Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  ‘The girls here are interested in what we’re doing. In the ASCI and the CLA in Blacktown.’ Dad cleared his throat. ‘And here, with plans for the new cryonics facility.’

  Sadie looked at me, like, Interested is a bit strong.

  Dad used to talk about the footy, about that bastard Geoff Toovey. We’d go to the drive-thru at the Criterion every second Friday night and I’d help Dad load a carton of stubbies into the boot, and he’d exchange a couple of sentences with the guy on shift about that arsehole Des Hasler too. I couldn’t imagine Dad saying bastard or arsehole now.

  ‘Are you a real doctor?’ I asked Justin. He pursed his lips and jerked his thumb up to a frame on the wall behind him.

  Dad said, ‘There are all different types of doctors, Natalie.’

  Justin held his hands up. ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without some serious formal qualifications. Not possible.’ He scoffed. ‘So you’re interested in what your dad is doing?’

  I told him it sounded like a bit of a joke.

  Justin didn’t blink. ‘More girls than guys have undertaken the procedure, did you know that? Globally speaking.’

  Sadie looked up at the Players Hold All The Cards towel, her expression strange. ‘So cryogenics—’

  ‘Cryonics,’ Justin corrected.

  ‘—is where you freeze a body so the person doesn’t die?’

  Over on his armchair, Dad and his smile swelled. ‘Bit more complicated than that. But, yes, under certain conditions the brain and other cells are able to be shut down and the decaying can be reversed. Later on, not too far down the track, we believe technology will be so advanced that parts of us can be revived.’

  ‘But you’ll be all alone,’ I said. I imagined heavy steel doors hissing open and bodies defrosting, stretching, blinking. ‘How much does it cost?’

  I wondered when our money would run out. I knew Juniper’s teeth needed fixing and she’d go nuts without her gymnastics lessons.

  Justin steepled his hands. ‘Look, Natalie, some people care about sports cars and satellite dishes and jet skis. What Gary and I and a bunch of people in the ASCI and the CLA care about is eternal life. We want to return to a world where “dead” doesn’t technically mean “dead”, and we can pick up where we left off.’ He opened his palm out towards the things in his lounge room. The cat returned. Its claws went to work on Justin’s armchair fabric.

  He addressed Sadie and me on the couch. ‘You girls, Gary, want a drink? Beer? Whatever you want – I’ve got, like, some cans of Fanta in the fridge. Sadie – did I say that right? How about I show you something in the freezer.’ He paused. ‘And, no, it isn’t a body.’

  Dad chuckled.

  I nodded when Sadie suggested getting me a drink too, and she followed Justin into the kitchen.

  Silence. ‘Dad?’ I pleaded with him non-specifically. I’d figured out that Dr Justin Berryhill wasn’t likely to offer him a brilliant new job with a BMW and a pay rise.

  Dad shushed me gently. ‘Years ago we didn’t think hand and face transplants were possible.’

  The fact that Dad retained bits of information like this felt perverse. I mouthed, Let’s go. I wanted to mouth, Des Hasler. Remember?

  I heard Sadie shriek. ‘Get your hands off me.’

  Dad and I sat up. I beat him to the kitchen. Justin stood beside a kitchen chair, his hands up high. Sadie’s hip was keeping the fridge door open.

  ‘What happened?’ Dad was shaking.

  ‘I was just getting the girls a Fanta …’ Justin pointed to two orange cans on the bench behind him. ‘And I went to show her the scientific thermometer I keep in the freezer by way of explanation about—’

  ‘And you grabbed me.’

  ‘I did not.’

  Sadie looked at me. ‘He grabbed me. He touched my boobs.’

  Dad was upset but I knew it wasn’t just about this. I could see he was thinking hard and it was something like, Can’t anything just be good?

  Justin pursed his lips and shook his head. His face reddened. His eyes were small and dark and wet. ‘No way. No fucking way.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dad said, clapping his hands together the way Mum did to stop ugly things getting out. ‘We should probably go anyway. Sadie, you all right? Okay, then.’

  I held her arm at the elbow. The open fridge door began to beep. None of us went to move Sadie out of the way.

  Justin grabbed a Fanta can and waggled it like evidence. ‘Christ, Gary. That wasn’t anything. You should have told me you were bringing other people.’

  Dad let Sadie and me walk in front of him down the stairs. Our shoes were loud and fast on the thin carpet.

  ‘See you soon, Justin,’ Dad said at the door. ‘Maybe at the thing at Leanne’s place.’

  ‘Gary—’

  ‘It’s fine. Thanks, Justin. Bye.’

  Dad let himself into the car first. After a few seconds, he leant over, looking old. He unlocked our doors, we buckled ourselves in and he drove. We would need to make a stop for the bread and milk Mum was expecting.

  ‘Sadie,’ I said from the front seat. ‘Tell Dad how you make things up like that all the time at school.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Natalie!’ Dad said.

  ‘Admit it.’ I turned around and made eye contact. ‘You were out of the room for ten seconds.’

  Sadie sat with her arms folded. Lights from Justin’s neighbourhood – a neon 7-Eleven, a do-it-yourself car wash, a laundromat – quivered over her face.

  I hissed, ‘Tell him.’

  Dad tapped the wheel. ‘The important thing is that everyone is fine and you got to see where I go to meetings. And, Natalie, maybe it will help you and your mother understand my wishes.’

  Mrs Collett drove up on Saturday. On a day trip to one of the Pacific islands, she’d bought dolphin-shaped salt and pepper shakers for Mum and wooden hibiscus brooches for Juniper and me. She held out a stubby cooler.

  ‘Gary around?’

  Mum nudged me forward. ‘I’ll take it to him,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you for having me,’ Sadie said. Our first words to each other for days.

  Mrs Collett touched the sunburn on her nose. ‘Yes, thank you very much. Even when you’re at different schools, we’ll still make the effort, won’t we? Your turn at ours next, hey, Nattie?’

  As sharp as a wet sting to my skin. No way.

  Once Sadie had gone, I took off for the back of the house, kicking past the clothesline, round to the side of Dad’s shed. I tossed the stubby cooler up onto the roof, but it bounced down to the grass. I stood panting. Go for it, Sadie, I thought. Go off and get pregnant, or get popular, at your rubbish high school where no one wears the same shoes and everyone drops out anyway. My uniform – the woollen forest-green dress with the tartan collar – was hanging in my wardrobe. I didn’t have to see Sadie again, at all. Mum and Dad wouldn’t notice either way.

  *

  I promise Mum and Juniper that I’ll be back, my mind already shifting to the rest of the school fete plotted out in bright plastic and wide swinging skeleton metal on the bottom oval of the primary school that, five years ago, used to be mine. Juniper is fourteen now and gossipy and smart, taut and focused. As her older sister, I’m mostly irrelevant. Juniper wants a little sack of White Christmas to eat before she takes to the stage with the other cheerleaders. Mum has tried telling her that this will likely make her feel sick in her tight leotard, already blossoming with sweat beneath her armpits, only minutes to go before her club’s routine to ‘I Love Rock ’n Roll’. But she refuses to listen.

  Mum is crouched over. She plucks at Juniper’s stockinged legs.

  ‘There’s a bee,’ Juniper is saying.

  ‘Do you have to be so dramatic?’ Mum says. ‘There’s no bee.’

  ‘It’s a bee. Get it out.’


  ‘You’re not getting anything to eat and there’s no way anything got into your stocking.’

  Down on the oval, past the heavy dip of the yellow slide where the operator is handing out hessian sacks, Sadie and I once buried a shoebox full of treasures from the depths of our fish tanks, treasures from the dregs of her mother’s makeup bag, from Dad’s jars of spark-plugs and oily washers. Into the box I’d placed wooden dolly pegs, novelties that Mum preferred even though they were no longer practical. Sadie and I collected it all when we were only seven or eight, when we first became friends. I itch to see the trove again, but part of me doubts the box exists. I’m buoyed by the idea that I could have made the whole thing up. Not just the miniature fluorescent castle that my goldfish looped through and over, but the shoebox itself, and the wet soil and the holes in the ground that Sadie and I gouged out with spoons. If I’d made it up, I wanted to know, how did that idea start? Where did it come from? Why would I do that?

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I tell them. Mum shades her eyes with her hand. She smiles at me.

  The sky is blue and clear. Juniper worried about the weather for the fete all week, just about setting herself alight with panic, Mum had said while she twisted threads of elastic through her glittery braid. On the oval a lamb at the petting zoo bleats brokenly. A woman’s voice calls out, Never took me hunting! A father lifts a baby onto his shoulders.

  Then, at the top of the concrete steps, I see her. I pretend I don’t.

  ‘Natalie.’

  I toss my head and try to look confused. The sun is in my eyes. I let my eyes go past her.

  ‘Oh!’ I say. ‘Hi.’

  We give each other a dinky little hug. Everyone at my school does this at the beginning and end of breaks, and to say goodbye at the end of class. The teachers had a staff meeting about it, apparently, about the messages it sends about inclusion and exclusion among teenage girls, and the time and energy it sucks out of our brain space.

  ‘Can’t believe how long it’s been since we went here.’ I swallow hard and Sadie doesn’t answer, almost as if she hasn’t heard. We haven’t been at school together since Mr Jacobson’s class in Grade 7.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Sadie finally says, ‘that teacher who used to be a singer and then quit teaching and went to Antarctica? She liked a poem I wrote once. She used to say nice things and make everyone feel good, and then she left to be a scientist.’

  I nod. ‘But surely that was a lie. The Antarctica bit, I mean.’

  Sadie grips herself, just above the elbows. Five years on and she is beautiful and tall. Her breasts are even bigger now. She was the first to get them in primary school. The other girls – a netball-skirted group of friends and tormentors – harassed her every day, lurking behind her to find evidence of a bra through her school shirt.

  She reaches into a paper bag looped around her wrist, pops a lolly into her mouth and accordions the wrapper with her hands. She has big square fingernails painted red.

  ‘Do you like any of your high school teachers?’ I ask. ‘Any good ones?’ I sound like an uncle at a barbecue.

  ‘I guess,’ she says. ‘That’s a weird question.’ Sadie takes her phone from her pocket and rubs it down the front of her skirt. ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘A fair bit, actually.’ I start to tell her things. I move myself up a high school social bracket, invent a Grade 12 party that was pretty chill, but then turned wild. I lie and say that the cops showed up, three of them storming through the lounge room, showing mercy by the end, one even accepting a serve of nachos in a plastic bowl as a peace offering. I make up an art prize, hint that I might win, paint myself into the role of a deliberate and admired outcast at my expensive, progressive single-sex high school for girls who want to be oncologists and lawyers.

  ‘Mum’s boyfriend is a cop,’ Sadie says. ‘I don’t think that happens. With the nachos, I mean.’

  I shrug, searching the oval. I find the father with the baby on his shoulders stitching his way across the green grass. ‘I guess the cop who came to the party wasn’t your mum’s boyfriend.’

  Sadie rolls her eyes. I wish there was someplace to lean on, but Sadie’s claimed the railing. I realise I haven’t had any water since breakfast and the forecast said thirty degrees. My head feels grainy and dry.

  Sadie looks at me properly for the first time. ‘How’s your dad?’

  ‘He’s good. He lives in Shorewood now.’

  When I visited him, I found myself comparing his third-floor flat with Justin Berryhill’s upstairs lounge room, with Justin’s towels for curtains. Outside Dad’s front door, someone had left a plastic bucket half-filled with grass clippings. We sidestepped it, him first, then me, nothing to say about it. His flat inside was bright and ordinary. A fat recliner sat in the corner facing a bookshelf, and a table and chairs that used to belong to the whole family was wedged into an alcove in the kitchen. There was no room for the yellow Morris Minor in his garage downstairs. Mum took care of it, housing it at her brother’s property, promising to leave the car covered and protected till Dad wanted to start working on it again. Surely Mum knew the car would be at Uncle Al’s forever. But, for once, she didn’t point it out.

  ‘Is he still …’

  ‘A bit weird?’ I try to laugh. ‘Still alive. Still talking about dying. But he’s good.’

  Once, in the Morris Minor with Dad and me as his passengers, Pop took a corner too quickly and the door swung open right there at the intersection. It was funny, Pop had said. Why couldn’t we see that?

  At Dad’s flat that day, he showed me the brand new mincer he’d bought and the juicer he’d gotten secondhand. He put on some music and I rested my feet in his lap. After a while he rubbed them like nothing had changed. I sensed things he wanted to ask me. When was the last time he and I had been alone together, with no Juniper springing up around us like a foal, without Mum telling us all to hurry, to calm down, to stop our nonsense? Even the afternoon to go see Justin had been invaded.

  I stare at Sadie. ‘And your sister?’ she asks.

  ‘Juniper’ll be up on stage any minute. She’s a cheerleader now. Under-15 state champions.’ I deliberate over my watch for a few seconds. I feel Sadie getting ready to leave. She digs out a scrap of lolly from her teeth and swaps her long hair from one shoulder to the other.

  ‘Listen,’ I say in a rush, ‘have you heard anything about me?’

  Sadie stops inspecting her fingers for loose strands of hair. ‘Like what?’

  A swelling and roiling in my belly. ‘Do you remember Michael Moroney? From primary school?’

  ‘Yeah, you used to like him.’

  ‘He’s been telling everyone that I—’

  Introductory bars of Joan Jett cascade from the stage onto the oval. I picture Juniper cradling her arms over her head, raising a leg to land lightly beside her ear. When she bounds onstage, grinning, she will be a brown curl of muscle.

  Sadie is asking me something, but the PA system is too loud with sounds that are tinny and thin and filled with gaps. What’s he been telling everyone?

  ‘That we had sex.’

  She pauses. ‘I hadn’t heard anything, actually.’

  ‘But you know Michael Moroney’s friends,’ I say. ‘His friends go to Wakefield too.’

  Sadie looks me in the eye. ‘Yeah, but they’re pigs and I couldn’t give two shits what they say.’

  And she sounds so much like Mum, fierce and calm and confident, when she and Dad split up. When Mum’s surety was like a spell.

  ‘It isn’t true. That isn’t what happened,’ I say. ‘I told him not to.’

  Bile in my throat. The humiliation, again, at all the things Sadie might know.

  She nods. She leans her hip against the railing, like it’s five years ago and she’s holding open the door of Justin Berryhill’s fridge.

  ‘I believe you,’ sh
e says.

  The house party with the police officer scooping corn chips from a bowl dissolves and a different party comes into focus. I’m wedged between Michael Moroney’s washing machine and the laundry sink and Michael’s cold fingers are kneading my breasts and then poking down the waistband of my shorts and he’s sipping beer from a bottle and talking me into it and yelling to his mates out in the hallway, Come here and say that haha and Yeah, I bought more, just give me a sec. He can hear them but he can’t hear me. By the time I’ve figured out how far away I am from Sadie, with her can of Fanta, shrieking Get your hands off me at Justin Berryhill, it’s all over.

  Michael Moroney does not go to Wakefield. He sleeps in a shared dorm at Trinity College where his walls are postered with Messi and Ronaldo. When he finishes school he’ll take up a contract with Liverpool FC Academy Under 18s and buy a Jeep for himself and a titanium watch for his nutritionist who makes sure Michael eats right and treats his body well. Michael is home for the weekend but his parents are at a murder mystery party. A chance thing, really, after all these years since primary school, that we’d run into each other at the Exeter Street Caltex, where he said he’d add me on Facebook straight away and invite me to his party, which was BYO and no pressure.

  There are grains of laundry powder on the tips of my fingers and I’m thinking of Michael’s mother and whether she does all the washing in their house and whether she ever pushed Michael around in the washing trolley like my mum used to, laughing, warm soft towels under me and a collection of pegs in my lap like treasures.

  Acrobat

  Dr Butler started talking about the next phase of the operation. He typed fast, using only his forefingers.

  ‘The next phase?’ My knee quickened with pain. My mind seized up.

  ‘The next stage, obviously,’ he said, ‘is physiotherapy, which will be longer than we perhaps thought.’

  ‘Like, how long?’

  Three weeks ago, Dr Butler had located the cysts in my knee and spent an hour scraping away fifty per cent of my ACL. Afterwards, I’d spent the same amount of time vomiting into a kidney dish in a recovery room that had a view of the river.