Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 5, Issue 2

by Penni Russon

  ‘Mish!’ Gabi raps on the locked bathroom door. ‘We’re home.’

  * * *

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ Gabi says in the darkness, long after I thought she’d drifted off to sleep, ‘that Amy died doing something you’ve never wanted to do?’

  I turn away from her. ‘I wouldn’t say never.’

  Gabi makes a curious sound that I take to be a laugh: a cruel or pained hack in the back of her throat.

  ‘What? I’ve considered it.’

  ‘Mish, are you serious?’ Gabi doesn’t laugh this time. She switches on the bedside light. ‘Are you serious?’ Gabi asks again. ‘Are you thinking about it now?’

  ‘Do you think Amy would have got pregnant if she’d known what the outcome would be?’

  ‘I never met Amy.’

  ‘Would you have had a baby? If you’d known having Sage meant–’

  ‘God, Mish. Before Sage was Sage… When he was just the idea of a baby… I don’t know.’ But she thinks some more and says: ‘Yes. Yes, I would have had a child, even if I’d known it could kill me. For me, I don’t know what my life would have been for without babies.’

  * * *

  The last time I saw Amy, I was surfacing from some pretty serious meds, and everything was pillowy and formless except for the sharpness of her.

  ‘I’ve brought you some clothes,’ she said, holding up an unfamiliar overnight bag. ‘T-shirts, trackies. Pyjamas. A toothbrush.’

  She was there but she wasn’t there. She was flushed with love, ringed with colour when everything and everyone else was the same washed-out institutional grey.

  She was getting married.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Spring. A spring wedding. I know you think that’s hokey.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s hokey.’

  ‘Well, I know it’s not your scene.’

  ‘You’re my scene, babe.’

  She chewed her thumbnail, a habit she’d always had.

  ‘Spring?’ Deep inside the hospital I’d forgotten if the sun was shining. ‘What month is it now?’

  ‘July.’

  ‘I’ll be out of here by then. Clean and sober.’

  Amy clutched the bag on her lap. ‘Oh Missy, you’d hate it. It’ll be so uptight. The whole thing’s just to please my mother, really.’

  A slow aura bloomed around her, some side effect of either the drugs I was on or the drugs I was withdrawing from. I watched the colours appear one by one, gold and orange and indigo.

  ‘I’m sorry, Missy,’ she said. She snapped open the large clasp on the bag and then snapped it closed again. That was what she was here to tell me. Not that she was getting married, but that I wasn’t invited to her wedding.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told her, hazily. I wanted her to leave so I could curl up in a ball and sleep. But when she stood I said, ‘Don’t go yet. It’s so depressing here.’

  She didn’t sit back down. She dropped the bag on the bed and started unpacking it, shaking out the clothes, folding them and piling them into the drawers by the bed.

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Jesus, stop, would you?’ I patted the bed. ‘Sit down next to me.’

  She perched on the edge of the bed. I wanted to tell her I was happy for her, but all I could think about was what it would mean for me. ‘Is this really what you want?’ I asked her, grabbing her hand. ‘Marriage? You’re only twenty-four. Isn’t that kind of young? Can’t you guys just shack up? Live “in sin”?’

  ‘I knew you’d do this,’ she said. She turned my hand over, ran a finger from my wrist up the yellow skin to my inner elbow. ‘Track marks,’ she said.

  ‘Road maps.’

  ‘They just take you to the lost places.’ She turned my hand over and put it down gently on the bed. We both looked at it, like it was an object that didn’t belong to either of us. ‘I’m tired of being young, Missy,’ she said. ‘I’m ready for what comes next.’

  * * *

  ‘Do you really want to have a baby?’ Gabi asks.

  ‘I just meant I had considered it. At times. In the past. But… I made my choices.’

  She looks at me. ‘You never told me that before. That you had considered it.’

  I shrug and turn to face the wall.

  Gabi turns the light out. ‘I want to have another baby,’ Gabi says softly.

  Silence festers between us.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ I tell Gabi, eventually, ‘then you should have one.’ She says nothing. So much time has passed that I’m not sure if she’s fallen asleep, or if she is just lying awake in the dark.

  * * *

  Sage wakes me. He stands by my side of the bed, waiting for me to come around—rise to the surface, up, up. He puts his finger to his lips. Ssh.

  We are both blurred by darkness, there are no edges to us as we stumble together through the shadowy hall. Sage’s room is deep with hostile, masculine clutter—small metal cars and grey warships and knobbly ugly figurines­ litter the floor—but in the midst of it all he is a soft pale embryo lit by the greenish moonlight that enters the room through his curtainless window. I strip the bottom bunk while he takes off his sodden pyjamas. He wads them up in the sheets. I carry this bundle to the laundry and stuff it into the machine. When I get back to his room he has already climbed up into the top bunk.

  I touch his face. ‘Hey, mate,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry about it, okay?’

  He squeezes his eyes closed. And then opens them to check that I am still there. ‘Don’t tell Mum,’ he says. ‘She worries.’

  ‘It’s not normal,’ Gabi said last time it happened. ‘He’s ten. He shouldn’t be wetting the bed anymore.’

  And I said, ‘How would I recognise normal if it rose up and hit me in the face?’

  He looks like me, Amy. I see myself in him. Am I the mirror he’s grown up with, the mirror that tells him not who he is, but who he should be? God help him.

  I don’t bother going back to bed. I sit in the kitchen drinking tea, remembering the full round taste of whiskey or bourbon in my mouth, the burn in the back of my throat. That’s what I miss. The burn. The pain. The searing heat of shooting up, travelling through my veins. How twisted am I? I ask Amy. And then: Don’t answer that. The shaking head, the sad eyes, the half smile, the freckled lip. I miss the pain.

  In a few hours I will wake the boy, who will not want to rise, will not want to go to school but I will wake him anyway, another small betrayal. I will make coffee for Gabi, grinding the beans, heating the stovetop steamer, frothing the milk. There will be a pan of porridge simmering, sprinkled with nuts and seeds, fruit swelling under the surface. Sage and I will eat at the table, Gabi will have hers standing up, leaning against the kitchen bench. She will be hurt, silent. But she will kiss me before she leaves for work.

  I will walk Sage to school. I will say, ‘If any one of those redneck losers gives you grief, I’ll punch him on the nose’ and Sage will roll his eyes. But he does not like to walk to school alone. I will wait till the bell rings and then I will walk home along the dirt roads, the leaves of eucalypts shivering overhead.

  I will make the bed for Sage, sheets from the dryer still crackling with electricity. I will do yoga—breathe, stretch, breathe. Yes, I will clean out the shed. And I will paint. I promise. If not today, then soon. I will bleed the colours. I will paint the body of a woman in this landscape that grows over me, under me, from me. And while I am not painting, I will weed the garden, boneseed, soursob, onion weed, cooch, and I will protect the bulbs, already new with erupting life.

  Sometime after three, I will head out to pick up Sage and he will be waiting, adrift, a smudge of grey against the grey in the winter playground. He will say, ‘Oh, you’re here,’ as if he could be expecting anyone else. Yes, I’ll say. I’m here. I’m here.

  Dear Amy, I will write, but only in my head. I made my choices.

  Lost and Found

  Kirstyn McDe
rmott

  Ghost never meant to scare anyone. But she was small for her age, and quiet, and given to walking about in socks. Oh, her mother would gasp, whenever she noticed Ghost standing in a doorway, or beside the fridge, or sometimes right behind her, waiting patiently to ask a question. Sweetheart, you mustn’t creep up on people like that! Ghost’s older sister, Jemima, simply shrieked. Most of the time, she punched Ghost in the arm as well. Little sneak, I’m gonna kill you. Ghost had long stopped protesting. Instead, she tried to keep out of her sister’s way. Often, she hummed or sang softly to herself as she went about the house, so her mother might hear her coming. Freak, Jemima would snort. Think you’re gonna be on The Voice, or what?

  ‘Be nice to Jem,’ her mother told Ghost as they unpacked yet another box of kitchen stuff. Jemima was in her bedroom, music blaring through her closed door. ‘This move is really hard for her. She’s had to leave a lot of friends behind.’

  ‘I had to leave my friends as well,’ Ghost said, even though she didn’t really mind so much. Indira and Kaylie had been best friends with each other, really. A lot of the time Ghost had felt like she was merely tagging along. Like she didn’t really fit.

  ‘I know, sweetheart,’ Ghost’s mother said. ‘But it’s different for Jem. She’s sixteen this year, and at her age... well, you’ll understand when you’re older.’

  Ghost said nothing to that, just unwrapped another plate and smoothed the newspaper flat with her hands.

  ‘You’ll make new friends,’ her mother said. ‘School starts in another week, you wait and see.’

  Ghost chewed on her bottom lip. ‘I won’t know anyone.’

  ‘You’re starting high school, sweetheart. Everyone’s in the same boat, their first year at a new school.’ Her mother squeezed her hand. ‘I bet they’re all sitting at home right now, just as worried as you are.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Ghost’s mother smiled, then wiped the back of one hand theatrically across her forehead. ‘Whoa, look at the time there, kiddo. How about we get Thai for dinner, what do you say? Or Indian. Your sister would like that.’

  Ghost shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’

  Her mother kissed the top of her head. ‘Be a darling, will you, and take all this paper out to the bin? I think it’s recycling this week.’

  Ghost folded the crumpled sheets into her arms and carried them out the front to where the rubbish bins huddled against the side fence. Their new house was more like half a house. Like someone had drawn a line down the middle of one big house and cut it in two. Maybe that’s why their street number was 27B. The half-house at 27A was identical, but flipped around, with the driveway running down its left side instead of its right, and a front door on the right side instead of the left. A mirror twin, the same but different. Ghost wondered what it looked like inside. If its small back-corner bedroom had the same pale blue walls and tired grey carpet as hers.

  Ghost opened the lid of the recycling bin and tipped the bundle of paper into its mouth. A scrappy garden was planted along the fence-line, wild with daisies and geraniums and grasses gone to seed. On impulse, Ghost bent down to pick a handful of flowers to take to her mother.

  And saw, staring up at her, a tiny pale face.

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered, her fingers already reaching through the foliage. It was a statue of some sort, half-buried in the soil. She dug it out and brushed off as much of the dirt as she could. Made of white china and no bigger than the length of her hand, the figurine looked like a baby angel. Fat and round-cheeked with two stubby wings, it lay on its side, propped up on one elbow. The other arm held a squareish blob that was probably supposed to be a harp.

  Ghost smiled, pleased with her find. She stuffed the angel into the pocket of her jeans and began to hum beneath her breath as she walked back to the house, all thoughts of flowers forgotten.

  It was the first piece of Flotsam she’d come across since the move.

  * * *

  Some people collect postage stamps, or movie memorabilia, or anything at all to do with little green frogs. Ghost collected Flotsam. She’d found the word in a book about pirates and seafaring, and liked the way it felt on her tongue. It referred to the stuff that floated about on the sea after a shipwreck. Parts of ships and lost cargo and bits of debris that anyone passing by could claim for themselves. Flotsam was an old word and wasn’t much used these days—except, she supposed, by pirates and seafarers—and she liked that about it as well.

  Ghost kept her Flotsam in a large shoebox beneath the bed. From time to time, she would pull everything out and spread it across the floor, and make up stories about where it might have come from. One of her first ever finds was a baby’s sandal, small and scuffed and navy blue, with dull silver buckles and the shadow of a tiny foot worn into its insole. The shoe had been lying in the middle of the footpath in front of their old house one day when she came home from school. Alone. Lost. Abandoned.

  The box also held a bright green ribbon that she’d found caught in a hedge, still tied in a bow. And a single silver earring in the shape of a leaf she’d discovered tucked between the seats of a bus. And a poem about a lion and about love that someone had written to a boy called Simon on a piece of pink paper. It had been folded inside the pages of a library book, and Ghost could never decide whether it was Simon who’d left it there or the poem’s author, a girl too shy perhaps to pass it on to him.

  These were her favourite bits of Flotsam.

  Junk, her sister sneered. Other people’s trash. But Jemima was wrong. Ghost didn’t collect rubbish; she had no interest in what people deliberately threw away. It was the stuff they overlooked, or forgot about. The stuff that just got lost, that was left to float away on its own, to ride the waves and the tides until it washed up at her feet.

  * * *

  The girl was sitting on the front steps of 27A, knees drawn up to her chest and one arm swinging lazily by her side, drawing patterns in the dust at her feet. She had long brown hair that hung over her face like a curtain and was wearing a pale blue dress. Her feet were bare, her toes grotty with dirt.

  ‘Hello,’ Ghost called over the short wooden fence that divided the houses. She had been combing through the garden in hopes of finding more Flotsam.

  The girl lifted her head. She glanced around, as if expecting there to be someone behind her, then pointed a finger towards her own chest. ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘Who else?’ Ghost replied. She stood on tiptoes, hand clutching the top of the palings to keep her balance, and peered over the fence. ‘Do you live here?’

  The girl got to her feet, tucked her hair behind her ears. Her dress was baggy and shapeless and came down to just below her knees. Smock, was the word that popped into Ghost’s head when she saw it. The girl seemed to be around the same age as Ghost, and Ghost wondered if she would be going to the same school next week.

  ‘Do you live there?’ the girl asked, pointing over the fence to Ghost’s house.

  ‘We just moved in a couple of weeks ago. My mum got a new job.’

  ‘Oh,’ the girl said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Gina.’ Ghost shrugged. ‘But everyone calls me Ghost.’

  ‘Ghost?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It’s kinda dumb.’

  The girl grinned. ‘I like it.’ She took a couple of steps forwards. Her hands were clasped together, fingers curling and uncurling around themselves like a nest of baby snakes. She was skinny, even skinnier than Ghost, and there were dark shadows beneath her eyes.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ghost asked.

  The girl stopped walking. ‘I don’t...’ She frowned, as though trying to come up with the answer to a difficult question. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to remember.’

  ‘Is this like a game?’ Ghost asked. ‘Am I supposed to guess or something?’ Behind her, there was a soft scuffing sound and Ghost turned t
o see her sister standing at the foot of the front steps, arms crossed over her chest.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Jemima demanded.

  ‘Her.’ Ghost pointed and turned towards the fence, meaning to introduce her sister to the strange, nameless girl, but the yard next door was empty.

  Jemima sniffed. ‘There’s no one there, dumbarse.’

  ‘There was a girl.’ Ghost pulled herself up onto the very tips of her sneakers and peered over the top of the fence, thinking that the girl must have crouched down for some reason. It seemed impossible for someone to have run away so quickly, so quietly, yet there was absolutely no sign of her.

  ‘You’re getting a bit too old for imaginary friends,’ Jemima said. The smile on her face was more of a sneer.

  ‘I didn’t imagine her.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Jemima rolled her eyes. ‘Mum says lunch is ready.’ She tossed her hair over her shoulder and jogged up the steps and into the house.

  ‘Hey,’ Ghost whispered through the fence. ‘Are you still there?’

  No one answered. The neighbouring yard was empty and still, with not even a breeze to stir the overgrown grass. And yet, as she turned and followed her sister inside, Ghost couldn’t shake the feeling that a pair of dark-shadowed eyes were watching her each and every move.

  * * *

  No kids lived in 27A, according to Ghost’s mother. Just a retired couple who spent more time travelling in their caravan than sitting at home, which was probably why the house was empty at the moment. Ghost kept a keen lookout over the next few days, but she didn’t see the girl again. Not like the first time, anyway. Every now and then the sensation of being watched prickled her skin, and sometimes she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, but there was never anyone when she looked.

  Then school began and Ghost found other things to worry about.

  ‘So, girls, how was Week One?’ their mother asked that Friday over dinner.