During my first week, Pat with the terrible teeth and corkscrew curls tried to explain the way the place worked. Some people can’t hack it, she said. They take the calls personally, and those are the ones that are out of here in three weeks. You’ve got to get it into your head that this is just a job.
I nodded. I did not want to be one of the weak ones who couldn’t hack it. She explained the center’s social dynamics. She pointed out the couple in the far corner who were having an affair. She pointed to the middle-aged man who went to Thailand every year to get a hair transplant. She pointed out the pair of skinny men with soft bellies. The dumbest fucks here, she said. They knew nothing about anything. Climate change is real, she advised me as I finished another call. I nodded. She told me about the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the melting of the permafrost, the rising incidences of freak weather activities, as though I believed it wasn’t happening. The glaciers were melting, she said. And I nodded. The sea would rise by a hundred meters, maybe more. The Maldives were already sinking below the surface. The oceans were acidifying. The state government was soon to begin fracking the Great Artesian Basin, the underground water source that covered a quarter of the continent, the real-deal shadow of the mythical inland sea the nineteenth century had earnestly supposed was Out There. The water would be poisoned. The land would dry up. The ground would quake. There was no turning back. And those dumb fucks, she pointed again, all they give a shit about is footy and lunch.
I nodded.
Hey, you’ve got to answer in three seconds, you know, she gestured to the screen, where the incoming call icon was displayed. If you don’t answer within three seconds, you’re gone.
It occurred to me only later that perhaps I was not suited to this type of work, not having much in the way of appropriate boundaries between myself and the rest of the world.
On the first free day after my initial week at Triple Zero, I woke up near noon and found that there were no coffee beans left in the biscuit tin by the stove. I pulled on a too-big sweater over a tatty dress and left the house without showering. Outside, I fumbled with the keys to the iron security door. A week earlier I had tried to leave the house to find that, overnight, somebody had wrenched the heavy couch underneath the front window across our door to bar our exit. There was no way to push it out of the way. I woke up my housemate Paul. With Joe, who lived in the room next to mine but who I barely ever saw, I watched Paul climb out my window and shimmy down the drainpipe. We watched him jump from the awning and push the couch back into place and use his key to open up the door and walk back into the house.
The couch barring the door seemed like an augury. It seemed to confirm my suspicion that everything contained the potential for menace. After a week taking emergency calls, everything did. The Greek lady next door was sitting beneath the trellised grapevine that grew over our stairwell to the street, but she turned away from me as I locked the iron security door and pretended to organize the wool in her sewing basket. For a moment I saw myself from her perspective—the knotted hair and rumpled clothes—and I realized that I looked quite as “wild” to her eyes as the kind of people the architects had been afraid of when they’d built these houses up above the street. And this troubled me, because I wanted the lady and her husband next door to like me. I walked by her and turned left under the dappled light of the trees, towards Redfern Street and the cafés with their croissants and good coffee. As I walked I couldn’t help but take everything personally. Every billboard. Every flyer in the gutter. A woman on the street by the florist saw me and called her husband to hurry into their idling car, slamming the door shut. The car seemed to veer towards me. Every driver I saw had unreliable wrists. The man who owned the Italian deli watered the alleyway potted plants with his back to me. On the corner of Redfern Street an ibis perched atop a rubbish bin opened the big black garden shears of its beak as I passed. There were magpies, which I also took personally. In the corner of my vision I sensed them preparing to swoop at my head.
After just a week I had already began to adjust to a life where there was no time to analyse information if you were going to be one of the ones who could hack it, and where three seconds was all it took to get gone. I was primed for gut reactions. I was attuned to all the reflex tests of the psyche: hot takes and pop-ups and “Act Now” demands.
In January of the year I left Sydney I became afraid of walking too close to the gutter and the cars that veered around corners too quickly. I was afraid of cyclists, people in tracksuits by traffic lights, afraid of staircases and lit cigarettes and power lines. I was afraid of men. I was afraid of just about everything.
I ran into Lachlan near Redfern Station. I had not seen or heard from him in months. And then, on a Wednesday night, I passed him as he was pushing through the turnstiles and into the street. I pretended not to notice he was there. But in the reflection of the shop windows I watched him follow me down the street as I walked towards an ATM.
He caught up with me.
He leaned on the ATM as I withdrew two twenty-dollar bills and asked me why I hadn’t said hello.
I had supposed he would not want to speak to me again, and I had not wanted to see his face, or the expression I supposed I would see there—surprise, then amusement, then dread. Because he was afraid of me, for reasons I never entirely understood. But I did not say that then.
Instead, I asked him how he had been, and he told me about the desk the university had given him on the bottom floor of Fisher Library upon acceptance into his doctoral program. At night, he said, they turned off the overhead lamps to save energy. After that, the only lights that remained were the orbs over the occupied desks. Four or five people sitting beneath lonely jaundiced spotlight. And then, he said, if you haven’t moved for a while because you have been, say, sitting holding your head in your hands, that light switches off as well.
He was writing his doctorate on Patrick White, which made sense. Lachlan must have been the only man in Sydney to sleep beneath a framed portrait of the nation’s greatest unread novelist. He might have been the only man in the world who had ever done such a thing.
We fell into step with each other. The air hummed with mosquitoes and crickets. Bats took flight through the bright orange dusk. We followed along Redfern Street past doors of pubs where the noise tumbled out into the streets, by chicken shops and galleries, across the smashed glass of shuttered storefronts, past terraces with only the screen door shut. It seemed like some of those houses were remnants of an older city. Bougainvillea choked the windows, tree roots unsettled the pavement, and the streets in the last light of evening looked like the return of the bush was being kept only barely in reserve. Water dripped from the gutters and drains. It seemed as though the whole city was wet.
We did not say the kinds of things you might normally say to somebody you had not seen in months. His name was Lachlan, except it wasn’t, not really. I have given new names to everybody I once knew, everybody expect myself.
What’s this dress? he asked. I haven’t seen this dress before.
Why would you? I said, and followed him into a bar.
It’s nice. This, what, this lace thing? He brushed a finger across the fabric, beneath which lay my collarbone. Sweat rolled down my chest and soaked into the polyester lining beneath the lace, but the dress was black and he could not see what a mess I was underneath my clothes.