LEX: I don’t have any parents and I’m not going to have ANY gender. I’m never going to turn into a girl, or a boy. I’m going to stay being me – just Lex – forever.
JERK: (laughing) What a witless tadpole you are! Look under your clothes and you’ll find that you’re a girl. In another three months, you’ll turn into a woman and be sent off to the kitchens. Lou is a boy. He’ll turn into a man and be sent off to the war effort. That’s what happens to squirts like you. Either that or you’ll both wind up in a Herd.
LEX: That’s not true! You’re making things up, trying to scare us. Just because you’re a Big-Up doesn’t mean you know everything. Me and Lou aren’t gendered yet—
JERK: (laughing harder) Dimwitches. Fail-geeks. You don’t even know your gender orientation!
SCHAUM: (her voice is crackling and sparking at the edges) I … I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Are you saying (she lifts a tentacle and pokes it at LEX) that you and … and … my Study Partner are not of one mind? Vertebrates have disagreements amongst one another?
LEX: Oi … That’s my plexus you just solared! (but she’s not harmed. She catches the tip of the tentacle in both hands. She is unsure what rules of etiquette govern the holding of tentacles with an alien entity.)
LOU: Ohhh. You don’t know the half of it, Noodle-Head. The colonial fathers who came to your planet brought along half-size clones—
JERK: Shut up, shut up, little nitwits—
LEX: That is, clones like us. We’re the size of human children— (continues holding the tentacle)
LOU: —brought here as a race of underlings. To do boring, labour-intensive tasks in the colonies. Meanwhile our Superiors – like your friend Jerk – are free to be … Superior! They’re bigger and stronger than us. We call them Big-Ups.
JERK: Stop! Information about our cloning policies is strictly classified!
LEX: —except we won’t grow much taller or heavier. Even when we’re fully grown.
LOU: Basically, the Big-Ups think of us as living machines. Expendable.
JERK: This is going to end very badly for you – whatever your names are – Loo-Loo and Laxative?
SCHAUM: This is all very new to me. I had no idea your species were differentiated socially.
JERK: Very badly indeed. I’m alerting my dad right now. We’ll soon see who has the last laugh!
Screen blinks off again.
SCHAUM: What about the others who came through here, the screeching team?
LEX: The Herd, we call them. They’re half-size clones like us, but they can’t work any more. They’ve lost muscle tone and motivation. So all they can do is wander about singing. Trying to be jolly.
CHORUS: (singing offstage) Clones don’t eat and clones can’t play. We have seen neither moon nor day. Clear the dung and heap it high. We must work or we will die …
LEX has been holding SCHAUM’s tentacle all along, absent-mindedly caressing it.
LOU: Not that they succeed. With the jolliness, I mean.
SCHAUM: I am sensing deep sadness in all that you say. Amongst my people it is unknown, this kind of soul-disagreement … (she makes an odd sound, something between a tinkle and snort) Ooo-EEEee! Sorry! I couldn’t help myself.
The air within her room begins to fill with softly glowing lights.
SCHAUM: (raises the tentacle that LEX was holding) Your … uh … upper extremities? ‘Hands’? Your hands are causing a very specialised sensation in my thrips! Resulting in an Aura Bloom.
LEX & LOU: (together, looking around) Ooooo!
LOU picks up a tentacle and strokes it too, holding it to his cheek. The glowing lights grow more intense.
LEX: I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.
LOU: And it makes me feel different too. It makes me feel all warm inside. Do you feel it too, Lex?
LEX nods. Both appear bewildered.
CHORUS: (singing offstage) Come with a whoop and come with a call, come with a goodwill or not at all …
CHORUS shuffle onstage then hesitate, bewildered by the lights. They stop singing and instead begin to hum in unison.
SCHAUM: What has happened to them? That noise they’re making – it’s different now. Almost attractive.
The screen flickers and JERK reappears.
JERK: Stop! Turn off your lights! The Herd clones are changing their tune and they can’t do that – they’ll … they’ll … I dunno! Whatever you’re doing to them it’s WRONG! You don’t have permission—
SCHAUM: I cannot ‘turn off’ an aura bloom any more than you can turn on the moon’s beams. I am at one with the planet. And your underlings are connected to me. They’re amplifying the bloom. Nothing can stop it.
JERK: Oh really? Well! My dad’s sending a Squad and they’ll smash all of you! For breaking the rules – for changing the system—
LOU: Lex, we have to do something. Before the Squad arrives.
LEX: Wait! I have an idea. Hold on tight to Noodle Lady – keep her glowing, quick—
LEX runs over to the CHORUS. She grabs hold of two of the humming clones and draws them towards SCHAUM. Then she picks up a tentacle and places its tip in the arms of first one CHORUS member, then the other.
The bloom begins to throb.
SCHAUM: This is glorious. I’ve never felt so intensely alive.
LEX drags another pair of CHORUS members towards SCHAUM and connects them to the tentacles. The lights grow brighter and more intense. A rainbow begins to arc and sway across the stage. The screen flickers on and off.
JERK: Stop it! The power is surging. Whatever you’re doing, stop it now! You’ll blow the grid!
The CHORUS members relax as they come into contact with SCHAUM’s tentacles. They begin to smile and laugh, embracing the tentacles, wrapping the flexible limbs around themselves.
In the distance, a bleating alarm.
JERK: Oh no! I can’t believe this. We’re getting the signal to evacuate. This can’t be happening. You careless freaks! You’ve not only ruined my study assignment, you’ve destroyed the WHOLE COLONY!
SCHAUM: (her voice grows deep, rich and musical) The young ones and I have attained symbiosis. Their affection has transformed the biosphere of MaggiNoo. From this day forward, our waste products will no longer be available to you. If your workers touch our tentacles with intent to exploit us, they will be vaporised. The half-size clones are immune from harm, but you and your Superiors must leave this planet.
JERK: Nooooooo …
The screen flickers and blacks out.
LOU: The Big-Ups are leaving? Lex, you’re brilliant!
LEX punches the air in triumph, does a cartwheel and then runs over to join LOU. They both embrace tentacles. The air shimmers, as an intergalactic Aurora Borealis forms across the stage. All the freed child-clones turn their faces to the light in wonder.
ALL: Aahhhhhhhhhhhh … ! (their voices join in a hymn of pure joy, wordless and sweet)
Lights dim.
CURTAIN
What a Stone Can’t Feel
Penni Russon
As far as superpowers go, it’s a pretty lame one. I haven’t worked out how to use it, you know, to fight crime or save the world. I can’t even use it to save Bonnie.
What it is, is I go into things. On Sunday, I spent a few hours scooped inside a bowl. Not in the empty part where the icecream or the cereal goes. I mean inside the substance of the bowl. It’s sort of a Zen thing. I was the bowl but I was not the bowl. I was me, Vega Sandrine Collins, and I was finest-quality porcelain, dishwasher and microwave safe, made in China. It is very restful being a bowl, once you get used to the sensation of not being yourself. A bowl doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t love or hurt. You can fill it, empty it, a bowl doesn’t care.
‘I’ve got one,’ says Jessame.
Lyss and Jessame are Bonnie’s cousins. It’s the four of us most afternoons. Jessame and Lyss walk in, slipping off their sch
ool blazers and casting aside their straw boaters, covering the grey-flecked lino floor with their capacious schoolbags emblazoned with the St Mary of the Cross logo.
I go to Currawong High. Bonnie used to go there too. Back when we thought she was going to get better, I used to tease her that she would fall behind and have to do vegie maths and become a panelbeater. I don’t even bring her homework any more.
Bonnie smiles her thin, barely there smile, waiting.
Jessame says, ‘How do you think the world will end?’
‘Jessame,’ groans Lyss.
‘Chicken flu? Plague? Something that wipes out humans and leaves the animals to get on with things. That’d be the best.’
‘Jessame,’ hisses Lyss.
‘What?’
‘We’re in a hospital. It’s kind of off to talk about plague.’
Jessame shrugs. ‘Or the earth will get too close to the sun. The sun will die. A meteor will hit us. Something to do with space shrinking, growing, getting hotter or colder.’
‘But not for billions of years, right?’ Lyss asks, directing her question at me rather than her sister. ‘Not for billions and trillions of years?’
Jessame rolls her eyes. ‘Who cares anyway? It’s not like you can stop it. And at least we’d get out of our piano exams.’
I am not really playing the game today. I’m not thinking of an answer. I play my own game instead, picking out objects with my eyes. A vase, a metal kidney-shaped hospital dish, a teaspoon.
At first I think Bonnie is not playing either, but it turns out she is considering her answer. ‘Definitely epidemic,’ she muses. ‘Some kind of cancer, maybe,’ she adds, with more scientific curiosity than self-pity. ‘You know that’s what Tasmanian devils have? A sort of infectious, transmittable cancer?’
‘What about you, Vega?’ Lyss asks me. ‘How do you think the world will end?’
I shrug. ‘Maybe it already has. We just haven’t noticed.’
‘Don’t,’ says Lyss. ‘I’ll have nightmares.’ She pulls out a bag and carefully unfolds her knitting, a complicated white lacy blankety thing that she’s making for some other cousin who’s expecting a baby. They have lots of cousins. I have none, nor sisters or brothers. I only have Bonnie.
The next day at school. Lunchtime. The school smells of Vegemite-and-white-bread sandwiches, of pies with sauce, of freshly opened packets of BBQ chips. I go to the second-storey bathroom in A Block. I lock myself in a cubicle, remove all my clothes, fold them, and place them on the toilet seat, with my shoes on top.
I used to spend whole lunch hours in here, hanging around inside a smooth grey river stone. I can enter any inanimate object, but I prefer stones. They are small and unremarkable, easy to carry around in my pocket in case of emergency.
Since Bonnie stopped coming to school, I’ve been experimenting more, discovering nuances in my power. I’ve learned I can travel from object to object without returning to my body. I slither into a brick, then to another brick, up and up until I get to the school roof, where I pour myself out, until I am in my own body again. The worst thing about my power is that I can’t take my clothes with me. I have recurring nightmares about rematerialising in my own naked body in the middle of science class or PE. But on the roof of A Block there is no one to see.
I sit on the roof, hugging my legs against the cold pricking air, and look down on the schoolyard. The boys mostly play sports, or sit on the picnic tables, legs spread wide. The girls move in an elaborate dance, looping around the buildings, breaking formation, re-forming. And change your partners, dosido.
‘They look so small, don’t they? Like some kind of toy.’
Vivian is standing on the roof beside me, looking down over the edge. I didn’t hear her land, but she’s so light on her feet this is no surprise. Vivian can fly. It’s no secret. Some powers are too cool to conceal. I’ve never seen her on the roof of A Block before. Usually she is down there, in the thick of the dance, whirling lighter than air from one friend to another – clutching, laughing, now serious, now cruel – as if she invented the dance and it’s her they are all trying to follow.
I am incredibly conscious of my nudity. It is the dream come alive, but as in my dreams, she doesn’t seem to notice. Not even really looking at me, she says, ‘You’ve got that sick friend, right?’
I nod.
‘She gonna get better?’
Vivian is wearing a ring, gold with a pink jewel gleaming in it. ‘No,’ I say to the ring.
‘Man,’ says Vivian. ‘That’s so unreasonable.’
She steps off the roof and freefalls, until an updraft of air catches her. She lands lightly and joins the dance, never looking up to see if I’m still watching her. I heard she has hollow bones, like a bird.
‘It’s my turn,’ I say that afternoon. ‘If you could be any object you wanted, what would you be?’
‘A bird,’ says Lyss, not looking up from her knitting.
‘Nope,’ I say. ‘It can’t be something living.’
‘It can’t be technology either, can it, Vega?’ says Bonnie, who is the only person in the universe who knows what I can do. ‘Nothing with a battery. No electricity.’
‘Shoot,’ says Jessame. ‘I was going to say my phone.’
‘What about an egg?’ Lyss asks. ‘Is an egg a living thing?’
‘It’s, like, a chicken abortion,’ says Jessame.
Bonnie has the most scientific brain. ‘It’s a cell from a living thing,’ she muses. ‘It begins its life with all the biochemistry to become a chicken if it’s fertilised. There must be a point, though, where it crosses over and becomes inert. Like a blood cell or faeces.’
‘Why would anyone want to be faeces?’ Lyss shudders.
‘I’d be a condom,’ says Jessame.
‘Ew!’
‘What would you be then, Prissy Lyss?’ Jessame challenges. ‘A wigwam for a goose’s bridle?’
‘Something beautiful,’ says Lyss. ‘Something intricate. Like a nautilus shell.’ Actually, it’s a good answer. I think about twisting and turning down the corridors of a spiralling shell into its secret coiled heart.
‘What about you, Bonnie?’ I say. ‘What would you be?’ But Bonnie has closed her eyes. She is no longer playing our game.
Lyss rolls up her knitting. Jessame shrugs herself back into her blazer.
‘See you tomorrow,’ they say to me. They used to be my mortal enemies, appearing on weekends and holidays to take Bonnie away from me. I was jealous of the sinewy family ties that bound them to Bonnie, while my own connection felt alarmingly arbitrary, an accident of fate that deposited us in the same kindy class ten years ago.
After the sisters leave, I linger next to Bonnie’s bed to say goodbye. Her eyelids are translucent; her skin has yellowed from being indoors so much, or from the medicine, or both.
‘Vega,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t go yet.’ She shuffles herself into a sitting position but begins to cough, an aggravatingly dry tickle that I can feel in my own throat. I reach for the buzzer to call the nurse, but she grabs my arm. ‘No,’ she gasps. She gives me the signal that means private conversation. We’ve been doing it since we were little kids, flashing it across classrooms or crowded playgrounds, behind the backs of boys, or at each other’s dinner tables, right under our parents’ noses.
I sit on the bed, waiting for the coughing to subside. Finally: ‘There’s something I want you to do,’ says Bonnie.
Vivian sits next to me in maths. She smells like atmosphere: sweet cumulus, savoury sea breeze.
Mr Smith walks into the room. ‘Open your homework books and we’ll go through the answers.’
I flip open my homework book, but I haven’t even attempted it. I see Vivian hasn’t done hers either.
‘The thing is,’ Vivian murmurs, keeping her eyes on Mr Smith, who is scribbling answers up on the board. ‘I know how I got up on the roof. But I wonder, ho
w did you?’
It’s not as though things were always perfect between Bonnie and me. We had a habit of falling for the same boys. Even girls would feel they had to choose between us. Some preferred Bonnie, who was funnier than me, and smarter, and kinder. Some leaned towards me, and to be honest, I have no idea why.
There was this one girl in primary school, Tammy, who made a sport of playing us off against each other in Year 5. I remember a particularly long tense afternoon of pretending to hate Bonnie in order to please Tammy, wildly flashing private conversation, private conversation at Bonnie when Tammy wasn’t watching. I remember a different, wet-timetable day, sitting on a beanbag in the reading corner, grimly holding back tears, while girls in the class gathered around, gasping breathlessly, ‘Aren’t you and Bonnie friends any more?’ And Bonnie standing next to Tammy, staring blank-faced from the other side of the classroom.
Tammy was just one of those people who knew how to hurt you where it didn’t show. She hurt you because she could, not for any other reason. She was like the cancer flourishing inside Bonnie. You couldn’t even take Tammy personally. No point asking, ‘Why me?’ Tammy was a bad thing that happened to good people.
When the bell goes for the next class, Vivian says to me, ‘My people usually hang out at the top oval at lunch. Why don’t you meet me there and we can talk?’ She’s wearing her gold ring, the stone the dense, glassy colour of raspberry icy poles. ‘It’s a pink sapphire,’ she says, when she sees me looking at it. She gathers up her books and leaves.
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean Page 9
