Aubrey had been waiting in the library for a long, fidgety tuna-casserole stinking hour waiting for Ursula CC Browne. Tuesday was senior’s day and the over-run librarian, Larry, was just old enough to remember a time when young people stood up on the bus for their elders without being scowled out or verbally shoehorned from their seat of comfortable ignorance. Larry was nice enough, but Audrey sensed that he was somewhere, somehow damaged and not just in the way anyone must be who seeks out as their daily sustenance the quietude of parallel lines and the fathomable mysteries of barcodes.

“You see that lady with the basket?” Larry had asked him.

Aubrey nodded. He sensed that this question was less conspiratorial or confessional than it was potentially coercive. Aubrey had purposefully arrived before the senior’s session, having been caught out before at the back of a whistling line of complaints about the postal service and the proliferation of neighbourhood crow communities while he waited for a 30-minute window of computer time. And Ursula had been allocated a time of arrival ten minutes prior to this to accommodate the requisite lateness he knew to be intrinsic to her enduring sense of self. Thirty minutes after this time and Aubrey knew that despite his best efforts, he would have to give up his prime spot in front of the library’s fastest hard drive and its largest glare-free backlit screen.

Larry lowered himself into a crouch beside Aubrey’s chair.

“She’s looking for her lost lover,” he whispered.

Aubrey blinked.

“Her?” he said.

He took in the grey-haired woman next to the service desk. She might, he pondered, have recently brocaded her way out of a war and into a wary peace solution between polyester and gold-flecked cotton twine. Not a border had been neglected or singled out for simplicity. From neck to ankle, every item composing her striking habile had been dutifully, and somewhat lovingly, Aubrey thought, edged with a sparkling knitted brocade.

“She wants to see if she can find him on the internet. She’s doing research.”

The woman fiddled with her basket for a moment and produced a plastic wallet so full that the Velcro tabs could no longer kiss.

“It’s called stalking,” Aubrey said flatly.

Larry flinched.

“It’s not stalking if you love them,” he lisped, Aubrey thought, just a couple of nanoseconds too quickly and in a couple of quavers too low.

Aubrey considered Larry for a moment. While the librarian uniform was optional, Aubrey had never seen Larry in any other clothes. Not even at the Swiss deli or NightOwl or the all-night chemist, which had happened several times and not, most significantly, in the front garden of his single-storey duplex weeding the grass stalks that shot up amongst the pebbles surrounding his succulents and his collection of novelty garden statuettes, within which a gremlin with glowing squinty red eyes was by far the menacing of this peculiar prediliction.

“She keeps losing the bookmark I set for her,” Larry whispered. While this seemed a simple statement on the surface, the conspiratorial had conspired with Larry’s lisp to make the coercive tone slightly more menacing.

“You want me to reset her bookmark,” said Aubrey.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Larry smiled and small bubble of spit bloomed in the grotto between his two front teeth. Aubrey wondered if Larry, if he was even aware of this talent, could do it on command and was just about to ask him whether he’d ever tried, when the woman appeared beside him, or rather, a line of sparkling brocade entered his field of vision and hovered for a moment before foxtrotting lightly back out of it.

SORTING QUESTIONS INTO THE FOUR QUADRANTS

*Textual Questions Based in the story
^Intellectual Questions Based in life

Closed Questions
*READING COMPREHENSION:  Why did Jack and Jill go up the hill?
^RESEARCH: How do you make a well?

Open Questions
*LITERARY SPECULATION: Did Jill hurt herself?
^INQUIRY: Are accidents always waiting to happen?

EXTENSION QUESTION

Will vinegar and brown paper really fix Jack’s crown?

“She was talking,” confirmed her small sister, swiftly applying the weights within her own basic system.

The mother had noted with some pride that her small daughter’s system showed progress — it was certainly more sophisticated than the same time last year but otherwise completely transparent. In numbers, she surmised that four minus one equals two plus one. In words that amounts to: sacrifice one sister (there’s still another yet) and the friend can stay.

“She was also reading,” the small sister added, eyes darting because mime never lies.

“Why does she read for approximately thirty minutes before sleeping?” asked the small friend. Earlier she’d used the word “options”.

The mother blinked and sighed away the belief that a child who retains and correctly regurgitates the civilized relics of adult speech must be a dedicated reader themselves.

“She likes books,” groaned the small one’s twin from under a muddle of sheets.

Only moments earlier, the small one’s twin had bemoaned her sibling status as one that “sucked”. This one was a lover not a reader, but at nearly eight, this was the first time her twin had trumped her at schoolyard seduction. The small friend had chosen a favourite.

“What is she reading about?” asked the small friend.

Eyeballs rolled in the small twin’s head. The small sister, the other small twin — the favourite, mimed a question mark, if you can imagine such a thing.

At last, the eldest sister spoke from the room to which she had been moved.

“I am reading about the ample yet ineffective bony scutes of Dasypus bellus.”

She pronounced her soft consonsants with a slight whistle, arousing a bout of delighted bouncing in the small friend.

“What is thatus?” she implored, bouncing precisely on the part of the bed she had recently discovered made the very loudest rude noise.

The small sister snuffled with glee, held her nose, and mimed a jolly good stink.

“Occasionally,” answered the eldest sister, “we must look into the past for answers to our future.”

“What does she mean?” asked the small friend, pinning the mother (a wriggling specimen unprepared for cross-examination) to the wall with a frown.

Unpinning herself, the mother pointed to the clock and moved toward the lamp. The small twin’s hand shot out from the muddle of covers and stopped hers on the switch.

“Wait,” she said.

The small sister mimed her twin’s command.

“The beautiful armadillo is extinct,” came the voice from the other room. “All that armour held it down and made it slow.”

“How does that change the future?” asked the small friend, flagging now, turning back to bounce another show-stealing noise.

“I will tell you,” said the eldest sister, as the small twin’s hand fell and the mother’s hit the switch, “in approximately thirty minutes.”

The bouncing stopped. And in the dark, silent room the small three all mimed sleeping.

Sugar rattles through the saltshaker, grizzling like a car engine on a cold morning. Grimacing into the twist, Sunny watches as a white salt Christmas falls from the pepper mill and dances across the plate. It is these minor violations of order that she finds unbearable. She wouldn’t tolerate it in any of her wait staff, and she won’t tolerate it at home.

Yesterday, it was peanut butter hardened overnight in the fridge and not softened in the pantry. This doesn’t compare with the missed lavender in the rinse cycle on Friday. That was laundry day for the aprons. She’d had to wear that fustiness all day Monday, wafting it in the face of the others as if it belonged to her. As if it were a scent she secreted from a gland below her waistline. If she wanted to smell that way, she would have worn fox furs to the charity auctions when she’d had the chance. Monday night she’d taken her own apron to the laundry and washed it twice, letting it soak in a double concentration of lavender, orange and frankincense for one hour before rinsing and pushing it into the drier with a silent restorative prayer.

In the middle of the dining hall, between the tables laid with crochet placemats of varying thread weight, texture and tone, and the rows of gleaming water glasses and bakelite jugs in soft sunshine lemon, faded raspberry, and subdued mint, Sunny holds the skirt of apron to her nostrils and pulls what she hopes will be a gingham rush of calm. She stands there for some time, her face in the cotton folds of the skirt, until she feels the python, taut at her neck, uncoil. This python grip, she determines, is not a real dizziness and therefore, not of enough significance to warrant Doctor Randall’s knowledge of it.

Sunny is still not sure where to place Doctor Randall when considering the matters she still wields some power over. In her other life, for that is how she prefers to think of it and not just as “her life” or “in real life” with all the connotations of an ending that those phrases bring, she would not have deigned to allow any male other than Gerald, no matter how highly qualified, to manipulate her flesh into giving him recondite answers unknown even to herself. Doctor Randall is a reed bent against a relentless breeze. He enters a room with the demeanour of one who has stood at a dinner table, declared his ultimate position and suffered a resolute and unanimous shouting down. Whether it is the field to which he finds himself designated with the elevated sense of propriety that characterizes his clientele, or some predisposed and enduring deficiency in his makeup, Sunny has not yet determined. She knows this: He is neither a woman nor her husband. These two facts vest in her the right to select which parts of truth she will assemble and for precisely how much of his benefit.

Sunny reaches down and hooks her fingers under the plastic rim of the box that sits in its new position under the servery. Last week in Computer Skills, they had dressed this box up with a laser printed label that reads With condiments from the chef. That little joke had been Rhonda’s. A little joke she confessed to having stolen from The Experience of a Lifetime. As Sunny piles the cross-infected shakers and grinders into the With condiments box, her mind catches on a thought: Rhonda will be compelled to tell the cruise ship story every time she lays eyes on the box. The cruise ship story has, on frequent recounts, lurched into scenes that would not be an appetizing accompaniment to anyone’s meal. Best find a new place for the box, Sunny decides. Out of sight and out of common parlance.

In the kitchen, morning lies half-draped across the industrial metal benches, cutting a clear apartheid down the length of their middles. Within ten minutes, it will be bright enough to negate the need for coffee. From the black rectangle that is the open cool room door, a wavering vision collects the light and emerges as a metal tray. Ring-adorned hands, orange-freckled to the knuckles, perch in a pair on its end. They are the hands of Desdemona. Sunny knows this not just because she knows those hands belong to hair that must now fake the same zealous shade as those freckles, but because she is the only other person who cannot sleep past four a.m. As she steps out of the cool room, Sunny sees that Desdemona is wearing her gypsy dress again. She feels the python tense and poise to coil. She has asked Desdemona three times not to wear the gypsy dress when she is rostered for kitchen duty. It is a safety hazard. She has told her this, mouthed the words carefully, sliding the soft consonants down the slant of vowels and into the waiting doorstop at the end. Sunny always provides extra thinking time for fast listeners. Last time, she had sat her down in her the windowless little room they call the prep room and explained. What if a scalloped sleeve were to catch on frying pan handle, or worse – but she did not say this – pull one of her own trays of baked custard tartlets to the floor in a paisleyed mess of yellow?

“Well, before you say it, don’t,” says Desdemona. Her chin juts in exaggerated effort as she makes pains to roll up her unrollable sleeves.

Sunny blinks twice before speaking. This is another in her arsenal of carefully stashed communication weapons. This one is a patience-saving smoke shield that she developed when Gustav, that talented but temperamental chef, was under her employ at Ensoleillé. Two blinks had kept her customers for three years of Gustav’s bliss.

“Desi, dear. Would you be so kind as to take Mr Lamb his morning coffee on your way up to get changed?”

Sunny suspects that Desdemona should have spent her whole life in a place like this. She is more suited to external exertions of control than she.  It has taken Sunny some months and some public discomfort to realize this. Every one of Desdemona’s childlike attempts at boundary pushing cement this theory in Sunny’s mind. Of all the residents, it is only Desi who experiments with fashions that made no appearance in her prime, nor in the fashion era near after. Only Desi flirts with the male residents in way that suggests she’d be willing to apply a Russian shade of red to her lips and test efficacy of Doctor Randall’s special male prescriptions. She is also the resident most likely to explode into vivid displays of petulance when her overwrought philanthropy is questioned.

Sunny’s shoulders involuntarily hunch when she thinks of the embarrassment with Professor McSweeney and the cheap plastic dolls at Christmas. Desi had started conducting raffles once a week at the start of the Yuletide season. The proceeds, Desi informed the residents in her fidgety quick speech, would be used to buy Christmas presents for the poor children in Bali. The conditions there were something she had experienced first-hand over a series of extended breaks for the past 15 years. It was “an issue”, this is what she called it, that was very close to her heart. Professor McSweeney, however, having spent two weeks in discussions with Death and eventually negotiating an agreeable postponement, had been absent from Desi’s otherwise captive audience. As a result, he had missed Desi’s dubiously emotive introduction to her philanthropic quest. Arriving at the table on the first morning of almost wellness, he had been confronted with an ice-cream bucket full of numbers bearing the words “Bali Christmas”. Unfortunately for Desi, Professor McSweeney’s lifelong topic of choice was Anthropology with a capital A. What ensued was the result of a well-informed unwell old man having his buttons pressed by an erratic, undereducated thespian. If it was one thing Desi did possess, it was that cloak of delusion that so many actors can draw around them under duress. Professor McSweeney emphatically expostulated, raising his chest higher than the table, that for a nation of mostly Hindus who would be celebrating Saraswati Day on the 25th of December, it would be more appropriate to spend the money on the gift of learning. Books and particularly those of a literary bent, he insisted, would demonstrate more relevance and reverence to the Goddess of all knowledge and the arts that the Balinese would be acknowledging that day. To Desi, this was a double hit on both Achilles heels – her overly abundant faith and her lack of education.

1.

He listens to a lot of Kenny G, yes. He does not tell them this in the email, no.

Juana shakes her head. We are remembering for the computer. Tap, tap.

Tap.

He tells them he is going to marry them, yes. He tells them that they are more beautiful than the sunset over yesterday’s Hanoi and the sunrise after Armageddon, yes. Most of them speak English after they’ve thought it out first but they know enough not to reply that a poet and his purse are easily parted.

That’s how he gets them out here, yes. It’s fast-slow, fast-slow, slow then fast. So, when they see the house, the customers seem like the better thing. You can see it behind their eyes, the foxtrot of indecision as they try to figure out what he is and if it’s worth it. (‘It’ being not just the best part of their life but the entire damn thing.)

“Yes” to the job and “No” to him is a nice way of saying that they just can’t figure out what it’s worth. Sun Li once confessed, laughing a fretwork trill of notes at her fine fool self, that she had thought Armageddon was somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.

He listens to a lot of Kenny G, yes.

In my first week in the house, I took this to mean that, despite appearances, Draco was a Man of the World. I’d heard Mr G once before, in the Sydney Tower elevator. He was playing the day I arrived, stirring mediocre discontent through the jittery leaves of the Weeping Wattle. I had walked in the front gate to the image of Juana, draped across a rotten rattan chair, her black hair like an oil spill spooning the gentle swell of her shoulder. She was scooping out the seeds of a paw-paw with a fork and feeding them to a cautious crow that sat like a cock-eyed parody of a parrot on the shoulder of a Balinese garden statue. I put my bag down beside the water feature and when Juana heard, she turned to look at me over the black slick, her sudden shoulder bare as the hair slid, and she smiled wide in her perfect face, her age circling her brown eyes like tree rings that must race themselves back home again.

“Welcome, honey,” she had said. “He’s inside.”

2.

Inside was beyond the shock. And the shock, as they now know, was a bit of everything.

Yes, it was all still there when they pressed his head to the wall and his wrists together behind him. One of them cursed when the wall shook and a bag of bolts fell from a beam onto their head. What they did not know is that this would have hurt him more than it hurt them. A bit of everything is nothing to everyone else, but it is everything to him.

He had stuffed the balcony so full with bits of everything that it bulged and pushed and complained, sometimes loudly, at its filigreed banks. This was a vista so overwhelming in composition that a girl could not on first viewing get a grip beyond impression. Only after we had sat and sat again under the towering canopy of garden, with shadows of his collection falling across our faces and the crow begging sideways for more, could an inventory of familiarity imprint itself upon us.

I can tell you now with confidence that, beyond the fleeting obsessions that arrived and left in the space of one dark hour to another, he housed on that balcony alone a mountainous range that aged under moss and limescale like any other but was composed of layers more volatile and less silent than the words ‘igneous’, ‘sedimentary’ or ‘metamorphic’ will ever describe.

Before his old grey cat disappeared for the very last time, I watched as it scaled a cautious path over the horizon I had come through time to know: damp boxes of rusted cans, piles of terracotta pots arced like an audience of crooked smiles, a Christmas tree, wicker planters, bicycle frames raped back to potential, a wrought iron bedhead with tiny pink flowers painted upon its ivory finials, yellowed books in hanging baskets like Babylon gone badder, garden chairs, metal awnings, fridges rusted into the postures of battered wives, wine racks, air conditioners, sand bags, telephone directories, prams, a pull-out sofa long-side up, and a palm-frond forest of potted plants left to devise their own processes of natural selection in a foreign land.

While this catalogue of the discernable made up the crust, without the necessary heart for excavation, none of us ever came to know exactly what it was that supported it from below.

Yes, that is, until they came along.

3. ( … )

Gangly on the brake pedal, trouble with boots

The trip ends like a spoof. She goes gangly on the brake pedal and I go too short in the leg to reach the button that will release my bag from the boot. We know the coach has left the station but we work the farce for the fun of it and, hell, when you’ve faked that many hook turns you have to at least go through the motions of trying.

It’s peak hour for three hours in the Melbourne CBD each evening and we have swum into this show of lights and glinting metal like unwitting minnows against a seasonal salmon migration. Yesterday she nearly mounted the median strip swerving down sunlit lanes in mild midday suburban traffic. Tonight, she has a dangerously entertaining reputation to maintain.

We cross two lanes, perform an illegal hook turn across an intersection hosting eight different directional options, cut off a police car, swing around 180 degrees to face due east again, sidle across two more lanes and wait patiently for the light to turn green. This last manoeuvre is a token courtesy rather than a genuine concession recognising the primacy of traffic regulations.

“You’re not gonna make it. We’ll drive you to Avalon,” she tells me.

“It might be running late,” I offer meekly.

I’m the dummy who booked for the wrong airport, basing the decision on aesthetic preferences rather than proximity.

Say it out loud and you’ll understand: “I’m leaving on a night flight from Avalon”.

Okay, now this: “I’m leaving on a night flight from Tullamarine”.

Got it? So, now you can see how all this started and how legs went gangly and I turned into an exasperated Kevin in an episode of the Wonder Years, trying to get into his older brother’s stop-starting car.  (Or in my case, weak with giggling as I try to salvage my bag from the boot of my friend’s car as she decides where and whether to park.) Now you’ve got the picture, throw in the large glass of Verdelho I had with pizza only fifteen minutes ago.

Suddenly, you’ve got yourself a lady with her coarse dyed-black hair escaping its half-hearted chignon, dragging a suitcase, juggling hand luggage, and scrambling cash, coins and ticket back into a purse, as she is asking the wrong driver if this is the coach to Avalon and he is telling her “No” and pointing to the right enormous white block with wheels just departing.

Then the lady is running to another driver, with wild questioning eyes and her skirt blooming and he is asking her, “Avalon?” although he already knows and her entire audience of passengers waiting for the quick coach trip to Tullamarine know too. And the second driver is walking briskly, purposefully out of the coach parking bay and signaling to the departing coach. And now, there is a moment filled with every kind of waiting (wrapped around the lady’s huge swell of rising dread at the possibility of such public disappointment) where the Tullamarine audience falls respectfully silent as  it watches for what hearkens from behind the blackened windows of the departing coach. But the coach slows, turns and pulls into the bay in front of the lady.

(Had a man emerged from that coach and kissed her, she knows there would have been applause but this is a simple, singular and everyday romance painted only slightly larger by the complexities and diversity of the fuels involved.)

A couple of the passengers smile sheepishly at me as I make my way, shaking with the rush, down to one of the darker seats at the back. I have made a panoptical spectacle of myself and now it is time to slink into my seat, repress the excessive heartbeats and pen my Verdelhoed impression of the trip.

Within seconds it seems, the sky has turned a deep velvet blue and Melbourne has become a smattering of sequins pressed upon it. From the back seat, a man’s telephone conversation narrates in baritone the unexpected joys of an extra 24 hours of holidaying that he has somehow been gifted. Soon, this conversation will turn into a soliloquy on the benefits of defining the middle-aged parameters of a romantic interlude from the outset, but we have not reached that point yet. I have also not yet become slightly nauseous with motion, nor noticed that the black fineline pen has leaked all over my fingers. What is actually happening, is that I have started writing this:

As you hand over the fifteen dollars that was ten asked for but should have been twenty (for pizza for three), you flick quickly forward to the knowledge that notes spent now could disrupt the subtle fluctuations of cashflow in a future unspent.

On the bus that will take you to Avalon, a distant airport mistakenly booked and perfectly named, you chance (through palings paced at 10 centimetres walking) upon a dazzling jingle of moonlit coins shining your homeward path, like the coins shining and unspent that sit in your purse and that your throat is already waiting to be grateful for. Four dollars in a vending machine at Avalon will almost quench this begging, desperate new thirst.

I flick the book shut with sudden disgust. It could be the tortured prose. Could just be the coach. More likely, it’s the ugly marriage of both.

Avalon airport is a disappointing oasis of white-pebbled gardens, figurative statues that would seem better placed in a Russian space museum and a large neon sign introducing the arrivals as if to the set of a reality TV show. Without the evening spotlights to profile its minor attractions, Avalon would be a tin shed too far away from the distant mountains to even invoke the mystical loneliness of the word ‘remote’.

At check-in, a plain pony-tailed flight clerk too bored with her environment to bother with the airline’s mandatory lip gloss informs me that the plane will be an hour late. Beside her, another ponytailed drone is arguing with the leader of a large Chinese contingency about a stack of maroon passports dismembered from the hands that should be holding each individual one. From within the fuzz of drink, pizza and motion-sick circumspection, I find that none of this bothers me. In a moment, I am past the bag inspection spending my coins on the water, taking several large swigs, pushing into an even-more stubborn smudge the black ink I have suddenly noticed like an unfortunate birthmark across my middle fingers.

The babble of Chinese grows around me. The plastic seat that is to be my new home for the next two hours embraces me warmly. The water acts as coolant on an overheated engine. Tired but content, I settle into the last pages of a good book and I consider this: there are always worse things than a late plane almost missed from a disappointing airport. In fact, everything is probably worse than that particularly wonderful thing. You can be leaving a dear friend behind in another city to go home and face things you’ve spent three days avoiding and that’s okay.

A spoof ending is the best one can probably hope for.

The first time I walked into that spiritually hijacked church hall and scoped the scene, I thought I was going to be like the Fonz at a debutante ball: totally on top of the situation, Mrs C.

Fifteen minutes later, I found myself locked in the toilet office of self firmly suggesting that I cool it. Richie.

Unused muscles tremble when remembered. Getting a tremble on between Frank and Noelene is not what they really mean when they say “it was on for young and old”. While inwardly I battled to salvage what remnants of cool I might have mistakenly presumed to possess, our 65-year-old teacher joyously and untremblingly and not immodestly introduced her breasts, first to the high-pitched ceiling, and then to the timber floorboards almost a foot in front of her.

Yoga — as purveyors, partakers and the peripherally informed, alike, will know — is not a competitive sport. In fact, it is not a sport at all. For the hardcore yoga evangelists, it is a lifestyle. For the rest of us, it’s an optional lifestyle decision with the kind of commitment modularity that lends itself well to appointment amnesia. Nevertheless, in a yoga environment one lives by the rules of the habitat and if this means pretending that no one else in the room exists except for the explicit purpose of smiling at serenely or gently reassuring as one’s eyes should happen to meet another’s mid-tremble, then so be it. It’s elevator rules on smacky ecstacy with your head between your legs.

However, sport or no sport, competition or no, there is an arguably dominant element of human nature (strive for a bodhi tree-dotted eternity as we flawed fuckers may) that does not slide naturally into blinkered individuality.  It is this dirty play element that forced me to return each week, gazing intently over the rotated head of Noelene to check Betty’s downward dog and under Frank’s armpit to measure the angle of Beryl’s salute until I could confidently say that I had those geriatric overachievers licked.

After several weeks, I reached a point in my “practice”, if that is what I may deign to call the stretches between our teacher’s increasingly lengthy chats about her Indian sojourns in the sixties, where I looked forward to the climactic build of voice and breath and silence to the inevitable click of the tape-player. This click would start the week’s relaxation tape which, like the saffron-sprinkled chats, were also week-by-week pushing the boundaries of conventional meditation. Like so many that had been led to the water by their Yogi, I now found that my greatest challenge (undeniably, irrevocably, unsavourably) was my own living-poisoned mind. Each week, when the tape started and our teacher instructed us to imagine a place of calm and serenity, I hit upon the same dogging hitch: my mind had an interior decorator with a crippling indecision and creativity problem. (And if you listened to her, she’d add a very low budget.) Each week I told myself I’d kick her out if she showed, but she always crept in with the same catchy earworm:

What would be the most relaxing?

And so, the dreaded duologue would start.

Go away.

A very green forest with lots and lots of trees? An oasis with very clear water like maybe something like in photos of Thailand or something? God. You really haven’t traveled enough. If you’d traveled enough I would have somewhere that you really loved that I could call on right now.

What about that tunnel leading up to the Victoria and Albert Museum from the tube in London? There was that busker playing that totally divine violin piece in there that made me swoon for a good 40 seconds that I never wanted to end.

You can’t lie down and be serene in a tube tunnel in winter. That’s just ridiculous.

Well, at least its atmospheric and I’ve actually been there.

Well, OK. Somewhere atmospheric and familiar then. The mountain near your Dad’s.

The one he had his ashes scattered from? Oh. Great. Yeah sure. I’m sure no one else will be disturbed if I weep quietly beside them … Fuck fuck . You always do this. I have to think of somewhere or this will be over and they’ll all hear me breathing heavy and by the time I sort that out I won’t have even started to relax …

In yoga, as in all things, the breath should lead. It sounds so simple they tell us. It sounds so simple because it is and we all forget (we silly, flawed fuckers). So, each week, after the row with my interior designer was over and, either she’d left in a huff or I’d headlocked her in childpose and sat on her until she shut up, I’d be left concentrating on calming my breath lest a sign of my turmoil become externally visible. With nothing more than the breath, right near the end, each week I’d begin. I had accidentally stumbled across the great secret: exhaust your demons — fumigate them with oxygen and douse their entrails with carbon dioxide until your head floats instead of spins.

Keep in mind now our previous wisdom. Yoga is not a sport. Yoga does not have levels, only spheres that one should drift through, melting as sugar might on its way to nothing but sweetness in your tea. Now that you understand this, now that you have reached this blissful awareness, try if you can to relax your toes — working up to your knees, your pelvis and all the way to your solar plexus as the tape-player button now clicks and you hear these words:

Today you are going to imagine yourself in a place of calm and serenity … with a person you really don’t like.

What would be the most relaxing?

The house didn’t want us at first, you know. All sorts of complications arose, not least of all Bill. He told us it had rising damp. He told us that the agent was a crim. The agent told us the house had known only love. When I stupidly asked Bill what he thought this meant, he told us that people plant words in your mind so they’ll grow. Then he told me, that the mango tree in the back would be a problem. He thought the Chinese elm would be hard to get rid of. We both laughed, me a little reluctantly I’ll admit, when Bill reminded me how resilient the Chans had been. I decided to take this as a sign too. Some things plant their roots and that’s it. That’s what you did. I could never do it. Not here, anyway.

On Mondays I take the Valiant down to the hardware and fill the latest list. I like driving the Valiant. I like its soft aquiline nose and its no-nonsense hum. It makes me feel just like it promises. It makes me feel that Grace Kelly brand of collected, complicit as blonde with the sun behind it, like the day after a night popping Poppa’s stolen pills. (You know I only did it for that year, don’t you? That year we buried and replaced with a job in the Chan’s bakery. The year that still smells like baker’s yeast and has the texture of mock cream.) Mary and I make the hardware list on the Sunday evening, while we are taking turns to soak our feet in the peppermint footspa. We found the footspa high in your hall cupboard. It was one of the few things you hadn’t given away in one of the clear-outs you pressed us to help you with these past few years. It was up there with Bill’s coin collection and my Domestic Science sampler, which elegantly abbreviates everything a person might really need.

ABCDEFG 1234567

Dear Mother,
Home is where the heart is.
Love always, Veronica xxx.

By the time I return to the house each Monday, a fleet of utes and vans have appeared as if at the end of some mysterious convoy, scattered across every spare patch of yard or drive. Tradesmen crawl through the ceiling shafts, line the gutters, balance their sturdy calves across ladder rungs. Under their attention, the house assumes an alien identity: a corpse with the suggestion of breath left in it. It is something to be palpated, prodded, incised. I am Elliott discovering E.T. a ghastly white, a team of medical investigators swarming around him. Was E.T. a he? We assumed so, but only because he looked so comical in that wig. Do you remember how I cried into my popcorn, and you asked me, as I rubbed fists of salted butter at my traitor eyes, how I could care about something so foreign? You used that word so specifically and so often that it became, for me, a concept more synonymous with the familiar. Perhaps this is why I am persisting with this house, despite the fresh inventory of faults that my attention is drawn to on a daily basis. It’s a masochistic pleasure we find in what the optimists among us call “a challenge”.

The new Mr Tom-Tom shies away when I attempt to lure him out from the tangle of impatiens at the side of the house. In this way, he is nothing like the original Mr Tom-Tom who was, in comparison, a simpleton with his trust. So many things are like this now. Coming back here, I find the landscape of my memories populated by exotics. Elsewhere, I have made the same set of decisions based on the same criteria, made the same lists and hired the same breed of men to enact my wishes – and yielded measurably similar results. I have become expert at restoring history beyond the point of forgotten. I have rebirthed Tudor cottages, abandoned churches, warehouse offices, terrace studios. I have remolded and reconfigured the space that holds me in to suit my own ends, and no one has ever objected. Here, as always, I find that everything fights me for this privilege.

Wednesday is Bill day. He races over after work, still in one of his Italian suits, hoping to catch the last of the builders before they begin  to think it is going to be an easy end to the week. Bill parks his purring black beast across the driveway entrance and rubs his feet vigorously on the bottom step. Mary and I watch as he emerges at the top and crosses the threshold. He is the ship’s doctor, confirming the plague aboard a vessel bound for the new world. Mary and I can’t look at each other when he arrives. Bill still can’t look Mary level in the eye and he’s only good with mine for the moment it takes to check that I’m listening.

Killing it? This is Bill’s way of saying hello. Depending on the latest list, Mary or I will say, Well, the knife is in, Doctor, or Diphtheria would have to be quicker. The square heels of his shoes tap out his trajectory, a sharp jungle drum warning to the unfortunate man stowed away in a wall recess, who may have dared to compromise the unbendable laws of structural integrity. After Bill has left, the unfortunate man and I work our way through Bill’s inventory of insufficiency. They have used the wrong tiles to cap the back steps. The millimetres between an apron and a benchtop should be double. An architrave should extend beyond the point at which it currently ends. Treasurer and Secretary of Insufficiency, we shave back a King’s demands and balance a budget tipped on the side of benevolence. On Wednesday nights, Mary and I haul the footspa out, pour two neat scotches and talk Bill out of our day. Then we switch on the television and watch something deliberately moronic like The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan or Wife Swap USA. Mary always nods off first, her red glasses slipping down to the sudden dip at the end of her nose. On the ad breaks, I lay my fingers across her warm brown neck and watch the small pop that explodes rhythmically at the back of her throat as she inhales.

Mary and I are planning our Thursday visit when the telephone slices through the morning and cuts it off from what will be the rest of the day. Do you know it has been scientifically proven that chicken soup really does have healing powers? Mary tells me that a team of scientists in white coats took turns to stand around stirring the pot while other scientists lay tucked up in bed, feigning the kind of sickness that makes us feel so unreasonably well. Mary has a special talent for stirring the pot and for chicken soup. She is by the stove, bathed in a skylit mist of allspice when I tell her we need to make our visit straight away. She hesitates before putting the spoon in the sink and turning the stove to zero. When she turns back around, the cool undersides of her arms brush against my forearms and she moves forward to embrace me. Words appear, mechanical projections in front of my eyes. I could weep, they glow, silent as neon. In Mary’s arms, my nostrils fill with the mist she has emerged from; the molecules mutate and reform as the prickling of salt-buttered popcorn. Between Mary’s embrace and the key turning in the door to lock it, we have clasped shut windows, scrawled an erratic dismissal note for the builders, washed our faces – in short — performed a loose-knit repertoire of actions that I will never be able to recall no matter how many times I try to replay them in my mind again afterwards.

Bill’s black panther is parked in the ambulance bay when we arrive. Mary talks me out of the Valiant’s plush neutrality the way a do-gooder talks a jumper from the ledge. In the foyer, we are met by a woman in a cheap green suit that makes her look like the ambassador for ex-patriot Martians. Marjorie, the Director, she announces. Marjorie’s wiry black coif throws its lines at a hard form, more a wasp nest than beehive and as unyielding as her gaze, as if hair and eyes remain faithful to a strict post-war agreement. Her lips flatten across their dry length. She was still so young, really, she tells us, the dark blue rings of her eyes flashing wide around their pale, hollow centres. I wonder how many times she must have done this now. So many that she has come instinctively to count her own musings as the necessary addendum to an endless parade of textbook grief. We allow Marjorie to take my elbow and lead me through to goodbye.

I am shocked to find your room so bright, so fresh, so airy – all the words I have used in the past to sell the space around myself to others. You lie in the middle of it, as commanding as ever, even in stillness, with a glass vase of yellow-and-pink frilled carnations (I know you would have thought crass) on the bedside table beside you. Upon the white sheets, the edges of you appear embossed. I step closer and see this is an effect created by the pale pink halo that surrounds your body, as if you have been rolled in raspberry cordial before venturing out to make snow angels. You are wearing the new pink flannelette nightie I brought you last Thursday, the one I instructed the nurses to wash before letting you wear. You have always enjoyed the soft sigh of flannelette against your breasts. The nurses would have crumpled easily against your second wind of childish determination.

I cannot bring myself to touch your hand, let alone bring my lips to your cheek as the nurse coaxes me to. I had not planned to see you this way and, rather than the chainsaw blade of sorrow at my sternum, I feel my neck marbling with indignation. Around me, this stark room with its shadowless corners and its generic nods at human need becomes the scene of a violation I cannot name. I begin to spin, to become a dizzying cyclone of rage bashing up against anything that will take the full, falling weight of me. First, at the Martian Ambassador for bringing me here; Bill for not knowing how to look after me properly; you for not being here to rise and fill the shape of your own definitive moment, and all the while unsure whether any words are leaving my body – whether I have managed yet to pull under everything that dares to anchor itself firm to these gaping vacancies. The Martian Ambassador takes Mary’s elbow and says reasonably, We can leave the paperwork until she’s ready.

I hope you understand that it is not through our presence but through industry that we show the truest depths of our devotion. While it is Bill and Mary who allow themselves to be led through a warren of small, innocuous offices by their elbows, it is I who spends the week clearing the cupboards in your empty flat, visiting Mrs Randall below, the Larkins across the hall and, back on the old street, Mr Chan’s nephew — the only Chan left to remember you. Each afternoon, Mary leaves the paperwork and the offices to come and stay with me in this musty week of early evening thunderstorms. (Yes, I remember how you hated thunderstorms, even though it was Bill and your handy man you called as soon as a dark cloud appeared to menace the horizon.) As the rain rattles at the window like a B-grade movie burglar, I sink into a silent cocoon of thought at the irony we are intrinsically wired to gift any show of nature.

The old man in the low-necked singlet is not at his window when we return to the house. Mary’s key in the lock opens back onto the morning of the day we left. As the door swings open, the ragged loss of that morning hovers then evaporates into the overwhelming immediacy of our senses. The odours of vomit, urine and faeces commingle in a vile dance down the hallway toward us, heralding the news of some other truly terrible wrong.  We clutch our stomachs and retch uncontrollably. I turn to see Mary empty her breakfast over a verandah rail. The returned cornflakes are drained gold clinging to the federation green rail. How patriotic, she offers weakly and turns again to claw at the sky with her tongue, a fish too long on the hook. I draw the tied cardigan from her waist, wrap it around my face and brace myself to burgle the truth from my own home.

At the end of the hall, I find the soup pot upturned across the timber sheen of kitchen floor. Pieces of chicken are strewn about in a macabre display of the variation to be found along the spectrum of consumed and expired. Instinctively, my eyes follow the gravitational pull of watched to watcher and land on the new shelf installed above the pot hooks. Here, underlined by a sway of stainless steel, I find the new Mr Tom-Tom, the slits of his eyes pouring wet diamonds down to his nose, his body flat as an old pillow. Do you remember the pyjama cat I kept at the end of my bed all those years? The pyjama cat is hungry, you’d tell me on wash days. The new Mr Tom-Tom looks hungrier and sadder than the pyjama cat did just before you somersaulted him up into the square abyss at the back of the garbage truck. Only this time, I don’t scream.

You were right that day, I tell you, lifting an unprotesting Mr Tom-Tom down into my arms. However odious, it is always better to know.