I sort of do it automatically now, Clemmie said.
I’ve started doing it too.
Keys in your fist?
Yeah. When I have to walk home from work at night. Or on the bus. If it’s late. And it’s one of those eerie, empty night buses with just you and a stranger and the driver. I push the keys between my fingers and just hold on to them. I never used to do that, before I started working at Triple Zero. And it’s only when I come home from work. I dunno, I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t know about all the bad things that could happen, didn’t hear about them all day on the phones.
I think I started doing it when the woman died. In September last year I think it was? In Melbourne. Because I thought maybe if she had fought back then that man wouldn’t have killed her.
She did fight back, I said, and pulled away from Clemmie. He was bigger and stronger than she was. She did fight back.
Did she? I dunno. It’s scary, she said. You should quit that job.
No. I’m fine.
I stood up and shook my head. I’m going to get another drink, I said, and put a hand on her head as I left. The eyes of the men in the swimming pool followed me as I climbed up the ladder.
I had no intention of getting another drink. I simply wanted to leave without having to explain myself. It upset me to have her tell me that I was not cut out for my job, and it upset me to talk about the woman who had gone missing in Melbourne the year before. Leave, retreat, no, my body compelled my brain, without any regard for social niceties.
I walked down a corridor and towards a door I thought might be the exit. Instead, the door led out into the garden, where a shed was rotting into the grass. The garden appeared nearly empty, but I liked how overgrown it was. The moon that I had seen trapped in the glass of the hydrotherapy room was brighter out here, and seemed to fill the evening with light. Cicadas screeched in the trees, and for all the strangeness, I didn’t mind, because it was cooler out there in the dark.
The only sign of activity was in the shed. Two men sat in the shadow of the open doorway, on plastic orange school chairs. They beckoned me over. Neither of them was wearing shoes. I was handed a beer.
You from around here? asked one of the men. I told him I lived in Redfern, and had grown up in Ashfield.
You don’t talk much, do you? he said. I shrugged.
That’s cool, he said. I like women who don’t talk.
The stranger gestured to his lap, as though to suggest that I might like to sit there.
If we were truly rational, we would be deathly afraid of mosquitoes. After all, mosquitoes carry the sorts of diseases that, if you look at the sheer number of lives lost, make them just about the most dangerous insect on earth. I had always been told that cars were more dangerous than planes, and had never really taken the idea seriously, but the first weeks at Triple Zero taught me to reconsider their dangers.
Cars flipped over. They started smoking. They ran down children. They veered off the road, they smashed through houses in the middle of the night. They poisoned their passengers. I did not know how to drive, but if I had, I would have stopped. The calls made me walk along footpaths as far away from the road as I possibly could.
The fear of cars was joined by new, less rational fears—that the fuses would short and the house burn down, that the scaffolding over the footpath would collapse as I walked beneath it, that the waters would rise and swallow the street.
And so it seemed plausible to me that the Liverpool-bound train I was riding along the Inner West Line could flip, that a body could launch itself in front of the metal as it sped along the tracks, that a man could fling open the door between carriages and rampage through the train with a knife.
On the seat behind me, two blond girls with dark roots commiserated with each other. He doesn’t deserve you, one said to the other. That’s what I told him! I told him he doesn’t step up his game I’m out of there. I turned my phone black, rested my head against the glass, and watched the houses slip by. I recited the stops to myself from memory, memories from childhood when the city seemed like a shimmering wonderland, and memories from adolescence, when I took the train looking always for something I never seemed to find. This stretch of railway was the measure of how far I was, at any point, from home. Redfern, Macdonaldtown, Newtown, Stanmore, Petersham, Lewisham, Summer Hill, Ashfield. I counted down the stations as they flew by.
I was on the train because my mother and stepfather were gone for the week, and I had promised to feed the cat. I was welcome to help myself to any food in their absence, and had full license to use both washing machine and dryer.
All the lights in the house were turned off except for the lamps in the hallway and the front room, because my mother imagined that such a strategy would prevent any potential burglar from supposing the house was empty. I turned the hall lights on and stacked the mail on the hallway table and walked through to the back of the house, where I opened a tin of food and emptied it into the bowl by the back door. There was no sign of the cat. Probably hiding, or else dead from the heat. The news said that January was of hottest-ever days and broken records, 123 by the end of the season. Some days, the heat was so powerful that people died simply sitting in their own homes. The newspapers had started calling it the “Angry Summer.”
I made tea. On the bench beside me sat a stack of papers from the Saturday before they’d left. The crossword of the Herald, filled out in two sets of handwriting. My stepfather’s spiky consonants against my mother’s neat vowels. An eggy thumbprint from the turning of a page. I opened the alcohol cabinet and poured scotch into a glass, knowing that every year they were gifted a new bottle, that they would barely miss it if I finished it.
As the light began to dim I took the glass and walked down to the end of the house where the bedrooms were. I opened the door at the top of the hallway and walked into my mother’s bedroom, where the bedside lights were turned on. I had been expressly forbidden to turn them off.
My mother kept all the photo albums on the top shelf of the wardrobe in her bedroom. There were maybe thirty of them. Putting the glass of whisky down on the bedside table beneath the lamp, I stood on the linen chest at the foot of the bed, opened the door, and pulled down the albums at the very top of the stack. In those albums lived the few pictures there were of my parents and myself together.
In one photograph my father lay across the bed on the same paisley bedspread my mother still used. I lay beside him, sleeping, my hair knotty, my bottom in the air, face pink in sleep. In the photograph my father looked at me as though he could not quite comprehend what he was looking at. You couldn’t tell anything about him from the photograph, not the Great Explorer whose blood ran in his veins, nor the harm he was capable of. Another photograph showed my father kneeling beside me while I reached out to pat a wallaby in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park shortly before my father left Sydney and moved to Melbourne. “Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair,” went the song on the radio from around the same time. When it played I remembered dancing with him in the basement where he kept the sound system. I was too small to really dance. I stood on his feet and we shuffled around the room. I could never remember the words to the rest of the song. But I took the idea of not cutting one’s hair very seriously, particularly if you wanted men to keep calling you “darling.”