Red Can Origami

by Madelaine Dickie

  The painkillers he prescribes aren’t strong enough. It’s like swallowing razor blades. You can’t drink water and your piss has turned black. Lucia’s phone rings busy but Ash is there in ten, bringing several cards of under-the-counter horse pills.

  —They’ll knock you out for days. And the paper just came—have you seen this?

  The Daily Gubinge has run a front-page exclusive on the burst tailings dam. Lucia’s byline’s on the piece and it’s brilliantly written. She quotes the tailings dam report at length. Gerro has offered a broad statement to the effect that they’re investigating the incident and that farmers will be compensated for the loss of any livestock drinking from the river. Fishermen in Boab Bluff are urged to be cautious of radioactive fish. You hope this is it, hope this will be the start of some rigorous media scrutiny into Gerro’s activities, but in the following days, there’s no other mention of the radioactive sludge burning its way through Burrika country.

  Ash checks on you during his lunchbreaks and parks on your couch at night. He cooks pots of dhal that taste vaguely of cinnamon and isn’t the slightest bit put out when all you can manage is a few spoons.

  One night, Yuma Watanabe appears on SBS World News. He’s in Fukushima City, and the camera pans to show an amphitheatre of mountains. He’s sombrely dressed in a black suit. His cheekbones, once giving his face handsome distinction, now look gaunt. He tells the journalist that he’s resigning from his position as CEO of Gerro Blue—a global uranium mining company. He’s quitting to join the clean-up. Not of bodies and debris, but of radioactive soil.

  —What the fuck, you hiss at Ash. What the fuck! We have a radiation issue right here that he’s responsible for! Why the hell is he volunteering to pack bags of topsoil in Japan?

  —He’s probably been asked to step down, Ash says reasonably. He’s probably got family who were affected by the tsunami …

  Noah appears in the delirious dreams between sleep and waking. Usually you’re at a meeting or at a party and you’re trying to reach him across a crowded room. But he’s always surrounded by people hassling, humbugging and demanding. He doesn’t see you.

  A few days after your tonsils shed their white cocoons, Lucia rings, urgent and excited.

  —Jeff’s leaving. I want you to go for my job! Well actually, it’s your old job, I’ve been on news for a few months now. We’ve got a new sports reporter. Noongar fella. His wife’s Burrika.

  Your head’s spinning.

  —Money’s still shit but we can take on Gerro. We’ll be working together. It’ll be real investigative stuff … Gerro’s refusing to speculate on the extent of the radiation damage and I think when it comes time to release the findings, they’ll find a way to avoid that, too. But they won’t be able to if we put the pressure on … So, what do you reckon?

  —I’ll go for it, you say.

  An hour later, as you’re relieving the stovetop of months of percolator spit, your phone rings. It’s Lucia again. There must have been something she forgot to tell you. Something else about the job, or Gerro. Outside, the light quivers through the tiny starfish leaves of the Japanese maple. Lucia can barely speak. Each word is waterlogged.

  —Ava, he’s dead.

  You’re no longer allowed to say his name. Madge tells you that he now must be called Nyaparu.

  —Nyaparu, you repeat, that plaintive sound at the end.

  A word for a thing without a name. A word for a man who has hanged himself. A word for nothing.

  For days, you feel nothing. And the nothing’s spiked with the same thought, over and over again: ‘Why didn’t I? If only I …’

  That last night together, on repeat. He seemed hopeful, brighter than he’d been in months. You didn’t pick it. You had no idea. Your own unkindnesses, on repeat. The time he found you in bed with the bodyboarder, the time he said, ‘You insult us, you insult our old people.’ The old people, the way the old ladies went quiet around the campfire that very first night, the feeling of his skin under your lips in rain. ‘A secret,’ he’d said.

  But not so secret that you can go to the funeral.

  —I don’t think it’s safe for you to go, says Lucia. Katherine says she’ll kill you if you turn up. She’s bringing a gun.

  —Good, you say. Let her.

  Once you transcend the numbness, there’s anger, a whole well of it, Murakami-deep. When the woman guarding the self-serve checkout leans in to make sure you’re not cheating the system, you swear at her. When a four-wheel drive pulls in front of you near the blown-up statue, you accelerate and give the bigger car, with its heavier fruit—its snorkel and Maxtrax and winch—a nudge, right up against its Port Hedland plates.

  And you keep thinking, this time two weeks ago he was still here. You could’ve stopped it! This time two years ago, you’d only just met. You keep thinking, how are these people drinking coffee and standing in line at the post office; how are these grey nomads just sitting here, at the Beach Bar, in patient, dumb boredom? As if time isn’t precious? As if they have forever? You wish you could make some Faustian bargain—oh, what you wouldn’t trade. No-one, except maybe Lucia, has any concept of Noah, or of the disaster zone less than a hundred kilometres from Gubinge, or of Fukushima, the warning of it, of what it means for you all.

  North of Fukushima, north of Sendai, the seaside village of Onagawa was hit the worst, not by radiation, but by the wave. Here, the tsunami surge exceeded fifteen metres and was amplified by the trench-deep bay, compressed between mountains. White seabirds took shrieking to the air, thousands of them, like an explosion of origami cranes. Locals fled to the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant and took refuge there. But not the trainees at the local fish processing factory, twenty young girls from China—they panicked and rushed back to their dormitory. Mitsuru Sato, the manager of the factory, calmed them, coaxed them, and evacuated them to higher ground. Then he went back to the dormitory to search for his wife and child. The Chinese girls watched as the dormitory was swept away.

  Enough, enough—it’s too much.

  On the eve of Nyaparu’s funeral, you go up to the fishing club car park. The moon’s almost full, but not quite; the tide’s almost a spring low, but not quite; the semillon sauvignon’s almost as good as the one he poured for you that night, in the back of the ute, only not quite.

  You’ll come back when the moon’s full, and you’ll wait for Noah to climb sweating down the rungs of the ladder in his workboots, to swagger across the mudflats and say goodbye, proper way.

  Around midnight, the wind picks up, and you think you can hear the sound of wailing, that other-worldly sound, like the warning wind of a cyclone, that sound from the very bottom of grief.

  A month later, your face pressed against the chopper window, it looks like country’s singing. There’s a profusion of plants after the swing of the cyclone’s skirts and between them, the soil sparkles like cinnabar. Mango and mangrove leaf greens clamber right down to the mud. Lucia sits on one side of you, Olivia on the other. And Noah’s words sit close to your heart: ‘We’ve both seen it with our own eyes. Gerro can’t cover this up.’ You know amid all this life—the plague proportions of mozzies and catties and marchies and whistling ducks—that out over the mine site, country’s still reeling. You’re going to make sure Gerro Blue pays.

  Acknowledgements

  My husband, Tom, says, ‘Behind every great writer, there’s a fulltime job!’ Thank you, my love, for working so I can write. Thank you for letting me steal your funniest jokes, and for letting me fish with three handlines at once. Thank you for weathering eleven years of Cyclone Herman.

  During the drafting of Red Can, I had a magic two-month writing residency at Youkobo Art Space in Japan. To Tatsuhiko-san, Hiroko-san, Makiko-san and Jaime-san— I have the best memories of the art exhibition nights at Youkobo and the wonderful conversations that ensued; of running laps around Zenpukuji Park and hitting Kichijōji’s Harmonica Yokocho for Japanese gypsy jazz. My time at Youkobo was supported through an AsiaLink R
esidency, funded by Western Australia’s former Department of Culture and the Arts.

  Gilly Grundy, your insight, vision and exquisite grasp of plot radically changed this book for the better. Thank you for being my first reader, and for those twenty-plus pages of feedback. After Gilly, subsequent drafts of the book and synopsis were read and edited by Luke Bagnall, Nathan Hobby, Tom Nagle, Maggie MacFie, Marie Zuvich, Denise Taylor, Hayley Scrivenor, Zoë Barnard and Jemma Arman. Your feedback was invaluable.

  A special thanks to the Kimberley linguist Thomas Saunders, who assisted with the Kriol and Kimberley Aboriginal English passages in the book. Language in the Kimberley is a fluid thing, and often people code-switch between languages, depending on who they’re speaking with. Thomas didn’t agree with all my linguistic decisions—for example, choosing not to drop copulas in stative clauses—but I hope the decisions I’ve made assist with ease of reading. I’m very grateful to Thomas for sharing his knowledge.

  I would like to acknowledge the whole team at Fremantle Press for supporting my work. Georgia Richter and Armelle Davies—your edits were shrewd and brilliant. A belated thanks to Claire Miller for all your help behind the scenes on Troppo. I can’t wait to work with you again on this one!

  The Drones kindly allowed me to use their album title Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By. Ava also listens to Warumpi Band’s Big Name, No Blankets. The haiku ‘Chain-Mail’ was originally published in Harold Stewart’s A Net of Fireflies (trans. Harold Stewart, Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., 1960). Watanabe appropriates Bob Dylan’s famous quote, ‘People seldom do what they believe in. They do what’s convenient, then repent.’ He also appropriates Joseph Conrad’s quote, ‘It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.’ Ava reads Toshi Maruki’s following remark in the Maruki Gallery: ‘These tragedies are not told to us by the beautiful clear waters and light island shadows.’ This line is published in The Hiroshima Panels (trans. Nancy Hunter, Yasuo Ishikawa, Kimie Itakura, Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, 4th ed., 2010). I’d like to note that Dick Smith’s banned Australia Day ad wasn’t broadcast until several years after the fictional events in the book.

  Finally, I wish to acknowledge James Mansfield, for inventing Swagmo, and all of my friends and colleagues across the Kimberley. Red Can’s running fat with the stories you shared with me, and the stories we lived together. I dedicate this book to you.

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  Caught up in the hostility directed at Shane, and flirting and surfing with the hell-man Matt, Penny soon finds herself swept into a world where two very different cultures must collide.

  ‘Where Troppo is particularly sharp … is in its abstract yet precise evocations of the sensory overload of Indonesia and in its dense, poetic riffs on the almost narcotic pull of chasing waves.’ Weekend Australian

  AT FREMANTLEPRESS.COM.AU

  FROM FREMANTLE PRESS

  For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm and powerful presence fills her world.

  But in the aftermath of his sudden death, Orla, her mother and her sister are left in a no-man’s-land, a place where the rights and protections of the nuclear family suddenly and mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl and woman must be navigated alone.

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  ‘An engaging and confronting novel that explores the resounding impact of grief.’ Books+Publishing

  AND ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES

  IMAGE: CHARLOTTE DICKIE

  Madelaine Dickie has been writing since she was seven. Her first novel, Troppo, was published by Fremantle Press in 2016. It won the City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award and was shortlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award. Red Can Origami is her second novel. It was written on Balangarra country, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, Japan. Madelaine loves to travel. A surf-obsession has led Madelaine from Spain’s Mundaka to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, to little-known waves in the Dominican Republic. She is studying Spanish and speaks Indonesian. Madelaine currently lives in Exmouth, WA.