Sixty Seconds

by Jesse Blackadder

  Geography. Fifth period meant it was now more than a week since Toby died. If I clenched my jaw as hard as I could and stared at my textbook, I wouldn’t cry. It was like walking a tightrope. I didn’t have any brain left over to think about igneous rocks. Just enough to think this about Laura and her friends: they were enjoying my tragedy. Not in a cruel way – they really were sad for me – but they liked the attention. Briefly, I was the most important kid in the school.

  When the last bell went, Laura came with me to my locker and watched while I stuffed things into my bag. ‘You live near me, don’t you? How do you get home?’

  ‘Bike,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you come on the bus tomorrow? I get the seven forty-five. I can save you a seat.’

  I nodded in a vague kind of way that didn’t promise anything.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Jarrah.’ She stepped close and, before I realised what she was doing, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Bye,’ she murmured.

  I still felt like a million invisible eyes were watching, so I didn’t touch my cheek or stare after her in shock. I moved things around in my locker for a few minutes and then closed it, hitched my pack over my shoulder, and headed towards the bike racks, keeping my head down so I didn’t have to look at anyone. I couldn’t stand any more sympathy.

  On the way home it felt good to stand up on the pedals and use my whole weight to shove the bike in the direction I was riding. In a week or two, I reckoned, everyone at school would be back to normal. I’d be back eating lunch with Billy in some place no one could see us. It was like a swap-card craze, or when someone broke an arm. For a few days or weeks no one could talk or think about anything else, and then suddenly it was all over. That would be me. Laura and her friends would forget me, and I’d sink back to my normal level.

  In the meantime, I guess it kind of took my mind off things.

  Kind of.

  BRIDGET

  Today you will return to this thing called your day job. You finish breakfast, put your plate and cup in the dishwasher, say goodbye to your husband (you even peck his cheek) and Edmund (is the man ever planning to go?), check your handbag, check your mobile, find your car keys, get into the car, and drive yourself to work. Koala extinction is an almost appealing prospect, with the relief from feeling that it promises.

  But in the car park you cannot get out of your car. You forgot that work meant people. You forgot the open-plan office and your colleagues. You cannot unlock your fingers from the steering wheel. That grip and the diagonal pressure of the belt across your chest are the two things holding you together.

  Meredith was right: you hadn’t thought this through.

  She’s been dropping in most days and found you alone in the garden on Sunday morning. For the want of something to do, you were weeding, and she got down next to you and helped, and told you about the foundation she represented, where as far you understood, parents with dead children tried to help each other feel better. You’d sensed she wanted to tell you her own story, but you threw your hand up instinctively to stop her saying more.

  ‘Just know there’s support available,’ she’d said. ‘Emotional, legal, even some financial.’

  ‘Legal?’ you’d asked.

  ‘I could come with you to the coronial inquest when the time comes. Be with you for any further police interviews.’

  ‘They told us they were done.’

  ‘Well then, that’s good.’ She looked at you with sorrow on her face. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your work?’

  You didn’t feel like talking, but you sighed and went ahead. For a decade you’d lectured in wildlife ecology at the University of Tasmania, and researched infectious diseases in native mammals. The catastrophe of Tasmania’s devils, ravaged by facial tumour disease, kept you awake at night for years, supplemented by general scientific concern about the demise of the world’s pollinators, the way the high latitudes were heating far faster than predicted, and the resulting tipping points of the global ecosystem. The same big pictures keeping most scientists awake at night. You used to wonder why the whole human race wasn’t lying awake worrying; why they couldn’t see beyond their individual lives. Now you know.

  You told Meredith about the new job, the one that drew you up from Tasmania. A chance to get out of the tightening vice of twenty-first-century corporate academia, to do something small but real: assessing the scope and extent of the North Coast’s geographically and genetically distinct population of koalas, and writing a plan of action to increase their chances of survival.

  ‘A government job,’ she’d said thoughtfully. ‘That’s good.’

  You didn’t know what she meant, but she explained: compassionate leave entitlements, flexibility, time in lieu.

  ‘You can probably have as much time off as you want,’ she said.

  You’d stared at her in shock. ‘I’m going back tomorrow. What else am I going to do?’

  She’d shook her head and hugged you, one of those long, warm hugs. A female hug, the kind you would have had from a mother, or an aunt, or a best friend, if you’d had any of those things. Finn, the extroverted, has his family ringing constantly. Your much smaller number of old friends have been scarcely brave enough to call you once in the face of this tragedy, and so returning to work is all you know to do.

  Chen appears next to your car. He must have been watching for you. He opens the door and crouches so your faces are level.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not too soon?’

  Eyes straight ahead, hands locked. ‘I can’t stay home.’

  He exhales heavily. ‘I know. Walk in with you?’

  Your knuckles relax and your hands slide from the wheel. You manage a nod and he holds the door while you unbuckle, gather your things, swivel, get out. You close the door and press the button to lock.

  He takes hold of your arm. ‘Hug?’

  Before what happened, you’d never hugged. Over the past week he’s hugged you without reservation, but one hug might bring you down this morning, and you decline.

  Walking up the steps, your knees shake. Chen opens the door, lets you pass, follows you in. It’s too early for Christine to be in reception and you pass into the open-plan office ungreeted. Your desk is in a cubicle at the far end. You’re early, like always. Only four people are in. You can do this.

  The pattern is the same as you pass each of them. Eyes meeting yours, confusion spreading across their faces, the visible battle as they decide what to do. One looks down again quickly, blushing. Two adjust their features and give you sympathetic nods, murmuring. The fourth goes to rise, but a gesture of some sort from Chen indicates no, not yet, and she reverses the move.

  You make it to your desk relatively unscathed and Chen leaves you to make tea. You open your stubbornly retained paper diary and stare at the expanse of a week. There are things written there, matched against times. Meetings that might have been significant from the perspective of a week ago.

  You place both hands flat on the desk to hold yourself steady. If you breathe, this will be possible. You will plan your day, and your week, find some structure to buttress you through the infinite hours, some sense of motion or meaning. Something.

  When Chen returns with two steaming mugs you’re still clutching the desk and he winces at the sight of you.

  ‘Here, let me help.’ He wheels in a chair and squeezes it next to yours, starts up the computer and looks down at your diary. He puts a finger on the first meeting, checks the names, turns to the emails avalanching to your inbox, types a search query, finds four relevant messages, sends their attachments to print, collects a slender sheaf of papers.

  ‘Step by step,’ he says. ‘Read them. Agenda first. Use a highlighter pen, mark them up.’

  ‘Why will I be attending, again?’

  He gestures at the spread of the week in your diary. ‘Because you need things to do. No one expects anything from you. If there’s anything you want to say, make a few notes.’

  He c
ontinues, scrolling through emails, marking things in the diary, printing, putting messages that need responses to one side. You won’t be able to do any of it. Every appointment, every list, every pile of paper is another step away from the life that had Toby in it. Already you have turned into someone he wouldn’t know, someone you don’t recognise.

  ‘I’m just across the way,’ Chen says. ‘Text me and I’ll be here in fifteen seconds. And Bridget – no media, hey? Or social media. No Google.’

  He’s been a friend this past week. Keeping you afloat when everything in you wanted to sink. Edmund must be doing the same for Finn. Who is helping Jarrah?

  Your heart crumples under the weight of this, though you’ve tried, in the terrible week past, to reach for him. He’s been distant, unreachable, remote. He acts as though he’s fine, he doesn’t collapse into the sudden weeping that overtakes you and Finn. You can only cling to the thought that Jarrah’s a boy, not a parent, and normal life will at some time begin again for him. He’ll grow up and heal – he’ll be all right.

  A chime alerts you to the meeting about to start. You collect your papers, a pen, a pink highlighter, and your mobile phone. Knowing now what life can serve up, you’ve become one of those people you used to despise, who need to carry it everywhere.

  The office is now full of people, though unnaturally quiet, and quieter yet as you rise and walk towards the meeting room. Along the way, and as you enter, stilted expressions of sympathy. The hesitation of your co-workers as they murmur their sorrow. You appreciate that they want to acknowledge it while not going any further. You wouldn’t know what to say either. A few of them add ‘If there’s anything I can do …’ and you nod.

  The meeting begins and you sit straight and stare at the agenda, and occasionally you refer to the notes, and mark something with the highlighter, but essentially you are far from the room. They are careful to ask you nothing, demand nothing, not look at you for too long. You are grateful.

  On return, your desk is piled high with offerings for morning tea. The workplace equivalents of beef casseroles and chicken soups: muffins, cookies, chocolates. At least there are no flowers. But what will you do with the rest of the day?

  ‘File,’ Chen says. ‘Your desk has been a mess for months.’

  You stare helplessly at the mound of paper on the desk, already defeated, but he reaches past you and plucks the first sheet from the stack. He reads the first few lines aloud. There is a date mentioned.

  ‘Last week,’ he says. ‘Too late.’ He lets it slip into the recycling bin. ‘Done. Next.’

  The tsunami of paper is something that defeats you even in a normal week, and you’d have said, if anyone had asked, that you’d be utterly unable to cope with it today, this day, this Monday. But Chen prods you into a kind of momentum, and after he leaves, you work slowly down the pile, somehow falling into a state of mind in which pieces of paper and the order in which they should be stored are accessible to you, something like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

  The problem is a stack of papers, each filled with a demand. The solution, as Chen showed you, is simple: take one more step. Any that are too demanding are put in the too-hard pile – he’s given you permission to create one – any that are intractable or unimportant are binned, the rest are filed.

  You work through lunchtime. Especially through lunchtime, when people might feel they have to talk. At two pm, just as you’re slowing down to avoid the end of the filing, your phone rings. Your boss wants to see you.

  In his office he stands to greet you and nods solemnly, waves you into a chair and goes through the usual expressions of sympathy. He’s awkward; this is not his forte. He’s visibly relieved when he can move on to business.

  ‘You want to get out of the office, Bridget?’

  You feel a moment of panic. ‘What?’

  ‘Chen and I have discussed shifting the koala fieldwork forward. He can start it this week. You’d work with him in the field for a month or so, doing the grid analysis.’

  Your mind turns slowly. This is menial, assigned to the most junior workers, the new graduates. ‘Um. I didn’t think I was doing the fieldwork.’

  He leans forwards. ‘Chen thinks you need a straightforward task, and some fresh air. I agree – if that’s what you want.’

  They’ll be glad to get you out of here, because no one knows how to speak to the devastatingly bereaved. After a month of office sympathy you’ll be heart-attack material, if today’s allocation of muffins and biscuits is anything to go by. That’s the kind of joke you once would have made. No one has mentioned death, or children, or unfortunate accidents. Many water-cooler topics to avoid. Yes, on the whole better to get you out. Bless the government and its flexible jobs and discretionary budgets. Chen has come up with a way to protect you.

  You agree and shake Rob’s hand. A month’s reprieve. By the time it’s over, the shocking intrusion of your bereavement will have passed for the rest of them, and some kind of return to normal might be possible. For now, you are in quarantine.

  FINN

  After Bridget drove off in a crunch of gravel, silence settled over Finn and Edmund. For the first time in a week the house was otherwise empty. Parrots shrieked in the blossoms outside and the smell of coffee hung heavily over the kitchen. It had begun tasting evil – dark and metallic – but Finn couldn’t yet accept the loss of the morning elixir that had sustained his adult life and so he forced it down.

  Edmund rinsed their mugs and stacked them. ‘I’ll head back this arvo. What say we get a bit organised?’

  He meant well, Finn knew. And Eddie was right. Bridget had gone back to work, Jarrah to school. Without something to get on with, Finn would crumble.

  ‘I guess we missed Sculpture by the Quay,’ he said, realising it for the first time.

  ‘We’ll shoot for next year, don’t worry,’ Eddie said briskly. ‘Let’s get your studio sorted first and go from there.’

  The studio, beyond the pool. The zone where no one went. He’d locked the pool gate with a chain and padlock after the police removed their tape, and it had remained that way since The Day.

  He would have walked around to the back entryway, but Edmund took his arm and nodded at the gate.

  ‘You’ve got to go in sometime.’

  The padlock yielded with a clunk. Finn lifted the chain, feeling the greasy weight of it in his hands, slung it over the fence, and pushed the gate open. The pool lay beyond, clear and rippling gently in the morning sun. The monster in their backyard. There should have been some evidence, surely, of what happened there? But apart from a scattering of dead leaves across the bottom, the water beckoned as invitingly as it ever had.

  Soon, Finn knew, he’d have to carry out maintenance. Scoop a vial of water and drop in the indicator chemicals, wait until the colour showed the level of acidity, then splash the required chemicals into the pool to maintain its balance. But no chemical test would show what had happened.

  ‘Want me to go first?’ Eddie said.

  Finn nodded and followed, eyes fixed on Eddie’s neck. The man had outstayed everyone else. Even Conor had left yesterday to go back to work. Eddie had stepped up from agent to friend. Finn assumed he owed this at least partly to the man’s past with Bridget, or, more likely, to his potential earnings from Finn’s art, but he was grateful.

  They skirted the edge of the pool, Finn avoiding its brilliant, sparkling blue. Edmund reached Dragon Sentry and pulled the lever to open the sliding doors. They stepped through, neither turning to watch the doors close, though the sound of the latch locking behind his back made Finn flinch.

  On the floor, pieces of clockwork, strewn. The welding torch flung aside. A stagnant coffee on the bench.

  Until a week ago, the studio had been his sanctuary. His first proper workspace: the shelves he’d constructed, the welder with its lanky argon tank, the hoist, taken from a previous life lifting engine blocks from unresponsive cars, its hook now dangling in the service of Finn’s art. The double-door
ed outlook straight into the pool area. The one direction he hadn’t glanced that morning.

  ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ Edmund asked softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do some carving. Take the pressure off. The commissions can wait.’

  Finn blinked back to the moment. ‘I don’t think I can do anything.’

  ‘You need something, Finn.’

  Finn picked up the torch, hefted it experimentally, hung it back on its hook and disconnected the welder.

  ‘What about another place to work?’ Edmund asked. ‘You could hire a studio.’

  ‘We’re not staying here.’ It wasn’t until the words were out that Finn knew he’d actually made the decision. ‘I’m going to sell the house. We’re going home.’

  *

  The mountain had been the decider, when they first saw the place.

  The four of them had flown up together for Bridget’s second interview with the Primary Industries Research Institute. It had been raining, and from the plane Finn had glimpsed sodden cane fields among the clouds. Being Tasmanian they were used to rain, but when Finn stepped out of the plane, the humidity hit him like a slap, slick with aircraft fuel. He sweated across the tarmac, damp where a grizzling Toby sagged, heavy and uncooperative, on his hip. He had screamed for much of the flight, from ear pain, Finn thought.

  ‘Is it always this hot?’ Jarrah had asked.

  ‘No,’ Bridget said over her shoulder. ‘On the days the volcano’s erupting, it’s hotter.’

  Finn gave his oldest son a warning glance. No complaints, at least not before her interview. She’d gone on about the extinct shield volcano straddling the state border, the biodiversity hotspot, the volcanic-core-turned-mountain, and other facts that had failed to move the male members of the family. Jarrah trailed behind them into the terminal, pink-faced and irritable.

  They collected the hire car, manoeuvred their way out of the car park, headed south. Turned into Tweed Heads for lunch. Found a place that served fish and chips and seafood on the river, where they could sit under cover, out of the rain.