Fiction

Your friend, your handsome friend, he speaks on the screen, stands next to your beaming face and describes parts of you I have never seen, he knows more than me, I who made you, of your sorrow. He makes a joke and people in the room laugh, people whom I have never met, never will and who understand the joke and whose eyes crinkle above their cloth masks. They are pleased for the release. I could attack them, I could bite down on their bones, I am a rabid dog jawing the air.

The boy says, ‘You’re the one who writes novels, aren’t you?’ Patrick doesn’t reply. He did, he wrote one, it won an award but no one would publish it, but he thinks now, this might make a good novel, about what happens when you fuck your employees around, when you give them two weeks’ notice when you know they’ve got a million-dollar mortgage. The boy says, ‘I was thinking of becoming a writer,’ and Patrick laughs, almost runs into a van, says, ‘That’d be the dumbest decision of your life.’

Atchison believed a church bell would be like the belt of his trousers. It would save him, save us all, from embarrassment. I have heard that many men in these parts see no need for conventional accoutrements such as underpants, but a bell was of a different order. It would keep us from being spiritually, civically, communally naked. Rung out and resonant rather than strung out and desperate. Selwyn Atchison, Presbyterian burgher, barley farmer and barely above the ruminant, would not settle for less. His happy collie came straight for me and my pocket of lozenges as Selwyn settled his dray and formally tap-tapped a bony knuckle on our rufous she-oak door.

All weekend she thought about getting rid of Mitzy. Jill fed Mitzy, walked her, and Mitzy was silent. She sat on the couch with Jill, her head on a throw cushion, looking at her from the corner of her eye every time Jill took a sip of wine. Jill had a bad day at work on Monday, came home irritated. Mitzy followed her around the apartment for hours, staring up at her with her mother’s brown eyes. Eventually Jill relented, took the leash off the hook near the door.

She climbs off the couch to right the handle of a bucket and to haul it – nuggety little thing – across the room. The rain hangs from the ceiling crack like a string of beads and scatters over the floor. Connie would more know a string of beads than a bird. We have beads. I used to see bird carcasses around but their hollow flying bones are no good for swamping. The floods. What was left of the chickens – those mass graves – is washed away.

Leo pushed away the plate of fries and climbed down from his seat, copper mane flopping around the toddler’s face. Brooke had wanted to call him Aslan, but Martin had intervened. Martin was sensible. He could parent with one hand tied behind his back. Brooke could barely parent with both hands, an early childhood nurse for a mother and nine books on raising children (waiting to be read, but still). She had no maternal instincts whatsoever. So much for women’s intuition.

Things are dim, inside the museum. There is no flash photography in the galleries but leaning in close reveals that the blues and the dark indigo in the set also show signs of use: they are splashed and grooved, as if Smith was trying to paint while sailing on rough seas. I imagine him onboard the Resolution on another voyage of discovery entirely, gazing in astonishment at icebergs and floes, attempting to paint the white on blue on grey world of an untouched Antarctica.

Children between the ages of six and nine are randomly selected for the giant with an app developed by local entrepreneurs. In May last year, a group of children calling themselves Extermination Rebellion concealed the whereabouts of eight of the selected for several weeks, but the siege ended when the children were discovered hiding in an abandoned shearing shed. Twenty-two children were arrested but they were all too young to be charged with a crime.

When I’d got inside the gallery, I’d try to find an area to stick my ticket on the wall, so that I could be exhibited. Both times I’ve been caught. They watch me more carefully now. It’s like a treat for some of them. A service. It gives them something to do. I hyphenate their time. They think I’m trying to be famous; I’m not. I’m just trying to externalise myself, to see if I can look at anything I do as if from an outside perspective. They never let me succeed, so I don’t.

As befitted such a place, we coexisted there with other creatures: translucent geckos in the corners of the rooms; fat grasshoppers on the deck; fruit bats in the dusk fig tree; brush turkeys skidding across the road; and George the white cat, slinking in with something not-quite-dead between her dainty teeth. If we left the louvres open, a big brushtail possum climbed in to share our food, crouching like a squat grey Buddha in the fruit bowl, a banana clutched between his sharp front claws, a contemptuous expression on his toothy face. He would only clamber out when we shook the furry end of the broom at him.