’t survive one drive, how am I going to manage at home? I’ve done nothing but talk and sleep and art therapy for ten days. Art therapy. Jesus.”

“I hope you brought home something to stick on the fridge.”

“Or we could just turn around and you could drop me back there. Imagine filling out the form. Reason for re-admission: storm-induced breakdown.”

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“That label. Don’t say that. It wasn’t.”

“You’re a doctor now?”

“Things just got on top of you, that’s all.”

Just then, two things happened: the rear wheels skidded on the slick black surface, a little fishtail that she soon righted, and a smallish branch fell on Carter’s side of the windscreen and stuck for a moment, blocking everything until the wipers worked it loose. She didn’t stop, didn’t even slow.

“Fuck,” he said. “We’re going to die.” He laughed in a thin way and raised one arm to grip the handle above the door.

After they both found their breath again they were quiet for a time. In the headlights, the bullets of ice on the road in front of them formed a coded pattern, growing denser as they drove, thickening and piling up.

“Are we covered for hail?” said Carter finally. “Maybe it’s an exclusion. Sometimes they exclude hail in the fine print, which is ridiculous. You can be a shit driver, plough straight into a tree and they cover you for that. Fascists.”

Carter flinched and reached for the dial again.

“Leave it,” Anna said. “Please. It’s blocking everything else out.”

It did block everything else out. For the next few minutes on that dark and winding road, they couldn’t hear the rain or the wind or the hail – only the fierce static from the cheap radio, the standard factory-issue kind designed especially to make everything sound tinny and hysterical.

Carter cupped both hands around his eyes and held them against his side window. “It’s easing,” he said.

“See?” said Anna. “A little faith.”

Carter was right. They were through to the other side of the storm, and the wind and the rain were just echoes of the fury of before. Then the static dimmed to a background hum and the radio clicked and they could sense it searching. “Thank Christ,” said Carter, and what he meant was this: surely they’d travelled far enough now. They were toward the top of the mountain and that meant within range of the city and soon,

“In the headlights, the bullets of ice on the road in front of them formed a coded pattern, growing denser as they drove, thickening and piling up.”

“Can you turn the demister up?”

He reached for the dash and jostled one dial after another.

“It’s full whack.”

Yet still, frost was creeping up the windows and the windscreen.

“You could just stop. I mean, we,” Carter said. “We could just stop.”

“Here, on the road?”

“I mean the whole thing. The injections and the tablets and the harvesting and the implanting. The diet and the vitamins.

We go back to drinking wine and having sex when we feel like it. We just say no, from now on. No more cycles. We just stop.”

She laughed, a little.

“Why not? Why can’t we?”

She steered around a corner, fast and focused. “It’s all I have. If I stop, I have nothing.”

Out the window, the rain was pelting the trees and shrubs that lined the road, lacerating leaves and breaking off branches.

“Oh thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

The wipers, madly clunking, faster and faster, the drilling chips of hail and their high-pitched clinking, the incessant whirr of the demister, the pounding pressure of the rain on all sides and now, the occasional single whack of a serious projectile, as if they were stalled and trapped on a driving range not far from the tee. She winced with each blow. Something was about to shatter. She had to project her voice, to be heard.

“The radio,” she said. “Loud.”

“You’d be lucky, out here,” Carter said, but he pushed the button on the dial all the same.

At once, loud static flooded every inch of space within the car, a screeching white noise assaulting them. Blackboard, meet nails; two pieces of styrofoam grinding and sheering.

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any moment, they would pick up a station and that ghastly noise would end. The station wouldn’t be anything special, perhaps midnight-to-dawn love songs or volunteers reading newspapers for blind people, but something was coming and that meant they were no longer alone out here and the worst of their night was over.

The radio found the signal it had been searching for and a new sound came through the air. Anna could hear this new sound, unmistakable even through those cheap speakers. It was soft and tentative, and brief. A fragile, breathless thing. It was the cry of a baby.

“Did you hear that?” Anna said.

The radio was quiet.

“Hear what?”

“That. That noise.”

Before Carter could say a word, before he could even nod, it came again. Stronger this time, and clearer and longer. This time it was the cry of a baby who wakes to find herself alone.

Plaintive, with a pause at the end as she gasped for air.

“Tell me you can hear that.” She was begging, squeezing the wheel and begging.

“Some kind of artefact,” Carter said. “Like an optical illusion, but with sound.”

Again, though, Anna heard the baby, high-pitched and shrill. It was calling to someone. She inhaled a sudden rush of air. “It’s frightened,” Anna said.

Yet neither of them moved to push in the dial, as if their hands would not move, as if they knew that turning off the radio would not stop the baby crying because a radio was a mechanical thing and not the same as picking up a baby and shushing her and rocking her and feeling her weight heavy in their arms.

The baby was louder now, and becoming more distressed.

It was gasping between each ragged cry. It was desperate. It was a desperate, lost and lonely baby and it was crying for Anna and Anna could not find it and could not comfort it and it would go on crying and nothing would make it stop.

“Stop it,” she whispered. “Make it stop.”

There was something in the line of her neck, something in the way her arms held the wheel, that made him turn toward her. “Anna,” Carter said.

“That’s my baby,” she said, then she gave a guttural kind of sigh and, in an instant as he watched, she seemed to deflate.

She collapsed back against the seat, her chest softened inward and her chin fell forward and her mouth dropped open as all of her air escaped. Both of her hands fell from the steering wheel as though they were stones.

Carter shot out one arm for the wheel.

Anna brought both hands up to her face and as she did, the car accelerated.

“Slow down.” He was yelling now, despite how close she was. “Stop. Take the wheel. Take it.”

The car veered on to the wrong side of the road, then Carter jerked the wheel and it swerved back, overcorrected and drove along the verge, bumping and rattling. The front left indicator hit a marker where the bitumen met gravel – even above the crying there was the sound of the impact, the shattering of the headlight – and Anna’s head thudded against the driver’s side window with the jolt. Then Carter reached farther and pulled on the wheel and the car careened back to the middle of the road, still fast, sliding on the hail. The baby was screaming now, filling the car. It was piercing and shrill, it was frantic.

Anna was frantic. She pulled at her hair, she turned her face upwards so she was yelling at the roof.

“Anna,” he yelled. “Put your foot on the brake.”

He steered around a sharp bend with his right arm outstretched. As the headlights swept around the corner, they revealed something standing in the middle of their lane a

few dozen lengths ahead. It was a deer, mid-sized and solid, and right in front of them. It was a doe. In the light of the highbeams, the nape of her neck was white, and the inside of her back legs, and her belly, and the inside of her ears seemed to glow. Her long nose was dark and her eyes shone with an orange iridescence. She stared at the car coming closer.

“Brake!” he yelled.

Anna braked. The car skidded for metres and the back wheels swerved out to the side. Anna and Carter were flung forward, and then to the left. The world moved sideways as they spun around in a circle and the trees and the rain all blurred together and everything turned and the wheels squealing on the ice on the road and the baby screaming and the car seemed all at once a light and frivolous thing, as though it weighed no more than the air around them.

After one revolution the car stopped, still facing forward, still pointing toward home. A car’s length in front of them was the deer. Anna and Carter rocked a little with the car, then they also stilled. The rain softened and the crying of the baby stopped. The radio filled again with the sound of the static, quieter now, a background hum. The deer had not moved, had not so much as tilted her head.

Anna opened her door and, after a little fumbling, unbuckled her belt. She stood. She teetered and held on to the frame of the door. She rubbed the inside of her forearm against the side of her head and as she dropped her arm again, Carter could see her white skin was red and dark and it smeared across her wrist and ran across her palm and down her fingers and began dripping to the ground.

Carter watched her as she moved toward the deer. He wanted to tell her the thought that had occurred to him as he sat strapped inside the spinning car: that somewhere beyond the ridge was a house, and inside that house was a room and in that room was a baby monitor and somehow the radio had picked up on exactly that frequency that carried the sound of the crying baby to its mother who was, right now, holding the baby up over her shoulder and rubbing its back with her firm hand. It was a real baby with a real mother, and it was safe. He wanted to say all of this to Anna, but most of all he wanted to say You’re all right, Anna. You are. Carter said none of this.

Anna walked in front of the headlights until she stood between the car and the deer. The rain was lighter now than before, but her hair was soon damp and her dress clung to her back and her legs. She swayed.

“Where’s my baby?” Anna said to the deer. “Where is it?”

The deer went on staring, with its soft mournful eyes. It did not answer her.

Toni Jordan (@TonileeJordana) wrote the international bestseller Addition (2008) – a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick and longlisted for the Miles Franklin award – Fall Girl (2010) and Nine Days (2012), which was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards and named in Kirkus Review’s Top 10 Historical Novels of 2013. Her latest novel is Our Tiny Useless Hearts (2016). She teaches creative writing at the Faber Academy at Allen & Unwin.

Fiction Special

THE BIG ISSUE 2017

51

America’s SeventhRichest Musician

by FIONA HARDY FAME. FORTUNE. FIDELITY.

T

hey weren’t that thirsty, but Kenzie couldn’t walk past a Starbucks without going in. She called it scouting the opposition, since she worked in a bagel place in Arlington Heights called Toasty Beans, but it was really a thin excuse for her to drink five cups of coffee a day. They were on the corner of 26th and Wilshire and Henry got all the way to the counter before someone asked for his autograph.

He was signing his name on a teenager’s plastic cup when the server hissed to the barista, “Why is he even with her?” He could hear them – no-one was as good at whispering around celebrities as they thought they were – and when they looked up, Kenzie was standing in front of them. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. It wasn’t even the first time that day; in bed that morning, Henry had watched over Kenzie’s shoulder while she opened her email inbox to a Daily Mail article that shouted WHY HENRY STAYS WITH “THAT” NOSE. Henry smudged his signature without realising and watched Kenzie while the women stared up at her, frozen. She didn’t say anything. She never did. She just winked.

Henry, on the other hand, said, “Are you kidding?” and demanded a refund, which the summoned manager agreed to swiftly while the server took her freshly ground tears out into the back room. AMERICA’S SEVENTH-RICHEST MUSICIAN REFUSES TO PAY FOR COFFEE. The headlines probably wouldn’t say that. He was recently obsessed with the number, though. Seventh. He wasn’t Beyoncé or Jay, but he had their numbers in his phone.

They took their coffees down the road to Douglas Park and sat on a bench in the sun. People took pictures of them with their phones while Henry and Kenzie talked about what they should do on the weekend. Kenzie thought they could go dark, head to a waterfall she’d seen on a Buzzfeed post called SIX PLACES TO MAKE YOU FORGET LA IS LA. Henry said he needed to practise. Kenzie thought they could bake a cake instead. Henry said he loved hummingbird cakes. Someone nearby gasped.

The truth was that Henry was no longer in love with Kenzie, but he didn’t know what to do about it. People made fun of her appearance every moment they were out together, while others did all they could do to emulate it. There were Tumblrs dedicated to sourcing everything she wore, Kenzie

Fiction Special

Hair Tutorials that racked up millions of YouTube views, and a month ago in the Guardian, plastic surgeons reported a reduction in rhinoplasty requests, with one telling the journalist that they had even been asked to make a nose bigger to be “like Kenzie”. Henry thought for a long time that she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen, because she wore confidence over her whole body like a designer outfit. She was cool in a way even he (America’s seventh-richest musician) did not feel like he was. She was magic at five-foot-eight.

But he didn’t love her any more. It wasn’t her face; he was just done. The spark had gone. He hadn’t found it with anyone else yet, but he dreaded the articles that would come out: KENZIE DUMPED FOR MAID/AGENT/ACTRESS. Anyone they’d taken a picture of him with. He’d gone to the movies with his cousin Amanda once and the first article that came out said MYSTERY BRUNETTE NOSING AROUND HENRY’S RELATIONSHIP. They sat on the park bench, drank their coffee, and Henry felt bad for feeling bad. When they left the park they would get into a car that cost $125,000, that he didn’t even pay for, because he got it as a birthday present, then go home to his sprawling Palisades home and practise guitar in the studio out the back with its soundproof walls. Kenzie would go to her studio and work on her fashion “outstallations” – Henry’s word – where she would buy a dressmaker’s mannequin and clothe it beautifully, then leave it on a median strip in the city without taking a single picture of it. Everyone else would do it for her, and then someone would haul off with it. Kenzie said to Henry: “Fashion is ephemeral.” Ephemeral was her favourite word. She thought about getting it tattooed ironically on her arm for a while, but couldn’t decide on the right artist.

How could he not live with her?

“If you hadn’t moved in with me after you got evicted, where would you have gone?” Henry asked her now, trying to be casual. He’d acted in that Pepsi Max commercial: he could do this.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I would’ve moved in with my mom? Or yours,” she said, and winked at him.

Henry’s mother loved Kenzie. They had both been born in England and talked endlessly about Sainsbury’s and about the royals as if they knew them. (They didn’t, but Kate had once been photographed in the audience at one of Henry’s THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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charity gigs.) His mother lived up in the hills and he saw her at least twice a week, when they went over and she made shepherd’s pie. Moving Kenzie in with her wasn’t a terrible idea. HENRY’S MOTHER IS TEAM KENZIE! “But what if you had more money?”

“I didn’t really get a chance to think about it,” she said. “You swept me off my feet and over to your place before I’d even finished reading the letter from the agent.”

“Yeah,” he said. He had done almost exactly that. He lifted her up and carried her all the way downstairs to his car before

“Kenzie made you feel interesting, like you mattered, even more than album sales and fan mail.” she said, laughing, yes, I’ll live with you.

That was eight months ago. The first six months were bliss, even though three of them were taken up by a tour of Asia.

She wrote fashion articles and designed more than ever and continued the waitressing job he’d met her at even though Henry told her he’d pay her an allowance. “That’s okay,” she said, “I like my job.” HENRY MAKES KENZIE WORK FOR HER ROOM AND BOARD. “What if I sold my place?” he asked. “Where would you want to move?”

“Hmm.” She sat forward with her hands draped loosely over her knees, her face serious. He would miss the times when she gave his sentences her utmost concentration. She did it to everyone; it’s why people who knew her understood exactly why Henry picked her out of the thousands of women, movie-star beautiful or actual movie stars, who said hi to him or waved or screamed his name or threw themselves at his car window. Kenzie made you feel interesting, like you mattered, even more than album sales and fan mail and being America’s seventh-richest musician.

“Manhattan,” she concluded. “A good music scene for you, lots of writers and fashion houses for me, and cafes everywhere for me to work. Or London.” She brightened. “Your mother would be delighted to be able to visit there so much.”

“I meant nearby,” he said. The conversation was going too far out of his control, unless he rented her an apartment in Manhattan. If he did, he wouldn’t bump into her for at least another eight weeks, when he was due there to promote a new bar opening. But then she would be far away, too far away for them to be friends.

“Why do you want to move?” she said. “Literally yesterday you were stretched out in the pool saying, ‘I love my house’. Do you want to buy an investment property or something?”

“Yes,” he said, relieved. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Suddenly it seemed like genius: buy another place, as a sensible financial decision. Then put her in it.

“You want me to look up some places for you online?”

“Sure,” he said. “That would be great.”

He wondered how much she would agree with a gentle breakup, make it seem like they just drifted apart. KENZIE

Fiction Special

SAYS SPLIT WAS “AMICABLE”. Possibly. Kind was her default state of being. But when she used peanut butter it ended up all over the outside of the jar, and somehow, looking at that three weeks ago, he realised it was all over.

“Is that why you’ve been so distracted today?” she asked.

“You aren’t really listening, but I feel like you’re thinking about something else rather than being purposefully rude.”

“Yes,” he said. “Sure.”

She smiled and left it at that. He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Should we go home?” he said. He should probably tell her now. Tonight. Tomorrow. Before the weekend, at least.

But he did not, because that night she took the Mini – the blue and silver one he bought for her because she said she’d always wanted one – and went to the gym with her friend Sophie, who called Henry half an hour later (she called him for the smallest of reasons), and said, “Is Kenzie there? She’s not answering her phone and she’s usually on time. Also, how are you, anyway?”, and Henry hung up on her and took his Ferrari out to find Kenzie, and instead found the emergency services and a drunk woman sitting in the back of an ambulance, looking at her mangled Landcruiser on top of a blue and silver Mini and bawling at Henry’s white face, “It was her that came out of nowhere.”

T

errence came over the day before the funeral, with four bunches of flowers and five cards signed by everyone at the management company. “They all had too many things to say about her,” he said, pushing at one of the bouquets with his foot. “Couldn’t shut them up. Five cards it was. Anyway.” He gave Henry an awkward hug. “I’m sorry about Kenzie. I know you were mad for her.”

“Mmm,” Henry said. The world was cloudy, like there was cotton candy between him and everyone else, between his words and his feelings.

Terrence sat him down. “Don’t write an album about her,” he warned. “If it’s horrible, everyone will hate you and you’ll ruin your career. Only lovesick teenagers will buy the album.

And don’t get me wrong, they’re a strong market, but if you hit the right notes, you’ll sell to everyone. Just one song. And I’ve already got someone on it. We’ll do a duet, get someone else with you. I have a few people in mind, no names yet, but Taylor, don’t tell anyone, she’s interested, she’s sad, she’s tweeting about it. There’s a picture of the two of them from your birthday being retweeted tens of thousands of times, so Violet keeps telling me. Anyway. Don’t go putting anything out there without telling me, no sad acoustic pieces, all right? Just put your sunglasses on everywhere you go and for god’s sake don’t smile outdoors for at least a month.”

Later that day, Henry left without telling anyone and went to his mother’s house. She held on tight to him and he cried for a while until he felt a little better. He thought about telling her that he was going to break up with Kenzie but it seemed petty now, and it wouldn’t change anything. There were people everywhere – his oldest friend Navjit, his brother Will who’d flown down from Portland with his family for the funeral and was staying in one of the spare rooms – but they were all THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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consoling someone who’d lost the love of their life and not someone who’d lost a friend. Navjit couldn’t stop crying every time he saw him, and Will held onto his wife’s hand like she was about to disappear.

The nearest he came to the truth was when he called his driver to take him out to buy a new suit. Paolo was fifty-eight and lived around the corner; he would drive his old Jeep over and park it behind the house, then come back around in the Bentley and open the door for Henry, smiling with all of his teeth and saying, “How is your beautiful mother?” This time, though, as he pulled up, he got out of the car and launched at Henry with a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She was wonderful. I loved her. Everyone did. She was a great woman. You wouldn’t have married her, but you will miss her.”

Henry hugged him back. “I will,” he said, holding tight.

“She was my friend.”

“She was everybody’s friend,” Paolo said. “You know she came over once with a pie when I told her my wife had broken her finger?”

“I didn’t know that,” Henry said, but he did remember coming home one day to a pile of cherry pits in the sink.

“Everyone will miss her,” Paolo said. “And everyone in the world who didn’t know her should be even more heartbroken than us.”

After he got home with his tailored Raleigh Beckett Junior suit in its monogrammed suit bag, Henry went into the studio and picked up a guitar. He hadn’t held one for a while, not in the days since the accident. There was a wall of them. He had stopped at four cars, but could not stop with guitars; there were more in the basement, which he rotated on the wall mounts. He picked up the one Kenzie liked the most – a 67 Fender Telecaster in candy-apple red – and picked out a tune.

After a while, he sang to it: “Everyone in this world who did not know her should be sadder than those that did.”

H

e didn’t write a song about Kenzie: he wrote eight.

He called his favourite one ‘Unfinished’, and when he played it for Terrence over the phone his manager said, “I said, don’t write anything. Put it away, man. Save the music but scrap the sentimental lyrics.”

Henry went to his studio and put the rough version on SoundCloud. By the time he went to check the views, six minutes later – after re-reading goodbye messages on Kenzie’s Facebook page and crying – it had already been taken down, and there was a message on his phone: I said don’t. Henry went back to SoundCloud to change his password but Terrence, who Henry had hired because he was savvy beyond his stream-of-consciousness way of talking, had already done exactly that. Now he couldn’t even get in.

A musician unable to access his own music. Henry started to set up a MySpace page, but halfway through he gave up, and sat staring at the screen. No-one would believe it was him.

Maybe he could put a video of himself up on YouTube? He didn’t really have the energy. He emailed the song to Navjit, who called him fifteen minutes later in tears again. “Play it at her funeral,” he said. “She would love it.”

Fiction Special

“It’s about her, not me,” Henry said. “I can’t take over her funeral.”

“Shut up,” Navjit said. “You don’t know anything. Call her mother.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I’ll call her mother. Did you know Kenzie brought my mom over a selection of books when she told her she had nothing to read?”

“I didn’t know that,” Henry said, but he did remember staring at a gap in his bookshelf. “Don’t call her.”

“I’m going to call her,” Navjit said.

Kenzie’s father rang shortly afterwards. “Play for my daughter,” he said, his voice cracking. “You think she wouldn’t want you to? That friend of yours said you were worried you’d be taking over her funeral. Of course you wouldn’t. You meant so much to her. Immortalise her.”

He called Navjit back. “Now I can’t say no,” he said.

“Immortalise? Fucking hell – I haven’t even memorised the thing yet.”

“You think anyone’s going to be mad at you for that? For dropping a note?”

“Not a note – everything.”

“I believe in you, man. You need me to help?”

“No.” “I love you.”

“You too, man.”

He practised all night and did not sleep. When he played at her funeral, in a church full of yellow roses, everyone saw his drawn, tired face and clutched at him with misery and pity.

Terrence shook his hand and said, “You look great.”

There were no cameras allowed at the funeral, but the song made it out of there anyway. There were two different videos, one, Henry guessed, from about where Terrence was sitting.

People were singing it even as the procession wound down the road to the cemetery straight afterwards: Everyone in this world who did not know her should be sadder than those that did. It did not rhyme, and they did not care.

Terrence made him record it properly; Henry gave Paolo a writing credit.

It took two weeks to become America’s Bestselling Song of All Time. Diana had nothing on Kenzie. Taylor did a cover and donated fifty per cent of the profits to a girls’ journalism school in Pakistan. Henry tweeted: She would have loved that.

The cafe Kenzie had worked at got so much business that they knocked a hole in the wall, spread out next door, and built a shrine in the corner. They said the tips went to Taylor’s journalism school, but one of the waitresses told Henry that wasn’t true – it just went to her boss. They had a plaque up now: America’s Number One Toasty Beans Franchise. After Henry saw that sign, he never went back.

Fiona Hardy (@fionathehardy) is a bookseller at Readings Books in Melbourne. Her book reviews have appeared in various publications, and she is a committee member of the organisation behind the Ned Kelly Awards. In 2016, her manuscript Rosebud made the Text Prize shortlist.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Useful Tips for Broken Hearts

by ANNA SPARGO-RYAN A CAR PARK. A SWIMMING POOL. AN ABSENT LOVE.

S

ometimes I find a reason to go to the tip. Put some stuff in the back of my car and sit on the weighbridge, wait for the woman to reach down to take my card.

You taught me how to go there. We went those days after we moved in, when it was raining. You said, “just the carload”, and we drove around the bend to the landfill void.

Those guys were singing, all of them, like working at the tip was the greatest joy they knew. You showed me how to take the stuff from the boot and dump it over the line but not in the hole, so the guys in the hi-vis shirts could rummage in it for something to take home. Did they even work there?

One of them leaned against a stack of DVD players. One crunched a cigarette under his steel-capped boot. We put our garbage bags over the line and drove out again and it cost thirteen dollars and change. Now when I go there, I say hello to the men with the rakes, and I take as long as I can to pull the old things from my car, and I pretend you’re on

against the retaining wall, and pretend you’ve just gone to the bin for a second and then I’ll drive you back to the office in time for your meeting.

Remember the time you tied a used condom to the chainlink fence in the park with the lake? And remember the time you bent me over the play equipment on Chapel Street?

And remember the time we hid in the bushes in Carnegie and there were people walking their dogs but we had nowhere else to go and I had that new dress on so you hitched it up in the cold air? And remember when we slept in the car near the beach and folded the seats down? And remember when we lay under a Corymbia citriodora and the wind came through so gentle and it was late winter and we were always going to be together?

And remember when we sat by the escalators near Myer that said “inbound” and “outbound” and decided we were sideways-bound? And remember when we sat near the chocolate cafe and I wore a hoodie with holes in it and

“I know everything there is to know about seeing you. If a hundred men walked past me I would know you from the way you put one foot before the other.” your way around to grab the rest of it. Then I go and sit on the side of the road and watch the people go in and out of the cemetery and think of other things I might be able to bring to the tip.

Sometimes I sit in the park near your work. Sorry. I think I hope I’ll see you, but then a guy will walk across the oval in a grey jumper and I think, shit, it’s him! and realise maybe I don’t want to see you. I don’t know the point of seeing you. I know everything there is to know about seeing you.

If a hundred men walked past me I would know you from the way you put one foot before the other, from the way your hands fall against your body, from the crick of your knees. I sit at the park anyway. Sometimes I drive around the block so I can pretend I’m not just sitting in the park but actually coming to meet you, maybe for lunch, maybe to take a sandwich down to the beach car park and sit with you and watch the water slap against the retaining wall. Then I go down to the beach car park and watch the water slap

Fiction Special

we laughed under the stretched arms of bamboo? And remember when we watched British panel shows for the first time, because I don’t, but there must have been a first time even though it feels like we were born to do that? And remember when we slept on the floor in your parents’ kitchen because it was so hot our skin peeled off? And remember when we smoked on the Dandenong train platform and there was classical music playing and then your mum rang and we went there for dinner and it was the first time you’d brought a girl home?

And remember when we laughed? And all the other times we laughed?

Sometimes I drive past the apartment where we lived near the school. It looks exactly the same except someone has put some plastic seats by the front door. I think about when I would sit there and talk to my nanna on the phone, and I had to shout so loud the whole street could hear me even though she couldn’t. I would talk and smoke and leave all my butts THE BIG ISSUE 2017

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there on the concrete. You would be inside at your desk, and I would come in and the light would be all soft around your face and your hand would be so steady around the paintbrush, and I would kiss your neck and it would smell like you. Have you been using the same deodorant all this time? Sometimes I pull out the clothes you’ve left in the wardrobe and see if I can find you in them. There’s a bit of you in the black hoodie, the one I stole, or maybe it’s me in there and that just seems like the same thing as you being in there.

“Sometimes I pull out the clothes you’ve left in the wardrobe and see if I can find you in them.”

Sometimes I buy you things. I bought you some fun-size Kit Kats. I bought you some weird flavours of chips that made me think of you. I bought you some jerky. Actually, I just buy you food. I buy the food you would like and eat it myself so I can pretend you are eating it. I eat it the way you would eat it, and tip all the crumbs into my throat at the end. Not in a psycho way, just so I don’t forget how you do things. Like how you eat chips with your fingers sort of folded around themselves, and how you hold your knife like you’re in primary school, and how you look at an entire menu before you decide to get the same thing as every other time.

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Sometimes I think about ordering a coffee just so I can say “latte no sugar” because they are words you say. Sometimes I go to the bakery and buy exactly what you always bought for me, in case they think “that’s the same order as that nice blond man” and think that I must know the nice blond man, which is you.

Sometimes I drive into the pool car park just to have an excuse to think about you. I look through the windows and see all the people in there, all the water lit up and the splashing and the faces open with shouts. There are so many people that you may as well be there too, even though you aren’t. I think of them swimming in the lane with you, not even knowing they are swimming with the person who taught me how to go to the tip and who taught me how to pay a bill on time.

Sometimes when I sit in the park near your work, I think about the people at your work and how they just slide by you in the corridor or wash their hands next to you in the bathroom or park their car next to yours and don’t even realise how lucky they are to do that, to park their car next to the person who tied a used condom to a fence with me and then bought a chicken parma and ate it at a picnic table and touched my feet with his.

Anna Spargo-Ryan (@annaspargoryan) is the Melbourne author of The Gulf and The Paper House, both from Picador.

She won the 2016 Horne Prize and writes widely on mental health, loss, love, and breakfast.

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THE BIG ISSUE 26 AUG – 08 SEP 2016

Concessions

by ALLISON BROWNING A LAST SYMPHONY.

I

’ve written another list already. I know you’d be laughing about that. Just three things this time: mints, Brylcreem and the Italian newspaper. I’ll bring them to you when they’ll allow me back. A few days, they said.

So you can settle.

I’m not sure what that means.

I thought I’d planned it well, that planning would make it okay. I booked the cab days before and checked with the cab company twice to ensure the reservation was made and the driver would arrive at 8am. He would definitely be there at eight and would toot the horn. I asked about that. I didn’t want the invasion of the doorbell, but a toot would be perfect, a signal to gently collect what we needed and then I would gather you. I couldn’t be driving; I knew I needed to be beside you, with you, not focused on traffic.

Once the cab arrived I would ease you up by the crook of your arm and I’d button your cardigan — the Melbourne morning chill would nip at your bones but the thick woolly I gave you for your last birthday would keep you warm. I’d drape a jacket around your shoulders for good measure and your feet would be in slippers, new socks beneath. That was my plan. The driver would understand we might take a little time to come out, but he would wait there for us in the car, I checked it would be okay. I had it on the list I’d made of things to ask about.

I asked many questions of the woman taking the booking.

I explained we might need some assistance with the bags.

The woman seemed rushed, she was curt, but told me the driver would get the bags into the car. “That will be fine,” I said as I pulled the handkerchief from my trousers to rub at my nose.

This morning by 7.30am I’d repacked the suitcase. It had been packed days before but I took it apart and rechecked everything. I had the list out and ticked off each item. Twelve pairs of underpants, a pair of brogues, four shirts, five singlets, toiletries, a thermal vest, pills, your favourite scent.

I planned to put that on your new dresser and pop some on your wrists, your neck, perhaps dab some at the collars of your shirts so you would smell as you always have, so the whole of you fills the room. You won’t need to remember to apply it. I won’t let you become like the others I’ve seen in those places. Some things don’t have to change.

Fiction Special

I’m still hoping you might be allowed home to visit or perhaps we can have weekends together here at the house.

That’ll break things up a bit. The staff never gave me a firm answer when I asked about it. So perhaps some weekends I might have you here with me. I know you’ll miss the garden terribly, Enzo. I mentioned this to the woman at the desk.

She reminded me there was the garden at the facility and I would be welcome to spend time there when I came to visit my friend.

My friend. That’s what she called you. I suppose I shall have to get used to that now.

After the first time I toured St Stephen’s I got home and I sat down with the brochures but I recalled only words here and there, there was so much to take in and all I seemed to remember were snippets. The phrase “well cared for” was used a lot. The regular doctor was marvellous, the admissions officer said. “A marvellous man,” the nun had chimed in. I remembered the word marvellous specifically.

At the time, I felt uplifted to hear such a lovely adjective — a single word like a lone soaring note standing out in a dark score of information. So they had the marvellous doctor as well as qualified nurses, more than one on each shift. Not like other places.

There was the garden and that was a good thing, I needed to remember the positives. It hadn’t looked much chop to me when I first inspected the place, but the mowed lawn, the couple of eucalypts and the bench seat were better than any of the other facilities I’d been to see. There was a gazebo — you’ll spend a fair bit of time there I expect, you’ll like that.

They mentioned the gazebo a lot, as though it was important, a real feature. A peaceful spot, they said. I thought I’d be able to get it looking quite lovely if they’d let me at it. Plant a little ivy or passionfruit to grow along the old paintwork.

What felt right about it all was the chapel, Enzo. I know it’s not going to be like mass at St Mark’s but you’ll be able to go to service still. It’s just the four pews with space behind for wheelchairs, more a place for private prayer but it’s more than the others had. Come to think of it, I didn’t ask if they have any sort of mass or if it was just for prayer. Does it matter to God if you don’t go to mass if you really can’t? I am relatively certain that God might make allowances in these circumstances, though I am no expert.

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They asked me a lot of questions about family right away. The arrangements of payment, relatives to take care of things. They noticed the band on your finger, the one matching mine. They asked about your wife, a Mrs Vecchio, or had she passed? The questions came fast. I hadn’t accounted for all of this, how to answer, how to manage things as they should be. This was the best place. Definitely the best place, what you would want. As they asked those questions, I knew I didn’t need to be rocking boats. I said nothing of us.

You knew you would be going away. I told you you’d have a room of your own. So now you won’t hear my schnozzle tooting away, not any more. I hate to see you so upset and I hope you know somewhere in your heart the reasons why this must be so. You know how hard it got to climb the stairs; that body of yours forced physical reminders upon you regularly.

The body is a smart thing, clearer and more insistent than the mind. Lets you know straight up when enough is enough.

But the mind is different. The everyday things that need remembering sneak away slyly, taking alternative routes around the mind’s storage and exiting like ghosts. Your memories now are vaporous things, like forgotten gas slipping through our kitchen window, the stovetop knob left turned to “on”.

I know you didn’t want to go. I need you to know how my heart broke each time you asked why I wasn’t coming with you. “This is my house,” you argued. You asked me why you had to go. And I wished I could tell you something that would

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make sense of it all, make it seem like it was fair or kind.

I wasn’t sure how it would go once we arrived there.

I knew there would be more forms to sign, more formalities.

I’d already done so much paperwork, but there were always more slips and papers to make it somehow officially right, as if signing my name at the bottom of pages could take the wrongness away. I wondered if all the papers might be there as a distraction, so many questions to put the brain in its most practical mode, far away from where emotions are stored and felt. Perhaps if you continue to fill in forms, keep signing your name, it keeps it all at bay. And here I am now with no more forms, yet a pen still in hand writing words you’ll not see.

You know I am not one for tears but this morning I put a hankie in my trousers, just in case. And I made sure you had your usual one: a deep crimson cotton, folded neatly, ironed and tucked into your shirt pocket and then plumped out at the top for effect, your style. Though I expected the newness of the place might be enough to occupy your attention. You might even be excited by the buzz of activity at St Stephen’s.

The hankies though, better to be prepared.

The house seemed too still before we left but I couldn’t place why. You were sitting there in your usual chair and I kept myself in motion, preparing breakfast and nattering away. The radio wasn’t on — I had forgotten this. Now I think of it, each task seemed laboured so as to get the morning right. If I could have thought my heart into beating normally I would have. I tried so hard to allow things to flow as usual,

but as much as I tried each of my actions bore so much resistance. I wanted to hold each moment, to freeze things.

And so I had forgotten the radio and the house was left silent where usually the sound of ABC Classic would be blended with that of eggs being scrambled and coffee percolating.

Do you remember how you used to say we had our own magnificent orchestra in place each morning? One of cutlery and running water and plates and pots and pans and percolation. You said we almost didn’t need the music on.

You are not allowed coffee any more. I haven’t reminded you of that, though I have instructed them of it at St Stephen’s. “I am an Italian man! My blood doesn’t work without espresso!” you told Dr Wilcox when he said you couldn’t have it any more. You forgot the doctor’s visit though, soon enough after. We’ve had the percolator on the stovetop still, appearing defiant of Wilcox’s advice, brewing as normal each morning. But if you knew the truth of the dark liquid within you would deem it an abomination —

you to another resident and plant a topic of conversation between you both and then wait for the right moment to do a vanishing act, to just slip away. You might then forget me for a bit. But what if you got distressed? What if you felt abandoned? Or, I could try to make it a happy departure, tell a joke, and say, “I’ll see you tomorrow”. But I worried I might not sound chipper enough to pull it off, that my act would be terribly unconvincing. A light kiss might work, and a cuddle, as if I was off to the shops for bread, as if I’d be back in ten.

But I knew I shouldn’t count on this. With you being a new admission, the staff would be present, they might notice.

There were so many variables to consider.

I packed a CD player, a small thing that looked like a bubble, not at all like our old one here at home. You might not remember to load a CD into it, but I figure I can probably butter up the staff and ask them to press play. Maybe the staff might fancy some Chopin. Good old reliable Chopin, Barber, Schubert — they are all there in the collection.

“I kept coming into the room, wearing a path into the carpet, to check on you like you might vanish there and then.” decaffeinated coffee is for the weak of heart, you always say, and certainly not the Italian way. What you don’t know, my love, is that I have been decanting ground decaf into the regular espresso packet, so you might still have your morning joy, and somehow, by the grace of God, you have never detected the difference. It’s better for your heart they say, better for your moods.

This morning, before the cab came, I stood by the stove working the eggs as you sat in the living room watching the garden. I kept coming into the room, wearing a path into the carpet, to check on you like you might vanish there and then.

You had the newspaper in your lap, upside down. You took one of the sheets of paper and crafted a paper plane, making the folds your hands know by heart, your eyes fixed straight ahead, your mind dislocated from the task, you were all body. Then you shot it across the room toward me, your aim weaker than usual, and smiled. Right then, your you-ness was in your eyes again.

“The flowers are laughing,” you called out.

From the kitchen window I could see last night’s heavy rain had settled on the petals and, as the raindrops ran off the flowers, the blossoms bounced up, relieved of the pressure, and nodded their heads. They did indeed appear to be laughing. I could see that.

“They are laughing at us, Nev,” you said.

I told you they were having a good old laugh. A good old laugh indeed.

You sounded like your old self.

I wanted to cancel the cab more than I can tell you.

I wasn’t sure of how I would leave St Stephen’s today.

I’d planned several ways in my head, and then I made a proper list of them. I thought perhaps I might introduce

Fiction Special

I purchased a set of them for you. They’re on your bedside table. At home I will be listening too. We might still listen together, more or less.

Afterwards, after I left you there, it was a blur. The list was in my hand, I remember that, but the rest… I can’t recall who it was who pressed their hand softly into my back as I walked toward the exit. I remember the damp of your palm as I squeezed your hand before I went but, no matter how I try, I can’t recall the look on your face. It’s there in my mind’s eye only in pieces — eyes, chapped lips, a smooth chin…

I told you I’d be back shortly.

The house is silent now. I’ve drawn the blinds.

We usually have lunch at one but that’s quite some hours away. I’ll need to get to the shops. I’m not sure if I’ll make sandwiches or whip up a soup and I keep wondering which you’d prefer.

I recall the day I knew things were changed irrevocably.

When all those months ago you came home empty handed from the store, my shopping list in your hand and you telling me you didn’t know what to do. You just didn’t remember what was what or how to buy the things.

You said my name over and over, pressing the list into my hands. And I recall holding you then, holding you so bloody tightly, feeling so frightened and yet so blessed you remembered my name.

Allison Browning’s writing has appeared in publications including Australian Love Stories, Best Australian Poems and Kill Your Darlings. She is now working on her novel manuscript, a love story between two elderly men, which has been supported by a Glenfern Fellowship and an Australian Association of Authors mentorship.

THE BIG ISSUE 2017

65

PUZZLES CROSSWORD » by Chris Black (@cjrblack) 1

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CRYPTIC CLUES

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The answers for the cryptic and quick clues are the same.

ACROSS

1. Opinions stick (9) 6. Degree follows odd steps (5) 9. Touring capitals without a visa perhaps? (7) 10. Little bit of yarn under the bed? (7) 11. Rider Haggard gets more boring (5) 12. Setter’s into REM and Queen (and the rest) (9) 13. Interrupted butcherbirds’ duet? (9) 15. Gordon, Gordon? (starting to hear echo) (5) 16. Tapes new series (5) 18. Masons say Den Master is out of order (9) 20. Patsy repairs page’s coat? (9) 23. Out of line to query directions (5) 25. Earned outrageous riches, finally gets liked (7) 26. Track Spooner’s two sea creatures (7) 27. Detect polar opposites in diocese (5) 28. Newcomer’s writing sounds brilliant (9)

66 THE BIG ISSUE 2017

DOWN

1. He makes love with a quiver?

(5) 2. Socialist not so revolutionary here? (7) 3. Student group reunited outside for recess (9) 4. Suffer at home with contemptible man (5) 5. Vatican rags – they cover a lot?

(4,5) 6. Peter almost became a priest (5) 7. Spice Girl penned cricket match musical? (7) 8. Early PM’s surprising fear? Not working (9) 13. Vicious uprising – tasers produced shocks (9) 14. Snub convention pre-drinks?

(7,2) 15. Cordial and endearing exchange (9) 17. A gang working in desert (7) 19. Move aside as roadworkers do this (4,3) 21. Somewhat belated cheer (5) 22. Stuffing stork and small duck into trunk (5) 24. Sounds like Peter out for John in cowboy movies (5)

QUICK CLUES ACROSS

1. Disapproval (9) 6. Cuban dance (5) 9. Synthetic material (7) 10. Minor element of story (7) 11. Not so wet (5) 12. Rest (9) 13. Startled (9) 15. Lizard (5) 16. Rash (5) 18. Skilled workers (9) 20. Fall guy (9) 23. Awry (5) 25. Causes to be loved (7) 26. Train track (7) 27. Notice (5) 28. Neophyte (9)

DOWN

1. Love god (5) 2. Oblique letters (7) 3. Break (9) 4. Suffer; sustain (5) 5. Means of communication with many (4,5) 6. Jewish scholar (5) 7. Pleasant-sounding (7) 8. Between lunch and dinner (9) 13. Catastrophes (9) 14. Cheers (7,2) 15. Sweet cordial (9) 17. Give up (7) 19. Move aside (4,3) 21. Uplift (5) 22. Body (without limbs or head) (5) 24. Western actor; Batman’s alter ego (5)

EDITORIAL Editor Amy Hetherington Deputy Editor Katherine Smyrk Contributing Editor Michael Epis Contributing Editor Anastasia Safioleas Editorial Coordinator Lorraine Pink Art Direction & Design Gozer (gozer.com.au) CONTRIBUTORS Film Editor Annabel Brady-Brown Small Screens Editor Anthony Morris Music Editor Sarah Smith Books Editor Thuy On Cartoonists Andrew Weldon Michael Weldon ENQUIRIES Advertising Jenny La Brooy on (03) 9663 4533 jlabrooy@bigissue.org.au Subscriptions (02) 8227 6485, subscribe@bigissue.org.au Editorial Tel (03) 9663 4522 editorial@bigissue.org.au The Big Issue, GPO Box 4911, Melbourne, VIC 3001 thebigissue.org.au © 2017 Big Issue In Australia Ltd All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

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CROSSWORD SOLUTIONS #543 ACROSS: 1 Unsafe 4 Sprinted 10 Cartwheel 11

Shift 12 Etna 13 Spectacles 15 Arbiter 16 Nimrod 19 Sketch 21 Tangelo 23 Pistol grip 25 Ball 27 Raita 28 Theatrics 29 Alley cat 30 Sphere; DOWN: 1 Uncle Sam 2 Springbok 3 Fowl 5 Pelican 6 Instalment 7 Trial 8 Detest 9 Peeper 14 Stationary 17 Operative 18 Coalesce 20 High tea 21 Toilet 22 Sparta 24 Still 26 Stop The solution to Adder’s Coil Ed#543 and a brand new Adder’s Coil will appear in Ed#545.