by Kathryn Hind
Another van eased past, branded in graffiti. Two sets of brown legs hung out the window, both crossed at the ankles.
‘Oi!’ Eddie shouted. He lifted his shirt and pressed his nipple against the window. The van tooted its horn and Eddie laughed.
Lucy scampered up onto Sven and pressed her nose against the window, panting. A ute with a mastiff in the tray moved ahead of them in the next lane. The dog paced back and forth, unchained and restless, without a place to shelter from the sun. It saw Lucy and stood on the edge of the tray, leaning out towards her, barking. They overtook the ute and Lucy scampered over the console and into the back seat, barking her reply.
They sidled up to the graffiti van again, and the dangling legs were replaced by middle fingers from the women within.
‘Rock’n’roll!’ Eddie yelled, launching out of his seat. He slid the van door open and hung outside, fist extended to the sun. Lucy’s paws scrabbled for traction on the seat and she was gone, the white tip of her tail streaking out the door.
‘Lucy!’ Amelia yanked the handbrake on and opened her door. A motorbike swerved around her, the air of it grazing her skin.
The traffic moved forward as she ran against it, following Lucy. Horns beeped. She saw a flash of fur up ahead, weaving between a silver bull bar and the hood of a red sports car.
‘Lucy!’
Amelia darted through cars, pressing into their hot bonnets, dodging side mirrors, exhaust searing her calves.
On her tiptoes, her chest tight, Amelia searched for Lucy amid the haze of fumes, the glare of sun bouncing from metal surface to metal surface. There was a hive of horn-honking ahead and a gap in the traffic; Lucy stood facing a car, ears back against her head. Her tail was between her legs and she was lowered onto her haunches as the driver leaned on his horn. When Amelia reached the spot Lucy had been, there was no longer any sign of her. The traffic continued snaking ahead.
A black-haired woman had her window down, tapping ash from her cigarette. ‘Did you see a dog?’ Amelia shouted. ‘Did you?’
The woman inched her car forward, avoided eye contact. Amelia pushed herself off the vehicle and kept running. She caught a glimpse of Lucy four or five cars in the distance, but she disappeared under a Land Rover.
‘Lucy!’ The air was sharp in her lungs. Her legs burned. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she said, approaching the stopped Land Rover. Its tyres were huge. She bent beneath the vehicle, looked for the familiar fur … and there was nothing.
‘Better run,’ the man said through a gap in his window. He pointed behind him with a thumb.
Amelia saw her a few metres away, poised with two paws on the barricade, preparing to leap. On the other side, the traffic going in the opposite direction rushed past, four lanes of vehicles escaping the city.
‘Lucy, stay,’ Amelia said. She raised her hands, pushed them gently down. ‘It’s all right, girl,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
Lucy looked at her; her pupils were large, her body trembling. Amelia was still, everything tense. Lucy stared, and Amelia stared back. ‘Easy, girl, easy.’
Lucy slid her paw down the barricade, began to retreat. A siren started up very close by and, in a flash, Lucy jumped. With a clear, graceful leap, she disappeared over the other side of the wall.
Car tyres screeched. A white hatchback jerked out of its lane. Amelia ran to the road barrier and threw her top half over, the cement grazing her stomach as she peered at the other side. Down the road, Lucy cowered against the barrier, her ears plastered back. Her mouth was open and she yelped, high-pitched, confused. Amelia couldn’t tell if her dark coat concealed blood or injury. The traffic hurtled past. As Amelia ran, a piece of wire tangled between her legs and she almost fell, hands out, face angled towards the ground. Then she was there, at the barrier, reaching over and grabbing fistfuls of fur. She dug her fingers into the scruff of Lucy’s neck and yanked her up over the concrete, scooping her hind legs up beneath her. She collapsed to the road, her back to the barricade. She cradled Lucy on her lap, running her hands along Lucy’s body searching for sticky blood, squeezing limbs to test for broken bones, found nothing. Amelia buried her face into fur and it zapped her cheeks with static.
Fast footsteps approached, but she kept her ear down, listened to Lucy’s heartbeat bashing her ribs but starting to slow. A figure blocked the sun and when she looked up, it was Sven, out of breath, his hands on his hips.
‘Is she okay?’
‘I think so … I don’t know, she’s so frightened.’ Amelia buried her head again in fur, breathed in dust, sweat and skin.
The traffic driving into the city surged forward; an extra lane had been cleared of debris up ahead. Eddie approached at a trot. ‘Great catch,’ he said.
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ Amelia said.
‘Do what?’ he said, hands open to the sky.
‘The door, man,’ Sven said, still quiet, still calm.
‘Well, I thought she was trained, I just –’
‘She is trained! She got worked up and you just let her out onto the road!’ Amelia said.
Eddie kicked at a spot on the road barrier. ‘It was an accident,’ he said, shrugging. ‘This is no place for dogs anyway.’
Amelia gripped Lucy tight. She couldn’t tell which trembles were her own and which were Lucy’s. She leaned back and the hard, warm barrier took their weight. Vehicles gathered pace. Down the road, the van was stationary, blocking the lane. Music blared from a passing car, a deep bass vibrating plastic and metal. ‘Get off the fucking road!’ the driver yelled at them out the window.
‘Let’s go,’ Eddie said. Lucy squirmed in her grip, restless and no longer willing to put up with being squeezed. Eddie held out his hand to her. Holding on to Lucy’s collar, she refused the hand, pressed herself up from the asphalt so that little stones dug in to her skin. Her legs were shaking and she rested her fingers on the barrier. She scooped Lucy up into her arms and walked behind the others, in single file, towards the van.
Clare was sitting in the open door of the kombi. ‘Are we done?’ she said, jumping to her feet. A bus groaned as it edged closer to the back of the van. The traffic in the lane beside it was unyielding. Sweat prickled down Amelia’s neck and her arms itched where Lucy’s fur bristled against her.
‘Let’s go,’ Sven said, placing his hands on the back of Eddie’s shoulders, steering him towards the driver’s seat.
‘Righto, righto,’ Eddie said, dragging his feet.
Amelia and Lucy had the middle row of the van to themselves. Clare sat in the front seat, Sven in the back. Lucy’s paws dug into Amelia’s thighs and Amelia hugged her neck; Lucy shook off the clinginess and stuck her head out the window.
Eddie insisted on dropping her where she wanted to go. If she’d bled onto the seat, he showed her mercy and did not mention it. They cut through the city, passing servos and fast-food joints on the outskirts, finally making it to the leafy streets of Kew.
‘Just here, please,’ Amelia said, pointing to the car park of the local shops. The van rolled to a stop and Amelia sat for a moment, waited for relief to rise up through her, for the familiar surroundings of the shops, the hanging baskets bursting with flowers, to make their impact. The others seemed to wait, too, seeing what she would do.
When nothing came, she took a deep breath. ‘Thanks,’ she said and slipped out of the van, keeping hold of Lucy’s collar.
Sven climbed down, too. ‘Here,’ he said, leaning back into the van, clicking something. ‘Take this.’ He handed her a long black strap. ‘So she doesn’t run.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ She looped the strap through Lucy’s collar and held on to the ends.
Eddie got out of the van to give her a hard pat on the back, then accelerated off with two beeps of the horn. Clare looked out from the front window, curled up with a pillow. An elderly lady flinched, put a hand to her chest as Eddie howled out the window. Once recovered, she continued to shuffle her walking frame up a ramp.<
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The heat of the pavement seeped through the thinning soles of Amelia’s shoes. She tied Lucy beneath a supermarket awning; gold and silver tinsel weaved around the pole. Amelia dragged over a white tub of water that read Doggy latte in black texta. Lucy lapped at it, splashing Amelia’s legs with the sun-warmed water.
The lady with the walker moved towards them; when she was a few steps away, she stopped and met Amelia’s eye. Lipstick was painted above her mouth, decorating lips that weren’t there. Despite the heat, she wore a huge knit cardigan in Christmas greens and reds. She stared with a vacancy that suggested her body was also only a design for a person no longer present. Amelia smiled at her quickly and tied another knot in Lucy’s new leash.
‘Darling, Merry Christmas,’ the woman said in a wavering voice. ‘I hope Santa looks after you … But only if you’ve been a good girl.’
‘Thanks, you too,’ Amelia said.
‘Have you been a good girl?
Amelia closed one eye against the sun and looked up at the woman. ‘Dunno,’ she said.
The woman nodded. Her arms shook as she held the rubber grips of her walking frame. ‘As long as you’ve tried your best,’ she said. ‘That’s all a young girl like you can do.’
The woman worked her way over a lifted paving stone, leaving a scent of talcum powder behind her. Lucy’s tongue hung from her mouth as she panted. She looked up at Amelia, all the wildness of earlier gone.
‘Stay,’ Amelia said, holding up her palm.
The supermarket doors slid open and closed for customers, releasing bursts of cool air. Amelia walked inside, into fluorescent lights and polished floors.
The aisles stretched out ahead, full to bursting. Cash registers beeped. Someone bumped past, caught her shoulder, another rolled his eyes as she stepped out of the way of his trolley.
A teenage boy unpacked a stack of cardboard boxes, shoving bags of chips into place with fast hands. The sanitary products were one aisle over; packets of pink, purple and yellow rose before her. She grabbed a box of heavy-flow tampons and scratched open the plastic wrapping while pretending to browse. She lifted the box to the shelf and, under the cover of the neighbouring products, tipped the tampons into her hand. Feigning close interest in a packet of pads, she put her fist into her pocket and let the tampons fall in. When she looked up, the chip-packing boy was watching her from the end of the aisle, eyes wide. With a new cardboard box of chips in his arms, he returned to his station, her partner in crime.
In the bakery section, a gluten-free orange and almond cake sat alongside a Victoria sponge. She fingered the two-dollar coin in her pocket, looked at the security camera watching over the cakes. Her lips were dry and swollen; she caught a thread of skin under her teeth and dragged it downwards. There was the sting of it, the taste of blood.
A basket sat in the corner with a ‘Specials’ sign in bright orange; it was full of a mishmash of products shunted from the shelves as they neared their use-by dates. Rummaging under a mountain of vegan beetroot and sweet potato crisps, she spotted a packet of sponge fingers: $1.75.
She joined the queue for the checkouts. People shifted their weight, flicked through magazines. Some of them looked at her and quickly looked away when she caught their eye.
‘Next please,’ the cashier sang out. She wore a crisp blue apron tied over a yellow shirt.
Amelia’s shoes screeched on the linoleum. ‘Found everything you need, darl?’ The woman had a yellow name badge: Rhonda. Make-up was caught in the lines on Rhonda’s forehead. Her eyelashes were black and clotted.
‘Yes thanks,’ Amelia said. ‘Just these.’ She flopped the sponge fingers onto the counter. Rhonda scanned the item and, upon seeing the price, examined the package.
‘You probably don’t want these, love. They’re out of date.’
Amelia took the packet from her, pretended to examine the date for the first time: the expiry was the day before. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘Can’t sell ’em, love. Not allowed to. Health regulations, you see. ’Cos if you buy these from us and get sick –’
‘It’s fine, really. I’m not going to get sick.’
‘It’ll be stale, darl. You won’t enjoy it,’ Rhonda said.
‘Stale maybe, but definitely not deadly.’
‘I’ll have to call Mark, darl,’ she said. ‘You can fight it out with him.’
‘Please don’t call Mark,’ Amelia said.
The woman held the sponge fingers out in front of her, squinted at the label again.
‘There are nice cakes on the shelves, hun, why don’t you grab yourself one of those. You don’t have to queue again.’ Rhonda winked.
‘I don’t want those cakes.’ Amelia slid her two-dollar coin across the counter.
Rhonda’s eyes darted down the growing queue. ‘Take the bloomin’ things then,’ she hissed. ‘But I tell you something, missy: never shoot the messenger.’ She opened the till and gave Amelia her change. ‘Need a bag?’
‘No, thanks,’ Amelia said, and she couldn’t look at Rhonda as she snatched up the packet and was spat out into the heat by the sliding doors.
She squinted, adjusting to the glare. Lucy’s tail wagged as Amelia approached. Amelia cupped the side of her head in her hand.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘This is it.’
Lucy moved her head, licking the space in front of Amelia’s face. There was a new addition to Lucy’s collar: a knitted Christmas tree, bright green with red baubles. It was tied on to her collar with twine. No one was nearby to take credit for it; she scanned the car park for the cardigan woman but didn’t find her.
Amelia walked around the back of the supermarket and followed the walkway to Sid’s house. Dry grass reached out to itch her calves. The plastic wrapping of the sponge fingers rustled as it bumped against her leg.
Sweat gathered along her hairline and upper lip. A row of tall bushes lined the path and she tucked in behind them. Backed by someone’s fence, she twisted open a tampon, undid her shorts, and shoved it up into the warm mess inside her underpants. Her hand came out strung with blood. She wiped her fingers along grass as best she could, some darker bits of blood settling beneath her fingernails.
Her heart was quick as she passed the houses she knew, as she recognised the children playing in a sprinkler, their same old dog barking from the window.
The place was more magnificent than last time she visited, though perhaps she hadn’t appreciated it properly then, during a few days of respite enforced by her mother. Japanese maples matured with grace, the wisteria worked its way higher and thicker on the pergola, the azalea bushes were fuller, as if puffing out their chests. Sid was a born gardener. Unlatching the gate, walking under an archway, it was suddenly obvious that she would end up here, with Sid and the sanctuary he’d grown.
Lucy knew exactly where she was; she tugged on the lead, anxious to go ahead. After double-checking she’d closed the gate, Amelia held the sweaty plastic of the sponge fingers in her mouth while she untied Lucy; as soon as she was free, she launched down the garden path, leaving a wake of flying stones. Amelia stood under the shade of an oak and tried to take it all in, the splendour of it, the fact that she was there. Sid had finally got the fountain working, a big elaborate white thing with rounded cherubs’ bums, water splashing against the stone basin. Even amid the neighbours’ ornate gardens with trees cut into balls like poodle tails, Sid’s work was impressive. Colour was woven through so that the garden looked grown, not designed or built, as if each plant had chosen to be in a relationship with those around it. She knew it was important to him that she see the meaning of what he was doing, and she did.
He was there – visible only in fragments – between bushes on the far side of the garden, up a stepladder. Lucy would soon give her presence away, but Amelia was glad for the few seconds to take in her best friend. His calves were straining, bigger than she remembered, his toes exposed in thongs, in danger as a branch fell victim to his pruning.
It was unlike him to not wear his proper boots; he’d been so proud when his never-there boss, the owner of the property, had bought him a pair with steel caps in them.
His legs were going down the ladder then, and eventually a forearm was revealed, more defined than when she last saw him, muscles of the kind she didn’t think him capable of growing. The tone of brown to his skin was new as well; despite working outdoors, he didn’t tan, unless you counted his freckles joining up. But despite the differences in him, she knew this person, every piece of him familiar. He was down off the ladder, ducking under the branches that obscured his face, bending to talk to Lucy; she stopped briefly to sniff his hands then burst through to the other side of the foliage.
It wasn’t Sid after all. It was Zach. And that too shifted into place somehow, as if every step she’d taken had been leading her here; the previous weeks all shrivelled up to this meeting, this moment, standing face to face with him in the yellow afternoon.
‘Hey,’ he said.
He was a few metres away, too far to touch her or to be touched. The beating of her heart was too fast for the way she waited, staring. He paused too and they were animals sizing each other up. A dragonfly flew close to her face, and she didn’t flinch at the buzz of it, nor at the tiny movement of air its wings created at her cheek. Zach pushed hair out of his eyes, wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand. It wasn’t too late to run. She could leave now – walk down the path, beneath the archway, back out the gate she’d just stepped through – and this meeting could be erased. And yet she was still. He’d always been able to do this, to lock her up inside herself.
‘How are ya?’ he said. He put his hands on his hips. There was a slight curl of his mouth: he was laughing. She managed a step back because suddenly the distance between them was much too close. His hands dropped off his waist. Somewhere down the street, a lawnmower false-started, tried again. Choked.