Fiction

For a time we moved into the [_____] memorial. Many had died, but we were not among them. Some among us had come closer than we would like to remember, but to not remember seemed a small destruction. There were no names inscribed on the [_____] memorial. In some ways this made it easier to inhabit. In any case, the names of the dead were carried with us. This wasn’t a radical occupation. Hardly utopian idealism. It was not even as simple as having nowhere else to go. We could move as freely about the world as the next person, give or take, if at the not insignificant expense of our histories. But there was nowhere else in which we recognised the greater scope of our lives, unabridged; each moment lit and shadowed by what we had survived. Did we hope, against all reason, that our lost might find us there? Yes. Of course.

Pistol noticed a bus. The illuminated destination board said Adelaide. They got on. It was quite late. The passengers were mostly asleep except for a couple deep in a vigorous embrace. Difficult in a bus but worthwhile if you know a good chiropractor.

His name was Edward, and he liked to be called Edward, not Eddie or Ed or some other diminutive that would make him more familiar. I had always thought the name Edward was rather beautiful, and it suited him. He had full, curly hair – dark brown, flamed with orange. His eyelashes were long, his eyes big. They sat wet in their sockets, betraying him.

The ill one. The little one. He cried and cried. Someone far held him in her hands. Like a fish. Her eyes looked at him. She said nothing. Someone far came. She touched my face with her lips. I waited over and over in the dark nights. All dark nights the same. That she would remember me. Her black hair shining. Amen.

A delivery van has dropped some of its cargo, and hunks of a carcass are strewn down the street. It must be beef, I think. Or lamb? The smell is so pungent – well, I don’t know, I’ve been a vegetarian for 15 years. Beef, I decide. Each piece is rock-sized. Like a rock that would feel good in the hand. Today I am going to the hospital for a cystoscopy, a procedure where a small camera enters the bladder through the urethra. The young doctor tells me it will feel less invasive than a Pap smear. He guides the camera in and I watch on screen, the bladder looks like a veiny eye with no iris. When I return to the waiting room a man asks me nervously if he should remove his underwear. Just the gown? Just the gown. Good luck. Hours later and the rocks of beef are no longer bright with blood but flattened to the tar, the raw odour still hanging in the air.

We were grateful for a place to stay, and the house-sitting duties were few and easy (water the plants, feed the fish). The house belonged to a friend of my partner’s younger sister, May, so we regarded it as older siblings might, giving certain decor a pass – the hanging seashells, the excessive macramé – and noting with pride the abundance of the veggie garden, which put our own to shame. As she handed us the keys, May pointed out the FOR SALE sign across the road and told us the happy family that lived there had not been happy. “But he’s in jail now,” she said, as if that fixed things.

It’s so exciting you’re here to stay. I remember when I was the new one. A lifetime ago. You’re going to love it here. Our friend is so amazing. All friends are… Well, almost all. But ours is the best. When I was new there was an old one already here. They were lovely, so kind. They taught me everything I needed to know: where to go, how to ask for in and out, what kind of games to play until I came up with some of my own. Then they and our friend played those games with me. I was so proud. They’ve gone now, the old one, long ago. I miss them. One came from the place with strange, sharp smells. Not all places are happy. That one brought some of those bad scents along and the old one left. Their smell was so different the moment they went and our friend cried, so hard, for so long. I did everything I could to help, but sometimes pain is simply there until it’s not.

She was a bad dog. She couldn’t be told. She ate nothing but touched everything with her mouth, her snout – chewing, sniffing, licking, breathing. She had no respect for objects of value or concepts of hygiene or punctuality or personal space. She stole handkerchiefs. She tore up shoes. She put her paws on the kitchen counter and her nose in the coffee cups and water glasses and left a smear with her tongue on the rim. She slipped between our legs as we moved from one part of the house to another, leaving clumps of brittle white fur in the most unlikely of rooms. She disrupted our daydreams and quiet acts of domestic reverie by barking and whining and sitting unnaturally still on the floor beside us with eyes that said I want I want I want. She didn’t belong in our world of narrow-mindedness and decorum, of carpet and sliding doors.

When I was a kid, we walked from Summer Hill to the Lebanese sweet shop in Dulwich Hill, a good 40 minutes, to be rewarded with sticky namoora, baklava and thick coffee served in silver pots. One time we took some five-year-old friends of mine, high on the promise of syrupy sweets, who then dragged their feet, close to tears, on the return journey. Once he had apologised to their parents and they had all left, he looked at me proudly and said, You are a true walker.

He was calmer now than he was three years ago when she stopped breathing. It was just the two of them, and she’d eaten too much doughnut. He could tell immediately, but he also knew that she would usually spit out the excess. But not this time. Suddenly she looked confused. He had never seen this face before, and he never wanted to see it again. It was a face of angelic fear – a fear without understanding or context – and then she turned white, or blue, and time dilated.