Fiction

A little way along, finding beach showers, she drinks deeply from the small coppery faucet. Ella’s father says you can learn to love yourself just as much as you hate yourself. That the line is very fine, that you just have to click and practise. She is trying. She thinks then of leaving town and walking home, and sets off shoeless and hatless in the melting sun.

Voula looked around the kitchen. The kettle gathered its breath.

“Where is your dog?”

They waited for an answer.

“In the freezer.”

There was a strange moment between Lance and Voula.

“How long has it been in the freezer?”

“Two years.”

“Dad, I thought the vet took Pixie, after she died,” said Lance.

Mr Harvey shook his head sadly.

Voula slowly rose and opened the freezer door. There, behind a packet of frozen peas, was a large, misted-over plastic bag with a couple of dark paws visible through it. And was that an eye peering out like something left behind in Shackleton’s icy hut? Mr Harvey sniffed back a tear.

Steph was lying on a hospital bed then or later – a gurney, was it? – like someone in a movie. A male nurse, Russian he said, tried and failed three times to insert a catheter into her left arm. She said she thought a catheter was something you stuck up your urethra in order to pee, and for some reason he found this funny. She was shaking then – rattle, rattle, rattle went the teeth in her head as if she were a skeleton in a cartoon. She recognised her skeleton then, or she understood it somehow, in the same way she had not recognised the finger the surgeon said was hers.

Young women can pull achillea from the soil of a night-time graveyard. Preferably the grave of a young man, although any graveyard new to them will do. They must be silent. This is how I know it is a tale for women. The young women should tuck their prize – blooms, stalks, leaves, roots, grave dirt – under their pillows. They can wash their sheets in the morning but grave dirt is not so different from any other: all dirt is made from the dead. The achillea I’ve seen in graveyards is always white.

And truth be told I don’t mind him telling me my story. But I’m bothered that he tells other people, because that means I can’t ever tell that story again, in case they think, “Hmm… that’s not your story – that’s Brian’s.” And I may not even know they think this, because they might be too polite to say. I know I said they weren’t polite – but maybe they are, at least about this. He’s a friend but the fact is he’s stolen my story and may not even know it. Can you accidentally steal something?

Final plans, he announced, in his very best baritone. He shunted his coffee mug aside and stubbed a blunt finger on the architect’s drawings. Council approved, he added, and gestured to a sheath of papers with unintelligible signatures.
Congratulations, I replied, nodding to simulate excitement.

Lounge chairs and sofa go here. Opposite the TV – 152 centimetres. Home cinema.

That’ll save you, I said.

I wish. Gunna cost a bomb. All this wall is double glazing. From inside you can see the deck and outdoor spa.

Save you going out, I mean. Not for the first time, I worried for my neighbour and his budget.

Lots of natural light. Ceramic dolphins either side of the spa.

Ah, symmetry, I said.

We push the bikes through fields of stinking black muck, the sun beating hot on our bare heads. My hair, shaved a week ago under bad light in a roadside toilet, is a snatch of silk on fire. Ahead of me the mechanic shows frustration, stomping dirt. When he turns to squint at me, his face is pinched with aggression. My throat scratches with thirst. I need to piss, but I’m afraid of appearing old and weak. Colette hated the humiliations that age brought, and remembering her determined efforts to appear youthful, I push with my legs, lower my face parallel to the plastic bike seat.

One day, some older boys had a tomato sauce fight at recess, squeezing their sauce packets and wiping them on squealing victims. When the boy ran the wrong way, straight into the path of a kid from year 5 who was primed and waiting, he received a smear of tomato sauce down the front of his shirt. He was not upset – none of them were – they were having the time of their lives. But over the following days when the game was long forgotten, the boy still sported his wound. It dried and hardened and eventually flaked off, leaving behind a henna stain that he wore every day like a birthmark.

I try to remember her like that, coming home from the train tracks, full of love, of that orchid blue, but she always ends up in the hole. Her boss, those cops, telling this drunk woman that she didn’t work for the council anymore and she needed to move on, to hand in her uniform, her knowing she had nowhere to go, pulling soil over herself, saying, No. Don’t take this away. Bury me.

That afternoon, Jen and Mark bought cleaning supplies and a few bags of organic soil from Bunnings. When I asked Mark about the soil he said, ‘You know, to fill in the hole.’ Suffice to say, three bags of soil didn’t do anything but agitate the hole. It rumbled and belched smoke. Mark lost his balance and tumbled in, his screams fading into the distance.