Fiction

Okay, let’s just say the temperature is on the snug side. Let me check the notes… a little over 10,000 degrees. But only 5000 if we’re talking Celsius, and we are. Plus, it will be so far away. You’ll get wrinkles, maybe freckles, but freckles are super cute. Don’t you think? Anyway. Where were we? Miles away. More than you can count. Sorry, could you repeat that? There’s a buzzing. Okay, yes. It is still hot enough to burn skin. We get it. Nobody likes burnt skin. Youch. But you know: wear a hat. Put on a shirt – after all, nobody wants to see that. If you have to wander about, just rub this tube of cream all over your body.

The cane steamed past, so fast it just looked like two fat lines, one green, the other a strip of golden against the blue sky. As we slowed at an intersection, a lady looked down at me from the cab of a truck. I saw her arm squashed against the sill, peeking out of acrylic floral. Her face that lowly with disapproval. The deafening roar of the engine. I grinned, happy despite it all just to be free.

I tell Mum I will have to prune the roses. She says she will do it. They’re heirloom, she says. They can be pruned aggressively, but you need to know what you are doing. We drink our tea and eat our cake. We avoid our earlier conversation, about Stephanie, my daughter. She has not returned their calls nor visited them in several weeks. I should speak to her. I should tell her it isn’t on.

Anna couldn’t say what it was like being one of two sisters who were famous for a time as the most beautiful girls anyone had seen. It was like expecting a mountain to tell you of its mountain-ness or a tree of its treeness. It just was, their beauty, a fact that permeated the air, real, necessary, enveloping.

When they arrived at the gates, some resisted and were arrested. Others tried to negotiate and were swaddled in rugs and treated for concussion. I tried to avoid the chaos but could still hear the shouting and see the flares; and I could still smell the smoke. I made countless errors at the clinic that night. Some saw this as the expression of an unconventional sense of humour. I was not feeling myself.

That night, as the baby fed, I scrolled through old photos on my phone and wondered if you could envy yourself. I saw my face, my body, my hair, from years and even months ago, and felt a painful tightening in my throat and my jaw. I began to resent the phrase I had heard, yet I could not stop repeating it to myself – the mother cut, the mother cut.

‘Hurry. We must hurry.’ The jailer throws a cloak over Chidiock’s head, so now he looks like a limping girl, face hidden inside his hood. His weight falls into me as we make our way down the stairs. I think it must be God helping me get this far as I cannot surely do this on my own. It must be God helping me and Chidiock through the gate, God willing me on so I can help this broken man who is my son.

He became more serene but as righteous as ever as he discharged information on blade maintenance. His overalls were neatly ironed. His face a polished brown. The rest of his body was pure white. A shock to see whenever he came out of the shower. The two-toned effect of him always catching us out. The smell of him too. A smell of lawnmower oil and grass. After the suggestion he stand for parliament, he took to combing his hair. A work in progress, thinning, so that you noticed the attention given to it.

The spa has been on the cards since the end of spring. Before this, like everyone in Queensland, my father dreamt of a pool. Not a big pool. Not a pool for show and not a time-and-money pit, like my brother Angus has. On Saturdays, my brother’s pool requires hours of combing for leaves and the fallen limbs of palms so that, on Sundays, his beautiful, tanned daughters can stretch long and listless beside it, as allergic to the water as cats. My father’s dream was for a small pool of easy maintenance. In the end, the fear of looking showy gave him digestive issues and he couldn’t afford a pool anyway. So, the spa.

Lucy Tran looked in the mirror and felt invisible, behind her black hair and huge school blazer. She felt invisible on most days. She never thought she would actually disappear, be taken, have her life squeezed out of her. If anyone had told her that her face would be on every television channel, she’d snort in disbelief.