Kindred

by Michael Earp

  “Humming with life, tension and comfort, this is the book I needed when I was growing up as a young, queer Aboriginal woman.”

  ALISON WHITTAKER

  What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be human? In this powerful #OwnVoices collection, twelve of Australia’s finest writers from the LGBTQIA+ community explore the stories of family, friends, lovers and strangers – the connections that form us.

  Compelling short fiction by bestsellers, award winners and newcomers to #LoveOzYA including Jax Jacki Brown, Claire G Coleman, Michael Earp, Alison Evans, Erin Gough, Benjamin Law, Omar Sakr, Christos Tsiolkas, Ellen van Neerven, Marlee Jane Ward, Jen Wilde and Nevo Zisin.

  “Beautiful, fresh and exciting, Kindred brings together the pleasure of reading about people who share your own experience, and the delight in discovering lives, worlds and ways of being that are utterly unlike your own. It made me believe that the world is bigger, kinder and more beautiful than I’d thought possible. Kindred peels back the labels we all wear to find the people, stories and beating hearts underneath. It’s a book for everyone.”

  Lili Wilkinson, award-winning author of After the Lights Go Out and The Boundless Sublime

  “Humming with life, tension and comfort – this is the book I needed when I was growing up, not only as a young, queer woman, but as a young, queer Aboriginal woman. These dozen stories don’t capture a singular queer and/or trans voice on this continent, yet they harmonise in a way that draws us in to the choir. These stories might not be all ours, but these are the stories of people we know to be our kindred. They help us dream of futures – possible or not, easy or hard – that don’t doom us.”

  Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi poet and award-winning author of BLAKWORK

  “This is the book I desperately wish I had been able to read when I was young, and I’m grateful it can be read by queer kids now. It is packed full of some of Australia’s best queer authors, who bring the book a wonderful range of different experiences. It will warm even the coldest of hearts.”

  Rebecca Shaw (aka @Brocklesnitch), writer and comedian

  To all the queer activists who fought to get us here, and to the queer youth who will write the future.

  Introduction

  Rats

  by Marlee Jane Ward

  In Case of Emergency, Break Glass

  by Erin Gough

  Bitter Draught

  by Michael Earp

  I Like Your Rotation

  by Jax Jacki Brown

  Sweet

  by Claire G Coleman

  Light Bulb

  by Nevo Zisin

  Waiting

  by Jen Wilde

  Laura Nyro at the Wedding

  by Christos Tsiolkas

  Each City

  by Ellen van Neerven

  An Arab Werewolf in Liverpool

  by Omar Sakr

  Stormlines

  by Alison Evans

  Questions to Ask Straight Relatives

  by Benjamin Law

  Acknowledgements

  Resources for Queer Teens

  About #LoveOzYA

  About #AusQueerYA

  About the Authors

  “Kindred” is an encapsulating word that places “me” next to “you” and “us” next to “them” in such a wonderful way. It speaks to the connections between us and ignites a sense of community. You know that feeling of warmth you get when you walk into a room that’s filled with your people? Your squad, your besties, the ones who have your back? That’s how the Australian young adult fiction community makes me feel. Add to that a layer of queerness, and you’ll have my happy place.

  I started planning Kindred after the release of the first #LoveOzYA anthology, Begin, End, Begin, in May 2017. Like with many things, I saw something I liked, and wanted a dedicated queer version. A month later, while attending the Centre for Youth Literature’s Reading Matters conference, I realised the importance of an #AusQueerYA anthology of short stories. A theme had emerged throughout the conference program: minorities of all kinds are constantly oppressed by unchecked privilege, and our hope for the future relies on addressing these imbalances directly through our writing, our reading, our collection-building and our conversations. I just kept thinking now’s the time, now’s the time. Over the years I have worked as a bookseller, I’ve witnessed the willingness, even eagerness, of teens of all genders and sexualities to embrace LGBTQIA+ YA. This strengthened my conviction that LGBTQIA+ youth deserve the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the literature they read, and what is published for them. It was time to make this dream real. I knew we were ready for a book like Kindred – a queer #LoveOzYA literary celebration.

  The Australian queer community connects with each other and with the straight/cis community in a wide variety of ways, and personal relationships often transcend barriers that we might have otherwise let come between us. Connections can happen on a familial level, a friendship level, a professional level and a romantic level. They can also happen between passing strangers, where fleeting interactions change the course of our lives in unexpected ways, or build relationships we could not have foreseen.

  I asked the Kindred contributors to write their short stories around the theme of connections for the simple reason that I knew each of them would respond to it in their own way. It is impossible to define one homogenous experience of connection; there are simply too many between us, each with their own nuances. Similarly, there are myriad ways of being queer, and accepting each of our differences is what will make us stronger in the end. A person is a person is a person.

  This collection has been carefully curated to reflect the inclusive and intersectional Australian LGBTQ+ community. It features work from writers of various genders, sexualities and identities, including writers who identify as First Nations, people of colour or disabled. The contributors are internationally acclaimed writers, award winners, #LoveOzYA favourites and exciting new voices to the YA community. Their short stories are arranged to reflect the weaving and undulating threads of connection that rise and fall in our lives.

  So, Dear Reader, here is the best gift I could think to offer you: a fabulously queer collection of wonderful writing. I hope that you will find an echo of yourself within its pages. Because these stories and characters and authors have got your back. We’re your kindred.

  MICHAEL EARP

  It’s lice-dousing day so we all line up and dunk our heads in the bucket filled with stingy liquid and then wait, cold- trembly and dripping, till the buggies curl up and die. Then we pass the pail on to the kids from South Tunnel and they do the same. We try to keep it clean and bug-free down at Melbourne Central Station. We might be Rats, but that don’t mean we’re dirty, right? The Feds call us vermin, though we know better.

  Sammi comes over and wipes up the drips down my face with a dirty towel, then plants a kiss on my forehead.

  “Whatcha got on today, Michelle?”

  “I’m on Scavenge,” I tell them. We got tasks that rotate through the week and yesterday was my Whatever day, so I got to just ‘lax down here in the Tunnels, safe and warm, and the day after a rest always means Scavenge. I gotta head up to Open Air and see what I can find for us to eat or trade or sell or play with.

  “Good luck,” they say. “I was on Scavenge yesterday and it was cold as. Found a few bits and bobs, though. Check this!” They pull a little enamel pin from their pocket. It’s a heart with big arteries coming out and squirts of blood and veins all over in reds and purples.

  “That’s so cool,” I tell them and they pin it to my jumper. “Yeah, nah,” I say, “it’s yours,” but they shake their head and are like, “You have it, for luck up there today,” and a quick dark look flashes over their face, and I reckon it’s ’cause yesterday they did
this daring and narrow escape from the Feds. We all had a big laugh over the way they managed to evade capture, knock a Fed over on his big arse, and get it all on their Eye so we could have giggs and meme it for the feed later. We all got Eyes even though we are poor as, ’cause they’re cheap and it gives us something to do. I keep mine running most of the day in case something fun happens and I can feed it. The little cam bead sits in the middle of my septum ring and I load good shit onto one of the few handhelds we all share down here for edits of the best stuff. A good evade is prime feed content, ‘cept we know what it’s really like to scrape by ‘em. Our ranks are always dwindling ’cause of the captures. If they get you, they shave your head and send you to a kid factory where you hafta work day and night. No thank you.

  I’m all for the distrib of duties we got down here, but why kids gotta give me glances and hugs like they never gonna see me again when I head up for a Scavenge? Way to make me nervous. It’s not like I don’t throw out them same looks when someone else goes up to Open Air, don’t make the hug a bit tighter and a bit longer in case I don’t see ‘em again. It’s fraught and stuff, I guess. I’m here trying not to stumble over everyone’s shit and get my jacket on and babes is staring at me like they’re trying not to have a sob or something.

  Truth is, I don’t mind Scavenge. I kinda like Open Air. It feels all big and full of possibility, you know? Sure, it’s scary, but I got this dual kind of feeling about it, like the scare and the potential mix up against each other, make my blood sing through my body. The sing starts at my fingertips and floods its way up my arms and through my core as soon as I step out of our tunnel and I place my hand on the passageway as a kind of goodbye to home.

  Home. Home is a tunnel off a tunnel. Home is the rumble of trains on the constant, and without it comes a feeling of absence that you can’t place for a minute. Home is a hole in a black subway wall, a crack in the wall of things that you can slip between and hide in if you’re sly enough. Home is a group of musty ratbags hanging on to life by the teeth, darting between Feds and the railcops, faces smeared with the soot and dust that clings to the walls and our hands as we make our way along them. Home is a ring of gleamy-toothed smiles in grimy faces, lit by the harsh white light of torches, making shadows dance on the walls; or when you come back with a choice score from Open Air, and you get to share it. Home is a dark-dank maze but it feels like freedom. That’s what home is.

  Right away I cop a shouty, “Hey!” from a RailCorp employee as I ping out of our hole in the wall, glance right and left even though the 10.23 from Upfield is still two and a half minutes away, then I zoom across the tracks, and heft myself onto the platform, quick-as. I ignore her because she’s not a Fed or a railcop, and instead I hustle on up the escalators, tryna look at home among the miserable workers on their way to cubes in surrounding high-rises. I don’t fit in at all, not ’cause I’m grubby as, because I reckon I still got life in my eyes and all they got is the drudge and all that. Still, I let my fingers brush now and again over the hems and sides of their coats as I pass, feeling the weight of the clean fabric under my fingertips, or dipping in to smell the chem-clean stink of their hair. Sure, it’d be nice to have clean hair or a fine jacket, but at what cost, I ask you?

  I come up into the station entry and peek about for railcops. Don’t see any, so I jump the gates and slide over the turnstile teeth in a smooth motion, practised easily ten thousand times. I zoom up one escalator, then the next, and I’m in the atrium, a huge open-space roof way up above with a dome of metal and glass. Bots zip and slide across the surface up there, repairing the glass broken from the last time someone went boom in the mall, a month ago? Two? For men’s rights? Or pro-life? I can’t keep track.

  I sidestep around the tumble-down bricks from the old shot-tower, hemmed in by police tape, and slide up one of the lane-like exits, dodging folks lined up for shots of real espresso that cost enough to keep us Rats going for a month. My nose plucks the invisible bits of the coffee from the air and the smell makes my mouth water, but there’s no time to savour it, ’cause I’m hustling past. I sidestep an old bird who goes, “Oh!” as I zig past her, then quick-leap a dude in his sleeping bag who hasn’t been cleaned up by the sweepers yet. I prep myself for a nano-sec and just like that, I’m in Open Air, the cold wind biting at my fingertips and the sun pulsing weakly behind the cloud-cover, everything big and open and noisy and furious.

  “Out of the way, Rat,” gruffs a portly dude in a neatly pressed grey wool coat, and I’m all like, bloody hell, I’m tryna orient myself here, you dunno what it’s like to go from cramped dark to all this open, like, physically and symbolic, jeez, but he don’t care and barges me to the side. I’m not expecting the shoulder and my feet get all tangled up in each other. I trip right into the bike lane, bellowing, “Whoa!” as cyclists and zippy Hondas swerve around me. “Soz, soz!” I say, and right myself as someone on a shiny chromed zoomer bike slams on her breaks, clips the gutter and flies over her handlebars, into my arms.

  I mean, it sounds hella romantic, though it’s more a thumpy clutter of limbs and “ow”s and a barrage of bike bells and “oi!”s from the cyclists who weave past us, lying there.

  “Hi,” I say, and she says, “hi,” and I clamber to my feet to help her up. She takes my dirty hand in hers and the sun actually pushes out from behind a cloud, glimmering off her helmet and into my eyes, turning everything wet gleamy and golden for a sec, and I’m dazzled in so many different ways. I’m stood there, in the sunshine, hand-holding with this gnarly babe, my dreamgirl, and I’ve committed grievous personal injury to her. Shit!

  The sun goes back behind the clouds as the two of us take shelter in the gutter and she takes off her helmet, shaking out three-quarters of a headful of tight black curls, the rest scraped clean. It’s an amazing haircut. Mine is hack-slashed with a blunt pair of sciz, damp and it smells of delouser which makes me feel a bit self-conscious, on top of everything else. But her face is sunny, even though I stink of chems and have knocked her headlong off her treadly.

  “I’m so sorry!” I tell her. “Some dickwad pushed me into bloody traffic,” I ramble, gesturing to where the dude was, but he’s long gone. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she says, dragging her bike out of the road. “Just a bit banged up. You too, by the looks of it.” She points at my arms, and I notice that the elbows of my jacket are ripped up, as well as my skin underneath. Bloody hell, I’ve gone and ruined the only decent jacket in all of North Tunnel, the Rats are gonna kill me!

  “Should we exchange insurance info?” she says. My ears prick and I’ve got this urge to turn tail and evade, evade!, but I don’t. Something keeps me standing there. It could be the cute and crooked way she’s smiling at me.

  “About that …”

  “No personal indemnity?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I mean, it’s okay. My bike isn’t dinged or nothing, only my knees and they’ll heal.”

  “Phew.” And there I was, about to totally flee.

  “I was thinking of knocking off work, been on since 3 am.” She does a bit of a tappity-tap on her handheld, then goes a little bashful and flushy-red in the cheeks and my heart drops and clunks into my guts because she says, “Wanna get breakfast with me?”

  And I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.

  ***

  Her name is Maita, and in-between delivering meals on her bike for Grubber, she’s studying to finish Level Eleven. As she tells me this, I sneaky-dig inside the pockets of North Tunnel’s One Good Jacket, recently destroyed though for a good cause, looking for a few spare creds. My hand wraps ‘round a plasticky note and I’m like yes!, ’cause maybe it’s enough for a cup of Cofi.

  “What about you?” she asks.

  “Well …” How do I tell this hardworking, highly educated and seriously refined babe that I’m a tunnel rat? What if she screws up her nose at me and hightails it, or calls the Feds? Then I think, bugger it. If she doesn’t like
me for me, tunnels and all, then what’s even the point? “I’m living underground for the mo.”

  “Oh,” she says and I’m all, shit, I’ve lost her, but she nods and keeps in step with me as we head towards the racks outside the State Library. She locks her bike up and glances at me shy, then threads her arm through mine. I smile back at her, sorta bashful, thinking about how rad it will be to spend an hour or so across from her at a table, hands gripped around a hot cuppa synth, staring into her deep, brown eyes and watching them crinkle at the sides if I can make her laugh, maybe brush her leg under the table with my knee and feel the sparkles zap between us …

  Then I spot the Feds, marching down the road behind her.

  I know that formation. They’re doing a sweep!

  I gotta get out of here, I gotta warn the Rats! No time for Cofi and coy looks and knee-brushing sparkles. Bloody hell. I never get to have any fun. I drop her arm and twist away as she turns and sees them too, and she’s like, “Michelle?” and I say, “Sorry!” and I charge back towards the station, artful dodging the flow of commuters coming my way. Thump thump thump go my feet over pavement, and when I fly down the escalators and back into the station, the Feds are lined up at the turnstiles and I know I’m too late. They’ve closed the station now rushy-time is over and they’re fuming it; flushing us out with great clouds of oily gas that billow up from the subways below. The fumes don’t kill you or nothing, just make you wish it had, it stings and makes you coughspluttercry and panic and flee. That’s when the ratcatchers come swoop you up and cart you off to the kid factories. North Tunnel! There’s nothing I can do for them now the fumers are pumping out that sick gas. I hope they got a warning in time.