The Boy Who Believed in Magic by Zahid Gamieldien

September 29, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Zahid Gamieldien is a writer, tutor and former lawyer. In 2015, his fiction has been published in Overland, Tincture Journal, Bahamut Journal and Pantheon Magazine.

The Boy Who Believed in Magic

The camp gets attacked on a Monday afternoon. I’m in the antechamber of the medical tent, administering the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella to a young girl. She’s afraid of the syringe, and I tell her not to worry, that everything will be okay. Her mother soothes her in Manding language, probably Dioula, but even she seems tense. The girl is bawling and I call the Dutch nurse, Klaas, into the antechamber.

I’ll show you a magic trick, I say to the girl.

Klaas nods and I turn to a cabinet, on top of which is a Styrofoam cup. I make a small hole in the cup and push my thumb through it, and then I grip it with both hands. Feigning intense concentration, I lever my fingers and palms from the cup, which is held in place by my obscured thumb, and I shiver the cup through the air as if it’s levitating. The girl goes quiet. Klaas kneels beside her and swabs her upper arm with an alcohol wipe. He jabs her with the syringe. She begins to wail and I grab hold of the cup while Klaas and the girl’s mother apply a bandage to her puncture. Sighing loudly, I return the cup to the cabinet and listen to the girl’s crying fade from the medical tent.

You should give this doctor business up and get into the magic shows, Klaas remarks. We chuckle; I like the way he shushes his S’s.

I’m about to reply when I hear a convoy of jeeps in the distance. Klaas and I step out of the medical tent and stand there, watching. The camp is in chaos. People are running every which way: some roil the dirt as they sprint to nowhere; others dash into their tents, which are draped in white sheets like Halloween houses or Californian bungalows being fumigated. The sheets carry UNHCR branding.

Through a rust-coloured cloud of dust, I spy a man that I recognise. He’s barefoot, carrying a machete, leading his family toward the dirt road.

What’s happening? I ask.

It’s better for you to run, doctor, is all he says.

I don’t move.

The regular doctor at the camp, a South African named Sissy, sprints past me and into the medical tent. Klaas and I follow her. She heads for the tent’s main room, which has two rows of eight hospital beds divided by a narrow aisle. I realise that most of the patients must have fled behind my back: only four remain, and each of them is unconscious.

Too late to move them, Sissy grunts.

Klaas and I wear guilty expressions and now, close by, I hear peals of gunfire, the screech of brakes. My skin feels numb, tinnitus in my ears — no, not tinnitus: I can isolate the screams of individuals, of children, of women, of men, and they get cut short, these screams, abruptly, like when you press the mute button on a TV remote.

Klaas’s brow is moist; he wipes it with a shaky hand. Sissy, the only one of us with her wits about her, drags a sheet up over the face of one of the patients. Klaas and I realise what she’s doing and we follow suit, until the four patients are entirely covered. We head back to the antechamber and wait.

The footsteps on the ground are heavy, jackbooted perhaps, and I know immediately that the people sheltering in their tents are not going to survive: their choral screams rise and grow elliptical and fall silent, the tempo dictated by a grim layer of percussion. I dap my Adam’s apple in my throat and try not to picture it, but I can’t help it. Klaas whimpers; he’s pale as a waxwork and wet with sweat. Sissy places her hand on his back, as if to steady him in case he passes out. Her mouth is shut tight.

Two soldiers, dressed in black shirts and camouflage pants, enter the antechamber. Both have AK47s. One of the soldiers is tall, not yet twenty; he’s wielding a machete as well as a gun. The other is pubescent, a boy, although he has no laugh in him and his brow is as creased as a forty-year-old’s. The tall soldier raps something in a Kru dialect, directing his question at Sissy. He jerks his rifle toward the main room. Sissy stares at him dumbly and he repeats the question in French.

C’est une morgue, Sissy responds. Allez jeter un oeil. She’s defiant, but her voice quavers. Squinting dubiously, the tall soldier issues a command to his accomplice, the boy, who adjusts his aim.

The tall soldier ambles into the main room. He pauses near a covered patient and slings his AK47 over his shoulder, and then he takes out his machete and drives it through the patient’s chest. There’s the crack of a ribcage and the gurgle of blood in a throat, the strain of ungreased bedsprings. I stifle a scream, Sissy’s eyes go to her feet, and Klaas holds his breath. We don’t watch any more. The tall soldier returns to the antechamber, dragging behind him a white sheet with which he wipes the stains from his machete. He shrugs and says something to the boy, before he drops the sheet and exits the medical tent.

The boy’s forehead grows more serious and he’s yelling at us in Kru which, of course, none of us can understand. He’s becoming frustrated and I realise that he’s asking us — no, ordering us — to turn around so that he can shoot us in the back. We comply, slowly.

Don’t do this, Sissy pleads. We’re doctors. Médecins.

I glance over my shoulder: the boy is unmoved, or otherwise, he doesn’t understand. I see that Sissy and Klaas are holding hands. Klaas is muttering a prayer. They’re resigned to their fate.

I’m about to clasp Sissy’s other hand when I spot the Styrofoam cup on the cabinet, and I don’t know why, but I grab it and push my thumb through the little hollow in it.

I’ll show you a magic trick, I offer.

There’s confusion on the boy’s face, yet I press on with the routine, releasing the cup from my hands, leaving it perched on the end of my thumb, giving the illusion that it’s defying gravity.

See, it’s magic, I say.

Mah-jik, the boy repeats.

That’s right, I say. Magic.

He takes a couple of paces back and glances outside of the tent. I crush the cup in my hand. Sissy’s expression betrays her puzzlement, Klaas’s his relief. The boy mimics turning a key in a lock, and I’m confused.

Unlock? I ask uncertainly.

I think he wants a car, Klaas observes.

I take my keys from my pocket and jangle them, as if I’m performing another trick. The boy beckons with his rifle and I cant my head to the others, indicating that we should follow.

In single file we step out of the medical tent. In Dutch, Klaas recites the Lord’s Prayer. The camp is a Golgotha of corpses upon which dust is settling like ash, like in the aftermath of a volcano. The tents are silent and riddled with buckshot. Sissy’s hand is over her mouth. I also want to vomit. The boy prods me in the side with his AK47 and we walk — the three of us now in front of him — toward the dirt road, past booted and barefoot soldiers, and the dead, and firewood that is being kindled for a pyre. In the shade of a palm tree is a group of armed men, who laugh out of the sides of their mouths, gravely, or as if they’re chewing tobacco.

As we reach the dirt road, I can hear yelling from behind us. It’s the tall soldier. He’s about thirty metres away, striding toward us and waving his hand to call the boy back to the camp. I expect the boy to stop, but he presses the AK47 against my spine, forces us to quicken our pace. We get to my four wheel drive, which is near the parked convoy of jeeps, and the yelling is getting louder, closer.

I jump into the driver’s seat and the boy gets in the other side, pointing his gun at me. Sissy and Klaas hop in the back.

Make it fast, Sissy urges.

Ja, ja, ja, Klaas adds.

They buckle their seatbelts. I start the engine and immediately my window smashes. The tall soldier is opening fire on us. I reverse and lose the back wheels in a ditch, and I hear them spin unavailingly, and the spittle of bullets against the side door, and then the tyres gain traction and we’re away.

Once we’re out of sight, I move to switch on my GPS and the boy stays my hand.

Where do you want me to go? I ask, and he shuts his eyes in meditation.

He doesn’t know where he’s going, Klaas says.

He saved our lives, Sissy replies quietly.

The boy opens his eyes and yawns. Miles of dead road drift by, and when we reach a fork he indicates that we should take the road to the left.

The other way goes to the city, I suggest, pointing. He sits up straight and places his finger on the trigger; he’ll brook no argument. I say, Okay, okay.

After we’ve been driving for ninety minutes, the boy straightens his fingers. I bring the car to a halt near a village that’s been burned to the ground. There’s no sign of life; only the outlines of the dwellings remain. The boy taps his chest and blinks back tears.

I think he was kidnapped from here, I say. We drive a little farther down the road and then get out of the car. Beside us is a dried up cocoa plantation, the trees forked like dowsing rods that have lost the art of divination.

As we enter the plantation I notice that there’s a camp there, hidden from the road. Tarpaulins are tied to the branches of the cocoa trees and curious people with sunken eyes begin to emerge, to study us as we approach. The boy says something to a middle-aged woman, who nods approvingly. He guides us between rows of trees to one of the campsites near the end. It’s sheltered by a faded tarp and there’s an old man seated there. He’s fanning flies from the face of a woman, an elderly woman, who’s lying on the ground; she has a severely infected wound on her neck and her lips have gone white. The boy puts down his weapon and holds her hand in both of his.

He gazes up at Sissy. Dok-toor? he implores.

The breath flows heavy through her chest. She shakes her head. Sorry, she says. There’s nothing I can do. Désolée.

The news sinks in, and then the boy’s eyebrows rise with hope as he looks to me. Mah-jik, he says, and I begin to sob, and I see that Sissy’s jaw is tight, and Klaas has his head tilted to the sky, and I watch as the boy realises that there’s no such thing.

My attempts to find Maria Zafarelli Strega and The Card Collection by Peter Boyle

September 24, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Peter Boyle lives in Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, most recently Towns in the Great Desert (2013) and Apocrypha (2009) which won the Queensland Premiers Award in 2010. A new book of heteronymous poetry Ghostspeaking is due out next year with Vagabond Press. As a translator of French and Spanish poetry he has had four books published, including Anima (2011) and Tokonoma (2014) both by the Cuban poet José Kozer. He is currently completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney.

My attempts to find Maria Zafarelli Strega

During my partner’s absence in Bhutan I went by myself to Buenos Aires in late May 2014 to find out what I could about Maria Zafarelli Strega. I had read the few poems by her included in the 2011 Antologia de Poesía Rioplatense published by Alianza Editores and wanted to find out more. It seemed she was still alive but where? A friend in the film and theatre business in Buenos Aires had suggested an address but no one there had heard of her. Asking at nightclubs and bars in the Palermo district (a suggestion sparked by correspondence with one of the staff at Alianza) eventually brought a result.

After three nights of useless searching, I met a middle-aged woman who gave her name as Carlotta and immediately sparked up at the mention of Maria Zafarelli Strega’s name. “Of course I knew Maria”, she said. “Buy me another drink and I’ll tell you about her.” The chill from an open side door drifted across us. Up on the stage a rather shrill singer had just finished a round. A noisy group of Spanish tourists had moved on to another nightclub. We settled down at a table in the rear of the bar and she began, “Maria was tough – her life was tough. When she was young she was wealthy, I mean they were all wealthy, her family, but cursed because of that father of hers, a monster if there was ever one. Dead now and anyone might have done it though I’ve got my theories. The only really happy time in her life was the summer holidays with her grandparents in Uruguay – at Punta del Este. She’d talk about the huge drop from her grandparents’ house to the ocean and the din of cicadas. And then, when she was twelve, her grandparents both died. I don’t think she ever got over that shock. She told me too about when she was fourteen and another girl in her class sat on a window ledge to feel the top of her head, found all these bumps and told her she was destined to be a great genius. She never spoke about her father and the terror she and her mother knew because of him – I think she was too frightened ever to talk of that. But, as I said, he’s gone now, found in a lane near Teatro Colon with three knives in him. She disappeared just after that.” She said this last phrase slowly, with a knowing look I thought, but maybe I’m reading too much into it. “Maria told me she was twenty two,” Carlotta went on, “when she finally got free of her father. She’d left secretly for Uruguay, finally ready to become someone else – the only way she could ever be herself. It was tough, her three years in Montevideo. Moving from place to place, half-starved sometimes, looking for cheap places to eat or sleep or escape from it all with alcohol or pills, mostly in Aguada and Villa Muñoz, never that far from the Estación General Artigas – that was when she met Aurélie, the great love of her life. But if you know about Maria you know about Aurélie. I don’t want to talk about Aurélie – if you know how it ended it’s too painful to talk about, and maybe I’m jealous – maybe I hoped somewhere I would be loved like that. But I was never Maria’s type. We got to know each other around the time she and Aurélie broke up, after she’d tried to kill herself with barbiturates. But I don’t want to talk about that.” And at that Carlotta looked worried, confused, downed her drink, swept everything into her handbag, and prepared to leave. “I forgot. I should be somewhere else. Come back tomorrow night and I’ll meet you here. I don’t want to talk any more but you can see the scraps of writing she left me. It’s all I have of hers . . . she never liked photos.” And with that she rose to her feet and, slightly the worse for her several drinks, vanished into the chill late autumn night.

The next day I went back to the bar and waited and waited. At one in the morning there was still no sign of her so I left. I returned the next night and waited. When she hadn’t turned up by twelve thirty I started to leave. We almost collided in the door as Carlotta walked in, making no apologies as if the missed night had not existed. Once we were seated at the same table in the rear of the bar she produced from her handbag a battered dog-eared copy of a French edition of Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval. And, as I opened the front cover, there on the title page was the word “Aurélia” surrounded by hand-drawn stars and a strange shape that on closer inspection was a bolt of lightning severing a pigeon into two parts. Flipping through the book I saw pasted onto various pages small cards covered in what I took to be Maria’s handwriting, at times in a peculiarly disjointed Spanish. Were these really the writings of Maria Zafarelli Strega, the poet born in September 1961 whose whereabouts had been unknown since 1995? Her name was written on the front cover, in a neat miniature script that certainly looked like the one letter of hers I had been shown from the archives at Alianza Editores or, to my mind, like the scrawl on a handful of similar cards later brought out by the owner of a bookshop on Florida, another enthusiast of her poetry whom I met through introductions from my film and theatre friend, Fernando. (When I spoke to the woman at the bookshop a few days later, shortly before flying back to Australia, she gave the impression she was tired of the mysterious disappearance and the endless speculations. She seemed fairly certain that if Maria had disappeared it was because Maria had wanted to disappear. After all, she said, the years of the dictatorship were long gone and there seemed little reason to suspect foul play, and yet?)

Carlotta spoke very little that second night, content to give me time to read the notes and, with her permission, I copied down several of the cards. There were many I barely glanced at, cards with only phone numbers, names of people, individual disjointed words or phrases scrawled in ways I could not decipher. They seemed to point towards a privacy I already felt should be left as privacy. It was Maria’s writings as a poet I was interested in. I already felt I had come as close as I ever would to the real Maria. Her thin volume of poems I have never been able to track down – only 100 copies were produced in 1988 and there have been no re-issues. It is only her poems in the Anthology I have ever been able to find. The fragments I found on the cards I will reproduce (in translation) here. I was struck by the strangeness with which she wrote about herself, almost always, in the third person, not unlike the poem in the Alianza Anthology titled “From the notebooks of Maria Zafarelli Strega”[1]

[1]Only later on the plane back to Sydney did I recall a certain phrase used by Ana, the woman in the bookshop, “Sometimes when people disappear they stay exactly where they are.” It occurred to me that if Maria had changed her name once she could do so again and for a few moments I wondered, but it seemed too crazy a thought, could Carlotta be Maria?

The Card Collection

MZF’s vertiginous reinvention of herself began at age 22 on a sidewalk near the Cementerio del Norte in Montevideo, a cold morning in mid-winter. She no longer had a name – that baggage of evil had fallen into the sea on the ferry from Buenos Aires – and for three days she had wandered the city without a name. That morning she saw it appear all by itself on a shop window frosted over by 6 am chill: Maria Zafarelli Strega. Her name.

She heard only the sounds no one hears.

Poor Maria. If she could just climb out of herself and step down into the other world. Then she could love.

She always dreamed of living in Paris but every time she saved up money to go there someone would break into her flat or strangers would steal it. Even when she had no flat, even when she had no money. She was destined to survive here only or not at all.

It will not be easy to be born under the earth. I have heard plants tell me that.

An ordinary evening in the park near Paseo de Florida. She was invited by two mice to accompany them and she tracked her way across the park into a deserted building, the two mice constantly looking back to make sure she was following. Once she entered the building, they wanted her to go down into their underground burrow and she had to explain patiently that this was not possible. And from the window, just above her, the leaden weight of the sky kept trying to force her to surrender.

For a whole month during the bitterest winter of my memories, in a hovel near the docks I would unfold my map of Paris. The two working girls who let me stay there marveled at the joy I took in my map. I would say out loud, I will write this novel on this street, on this street I will write a poem, at a bar near this corner I will begin my most famous book. And I would imagine making my way through the curves and steep tunnels of lanes leading to Père Lachaise or heading across the Marais. The two girls watched with incredulity as I played with the map. I was at some time the lover of both girls but we did not make love anymore. Our bodies had become too strange, too much a tangled skein of catastrophes. I remember once kissing the long scar that trailed down one girl’s belly. I remember a very drunken dawn when one of them tried to kiss the knot of pain that kept exploding deep under my skull. When they made it back to the room at dawn after all the clients of the afternoon and the night, after working the streets and sometimes being kicked and beaten, they came back to sleep.

Years later I had a much older woman who was my lover. When she left me she said, “I have made this for you. Lay this small sack of herbs over your eyes and you’ll find sleep. Someday you’ll see. When you can’t give love anymore, at least you can give sleep.”

I was destined to survive here only, to invent my name, to discover almost nothing – but that slender thread would be everything.

Self-sabotaging faces in a frosted mirror at dawn.
We were breathless like the wire of the sky.

When the cat came to play with me and I had to explain that I would be dying soon it understood everything straightaway. Everything I could never explain to people was clear straight away. And because words were almost unnecessary, new playful words migrated into my head or suddenly were just there, secreted by some twist in a vein or fold of tissue, puffed up there and then like balloons in the vexing inner chamber of my head. The words were not audible. I simply saw them, like the words of my new name that just wrote themselves out before me one morning. They made me remember things that came from another world.

She was being driven out along the magical bridge of the seven rivers. River after river flowed slowly by under the narrow bench of her carriage while, in front, the driver sat idly flicking a knot of string into the air above the horse that shifted a little forward every few moments. An immense dawn sky stretched in layers of gold and pink interrupted by white wisps of cloud but there were no birds. She wondered why in all the teeming flow of waters there were no birds, and why the silence of the world was so total. “India” she thought to herself, and here she was, being driven towards this secret India devoid of people, this plain of silent rivers and limitless dawn. Each river she crossed was less than a river – it was as if every river had been shredded into thin ribbons of water in an inexhaustible plain. Is this the Ganges or the pampas, she wondered. “Nous voyageons vers l’Orient mais nous sommes en ‘Oriente’”, she said to herself in French, using the old Argentine name for Uruguay, and then, counting each separate stream she was passing, she thought “when the sequence of finite numbers has run out I will wake up at my grandmother’s house in Punta del Este”.

Waiting out the grey wind. Sometimes I wake and I think: it is somewhere. In a small box slipped under the floorboards of the stairs, my blue wish, my breath. What came out of my eyes one night, what hid away.

At a certain time I had to say, No, I will not go any further down the dark road. I will stop just here, under this tree, and write for two days, then I will die. And the two days grew and grew and started to look, almost, like a lifetime.

Along the flat endless road where I walk sheltered from the brisk wind by fragrant burning piles of cow-dung, I stop beside a small one-room house where I catch sight of a tiny mirror dangling from the ceiling. Stepping through the doorway I am suddenly in a corridor of whirling mirrors each turning at different angles at different speeds as if in answer to a multitude of undetectable breezes, a myriad of off-centered climates or micro-whirlwinds that arise only in private deserts. Fearfully I step among them and my face slips into one mirror while my hands, my legs are elsewhere. I am enjoying my fractured loneliness when a woman steps from behind a curtain. She is wearing purple gauze and a conical blue hat that is topped with the sign of the moon. “It is all frightfully simple,” she says. “You just choose.” And her smile slides back and forth between a wide gentleness and a knowing carnivorous intensity. Between the small circling diamonds of glass I freeze and I wonder, Am I she?

Who is it who comes to me, who is almost known, almost visible, almost might leave a glance inside me, a thumb print on a wall, a name, even just a single word, now in extremis as a curtain falls back into place when the breeze stops, something or someone whose gliding past brushes me, glare of the one day so awful, yet needing to be stayed with, this absolute face I yearn for, the longest arc of days, washing of the sea through the window of death, wave on grey wave tilting towards the end of vision, almost slightly, who?

Yesterday all day rats circling round me – first in the rat eyes of the old woman nibbling at the fingers and toes of the children caught in the sugar house, then in the two small sandals worn by the woman eaten by rats. When all that is left is terror and hunger. When we are both the rat with its numbed eyes and the victim unable to escape, a wilted starved body nailed to a bed of collapse. In the distance the rising falling notes of the legendary piper who would lead away our nightmare. A music in the world’s far corner that holds the key to our unsuspected otherness. The part of us already elsewhere.

Feast by Annette Ong

September 24, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Annette Ong studied Creative writing at the University of Western Australia. She is a published writer of fiction, articles and reviews.

Feast

A crow surveys the scene; cocks its head to the side and eyes its kindred circling above. With hunger unabated, their squawking increases as the single crow stands sentinel over its lifeless prey, shielding its form. Claiming ownership, it claws at the lifeless body of a rat; its tail the length of its body. Nudging the rat inches down the footpath, it is hopelessly exposed to the scavengers overhead. Instinctually, it snaps the rat’s already loose neck in its beak and lifts. Airborne for a short distance, it struggles to get proper lift-off. The dead weight weighs it down. The crow tries a second time; desperate to escape, it clutches the rat’s neck tightly in its beak, the still-warm body hanging, a sack of blood, flesh and bone. The crow expands its brilliant wings to full length and this time, manages ascension. Higher, higher, slowly, it flies. Landing softly on the branches of a tall pine tree, hidden by green, it lays the rat’s body down. Its beak has punctured the rat’s neck; a hole the size of a ten cent piece, gapes red and inviting. Sliding its sharp beak into the hollow, it pulls back on tender meat and sinew. Holding the body down with its claw, its beak meets bone. The crow feasts. It takes its fill until the rat’s body is turned inside out. Stepping back, it inspects the carcass. With a belly full, it carefully preens its wings, while the call of its kindred rises from the below the branches.

High above the city streets, shadows lose strength as the sun begins to rise. The crow perched comfortably, listens, as machines churn to life, traffic begins to spill into the streets and the rats… the rats, are awaking.

***

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, the clock flashes and the alarm screeches alive. He springs upright in bed, remembering a news report he’d read in the past, stating the dangers of being jolted awake. Something to do with letting your body wake naturally; a shock to the system is never a good idea they’d said. Listen to your inherent body clock, they’d said. If he did that, he’d never get out of bed. No, maybe a shock to the system was a good idea.

World weary and its only six a.m. Shuffling to the bathroom, he washes his face, brushes his teeth, shaves a little and tugs a comb through what is left of his hair. Inspecting his balding head in the mirror, he is reminded of Moses parting the Red Sea. His remaining hair stands on both sides of an ever-expanding patch of sunburnt scalp. He rubs sunscreen in and hopes it works.

He dresses mechanically; sniffs at yesterday’s shirt and puts it on. He grabs his battered briefcase and shuts the door behind him. On the way down, he meets others. They nod to each other in recognition as they descend the apartment stairs. They don’t know each other’s names but they know each other’s lives. Together they are channeled out into the street, under the growing sunshine, and into the maze.

Entering the fray, he walks with little purpose; defeated by the day already. Bodies on both sides of him, scamper from one side of the footpath to the next. Some whistle down taxis, others natter pointlessly on phones, while some stare down from the grubby windows of passing buses.

Arriving at his desk, he sits down and can’t remember how he even made it there. He can’t recall getting up this morning, let alone entering the office building. Everything is a haze of foggy memories, with no sharp edges, nothing to grasp and hold on to. He suspects it’s like this for most; as he sees the young girl from Accounts sit resignedly in her chair, her eyes blank and lightless, as her computer screen flickers to life.

The cubicles begin to fill. Together, they live and die by the clock. Glazed eyes survey the big hand, willing it to chase the little one faster, faster, faster. The hours pass but he can’t remember what he’s done all day. He has no memory of lunch; however, a half-eaten egg sandwich sits on his desk suggesting he must have got up at some point to buy it from the staff canteen.

When five p.m. comes around, he stands. They all stand. Together, they emerge from tunnels of different hallways to wait for the lift. Those with little patience take the stairs. He takes the stairs. Exiting the building, he heads home. Bodies merge as one, as neighboring buildings expel workers for the day. He stops off at his local supermarket to pick up dinner.

The automatic doors slide open to welcome him. Walking to the Deli counter at the back, he can’t recall how he arrived there. He takes a ticket from the machine: Now Serving 65, it flashes. He fingers his ticket stub; he’s number 75. He waits with the others as they survey the meats on display under glass countertops. A teenage boy wearing a hair net weighs five hundred grams of salami for a woman with a screaming toddler attached to her left leg.

There is a special on roast chickens: five dollars a bird. There’s only one left and it looks like it’s been there all day. The unforgiving glare of fluorescent lighting makes it look even sadder as it spins languidly on the rotisserie. Under hot orange lights, the oil drips from its headless body, resulting in a stagnant river of fat, reflecting its grossness in all its glory. He welcomes the rush of saliva in his mouth, as he desperately eyes the carcass.

He shifts his weight from foot to foot, growing secretly desperate as the numbers flick by and the chicken remains spinning. 71, 72, 73…the seconds feel like minutes and the minutes like hours. New customers join the queue and eye the bird with the same focused intent. He inwardly screams “It’s mine!” as he begins salivating at the thought of tearing into the white meat. They circle the counter, fidgeting with anticipation.

“75!” yells the teenage boy.

He approaches the counter, gives the boy his ticket and grandly asks for the chicken. With the bird safely wrapped in its heat insulated bag and tucked under his arm, he spins on his heel and the scavengers’ part, cowering to the sides as he marches down the aisle.

***

Slamming the door to his flat behind him, he can’t remember making the journey home. Standing in his kitchen, flinging his briefcase to the floor, he opens the sliding doors to his tiny balcony. Rolling up his shirt sleeves, he sits and places the still-warm chicken on a chair in front of him. Ripping open the bag, he tears a drumstick from the lifeless body. Biting down on the flesh sends him into raptures; he feels a gnawing hunger being satiated, albeit temporarily. He pulls off another drumstick and chews down hard. Chicken grease coats his stubby fingers as he splits the body in half; a hollow cavern within. Sucking the bones dry, he flicks them to the street below. There is nothing left but soggy skin.

Belly full, he leans back and closes his eyes. Shadows begin to form shapes on walls and in corners, as the sun loosens its grip on the day. A stale wind wafts from the street below and above him in darkening skies, a murder of crows circle.

Toasting an Honorary Jet and Okay Son-of-a-Bitch by Luke Johnson

September 21, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Luke Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous journals and been shortlisted for such awards as the 2014 Josephine Ulrick Prize. His novella Ringbark was published by Going Down Swinging in 2015 as part of the Longbox series. He lectures in Creative Writing at UTS and UoW.

Toasting an Honorary Jet and Okay Son-of-a-Bitch

What a circus. Old people wearing red-rimmed wayfarer sunglasses and riding scooters, bums getting around in toupees made from real human hair, ugly teenagers dressed in t-shirts that say, so fucking ugly! so fucking what! I stopped in Newtown once before, to look at a sofa bed for sale. The man selling the sofa bed said to me, I can tell you it’s the most comfortable sofa bed I’ve ever screwed on; that’s a fact. It was his guarantee to me against discomfort, I guess. He was wearing a vest and I thought comfort was clearly not his big thing. I looked at him in his vest and asked him, Have you ever let somebody fact check you with that vest on? I tried pronouncing the word the way he had pronounced it, fact, with my nostrils forming a diaeresis over my vowel of a mouth. He flattened out his chin and said, Go back to the north side, arsehole. I said, Don’t be so sore. He went inside his apartment and left the sofa bed on the street out front with only his dog to look after it. I have a suspicion the mutt might have been named William Carlos Williams after the poet William Carlos Williams. At least, it had the initials WCW engraved on the pendant attached to its collar and when I petted it and asked it to tell me something interesting it barked in an offbeat, syncopated sort of way.

That was a year and a half ago. Today it’s, ‘Sir, we are trying to raise money for racism.’ Yes, reluctantly, but sure enough, I’m in Newtown again. Not looking for furniture but to help honour my father with a bronze cast in the foyer of the theatre where they staged his first ever play. Of five children, I’m the only one to have followed in his decrepit, artistic footsteps. My participation is expected. Something in the order of, ‘Yes, he was a tyrant to live with—but didn’t he know how to pull at the heartstrings.’ Maybe even an elaboration on how my own writing is going after that. Provided there’s some genuine interest, of course. Often hard to tell. But I’m getting ahead of myself. See, before any of this conjecture can take place, the man walking in front of me needs to drop a dollar into the girl’s bucket for racism, so that I can slip past without being harassed and the world can become the stupider, albeit slightly more tolerant, place she dreams of. ‘Against racism,’ he corrects her, impatiently putting his hand into his pocket. He’s black, she’s white—he should know, I guess. I’m tempted to ask him if he’s sure. She nods her head enthusiastically and in it goes. And on I go.

Past the red and white barber shop where dad used to get his beard trimmed and neck shaved. Of course, it’s a café now. The kind that expects its patrons to bring their own chairs. Not completely true: there’s a pile of dirty red and white cushions on the footpath out front. Then again, I suppose people who drink their coffees at places like this—places that have their web address built into their clever, lower-case titles, t h e j i t t e r y b a r b e r . c o m—probably don’t have any major prejudices against parking their skinny-jeaned derrieres directly on the asphalt anyway. They can watch to make sure their pushbikes aren’t being stolen while writing in their journals (they write with pencils in this suburb) or working on their MacBook Pros (and process with three-thousand-dollar Macs). What’s the wireless range like? I wonder as I pass. Not really; I know it’s excellent—I can see the simultaneous looks of contentment and annoyance. Actually, what I really can’t help wonder is what happened to the old barber who used to have signed photos of the ’51 and ’53 premiership winning teams on the wall of his shop and who drank cider and listened to the races while he was working and who’d dash out of the shop mid-shave to place a bet at the last minute. He used to think of my dad as an okay son-of-a-bitch too. At least, he never cut open his throat and let him bleed out over the floor after one of his horses got picked at the post. I’d call that an endorsement.

That was then. When even the gutters smelt like they’d run with Brut. Even Brut couldn’t save this suburb now. What it needs now is one big long moving walkway. The kind with glass panels down either side. High glass panels. You could stroll from Darlington to Enmore without being licked by some bohemian’s gypsy dog that way. On this occasion the mutt in question—not at all like the dignified beat-mutt I met the last time I was here—and its owner are standing at the stairwell entrance to one of the street’s many sex shops, two doors down from t h e j i t t e r y b a r b e r . c o m (or is it just the jittery barber, dotcom implied, like PtyLtd?), trying to argue their way in. For a moment I’m not sure which one of them has been refused the entry. ‘Come on, if she was a seeing-eye-dog you’d let her in,’ the mutt’s owner is defending his right to bring his non-seeing-eye-dog shopping for pornography with him. ‘Blind people don’t buy pornography,’ the shop keeper is arguing back, ‘they jerk off by sound, like whales.’ There’s your answer, I tell myself, feeling sorry that the dog should be discriminated against on account of its able-bodied mammalian jerker owner. I consider offering to stand there and hold the leash so the owner can dash upstairs and buy some new DVDs—or magazines, if it’s the sound of pages crinkling that tingles his blowhole. But I don’t want to be late to the theatre do, so I just pant my tongue at the poor mutt and press on.

Jesus, the theatre do. I can see it already. A soiree of handsome actors and actresses milling about with scarves wrapped loosely around their uncollared necks, volunteer drama-academy students playing the roles of waiters and waitresses (black-tie costumes borrowed from the department wardrobe), celebrated choreographers appalled with the pitiful range of vegan alternatives, and one or two professional bar staff—the poor RSA-trained sons-of-bitches—acknowledging shom-payne orders with the tiredest of nods. If there is time to elaborate (returning to an earlier thought, circa paragraph two), then I’ll state now that I intend to bite down on my lip, look them in the collective eye and respond, ‘Difficultly.’ Let them lower their heads then and understand how tough things must be for me—the talented bastard’s untalented son. ‘But we find a way to go on,’ I hear myself filling the awkward after-silence, signalling the end of my dismal blessing. ‘Hard as it is. We find a way, right?’

And between you and me, I must say, it gets harder every day too. The writing, that is. The letting go part was decisively easy. My father let go of us long before we ever had the chance to let go of him. He was an expert in letting go. First he let go of us and then he let go of himself. When it came time to grab hold of something again, the patch of chest covering his heart was about all he could manage. Even the number 0 at the bottom of the phone’s keypad was beyond his reach by that late stage.

A word on my dad, as I pass by a schoolkid with his socks pulled right up to his knees in a way that was squarely unpopular in my heyday: he hated the theatre. My dad was meant to be a famous rugby league player, not a divorced playwright. He trained with the Newtown Jets’ reserve-grade side in 1982. That was the year the first-grade team played their home games in Campbelltown in preparation for the merger. Dad probably would have been a second-rower for the rest of his life if the alliance hadn’t failed and the Jets hadn’t been booted out of the competition. As it was, dad fell in with the theatre crowd and never played rugby league again. This isn’t as dumb as it sounds. Well, it is, but we’re talking about a period when the players still held regular jobs during the week and worked out in public gyms at night and on Saturdays and held diplomatic immunity against DUI charges. My dad worked out at the Newtown gym every night and was the second strongest bench presser in the suburb. (By the time us kids came along he could lower the thing right down onto his sternum plate and shoot it back up with such force it felt like a special gravity ride you paid to go on.) Only one person in the gym could out-lift dad in those early days, and he was tied in with the theatre as a stagehand. That’s where dad started. With Roger. In the day Roger worked as a cop, at night he shifted props. He was a prop cop. Shifting props with the cop: that’s where dad met mum. And then some. (Like I told you, difficultly.)

Meeting mum was one of the stories dad didn’t wait till I was old enough to tell me. ‘Your mum, she was trying to be an actress,’ he liked to start, thinking I’d enjoy the bawdy rhythm he used to inflect it with right from the opening. ‘But the thing is,’ he’d whisper, ‘she was terrible. No matter what it was, they only used to give her background roles—usually playing the part of some piece of scenery, a tree or a rock or a farm animal or something. Then one day I see her waiting backstage, getting ready to go on and I say, “Hey, you’re too good to be playing a tree again. I’m going to write you a lead part. How’d you like that?” “You’re a stagehand,” she says. “Hey, I’m a stagehand like you’re a tree,” I tell her back. “I’ll write you a lead role but you gotta promise you’ll go out with me.” A week later, I finished Willow and when they cast her in the lead role, not only did she go out with me but she gave me a suckjob on the first date. Midway through she stopped and looked up and said, “I can do it like a tree if you want?” I just looked at her without saying anything and she went back to it, waving her arms about and making whooshing sounds as she did.’

Less than half a block from the theatre I come across dad’s old pub. This was where he used to go after each performance. Often he wouldn’t even bother with the show, he’d come here and get drunk instead and threaten to kill himself by driving his car across to the Sydney Football Stadium without stopping at a single set of lights regardless of the colour. This feat was one he famously achieved during his internship with the Jets. It’s what made him a club legend without having ever even sat on the reserve bench for a first-grade game. Another time he reversed his car all the way to the top of an eight-storey parking garage. They were set to inaugurate him for this. Then the collapse.

I decide to stop in for a drink. I tell myself it will help me with those questions which require an answer beyond difficultly, or the condolences which come in the form of tedious stories, beginning, ‘You know, I never told anyone this, but it was a performance of The Brave they put on at our university which convinced me to drop out of my degree in the final year and pursue fulltime acting…’ ‘You don’t say?’ ‘See, arts-law was the dream my parents had for me, not the dream I had for me.’ ‘What about your student loan debt?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Never mind. How about swooshing your arms like tree?’

What shall I drink to? I ask myself, taking a seat at the bar. Besides me there’s only two other people in this hotel. One’s a permanent shadow on the wall of the poker machine room, the other’s the bartender. Maybe it’s too early to expect a crowd. On the north side anything before eleven-thirty p.m. is too early. I thought this was the suburb of premature crowds. What about those pagans I crossed coming out of the train station? Camped out with their sleeping bags like dedicated rock fans. Their toupees might have been made from the hair of the prophet Kurt Cobain, the way they shone up at me. The girl trying to raise money for racism could have learned a great deal from the way they went about their business too: head shamefully down, letting the sign do the talking. ‘To dad,’ I say, charging my glass.

After four beers and four toasts I’m just about ready to front the scene awaiting me, when a very unexpected thing happens. Russell Crowe comes into the bar. I know it’s him straight off because tucked into the front of his tracksuit pants, with the flap that contains his licence and Medicare card hanging visibly over the drawstring crotch area, is a South Sydney Rabbitohs wallet. That is, a bright-green Velcro wallet with a big Rabbitohs emblem on its front and red hemming. Before I can say anything the son-of-a-bitch comes right up to where I’m sitting and orders himself a beer. He doesn’t just order himself a beer, he leans over the bar and pours himself one. A stout. At first he drinks from his cupped hand the way we used to drink water from the taps when we were down at the netball courts kicking the soccer ball around. When he’s taken his fill that way he grabs one of the dirty glasses sitting on the sink top—could even be one of my lager glasses—behind the bar and fills it, leaving no room for head. He doesn’t sit down to drink either, but stands with his hairy forearms soaking the spilt beer back out of the soggy bar mats.

‘What’s your story, morning glory?’ he says to me.

‘My dad used to play reserve grade for the Jets,’ I say.

‘Then your dad’s a bloody legend,’ Russell says back.

‘My dad’s dead.’

‘Yeah, cheers to that,’ Russell nods his head, decent son-of-a-bitch that he is.

Geometry and Geography by Marion Campbell

April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Marion May Campbell is a Melbourne writer who currently teaches in Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University. Her latest work of fiction is the short novel about failed revolutionaries konkretion (UWAP 2013). ‘Geometry & Geography’ is from a work-in-progress.

​

Geometry and Geography

Little sister is doing a maths assignment on the card table under the salty-louvred window in the Shoalwater Bay shack they are renting. There is the good feel of sand on linoleum underfoot. No one cares about housework here. One clean sweep is all. She’ll do the ten Euclid problems then get ready for Saturday arvo dancing classes — shave legs, shampoo hair to squeaky clean, since this is before conditioner, draw up silky stockings, trying not to ladder them with chewed fingernails, clipping each stocking with the rubberised suspender buttons, shimmy into the tight green and black hound’s tooth skirt and grey cashmere jumper. Slip into the patent leather shoes with the squashed heels. On the first floor Dancing Studio she and big sister will be lined up with the others, teased and bouffed and sprayed, along the studio wall for the boys, who’ll skid across the polished boards to choose their partners for the Pride of Erin. Will the tidal wave part around them, leaving them there? The word wallflower hovers. Oh the Red Sea dividing. Red is the blood that flows from me. Let the boy-wave not divide like the Red Sea around us, and leave us stranded like two cooling lumps of pumice stone. But let me not be chosen ahead of her. Then I’ll have to drag her sorrow, ball-and-chain. The mother has her hand cupped over the speaker of the receiver and says something to the blue-eyed grandmother, a tiny wrinkled and painted doll sunk in the depths of the cane armchair. Voice broken, the mother coughs. The big sister asks hoarse, What, what?

The scream comes from another world. With its savage ripping force it skins her. She sees herself blue, blood pulsing under the moon sheen, a skinned rabbit. That voice is a killer wind. She dares not look. She’s not where her big sister is. She cannot be. That space is always taken.  She doesn’t know what her sister knows. She’ll never know what her sister knows. She rents the space of not knowing. I still rent the space of not knowing. The scream rends the space of not knowing.

There’s only the scream in the room, all the air’s stolen by it. It’s a tearing of the voice box and there’s no stop to it, like a line with arrows on either end, it might be infinite. It’s a destruction of wave harmonics.

The dead father is made alive out of myths.

When he’s two the dead father’s Enchanted Mother lets him take apart the Mantle Clock, Mainwheel, Mainspring, Wheel Train, gears serially undone, the whole Escapement: Escape Wheel, Pallet Fork, Balance Spring and Balance Wheel, until wall-to-wall, the lounge room floor is Time dismantled. Endless space now between the tick and the… At two mind you, the mother on the phone has said. The younger daughter thinks that to dismantle is not to mantle. Now that’s all he is: a photo of a uniformed moustached head on the mantle. The dead father is the first on his block to make a crystal radio set and he makes them for the neighbours as well. This is around 1927 in his twelfth year, common enough, since they were widespread, even in WWI. But it’s from these he gets hooked on microwaves and condensers. It’s not far to radar and beyond. Just waves big and small.

In this family they are good at making up genius boy children. The younger sister will have a boy child who speaks in clear crisp words at nine months and at ten months in telegraphic sentences — uzza icecweam as they glide past a Peters Ice Cream sign on a Deli. Maybe it’s because myths make magnetic spaces. Events are pulled to them. The grandmother says, Isn’t that a-mazing, as the Toyota Corolla glides under a freeway pedestrian overpass. Under the next pedestrian overpass from the elevated safety seat at the back the Baby Genius voice pronounces, Uzza mazing. With these enchanting boys it’s serial mazing.

The two sisters in the beach house enchant no one. They understand that they are girls. The space of the dead father draws the big sister, who remembers everything about him, indelibly out of her own life. Only the little sister can have her own life. She knows she can rent the father if she wants because he has retreated and she can make him over for herself and from faded bits and pieces she can borrow him when she wants.

From behind the dunes through the house the jade waves pound. The boom, the crack, the boom. And the gorgeous salt sea-weedy smell rises to fight that ripping scream. There’s been a fire, the mother says, re-cradling the receiver, threading the cord through her fingers, lighting a Capstan cigarette.

Little sister has just had her first period. It’s over now. Outside, away from them, she slips her undies off on the warm weathered boards of the front porch, safe behind the unpruned tee-tree hedge. The wood presses into her bare skin. Wood prints into her. Things press and impress and your body speaks back. The sun draws on her sex. She thinks it drawls. The sun drawls on me, speaks intense and slow. It works on me, like that stuff for wounds that pulls out the gunk, like what is it, like Magma Plasm. Her young sex milkily responds. What is this, what is this, it says.  It is sweet salty liquid almond speech.  The world drawls on you. You whisper back.

Even when mother sister grandmother are sucked into the black sinkhole of the telephone—there’s been a fire; it’s all gone—you can let the sun draw on your body. The sun pulls like a poultice. She reads her geography text. She has a state exam approaching. Study is the sun’s drawl, letter-by-letter, map-by-map. The sense of sun and the drawn Earth orbiting. Geography and geometry are what Egyptians did as part of sun worship — earth drawing and measuring. She reads Huddersfield and Halifax. She has her memory tricks. She gives her own names to them. Her body drawls back its slow language. Shuddersfield and Whollyflex. The industries. Smelting. The likelihood of what goes with what —where there’s coal, there’ll be smelting. Steel. Summat like that. Where there’s moock there’s brass, her grandma says her Scouse great grandma used to say. Coals to Newcastle. The weather, the climate and geography. Sun- struck daughter of a man who would’ve made it rain. The rainmaker father is dead and dead again.

So much later the Midlands and the North Country will carry their charge back to this scene. Oh the smelting. She will top the state in Geography.

Sooner she’ll learn the microclimates of a lover’s body. The quite non-tristes tropiques.

Now from the fibro shack perched on the low dune over the road the daggy burred Border Collie comes and sniffs her legs, licks the salt. What’s happening here, whatcha been up to, the moist nose reads her. Dusty Springfield is singing on the leather-clad transistor, I only want to be with you. The younger sister and the Border Collie are you for now, for Dusty’s voice.

The scream has died in the dunes. All their stuff was in the removalists’ storage shed. Is in another form. Chemical change is irreversible. But not for the younger sister. She can reverse. Most of it’s gone. They will be repeating in their broken voices over and over. Gone gone. She hates their voiced grief.  She sees with satisfaction the great gothic span of twisted metal hangars above the ocean of ashes punctuated by small heaps of foul reeking globular nothing.

The mother’s voice is blank. What this means is — all the photos and pictures and furniture from when he was alive are gone. The scarf, the sister’s voice is a roar of stolen air, exiting. Like the scream of the bushfire. Maybe her sister is a fury. A fate. One of those Erinnyes. She had one thing that was the father’s — the Air Force scarf, not a uniform scarf, but in the deep grey blue wool, that someone, maybe one of those endless volunteers knitted for one of the NZAF boys, in thunder blue basket weave stitch. The bigger sister’s relic from the father gone — he to sea, now the scarf to fire. This burning of all his things, of the antiques he chose, the books he’d read or meant to read, incinerated in the cremation he never had. Of course the mother will not jump in the two-toned, olive and apple-green finned Morris Major Elite to inspect what remains, as the Storage Management invites her to do— the sprinklers saved some things, you are welcome to inspect, the mother says they said.

There’s never been a body to identify, so why would she run to contemplate the remnants of thingsthingsthings? The photos would’ve burnt first, she says, lighting another cigarette. No I couldn’t bear to rake through the wreckage. The older sister howls and howls until the younger one slinks off again to the dunes where the old Border Collie will follow her. They’ll sit together and watch the swollen body of the ocean roll and break. This loud grief will always upstage her, until she becomes a subtle actress, or so she thinks.

And the younger sister, callous, letting the sun milk her like crazy, sets her mind free to do geometry and geography, or daydream the German teacher taking her in her arms, meine schöne meine Liebe, or even the boys’ eyes lighting up as they skid across the dance floor to choose her. The ones with oily rock n roll quiffs, more than shiny Beatles’ mops, the rebel boys in tight black jeans and winklepickers are the ones she wills to notice her. She’ll tease her hair into the biggest beehive. Take that, Pride of Erin.

The Sky Had Turned Pale Green by Emily O’Grady

April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Emily O’Grady is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology, where she won the 2012 Undergraduate, and the 2013 Postgraduate Writing Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, and Award Winning Australian Writing.
 
 

The Sky Had Turned Pale Green

When the drama captain dived into a shallow swimming pool in my final year of school the chaplain held a vigil in the chapel every lunch break. Each afternoon we gathered around a battery operated candle on the teal carpet in a blobby oval, offering significant memories while eating toasted sandwiches from the tuckshop and passing around a packet of Minties or Snakes. Each session began with two minutes of silent reflection and a meditative Angelus. When it was my turn to contribute I pretended I was too distraught to speak.

The vigils came to an end when she woke as a quadriplegic twelve days afterthe fall. The administration organised a free dress day to raise money for her family to renovate their bathroom, and renamed the end of year Cabaret in her honour. On graduation her parents dressed her in the school tracksuit and styled her short hair into a braided stump for the occasion. No one had thought of a ramp to get her on the stage so she sat by the bottom of the stairs—her parents gripping her shoulders—while a scrolled diploma tied with a purple ribbon was placed in her lap and subsequently rolled onto the floor. I couldn’t tell if the mood was one of mourning or celebration. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and I remember looking at her socked feet and thinking of sleeping lambs.

Bus 864F by Irma Gold

April 2, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Irma Gold is an award-winning writer and editor. Her short fiction has been widely published in literary journals, including Meanjin, Island, Review of Australian Fiction and Going Down Swinging, and in anthologies, most recently in Australian Love Stories, edited by Cate Kennedy. Her critically acclaimed debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward, was shortlisted for SPN’s inaugural Most Underrated Book Award and won her a Canberra Critics Circle Award for Literature. Irma is also the author of three children’s picture books, and the editor of a number of anthologies, including The Invisible Thread, an official publication of the National Year of Reading 2012 and the Centenary of Canberra 2013. Irma is Convener of Editing at the University of Canberra. She recently received a special one-off award for Outstanding Service to Writing and Publishing in the ACT and Region.

Bus 864F

When Celia got on at Currie Street, he was already there. She didn’t notice him at first, but then he wasn’t swearing right off the bat.

Before the bus filled up, she quickly ate the salad she hadn’t finished on her lunchbreak. Just mushrooms and rocket. All that had been left in the crisper. She’d forgotten dressing. It tasted awful. But she felt guilty about the Flake she’d crammed in at the bus stop.

Celia opened the novel she was reading. She liked to read in bed at night but she needed daylight for this book or she’d have nightmares. By Pultney Street all the seats were taken, except for one next to a man in his sixties who sat on the aisle. He wore a gold watch so yellow it was clearly a fake, and he kept checking it. As the bus lurched away from the kerb he began muttering, loud enough to be heard just above the engine. ‘Fucking shitting cunt of a world. Fucking shitting cunt.’

It was the C word that made Celia look up from her novel. She wasn’t sure at first which mouth it had come from. But he was still going, his face expressionless. ‘Fucking shitting cunt of a world.’ He looked straight ahead. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, his legs opened wide.

Celia was sitting diagonally behind him, up against the window. She noticed the ingrained dirt on his denim jeans, the long grey hairs on the back of his neck. He ran on like a soundtrack. Two teenage boys smirked.

Celia tried to concentrate on her novel but she kept treading over the same sentences.

‘Shut up, Mister,’ one of the boys said eventually. ‘Seriously.’

The man paused, looked at his watch, pulled out a bus timetable.

The boy flicked a wave of hair, turned to his mate. ‘So, you know sugar sachets, right?’ he was saying. ‘This guy that invented them spent, like, forever, working out how to make it so that you could, like, bend it in the middle and, you know, open it that way.’

The man folded his arms across his chest again and took up his mantra. ‘Fucking shitting cunt of a world.’

‘Seriously, Mister,’ the boy said. ‘Give it a rest.’

Celia wanted to tell the cocky boy to shut up himself. What if this man had a gun? What if the boy pushed him over the edge and he turned it on the passengers? Celia wondered if she’d have time to get on the floor. Maybe if he shot the woman next to her first, her dead body would fall on Celia and Celia could just wait it out, until it was safe. The woman was small but wide with a large handbag in her lap. Celia wondered how long she could take the weight.

The man kept going and the boy rolled his eyes at his friend. ‘Anyways,’ he continued. ‘In the end the guy – this inventor dude – topped himself. Cause no one appreciated his genius.’

‘For real?’ Celia heard the friend say.

People were pretending not to hear the man. ‘Fucking shitting cunt.’ Celia kept sneaking sideways glances. If something happened and they needed to put together a profile for the police she’d need to remember every detail. His eyebrows were blowsy and his cheeks were covered in red patches, old scars. His nails were neatly trimmed. He had a small paunch. His grey polo T-shirt was buttoned up to the throat. She’d heard that it was remarkable how accurate artists’ depictions could be from description alone. That sometimes seeing their pencilled perpetrator made victims cry.

At Aldgate the teenagers got off. As the bus pulled away they turned to wave slowly at the man, provocatively. He saw them. The expression on his face was unbending. Idiots, Celia thought. They were marked now.

The bus passed a sloping hill full of alpacas and thundered along towards Hahndorf, so fast she thought of the movie Speed. If the bus veered off on the corner and ended up on its nose, would she survive? She was near the back so perhaps all the bodies in front would give her a soft landing. Or perhaps the sheer force of propulsion would hurtle her over them all and into glass. Best not to think about it.

The soundtrack had stopped. This was almost more unsettling. They were already at stop 44 and the man still hadn’t got off. She didn’t want to get off before him. What if he followed her? What if he beat her to death with a rock? On the weekend she had been reading Raymond Carver.

But then a pretty young thing with red hair and tiny diamonds in her ears got on and Celia felt a terrible kind of relief. The man looked at the girl as she settled into a seat, assessed her, Celia felt. For once Celia was grateful for her mid-forties invisibility.

The man looked at his watch again, and then again only seconds later. Celia had abandoned all pretence of her novel.

In Hahndorf he pressed the button and instead of getting off at the door closest to him he walked to the front. Celia thought, Is this when he pulls out the gun? But then she heard him complain to the driver. They were ninety seconds behind schedule, he said. He would be taking this matter up with Adelaide Metro, he said. His words were crisp.

As the bus pulled away the man stood in front of a popular hotel, all fake old-fashioned brick and grape vines. And Celia thought, Perhaps he’s tourist hunting.

He had foolishly left his timetable behind. She took it. It would have his fingerprints on it.

 ***

‘There was a man on the bus yesterday.’

Keith had the paper open to the crossword, a Saturday ritual. ‘Not that guy from the hills? The one that stinks?’

‘No.’

‘Cause apparently he’s some genius artist. Real famous. Or that’s what Susie reckons anyway. But honestly, I don’t think the guy’s ever washed. He sat next to me the other day and I had to breathe through my mouth.’

Celia picked up a vase from the table. A browned petal stuck to its rim. She thought about cleaning it, then put it back down.

‘If that’s genius I don’t want a bar of it.’ Keith looked at her over the rim of his glasses, his pencil hovering. ‘So who then?’

‘No one in particular. He was unwell.’

‘Didn’t vomit, did he?’

‘Nothing like that,’ she said. Keith turned back to his crossword.

‘Another word for chimera? Five letters?’

‘He wasn’t quite right in the head. I thought he might be psychotic. You know, the kind that kills young girls.’

Keith snorted. ‘How’d you figure that?’

‘Dream,’ she said.

‘So it is.’ Keith pencilled it in.

‘Where’s the rest of the paper?’ she said. ‘You haven’t binned it already?’

‘Over there,’ he thumbed. ‘Maybe your psycho’s in it.’

Celia half expected Keith to be right, but there were no local rapes or murders. Or none that had been reported anyway.

 ***

It was nine days before she saw him again, after work on the homeward bound route. For a moment her heart stood still.

He sat on the aisle again, checking his watch every few minutes. His knee joggled up and down. She hadn’t noticed that last time, perhaps he had been doing it but she hadn’t noticed. She put her book aside to focus better. In case her testimony was needed. She was reading Rankin now and it made her realise that people just didn’t pay attention to what was happening around them. Meanwhile these girls were disappearing, being murdered. What if this man was a Rankin imitator, right here on Bus 864F, and she was the only one to notice him, really notice him. She’d heard there were such things. In an interview the author had admitted as much.

He wasn’t swearing this time. His lips were moving but there was no sound. He was wearing a pale blue polo T-shirt, the colour of a starling’s egg, also buttoned up to the throat. She considered repeating this phrase to a police officer. While she sat in a room empty but for a desk, framed by a single spotlight. It was the colour of a starling’s egg, she would say, folding her hands neatly in her lap. They would record her, of course. And when the case reached the courts her words would be read back to the jury. Or perhaps she would have to testify. She saw herself in a sleek maroon two-piece suit, the pencil skirt falling to just below the knee. She would wear her glasses, even though she only needed them for reading.

He stood and Celia realised with a jolt that she had not been monitoring him at all. He swayed and stumbled against the movement of the bus, grabbed onto a rail. For a moment he looked just like any frail elderly man.

He got off at stop 24A this time, just after the freeway. She couldn’t work out why.

 ***

Their dining table was red laminex, a gift from the previous renters. Celia loathed it, but nothing in the house was hers. Sometimes she stabbed the underside of the table with her fork. It made her feel better.

Tonight it was Keith’s turn to make dinner and he’d prepared one of his five standards, bangers and mash. Celia hated bangers and mash, especially his bangers and mash. The sausages were always overcooked, black and crusty. And the mash was from a packet, pasty reconstituted stuff.

‘Could you pass the salt?’ she asked. She didn’t need the salt. Sometimes she spoke just to pierce the silence.

Keith managed to pick up the shaker and pass it to her without his eyes leaving his book. Another biography, he was always reading biographies. She had hoped for a word, a brief moment of eye contact at the very least.

With her fingers she scraped together a mound of mash, watching to see if Keith would notice. She rolled it into a perfect golf ball, held it poised in the air.

Keith turned a page. Celia pressed the ball onto the underside of the table.

‘You done with the salt?’ Keith said. He looked up and Celia smiled.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’ She wiped her hand on her skirt and passed him the salt.

She considered telling him about her most recent encounter, asking Keith for his thoughts on why the man had got off at 24A. But she decided against it, he wouldn’t give the issue due consideration. Everything rested on her.

***

On her lunchbreak Celia bought a spiral notebook with a hard plastic cover. She recorded all the facts, folded the timetable and tucked it in the back. During staff meetings she spent her time thinking about the man. Actually, she spent most of her time at work thinking about him. Processing applications for provider numbers wasn’t exactly mentally challenging. She took receipt of the scanned form, entered the data, printed off a copy, put it in the delegate’s in-tray, and repeated the process until knock-off time. It was so mundane that one of her work mates had taken to watching old episodes of Black Books while he worked. He was up to season three.

She had to wait a week before the man boarded the 864F again. It was a Tuesday, 5.47 pm. Everyone had that work-weary look, the knowledge that there were still three more days of drudgery and commuting ahead. And then suddenly there he was, up the front of the bus, too far away. He was wearing a business shirt this time. She would describe it as ivory. She recorded these facts in her notebook.

A ninety per cent chance of rain had been predicted. Nothing yet, but the bus was headed towards a bank of swollen clouds, their undersides bruised purple.

They entered a tunnel. The man looked over his shoulder, straight at her, Celia was sure. The faint orange light accentuated brutal features. Celia shrank in her seat. Was he onto her? He looked away. No, he couldn’t be. She’d been so careful.

Out the other side of the tunnel it began to rain in fat spatters. Within minutes the bus sounded like a killing field. At Crafters a passenger behind the man got off and Celia crept up the aisle to take her seat. Now she could hear anything he said above the noise. Examining him she immediately observed something of concern and congratulated herself on moving closer. She wrote in her notebook, carefully shielding it with her left hand should he turn around: 6.18 pm, long scratch on the back of neck commensurate with a fingernail. Possible sign of struggle.

A breathless woman climbed aboard and made to sit in the empty seat beside the man. He held up his palm. ‘It’s taken,’ he said. ‘You can’t sit there.’

The woman stood suspended for a moment, damp curls at her forehead, too many shopping bags clutched against her waist. Then she shrugged, moved up the aisle and braced herself against a pole. Celia thought about standing for the woman, but they were about the same age. And anyway, Celia was on duty. A minute later he pressed the button. He was getting off at stop 25, different again. What was he playing at?

The bus pulled sharply up to the curb and he rose to disembark. In a moment of clarity Celia thrust the notebook into her pocket, grabbed her bag and followed him off the bus. The rain was falling in greasy sheets but Celia paid it no heed. He walked quickly, head down, not looking back once. Celia kept pace.

Dusk was descending quickly. Up ahead a thin milky fog crept onto the road. Celia pushed her hands into her pockets, ran her thumbnail along the spine of her notebook. She kept just the right distance, her heart hammering. He turned a corner, and when she turned it herself, the space between them had narrowed. Suddenly he stopped. She would have him soon.