A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

by Jane Rawson

‘You just take it.’

  With Jason’s help, Caddy lifted Harry’s body into the shopping trolley. She wedged the longneck under his back so it wouldn’t roll around, and grabbed a pack of Peira’s promotional matches from the table she kept reserved for hillsiders. He was heavy and the wheels veered off in any direction that took their fancy. She wanted to do this by herself, no help from anyone. No help from all those friends Harry had never known. Just her and Harry, like it used to be. She draped one of the towels Peira had lent her over Harry’s head, kissed him once before tucking it in.

  She wheeled Harry down Collins Street, letting the slope pull them along, stopping for a minute in the cool of a doorway. She really should have a hat. Or a job in an air-conditioned office, with one of those upside down bottles of chilled plastic water. ‘Hey Harry? You want to go down to the beach for a while? We could sit hip deep in warm water for a bit, yeah? That’d be fun, eh? Don’t know where we’d wash the stink off though. Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just get on with it.’ She slipped her hand under the towel and rested it on the back of his neck. It didn’t feel as nice as it used to.

  ‘Hey Harry? I love you, you know. It never changed.’ She wanted to bend over and hug him, but she knew that wouldn’t feel so nice either. ‘Yeah, I know: get on with it.’

  Maybe, she’d had enough. Maybe Ray was right. Maybe they should just move to San Francisco. She could get a real job, in a real building, go there every morning around the same time and sit at a desk until later in the day, then go home to an apartment with a bed and a fridge. She could even go to the organic grocery shop on her way home and buy something to cook for dinner. And she could get herself a great big glass of water from right out of the tap, and she could drink it. Then she could have a vodka, of course.

  Could she get a real job? No seriously, could she? What was the deal in 1997 America? Oh, wait up Caddy. It’s not real 1997 America. Why would she imagine a place where she couldn’t get a job? She wouldn’t imagine a place like that, of course.

  Yeah, maybe it’d be sweet. She could become a lesbian, cut her hair off all spiky but cute, wear red lipstick and have a piercing in her lip, wear big boots and laugh all the time in a friendly way. She could take up photography and learn to crochet and cook. God, maybe she could start drinking wine!

  There’d be no footy though. And everyone would be American. American like Simon. Did she want to hang out with people like Simon all the time? Were there any adorable Kiwi guys in San Francisco, all big and shy and sexy? Oh, that’s right; she was going to be a lesbian. Maybe she could meet a nice Kiwi girl instead. Or a Mexican! There were heaps of Mexicans in San Francisco, right? They could eat bonitos together, or whatever those things are called. And then they could walk around the streets holding hands and laughing, maybe shopping for cool clothes, and people would look at them and think, god, it’s great to live in San Francisco, where an Australian chick from the future can walk around hand-in-hand with a Mexican girl, and they can eat bonitos together and get drunk while they crochet stuff.

  It wasn’t the worst idea.

  And Ray would be there. She liked Ray. She liked Ray more than pretty much anyone except Harry. Ray was Australian, and he liked footy, and he liked her and they were friends. Ray would be there. They could remind each other about how this was the past and everyone was imaginary. Or maybe they could help each other forget about that so they could get on with just having lives, like the one where she had a job and an apartment with a bed and rode her mountain bike to the park with her Mexican girlfriend, who liked to be read stories from the New Yorker magazine, out loud. Ray had bought her a copy of the New Yorker magazine last time he was in San Francisco.

  On the other hand, she could go into one of these burned up factories they were walking past, and find something hideously caustic, and then she could put Harry down on the ground, drink the hideous caustic stuff and lie down next to him, and that would be that. Yaay! They could even hold hands while she slipped away, except he was getting all stiff now and she didn’t know if she’d even be able to bend his hand, just supposing she even could lie down calmly, which maybe wouldn’t be the case for someone with a gutful of something hideously caustic. She’d probably be busy screeching and vomiting black bloodstreaked foam and trying to grab her eyeballs so she could pull them out of her head.

  How did people in stories kill themselves when their husband died from having a too-dark shadow? Why was it so fucking hard to even get hold of books, anyway? Where did all the books go? There used to be that library in Footscray. It never had what she wanted. But it had books. What happened to that?

  She didn’t want to vomit black, blood-streaked foam. She didn’t want to lie down and just starve herself, that would hurt. Hanging was gross.

  They were outside the Commercial. ‘Yeah, it’s still closed. You keeping that longneck cold for me?’ The rubble was piling up and it was getting harder and harder to get the trolley through. At the corner of what used to be Frederick and Hyde she gave up.

  ‘Close enough, Harry?’ The crater spread out in front of her. ‘Close enough.’

  She tried to lift Harry from the trolley, but she wasn’t strong enough. She tipped the trolley over, and Harry made an awful sound as he tumbled onto the fissured road.

  ‘Sorry.’ The beer was rolling away. She ran after it and grabbed it. ‘Gonna have to wait a while before we open that one, eh? Let it settle a bit. Wait here, OK? I’ll be back in just a sec.’

  She pulled the trolley after her, walked around the corner to where a warehouse had three-quarters burned. She pulled paper, oil-soaked cloths, packing cases, out of the rubble and piled them in the trolley, then put two big pieces of timber in on top, wheeled them back to where Harry was lying on the lip of the crater.

  ‘I don’t know what else to do, Harry. I’m sorry. I should have never gone to the markets without you. I should have waited for you to get out of bed, and we could have gone together. Or I could have just got back in bed with you. I could have been there. I’d have had my arms around you and you’d have been snoring a little bit and I’d have been telling you a tiny story about some place I wanted to go in the afternoon, and later you’d have woken up and thought it was your idea. Only you wouldn’t have woken up and we wouldn’t have gone anywhere in the afternoon. But you would have been the last thing I smelled. Only you wouldn’t, there would have been the bushfire, and then the oil, just for a second. And I’d have known about the fire. I’d have been scared. I’d have woken you up and we’d have tried to run away, and we wouldn’t have been able to find Skerrick and you’d be telling me don’t worry, we’ll just find her and then we’ll go but I would have been losing it. I’d have been losing it, Harry, and I’d probably have yelled at you. I’d have said something awful to you and that would have been it, the last thing you heard. And then we’d both be dead, and so would Skerrick.

  ‘I don’t know Harry. We should have been born fifty years earlier. Imagine that, Harry! Imagine if we’d been born in the 50s. We could have lived in a teepee in the park, but because we wanted to. And then we could have gone punk and had heaps of drugs, till we got over it and got really great jobs in advertising. We could have had a house at the beach.

  ‘Blah blah blah, Harry. Sorry I was always imagining stuff instead of finding some way for us to live a bit better. Sorry I imagined you here. You were probably totally happy there in our imaginary back yard, with a beer and a hammock and New Zealand winning cricket. See the nice things I imagined for you? New Zealand winning cricket: like THAT ever happens.’

  I dreamed about your shadow, she thought. I was just over there, and I dreamed about your shadow. Why didn’t I know this was going to happen?

  OK, she thought. I have to get on with this. Am I living?

  She piled the rubbish and the wood up around Harry and popped the lid on the beer. About a third of it foamed out the top, which was OK because it was really warm and she didn’t really want it all. She sat by Harry’s
side and drank the rest of it and stared up at the ruins of the bridge.

  ‘This place is stupid without you, Harry,’ she said. ‘It’s a stupid dead old piece of shit place. I’m going to go. Is that OK? I don’t want to be here anymore without you. I’m going to drink this beer with you, and we can watch the cars not going over the bridge and I’m going to lie here on the ground and cry for a while because I hate how dead you are and how not here you are, and then I’m going to set you on fire and go away.’ She leant over and shook him, because she couldn’t think what else to do. ‘OK? OK, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  And then she did.

  STUPID IN THEIR OWN STUPID WAY

  I didn’t really ever speak to Simon again. I guess I should have. We’re old now. He’d be in his fifties. I have no idea where he is. Probably seeing America, I guess. Probably.

  Oh wait, you thought I was dead? I’m not dead: I’m as here as you are. Of course I am. I’m the I here – you think this story would be happening if I was bloated up in some Louisiana swamp, all nibbled on by fish and gators? Well, it wouldn’t. That Caddy thinks she owns this story, but it can carry on just fine without her.

  I read the other day that most of what we know is imagination. We see a thing, but we don’t really see it. They reckon, scientists that is, reckon only bits and pieces of stuff actually gets to our brain through our eyes, like maybe a third of the whole picture of what’s out there. The rest we just make it up; we make it up out of all the stuff we already know. We guess. Imagine. Pretty much the whole world is imaginary. It’s like I saw that one time we watched Friends, where they were talking about, just imagine if what I say is the colour red is totally different to what you say is the colour red. Which was kind of an amazing thought, I thought, though Simon said they were just being stupid. But in the end, it turns out it’s true. Not just about red, but about everything. Because we make up most of the world in our own stupid heads.

  And then I saw another thing in a magazine that said perhaps we’re a hologram, some kind of projection of something that’s really happening on the other side of the universe. Which is too imaginary, even for me, so I stopped thinking about that. Well, until now, but I had to tell you about it.

  So I don’t know. I have great dreams. My life is nothing special – it’s probably sort of like yours – I have this dumb job, and I’m seeing this guy and he’s fine but I still look at other guys, and some days I’m madly happy and most days I just exist. But I have great dreams. A lot of the time I forget that the things I dream didn’t happen. They seem real to me; as real as the things I remember, anyway, which sometimes get a bit blurry. So I’m this imaginary person who has this great imaginary life, some of which is real, but the best bits are imagined.

  I don’t know.

  Do other animals do this? Do they make stuff up?

  If I just had that goddamn bulldog I could ask her.

  A DRINK FROM THE TAP

  ‘Wait, Ray. Wait. Just a second.’ Caddy held on to the railing of the Flagstaff station entrance and closed her eyes. Ray watched her.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m ready now.’

  He pulled his backpack straps tighter. ‘Having second thoughts?’

  ‘Second thoughts? Nah. I am SO over this place. Let’s go.’

  Like always, Ray had put Dromana on the back of the map, just in case things didn’t go wrong and the maps worked. But things always seemed to go wrong lately – it was probably lucky he’d ditched the whole thing with Farren, the maps were turning out next to useless for actual cross-city travel.

  As they tumbled once more into The Gap, Caddy had a momentary twinge for Lanh. Maybe she could find a post office in San Francisco somewhere, send him a postcard. Australia Post was working really well these days. Maybe an email. She’d like to send him one of those snowdomes, maybe with the Golden Gate Bridge inside. That’d be nice. Oh! And some champagne!

  They were getting to the front of Shadow Storage & Retrieval. Caddy pulled Harry’s rolled-up shadow from under her shirt. She’d had it tucked into her waistband, next to her skin.

  ‘You again?’ The coat-check girl seemed unexcited to see them.

  ‘You bet! We’d like to store a shadow please,’ Ray said.

  ‘We’re closed.’ The coat-check girl shut the book she’d been reading and put it in her red patent handbag.

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘Yep. Closed.’

  ‘It’s just one shadow.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, when do you open up again?’

  ‘We don’t. We’re closed. They’ve closed us.’

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘You do have a hearing problem, doncha buddy?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ray,’ Caddy said. She took the shadow from him and tucked it back into her waistband. ‘Maybe I’ll make a pillow out of him or something. Would that be morbid? That’d be morbid, wouldn’t it? I’ll find something to do with him.’

  ‘What do you mean, they’re closing you?’ Ray asked the girl.

  ‘I don’t know what else I can tell you. Which bit of closed don’t you understand?’

  ‘So you’re out of a job?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘You’re pretty feisty, you know.’

  The girl was looking in her bag for something. She pulled out an emery board and started filing her nails. Once she was happy with them, she put the emery board away and got up from her chair.

  ‘You still here?’

  Ray nodded.

  ‘Look, buddy,’ she came out from behind the counter, slid the bolt shut behind her.

  ‘Nice pins!’ Ray thought to himself.

  ‘Look, buddy, I don’t know what I’m going to do. This is what I do. I don’t do anything else. But it’s gone now. So I guess I’ll just, y’know, wander the earth or something. Know anywhere a gal can get a good Manhattan and a coat-check job?’

  ‘Funny you should mention that,’ Ray said.

  ‘Not that funny really. I don’t hear laughing.’

  ‘We’re going to imaginary San Francisco, circa 1997.’

  ‘Well, don’t forget to send me a postcard.’

  So you could send postcards from San Francisco! Caddy made a mental note, which Ray interrupted partway through by saying, ‘You’re a real piece of work. Here’s the deal: we’re going to San Francisco. It’s a short journey, should take us about ten minutes. They have cocktails galore, and I hear they love a coat-check girl. So whaddya say? If you don’t like it, you can come back here and hang out in the internet café for the rest of your life, I guess.’

  ‘It’s closed.’

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘Do they sell hearing aids in San Francisco? Consider it an investment.’

  ‘Yeah, alright.’

  ‘The Gap is closed. Don’t ask again, alright? Your disability is beginning to embarrass me. We all got a memo, services no longer needed, change in the business environment etc, all the best for the future. Closed.’ She checked her reflection in a mirror she took from her handbag. ‘OK then. Let’s go. Suspended Imaginums, I presume?’

  She led the way.

  ‘Hey Ray,’ Caddy was signaling for him to drop back a bit and talk to her. ‘If The Gap is closed, does that mean we’ll be stuck in San Francisco forever?’

  ‘I guess it might mean that. Is that OK?’

  She thought about Skerrick, sleeping on a chair in the sun in Peira’s bar. Thought about Peira. Thought about Lanh again for a second, and then about Simon. She thought about Harry’s imaginary body, what was left of it, scattered in an oily crater in the ruins of Yarraville, an empty longneck sunk in the sludge beside him.

  ‘Yeah, that’s OK.’

  The Office of Unmade Lists was unmanned. Ray was a bit disappointed, but it certainly sped things up. In Suspended Ims, the tape recorder was switched off and unplugged.

  ‘You ready, Cad?’ Ra
y asked her. Caddy nodded. ‘And you? Are you ready?’

  ‘I have a name.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘It’s Ingrid.’

  ‘You ready, Ingrid?’

  ‘Yes, human, I am ready.’

  ‘I’m Ray. This is Caddy.’ This was ridiculous. ‘Let’s go.’

  Ray walked around a bit, getting his bearings, then stepped forward into the yawning blackness. ‘Close!’ he said. He tried again, then stepped back out. ‘It’s this one. After you, Ingrid. Don’t be afraid.’

  She raised one eyebrow, which impressed Ray immensely, and stepped through.

  ‘Hey Caddy,’ Ray whispered. ‘If I imagined having sex with her in San Francisco, will that be happening in this San Francisco?’

  ‘No Ray. Get in there, will you?’

  ‘You want to go first?’

  ‘I’ve just got a little something I have to do first, OK?’

  ‘Um, yeah, I guess. You are coming, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Oh, can you take this?’ She handed him Harry’s shadow. ‘So round here is all things I imagined, right?’

  ‘I think so. Are you going to look for Harry again?’

  ‘No. I’ll leave Harry in peace.’

  ‘OK,’ Ray looked to see if Ingrid was still gone. She was. ‘You’re sure?’

  Caddy nodded.

  ‘So I’ll see you soon, OK?’

  ‘Ray, stop worrying. I’m not disappearing. We’re going to live in San Francisco, remember? Meet me at that bar you like. The Pilsner?’

  ‘The Pilsner. An hour?’

  ‘An hour. Max. See you then.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Go find that girl before she hooks up with some rockabilly, will you?’

  Ray stepped through.

  Caddy sat on the grey carpet and considered. It was a brand new imaginum. It should be near the front, right? She could see the guy from Unmade Lists coming back from lunch break, so she hopped up, chose a spot and stepped through.

  She could smell eucalyptus.

  She’d been here when she was just a kid. She remembered her brother, swinging on a rope from that tree: she almost never thought of him anymore. The billabong was milky aquamarine, smooth, salmon-trunked gums with their branches grazing the water’s surface, roots clinging to the clefts in granite boulders.