Fiction

I wasn’t always here, of course. I’ve lived elsewhere. But I ended up here. My mother was already old then, when I came back home. She simply opened the door and let me in. I had nothing. I didn’t even have a suitcase. It was just me in the clothes I stood in. I’d called ahead, to say I was coming. There was a phone here then. There’s no phone now. I can’t afford it. All right, she said, I’ll see you when you get here. So I got here and she opened the door for me.

Even on gentle days, waves thrash up the front beach without ceasing. But the estuary is a flat, bright thread of quicksilver that advances and retreats, traversed by geese overhead and stingrays below.

Bits of your old life resurfacing, as if: Ready yet?

And didn’t you live or dream this already?

For instance, years ago, when you thought you were writing about another town, but it was clearly this one:

the girl with the dog on the beach

the strangers’ weekender filled with gaudy holiday house tack

the ungendered narrator doing a bad job of drying out, recovering from some unspecified wreckage

Walking slowly around the tree, the man looked for a face in the trunk, but he couldn’t find any cavity from which a voice might emerge. I’m not imagining it, thought the soldier. Truly this thing is talking.

The man said he’d come on foot from a nearby town, where he’d failed to find continuing work of any kind. And while someone had offered him a few nights of accommodation –  a blanket on the floor of an outbuilding – today they had asked him to leave.

“Do you have any friends?” asked the tree.

The soldier said he did not have anyone.

“A person without a single friend? That must be unusual,” said the tree.

Tommy Sloane was a wee thing and when he was born, they called him little gumnut because his whole head was hard like a stone and they couldn’t find the spot where you were supposed to be able to stick your finger clean through his skull, as if he was already set before he entered the world. He suckled on his mother but in the end, he stayed thin and so they gave him a bottle, which still didn’t help much except he grew attached to it. Even when he was a lad of seven he kept one in his backpack like a lucky charm, so when his mama found it on the road out to the bay she knew it wasn’t good.

Sally Arnett surveyed the esky as her husband put it down in the centre of their living room rug.

“Maybe we should call the police?” she said.

“You think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Jack didn’t reply, but instead pulled her to his chest and held her for the first time in months. She felt the quick thud of his heart against her cheek. Then he released her, turned away and went back outside. A moment later Sally heard the echo of his hammering resume. She pushed the esky with her foot. It didn’t budge. She leaned down. Sniffed. The edge of a scent crept through the gaps in the tape. Rot. Decay.

That morning we had pasted virtual missing posters all over the internet. My first thought seeing her was: We should take those down. The whole thing had suddenly become so private. Remy looked up as I squeaked through the gate. We held each other with our eyes, through the hole in the wall. Later, when our baby was asleep, we sat and cried together.

I keep thinking about it. There’s one guard, Cody, who lived here till his mum took him in when her pokies thing got sorted. He knows what it’s like, lets a few things go. One day, when the other guards were off dealing with a meltdown, he let Toby run on the grass for a few seconds. Toby still talks about it. I reckon for a quiet game, Cody would hide us in a cupboard, sneak us out late in the second quarter, when the ushers care less about where anyone’s sitting. The idea makes me think of when we were kids, how they’d let you into the cricket free during the last hour – till then, we’d peek through the chain-link fence and cheer when we saw the ball rolling on the sliver of grass between the stands. It was like seeing how the whole world works after being gummed up in the pages of a book written by some dumb-arse who had never gone to school.

I didn’t strike him, for I was a reasonable child. But how I wanted to. “Answer me properly, slave.”

Manis breathed long, as adults so often do. “Philosophers mock common ideas, master. Perhaps the stonemason said...”

Squinting up at the sky, the philosopher turned so that his back was fully to the sun. His laughter became forceful, more of a phlegmy wheeze, his mouth wide. I saw what he was pointing at now: his own shadow. Blackness on the grey dirt, a grotesque, misshapen version of his grotesque, misshapen being.

My therapist stops writing. Takes his glasses off. He’s got these big bags under his eyes. Looks like he gets less sleep than me.

The only rule, I say, is that you can’t kill them. But there’s a few cases where I think that’s happened. There’d be no way of knowing who did it, though. It’s untraceable. We have names like Cookie Monster, Cousin Greg, Walter White.

He glances at the clock behind me. Back at me.

Four nights a week he sits in the dismal concierge cage and fills postcards to Sydney; a junk store haul of faded linen scenes showing The Palisades, The Chrysler, Cleo’s Needle, and woodsy upstate hamlets he’ll never visit, won’t get north of the city save for the once, taking the Amtrak to Niagara in the new year: winter woods flanking the rail lines all a naked, brittle magenta, the Hudson frozen solid at its banks with great shards of ice heaped up in violent confection, while he swallows bad coffee and nurses his heart like a busted fist.