Fiction

They were reading in the lounge when a large helicopter landed on the helipad. Phil looked up from his paper, over the rim of his reading glasses, and could just make out the figures. The man hopping down held his fedora on top of his head, battling the pressure of the blades whipping everything around them. How stupid for a man to wear a hat on a helicopter, Phil thought. His own work had seen him take a helicopter on three occasions. ‘That’s him, then,’ he said to Ellen, staring out the window. She followed Phil’s gaze and sat up abruptly. ‘Who are all those other people getting off?’ Two leggy assistants followed the man, themselves followed by five or six much shorter women, all clutching small bags, some helping others to step down off the helicopter. ‘Excuse me,’ Ellen said, raising an arm to summon a nearby staff member in a polo shirt, ‘who are these people coming onto the ship?’ ‘Oh, haven’t you heard? Mr Gross has been —’

The Emerald Queen was just beginning its second loop of the Tasman Peninsula when Phil, Ellen, John and Karen were seated for their standing 7 o’clock dinner reservation in the smaller of the two grand dining rooms. ‘Isn’t it so much nicer in this one?’ Ellen asked, leaning back a few degrees as a linen serviette was placed across her lap. She looked to Karen. ‘And I’m sure it’s easier for John to hear us all talking in here, without that music they keep so loud near the buffet upstairs.’ ‘Oh, John can hear fine,’ Phil cut in, dismissing his wife’s jab. She was switched on, but sometimes a bit harsh. ‘The doctor said that now, with his implant, he can hear better than most 50-year-olds,’ Karen replied, firmly but smiling. They picked up their menus and read as though it wasn’t the same laminated list they had been scanning every night for almost three weeks.

I still have the dog my mother loved. See that lavender heeler, roan, smiling and straining in the rear-view. See her chasing after my mother, at least a kilometre from home. See that dog flatten herself out as she stretches to reach metal – low and fast and long. See my mother as she tries not to see it, any of it, from the driver’s seat of my older sister’s off-white Commodore. My mother, maybe she’s wearing vanilla oil, a second-hand silk shirt and her favourite cheap Priceline foundation, Crème Caramel. The V8 my mother left in once held my sister in Coles car parks at the edge of town: cheap whiskey, a boy called Bundy, petrol-station condoms. Now it’s being pushed into sixth by my mother’s butter-soft suede loafer, somewhere.

I was born at home. My mother was a hippie back then. Growing barrels of pot on the roof, and part of the Community of the Whole Person – an amateur psychotherapy thing. She told a story once about how I’d been a grounding force as a baby, while she was doing a therapy session with a high, damaged person, and she’d been glad I was there. My sister watched the birth, sitting beside the Great Dane. There’s a picture of me a few moments after I was born – dark hair, angel’s thumb on my forehead – lying on a bloodied sheet on my parents’ bed.

The city is performing a disturbingly accurate impression of a ghost town and I am trying to impersonate a dead virus particle haunting it, infecting it; like pneumonia in the lungs of the city, when the ghost of a city has no physical lungs. I walk, there are barely cars moving, there is barely any air to fill my lungs, there are definitely no people. I wonder what has happened this time, what news I have missed with no credit on my phone.

If they had given me a choice in who I’d want to haunt for the rest of their mortal life, it would have been a toss-up between a celebrity – a real celebrity, although I don’t really mind which one, they all kind of homogenise after a point – and my spinster aunt. I can see myself floating around her sprawling Federation cottage, dressed in a romantic, billowing white dress, doing kind and lovely things like leaving flowers on the windowsill, or gently rustling the curtains as she drinks tea and thinks about her poor niece, dead at 32, such a shame, so young, so beautiful, what a tragedy.

None of us were certain when the hole first appeared. Initially, we ignored it and sometimes would forget it was even there, except when we were sitting outside, hanging up our washing, or if we happened to look out of the large bay window above the kitchen sink that faced the backyard. ‘It’s just a hole,’ said Yusuf. Pitch black inside, perfectly circular, about the size of a basketball. It looked improbable and strange. ‘Maybe it will go away,’ said Soraya. But soon it became obvious to us that the hole was growing. Idhil dropped by to finish wrapping presents for her friend Maryam’s birthday. She commandeered my room and turned my desk into an arts and crafts station, attaching little cardboard cutouts of birds to a small gift bag.

I have been walking on the weekends to visit the goddess garden. Sometimes I wish that all life expected of me was one walk each day, to admire the things that grow without our encouragement. I wish that once my walk was over, I could disappear in the bowels of my home, to neither suffer nor experience joy, as I find both to be quite tiring. Instead, I have a job and a family I love, who love me back. I have meals to cook and eat, and a cat with a litter tray in the laundry.

Is this their final offer? Was that the best you could get? You’ve had it all thoroughly looked over as I asked? There’s not going to be another round of discussions? Isn’t there some factor that we haven’t yet considered? Could we maybe have a bit of a brainstorm, if there’s time? Can we revisit that list of stakeholders, just quickly? Is there a loophole, or, not a loophole, that doesn’t sound good, I mean some unexamined section of the legislation that might give us a bit of breathing space? A bit of wiggle room? How many lawyers are on this right now? And I’m paying for that, am I?

It was believed a whale had gone mad at the mouth of the river. Several fishing boats had been destroyed in acts of violence so extraordinary they were deemed inhuman. Each attack had come at dusk, while the boats were passing the heads on their way back to port – the same area where plumes of spray had been seen erupting from the water. Large transport ships reported strange and powerful vibrations ringing through their hulls. Gulls flew strangely, cormorants seemed skittish. Ocean swimmers’ strokes were thrown out of rhythm by a high, ancient melody that rose through the salt. A fluked tail had been seen troubling the waves.