You Wish

by Lia Weston

  I am a picker of souls.

  ‘Something like this,’ she murmurs to her husband, touching the edge of a page where our fictitious girl is playing netball and standing in a line-up of gawky teenagers. He rubs her back in response but doesn’t nod.

  They’re in, whether they know it or not. I try to compress my sigh, but fail.

  Outside in the corridor, my pencil scratches the page as fast as I can move it. She has an opal ring – unusual, lots of people think they’re bad luck. Bad circulation; her handshake was freezing. Ridges on her nails; some kind of immunity disorder? V-shaped eyebrow ridge of the habitual worrier. His wedding ring was slightly loose; the wear marks indicate it’s been that way for a while. Walks on the outside of his soles. Shadow of an accent, possibly South African. Curly hair masking most of his receding hairline; he’ll end up shaving his head when it gets too hard to disguise.

  The devil, as they say, is in the details.

  Burn mark on her left wrist, matches a grill or oven burner.

  I wonder what happened to their little girl.

  ‘Step, step, triple step, step, step, triple step.’

  There’s swing music rising from the basement. I pause midway down the stairs. In front of the chalkboard wall, Mica and Tarik are in each other’s arms.

  ‘If I push, you must go in that direction,’ says Tarik.

  Mica looks down at her feet. ‘Show me that circle thing.’

  ‘No, no. Triple step.’ Tarik propels Mica between the desks. ‘You are not ready for the circle yet.’

  They repeat the movements for a few minutes, keeping time with the trumpets. Mica is a quick learner. I can see her counting in her head. Tarik moves nimbly, suspender snaps flashing.

  Tarik finally spins Mica towards the stairs, rainbow hair flying, and she catches sight of me.

  ‘Tarik’s teaching me to Lindy hop.’ Mica spins back and thumps into Tarik’s chest. ‘Step, step, triple step.’

  The meeting sits heavily on me. I go to the photo board. There are more pictures of the brunette, sticking with the fitness theme. Push-ups, hiking, running, wiping away sweat, always smiling. Her hair is glossier than a glacé cherry. It’s like a picture book: see Girl skip, see Girl run. Never has anyone looked so happy to do a jumping lunge, besides my mum. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to touch my toes like that without snapping a hamstring.

  I lean closer to examine her face. She looks like a Jennifer. Or an Emily. A girl-next-door kind of name, maybe with a hint of the exotic. Sophia. Coco. Imogen. Elouise.

  Sophia.

  ‘Step, step, triple step, good,’ says Tarik.

  I abruptly break from the wall. ‘What are you working on besides Lindy?’

  Tarik and Mica separate reluctantly. Mica plonks herself down at her desk.

  ‘Work wife project,’ says Tarik, muting the music. ‘But finding the wife is a problem.’

  Work wives are one of our most popular books – a ready-made family to impress new colleagues or potential employers. Some clients want files they can drip-feed into social media – always risky; IF never advises it – or just have on their phone to show off during after-hours drinks. Nearly everybody requests the same wife: mid-twenties, five foot seven, brown eyes. If they want children, they’ll ask for boys.

  ‘Which client, Greaser or Twitchy?’

  ‘Greaser.’

  Greaser was hard to forget. Teeth like TicTacs, skin like plastic wrap, couldn’t stop sweating. The challenge will be to match the wife, who has to be pretty enough to be enviable but not so pretty that it looks like he’s blackmailing her.

  ‘Oh, hello, hello,’ says Tarik at the photo wall, looking at a picture of Sophia leaping over a sand dune. ‘I think you are my solution.’ He pulls it off and waves it at Mica. ‘This girl, does she work at a coffee shop? I am sure I have seen her. The one in Brunswick. It has the little tiny pancakes.’

  I tap my keyboard to wake the screen back up, and try to not look too interested at the idea that Sophia could be making little tiny pancakes only a few suburbs away. ‘She’s already in use, sorry.’ On my monitor an IF client is living out his dream as one of Beyoncé’s backing dancers.

  ‘But she’s so new,’ says Tarik. ‘What book?’

  ‘Imaginary girlfriend #17.’

  Mica snorts.

  ‘All right, all right.’ Tarik sticks Sophia back on the wall and returns to the archive.

  ‘Mica, what’ve you got?’ I say.

  ‘School formal.’ She leans back so I can see her screens. The girl is in a long sapphire-blue dress, hair caught back, lips lightly glossed. The boyfriend has an awkward grin and glorious boy-band hair. She toggles to the original picture. The girl used to have a septum piercing and a kilt, the boyfriend green hair and eyeliner. ‘All personality erased. Subject rendered normal.’ Mica high-fives herself.

  ‘You kept her black nail polish.’

  ‘It goes with the dress. I’m keeping it stylistically correct.’ She swings one of her legs up to hook under the other. ‘My mum would love this guy. If my parents had known about IF, there wouldn’t have been a single untouched photo of me left in the house.’

  ‘What about when you were a kid?’

  ‘Nope. They would have swapped me for a skinny girl who wore butterfly clips to school instead of a bumblebee costume.’ Mica turns back to her fresh-faced teenagers. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love what we do, but sometimes I wonder what happens when a client dies and then their kids find their book. It would be crap to see exactly how differently your parents wish you’d turned out.’

  I click, clip and smooth pixels for the rest of the day, ignoring the recurring vision of the toy sticking out of the client’s bag, the tiny coloured paw.

  Running in the dark is easy this time of year; it’s black when I go to work and black when I leave. There’s a handful of regulars on this route. We all spend money on our shoes but not our hoodies. We nod as we pass, exhaling into the inky sky, but don’t speak to each other.

  I’ve trained myself to breathe silently, file off the jagged edges of the rasping. I work on technique, practise until I am almost noiseless. Different loads, different landings, different parts of the foot. I smooth my stride out until I’m gliding as if the world is turning under me. I am the static point that controls its direction.

  The autumn air has changed already. Winter broods on the horizon. I add gloves to my running kit and try not to look as if I’m about to burgle your house. Tonight they’re not helping; my fingernails have turned white. I loop my arms in circles, trying to get blood to the extremities.

  I sort through pictures in my head for the couple’s book and wonder if they’ll show it to their other child.

  Tarik once brought his brand new son, Umut, to work, and handed him straight to Mica. Mica held Umut as if he were a ticking baby bomb.

  ‘Just because I’ve got ovaries doesn’t mean I know what to do with kids,’ she hissed at me later, holding a beer far more comfortably.

  I had rescued the nitroglycerine and walked him up and down the stairs while Tarik caught up on his emails. I could see, superimposed on the unformed face, the beginnings of Umut’s bone structure. I can always tell what they’ll look like when they’re older. It’s useful for the books. As a side note, never praise pretty toddlers. They’ll grow out of it eventually, then they’ll feel like something went wrong and it’s their fault. The odd-looking ones, the ones with lumpy faces and sleepy eyes, are the ones who transform. (Did you get told you had a lot of character as a kid instead of being told you were gorgeous? Congratulations; you’re probably very good looking now.)

  Umut’s praline eyes closed after only a few minutes. Babies like me. Mum says it’s because I have a low-frequency voice. June used to press her ear to my chest to ‘hear the bass thread’. (She was going through her Florence + the Machine period at the time.)

  I shut off the image of June’s face, the spilt wine.

  I don’t know how people continue t
o function when children are lost. IF’s books are supposed to help, but do they? If you’ve experienced death, you know the ripple effect. Think of it this way: the Boxing Day tsunami killed 230,000 people. Two hundred and thirty thousand. Multiply that two hundred and thirty thousand times for every friend, relative, co-worker, all those left behind who will never be the same, and ask yourself, how are we not drowning in grief all the time? I can’t imagine how much worse it is when it’s your own kid.

  I feel the wave of panic rising, stuff the thoughts down. Keep running. Keep running.

  Across the parklands now, watching the mist coil around the tree roots like tulle skirts. Past the cemetery, where the temperature drops yet again. An ambulance slides down the street, sending silent red and blue pulses across fences and windows. I pull my sleeves over my gloved knuckles, cross against the Don’t Walk sign, and turn the corner into the car park behind my flat.

  Something moves by the bins. I stop.

  A thin shadow slips up the wall and turns its head, an object in its mouth. A long tail dangles down helplessly from its jaws.

  I’ve never seen a fox in real life before.

  For a moment, neither of us moves.

  Then someone slams a window and the fox is gone, its white tail tip twitching over the edge.

  Once home, I lean over the balcony railing, blowing on my freezing hands, wondering where the fox lives. Another animal unleashed on the Australian ecosystem by British invaders who wanted something familiar to hunt for sport.

  I think about texting Mica but she’ll be in bed by now, tucked up with her Hello Kitty pillow and the kind of book where everyone has a secret and knows how to dismember a corpse. I know better than to interrupt Mica when she’s reading.

  I try to sleep but I can’t.

  The baby girl won’t leave me alone, the bones in her mother’s chest.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PAIN IS FEAR LEAVING THE BODY.

  I look at the slogan painted above the row of treadmills and wonder how well it would work in a medical setting. (‘Doctor, I can’t breathe properly and my arm hurts!’ ‘Don’t worry, that’s just fear leaving the body.’)

  Underneath this motivational horseshit is Amity, walking on a treadmill and reading a magazine. It’s safe to say she’s not experiencing fear of any type.

  Mum is performing squats at the Smith machine with grim determination. ‘You’re late. We were supposed to start working out half an hour ago.’

  ‘I had a call from a client.’

  I actually lost time going through the archives to find all the new pictures of Sophia. She came to me in an emerald dress, in denim shorts, in Superman pyjamas, in a Ramones T-shirt and little else. (Instant save to the Favourites file.) Best of all, several pictures show her in the city. Tarik’s Brunswick sighting might be right; she could actually live here.

  Mum grits her teeth and pushes back up to standing. She’s racking sixty-five kilos, which is pretty impressive for someone her size, and a little bit scary.

  ‘Do you want some of the weight plates off?’

  ‘I need to work on my glutes.’ Mum clanks the bar back into place. ‘Apparently I’ve got a lazy bottom.’ Said with an air of injured outrage, as if her body has been misbehaving on purpose.

  The guy on the next machine side-eyes us both.

  ‘Your physio said that?’

  ‘He’s making me do leg lifts, of all things. I asked him if I should wear a neon leotard and play “Xanadu”.’ She steps out from under the bar. ‘He didn’t get it.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, though I don’t get it either.

  She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Did you bring an extra water bottle?’

  ‘Was I supposed to?’

  ‘I forgot mine.’ She glares at the one in my hand. ‘No, don’t give it to me,’ she says as I offer it. ‘You might have a cold. I’m shooting tomorrow.’

  I don’t have time to be offended before she strides off to the front desk. The girl there has a ponytail so tight her eyebrows are almost behind her ears. Mum chats to her chirpily as she taps her credit card on the machine, because every new person is a potential book sale.

  She drags me onto the stair climbers. Stair climbers are as weird to me as stationary bikes, let alone the fact that people will pay membership fees to use them. They know stairs are generally free, right?

  Fourteen televisions flicker different stations to the tune of stuttering dance music. My mother’s not looking anywhere except the digital display, and even then she’s not really seeing it. Her numbers keep climbing. There’s a different note in her breath that I’d analyse except I’m trying very hard not to die. I have a running list of places I don’t want to drop dead in, and anywhere within five metres of a stair climber is one of them.

  She finally quits to grab her water bottle, which I’d failed to point out that she didn’t actually fill. She takes a swig and gets nothing but air.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Mum and stomps off to the dispenser.

  I abandon the stair machine of death and lean on the wall next to her while she fusses with the no-spill cap. ‘Anything the matter?’

  ‘Nope.’ She breaks the cap’s threads and shoves the bottle under the tap.

  ‘Yeah, you seem very chill.’

  Amity, in the background, flicks over another page of her magazine.

  Mum stalks off to the stretch area, which is deserted as usual. I follow.

  ‘Remember how you told me about talking and stuff? If you were wound any tighter, you’d start ticking.’

  ‘This is not the time to get on my back.’ Mum drains half her water.

  ‘So tell me what’s going on.’

  She sinks cross-legged to the ground and stares at her interlocked thumbs for a few moments. ‘It’s your father.’

  Oh God. Heart attack. Cancer. Some strange blood disease that’s hereditary. ‘Is he okay?’

  She pauses just long enough for me to think that he may actually be dead. ‘He’s ignoring me.’

  I go blank out of sheer surprise that she’s really talking to me about this. As a rule, the Lashes don’t discuss their problems. This is a rare opening into the secret world of grown-ups. I can find out why Mum and her sister never see each other, why no one refers to Dad’s father by his name but always as ‘That Idiot’, and which cousin lost their house through gambling debts. Now all I have to do is find a way not to fuck it up.

  ‘Maybe Dad’s just really busy with work. You know what he’s like. That mapping survey, he forgot to eat for two days, remember?’

  She shakes her head, her hair sticking to her neck. ‘Something’s going on.’

  I cast a wide net for a response that’s not a futile platitude. Have you tried talking to him? It’s probably nothing. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Given my history, I clearly shouldn’t be giving relationship advice to anyone, especially my parents.

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’ Damn it, you idiot.

  She gives me the WTF look I deserve.

  I try again. ‘Has Gen noticed anything?’

  ‘I’m not talking to Gen about this.’

  ‘Well, have you tried talking to Dad?’ Good work, Tom, two for two.

  ‘I would if he was ever home. And even when he is home, he’s locked in his office.’ She scans the yoga mats, the rippled gym carpet, as if the answer is lying under the bench press.

  ‘Maybe send him an email?’ (Joking is my default mechanism under extreme emotional pressure. Sorry.)

  A song comes on which contains only four phrases: It’s a party. Where’s the party. Let’s party. Do you wanna party.

  ‘And we haven’t . . .’ she gestures vaguely. ‘You know. Not for ages.’

  For a moment I have no idea what she’s talking about. Until I do. Oh God. ‘I see,’ I say, trying to sound as neutral as possible.

  ‘It’s just like before,’ she says very quietly.

  ‘What is?’

  Mum holds my gaze. Something dips an icy
fingertip in the well of my stomach as I realise what she means.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  And then a strange expression develops, one I haven’t seen on her before, one I don’t like. Her pupils begin to dilate, black pushing out the gunmetal blue. Warning, warning, adrenaline incoming.

  ‘You can do it,’ she says.

  ‘You want me to ask him?’ I stop and put my brain back together. ‘You want me to ask him if he’s cheating on you.’

  ‘Not outright. You can find out other ways. The way you know things. That thing you do. Do that thing. It’s that weird gift you have.’

  ‘It’s not a gift.’

  ‘It’s easy for you.’

  ‘You want me to spy on Dad.’

  ‘It’s not spying. Just,’ she rubs her leg and digs her thumb inside her knee, ‘watch him, ask a few questions, see if you can find anything unusual in his office.’

  ‘That is pretty much the textbook definition of spying.’

  I have no idea what to do. There’s no stylus for this. I study the carpet instead of her eager, desperate face. Let’s party. Do you wanna party.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mum turns her head, chewing her lip, to watch Amity ambling on the treadmill. ‘Right. So you’ll erase family members for other people, make people new wives, because that’s perfectly okay. Because real life doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Do you understand what you’re actually asking me to do?’

  ‘I’m asking you to help me.’

  ‘I can’t stalk Dad to do it,’ I say. I glance back to make sure Amity’s still a distance away. ‘I can’t get involved. Not again.’

  ‘That wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘That’s not what you said at the time.’

  Mum looks as if I’ve slapped her, then recovers. ‘If I did, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’ She drops her head. ‘But I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I can’t watch it fall apart again.’

  In this unguarded moment she looks like a normal fifty-something woman instead of Amanda Lash, bestselling author, inspirational figure and YouTube celebrity.