by Cate Kennedy
YOU ARE A LIAR! You didn’t ask him about the noise.
Don’t sulk.
THE NOISE IS NOT IN MY HEAD!
Why do you spend your money on nightclubs and a good time? I own this apartment. I went without.
If there’s one thing I hate it’s your smirking.
That needle really hurt. Jean could find my veins.
Where’s my niece?
She’s not interstate. She lives in Earlwood.
She would have told me if she left.
She said she did? I don’t remember.
Why are you crying?
Nonsense. Maybe you were in the wrong. I’ve lived alone for sixty-three years. You’ll get used to it.
Is yesterday Monday or Tuesday?
I don’t want a bath today.
Put that photo of my niece against the wall. I don’t like her anymore. She’s getting my money and yet she won’t visit.
I like history shows. They bring back memories.
I thought you were a fool. Now I know you are. Fancy not having heard of Winston Churchill.
TURN IT UP LOUD. TURN THE TV UP LOUD, SO I CAN’T HEAR THAT NOISE AGAIN.
It’s not in my head. Don’t be unkind to me, Ken.
I’m afraid of dying and yet I have to. That way I will find peace and quiet.
The lift is broken again. I’m stuck here until they fix it. Last time it took three days.
It’s that dirty Egyptian miser. He runs the block and won’t buy a new lift.
Where’s the Wedgewood serving plate?
I can’t have broken it. I never take it out of the cabinet. I must be going mad.
What?
I need something stronger. The pain is terrible.
I don’t (feel?) so good.
NOISE!!!!!!
I have cotton wool in my ears to stop the noise. It doesn’t work.
Don’t bathe me. My body is too sore.
Every time I look at the cabinet there is less Wedgewood crockery. What is happening to it, Ken?
I don’t remember breaking them.
God take me. I’m going mad. I’m a skeleton.
Your eyes are unkind today.
Don’t laugh at me.
I thought I’d die here. I need hospital.
Call ambul ...
Doctor.
I’m dying doc
noise.
noi
no
doc
(undecipherable)
The last card was impossible to read. Not so much words as a scribble done by a drunken spider dipped in ink. I remember talking to her nurse only once, even though the cards seem to suggest Gladys sent him down to complain about the noise often. He knocked on my door to say that Gladys was convinced I was causing her intolerable pain by playing my music and TV at loud volumes. Ken was about thirty years old, gaunt with the lived-in and lined face of an ex-junkie. I showed him my apartment and he could see I wasn’t causing any of the noise Gladys thought she heard. He showed little interest in anything except for a small silver art deco sculpture of a woman’s face. He picked it up, examined it quickly and announced that it was worth quite a lot of money. As he was leaving my apartment he turned back and said, ‘She’s a pain in the arse. The noise is all in her head. She’s driving me mad.’ With that he left. It was the first and last time I saw him.
MONUMENT
This Awful Brew
Julie Chevalier
If the sun were out you might have veered off to Maroubra beach and forgotten all about visiting Gav Cooke, justifying your existence and the whole gaol catastrophe, but it is raining. You drive on.
*
A custodial officer in blue appears and the gaol gate opens and just as promptly shuts, excluding you and the other visitors clustered under umbrellas. Someone inside the sandstone walls must be watching a monitor. It’s already ten a.m. and you’re anxious to prove your work has been worthwhile, that at least one prisoner is continuing to study and isn’t using. Hard to believe that until a few months ago you’d been in charge of the education of these prisoners.
Your hand itches to push the buzzer until a man lifts a small girl who relieves you of all responsibility by pressing it. You’re paranoid, imagining the surveillance camera swivels. Following you because you worked here? Possibly. One visitor is yelling and waving her bare arms in a jerky backstroke. You’re the only one wearing a raincoat. You like to have as much of your body covered as possible.
A car skids and stops. Doors open and young Asians, one with blond streaks, race to the gate. Rain spots their white shirts. Rain drips off the brim of a Koori father’s Akubra, drips on the bare shoulders of a redhead who’s rolling up the waistband of her skirt. Her legs must ache from standing in those boots.
The gate swings open and the officer orders a man to take the child down from his shoulders. He orders the redhead to pick up her baby and collapse her stroller, ready for searching.
You stand at the sign-in desk holding your ID. The later you arrive, the less time you’ll get to stay. The stooped man ahead laboriously prints numbers on a card. A bald officer passes the stooped man’s licence to a hirsute colleague. The officers pass the licence back and forth, marvelling at how one way the writing is the right way up and the other way the photo is. They wave the man through, then run their fingers down creased computer printouts, down the food-spotted computer screen itself, before agreeing that Cooke, #899472, the inmate you have come to visit, has been sent to Goulburn. Bugger, bugger, bugger.
‘When?’
‘Dunno. I saw a crim looked like him going out to run laps,’ says the hairy officer.
You look at your watch. The bald one rechecks Gav’s number and phones the wing.
‘He’s there, hanging around,’ they chortle, handing you a see-through satchel for your belongings.
Muttering families crowd the entryway behind you. The bald officer upends a stroller and shakes it until a baby bottle filled with orange cordial bounces on the cobblestones. You follow the arrows pointing to the visitors’ waiting room, turning around in time to see the redhead pick up the bottle, wipe the nipple on her hip and thrust it at the baby.
One of the officers must say something you don’t hear because the redhead screams, ‘Search a baby? Piss orf, you sick old pervert. You got somethin’ about baby bums or what?’
‘Officers found contraband in his nappy at Parramatta … ’
‘The filth planted that! I’ll tell my guy, youse are all perverts!’
To the right of the corridor a toilet door is ajar. The overhead cistern drips and rust oozes through the pipes. You imagine a sign, Last place to shoot up before visiting.
In the waiting room you join gaunt tattooed westies jiggling and scratching in front of a wall-mounted telly. Kids whining for soft drinks fling themselves over and under chairs. To distract them the adults fold fliers about the Children of Prisoners Support Group into paper darts.
Eventually an officer shouts, ‘Visitor for Cooke.’
You take a few steps forward. The officer steps close and whispers, ‘First time, luv?’
You jump. He must be new. You turn away. The less he knows the better.
‘Youse wanna go fer a beer after, luv?’
You cross your arms and shake your head. It’s like visiting a foreign country.
‘Be at the gate at four?’
You aren’t that lonely.
‘A bit long in the tooth for young Cooke, aren’t youse, but?’
He’s right about your preferring Gav. Who wouldn’t? You’d confided in each other every day like old friends. He’d had his first shot when he was twelve. He’d fetched beers for men who arrived when his mum still had someone with her. The day he gets out he’s going to
get a job in a gym. You trust him. Sort of.
‘Visitor for Cooke, pro-ceed, please.’
A video camera is mounted at each turn in the corridor. A blue uniform opens the door and you scan the visiting area, willing Gav to be there, waiting. Visitors and prisoners sit hunched over tables like primary-school parents at parent–teacher night. Not that you’ve ever been to one, or are likely to go for that matter. A woman officer hands over the number nineteen and you wander among the tables looking for Gav.
‘I don’t care who the fuck he is, you didn’t fuckin’ hafta let him spend the night, did ya?’
A male voice. Nothing to do with you. Gav is wearing a white plastic bag with no opening in the front. A body bag.
‘Table which?’ you lip-read him say to the female custodial officer. ‘Nineteen? OK!’
He can’t find the table with the nineteen on it because you’re still clutching the number. You hope he isn’t expecting someone more exciting. Finally he sees you.
‘Hey, Chalkie. There’s a table in the corner.’
What doesn’t he want the officers to overhear? He wouldn’t ask you to do anything illegal. He unwinds your fingers from their grip on the number. You want him to keep touching them.
‘Took a long while to get here, eh?’
‘I’ve been here ages.’
‘Me too.’
You smile and tell him about the police planting drugs on the baby.
‘Tell me about having an addicted mum, eh? Talk quicker. We’ll be lucky to get fifty minutes.’
He looks like he’s been working out, but not using is the important thing.
‘See Big Max’s lady?’ He points.
The whole room throbs. You turn in time to see Max’s hand move under his lady’s skirt. Probably she isn’t wearing knickers. Gav says she tapes a sawn-off fit loaded with heroin to her thigh, a takeaway for Max. Are drugs more a commodity than sex? You can never figure it out. That’s Berko coughing, the one whose missus claims she got pregnant in this room. You cross your legs and check out what a toddler conceived during a gaol visit looks like. Brown eyes, sticking-out ears and sticking-up brown hair – just like Berko. The air, thick with volatilised juices, wraps around you like a bodysuit of sperm, sweat and sour breast milk. Thank goodness for cotton knickers.
You sit side by side at the low table next to layers of chipped mustard paint, craving a hit of passion, some touching, love – the things everyone else here seems to have in abundance. You’re desperate to hear him say something personal – like his release date has been brought forward, and he hasn’t had a shot in months, and he’s enrolled in a certificate in sports training, and he attributes all this to your excellent work. Just I miss talking to you would do.
‘Instant coffee with fake milk and sugar?’
The legs of his chair scrape on the cement. Screams and swearing bounce off the high-gloss walls. People intertwine like pretzels – hands down neckbands, hands under shirts, hands up skirts, hands down pants. Berko’s clone, snot dripping from his nose, careens into the legs of your chair.
‘This awful brew.’ Gav places the coffee on the table.
You drain the last bitter drop and dig your right thumbnail into the bottom edge of the polystyrene until crescent-shaped dents ring the bottom, like the moon has orbited for the entirety of someone’s lagging, one crescent for each month. He jiggles his legs.
Names are called out as new visitors replace those whose time is up. The crim at the next table leans over to tell Gav that, bad luck, a trannie with a stroller has been barred entry.
Was that redhead a trannie? Bringing in drugs?
‘Gav, how’s your course going?’
‘It’s impossible to study when you’re two-out. You know that.’
‘But you’re still submitting a unit every fortnight?’
‘You try studying while you’re locked up with some arsehole eighteen hours a day.’
‘How many units have you sent in?’
‘The guy I’m two-out with watches telly until three in the morning.’
Like you’re responsible for the overcrowding. ‘I suppose you’ve gone on request for earplugs?’
‘No luck.’
He must have done something major to get the super offside.
‘You bring some in. Give it a go, Chalk. Earplugs and packets of Drum. Not for me. For yourself. Prove to yourself you’re no longer a puppet of the system.’
One earplug inside each cheek? Or in your ears and wear your hair down? ‘I could end up in Mulawa.’
‘Aw, don’t be so middle-class. You can count on me. I’d visit you.’
The hell he would! Suddenly it’s quiet. The paint on the cement floor is worn so thin you see the grey underneath.
‘Visitor for Cooke, one minute.’
He’s looking straight ahead. You keep your chin level with the table, look into his dark smoky eyes. Pinned. Just like the rest of them. He won’t even ring when he gets out.
‘Doesn’t matter, Chalk. I’m being sent to Goulburn tomorrow.’
‘Goulburn. Why?’
‘Visitor for Cooke, thirty seconds.’
You stand.
‘If I’d been able to get enough tobacco I’d have come down easier, but you weren’t here.’
‘It’s not my fault you’re using.’
He stands up. ‘Shh. Not my fault they urine-tested me when I least expected it.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Visit me in Goulburn, eh?’
‘Time’s up, visitor for Cooke.’
‘Please, Chalk?’
You touch cheeks.
*
Outside the gate the rain has stopped. Bright straw hats, striped bags and T-shirts replace sandstone, brick and concrete. You join the queue at the ice-cream vendor’s cart. No sense feeling hungry at the beach.
Permission to Lie
Beneath the Figs
Mark O’Flynn
Shona and Dean live in Abigail Street, a street that is twenty houses long on either side. It is a short, shady side street cutting between two main roads bludgeoning their way through the suburbs away from the city. Abigail Street is cool and quiet, while at either end, especially at peak hour, there is mayhem.
The shade is the result of a row of Morton Bay figs that buckle the footpaths of Abigail Street. The trees are on death row, having been placed under a council intervention order into their longevity. These trees have proved an ideal habitat for a colony of fruit bats that each year comes to feast on the ripening figs. Every night, particularly during the full moon, the bats swirl drunkenly through the sky like the opening credits of an old Vincent Price film. In daylight they hang from the trees like blackened tumours. In the words of local residents the colony has grown into a plague.
If she happens to leave it out overnight, by morning Shona’s washing is a mess. Her uniforms are particularly vulnerable. Dean’s car is also a mess. Every car in the street is a mess. A siren is set up in order to scare the bats out of the branches with short, sharp blasts like a ferry’s foghorn. It partially works. The bats fly about frantically for a while, then settle again to their gorging. Unfortunately the neighbourhood children are also woken by the sudden noise and the locals begin to see there are pros and cons to this and other solutions.
One evening, after a night at the theatre, where Steven Berkhoff tries to terrify them with dramatised tales of Edgar Allan Poe, they find themselves driving up Abigail Street at bat hour. They are everywhere. Suddenly, out of the distorted moonlight, a drunken bat falls from the sky and smacks against their windscreen. Shona screams. The bat’s face is pointed, like a fox’s muzzle. Its ears are sharp and, well, bat-like. Dean slams on the brakes and the bat, dribbling rabid saliva and fig juice, slides down the glass and off the bonnet,
wings outstretched as if trying to hang on.
Other people have had similar experiences.
There are so many of them that their urine is starting to kill the fig trees. It looks as though the leaves, yellow and withering, have been sprayed with Agent Orange. The botanical gardens are apparently facing a similar problem. This is when their neighbour, Ian Ikin, contacts the council. He demands something be done about the bats. They should be sprayed with a natural solution of python excrement and shrimp paste, he says. The council demurs. Their solution comprises a proposal to get rid of all the fig trees, to pave the entire nature strip with asphalt. There is a chorus of protest.
One of Shona and Dean’s neighbours is a family of Plymouth Brethren. Scarf people, the children call them, although not to their faces. They appear to have no opinion whatsoever on the problem of the bats. Dean facetiously likes to think the bats are the agents of Satan come to test the resolve of the Brethren. On the other side are the Ikins. They are the ones who lobbied for the siren. The siren has been borrowed from a vintner friend of theirs who uses it to frighten birds from his vines. When the figs themselves come under threat the Ikins are the most vocal in defending the trees and the amenity they give to the local area. You can’t underestimate, they say, the value of shade.
There is bat shit all over the footpaths of Abigail Street. It stinks of sour, fermented figs. Shona has to dodge the lumps as she walks from the car to the front door. Bats squeal in the trees, hanging there like great drips of bitumen. She shivers involuntarily. The invisible whump of their wings as they flap up the street is unsettling, especially after a long nightshift during which she has dealt with patients’ greatest fears. Nurses often work with the human condition in extremis. Her nerves are exhausted and frazzled. The last thing she needs is bats.
In the Ikins’ house, music is blaring. She wonders if she should phone, ask them to turn it down. But she doesn’t. On the other side, in the Brethren house, all is dark. The Ikins and the Brethren (called the Braithwaites) do not get on ideologically. Shona and Dean are the meat in the sandwich. The Ikins have no children. Shona and Dean have two. The Brethren have eight. The Ikins’ yard is messy with straggly native banksias and acacias. Pebble paths wind among them and they have a birdbath, empty now due to water restrictions. Ian Ikin is vocal about his lack of a lawnmower, which he offers as a measure of his small carbon footprint.
