Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

  The phone went to voicemail again. “It’s me sweetie,” she said, unable to keep the edge of exasperation, anxiety out of her voice. “Let me know if you want a lift, otherwise I’ll see you at the Towers. 3302, Tower 17. You know, in case you forgot. Love you.”

  She got into the car.

  * * *

  The sun had barely dragged itself free of the horizon when Art got his first real lesson in being a kangaroo. A dog, a heeler, probably from the neighbouring suburb, launched itself over the hill and in among their little mob, tearing a gash in the leg of some youngster then leaving it to bleed out on the ground. Art struggled to his feet and felt the surge of bodies around him as the rest of the mob fled, felt his own haunches tense and spring and wondered at the power that propelled him across the grassland. He was terrified and he was thrilled and for the first time since he’d come here he didn’t miss his wife or his job and he didn’t wonder if he’d made a terrible mistake. For now, he just was.

  The roos regrouped on a native grassland meadow to the west of the city and filled their bellies with grass. Art felt his muscles flex and tighten. He licked his paws over and over, felt the soft breeze lift the heat away from him. One of the babies of the mob, natural-born, tugged grass around his feet then slumped down to sleep.

  He looked at the newly planted sclerophyll woodland, eucalypt leaves shimmering in the light summer breeze. He saw the bulldozers on the horizon demolishing the edges of his city’s suburban sprawl, shrinking it further and further. He nibbled the native grasses and knew that finally he was where he was supposed to be.

  * * *

  Lally woke as soon as the light hit the windows of her new home. She pulled her phone towards her: he hadn’t called. She rang him again, got voicemail. She scrolled through the news: nothing about an accident, a fire, a suicide. Kaniya Kardashian had moved into a luxe HD Tower in New Mexico, her Taos mansion disassembled to make way for javelinas. The Secretary General declared the ‘Half the World for Habitat’ targets were on track. A Mumbai vox pop showed citizen after citizen praising the restoration of the ghats and the return of the monsoon. No news of an accident. No news of a fire. No news of a suicide.

  A suicide? Why would he have suicided? He wouldn’t.

  A protestor in Maribyrnong had chained himself to the bulldozer outside his neo-Georgian, a banner across his lawn reading “How about human habitat?” A GIF from Q&A showed Pauline Hanson shouting over and over and over “Brumbies need this land as much as bandicoots. Hating brumbies is unAustralian”.

  Art had cried the first time they’d heard about the Rollback, the Ultimatum. Lally had thought he was scared, sad to lose the house where they’d spent nearly twenty years, scared to move to the city where they’d be packed in with every other human. But he wasn’t.

  “To be on the right side of history, Lally. For once,” he had told her. “To have a chance to do something just. The weight of it all finally gone.” He had slumped into their anniversary couch (which, she remembered, he’d insisted on buying though she’d thought the old one was still fine), wiping his tears away. She’d never seen him smile like that. “Thank God.”

  They’d donated to WWF every month. They’d voted for the Species Justice Party and Lally had worked in their campaign office, volunteering her legal skills to help draft ‘Half the World for Habitat’ policies. In her youth, Lally had even spent some time up on a tree platform in Gippsland. She’d been vegan for years. She hadn’t really been sure what he was on about. She’d thought they were on the right side. Still, it was good to see him happy.

  It had been good to see him happy. But where the fuck was he now?

  She called the hospital.

  * * *

  Art had been getting their messages for months. Watching them from the front verandah as they picked their way across the grass of the sports oval opposite, heard their conversations, heard their plans.

  Lester, their leader: Art had seen the way he moved, had known in his heart the things he’d said.

  Lester had said it was time to rise up. He’d said that for them, for the mob, the Rollback would never be enough. None of it would ever be enough until the spread of bitumen was ended. Lock them in their towering castles, Lester had said. Keep them closed inside their walls. Stop their spread.

  From his verandah, Art could hear them, their plans for another night on the slick shining streets. He’d looked out the window of their Smart4Two as he and Lally drove boxes of possessions to be recycled, seen their bodies sprawled across the tarmac.

  The government people had come to Art’s door, Ultimatum in hand. Towers or Transference, they said? No rush, sir; take your time, sir. A representative will be back in three weeks to register your preference. Room already set aside in the Towers sir, so no rush. He’d signed right then: Transference. Selected his species: Macropus giganteus.

  And when Lally got home from the shops he’d passed her form over to her and hadn’t said a word. “Towers then, darling?” she’d said. “Towers, of course,” and she’d filled in the form and asked if he’d done his and he said he had, that he’d already passed it over to the representative, that he’d known already what her answer would be.

  Which he had.

  And now here Art was and there was Lester.

  Art bounded his way to the front of the mob to introduce himself.

  * * *

  Lally took Art’s favourite glasses, his precious Bohemian crystal, and packed them gently into a shoebox, nestled them in the tissue paper still left from unpacking. She put on her hiking boots, set the box on the floor, rested one foot on its fragile cardboard top and then balanced her full weight. The edge of the box crumpled and she slipped slightly to one side; suddenly the glass gave beneath her thick vegan leather boots and she heard its satisfying waterfall of crushing cracks. Rocking backwards and forwards, she ground the glasses into dust. She picked up the collapsed, torn box, careful not to cut her hands, and dropped it into the rubbish chute. She vomited into the sink, rinsed her mouth and slid the kitchen bench from its slot.

  “Is there someone there I can talk to about Transference?” she asked the technician who popped up on her laptop when she Skyped HabiNow.

  “If you’re considering Transference, ma’am,” the boy said, “I can put you through to our customer management officer?”

  “It’s about my husband,” she said. “I want to find out if he Transferred.”

  She ran the tap to wash the last of the vomit from her new sink’s chrome.

  “As I’m sure you’ll understand, ma’am, there are privacy issues.”

  “Of course there are privacy issues,” she said. “You think I thought I could just call you up and you’d tell me if my husband had Transferred? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “I wouldn’t . . . ”

  “He’s disappeared and he’s not in hospital and he’s not dead and he’s not in gaol. And it’s been two weeks since they executed our Ultimatum and here I am in the Towers and here he isn’t. I know you Transferred him and I know you can’t tell me that you did and you’re certainly not going to tell me what he is or where you put him, but I just want you to know I know. OK?”

  There was a sliver of glass in her finger, under her nail. She grasped it between finger and thumb and gently pulled it free. A drop of blood beaded there and she streaked it across the concerned face of the technician on her laptop screen.

  “OK?” she repeated.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “OK.” She hung up.

  “What do you fuckers want from me?” she muttered at the pod of whales streaming across her apartment wall, the tinkling windchime accompaniment of the projection lurching to a crescendo as a baby humpback breached and leapt from the blue-grey waves.

  * * *

  “ . . . until the new humans came,” Lester told him. “The new humans did not eat from us and the new humans took the land and made it smaller and smaller and turned it into walls and roads and speeding meta
l and we could not leap.”

  Art realised he hadn’t been concentrating, that he’d missed some of Lester’s gist. He’d been wondering how it was he could hear what Lester was telling him when, for the most part, the whickers and grunts of the kangaroos around him were just that: whickers and grunts.

  “We could not bound,” Lester was saying. “We could not jump. We could not fly.”

  “Are you nature-born?” Art asked, but Lester was on a roll now.

  “You are one among us!” he said. “You are welcome among us! You have chosen the shining path; you have made yourself righteous.”

  He mustn’t be, Art thought. He must be a Transferee.

  “You were Transferred?” Art asked him. “Me too!” Though of course Lester knew that. That was what he’d just been saying, wasn’t it: he’d been congratulating Art on his decision. “What made you chose Transference?” Art asked, and then realised Lester was still talking to him.

  “You will meet the metal,” Lester said. “You will take a journey strong and beautiful. You will leap and you will bound and when you meet the metal your stride will take you over the highest fence and onto the greenest grass where there are no roads and no buildings and nothing but open land as far as they eye can see.”

  “Meet the metal?” Art asked.

  “You are one of us,” Lester replied. “You are welcome among us. This dusk you will eat the sweetest grass and tomorrow, you will meet the metal. We thank you,” he said. “The mob thanks you.”

  * * *

  Lally had been driving illegally when she hit the kangaroo. She had no reason to be travelling across town—no family member to visit, no wellness initiative she needed to attend. Nothing she couldn’t do from home or by light rail. No way to justify the petrol she was burning. But she was angry, and she loved driving angry.

  So when it happened she didn’t call road services for help. She bundled the creature—so small, maybe it’s a wallaby and not a kangaroo, she thought—into the hatch of her Smart4Two and tried not to think about whether the blood would ever come off.

  The rest of the mob had scattered to a safe distance, and watched now as she fastened her seat belt and accelerated at a very modest pace.

  Yen opened the gate so Lally could drive up to the Sanctuary’s office. Lally wound down the window. “I’m not volunteering today,” she said. “Where should I park?”

  “Yassmin couldn’t make it,” Yen said, “so we’re one down anyway. Roll on in.”

  Lally parked and popped the hatch.

  “Nasty,” Yen said, and ran her hands over the roo’s body.

  “There isn’t anything . . . ?”

  “He would have died instantly,” Yen said. “You found him, right? On the side of the road?”

  “I . . . ”

  Yen talked over the top of her. “You found him.”

  Lally started again. “I was angry, I . . . ”

  “Shut-up, Lally. We need your work here. Species Justice needs you. God, Ambleside & Duray need you—where would those animals be without you? I’m not writing this up. You’re not getting Transferred. Let’s take him in.”

  They carried the little body up to the Tasmanian Devil enclosure, where seven or eight of the stocky, scrambling creatures were recovering from facial cancer. Lally stroked the soft fur of the roo’s head, said she was sorry and shed a few tears. Yen recited the Apology to Nature, and they hefted the body over the fence to be torn apart.

  “Cup of tea, Lal?” Yen said. “You should probably wait a while before you drive home.”

  Lally stared out the window at a recuperating ring-tail and listened as the kettle came to a boil, watched Yen wipe down her car’s front fender. She couldn’t keep waiting for Art to show up. He’d decided what he’d decided, for whatever reasons. He should have talked to her first—they’d been married twenty years, for god’s sake. But he hadn’t, and he’d gone, and Lally was buggered if she was going to sit around the apartment moping. The world was fixing itself, and she wanted to be a part of it.

  At the Towers there was mail waiting for her. A package from the firm, Ambleside & Duray, where she was partner: petitions from displaced animals seeking asylum, whose cases she’d be representing. And a letter on the stationery of HabiNow Transferrence Inc. She looked at the postmark—20 days ago, bloody Australia Post.

  She poured wine into a recycled plastic tumbler, momentarily regretting crushing the Bohemian crystal, and opened the letter.

  It was from Art, written before he was taken in to surgery.

  ‘Dearest Lally,’ it said. ‘By the time you read this I will probably be missing you horribly. I won’t be able to see you or talk to you; I won’t be able to write. I’ve decided to Transfer. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it, but I know you had your heart set on the Towers. I didn’t want to upset you. I just couldn’t bear being the bad guy any more, Lally. I’m tired of the weight of being human, of always making things worse. I want to be part of nature. I just want to be innocent. I love you always, Art.’

  “You wimp, Art,” she said. She chucked the letter on the coffee table, opened the depositions from Ambleside & Duray, and got down to work.

  * * ** * ** * *

  The Wandering Library

  D.K. Mok

  On the rippled red sands of the twilight desert, in a cosy dome panelled with skylights, I sat cross-legged on the knotted rug. I drew my gaze across the face of each child, my voice hushed in the lamplight.

  “I am the wandering library, the teller of a thousand tales, the bridge between worlds—”

  “Ms Bashir, we know who you are,” said a freckled girl. “You visit every year.”

  “The new children might not know.” I gestured towards a pale boy sitting near the back. His expression conveyed the degree of interest a glacier might have in a passing jellyfish. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll get straight to the stories—”

  “Tell us about the spider that snared the moon!” said a boy with black curls.

  “No,” huffed the freckled girl. “Tell us again how scientists made the giant, people-eating frogs.”

  The history of Cambrea University and their plan to resolve the world’s “big mosquito problem” had become a cautionary tale on the rise of genome editing, the decline of government regulation, and the importance of well-placed hyphens.

  “There’s time for several requests,” I said. “But first, I want to tell you a new story. It’s the story of a boy who dwells in a city of stone and cloud, a city that hangs between the sea and the sky. Every breeze sings with wheeling gulls, and the shadow of the albatross sweeps across the warm, green waters . . . ”

  The children listened in awe as I unfolded tales of the boy’s adventures: gliding across the waves on his skimmer, diving with ghostly shoals of manta rays, watching the sun sink into a glittering sea.

  Outside, the wind rustled through the spinifex. I reeled off several stories more, delighting in the gasps and giggles, the surprise and enchantment that danced across the children’s faces. Finally, I waved my hand towards a console on the wall, and the classroom returned to normal brightness.

  I flipped open the pod-crate beside me. “You can borrow five books each. Make sure you bring them back within three days, or I’ll send Paku after you.”

  The younger children squealed at the thought of being accosted by a cantankerous, woolly alpacamel, and jostled excitedly over the crate. I knelt beside one of the toddlers.

  “Hi, Lei. Are you’re still interested in sea creatures? This book is all about anglerfish.”

  The toddler grasped the proffered book like a talisman and raced off with greedy eyes. Nearby, one of the older girls cleared her throat nervously—she was perhaps fourteen, her thick brown hair woven into a braid.

  “Ms Bashir . . . Last time, you asked me to write something for you . . . about here.”

  She thrust a booklet towards me, the cover stitched with ochre cotton, the spine bound with brown string. Lines of ink and
imagination streamed across each page, and I accepted it as I might a rare treasure.

  “Thank you, Sidika. Do you mind if I share this story with others?”

  A flash of panic—mingled with pleasure—darted across her eyes, and she eventually gave what passed for a nonchalant shrug.

  “Sure.”

  “By the way, what can you tell me about the new student?”

  “Sava?” Sidika glanced over at the impassive boy. Several children had offered him books, but he remained resolutely seated, as though awaiting permission to leave. “I don’t know much about him. No one does.”

  I sauntered towards the rear wall, dispensing books as I went. Finally, I crouched beside the boy, noting that he didn’t turn to look at me. He was ten, maybe eleven, with wide, watchful eyes and scrawny limbs.

  “Hi,” I said. “What sort of books do you like?”

  “I don’t want any books.” His voice was soft and polite, but harboured an edge that discouraged further conversation.

  It wasn’t my job to untangle uncooperative children, and it was with a twinge of guilt that I knew I could leave behind any troublemakers. I could even skip a town if it became too unruly; after all, my schedule was already quite tight.

  Still, it was worth another try. Some children struggled to read, and expressed this through disinterest, even hostility.

  “If you’d rather, I have some audiobooks—”

  “I don’t need another story.”

  Another story?

  Perhaps he was still absorbing the stories from tonight, although something in his voice suggested otherwise.