Portable Curiosities

by Julie Koh

  ‘I want two,’ Elena1995 says to G. ‘One for the money shot and another as backup.’

  G gets to work. He pushes down a lever on a machine and makes a soft serve cone. He dips it in chocolate and pushes a Flake into the side. It looks like a regular cone from a regular ice-cream van. It’s nothing like the concoctions I’ve seen in the lab.

  He hands the cone to Elena1995 through the window.

  She makes a face.

  I ask her what’s wrong.

  ‘If this is meant to be an extreme ice-cream,’ she tells me, ‘it could at least be visually marketable. Like, add something that makes it pop.’

  ‘Do you want it or not?’ says G.

  ‘Whatevs.’ She pulls out a gold-plated ice-cream stand and sets it on the counter. She snaps the ice-cream from thirty different angles with her phone. She walks away playing with the filters.

  I ask G what makes the product so extreme.

  ‘The concept is: you put down the cash for it, we give you an ice-cream that has a fifty per cent chance of killing you on the spot.’

  A lethal ice-cream?

  ‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘There’s so much theatre to this product. I love it. The secret ingredient in it has this knockout deliciousness – a devastating flavour that I can guarantee you no one in the world has tasted. It may even be an as-yet-undiscovered basic taste – way more complex than umami. But the catch is that once you’ve tasted it, you may have to die. It’s just the nature of the ingredient. More addictive than sugar, too, so anyone who survives is going to be a repeat customer. This ice-cream’s worth more than the rest of my business combined. This is the magic fucking bullet.’

  I suggest that perhaps the whole scheme isn’t actually legal.

  ‘Look,’ says G, ‘if one had to come down on the side of legality or illegality, the side one would land on would most likely be illegality. But, you know, it doesn’t leave a trace. Plus, it’s a highly regulated scheme. Ian will be doing regular audits to check that it truly is a fifty-fifty chance for each customer. That we’re not tampering with the odds. Hey, Ian, you’re still here, right?’

  Lee pops out of nowhere, brandishing a green pen.

  Elena1995 sashays back.

  ‘Pro tip for your food article,’ she says to me. ‘If you put the whites in the photos up really high, like, it looks like everything’s literally bathed in light.’

  She has uploaded the photo to Instagram. She shows me the post. The caption reads:

  #allthegoodness #nomnomnom #ultimatefoodie #foodporn #dedicationtocraft #icecreamordeath #seeyouontheothersidemaybe #loveallmybesties #hugz #hashtagitsabiatchlife #idie

  The ice-cream is melting on its stand. Rivulets of white snake their way down the cone.

  ‘Ew.’ She takes the cone and tosses it onto the road.

  G hands her the backup cone.

  She sits on the kerb and goes quiet. The whole street is quiet: no one else is around. She eats the ice-cream, nibbling on it like a tiny rabbit. She has her phone in one hand and stares at the likes piling up on Instagram.

  I exit the van and sit down next to her.

  How does it taste?

  ‘No words.’

  How is she feeling?

  She shows me her phone. ‘All the love!’

  I mean, is she feeling ill?

  ‘I’ve got the luck of the Irish. It’s, like, in the family or something. I’m hardly going to die from an ice-cream.’

  A minute later, she’s doing the hippy shakes on the ground, eyeballs rolling, saliva bubbling from the lips.

  Her body comes to a complete standstill. Her limbs have settled at weird angles. The hem of her dress has hiked up to her waist, exposing frilly white briefs with pink spots.

  The hand holding the phone is outstretched. The likes keep piling up on Instagram.

  I put two fingers on her neck.

  There isn’t a pulse.

  I ask G what he’s going to do.

  G sighs. ‘It’s pretty dull isn’t it, the experience? We might have to develop add-ons – offer a more attractive package. Get them to bring a USB stick with their photos and literally flash their memories before their eyes. Play their favourite James Blunt single.’

  He pours unpasteurised honey from a large pail into a smaller pail. It spills in slow motion. I ask him what he’s doing.

  ‘It helps me think.’

  I ask him again what he’s going to do about the body. Surely he’s not going to leave corpses strewn around the city like a trail of breadcrumbs?

  ‘I guess it is substandard customer care. A bad look for the brand, probably.’

  G continues to pour the honey for a good few minutes. As he does so, it becomes apparent to me that this feature article could end prematurely with the subject pouring honey from one container to another for no practical reason. I wonder out loud what other embedded journalists do in these situations. Do they get involved?

  I make a decision.

  I tell G I’m curious to see where this goes, even if it gets me in trouble. In fact, I know someone who may be able to help out. The stepmother of a primary school friend of mine drives a transfer van that collects dead bodies from hospitals and homes, and takes them to funeral parlours.

  ‘Sounds good,’ says G.

  But where should she take the body?

  ‘The morgue or something?’

  I tell him he’ll get arrested.

  G comes out of the van. He looks at the body, then at me.

  ‘Look,’ he says, ‘so I didn’t give much thought to corpse disposal. But I’ve had some quiet discussions with various councils and they’re happy for my permits to incorporate a small population cull. The whole city’s overpopulated, so it’s good from a public health perspective. Plus it’s a more palatable death experience. If they did it with garbage trucks, it wouldn’t be as good, would it? And if you’re stupid enough to buy a Reaper, then you deserve to die. It’s natural selection. It’s a self-selecting cull.’

  I find it difficult to believe this permit arrangement exists.

  ‘I put a little grease in the wheels of government,’ G says, ‘and they turned for me. And the police are always happy to close one eye in return for free product. It’s a cut-throat industry. People call me the bad boy of Sydney ice-cream, but I don’t think they know what bad boy really means. It’s a fucking war out there, lady. And I intend to win it with ice-cream.’

  Mrs Tracey arrives in her white Toyota HiAce.

  She is dressed to match her van, in a loose tux-style white shirt with the sleeves pushed up just past her wrists. She is wearing tailored white pants, white flats and pearl earrings.

  ‘I just came from a fantastically good lunch with some of the mothers from my grandson’s playgroup,’ she says. ‘You know that new place everyone’s raving about that does the toffee offal?’

  G shakes her hand. He explains what has transpired and asks if she can take the body to a hospital and tell them she found the blogger lying in the street, on the verge of death.

  As they talk, I reminisce. In primary school, Mrs Tracey was always one of those nice mothers who brought Tupperware containers full of sliced oranges to our netball games for the half-time break. She was one of those women who was so positive and wide-eyed about everything that you might have thought she’d been slammed in the head by a wayward crane.

  Even now, as she talks to G, she nods understandingly, giving him those wide eyes. It’s from her training in the death-care industry. She smiles with that big red-lipsticked overbite in such an empty way that it seems she might not even realise the gravity of the situation. If you sliced off the top of her head and looked in, it’d probably be full of mist and red carnations and rectangular wholesale wake cakes in chocolate and orange poppyseed, and a pasty organist playing ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’.

  We all stare at the former Elena1995.

  ‘I picked up three bodies this morning on the way to lunch,’ says Mrs Tracey. ‘So I have one
more bed for your girl. Serendipity.’

  She straps Elena1995 into a stretcher and loads her into the back of the van.

  ‘Would you mind very much if we take a photo together?’ Mrs Tracey asks G. ‘I’m just so thrilled to meet such a famous artisan ice-cream maker.’

  ‘An odd time for a photo,’ says Lee, as we cluster together.

  ‘Say cheese,’ says Mrs Tracey.

  Mrs Tracey drops me home before she drops off the bodies.

  ‘What is this?’ she says. ‘A hole in the wall?’

  It literally is. It’s one of the thousands of new horizontal hovels the city has recently listed on a special register to address the housing crisis. If you earn under $40,000 per year, you qualify to rent one of these holes for a subsidised rate of $750 a week. The initiative was inspired by the Japanese capsule-hotel concept except that the holes aren’t capsules, just concrete tubes with open ends.

  ‘It comes with a postbox,’ I tell her.

  ‘Dear girl,’ says Mrs Tracey, ‘you must start making more money.’

  As Mrs Tracey drives off, I make diving hands and launch myself into the hole.

  I light a match and hold it up to the fire sprinkler to set it off so I can wash my face.

  All refreshed for a night in, I lie in my horizontal hole eating a deluxe muesli bar from ALDI and fall asleep pondering the mechanics of G’s rapid ascent through the frozen-food ranks.

  The next morning, Mrs Tracey unexpectedly shows up again in her white HiAce.

  From the back window of G’s van, I spot her in the distance trailing us. When the van stops, she stops.

  G knocks out a few Cream Reapers in the morning and, each time, the very second that the hand with the smartphone flops out on the pavement, Mrs Tracey is there to pick up the body and load it into her van.

  It’s a slick operation.

  She carries the bodies all by herself, slinging them over her shoulder and dumping them on the stretchers. She has a strange level of upper body strength, especially for someone built like an English rose.

  I follow G out to see her. I warn Mrs Tracey that she shouldn’t get involved.

  ‘You suggested it, my dear.’

  G laughs. ‘Looks as if Mrs Tracey has a better business mind than you.’

  ‘It’s undeniably a growth industry,’ says Mrs Tracey. ‘You can smell the desperation out there. But you can’t cart all your customers off to hospital. It’d be better for you if these people just go missing, and I can help with that.’

  G invites her into his van for a private conversation.

  Mrs Tracey and her HiAce are hired on a permanent basis, with key performance targets based on numbers of bodies transported. In fact, G hires all of the lady drivers comprising the Tracey’s Transportables workforce. He shouts the team to a lavish toffee-offal brunch and woos them with the promise that he will buy them a brand spanking new fleet of white Toyota HiAces and have each vehicle fitted out with a stunning four-bed interior.

  With Mrs Tracey’s team on board, G decides it’s time to expand the Cream Reaper fleet. Nine more black vans set out across Sydney, each trailed at a respectable distance by a HiAce complete with lady driver. The rest of Mrs Tracey’s ladies are assigned to backup vans, on call to take over body collection duties when the designated HiAces are at capacity. The cost of running the transfer vans is incorporated into the price of the Cream Reaper ice-cream packages.

  I am curious about where Mrs Tracey intends to take the increasing number of bodies.

  ‘I’m a woman with connections. I know people who can disappear people, in return for a cut of my fee. I’m an expert in unpublicity.’

  Lee is sceptical that anyone can be disappeared.

  ‘If you think things can’t be hidden in Sydney,’ Mrs Tracey tells him, ‘you’re reading the wrong news.’

  Mrs Tracey decides to embark on a more active role in the operation. She takes to stepping out of her HiAce to ‘stretch her legs’, hovering around our van and keeping an eye out for potential customers.

  ‘I have a performance target, after all,’ she says.

  In Double Bay, she goes for a short walk and returns steering a middle-aged woman by the elbow. The woman is wearing head-to-toe beige and has just had a facial. With no make-up on, she squints out at us from behind dark glasses.

  ‘It’s over,’ says the woman. ‘It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.’ She has a crisp, newsreader’s voice. She refuses to elaborate.

  She calls her lawyer. ‘Yes, of course it’s Elizabeth. Don’t you know my voice? Just make sure the yacht goes to Chalice. No, I’m not in the bathtub, I don’t have pills, I’m eating ice-cream, for God’s sake. I’m fucking celebrating life.’

  The ice-cream, however, doesn’t kill her.

  ‘My God, that’s delicious,’ she says to G, ‘give me another one.’ She pulls an Amex out of a crocodile-leather purse and slaps it on the counter. ‘Use this until I’m done.’

  Nothing happens after the second ice-cream.

  She orders more.

  She sits on the grass median strip eating one ice-cream after another.

  Customers come and go. As they line up, they glance periodically at this gaunt expensive woman pushing ice-creams into her face.

  She turns to glare at them, mouth smeared white.

  ‘Fuck the whole business,’ she says.

  I ask her if she means the entirety of a particular registered business, or life in general.

  ‘Fuck your mother.’

  The sun begins to set. Orange moves into blue, and the six or so cones still haven’t killed her.

  ‘You know what, darling?’ she says to me. ‘I’m lactose intolerant.’

  She pushes an index finger into her throat, and throws up. She throws up on the grass, on the road, on her own trousers. The puke is somehow beige.

  ‘There, there,’ says Mrs Tracey, hurrying over, patting her on the shoulder. ‘Someone needs a little rest.’

  In an instant, Mrs Tracey has stabbed her with a needle, strapped her into a stretcher, loaded her into the back of the HiAce and driven off.

  By Wednesday, Mrs Tracey has designed a $4.99 Cream Reaper app downloadable to smartphones.

  She gives a demonstration to G and Lee.

  ‘This transforms the venture into an on-demand service. You press this button to request a cone. You enter your location. If you select “Deliver Now”, the closest van will respond to the request. When the van is within a kilometre of your location, you can watch it move towards you on a map. Alternatively, you can choose a date from this calendar so there’s time to get your affairs in order in case you end up dying.’

  G agrees to trial it.

  For most of the day, no requests come in. Lee wonders out loud if the app actually works. Mrs Tracey gives him the finger behind his back.

  Near midnight, just as the shift is about to end, the first request comes in. Ten ice-creams to be delivered to the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney.

  We arrive to discover a handful of drunk young suits playing parkour.

  Two short ones have clambered onto the sandstone wall of the museum cafe and are taking bets on who can jump the furthest from it. The only perceivable difference between the two is that one is wearing a red tie with blue stripes, and the other is wearing a blue tie with red stripes.

  ‘Three hundred says Murphy’s going to win by a metre.’

  ‘I’m putting four on Babiak. Look at those legs!’

  Someone wolf whistles. They laugh.

  G leans out of the van. ‘You called?’

  ‘Ah, fuck!’ shouts Red Tie. He checks his watch and looks at G. ‘You got here before twelve.’

  Blue Tie laughs and mimes a basketball shot. ‘That’s a cool hundred, right there, Jimmy boy. Two fiddys, mate.’

  Red Tie gets out his wallet and hands over the notes.

  They get off the wall and follow the others to the van. Their breath reeks of beer.

  ‘W
hat’s going down this fine evening, gentlemen?’ says G.

  ‘Put a few away at The ’Stab,’ says Red Tie. He shoves Blue Tie. ‘It’s this guy’s birthday. Took his wedding ring off to celebrate. Chatted up some of the ladies.’

  Mrs Tracey, hovering again, asks them what they do for work.

  Red Tie whips out business cards. ‘We’re institutional banking analysts. For all your institutional banking needs.’

  G looks at the name on the card. He takes us aside. ‘He’s the brother of one of my suppliers. Can’t sell them the cones.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ says Mrs Tracey. ‘No kills?’

  ‘I’m giving them plain vanilla. They won’t know the difference.’

  Mrs Tracey goes red in the face. ‘No one wastes my time.’

  She turns to the bankers and tells them there’s an extra charge of three grand each for a tasteful, though modest, pre-paid funeral should they experience death by Cream Reaper. She holds out her hand for their credit cards.

  ‘That’s a bit much,’ says Red Tie.

  ‘Didn’t realise you were cheap,’ says Mrs Tracey.

  ‘Ooh,’ say the other bankers. ‘Burn!’

  Red Tie surrenders his credit card. The others follow.

  G hands out plain vanilla cones. The bankers stand in a circle nudging each other and laughing, making bets on who’s going to drop dead first.

  Ten minutes later, they’re still standing.

  Now that they’ve tried the best taste in the world, they declare that it’s pretty shit after all. But it dawns on them that they’ve just been given a second chance at life. The hairs on the backs of their necks stand up. They feel all-powerful. Their senses are heightened. They were meant to live!

  They run back to the sandstone wall and start taking more bets.

  I get into Mrs Tracey’s van for a lift home.

  As we drive off, I look back at the bankers. Red Tie has jumped further than Blue Tie, and is rolling around on the ground in pain, clutching a broken foot.

  ‘Little superdicks,’ says Mrs Tracey, wiping the app from their phones remotely.

  We are gods of the streets. Winners of the ice-cream war.

  Our bells clang through the suburbs of Sydney.