Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  ‘It makes it seem like everything will be all right, doesn’t it?’ I said to Shannon. ‘Now that Suze will be a doctor, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, it does feel like that.’

  The streetlights were blurry in the mist, and the shops we passed were as dark as if they were hung with blackout curtains. The street with its wide verandahs stretched ahead in an overhung corridor of shadow, but no one had followed us from the bar, so we had no reason to be afraid. The only thing to make us hurry was the cold. At the carpark Shannon beeped open the lock of the Honda. We flung our bags inside and jumped in, and Shannon started the engine so the heater would come on.

  ‘Guess what? I thought ahead.’ Shannon leaned over to the back seat and pulled a big canvas bag onto her lap. She extracted a thermos and two white melamine cups from the bag. ‘Hot chocolate and there’s real chocolate as well. A block of organic dark. I don’t know why I never thought of this before.’

  ‘You are brilliant, Shann.’

  A couple of times we’d bought hot chips and gravy from the stand in the petrol station on the highway and taken them back to the car, but they had made us feel sick. They’d stunk out the car for days.

  I looked at my watch. ‘Probably not long now anyway. It wasn’t much of a crowd.’

  Once we’d snuggled into our seats, with the hot chocolate warming our hands and the car windows fogging up, Shannon turned on the radio. The upbeat voice of the DJ brought a skip of happiness into the car. I loved the first song that he played.

  ‘This is “our song”, Steve and me.’ I laughed, embarrassed. ‘How corny is that, having a song.’

  ‘No!’ Shannon rested her cup on the dashboard while she broke three squares of chocolate off the block and handed them to me. ‘Eat this before it melts. You’re a romantic. It’s a byoodiful thang.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Is Steve okay with you doing this?’

  ‘I told him I’m at a support group for Suze.’

  ‘Well, we are.’

  I nodded and slipped my shoe off. It was too dark in the well of the passenger seat to see if I was bleeding. The loud alert of a text coming through on our phones made us both jump.

  Bree and Ozlem clear

  ‘I’ll do ours.’

  I tapped out our message. Bec and Shannon clear

  ‘Hope we don’t go too late tonight,’ Shannon said through a gluey mouthful of chocolate. ‘You want any more to drink?’

  I shook my head. The warm cocoa was making me sleepy. I pulled out a tissue and wiped away the steam from the windscreen and the passenger side window, and passed the tissue for Shannon to clean her window. She took it but made a mock face of dismay.

  ‘I quite like the foggy windows. When you can’t see out it’s like you’re in a strange tiny world, car world. Cheap upholstery and farty-smell world.’

  ‘I haven’t farted, and if you’re going to then please let me know beforehand.’

  ‘Like when people fart in lifts and there’s no escape.’

  Another text came through, this time from Lu. Emma and I have split. I am clear.

  ‘Oh shit, shit. This could be it.’ Shannon’s voice was wobbly. She grabbed the cup from my hand, opened her driver’s door and emptied the contents onto the ground. When she had pulled the door shut she dropped the cups on the floor of the back seat and wiped the driver’s side window with the tissue I had passed her.

  Another text. He followed her into Trevvie park. Heading for bridge.

  We reached the park thirty seconds later and got out, trying to close the doors and the boot lid quietly. On our phones, the locate-a-friend app showed Emma in the pagoda beside the pond. Trying to walk fast but quietly made my left shoe chafe even worse and I was certain I was bleeding now. I could feel the moisture seeping into the lining of my shoe and pooling at the toe.

  The path through the park was well lit, so we kept to the shadows on the grass, our shoes occasionally crunching stones that had drifted from the white pebbled walkway.

  ‘Shit shit shit,’ Shannon hissed. ‘We have to turn off the sound on our phones.’

  Only a moment after we’d both done that our phones flashed with an incoming text.

  Hurry

  I pulled off my shoes and started to run down the hill to the bridge that led to the pagoda. My feet ached each time the scattered stones made contact with my tender soles. Shannon, the school athletics champion, sprinted past in the rubber-soled flats she’d slipped on in the car. When I reached the bridge, everyone was there. They turned and looked at me and I understood what they saw in my expression: the rage and fear that had been summoned in me, birthed from the cold sludge pit in my gut of every insult and shaming my friends and I had endured in our short lives. For this moment I was the leader.

  We ran silently to the pagoda, where we could see Emma pressed against a pillar, squirming against the grip of a boy who was using his right arm to pin her hands above her head.

  ‘We’re here, Emma,’ I said. In the darkness my quiet voice seemed to travel along the earth and up through the foundations of the pagoda, flinging the boy backward, away from Emma. As he swung around he stumbled on the uneven flooring and fell to his hands and knees.

  ‘What the hell?’ the boy said, but when he raised his face we saw that he wasn’t a boy. He was a man in his thirties, or even forties. His pants were undone and his half-erect cock glistened with a droplet of clear liquid at its tip. When he saw us looking he hurriedly stuffed it back into his pants and did up his fly. ‘Ladies,’ he said, rising on his knees like a begging dog and lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘No harm done here, ladies. We were just having a good time.’

  ‘No,’ Emma said. She hitched up her stripy pantyhose, which had been tugged halfway down her thighs, and struggled with her dress until it fell back down into shape. ‘No, we weren’t, you fucker.’

  ‘Did he say it?’ I asked.

  Emma shook her head. ‘No. You should have waited, like we said. I was okay.’

  ‘Say what?’ the man said. He was still kneeling. He had nowhere to go. We were all inside the pagoda now. Six women. One man. One baseball bat. ‘Look, I wasn’t going to rape her or anything. She never said no.’ He reached out to Emma. ‘You never said no, right?’ When his hand touched Emma’s thigh the sludge inside me churned up a dim memory of my childhood bedroom and the suffocating weight of the bedclothes. Then the sensation lifted and the clean air of the park flowed over me.

  ‘I never said yes, fucker. I was struggling,’ Emma said.

  ‘Show me your face,’ I ordered the man.

  He turned away. ‘No. Why?’

  I called Suze on my phone. ‘We’ve got one.’

  Lu bent down and thrust her phone toward the man’s face. There was a flash. ‘Got it. I’m sending now,’ Lu said, pressing the button.

  Suze’s voice was a whisper. ‘Did he say it?’

  ‘No, but he mightn’t have had time. Lu’s sent you a pic.’ I could hear the beep as the man’s photo arrived on Suze’s phone. Things were shifting inside me, again.

  ‘It’s not him,’ Suze said.

  I’ll never get it out of my head, what I saw when I found Suze that morning. Two other people, the ones who found the two girls before her, probably have nightmares like me. Three months later, I saw Suze in another way I can never forget, her grey broken face in the hospital after they had pumped her stomach.

  He’s around here somewhere. This is his patch.

  Shannon tsked. ‘Oh well, never mind. We seem to have found ourselves a right arsehole though. Baseball, anyone?’ She’s always had a wicked sense of humour. She swung the bat twice, hard, and it whished through the cold night air like a blade. The kneeling man bowed his head. He was probably praying.

  ‘Do you like baseball?’ Shannon asked. As she poked him hard in the back wi
th the bat we all moved in a little closer, our moonshadows stretching and reshaping around us.

  ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ he muttered.

  She pressed the bat into his shoulder and gave a swift push so that he toppled sideways, flailing his arms.

  We looked to Emma, who shrugged.

  ‘Next time,’ she said.

  The man leaped up and ran off toward the trees.

  The breath from our mouths was turning to frost but I wasn’t cold anymore. I bent and ran my finger through the blood on my foot then used it to draw a cross on the pillar.

  ‘Next time,’ I repeated.

  To my surprise Emma laughed, which made me and the others start to laugh. Soon we were laughing so hard that the park filled up with sound, and the whole of the night belonged to us.

  Fireworks Night

  On the night of the fireworks he rests his hand on the back of my neck as we walk. His hand is heavy and tanned brown. I can picture it lying dark against my neck, the fingers stretched enough to curl around my neck where it meets my shoulder, to cup the rosy hot skin burned by the sun of the summer festival.

  We are part of a crowd walking slowly down to the riverbank to watch the fireworks. People smile at me as they pass. They smile because I am not one of them, but I have come to watch anyway. I can appreciate this part of their culture, even though I am a foreigner. I can be a part of this event. We will all be a part of this event, it is for sharing, and we will come away happy and tired and then I will go home. Home to my own country. Tomorrow I will board a plane and go home and one day soon I will share this pleasure with my own people by showing them photographs and telling them about my adventures, and we will all understand each other better. That, I think, is what they believe.

  The weight of the brown hand resting on the back of my neck lifts, and Hiroshi points to a stall by the side of the road selling dinner boxes packed with noodles and dumplings and other small delicacies with rice. The stall is lit up by bare bulbs. Plastic flags in red and white stripes hang in an arc from the poles at each corner. The flags flutter in the evening breeze. The breeze and the moving flags make it seem like it should be cool, but it is still hot, the air is dank with humidity, and Hiroshi’s warm hand has left a moist print on the back of my neck. He reaches around my waist and guides me toward the stall, where the stallholder is shouting a welcome and waving his tongs over the range of his merchandise. I am wearing a black rayon dress that hangs from two thin straps at my shoulders. Hiroshi’s hand is hot through the rayon of my black dress as though we were skin to skin.

  ‘Irasshai!’ the stallholder shouts. ‘Welcome, hallo! Hallo Miss America!’

  He has a row of golden teeth along the bottom of his jaw that gleam in the light of the bare bulbs. At the stall next door, a man is selling goldfish to children. His stall is a series of plastic blue and white pools teeming with fish. The children have to scoop up a fish in a tiny net, then they are given their catch in a plastic bag filled with water. The fish man waves a scooping net at me, ‘Hallo, fish here, hallo.’ The golden-toothed stallholder makes a joke in a low voice to the fish man and they both laugh before turning away from me and Hiroshi.

  ‘What did they say?’ I ask Hiroshi, and he looks at me. I can see his lips moving as he tries to form the translation in his mouth, but his mouth is all slow and sticky from the heat and he cannot make the English from the Japanese.

  ‘About fish,’ Hiroshi says, and shrugs. Translating is too much trouble – it is too hot.

  A small child wearing a Japanese happi coat and tiny wooden sandals clatters past and touches my sleeve on the way.

  ‘Hallo, hallo, sensei,’ she calls before her mother puts a hand on the small of her back and pushes her forward.

  I know this child, although I can’t remember her name.

  ‘Hallo,’ I call back. ‘Goodbye.’

  She came to my class a few times, my class of toddlers and young children who repeated English words after me so accurately that I could hear my own Australian accent in their voices. To die is choose die. What will we do to die? The mother looks back over her shoulder and nods her head slightly as she smiles to me.

  Further along the road, a few stalls selling grilled chicken skewers have set up. The fat from the chicken drips and sizzles on the coals and the aroma wafts along the street past us. Two businessmen, their ties loosened and their sleeves rolled up, sit on low stools in front of the closest stall, drinking from big mugs of beer.

  We pass the local supermarket with its bargain bins of socks and cabbages, then the futon shop. Fluffy futons are stacked five high on pallets out the front while the old man who owns the shop sits drinking tea on tatami matting inside the window. He stares at me and Hiroshi as we stroll by, as if he thinks the window makes him invisible. Further along the road the pottery shop owner pulls down her shutter, locks it, then joins the crowd moving toward the river. Watching her brush streaks of clay dust from her shirt as she walks, I realise that the sights on this walk are souvenirs I should be collecting.

  Hiroshi is swinging the plastic bag with our dinner boxes back and forth in time with our steps. He leans over and takes my hand in his, then lifts it to his mouth and blows cool air into my palm.

  ‘Hot night,’ he says, then laughs. ‘Hot August night.’

  At home, August is the month when we have lost patience with the cold and the dark. We long for nights like this.

  As we round a corner on the road we see the riverbank laid out before us like a woodblock print. Many hundreds of people are gathered to watch the fireworks. They sit in groups, their brightly coloured cotton kimonos glowing in the dusk light. Each group has its own patchwork of groundsheets and blankets, and pairs of shoes and sandals are lined up neatly at the edge of each group’s territory. Paper lanterns sway on the decks of flat-bottomed boats cruising up and down the river, and down by the dock a man with a megaphone tries to organise a group of unruly elderly citizens.

  I feel a rush of panic for what I am about to lose. I stop for a moment and breathe in deeply, trying to capture and hold the complicated scent that is Tokyo on a hot summer night.

  We pick our way among the parties on the riverbank and find a small spot to spread our plastic sheet. I slip off my sandals and step onto the plastic. Hiroshi passes me the dinner boxes and I hold them while he unlaces his shoes and pulls off his socks, then steps onto the sheet beside me. As I look down I glimpse where my dress strap has slipped. The white skin where I was protected by the dress stands out in stark contrast to my pink shoulders and arms, as though this day, this festival, this country has burned its impression onto my body. I will never belong here and yet this place has become a part of me. A part that for the rest of my life will ache when I least expect it.

  Just as we have opened our boxes and lifted salty pickled plums to our mouths, the first firework explodes above us. Then another and another and for half an hour we all stare upward at the brilliant light of the sky, and at the climax the whole sky burns bright until suddenly there is only darkness and the smell of the burned powder and empty bottles and dinner boxes and children asleep on their parents’ shoulders and it is over.

  Acknowledgments

  To my Kanzaman friends, Jane Watson, Mary Manning, Penny Gibson, Pam Baker and Janey Runci, thank you for your helpful comments on story drafts and your excellent company. To all the literary magazines, thank you for being the engines of the short story world. And to Madonna Duffy, thank you for having me on your wonderful list.

  Publication details

  ‘The Salesman’, Griffith REVIEW 29: Prosper or Perish, 2010; and The Best Australian Stories 2010, ed. Cate Kennedy, Black Inc., 2010.

  ‘Procession’, Going Down Swinging, Issue 30, 2010.

  ‘The City Circle’, Griffith REVIEW 45: The Way We Work, 2014.

  ‘Stingers’, Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 10, Issue 6, 20
14.

  ‘After the Goths’, Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, eds Jason Cotter and Michael Williams, Hardie Grant, 2009.

  ‘Family Reunion’, published as ‘The Good Son’, Australian Book Review, June 2009.

  ‘The Word’, Southerly, Volume 68, Number 2, 2008.

  ‘One Good Thing’, Brothers and Sisters, ed. Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2009.

  ‘Breaking Up’, Overland, Issue 192, 2008; and New Australian Stories, ed. Aviva Tuffield, Scribe, 2009.

  ‘Serenity Prayer’, published as ‘Reality TV’, The Great Unknown, ed. Angela Meyer, Spineless Wonders, 2013.

  ‘Territory’, published as ‘Friday Nights’, Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2012.

  ‘Fireworks Night’, Eureka Street, 12 March 2008.

  Also by Paddy O’Reilly

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  A sparkling collection of award-winning stories.

  Stylistically varied and enlivened by a wry, dark humour, the stories in this collection span a broad range of experience – an alien visitor who communicates in the language of romance, a woman waiting for her death, a case of confused identity, and the sour taste of relationships lost or abandoned.

  O’Reilly’s characters are at once defiant and accepting, curious and bewildered. From Japan to suburban Australia, and onto a place where larger, odder things are possible, The End of the World plays with our perceptions of reality.

  ‘Fresh on every page, adventurous, enlightening, nicely restrained yet vivid and often moving.’ Australian

  ISBN 978 0 7022 3594 8