Fiction

These Bones

Published in Australian Love Stories, 2014. Edited by Cate Kennedy. And also in Bold, 2015. Edited by David Hardy.  

Enzo dreams of suplphur-crested cockatoos and red roseallas but it wasn't always this way. Before he arrived in this country the smell of the Mediterranean tinged the edges of his dreams. His twilight imaginings were punctuated by the call of market vendors peddling their produce and by the whiff of the over-ripe tomatoes they’d be selling off at a bargain price on Saturdays. They were the old-familiar sounds of his boyhood. Now it’s the screeching birds and the scent of freshly mown lawn. 

 On dreamless nights when Enzo stirs he becomes unsure of where he is and stretches out his arm for the glass of water his mother will have left him, but there’s no glass. In the morning when he reaches the bathroom he is often affronted by the man in the mirror—the hair that has vanished in the night, the tone of his skin that is no longer the deep, rich olive it once was, more sallow than golden. 

 The dark can play tricks of time, but Enzo’s dreams carry him through the night like the ship that brought him to Australia many years before and at dawn, as those dreams linger fug-like, thick and heavy behind his eyes, they remind him of where he lives now. The birds don’t let him down. The rosellas and cockatoos place him back here in his bedroom in Carlton North. Because of them Enzo knows that he is a man, not a boy. He knows that the earth here is not as good for growing, knows the sun warms the heart, yet dries the skin. 

 It is the Australian birds of his sleepy imaginings with their squawks, caws and tough beaks, that remind him that he is here on Amess Street and that the body beside him is Nev’s.

Read the article on the research behind 'These Bones' in Bold
Read 'These Bones' in Australian Love Stories  

Anchor Point 

Published in Overland issue 242. Shortlisted for the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize.

‘Are you able to sit up now?’ The voice on the other end of the phone is calm and easy like music.

The ground against her back, Leila has her eyes on the sky. Not long ago it was watercolour blue, milky and pale and full of cotton-ball clouds; now blue is draining from it and the air is cooler. Her fingertips feel icy. She reaches an arm towards her backpack, still there on the dry leaves.

‘Leila,’ the voice says, ‘are you with me?’

The warmth of her exhalation drifts from her mouth and meets the chilled air beyond in a slight haze. ‘I need to take some more.’ She fumbles one-handed with the backpack zipper, finds one of the blister packs and then lays herself flat on the ground again, arms stretched out. She is a butterfly, unfettered. Here, her arms are her own. No-one to pin them down. The ground is a bed, a safe one. It’s her place today. The shrubs encircling her and the trees above are a cubby house, her own private patch of the parkland. With no walls, no doors, she can leave whenever she wants and here no-one could stop her.

‘Can you tell me what you’re taking, Leila?’

‘To sleep, so I can sleep.’ Leila’s mouth is chalky and dry. Water would be good but there are only the dregs of warm Coke left in the can. Leila reaches for it, rolling onto her side, her woollen jumper catching debris—twigs, earth, dried leaves—with each movement.

‘Leila, can we just press pause on you doing that right now? Can we wait a bit more before you decide to take the meds?’

Her thoughts are ocean currents pulling in one direction and then changing. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘because I have them all here in my bag.’ She brings the pills to her mouth and gulps a little Coke, flat and sugary. ‘I didn’t forget them so it’s all good.’ She can hear her own cadence slacken, molasses-thick. While slower now, Leila’s voice still catches, she hears it stumble over the phlegm at the back of her throat, hears it hook on the nicotine gravel.

Continue reading 'Bruise' in Overland here.

Concessions

I’ve written another list already. I know you’d be laughing about that. Just three things this time: mints, Brylcreem and the Italian newspaper. I’ll bring them to you when they’ll allow me back. A few days, they said. So you can settle. 

I’m not sure what that means. 

I thought I’d planned it well, that planning would make it okay. I booked the cab days before and checked with the cab company twice to ensure the reservation was made and the driver would arrive at 8am. He would definitely be there at eight and would toot the horn. I asked about that. I didn’t want the invasion of the doorbell, but a toot would be perfect, a signal to gently collect what we needed and then I would gather you. I couldn’t be driving; I knew I needed to be beside you, with you, not focused on traffic. 

Once the cab arrived I would ease you up by the crook of your arm and I’d button your cardigan — the Melbourne morning chill would nip at your bones but the thick woolly I gave you for your last birthday would keep you warm. I’d drape a jacket around your shoulders for good measure and your feet would be in slippers, new socks beneath. That was my plan. The driver would understand we might take a little time to come out, but he would wait there for us in the car, I checked it would be okay. I had it on the list I’d made of things to ask about. 

I asked many questions of the woman taking the booking. I explained we might need some assistance with the bags. The woman seemed rushed, she was curt, but told me the driver would get the bags into the car. “That will be fine,” I said as I pulled the handkerchief from my trousers to rub at my nose. 

This morning by 7.30am I’d repacked the suitcase. It had been packed days before but I took it apart and rechecked everything. I had the list out and ticked off each item. Twelve pairs of underpants, a pair of brogues, four shirts, five singlets, toiletries, a thermal vest, pills, your favourite scent. I planned to put that on your new dresser and pop some on your wrists, your neck, perhaps dab some at the collars of your shirts so you would smell as you always have, so the whole of you fills the room. You won’t need to remember to apply it. I won’t let you become like the others I’ve seen in those places. Some things don’t have to change. 

I’m still hoping you might be allowed home to visit or perhaps we can have weekends together here at the house. That’ll break things up a bit. The staff never gave me a firm answer when I asked about it. So perhaps some weekends I might have you here with me. I know you’ll miss the garden terribly, Enzo. I mentioned this to the woman at the desk. She reminded me there was the garden at the facility and I would be welcome to spend time there when I came to visit my friend. 

My friend. That’s what she called you. I suppose I shall have to get used to that now.

Continue reading 'Concessions' in the Big Issue here

Bones 

The hospital is quiet. Val expected it to be busy, like the emergency rooms you see on television shows, thought she might blend in among people visiting or being admitted. But it doesn’t feel like that. She glances at her watch. It’s been half an hour since she stepped off the tram, half an hour of standing with flowers in her arms. Lurking. She must look like a suspicious person, but Val is going to be a decent person instead. She is here and it’s what should be done. 

In the lift, she adjusts the flowers in her arms to rummage in her bag and stuffs a peppermint into her mouth, the fresh bite of it hitting her tongue, attacking the unhealed crevice where her teeth had dug in when it happened. She sucks hard until the pain sharpens, then swallows and presses for level three. She doesn’t know what condition the boy will be in, if he’ll be awake, asleep, or conscious even. She didn’t dare ask when she phoned. She was nervous enough about the idea of fibbing. It was only a white lie, she told herself, and they don’t really count. 

She’d gotten the room number, though, asked if they’d moved him from where he was, like she knew him. They’d told her he was still in the neurology wing, still in room 306. 

She’d gotten that number and that was what mattered. 306, 306, 306 — her mantra as she rides the elevator up. 

Val’s stomach lurches as the lift rises and she closes her eyes, breathes in, and out. The suffocating feeling starts to drain away. The silence is thick, full; her ears feel like they’re ringing. She touches the plaster at her forehead absently. The doors slide open and she wanders down the hall, follows it round but ends up where she started, back by the lift. There’s the nausea again. She should just go. Lay the flowers somewhere and leave. 

The hall is void of any defining features. The walls are a pale shade of nothing and a crucifix intermittently appears like a Post-it note, a reminder for the wavering of faith. Val takes a deep breath, back- tracks, making another loop past rooms, past the nurses’ station that is devoid of nurses. She takes a right, sees number 304 and edges her way further down the empty corridor. 

The sound in the room is just a barely audible buzz; machines at work, making him breathe. The space is low-lit and the boy is motionless on the bed.

Continue reading 'Bones' in Aesthetica Journal here.

 

Home 

Published in Escape: An Anthology of Australian Stories, 2011. Edited by Bronwyn Mehan. 
Home was shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Short Story Award.

Those wolves — no, they were foxes.  I kept calling them wolves because I could never seem to get the name right.  I was scared the first time I heard them howl.  They sounded like crying children. But you explained they were only going through the dustbins searching for scraps.  Before long the noises became familiar and I didn’t hear them any more.

Your toilet flushed differently.  I would marvel at the lever.  The thing was loose, didn’t really work properly, but it didn’t bother me, it was new. For the first two weeks I’d press the top of the cistern in the night forgetting where I was — blindly fumbling for a button to push, knocking over your shampoo, toothbrush and random objects gathered on top, a convenient shelf in a small space. In my sleepy fug I was somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere where bathrooms were without levers and oil heaters and such. In the dark, if it were not for that lever, I might have been at home: your townhouse heated, warm like any Australian summer night, I might have crawled back into your bed thinking myself home, none the wiser. If it were not for the lever I might have padded back to your room though unfamiliar doorways, a map of my own in my mind. But there was the lever: the constant fumbling for the familiar. In the dark was the smell of your shampoo — paw-paw and coconut. That tropical scent seemed so far removed from the cold bathroom tiles and your musty feather duvet. Far from home. In your mismatched bedding there was the scent of your coconut head. Coconut wrapped in cheap haberdashery.

Continue reading 'Home' here 

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