A New Tense

Impressum

Dedication

A Call

The Flight

The Jones'

A Letter

Safe Subjects

Otherwise They Win

A Party

Bird Watching

Eddie Gardens

Self-Destruction

Ashes and Arguments

Old Dogs

Afternoon Tea

Codes of Conduct

Parking

Sun Catcher

A New Tense

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Impressum

Copyright: © Joanne Day, 2017

Verlag: epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.de

Cover design by Joanne Day and Robert Hanna

Dedication

For Nina

A Call

I was another Australian in Berlin and it was my first winter. Snow was covering cars. The warmest winter in years, people said, but it was cold enough for me.
     I lived with three other people. I’d met one of them, Julia, drinking outside a bar in Friedrichshain. I’d wandered in from the street, drawn by the music, but I hadn’t liked any of the bands so I ended up sitting down next to her and starting a conversation. We sat out the front for hours, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking cheaper beer. By the morning we’d decided to start a band and she’d offered me a tiny room in her apartment. It’d been so easy that I didn’t understand until later how lucky I’d been, all the struggles that other people had in trying to find apartments. I hadn’t even heard of the bar, I’d just been wandering around, locked out of the apartment I was crashing at, a friend of a friend from Melbourne who had started to hit on me with less and less subtlety. I told Julia about this and she offered me a place on her floor, and then, when we got more comfortable with each other, in her bed, until her other housemate moved back to Sweden and I could take over the room.
     We were all hanging out in Steffi’s room now. She had the biggest one that we used as a lounge, there was a television hooked up to a laptop that we watched movies on. Julia, Steffi and me were wrapped up in the bed and Max was lying on the floor. We’d been out the night before, separately, and we were necking beers, all in various states of ruin, except for Max, who was mostly sober and drinking a Radler because he was on call. I saw his eyes darting suspiciously to the window whenever he heard an ambulance outside (Krankenwagen, one of my favourite words), and he’d pat his pocket for his phone, all these actions subconscious, I thought. Steffi  was coming down from pills, and Julia and I were hungover and speedy from a show we’d played the night before in Mitte. I was nursing a bruised and swollen elbow. Some English guy had pushed past me up the stairs at Heinrich-Heine Straße and I’d started to fall. I tried to grab onto him when I did, but the stairs were so sleety and slippery that I took him down with me, and even though he landed on me and I hurt my elbow he called me a stupid bitch before he’d even gotten up. Julia had stood above him and yelled at him in German until he’d slunk away with his mates to a safe distance. He’d called us stupid cunts, and I could hear in his voice that he thought he’d put us in our place, like we’d never heard the word before.
     Still, Julia’d thrown her bottle of beer at him, And that’s what love is, she said as we ran up the street away from his pack of howling friends, that beer was mostly full.
     It was Saturday night and Steffi was getting up, trying on different clothes, a birthday party she had to go to, she said, and she didn’t even like the person that much.
     “So why are you going?”
     She shrugged. “Free booze.”
     That peaked my interest, but we had enough booze here, and besides, this was basically perfection, friends and blankets and beers, Withnail and I playing on the television, flicking bottle tops across the room at Steffi’s bin, Julia rolling a joint that she’d pass around. Maybe some more people would drop over on their way out, but even if they didn’t, it was great to just stay in with Max and Julia, neither of us working tomorrow, talk of going to Tiergarten in the snow. I wanted to bring my camera and take some pictures for the winter zine I was making.
     Steffi decided on an outfit, took a drag from the joint Julia was passing around and left. We all yelled goodbyes until the door closed, bon voyage, schönen Abend, have a good one!
     I was so warm and content that when my phone rang and I saw it was Jones calling from Melbourne I answered it straight away, even though, aside from the occasional email to let each other know we were alive, we hadn’t talked in months.
     “Jones, you shithead, how are you?”
     There was a crackling, and then a different voice spoke. “It’s Calliope, Lauren.”
     “Ah, right. Sorry, I thought it was Jones.”
     “I gathered, dear,” she said. “Look, I’ve got some bad news for you.” Her voice, distorted through the countries, was heavy with something and I suddenly couldn’t breathe.
     “What? Are Jones and Gary okay?”
     Max and Julia turned to look at me. On the television screen, Withnail and I were discussing who was going to kill the chicken.
     “Yes, they’re fine.”
     “Are you sure?”
     “Of course.”
     “Well, Jesus, Calliope, don’t lead with that.”
     There was a pause. “It’s your mother, Lauren. We just got a call from her partner. She died last night.”
     “Oh,” I said, and the way that I said it was Oh, is that all? “Um, how?”
     “A car accident.”
     “Right,” I said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
     “I’m so sorry,” she said. She sounded it.
     “It’s okay,” I said, to Calliope, but also to Max and Julia, who were looking at me in concern. I started to extricate myself from the mess around me, sending one of the bottles of beer to the floor. It spilled a frothy puddle on the stained floorboards but Julia waved me away.
     I went to my room and sat on the mattress on its pallets next to the radiator. Clothes on the floor, beer bottles lined up against the wall, rolled up scrap of cardboard on the desk. The room was about nine square metres, not bad because I didn’t have much furniture, except I dumped my clothes on the floor and it was hard to get anywhere. There were dregs of wine in a glass on the desk. It was filled with cigarette butts.
     “Is Jones there?” I asked.
     “Of course.”
     There was an exchange on the other end. I felt like it went on for too long, and even though it should be impossible for me to hear anything I thought that I knew what was going on — Calliope begging for him to take the phone, Jones shaking his head until the last moment.
     “Calliope,” I said quickly, “it’s alright, I don’t need to talk—”
     “Hey,” said his voice on the other end.
     “Hey,” I said. “How are you?”
     “I’m okay. How’re you?” Like a stranger on the street he added courteously, “I’m sorry.”
     “Yeah.”
     “Hang on.” There was a pause, the tinny sound of a door opening and closing. “Mum started making up your room,” he said. They still called it my room even though it had only been my room for a few years, and that was a decade ago. “She’s gonna try to convince you to come back, at least for a bit. For the funeral, I guess.”
     “What do I do?”
     “Well, that’s up to you, mate.”
     “Yeah, I know that, but I can’t think. What do you think?”  
     “I can’t make the decision for you,” he said.
     “Yes,” I said. “I know that, I’m asking because I want your opinion.”
     Dread came over me, and with it all the memories of how it’d been before I left, his coldness. I forced myself to remember that he was actually my closest friend and not some condescending stranger. Before he could say anything else, I said, “Can you put your mum back on?”
     “Yeah.”
     Calliope, on the end of the line. “Are you there?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Look, I think you should come back. For the funeral.”
     There was a light knock on my open door, and it swung in a bit farther. Julia was there. She mouthed, Are you okay? I nodded back at her. She stepped over the mess, handed me a cigarette and a fresh beer and left  the room.
     “Lauren?”
     “I’m still here,” I said, lighting the cigarette and blowing out smoke. “Look, I don’t know if I want to come.”
     “Of course,” she said, but the beat was a little too long. “Will you think about it?”
     “Would I even be invited? To the funeral?”
     “It doesn’t matter if you’re invited or not,” she said. “If you want to go, you’ll go.”
     “When is it?”
     “I don’t have an exact date yet, but within the week, I expect.”
     “Okay,” I said, but I still couldn’t think, and the static of the bad connection was the soundtrack to the snow falling steadily outside. I shook my head. “Well. I can’t afford a flight.”
     “I’ll pay,” she said quickly. “I think it’d be good for you and Kostas to see each other.”
     Kostas was Jones’ first name. He’d hated the name growing up, and would always introduce himself by his last time. By the time it didn’t bother him anymore he’d already been cemented in friend’s minds as Jones, and so it was only his family members who called him Kostas anymore. It occurred to me that it’d be early morning, their time. “Why is he there so early? Is he staying with you?”
     “Yes.”
     “Why? Is he okay?”
     “He’s okay. He’s...you know.”
     “Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t. My cigarette had somehow smoked itself, or at least it was finished. I butted it out in the over owing glass. “Look, I kind of...I can’t really think, right now. I don’t know if I’ll come.”
     “Well, how about this: I’ll look at some flights and email you the details. You can let me know if you’re coming tomorrow, or the next day, if you need to.”
     “Okay. at sounds good.” I couldn’t think of what to say and didn’t want to make small talk, and I didn’t want to talk about my feelings, either. “Um, I think I’m gonna go now, is that alright?”
     “Of course. I’m very sorry.”
     “It’s okay, really.”
     “Anytime you want to talk, just call us. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how you are.”
     “Yeah, I will. And thanks.”
     We hung up.
     I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at my big feet encased in their dusty and smelly woollen socks. My torn stockings ending mid-calf, hairy legs peeking out underneath, bruises scattered amongst the tattoos.
     A car crash. That was it, then, an end to the vague idea of some reconnection between us. I tried to remember her face, but all I could get was her hair pulled back severely, blue eyes, high collars. The rest was a blur. Which wasn’t surprising, considering we hadn’t talked in nine years, and of course I knew how long it’d been since we’d talked. Although I guessed when I thought of years now it would be how many years since she’d died, instead of how many since she kind of kicked me out, or how many years since the last phone call we’d made.
     We must have been comfortable around each other at some point — stories read in bed, trips to the pool, movies under a blanket on the couch, kid stuff  — except that I couldn’t remember any of that. When I thought of her I thought of the arguments, I thought of her sternly telling me that no, there was no other food on offer, of waiting until she’d gone to bed before I snuck into the kitchen and stuffed myself on Weet-Bix piled with sugar substitutes. When I was young she didn’t let me dress in anything other than little girl dresses, and I never felt anything other than uncomfortable in them, like I was constantly in costume. I thought of her version of a sex-ed lesson, which was to line up a bunch of vegetables on the counter and ask me to draw them. And I could draw, the teachers at school said I could draw, so I was excited for mum to see — doing it meticulously, getting all the detail, and then going back to replace the object with a new one. At the end, she didn’t look at my drawings, but said So, why did you only draw the new objects? Why didn’t you use something you’d already drawn?
     Because I’d already drawn it. I wanted something new.
     Exactly. You wanted something new, something you hadn’t touched before. That’s what boys think of girls.
     I know what she was getting at, except she got in too early, I’d only been nine or ten. I recoiled from men touching me for me years, in any context.
     Girls were safe though; she hadn’t said anything about girls.

I’d told Julia about my mum. She was one of my favourite people here, cool on the outside but so warm once you got to know her, always up for a beer or a line or an adventure or a day spent in bed watching movies. I had a bit of a crush on her when I first moved in, and I think she felt the same, but at least we were smart enough not to start anything while we were living together, and besides, when I got there I was still in ruins about Pete and I was fucking anyone I could to make myself feel temporarily better. I liked her too much from the first night to want to use her in that way.      
     I sat on the bed in Steff’s room and Max opened new beers and I told him a little about it, not much, just enough to take the shocked look from his face. Skinny Max from some little town in the south, wearing scrub-pants from his work and an old hoodie, cigarette hanging from his mouth, tattoos of tentacles curling over one hand. Max with scars over his left eye, faded but still noticeable, spider webs from his eye to his lip from when a car had hit him when he was sixteen. Another scar he had running down one hip pointed to where the metal started, I saw it in the summer when we all walked around the at in our underwear. It hurt him sometimes, he said, in the cold. I’d said, Still? and he’d said, without self-pity — while I looked at the scars on his lips — I nearly died. I got him to translate. Ich bin fast gestorben .
     “But are you upset?” he asked now.
     “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m going to go to bed, I think.”      
     “Me too,” said Julia. “Do you want to sleep with me?”
     “Yeah,” I said. I saw Max nodding. They were used to it by now, Max and Steffi, used to coming into one of our rooms and seeing us together. We spent a lot of time lying in bed with beers, talking until one of us would go to sleep and the other would remove the beer that we were holding, even though both of us had the ability of being able to not spill a drop from the bottle while we slept, which probably said more about passing out drunk than any kind of talent.

I woke the next morning to Julia snoring next to me, at on her back. She was wearing a baggy shirt with the sleeves cut off and at some point it’d twisted so that both of her breasts were revealed, which was no big deal, I’d seen them so many times before, but still before I got up I pulled the blanket over her.       
     Somehow I wasn’t hungover, or at least not yet, but my mouth was furry and I needed water, a lot of it: a bucket; an IV. I tiptoed out of her bedroom and went into the kitchen where I turned on the tap and, when I couldn’t find a clean glass, stuck my face under the flow. I stood near the window and watched the snow come down.
     I opened the fridge door, ostensibly to look for soy milk for coffee, and saw instead that there were a few Sterneys left  in there. I deliberated for all of a second, and then — “Fuck it” — took one and popped the top with a lighter from the kitchen table. I went back into Julia’s room to get my tobacco, and she stirred when I got my feet tangled in a bra and skidded against the bottles of beers lined against the bed. Groaning, she sat up, her bleached blonde hair standing up around her head, electrified, one eye closed, hand up against the wintry light coming in through her windows.
     “Morgen,” she said sleepily, her eyes half-closed. “Everything okay? You need me to get up?”
     “Nah, go back to sleep, it’s early.”
     “You sure?”
     “Yeah. I just opened a beer.”
     “Fuck. That’s intense.” She lay back down in bed, eyes closed, and said, “I’ll be up in no time, wake me for the next one.”
     “Yup, will do.”
     I got my tobacco from her equally dirty desk, picked up a notepad and pen from my room and went to the kitchen. Boiled the kettle and put coffee in the French press, mostly for the order of it, the early morning smell. I took a sip from my beer and thought about writing a list of stuff  I needed to think about if I was leaving, but there wasn’t much, actually. Our band, well, we had a couple of shows coming up but nothing too serious, and we’d gotten a bit lazy anyway, none of us willing to make the long trek from the S-Bahn to our rehearsal space in the cold. There was work, but that would be easy, too. I had a job in a bar in Neukölln, but my workmates were desperate for shifts, and besides, as excuses went I reckoned that dead mother was a pretty good one, I didn’t need to say estranged dead mother.      
     I didn’t want to say yes just now, though. Instead I rolled another cigarette, put my feet up, and found myself drifting there anyway, back to Melbourne, back to the house that Pete and Jones and I shared.

I’m walking home. I’ve had a shit day: first reason is because I found out that my tattoo artist, Jake, can’t finish the piece on my back because of the second reason, which is that he and my girlfriend, Sophie, want to be exclusive. The fucking was fine; I knew about that. He’d been awkward about it, but I thought it was just because he was weird about me being fine, when actually he was weird because they were at the hand-holding, wouldn’t-this-be-great-if-we-could-close-everyone-else-out stage, everyone being me, the person she’d been with for two years. My longest relationship. I was going to Europe for a couple of months, and she’d been acting weird, and I’d thought — god, how stupid — that it was because she’d miss me.
     I’m walking home from seeing her. She didn’t give me any good explanations, and she was cold and horrible, like I should’ve known that I was just a stand in for The Real Thing.
     I get home and see Pete on the porch. I give him the quick run-down. His eyes get huge and he stares at his beer and yells, “Je-sus, this is the last one! Wait a minute,” and he thrusts the beer at me and runs up the street. I wait for him on the porch, drinking his beer, and a few minutes later he’s running back from the shops, huffing and puffing, his scant muscles bulging from the strain of carrying a carton. He’s doing such a stupid shuffling run that I can’t help him because I’m laughing too much.
     We sit and drink. At some point I go into my room and collect the clothes Sophie left  and dump them in the street. People walk past them until one woman stops to look.
     “Really,” she says, picking up a pair of nearly new Dr Denim’s, “you’re giving these away?”
     “Yeah,” says Pete, “but give ‘em a wash first, they’re probably filthy.”
     The woman holds the jeans away from her for a moment and then shrugs, taking them with her.
     We stay in this position for a while, only moving to get more beers from the stinking fridge inside or to roll cigarettes. The sun goes down slowly, we’re still in the same positions, and after a while I can talk about the other stuff with Pete, how excited I am for Europe, about how now I could stay for longer, about how he should stop spending his money on bullshit to come meet me somewhere.
     “Alright, mate, I know you’re upset, but beers, speed and records aren’t bullshit.”
     I lift  my eyebrows at him.
     “But point taken, I’ll save up, you find me a place to stay and I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”
     “Fuck off , I’m not living with you again, you’re forever pissing on the toilet floor.”
     “Now that’s just your hurt emotions getting the better of you, isn’t it? That’s surely not directed at me, your dearest friend. Hey?” He starts to nudge me. “Hey, who’s gonna meet up with you?”
     We look up as Jones walks up the street, inspecting the clothes before stepping up to us.
     “Bloody hell, Laurie, they’re not yours, are they? I didn’t think you had any dresses.”
     “They’re not mine, but I have a couple.”
     “Really?” He takes my beer, drinks most of it and lets out a low gargling burp before he hands it back to me with only the dregs left. I sigh.
     “Have I ever seen you in a dress?”
     “Yeah, man, probably. Why?”
     He sits down on the other couch, pulls a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. “I just reckon you’d look weird in a dress. Like a dog on its hind legs.”
     “Jesus, Jones, fuck off.”
     “Yeah, come on, Jones, mate,” says Pete, “not today, she’s had a fucker of a time. Go get a beer and be nice, alright?”

My phone rang again sometime later when I was sitting in Julia’s room with her, drinking more beers and listening to music. It was an Australian landline number.
     “Hey, Calliope?”
     “No, it’s Jones.”
     “Oh.”
     “Look,” he said quickly, “I was a dick before. It threw me, I didn’t know what to say.”
     “Mm,” I said back, which I hoped conveyed, yeah, you were a dick, but that’s not been a huge change, has it?
     “I know, I know. So. Are you coming back? Can you spare the time?”
     “Well, yeah, I can spare a week or two, maybe more, it’s just...I don’t know, man. Am I gonna get a black suit, go to her funeral? That seems fucking weird.”
     “Yeah. I get that. But I was talking to mum, and she talked to some guy Mark — your mum’s partner, I guess, or ex-partner, whatever the fuck you call it — and she said there was some stuff with the will that you need to sign for. Might be easier if you came here.”
     I got the subtext, but I wanted him to say it. “They could just send that over to me though, couldn’t they? I don’t need to go all the way back for that.”
     There was a pause. “I want to see you,” he said. “We haven’t... well, you know how it’s been. It’s hard, mate, on the phone, or email, or fucking Skype. I do want to see you. Even if it’s just for a week.”
     It was partly the breakfast beers, partly the fact that I hadn’t heard him say anything that could be construed as slightly emotional in a long time, but I was close to crying. I held my hand over the receiver and coughed to get rid of any hoarseness in my voice.
     “Yeah, I’d like that too.”
     “Good. Okay. So, I’m looking at the flights now. There’s one for tomorrow afternoon, can you do that?”
     “My time or yours?”
     “Yours, obviously,” he said.
     “Okay, well, yeah, but won’t that be crazy expensive? I don’t know how soon I can pay that back.”
     “Don’t worry about that, we can sort it out later. It seems like you’ll be getting money soon enough anyway.”
     “Oh. Yeah, right. Well, yeah, book it then, I guess.”
     “You guess or you’re sure?”
     “I’m sure. Is there a return flight?”
     “Not for this,” he said, “you can do that when you’re here, should be easier. Email your details, yeah? Passport number and address and birthday and all that shit.”
     “You don’t know my birthday?”
     “Oh, the outrage! Like you know mine.”
     “Twenty-fifth of May,” I said immediately.
     There was a pause on the other end. “September eighteenth?”
     “Twenty-eighth.”
     “Close enough,” he said. “Send me everything and I’ll get on it.”
     “Thanks.”
     “No problem. Anyway, I have to go. You’re alright, aren’t you?”      
     “Yeah, man. It’s fucking weird, but yeah, I’m alright.”
     “Okay. You can call me, you know, if it’s not.”
     I wondered if Calliope had just walked into the room, because that didn’t sound like it was for my benefit. Of course, it could’ve been drunk paranoia on my end. He’d always been like this to an extent, it seemed like it was hard for him to open up, he did it well enough with me but still sometimes I had to almost interrogate him before he’d tell me what was on his mind.
     “Yeah. Sure. I’ll send you the stuff  now. And I’ll see you — when?”
     “Wednesday. We’ll get you from the airport.”
     “Yeah, right. Cheers. Bis bald.”      
     He scoffed on the other end, and said, “Don’t be pretentious, Lauren, you know I don’t speak German.”
     “Dickhead.”
     “Yup,” he said, and hung up. 

The Flight

There was some problem with the booking, I didn’t know what, I couldn’t understand. I don’t know why I spoke in German, I could barely speak it and my accent was awful. I tried anyway, but instead of saying I wanted to get my ticket I used Muschi instead of möchte. The woman hid a smile and shook her head and I felt like a fucking idiot. I’d been learning German for months, that was a mistake I thought I’d gotten over. My face burned, I imagined school kids chanting on the oval: Laurie wants pussy! Laurie wants pussy!
     “I have to go home,” I said in English. “My mum died.”
     I didn’t say it to make her feel guilty, it just kind of came out, and she looked sympathetic. She told me that she was sorry and spent a few minutes frowning at the screen before she smiled at me sympathetically. “Everything’s fine, you can go through,” she said.
     The flight was in a few hours. I changed most of my remaining money, which was fuck all, to Australian dollars. Spent the rest of my euros on whiskey at the bar, anything to cover last nights ‘one beer’ in Neukölln, which of course turned into all the beers and three hours sleep.
     I’d hoped to sleep as soon as I got to my seat on the plane but the man next to me was snoring and farting in his sleep. I welcomed the distraction of food but it quickly became a toxic mass in my stomach and the days of drinking caught up with me and I had to clamber over the snorer so that I could vomit.
     There was a stopover in Abu Dhabi. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the toilets and almost recoiled. I went into duty- free and sprayed myself with various perfumes, rubbed lotion on my dirty sticky skin until I didn’t smell anymore, or smelled less, which was something. Put on all the makeup I could and and looked at the result, matte skin, red lipstick, mascara. I wiped the lipstick off, smeared the eyeliner. Bared my teeth in the mirror to inspect the nicotine stains that’d been multiplying for a while. Still there, zigzagging the fangs that betrayed the stereotype of my English heritage. The red lips contrasted with the yellow of my teeth well, it was kind of nice to look at. The first molar on the right was missing from a cavity I hadn’t bothered to get filled in until it was too late and I sat in a dentist chair in Prenzlauer Berg feeling it pulled from me. I’d felt like my privacy was being invaded, as though the dentist had taken something from me that she had no right to take. I thought of that sensation whenever I tongued the much-tongued space.
     Behind me a woman stood holding some miracle wrinkle potion in her hands but she was looking at me. Her expression was almost concerned. I grinned at her in the mirror, our eyes meeting, and she jumped, put the lotion down and quickly walked away.
     I bought an expensive beer and brought it with me to the smoking section. Found a spare seat and sat down and started to read “I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus. My eyes were gritty from the smoke and I was having trouble concentrating on the book. Not that I needed to, I’d read it so many times, it was dog-eared and covered in various stains. I noticed suddenly that there was someone standing over me, a guy, a little older than me and attractive in a generic, boring kind of way. It was obvious from his expression that he was waiting for a response from me.
     “Sorry?”
     “Do you mind if I sit here?” He sounded Australian, Australian with a hint of something else. I looked at the clock above the bar and saw that I still had an hour before I had to be at my gate.
     “Go ahead.”
     He’s going to sit down, I thought, and say something gross about the title.
     He sat down and looked at the book. “What’s it about?”
     I thought for a moment. “Feminist art and obsessive love.”
     “Not about dick, then?”
     Ugh, fuck off, I thought. “It’s the name of a character,” I said coldly.
     “Yeah, I’m sorry. I regretted that as soon as I said it. I’m so fucking tired. It sounds interesting.” I thought the hint of an accent might be Polish.
     “Yeah, it is. It’s one of my favourites.” I started to talk about it and my brain disconnected from my words so that I was stumbling through sentences. I was fucked, totally fucked, had shifted between drunk and hungover so many times that I couldn’t remember what being sober was like. After a few minutes I saw the smile on his face was becoming a little fixed and I stopped. “Man, I have no idea what I’m saying. I’m fucking tired, too.”
     “Fair enough,” he said.
     After that I relaxed a little. I put my hand out.
     “I’m Laurie, by the way,” I said.
     He shook my hand. “I thought so.”
     “Sorry?”
     “ I thought I recognised you. I’m Thomas, Thomas Balsonowski.”
     I shook my head.
     “We only met briefly. You took photos at my sister’s wedding a few years ago.”
     “Oh, right.” My brief stint as a wedding photographer, something I’d stumbled into, doing it cheap for the family of a friend and then charging more when I realised how much I could charge. I didn’t enjoy the work at all, and I never got to work for friends because none of my friends got married, but the money was too good to turn down.
     “Would’ve been three years ago, I think. Her name’s Natalia Anders.”
     “I barely remember my own name right now.”
     “It was at the Botanical Gardens, that summer day we had that was about forty-five degrees. My uncle got drunk and did some fucking horrible speech where he said, ‘poon-tang’. The bridesmaids’ dresses were tie-dyed. It was pretty bad.”
     Suddenly I remembered. Everyone drank the champagne like water and bucketed sweat and a couple of hours in everyone was shit-faced. The mother of the bride — Thomas’ mother, I guess — had kept trying to set me up with everyone, she was relentless. I finally told her that I had a girlfriend and there was a pause where I wondered if she was going to get all haughty on me, but then she said I should invite her. And I was so hot and bordering on pissed off that I called Sophie and she came. She’d tapped on my shoulder and she was wearing a blue dress and her big boots even with the heat and I’d — well, shit, cliché and everything, but I’d been so fucking happy to see her, so bowled over by her brown shoulders and the sweat beading her hairline, knocked out by the fact we’d been together for two years and she still made me grin like an idiot when she looked at me. She’d helped me that day, fanned people with paper, laughed, pulled faces at me when the men who hit on her turned their faces away for a moment.
     “Yeah,” I said slowly, “yeah, I do remember that, actually.”
     Thomas smiled. “Yeah, it was something, huh? ‘Something’ in this case not necessarily meaning anything good.”                  
     (Sophie’s smile across the marquee, her eyes not cutting away from mine, even though by then I guessed she’d have started having let’s-go-steady talks with Jake.)
     “You’re lucky you left when you did. Things started to get really messy after the food ran out.”
     (We held hands in the taxi on the way home. As soon as we got through the door Sophie had taken off her dress, had lifted her hair to fan her neck and I’d put my hands around her waist.)
     I sipped my beer and tried to focus on Thomas. It was just drunken sentimentality that made me remember her in such nice terms, or at all. I didn’t usually care.
     Get it together.
     “Oh, yeah?”
     And he told me the usual, as I drifted in and out of the conversation, drunken uncles, vomit in hilarious places. I wanted to excuse myself, but I couldn’t quite do it, I was so tired, and besides that, I guessed he’d be on the same flight as me. He was a nice enough guy — or, at least, nothing overtly problematic in these first few minutes of talking to him — but I wanted to be around my female friends, I wanted Julia here with me, we could cackle in the corner.
     There was a silence between us, not completely comfortable. “Where have you come from?” I said. I hoped that he hadn’t already told me.
     “I came from America.”
     “Whereabouts?”
     “I was in Illinois. For a competition.”
     “What kind?”
     He paused for a second, and then said, “Well, I’m a taxidermist. They have a worldwide convention and competition there. They call it a championship.”
     “You’re a taxidermist? Really? I don’t think I’ve ever met a taxidermist before.”
     “Yes, I’ve heard that. A lot of people think it’s gross, or weird.”
     “Well, yeah, maybe a little, but still, it’s interesting! Do you do all the gutting and stuff?”
     “Yeah. My father was a butcher so I grew up around it.”
     I’d researched it once, I tried to remember what I’d learned.
     “So do you make the models from scratch, or do you have, like, bulk ones? But then they’d all look the same, I guess.”          
     He paused, his beer halfway to his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “You know about taxidermy?”
     “Not really. A little. I saw a video in a museum of an artist working on an animal. e tape only looped for about ten minutes but I stayed there for ages. The eyes were the best, the eyelashes. I did a little research afterwards. Not a lot, though.”
     “What was he working on? The guy in the video.”
     “Um...fuck. Something with antlers. A little deer? No. Something African. I don’t know, I was so focussed on the process that I didn’t pay attention to the finished product. That’s probably not what you want to hear, is it?”
     He smiled. “You just called me an artist, you can say whatever you want.”
     “Yeah,” I said, waving away the possible flirtation, “so where do you work, exactly? What stuff  do you do? Oh, you don’t work for hunters, do you?”
     He shook his head. “No, not for hunters, no. Not even because they don’t often eat what they catch but because most of the time they’re big fucking arseholes.” He said assholes, not arseholes. American-learned English.
     “I spend most of the time working with museums,” he continued, “using their labs, and I also have...” he shook his head. “No, never mind.”
     “No, what?” I sipped my drink. “Oh, wow, you have your own lab, don’t you?”
     “Yeah, except we call it a studio. But, you know, when I’m talking to people I usually hold off on the fact that I have a studio in my house where I gut and mount animals. It’s not the greatest of icebreakers.”
     “Nah, it’s the ultimate icebreaker! Who wouldn’t be interested in that? I’d love to see it.”
     He raised his eyebrows again as he drank his beer, set it down and wiped his mouth. “Yeah? You’re going back to Melbourne now too, right?”
     “Yeah. Would you mind? I could take some photos. I wanted to ever since I saw the video.”
     “What would you do with the pictures?”
     “Oh, I mean, it wouldn’t be for anything, probably. Just interest. I couldn’t pay you.”
     He laughed. “I wasn’t asking what the rate was! I was just curious. I got an award in the competition—”
     “You mean the championship.”
     “Sorry, yes, the championship. So I don’t need your money. Take my number, let me know when you want to see it.” He wrote his number down on a coaster and then, afer a moment, his name at the top. It was a good move. I’d already forgotten it.

We went to the gate together. We weren’t sitting near each other which I was thankful for because I was nearing the end of my ability to be able to make small talk. Still, I stayed awake until the plane had taken off  and levelled out so I could get another drink, a nightcap. I tried my best to make it last, sipping the beer slowly from the can and looking out of the window with my knees up and my head resting against my rolled-up hoodie. The clouds parted and there were waves of desert with highways cutting across it, highways to massive skyscrapers and high rises. I wedged the can of beer between my knees as I started to drift off, jerking a little through the layers of consciousness.

I was thinking about mum, about when we’d seen each other last. It was about six months after Jones and I moved in with Pete. We were out shopping, Pete had driven us to the supermarket in his old van. I’d gotten into cooking, I was pretty good at it, and Jones and Pete were constantly taking advantage of this. I didn’t mind so much, except that I didn’t do the dishes because I didn’t want to do all the cleaning and they didn’t do it because they were lazy shits. I didn’t want to have to ask them constantly to clean up because I thought it was gendered until I realised that yelling at them for being lazy shits wasn’t me falling into gender roles, it was just not wanting to live in squalor.
     I’d seen mum in the refrigerated aisle, just her back at first, and then her profile as she turned to look at something else. I’d wondered about what would have happened if I’d gone up to say hello. I’d lost a lot of weight at that point, better eating and bike riding but also forgotten meals and too much speed. Of course I didn’t know at the time that it’d be the last time that I’d ever see her. I didn’t chastise myself now for not going up to speak to her, because what could I have said?
     Hey?
     How’s it going?
     Why haven’t you spoken to me in a year?
     We saw each other when Pete was driving us out of the parking lot. Probably had the same expressions on our faces. We didn’t wave but we didn’t look away, either.

The sleeping tablet I’d gotten from Max was starting to kick in when the German woman next to me asked if I’d been to Melbourne before, and did I know how much the rent was?
     I thought of the cheapest place I’d lived in, the first, when I wanted to get out of the Jones’ for fear that I was taking advantage of them. I was only there for one rainy winter, housemates always asleep on the couch, running late for work. Flu constantly on rotation, sniffles and allergies to the dust in the house, we were drunk or high constantly which was fine because we were young. After a few weeks used needles started to appear in the bathroom bin, nestled among the bloody tampons. Nobody knew where they were coming from, or said that they didn’t, and I didn’t care so much. Beer had always gone missing from the fridge, and that was okay, except after a couple of months nobody was replacing it. Our house had always been the party house but now there were strangers sleeping on the couch, and strangers shooting up in our kitchen, and visits at all hours. I started wondering about what it would be like, found myself pissed as a bandicoot on the phone to Jones, telling him about it. Silence on the other end, and then:
     Jesus, Laurie, get a fucking grip.
     I’d just been rambling, no real idea of what I was saying. No, you don’t understand what it’s like...
     Silence on the other end.
     I’m kidding, I’d said, too quickly.
     Right, he’d said back. The conversation had ended pretty quickly.
When I got off the phone I looked around properly. House messy, but this wasn’t the mess of kids living out of home for the first-time mess, this was serious. Ants and mice and fat spiders that watched the flies buzzing around the rotting dishes in the kitchen, too stuffed to move.
     Later that night, when we were all stoned or drunk out of our minds on the couch watching RAGE, a mouse had sprinted up a leg of my track pants. I’d yelled in shock and jumped and had nearly given everyone heart attacks. When they realised what had happened, that I hadn’t lapsed into some kind of psychosis (there’d been a few freak outs in that house before) they started laughing, nothing malicious, probably just relief. I’d gone for a shower, and when I was bending down to inspect the little scratch marks on my thighs I saw that there were mushrooms growing under the sink. It dawned on me a little then that the way we were living wasn’t anarchic, or anti-conformist, or even artistic. We were just a bunch of kids, burned out even though we were too young to be burned out, talking about all the things we were going to achieve, things that would always start tomorrow.
     One day after Jones’d turned up in his beat up old Datsun Sunny, and after one conversation we’d packed my stuff  into the car and he was driving me back to his parents’ house.
     To the woman next to me (blonde, glasses, younger than I was by some amount), I said, in my best British accent, “I’ve never been.” 

The Jones'

I only had my carry-on luggage, a big old army backpack, and I passed quickly through customs at Melbourne Airport, I was one of the first people out. The hangover I so deserved had finally kicked in and I was so tired and hungry that I felt faint. As I came out into the international arrival lounge they were there immediately, Calliope and Gary and Jones, and I had to stop myself from double-taking at Jones because he was gaunt, cheeks pulled in, singlet hanging off scrappy shoulders that’d always been so strong.
     I went over to them and greetings were said. Calliope put her arms around me in a hug and it was too much. I was covered in cold sweat, my heart was pounding, and spit was pooling in my mouth. I was suddenly aware that I was going to throw up. I looked around for the nearest toilets but couldn’t see any, a bin was the closest thing to me. I mumbled something like an apology to all of them before I went over to it and vomited.
     Not much came out of me and thick bile burned the back of my throat. Someone was behind me, rubbing my back. It was Calliope. Good old Calliope. If I had enough hair I’m sure that she’d have held it back from my face.
     After a few minutes it subsided, my heart went back to its normal rhythm, but there was still something wrong. I felt disconnected and I couldn’t talk, all my words were coming out strangely. Jones looked worried. He took my bag and didn’t ask me questions, and when I staggered a little coming off the escalator he took my arm and linked it through his, supporting me.      
     In the car they took pity on me and stopped trying to involve me in the conversation. I sat with my legs drawn up, looked out of the window with hot air blowing into my face, which felt burned despite not having been in sunlight for weeks.
     I barely remembered going inside the house but I woke up sometime later in the bedroom that had once been mine. I went out into the kitchen. Jones was in there, sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open, drinking a beer, and I was so disorientated, was I really on the other side of the world?
     “Hey,” he said when he saw me. He closed his laptop. “How’re you feeling?”
     “Yeah, better. I’m so hungry though, is there anything to eat?”
     “Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff, mum made it for you.”
     “How long was I asleep for?”
     He looked at the clock on the wall. “Seven hours.”
     “Seriously?”
     “Yup.”
     “Right. Where are Gary and Calliope?”
     “They’re at some family thing.”
     I went to the fridge and pulled out all the containers. Beans in tomato sauce, a bunch of different salads, skordalia, spanakopita. I’d forgotten how good the food was here, Calliope went to her parents’ house a lot and cooked big meals, or her parents did alone and delivered them to her. There were beers in the fridge, too. I balanced a bunch of containers on the counter and popped the cap from the beer, drank greedily. It felt small in my hands compared to the longnecks I was used to and I necked half of it in a mouthful. I couldn’t be bothered plating up the food, and ate it straight from the containers, oily beans and fresh vegetables. Jones had opened his laptop again.
     Around a mouthful of spanakopita, I said, “Are you working on something?”
     “Yeah. But I won’t bore you.”
     “It’s okay, I’m used to it. Go on.”
     “It’s just some coding for a company.”
     “Okay.”
     After I’d eaten and put everything away we smoked cigarettes in the backyard, Champion Ruby for him, Pepe for me. He bought out speakers and played some music.
     “Are you playing the drums anymore?”
     “I’m practising, but I’m not in any bands right now.”
     “How come?”
     “I don’t feel like it.”
     “Okay,” I said again, even though I had a million questions.
     “How’re you feeling?”
     I considered. “Yeah, alright. Tired and jet-lagged but okay.”
     He lit another cigarette. “Have you decided if you’re going to the funeral or not?”
     “I dunno. When is it?”
     “Day after tomorrow.”
     “Right. Fuck. Um...I guess I’ll decide tomorrow.”
     “Fair enough.”
     A silence stretched between us. “So what’s happening with you, man, are you living here?”
     “Yeah,” he said slowly. “For a little while.”
     “Fuck.” I’d have asked what was wrong if I thought there was any chance that he’d answer me.
     “Do you want to see the paper?”
     “The paper?”
     “There was an obituary in the paper today. I saved it in case you wanted to see it.”
     I breathed deep. The air was warm and rich with jasmine. Somewhere on the street a family was having a barbecue, I could smell the smoke and hear voices from a backyard nearby.
     “Yeah, okay.”
     He went inside, sliding the door behind him. I stretched my arms up, trying to fix the knots in my back from the plane, even though it felt like the whole trip hadn’t happened, that I’d been in Berlin a second ago. Jones came back with beers for the two of us and handed me a newspaper, folded open at the obituaries page.

Turnbull, Madeline Jessica.
Beloved mother, and partner of Mark.
Funeral and memorial service will be held at

- and it gave the details of a church in St Kilda. Beloved mother? Who wrote that?
     “So did you talk to this guy? To Mark?”
     “Yeah.”
     “What’d he sound like?”
     He shrugged. “Just a guy. Pretty sad.”
     I pictured some kind of English Victorian, waistcoat and all. I wondered how they’d met, if she’d gone on dates, what they’d have done. If they’d had a first kiss, if they’d held hands. Beloved mother.
     “He left his number, he said that you could call him.” He drew on his cigarette and exhaled quickly, the way he always smoked, little mannerisms that I’d already forgotten about.
     “Oh. Right.” I looked at the number. Put the paper in my pocket. “Fuck it, I’m not doing it today.” I sighed deeply and realised that I was beyond the point of reeking, and I hadn’t changed my underwear in days. “I’m gonna have a shower, I stink.”
     I was digging around in the pockets of the jeans I’d been wearing on the plane, trying to find a hair tie, when my fingers brushed against the unmistakeable thickness of a baggie. I was home and safe and through god knows how many airport securities, and here it was, not much, a few big lines of speed, but still my heart stopped in my chest for a moment and then, when I put a hand to my chest to remind it to do its job, it compensated by going double its normal rate.
     “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, to no one. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the baggie in front of me.
     “Shit,” I said, as I was tapping out a little line, just a little one, on the bedside table, rolling up a five dollar note from my wallet. The familiar burn.
     The shower was luxurious. My apartment in Neukölln was old and charming but the water pressure was ridiculous, just a trickle, Steffi came out of it looking fresh but I came out with soap still in my pit hair. This, though, this was blasting, and I was gasping with the pleasure of it.
     I got out. There was a full-length mirror on the opposite wall to the shower. I unwrapped the towel and took it in, body going so from the winter and belly protruding from the beers but still a strong body, and if it wasn’t conventionally beautiful it was beautiful in its abilities, there was strength underneath the so ness. The first time I’d taken all my clothes off  around a woman — or a girl, we’d both been girls — had been fast, all of them off  at once. I was saying here it is. Expecting disgust or laughter. Instead, she’d sat up in bed and smiled at me and pulled me down on top of her.
     I liberated one of Calliope’s hair ties, smoothed my hair from my face, and went into ‘my’ room. I put on fresh underwear and cut-offs that hadn’t been worn since summer. I hadn’t had any clean shirts to pack and now I didn’t want to wear anything that smelled of sweat. I walked to the kitchen in my bra and shorts, called outside. “Hey, can I borrow one of your shirts?”
     “Yeah, go nuts,” Jones said. He’d been looking at his phone, he put it face down on the table. “They’re in my room.”
     Everything was crisp but deliciously off-kilter. Jones’ room smelled of cigarette smoke and there was an empty Vegemite jar full of butts next to the window. I opened a beat-up duffle bag on the floor, expecting Jones’ usual jumble of mess, but it was empty except for a few leftovers — an odd sock, a ripped flyer of a band I didn’t know. His general mess was in his cupboard. I picked out a black t-shirt, soft and clean, and pulled it on. Looked in the mirror, inspected my smile again, seeing how far I could go before I revealed the gap.
     I helped myself to his deodorant and then looked around at the room again. There was a notebook on the bed. I picked it up, just to hold it, and then put it back.
     My heart was racing a bit and I wanted a cigarette. I went back outside and lit one and started to talk about a band I’d seen, a feminist band from Sweden that I’d seen last week in Prenzlauer Berg, how when me and Julia had talked to them afterwards they’d said we should go visit them and play some shows and we could stay at their place, they all lived together and I was envisioning some blissed-out commune. Probably it was just drunk talk — our band wasn’t so good yet, we were just starting, but still, it was exciting. Halfway through I realised that Jones hadn’t asked me any kind of questions, I’d just come out and started to talk about it, and I was talking too fast. When I stopped for breath he smiled.
     “So how’s the jet lag?”
     “Yeah, I’m fucked.” Ordinarily I’d have told him about the speed, offered him some, but it still felt a little weird between us, and there was a self-awareness of the fact that I was taking speed just to sit here, and I would’ve had to admit that I’d brought it all the way with me, accident or not.
     “No arguments here.”
     I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.
     “What?”
     “It’s just... it’s fucking amazing to see you, man. I’ve really missed you.”
     “I’ve missed you too,” he said.
     We kept drinking. Jones played more and more music but none of the stuff  that we ever listened to together.      
     We didn’t talk about Pete.
     I guessed I couldn’t blame him, he’d been through the same, or nearly the same because Jones hadn’t found him. But I couldn’t bring it up. I couldn’t imagine his reaction if I told him that the world was still fucked for me, not all the time, but sometimes when I lay in bed trying to sleep after a good night out Pete’s face would come to me and I’d crawl into bed with Julia, and if she wasn’t home or had someone over then I’d drink in bed until I could cry or pass out, or both.
     And that wasn’t fair, anyway. It was impossible to know how Jones felt, and I didn’t really know what it was that I wanted to talk to him about. Mostly I didn’t know how to voice the feeling that I was arriving at something, some surety, but I didn’t know of what. Maybe acceptance, I sometimes thought, and I thought as well that I was avoiding that as much as I possibly could because that idea was so much worse than any pain.
     The speed made me sound nasal, made me sniff  every few minutes. Jones had his bare feet on the chair, was smoking cigarette after cigarette.
     I went to the bathroom to piss and have another line. It was still early, or early enough to have more beers and see if Jones had some weed to smoke before crawling into the clean bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow.
     I walked down the corridor. I was a bit drunk, I had to trace a hand along the wall as I walked, and as I did my arm brushed a photograph and nearly knocked it down. I righted it, swaying slightly.
     The house was covered in photos of Jones as a kid, looking at the camera, masses of curly hair, so fucking beautiful that I imagined his whole childhood had been plagued by old women in supermarkets pinching his cheeks until blood vessels were at risk of bursting.
     I went back outside. I was getting more and more in my head, trying to be conscious of the conversation and be quick in my responses but even with the speed I felt slow. We talked more about music, and this led onto music in video games, which led to the intricacies of a game he was making, and I was proud of him but as usual I started to drift. I was looking at him but my mind was floating away, thinking of photos I should get printed out, drawings I could do, a show I could play, friends I should get in contact with. Gemma, Ryan, Scotty, Holly. And Ada — I missed Ada. I’d only met her a few years ago but it’d felt like I’d known her forever, so that we talked about experiences we’d had when we were kids as though the other had been there.          “I’ve completely lost you, haven’t I?”
     I came back, shook my head. It was dark, the night light had flicked on. Moths and other bugs were bashing into it. “Yeah, completely, I was totally in my head. Go on, tell it again, I’ll try to listen.”
     “It’s alright,” he said, smiling. “You can just play it when it’s done.”
     “Thanks,” I said gratefully.
     He’d always been into video games, since I’d first known him. The first time I went to his house he’d made fun of me, telling me I was no fun to play against because I was so bad. I didn’t really know what a video game was — mum didn’t have a television or a computer or a mobile for years, which could’ve been great. Like I’d be trampling through the wilderness, or something, when what I was really doing was taking my skateboard down to the skate park and sitting with the older boys, drinking their beer and smoking the weed they gave me as a joke, imitating their machismo. One of the boys, they called me for a while, and I wore this title with pride before I started to realise that they were excusing me from something that didn’t need excusing.
     So when I went to Jones’ and saw the television and the console I had no idea what I was doing. When he realised that I was confused and getting embarrassed and angry at his comments he’d backed off, had said, It’s okay, you play for a while, I’ll teach you. I can’t believe you get to play for the first time. The first times, man, those are the best.
     “And you,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “What have you been doing?”
     I told him the outline. Working a little, playing a lot, boozy nights out and boozy nights in. Making zines. Odd jobs I’d gotten, people I’d met. “I’m in a band with one of my housemates,” I said. “We’re not bad.”
     “Oh yeah? That’s cool.”
     I couldn’t tell but I thought that I heard a tone of caution in his voice. Jones and I had played together for a while, growing up. He played drums, he said if you understood maths it was easy. I wasn’t sure that I believed that but it seemed to work for him. I bought myself a shitty bass and amp with one of my first pay checks and we started to play together.
     We started playing with Pete when he moved in. He played guitar, he’d been in a few bands in England, some folk-punk stuff we hadn’t heard of before, which I’d liked but Jones hadn’t.
     We got better because of Pete. Jones and I had been lazy with practice, preferring instead to get drunk, but Pete wouldn’t have that. He introduced us to bands we hadn’t heard of before. We all sang even though none of us had good voices. Jones’ was monotonous, Pete’s wavered in and out of tune. I could sing but I hated the girlish sound of it (it took me the longest time to stop hating anything feminine, one of the boys rang so often in my head) so I forced it to sound guttural. After I’d started to get horrible sore throats I went to see a doctor. He told me that I was starting to get nodules and said, trying to be helpful, Well, you should probably learn how to sing.
     Pete would stand in between Jones and the game on the television (the most dangerous place in the world) and wouldn’t say anything but would just look at him, chin tilted down and eyebrows raised, refusing to move until Jones, grumbling, would put the controller down and we’d go practice. We had a few shows, supporting other bands, and we got good feedback.
     “Maybe we could play together sometime,” I said.
     He shook his head. I thought he was going to say something — I wasn’t sure what — but he just stood up.
     “Do you want another beer?”
     “Sure.”
     I reached for my tobacco, saw that it was empty and reached for Jones’ instead. Lifted my arms to stretch my back and looked at the plants on the patio, ferns and potted palms in terracotta pots. One that I’d bought for Calliope for her fiftieth birthday. It needed watering. 

A Letter

I went to bed after Jones and I had smoked a joint. I wanted to sleep in his bed with him — we’d done it often when I first started staying over, it was obvious even then that we were like siblings, in no way attracted to each other. Calliope would knock on his bedroom door to get us up for school and would only roll her eyes at how late we were, not that we were in the same bed.
     I didn’t want to ask him now if I could. I didn’t think he’d refuse, but something was different between us. He was the one person who could annoy me the most — his harsh judgements about people, his one-word answers, how it was so hard for him to reveal anything about himself. (I once found out, three months after the fact, that he’d had a melanoma removed from his back, and I only found out when he took his shirt off one band practice and I saw the scar. Oh, yeah, he’d said, but it’s fine, don’t worry about it, I wear so much sunscreen now that I come fifty-plus. ) But I loved him the most out of anyone. His unexpected kindnesses, the way that, judgemental as he was, he never passed anyone asking for money or someone living on the street without offering them something, giving them a kind word, going to the nearest supermarket to buy food, the way his cousins looked up to him because he never spoke down to them. His version of sympathy, pats on the back and the consolatory face he made, the emphasis he put on: “Oh, mate ,” so that you knew he cared but you wouldn’t have any space to wallow in self-pity.

When I got into bed I couldn’t sleep, my heart thumped in my chest. I felt like Withnail, coming down from speed on the television half a world away. I put on headphones and listened to Fliehende Stürme, stared at the posters on the walls that were still up, like I’d died and they’d preserved my room to keep my memory alive.
     I had Calliope and Gary, I had Jones, but now I didn’t have family, or any that I knew about. Mum’s parents died before I was born, and my dad — whoever that was, I didn’t even know his name — left when I was one. They’d moved to Australia from England a few years before I was born but for all I knew he’d gone back after he’d left  us.
     Julia and I had gone to England to see a festival a few months ago. Afterwards she came with me to Liverpool, and then over the Mersey to Birkenhead, where mum grew up. I wasn’t expecting to find anything, and she was still alive then so there wasn’t any sentimentality. I just wanted to know. I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t feel like I should go, but I went.
     It was grey. Empty beer cans in parks, dog shit in the streets, unfriendly people. It was probably just the areas we were in, surely there was more to it, but we didn’t stay long enough to find out. On the ferry back to Liverpool the wind was icy and my clothes weren’t warm enough. It seemed fitting. I watched the city get closer and felt nothing for it. We went to the nearest okay looking pub to drink and I told myself I was okay with the fact that I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me.
     When I was younger this was painful. I wanted a close bond, I watched any television show greedily and scathingly, thought the relationships were unrealistic while wanting them — Buffy and Joyce, Clare and Ruth, Roseanne and Darlene.

I must’ve slept at some point because a while later I woke to sounds from the kitchen. There was a foggy, spaced-out feeling in my head where there should have been a hangover. I got dressed and went to see who it was. Calliope was in her dressing gown making a coffee. I leant against the door and watched her for a second. Couldn’t help but smile.
     “Good morning.”
     She jumped slightly, putting her hand over her heart. “Lauren!” Her slippers scuffed on the floor as she came over to hug me. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
     “Thanks. But it’s okay.” Even fresh out of bed, she smelled clean.
     “It’s not.” She moved me back and held me at arm’s length. “Really, I’m fine.”
     “If you say so. Are you feeling better?”
     “Yeah, cheers.”
     She let me go. I sat at the table. “Could I have a cup of coffee, please?” It was pointless to try to make one for myself, she’d shoo me away.
     “Of course.”
     I watched her move through the kitchen confidently, shaking her bracelets away from her hands as she dipped the spoon into the jar of coffee. I wondered what another word for maternal was, one that was middle-aged but not boring, someone who didn’t coo at everyone. Matronly didn’t work, that was worse. Protector, carer? The kind of beauty and confidence that she had was something to watch, but through no fault of her own it intimidated me. She was the only one I felt like this around. This desire to become meek, to hold my hands behind my back. Calliope wasn’t just a feminine woman; she was my mother figure. I knew better than to think that I was over any insecurities. I wasn’t easy around mothers, basically. I sensed animosity where there wasn’t any, I felt like I was doing something wrong. I didn’t know what the standards were, or if there were standards.
     I jumped as she set the coffee in front of me.
     “We wanted to be here last night, but it was Alexia’s birthday.”
     I wasn’t sure who Alexia was but the lack of explanation made it obvious I should have known. I didn’t ask, though, just said, “No, it’s fine.”
     “I was so upset when I found out. It’s just so soon, isn’t it?” The coffee was good but bombarded my stomach in a way that made my guts quiver.
     “What do you mean? Too soon for the funeral?” Christ, when had she died again?          
     “Well, no,” she said gently. “Since Peter.”
     Pete had flirted with Calliope when they met, told Jones over and over again about how beautiful he thought she was.

Jones : You think it’s funny but it’s not, man, just shut up.
Pete : Who’s joking? On a scale of one to ten, how serious are your mum and dad?

     “I guess it hasn’t been long,” I said. It didn’t hurt, for some reason it didn’t hurt, it just made me tired. I wanted suddenly to go to bed, put the blanket over my head, like that would fix anything. “Can we not talk about it, though? Not right now.” Not ever.
     “Of course. Whatever you want.”
     I drank my coffee. Birds sang outside and I could see her trying not to look at me in concern. My eyelids were being dragged down, heavy weights on shutter doors.
     “Are you very jet-lagged, dear?”
     “Yeah,” I said, clinging to it. “Yeah, I am very jet-lagged.”
     “Did you want to go back to bed?”
     I shook my head. It would be a fucking delight, the best, but I couldn’t stand it — even though it was so hot outside I felt strange, far away from everyone despite still having people here. Jesus Christ, what was I doing here? Was machst du in Melbourne, you idiot?
     “I’ll try to get back to this time zone,” I said.
     I sipped more coffee and molten lava rumbled in my gut. Excused myself and went to the toilet where I succumbed to diarrhea, painful and noxious. Waited until I knew it was over cleaned myself up, got rid of the evidence. Back in the kitchen I kept drinking the coffee because I needed it, it was liquid gold, the fact that it would shortly encourage another round of liquid shit wasn’t enough to deter me.
     “Are you hungry?”
     “Yeah, actually, I am.”
     “There’s toast, or...” she opened the fridge. “Well, Kostas went shopping yesterday, so there’s a whole lot of stuff. You can make that stir-fry thing you love so much.”
     That stir-fry thing was tofu scramble. “Oh, yeah, that’s awesome,” I said.
     “Is it? Is it awe-inspiring?” She taught literature, she hated the way that Jones and I talked. When we were teenagers Jones had had a short story published in a literary magazine, and a reviewer had praised it as ‘bogan poeticism’, and Calliope — and I’m very sure she never wanted me to see it — had snorted at the line.
     “If you saw the vegan version of airplane food you’d think it was awesome too.”
     “I’ll forgive you this time.”
     “Do you want some?”
     “Why not. Are you sure you don’t want me to make it?”
     “It’s fine. I’m okay, Calliope, really.”
     “That is what you say, isn’t it?” She was watching me very closely in a way that made my skin itch.
     “Yeah,” I said.
     I turned away to avoid her gaze and raided Jones’ purchases, a whole lot of good stuff, salsa and avocado and wholemeal burritos. Pressed the tofu, diced the garlic and the onion. Chopped tomato and mushrooms. My stomach started rumbling and I started to feel better, my body apparently deciding that it was more important to get food into my stomach than to continue to violently evict everything I put in it. I was looking for some smoked paprika when I saw a jar of Vegemite, and I disgusted myself by eating a small teaspoon of it by itself, my taste buds unsure of what to make of it after a six-month break.
     Calliope sat on the barstool opposite, drinking green tea. She made comments about the number of herbs I was putting in before I narrowed my eyes at her and she smiled and stood up. “I think I’m just going to get dressed,” she said breezily.
     “Wise move, Calliope.”
     I plated it up as she was coming back in. I’d made her another tea, I put it on the table as well, next to a small plate, where Calliope would put the tea bag after it had steeped. She said ‘shit’ and she listened to some music that wasn’t terrible but if you put the teabag straight onto the table you were fucked.
     My stomach started to hurt after I’d swallowed the first mouthful. I tried to focus on appreciating the flavours, thought about what various nutrients were going inside me. All the good that the magnesium would do, the protein, the calcium. I hoped I could keep it down.
     “Mm,” she said, her mouth full. “What did you think of the letter?”
     “What letter?”
     “Kostas didn’t give you the letter?
     “No.” I searched my mind quickly, in case he had. The end of the night was foggy. “I don’t think so. Who from?”
     “Oh, that boy, I swear to god...Hold on.” She padded to her bedroom and came back with an envelope. Inside was a letter written on lined paper, the writing slanting backwards. ere was something else in the envelope, something hard. A key. I looked at it before putting it on the table, and read the letter.

Lauren,
I didn’t know if you’d want me to call so I’ve written this instead. My name’s