Fiction

When you were little, you dreamed of a man in uniform. A man who would woo you with his charm and sweep you off your feet. You read a lot of Jane Austen. Underage and overeager, you and your friends would frequent the bars nearest the barracks. Stories of the strapping American soldiers with their sharp jaws and Southern drawls were too hard to resist. But it was an Aussie digger who met your eyes across the bar that New Year’s Eve. A Townsville local who went to school not far from you.

At the entrance to the mental health unit, the nurse stood impatiently at the door, insisting she couldn’t let Susan pass. Sebastian had told the staff not to give any information to his mother and, because he was no longer a minor, his wishes had to be respected ‘for privacy reasons’. She craned her neck in an effort to peer through to the ward and catch sight of the son she hadn’t seen for months.

Di’s clothes are piled beside Matt on the sand. He picks up her pullover and presses it to his face. It’s warm and smells of her. He checks the pockets of her jeans and finds her phone. It’s locked but he thumbs in the six digits of her birthday – 080888 – and the screen flowers open, illuminating his face. He smiles and scrolls through Di’s emails and text messages, call history and social media feeds. He tells himself he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but that’s a lie.

Hey man, for Rick? Yeah, yeah, thanks. Cool. How’s, ah, how’s your night been going? Yeah, same here. Good. Good. What, ah, what time did you start? Right… right… Where’d you start from? Oh, cool, yeah, that’s pretty far away, hey? You try and get one last trip that goes back out that way? Cool. Hey, ah, can I change the destination?

Brown shapes move across the screen, leaving dark streaks in the mud behind them. Salt glitters, and some darker crystal. The bodies move purposefully, now and then a flash of teeth that must be laughter. Happy workers, covered in the earth they think they’re saving. Later the mud will dry on their skin, cracking and burning.

I have recently taken it upon myself to work my way through the internet in search of my ancestry. I call it my 1080 Project. As a wise old tech-savvy male elder of the family Rattus rattus, and with no chance of a pleasant natural death, I’m planning to avail myself of our voluntary euthanasia as soon as I’ve completed the project.

We called him Santa – unimaginatively, on account of his white hair – but we might as easily have arranged those same five letters in a different order. He did not come down our chimney, but he did make his first impression via trespass – hearing a noise, my wife found him in our backyard. You should know that my wife is not the shrinking sort and I’d generally fear for the health of anyone stupid enough to cross her, but that day she was tired – we had spent much of the previous night at the hospital with our boy. And now this stranger, in our yard, helping himself to the discarded palings from our recently replaced fence.

At 15 Sebastian didn’t see himself as a vandal, as the law did. He saw himself as a writer. The secret language of tags and symbols, the liminal space of tunnels and railways, the argot of street writers, the underground camaraderie of the graffiti gang – all these things gave him something to commit to. So, it was only a matter of time before the cops caught up with him.

At first Andrea thought there was a problem with her eyes. She went to the optometrist at lunch. He had her read off a chart and blew puffs of air on her corneas. ‘Tip-top,’ he concluded. ‘You shouldn’t be having any trouble seeing the stage.’ But she hadn’t said the stage, she’d said the actors. She could see the stage just fine. As she headed back to the theatre she stuffed a 7-Eleven sandwich into her mouth, trying not to choke while texting her partner How is he? Is he awake? Is he hungry?

Mr Bull, our new teacher, arrived in the third week of summer term. He wore formal shorts and high grey socks and we named him Bullybum. He’d lived in the desert for three years before he came to our school, and when I said I wanted to be the prime minister, he didn’t laugh. The next day he brought in a thick glossy book called Our Nation and Its Leaders and handed it to me. He said, This is really for high-school kids but I think you’ll get it, Sally. He kept his hands on the book when he passed it to me, like we were posing for a photo.