by Jane Rawson
‘No really, don’t get up. I’ve gotta run.’
‘So, do you want to hang out again some time?’
‘Sure, that’d be great. But not unless you have primo booze, OK?’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m joking, fool. Let’s do something soon. Maybe we could get my bike started and go for a ride out to the country or something.’ God, that was a big commitment; what was she thinking? Not much risk of ever getting the bike started though …
‘That sounds great. Give me a call.’
‘No phone.’ She looked apologetic. ‘I’ll come by some time next week, though.’
‘Cool, see you then.’
‘Hey, and thanks for the drinks. It was fun.’
‘No worries.’
Caddy stepped out onto the street. It was hot. Damn it was hot. She was really sick of it being so hot. It was hurting her eyes and hurting her head and it even seemed to be getting into the joints of her legs. She stepped back into the shade and slumped against the wall.
Ray wanted her clean for tonight. What should she do? She should probably go home, have a wash in the river, clean some clothes and lie around in the shade all day to keep the sweat down. Perhaps she could do a bit more writing. With a bit of luck, Mukhtar would take a dollar to drive her into town on his bike later this evening, and she could avoid a long and sweaty walk. It was a good plan, and she liked it. If she could just make it home in this goddamn stinking heat.
A DAMP, COOL FLANNEL
You know when you hard boil an egg, right? And then you pop the yolk out from the white, leave it sitting there, a little firm ball of yellow on your plate? That’s what her eyes felt like. Maybe if you put the yolk in the microwave for thirty seconds: that’s even more what her eyes felt like. Warm, hard boiled yolks. She tried opening them.
That was definitely worse. Warm, hard boiled yolks rolled in Tabasco-infused sand. She closed them again.
‘Miss, can you look at me for a moment?’
Open again. The doctor was staring into her eyes, then her throat, then her ears.
‘Well, Caroline, it’s definitely dengue. There isn’t a lot I can do for you. You need lots of fluids and you need to rest. You mustn’t travel. Is it possible for you to stay here for at least the next three days?’
Caddy lifted herself up on the pillows of the Sofitel MyBed™, tried shifting her eyes left to look at Farren, the carbon credits billionaire. Sand ground under her bottom eyelids. She tried turning her head instead. Nope, definitely worse. She went back to the eyes-left option.
Farren was nodding thoughtfully and making ‘hmph’ing noises. ‘I don’t think that will be a problem,’ he said, but she noticed he wasn’t looking her way. She knew he had to fly up to Sydney this morning. ‘Thank you doctor.’
‘My pleasure. I’ve written you a prescription for something to help the pain and fever, miss. I’m sorry I can’t do more. Sir, shall I charge the cost to your room?’
‘Of course, thank you.’
When the door closed behind him, Farren pulled a chair up to the bed. ‘Caddy, do you think you’ll be fine to stay here until Tuesday? I have to leave in about an hour.’
‘I can’t afford it.’ She didn’t like to be so blunt, but every word was a tiny hand grenade behind her eyebrows.
‘I know. Your brother could probably cover it, but what the hell.’ She assumed this meant he was going to pick up the tab. She certainly hoped it did. ‘I enjoyed meeting you. It was a good game, and you’ve been great. How about when you feel better you give me a call?’ He waved a business card at her, held up between his index and middle finger, then put it down on the bedside table. ‘Do you want any breakfast?’
‘No. Thank you.’ It hurt her jaw to even say that much; she couldn’t imagine chewing.
‘Alright, well I’ll let you rest. I’m going to head down to the buffet, but I’ll be back in half an hour or so to check on you before I go. Just call my mobile if you need me.’
She nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘Go Doggies!’ He waved the scarf he’d bought at the game last night as he went out the door.
She fell back on the pillows. Even falling back on pillows hurt. God. She wished she’d asked Farren to pick up the painkillers from the dispensary while he was getting breakfast. She certainly had no way of going to get them. As she lay back, the pain leaked out the end of her fingers and left her brain clear for a moment. It had been a good game, he was right. Farren and his mate Sam had been fun, keen to learn about the game and to get wrapped up in cheering for their team. They’d drunk some, but not too much, and they’d shared the drinks around without ever making a big deal of how much spare cash they had. When the Doggies won, they’d bought a bottle of vintage Australian sparkling to celebrate; no showoffy French crap for these blokes. By the time she and Farren had got back to the Grand (luckily, he wasn’t one of those poverty fetishists who’d demanded to stay the night at the settlement), her headache had really settled in and her hips were burning. Not the best part of me to be in pain right now, she’d thought. Luckily, the alcohol was taking the edge off it, and she’d been able to do a reasonable job of enjoying the sex. Not even a reasonable job of pretending to enjoy it; a reasonable job of actually enjoying it. So it had been rather a disappointment to have the rest of the night totally destroyed by a prodigious nosebleed and the rapid creeping of pain from her hips to her shoulders, elbows, knees and neck.
‘I think my bones are broken,’ she’d said to Farren.
‘Sounds like dengue to me,’ he’d said, and then he’d called the doctor.
She hoped Ray wouldn’t be too pissed off.
Just as she was falling asleep, Farren came back in. ‘Knock, knock …’ He put a box and a bottle of water down beside her. ‘I picked up the painkillers for you, do you want one now?’
She gave him the sweetest smile she could muster. ‘Thank you so much.’
He popped one out of the foil and passed it to her with the bottle. ‘OK hun,’ he said, ‘I have to get out of here. Seriously, though, give me a call. Use the second mobile number will you? I’ve circled it. The first one, not so good …’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Now, I’ve left my credit card with them to send back when you check out, so get room service or whatever when you feel ready. Oh, you know what you should do? Get a massage. They’ll come up here and do it for you. Well, get better soon.’ He kissed her on the forehead, picked up his bag and then he was gone.
He was sweet. He was also married, which meant, really, he was a prick. She’d probably have to call him again though; Ray would insist. Could be worse though. Imagine staying in a place like this if she was feeling well! She tried to prop herself up again so she could look out on the view of the railway lines, but it hurt too much. Ah, crap. She really did feel completely and utterly awful. It was so quiet here. Saturday morning, and she was going to feel completely and utterly awful until at least Tuesday, and then she’d feel mostly utterly awful for weeks and weeks and weeks. Maybe she’d die.
Shit. Maybe she would die. People died of dengue all the time. No one knew she was here. Even if anyone knew, why would they care? She was nothing to no one. Maybe Ray would care. Maybe she should call Ray.
She used the bedside phone to call Ray. It went straight to voicemail. ‘Ray, it’s me. I have dengue. I’m at the Grand. Fuck. Ray?’ She hung up. Fuck.
‘Fuck!’
What if she died? Black bile panic welled up in her guts and swam in front of her eyes. Was there really no one she could call? She could call the doctor, right? But he’d already been. He’d already said he’d done everything he could. Had he said it like that: ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do’? Like, ‘I’m sorry, you will die’? Is that what he’d said? She didn’t want the doctor, anyway. She wanted someone to hold on to, someone who’d wipe her forehead with a damp cool flannel and rub her back. Someone who would just sit there while she cried. God damn it, how did she end up so alone?
Sh
e picked the phone up again and rang her house. No, not her humpy, her house. It rang and rang.
‘Answer it, Harry. Answer it!’
It kept ringing.
‘Answer! I need you! Harry, I need you … Harry!’ her voice rose into a shriek and broke on the edge of a sob. ‘I need you. Please come back.’
She put the phone back in its cradle, rolled over on her face and cried to the sound of rain on the window until she was asleep.
She slept with the bedside light on, two days and two nights, and the rain looked in on her from the floor-to-ceiling windows. In her dreams, Simon and Sarah slouched on the brown polyester satin of a Motel 6 bedspread, passing a cigarette between them and trying not to let the embers burn the sheets. Drops of water slid from the ends of Sarah’s hair, rolled down her burnished fourteen-year-old skin and dampened spots around the collar of the T-shirt she wore to bed.
MADE OUT OF FELT
Ray shifted the handlebars suddenly to steer around a dead sheep in the road. ‘Gotta pay more attention, man!’ He was heading up to Hanging Rock again to have another muck around with the maps. He’d broached the whole thing with Sam last night. Nothing too specific – he hadn’t said ‘magic maps’ or anything poxy like that, but he’d kind of floated the idea of a really rapid transport system that could get you from one side of the urban sprawl to the other.
‘What about power costs?’ Sam had asked, sensibly. ‘No power costs, mate. Totally free,’ Ray had replied.
‘Infrastructure?’
‘There’s none. I mean, it’s already there.’
‘So you’re saying that if we invest in this thing, get it up, it’s cost free? One hundred per cent profit?’
‘Apart from the commission to me, yes. It’s cost free.’
‘Staff costs?’
Ray had thought about it. He didn’t want to spend every day clutching a map, shifting commuters from one end of town to the other.
‘Yeah, maybe one, two. Minimum wage. It wouldn’t be any kind of hard work.’ Maybe he could get Caddy a job. He wished he hadn’t said ‘minimum wage’.
‘So can I see the plans?’
‘Not yet, man, not yet. Still very much in the infancy stage. But it’s the kind of thing you might be interested in, yeah?’
‘Yeah, possibly. Sounds pretty implausible, though.’
About then the footy had gotten really interesting and Ray had dropped the subject. A Doggies win was even more important to him than a sweet business deal. But the game was won now, the song sung, cheers and hugs all round and a new scarf for Farren, and now it was time for Ray to think business. There had to be a way he could turn this map thing into a fortune.
He pulled his bike into the bushes again – different bushes, didn’t want to get into the kind of habits that could get his stuff stolen – and locked it up. Pulled the map from his pocket and folded it so that Hanging Rock was on one side, Dromana on the other. ‘Let’s go see the seaside,’ he said to himself. And he stepped out into space.
Mind the gap? Did that voice just say, ‘mind the gap’?
Ray looked around. This wasn’t Dromana. For a start, it was dark as hell. There’d been no whizzing by of coordinates, no rapidly scrolling landmarks. Just here, and the dark.
He could have sworn some English woman had said ‘mind the gap’.
He sniffed the air. It didn’t smell of the sea. He wasn’t sure what it smelled of. In fact, it was definitely worth noting, he thought, that whatever that smell was it was absolutely not any smell he had smelled before. Not even close. And Ray had smelled a lot of things in his time.
Ray pushed a foot forwards into the darkness. The darkness felt oddly soft and yielding, and not the least bit like dark air. He put a hand out. The darkness seemed pretty much to be made out of felt. He waved his arm around a bit, and the darkness swung a little from side to side, letting in some bits of lightness.
Ray was no expert, but he was fairly sure darkness didn’t do that where he came from. He shuffled his feet forward a few steps, trying not to trip on the darkness, which seemed to have been left piled up all over the floor in a very messy way. With his hands, he pushed at the darkness in front of his face, trying to move some of it out of his way so he could see. His hand hit something hard. He felt for it again. Hard. Wiry. A coathanger?
‘Oh great,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m in fucking Narnia.’
He pulled the coathanger off whatever it was hanging on, and a little bit of lightness came in, enough to see that wherever he was, it was thick with darknesses hung on coathangers, flung over the backs of chairs, and piled knee-deep on the floor. As he shuffled forward, slivers and streaks of lightness began to fall and he could make out shapes. That felty bit of darkness he had his hand on at the moment? It was definitely cat-shaped, though stretched a bit long. The one over there looked like a small shrub, stick thin and leafless. He could see hanger after hanger hung with shapes of human darkness. He pulled some of them off the coathangers and held them up in front of the light to get a better look. They were all the shapes and sizes humans come in, many of them splayed into odd poses and surprised gestures.
‘Is this some kind of theatre?’ he thought. ‘The storage room of a gallery? Hey, maybe I made it to Prague, maybe this is some cool, modern art gallery. I wonder how many dollars we’re getting to the euro at the moment … fuck!’
Ray tripped on a pile of darknesses and fell on on his face.
Alright, seriously. What were the options?
1. Probably this was Dromana, in some massive clothing warehouse or something. Just cause he’d wanted to go to the beach didn’t mean he would. The maps weren’t that detailed.
2. He’d fallen down an abandoned mine shaft full of felt cut into the shapes of living things. A felt mine? Was this where Fuzzy Felt came from? OK, that could probably go fairly far down the list.
3. Prague! The storage room of a modern art gallery that had just finished a show about shadows. A very big show. Very, very big. Shadows. He pulled a piece of darkness from under his himself and held it up to the light. Do fish make shadows? If fish made shadows, this could be one. He’d always thought shadows were made by the sun, but maybe he was wrong and this was …
4. a manufacturing plant for shadows. In Dromana.
He was obviously going to have to find someone and ask where the hell he was. That was going to be embarrassing. It could also be potentially fatal or jail-termy, depending on where he was. He looked around for a felt gun. Nope. He’d have to just hope for the best.
Oh wait, he’d missed one.
5. Narnia.
He clambered upright and started shuffling forward again. Two, three minutes later – Ray hadn’t looked at his watch when he began shuffling, so no amount of looking at it now would tell him long the shuffling had been going on – Ray reckoned the light/shadow balance was turning in favour of light. Man, this was a damn big Fuzzy Felt mine. He pushed on. Another two or three minutes and he was kicking through loose darknesses, the floor now clearly visible, an almost straight path he could follow to what looked like the outside. He walked faster.
A young woman was sitting in what appeared to be a coatcheck booth. She was wearing a hat, one of those little round ones with a bit of a veil, like Jackie Kennedy would have worn. He wished Caddy was here to remind him what those were called. Her mouth was a big, bright red bow on her white, white skin. She was chewing; gum or tobacco, Ray couldn’t be sure. She spat. Tobacco.
‘What’re you doing back there, bud?’
‘I wish I knew,’ Ray said. His legs hurt. Shuffling used all kinds of muscles he didn’t even know he had (though, that said, Ray thought, I don’t know I have most of my muscles. In fact, I can probably only name about five of my muscles: biceps, triceps, gluteus maximus … OK, three). The good news was she was speaking English, which meant he probably wasn’t stuck in Prague with no way back. And the chances of a coat-check girl in a Fuzzy Felt mine were perhaps even slimmer than the mine e
xisting in the first place. She did have an American accent though. That was a little bit worrying. On the other hand, everyone in Narnia was posh and English, so her accent probably meant it wasn’t Narnia either.
Ray tried to play it cool. ‘I mean, the company that sent me said there was a package to pick up, but there was no one here when I got here so I just popped back to have a look for it myself.’
‘I’m always here.’
‘Maybe you were looking for something on the floor when I came by.’
‘Yeah, right. Maybe. You can’t be back there, you know. How’d you even get in?’
‘Um.’
‘Look, we’ll let it go for now. You pick up any shadows while you were in there? Empty out your pockets.’
Ray did as she said, taking the chance to look back into the giant warehouse or whatever it was. Looking in, he could see there were coat-check labels stapled onto each of the shadows.
‘Did you move anything? We got a system, you know.’
‘No ma’am.’ Ray had a lot of practice at lying.
‘OK, you’re all good. And you got nothing to drop off?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Get out of here, then.’
While he’d been shuffling, Ray had devised a plan. It was a pretty good plan. He’d get to the light, then he’d step out in the street and try to figure out where he was. Now he was here, he could see there was no street. He wasn’t sure what this where was. It looked a bit like when you’re on a plain somewhere, and the heat shimmers make the horizon appear as if it is dissolving into water. Yeah, that was it.
‘Excuse me, is this Dromana?’
That hadn’t been part of the original plan, but Ray was starting to worry, just a bit. He was fairly sure he didn’t want to step out onto a shimmery plain until he knew which part of Dromana he was actually in.
‘Did you say Narnia?’
‘No, Dromana.’
‘Oh, good. We had some people through here looking for Narnia the other day. Told em, you want Suspended Ims. If you were looking for Narnia too, well, I guess I’d have to call directory services and make sure they hadn’t got our listing wrong or something.’
