Of course Fi was fired for a tweet. Summoned to a cavernous north-facing room she’d never been in, desk cramped with paperwork, placards mounted on the walls of such overwhelming greenness that her hair, for once, camouflaged. Stop Adani! Rescue the Reef! Save the Koalas! Fight For Climate Action Now! Posters done pro-bono by artists whose work would cost Fi more than a month’s salary—not that she held it against them. Artists after all, should be paid, good luck to them, it was just a small sour spot with Fi that she did not possess some raw creative talent. That hadn’t stopped her taking a quick, excitable selfie in front of one of the prints when it had first arrived. It was by an up-and-coming with exponentially mounting Instagram fame, and just being in its presence, Fi had felt her cultural capital if not growing, then, like a rock passed by a comet, glowing from the heat. This was a few weeks after Fi had started the job she was about to be fired from, before the print had been framed and mounted behind the tired face of Lexi Bostik—brown skin, hair rippling down her back—who was now looking at Fi as if she did not know why she was there.
The poster depicted a similarly brown woman with rippling hair, their waves twinned. Indeed, most people in the office assumed the girl in the poster was in fact Lexi, rendered younger, the grey strips in her crown erased. The woman was also a metaphorical representation: gigantic, naked, non-existent areolas, earnestly hugging the fauna and flora of Australia—a wombat cuddled to her hip, wattle wafting through the scene, banksias up the wazoo. Lexi Bostick: protector of Australia’s natural bounty, lover of all species great and small, sentient and photosynthesising.
In the throes of being fired, it didn’t occur to Fi that the likeness might have been deliberate on the artist’s part, only that Lexi had seen herself in the painting and bought it for that reason. Charitable feelings down a dark, distant tunnel, Fi thought: Latent narcissism. Quietly, Fi suspected that while the browned skin of the girl in the poster was meant to be hereditary, Lexi—who had never claimed, as far as Fi was aware, to be a POC—had brown skin as result of years of sun exposure only. Lexi had grown up in the days before Slip Slop Slap. Fake tan, perhaps? No, she couldn’t prove that. Yet still Fi found herself fixating on Lexi’s skin, what seemed to her a deliberate obscuring of whiteness, however achieved.
‘Ah, Fiona, is it?’
‘Fi.’
‘Fi, right. You know why you’re in here, then?’
Fi shrugged, said, in a shrinking voice, ‘I put my Twitter on private.’
‘Even so, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.’
Fi nodded, surprised at the tears welling in her eyes, although she’d known going in there what to expect, had told herself she would not cry. She resolved once more to stand her ground, not to crack, although her fingers trembled.
Lexi was leant over the desk, her posture indicating she’d just been inspecting the documents held between her fingers, and this, firing someone, was a secondary task. ‘Please understand that this is not about your personal work ethic. I know you’ve done good work with the publicity side of things, which I’m sure you’re aware we need help with. But we do not condone violence.’
If Fi did, at some point here, feel guilt or shame (the two are not yet, at twenty-one, distinct), these feelings were quickly obscured by thoughts of how she would represent this interaction once she had left the room, in this year 2016, 140 characters at a time.
Fi had expected Lexi to say something else, an assurance that she agreed with the tweet, some indication that this was public pressure, that she was being let go with a wink and a promise of future references. But no.
In fact, when Fi closed the door to a new life of unemployment, her neon green hair back to being offensively at odds with the environment, she was left with the impression she’d been given a lecture on what it meant to conduct yourself as a decent human being in the world. Lexi lecturing her.
Fi collected her belongings and deleted all evidence of her personal affairs from the computer. Despite having only recently been promoted from volunteer to paid assistant, this was no easy task: she was logged in to six or seven accounts and her desk was adorned with dozens of trinkets, plastic replicas of objects she felt were the best expressions of her soul—a Gameboy, Lisa Simpson, replica McDonalds fries in miniature, and almost the entire bubble-headed main cast of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (she was missing Xander). Unceremoniously stuffed in her bag as she rushed down the stairwell instead of risking run-ins on the elevator, these objects made a sound like two wet, sandy hands, rubbed together. She made it to the tram stop with no tears shed.
Emboldened, Fi extracted and put on her over-head earphones, whipped out her phone like a knife, thumbed her passcode, then stared at the little app squares, blank. The tram she needed to catch from the city to the north came and went and she continued staring at her phone. Time passed. She put her phone back in her pocket and began walking next to the tram line, bag bouncing away from her body then falling heavy on her hip.
Was it possible, could she concede, she had—maybe—done the wrong thing? Was it an impulsive, thoughtless (drunk) thing to have done? Could she have kept her job if she’d apologised? She didn’t linger on this last thought, did not allow herself to acknowledge it, to hear it properly. With her noise-cancelling headphones in she also couldn’t hear: the rumble of traffic, a cat somewhere yowling in pain or heat, the squawk of a seagull, determined to hold his own amongst the pigeons.
Fi walked, tried not to compulsively plan. This had always been a problem for her, the planning. The fretful considering of every mental eddy of possibility; it was how, when she felt life began to slip out from under her, she tried to regain control. She could move back in with her parents, haul ass back to the deep suburbs. But: she’d stayed in her childhood room until the age of twenty-one, what would that look like, crawling back after only four months out? And she felt it keenly, now, what it had done to her development. While others of her class had moved out of home after high school, settled into new cities, moved into student accommodation, share houses, taken gap years, Fi had stayed at home while studying. At the time she’d convinced herself that she’d be on and around campus so much—making friends and socialising, partying, sleeping on friends’ couches—she’d only need to make the commute back every other day, late at night. The hour-long train ride would fly by, and she could actually save the small amount of money from her student stipend. But these imagined friends had failed to reveal themselves, and Fi had instead gone home each day directly after class, after once again putting her foot in her mouth, after yet again falling into paralysis and freezing up, unable to approach people like a normal human being. So, she’d spent her commutes back to the deep suburbs near tears, returning home only to get into increasingly fraught yelling matches with her mother (‘Maybe you’d make more friends if you didn’t have that thing through your lip, it makes you look a little unapproachable’; ‘Who said I want to be approachable?’).
Did Fi feel she’d grown up at all? No, instead, she’d finished a whole communications degree (with a minor, she liked to remind people, in creative industries) without making any real friends (yes, she was Aware of The Irony), without becoming anyone new, without discovering, as she thought she would, her Life Calling. She’d only, God, properly had sex two months ago. Sure, once or twice in high school she’d come close. Once where she’d technically done so, but she’d not, when the time came, been able to follow through properly, and chose not to count it. The lights had been glaring in her face; the wrong music was playing; the sheets against her skin were like an irritant; she’d asked him to stop. The imminence of parents coming home, doors opening, was too anxiety inducing, and she’d not been able to commit to the task.
She’d sometimes considered this first encounter, where there was an entry, so to speak, to be rape. Fi had clearly been uncomfortable, and he should have known better, yes. But then she remembered who had been the one to orchestrate everything, who had been the one to say, ‘Just put it in!’ And it was hard, in retrospect, to feel violated by Nathan, the spotty but nice trumpet player she’d decided would make a good story. Her Innocent Beginnings, who would have thought. Nathan who, still wearing socks and a condom on his no-longer-erect penis, had calmed her through the ensuing panic attack, and then—once it was clear she was not in danger of hyperventilating—promptly had his own.
In the end the real first time was with one of her roommate Phoebe’s friends, who she’d seen once or twice since, but she could not say if he remembered her name, or even, for that matter, the encounter. The encounter: sloppy, drunk, quick, never-ending, her back against the bathroom mirror. Outside through the slit of the window: a young father next door in silhouette, pacing back and forth, burping a baby.
When it was over Fi wanted to throw open the window and exclaim: Look! See! I can be carefree!
Fi walked like this, trying not to think, failing. Inventing and extinguishing futures in rapid, spiralling succession. Maybe she could get her pub job back. She was not good at pouring beer, but she was bubbly enough that the owner, a staunch butch called Wendy, let her serve customers. But God, no, hospitality was not for her. The late evenings. The fug of food that clung her dresses. She felt she was meant for bigger things than cleaning dishes, had to tell herself this whenever she plunged a hand into the cold, soiled sink water. She could barely stand it: bloated food scraps clinging to her forearm! The sound of plates crunching together! Chefs!
Maybe she could get Centrelink? Or another desk job doing admin or marketing somewhere? There had to be something. What if she apologised in public? On Twitter? Wouldn’t Lexi feel compelled to have her back? But no, hang on.
Fi took off her headphones, let in the sound of traffic, the kids shrieking in the park opposite. She’d been walking for almost an hour. The heat had registered at first only as a minor annoyance, but now she felt dizzy, on the verge of dehydration. Her clothes, unsuitable for the weather, were beginning to stick and rub, pools of sweat collecting under her bra, her legs under her dress chaffing. She could see the exact shade of blue her hip would bruise: Ceylon. The tram dinged, she ran to reach the stop, threw out her arm to halt it, but that was unnecessary—people were getting off.
Sitting on the tram Fi was too preoccupied to be embarrassed, as she normally would be, about her heavy breathing, her flushed cheeks, bright pink radiating across the bridge of her nose. The metal of her piercings was uncomfortable in her ears, lips, nose. She swept her dress (green, luminescent) under her legs to stop the seat fabric biting at her thighs. Finally, Fi opened Twitter.
If Lexi and her organisation really cared about the things they said they did, they wouldn’t have fired her. It was just a stupid joke. It would never have been a problem if Fi didn’t have the amount of Twitter followers she did. This—her online presence—had been a large part of the reason she was hired. And maybe she did support violence, for Evil Old White Guys Who Deserved It. For people who thought climate action could be ignored. For landlords and politicians who had made the prospect of her owning a home or even being able to afford bare necessities approximately as likely as not drowning against a vicious and unceasing river current.
Fi had thought Lexi different. That Lexi cared. But here was the truth in front of her: Lexi was a Rich (this much was apparent) White (probably) Boomer (almost certainly), whose organisation was a glorified hobby. She started to type. The tram dinged; wind and people rushed in and out, in and out, keeping beat to the clicking of her letter-by-letter explanation, audible from the headphones around her neck.
Let’s be honest, she finished, I was a scapegoat. She felt a hot flush of her cheeks, of both injustice and triumph, as she typed it, and the words she wrote solidified the truth. Alexis Bostik was a raging narcissist, and she, Fi, was the only person willing to say what she really meant. For a second, after the whoosh of the tweet sending, there was something there, in her gut, unidentifiable—one of her eddies, beginning to swell.
And then:
what the fuck
i am so sick of rich people pretending to be woke
not surprised
been waiting for something like this to happen
imagine pretending to care about social justice and then throwing your fucken intern under the bus the second they do something about it
Fi frowned, she was not an intern, but others were already leaping to her defence. She exited Twitter, put on some music.
Outside the tram, in late September of 2016, the first hot winds of spring, weeks late, rushed through Melbourne. Birds trilled. Jasmine hinted under the fumes of traffic. Jumpers were slung around shoulders. Small dogs ran without overcoats. On the tram, Fi sat hunched, opened her phone again, watched the comments come in, entombed, music swelling in her ears, in her own victory.
What Twitter had confirmed for Fi: Lexi Bostik was a Hypocrite, and this was what she said, cheeks still flushed, in her kitchen, drinking bad wine, to her roommate Phoebe and Phoebe’s friend Yasmin, while they waited for their other roommate Hannah to arrive, who wanted—Hannah did—to have a Chat About the Chore Chart. It was not clear why Yasmin was there.
‘Wow, she sounds like a total psycho,’ Yasmin said.
Fi could not help but notice how Yazz’s hair crested against her shoulders, her eyeliner perfectly cat-eyed, the Chinese characters tattooed between her collar bones, slipping down between her breasts; Fi could not help but notice that Yazz was cool—too cool to be as nice to Fi as she was being.
‘A total psycho,’ Fi agreed, without elaboration, trying not to blow her cover as an uncool person.
Yazz pulled something out of her pocket, a little baggy of translucent pills with brownish powdered crystals in them, said: ‘I’ve got something that might cheer you up.’
And Fi, (thank God!) did not say, What is it? Or even, that she hadn’t really done that sort of thing before. Instead she swept her fringe aside, looked performatively at her bedroom, and said, ‘Urgh, I’m still trying to recover from the weekend.’
Yazz shrugged, as if either way who cared, but—Fi could not help noticing—looked somewhat disappointed.
‘But what the hell.’ Fi held out her hand—too eagerly (she would ruminate on this later).
And it was like this that a few casual drinks morphed into a party. They moved outside. As the night turned cooler in one last nod to the winter just passed, frost licked at the corners of window. Hannah showed up and gracefully forgot about the dishes. Casual banter about-faced to stories of childhood. The daily call from Fi’s mother, usually answered, rung out in her bag. Texts were sent. Newcomers came, pulled up milk crates, stoked the dying fire pit, and, over the throbbing hum of music, disclosed secrets they would later forget, or regret, telling—and it’s hard to blame them, really, for keeping the neighbour’s newborn up well into the a.m., for forgetting the things outside their control so that they might, just for a moment, be seen by one another.
A question for the ages:
If a tree falls in the forest and no one
If a bear shits in the woods and no one
If a someone does something and does not tweet about it, does
If someone does a good deed, and does not exhibit it on the internet, was it a good deed?
Would the deed have been more effective if publicly exhibited?
If someone does not witness the tweet shitting—
No. Wait. We know how wrong the post modernists were, although it did seem like good fun. We know that trees fall, that bears, however many of them are left, do indeed shit in the woods. That even if no person sees it, there’s probably a scrap of plastic that has made the half-world journey to the woods just to witness the deluge. That there’s a corner of forest never seen by man, littered with microplastics. Nature continues to encroach and degrade in our absence. Vines of stubborn invasive plants strangle, permafrost melts, oceans acidify, fish in poisoned water sources pirouette, belly up toward the surface, all without our bearing witness.
It’s hard to blame Fi for the way she saw the world when we consider the house she grew up in. The way it sat, identical to the ones around it, cut copy, perhaps mirrored—a door on the left, a door on the right—for variety. A red roof for the truly eccentric. Someone new to the estate would be forgiven for believing the occupants were blessed with a sixth sense, the supernatural ability to identify their own homes. The children navigated the slim grey roads on instinct, without looking for street signs or tell-tale markers (of which there existed very few—a green Subaru here, a large ornamental budda there).
To Fi, this wayfinding was second nature also, and so she turned down Nelson crescent, Peak Lane, shoulders hunched, without thinking about where she was going, mouthing the words to a song. She snapped her mouth shut when the Beverly kids skateboarded past, some of the smaller ones ripsticking, either not yet savvy enough to know, or not old enough to care, how ridiculous it made them look, arms flailing widely, swivelling across the whole road. None of them acknowledged Fi, but this she was used to.
Another horde of children went past, Fi straightened her posture. On entering the suburb, she’d passed a row of new display houses, frilly with plants that seemed exotic to the surrounding community, but were in fact native to the area. The houses: clean and brightly coloured, lined up like novelty eclairs. In the not-so-distant past Fi would have eyed them with unveiled envy, sighing at the billboard photographs that promised gilded kitchens and swimming pools with feature fountains, but when she’d entered that morning, un-fresh from her hour train journey, re-entering the suburb of her childhood for the first time since she’d made her escape—the first time as a bona fide adult—she only scowled.
A rite of passage in these parts: display home pool hopping. Exclusively for teenagers whose parents had lax supervision styles or an over-reliance on temazepam. These kids, lanky and carefree, leaping one fence over the other, scrambling at the sound of an alarm triggered. The truly bold leaving bottles of Smirnoff littered around the side of the pool, smashed at the bottom, glass corners making shadows in the crisp aquamarine. Fi was only invited once, by a new girl who’d turned up at her school with flowing hair. She’d immediately and wrongly assumed that Fi’s then-gothic demeanour made her edgy, cool-adjacent. Perhaps it had been different in the eastern suburbs of Sydney from where the girl hailed, bringing with her tales of house parties unsupervised, underage nightclubbing, plunging into the waves at Coogee Beach drunk at midnight.
Teenage Fi, too intent on concealing how much she wanted to be there, spent the night throwing out defensive barbs whenever someone tried to talk to her, arm-coiled self-consciously around her stomach, compulsively sipping her drink. She was too insecure then to realise that at least one of the boys was flirting, reading his comments about her eyeliner as a personal attack rather than as an admittedly clunky pickup line from a young man who’d noticed from her T-shirts their shared interest in mid-2000s pop punk. In fact, it would not occur to Fi for some time that some people did, had been, flirting with her since her adolesce. When the realisation came—not until well into her late twenties, years after all this had faded—in a random bar in Fitzroy, it wouldn’t even be self-induced but prompted by a drunk friend interrupting Fi’s rant about Men Who Treat Unfuckable Women Like We’re Invisible’ to say: ‘You know it’s not like you’re hideous, right? I’d be very happy to look like you.’ In response Fi would excuse herself to the bathroom, look in the mirror for the first time as if with the eyes of a stranger, and, under the flickering blue light, realise that she hadn’t ever, really, seen herself properly.
But the night of the illicit swimming, Fi was still unconsciously trying to find her own features in those of the young women she saw on every magazine cover, website, store front and bus stop, she was still tallying every comment her own beautiful mother had ever made about her weight (‘Well you if you’re unhappy with how you look we can always go on a diet’) clothing choice (‘but you’d look so pretty if you tried a little’), or haircut (‘It’s just a very intense fringe), and had made herself sick trying to overcome the horror of being perceived in her swimsuit. Throwing up a florescent yellow into the garden, the other kids already hopping the next fence over, Fi had at least registered that the new girl took pity on her long enough to wait until the throwing up stopped, then called her mother, before she herself leapt over the fence with a quick apologetic look back.
When Fi’s mother arrived, she broke through a side gate, looking borderline superheroine in her determination, and set off an alarm. At home after an unconvincing scolding, she’d cooed over Fi’s forehead with a damp cloth. Put a large tablet into a glass of water that fizzed to yellow as the medicine dissolved. Remembering things like this made Fi feel awful: she did not really mean to treat her mother the way she did.
Tonight she would make an effort, she would be kind to her mum, even if even if Camila started to freak out about How Terrible Everything Is.
More kids on bikes zipped past, a thin pale boy rapping at the top of his lungs, shouting louder on the word he knew he shouldn’t. She scowled again. Racist! she hissed in his direction, but not loud enough for him to hear.
This was the way the suburb was structured: an oasis of clean living, made eternal. As if it had always been, and would always be, there. In reality, they were copies of copies that would degrade rapidly as they were designed to, when the adults—alleviated of parenthood—downsized and moved on.
For their part, the children could not imagine a future in which their homes would be flippantly destroyed for apartments, or flooded with time, nor did they have any knowledge of the brick terrace homes that were flattened out to make their sanctuary, Green Circuit. ‘Green’ here conjuring the image of fecund permeance the property developers wanted to encourage, rather than a literal description.
Up the street: a dog, nose down, wove an elderly Mrs Pearson between cars and letterboxes. Sniffing out other dogs’ piss, Fi thought, reduced by his own old age and cataracts. In his youth, though, the Jack Russell would have smelled not just the animal traces, human and dogs both, but sniffed substantially through time, finding, perhaps, the damp hints of flood plains and marsh, the scaled beasts that had once swum there, clues of the myths they spawned. The true nature of the place persisted underneath the community, in the large drains that collected and redirected water toward trees. In dry seasons marsupials and rodents resided there amongst teenagers coughing up smoke inhaled down the wrong pipe, exploring the tunnels on skateboards, hurling themselves into the dark passages, whooping. Their victories echoed down the tunnels and wafted out drains, startling all the mynas perched across the suburb simultaneously. This was before a kid almost drowned on a heavy rain day—his mother whipped up into hysteria when they found his skateboard washed into the trees—only to discover him, several hours later, damp but unharmed, playing Xbox at a friend’s house. Since then the drains have been sealed off, the bush fenced away. Teenagers, forced to improvise, relocated their experimenting to abandoned sheds and rooftops.
One of the kids on a bike circled away from the group, shouted goodbye to the others and pulled up beside Fi, swaying his bike back and forth to ride in pace with her walk. She turned to tell him off, but it was, of course, her brother.
She said: ‘What are you doing, hanging out with a racist.’
Her brother shrugged. ‘I’ve asked him not to.’
‘And?’
‘And he just said it louder.’
Her brother, Jake, with his chronic bystander syndrome.
Think again of the new girl, wanting to include, looking back, her body glistening as she leapt over the fence, deer-like. Jake too, suffered the same affliction, a natural ease, a certain grace. Never convincingly mean enough to be a ringleader, and with the way his hair flopped, sliding through puberty without even one bout of chronic acne—the world had not, at seventeen, been cruel enough for Jake to participate in his friends’ bullying.
‘He isn’t so bad.’
Fi almost did tell him to fuck off, but softened when she looked at him, remembered how easily he still slumped against her shoulder for comfort. They turned onto their driveway.
‘Does mum know you’re coming?’
‘She didn’t say anything? I talked to her literally two hours ago.’
Jake shrugged.
Then, reminding herself of the promise she had made: ‘She probably just forgot to tell you.’
They both stood at the door, looking at each other for a second.
‘Keys?’ she prompted.
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t live here anymore, remember.’
‘Yes, okay.’ Jake plunged his hand into his pocket, pulled out a long chain.
Fi snorted.
‘Shut up.’ He smiled.
‘How can you possibly need all those keys?’ Fi said, but thought: And when the hell did you get cheekbones. He’d lost puppy fat, as their mum would say. Something she assured Fi would happen to her, any day now, although Fi had never asked.
The door swung open.
Their mother, Camila Clarke: beautiful, Amazonian, wide eyed.
‘Why were you loitering near the door so long? You two scared the shit out of me, I thought you were someone trying to get in.’
She stepped aside to let them pass, Fi then Jake, walking his bike through to the backyard, the worn rhombus pattern of his tyres leaving dirt trails like two snakes weaving over one another on the clean tiles, a lovers’ dance.
Once their mother had finished looking, not into the street, but out through the fence to the bush, she closed the door: ‘Jesus. I just mopped! No, what are you doing? Stop it, you’ll ruin dinner.’
Fi closed the fridge door, noticing, as she never had before, its decadence. Sliced pancetta and salmon. Three different cannisters of cherry tomatoes. Low fat Greek and blueberry yogurt.
‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Christ, at least say hello first.’
‘Hello, what’s for dinner.’
‘Pies, in the freezer.’
‘I’m vegan.’
Her mother inhaled, she had been warned about this, over the phone, weeks ago. She’d asked when Fi had started caring about that sort of thing: ‘I don’t know, mum, when did you start being okay with murder?’
Jake had left the backdoor open and Camila now swooped after him to lock it.
‘Mum, stop. No one wants to rob us.’
And it was true: the Clarkes lived, unlike others in the neighbourhood, on a one-parent income. Theirs was one of the only houses in the estate without a pool, they did not attract the attention of any want-to-be looters, which were, in these parts, mostly bored teenagers. In contrast to her peers, whose houses were filled with untouched Nintendo Wii’s and freshly bought flowers, Fi fancied herself the struggling underdog. (One girl, Fi remembered, had a stripper pole in her bedroom and threw a tantrum one Christmas when given a Chihuahua instead of a Pomeranian).
The adults in the neighbourhood were mostly the children of farmers and veterans; they had entered the new world of the ’80s and come out with desk jobs and more money than they’d bargained for.
Jake in the kitchen raised his hands above his head in a shrug.
Fi summoned all her reserves of fortitude. ‘You okay Mum?’
‘Yes, yes it’s fine. I’m fine. It’s nothing.’
Behind her Jake shook his head, mouthed: ‘She’s not fine.’
(Her mother on the phone two hours ago, when Fi fibbed only slightly and said she’d not been fired but quit: ‘What do you mean a toxic work environment? It’s work, it’s always been toxic. That’s how work works.’)
‘Alright. Pizza!’ Camila opened the third draw and pulled out menu. ‘Have a look, decide what you want.’
‘Dad home soon?’
‘Should be.’
Jake lolled over to the bench, untucked his school shirt, and snatched up the menu. He would, Fi knew, eat an entire pizza, then half of hers, and it would not make a difference, no gut pain, no weight gain, no chin pimples. Fi scowled.
‘Mum says you’ve got a girlfriend.’
Jake looked up from the menu to likewise scowl at his mother, but Fi continued to narrow her eyes at him.
‘So, who is she?’
Jake dropped the scowl, studied the menu, leant further into the kitchen bench. ‘Noneya.’
‘Mum?’
Camila stood on tiles in the no-mans-land between the kitchen and the lounge, looking out the window where, through the trees, sunlight faded into cobalt. ‘Mmm?’
‘Mum.’
Outside amongst the trees, a steady chirping started.
‘Mother.’
‘Huh?’
‘Who is it then?’
‘What?’
Fi inhaled. It was just like them, of course. She was not going to learn this information until she pried it out of them, although that would betray more interest than she wanted to show. Why did she feel herself, the second she breached the threshold, reverting into a sulky, petulant child? But never mind—she smiled at the grunt of the garage door opening—the perennial gossip was home.
Derek Clarke entered and immediately swept into his daughter. ‘Fifi!’ he said, circling his arms around her in a tight hug, and planting a kiss on each of her cheeks.
‘Dad. Stop it, gross.’ She winced at herself, and tried to hug him back.
‘Oh, how you hurt me! You’re all grown up and now I’m gross. Oooh, pizza.’ He walked over to his wife and kissed her, tongue and all, and Fi and Jake exchanged a look of revulsion, briefly united. Remembering her mission, Fi turned toward her dad, but she did not even have to ask.
‘Will Penelope be joining us for dinner?’
‘Penelope?’
Jake groaned.
‘Miller?’
Jake sat up and made eye contact: ‘You’re so fucking judgemental.’
‘Language!’ sang Derek. ‘The Fungi, Fun Guy for moi, please.’
‘The one who believes in ghosts but not climate change?’
‘You don’t know anything about her!’
‘Don’t I?’
Fi sniffed, she was, she realised, disappointed in him. In the lack of originality of his sexual desires. The thin, pretty blonde? she wanted to say, did you come up with that all on your own?
‘Well don’t get her pregnant, she’ll keep it. It wouldn’t even occur to her, the ethics of bringing a child into the future hell-scape.’
Camila pivoted like a ballerina from the window, expression a mask.
Her brother made a face and put his hands over his ears (maybe Fi was wrong, superimposing a sex life he was not, in fact, ready for).
‘Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!’
This had come, most peculiarly, from their mother.
‘Oh Mum, come on.’
‘I don’t want to know!’ She turned back to the window, slammed down the blinds, shutting out the newly dark outside.
Things that stare out of us from the dark window: the heat, wet, throbbing. Little eyes blinking. Animals who are or have been, come to look and peek through windows, to scamper under the house, over the rafters. The tapping of paws, of something bigger than it should be, inside the roof. The scratching on the walls. The ungodly shrieking, and its echo. Trees that whisper to one another. Canopy shyness: the thin strip of stars blinking through the trees, curling around each leaf, labyrinthine. The thick humidity, pressing in. The clouds, dark and plump with rain, rolling forward. The cold that troughed too high and stayed too long, the retaliating heat wave, waiting. Humidity breaking in a thunderclap. A cat, somewhere, for fun, snapping the neck of a noisy miner bird, its carcass falling to the ground with a soft thud. The whirr of industry, fogging the sky. Seaside: a refinery, one tall pillar emerging from it, burning bright the excess oil, a beacon of eternal disaster. The rush of water, ebbing from a shoreline, rising with the moon. Crabs emerging from sand to scuttle into the black sea. Back across the plains of Country, the rustle of bulrush, eerie. Boots stomping over wet ground, cattails catching incognito. The seasons changing pace and meter, turning sharp corners. Record Breaking! The future, cataracted, becoming unclear. Two eyes, outside the window, closing.
The standing chairs were designed to prevent computer posture, Matt explained. ‘Hunchback, you know.’ Matt wore a scarlet beanie, one of many on rotation, Fi would soon learn, folded back so many times and positioned on the top of his head so that a large part of his shaved flat skull peeked out from behind. Pared with his thin shoulders, his overall impression, Fi grimaced, was somewhat phallic.
‘See the lever there, under the desk,’ he said pointing, ‘that’s for height adjustment, so you can make sure you’re always looking forward or up, instead of down. It’s really bad for your neck, but I’m sure you know that.’
Fi did not know that, but she nodded as if she did.
‘Also every day after lunch we have a post-team meeting debrief. Shoot the shit, do hand exercises. It’s important to stretch out your tendons, stop RSI. If your hands start to hurt even a little, you have to stop. It’s an occupational hazard here.’ Matt smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile, and it was a little creepy, like he’d just reminded himself that smiling put people at ease.
‘Okay great.’
Matt stood there a second longer, smile still stiff on his face. Fi winced again, was shot through with the anxiety she experienced when she found herself judging other people. It followed, to her mind, that they were judging her in return. Was that why Matt had brought up hunchback?
‘Right.’ Fi sat down. Or stood down, then adjusted the seat until she was in something resembling a sitting position and tried her best to straighten her spine into the crevice.
All of this information she listened to, but struggled to retain for even a second. The anxiety in her gut tightened as she realised what she had suspected ever since she applied for the job four months ago, shortly after she’d been fired: she was not even remotely qualified to be there.
Matt straightened back up and resumed his strained smile.
‘Don’t feel like you have to pitch or write anything today. Let’s just get you used to everything.’ Then he clapped her on the back and walked off to his glass walled office.
Fi focused on the screen, reached for the alien looking ergonomic mouse, designed to prevent RSI.
‘He wasn’t too condescending, was he?’
Fi turned to two girls around her age, one wearing a dog collar who looked like a gothic bo peep, the other in a pre-emptive summer singlet with sandy blond hair that fizzed in a luminescent halo. The angelic one smiled. The white and blue of the office buzzed at a low-level hum.
‘I love your hair, I wish I could get mine to that colour.’ This was bo peep. ‘I tried to bleach it once and it snapped off.’ She thrust out her lower lip in a pout to reveal a slice of deep pink that looked, to Fi, made of satin. Fi repressed the urge to reach out and stroke it.
‘I remember that. Your hair is way too dark to try that at home, Betty.’ The angelic one raised one well-toned arm to introduce herself as Caitlyn. With a y.
Fi smiled back at them both, mumbled thanks.
‘Don’t worry if you can’t remember anything he just taught you,’ Caitlyn said.
The tight knot in Fi’s stomach loosened.
‘This extremely rude person next to you is Justin.’
The man sitting next to Fi—legs splayed, T-shirt of tropical brightness—did not respond.
‘I would say he is not usually that rude, but I’d be lying.’
‘Well, Beatrice, I think you’ll find some of us actually like to work.’ Justin took off his headphones, winked at Fi, adding in a undertone, ‘and I am certainly not one of them.’
Betty said: ‘I generally do our pop culture stuff. TV shows, gadgets, fads, etcetera.’
‘So, Game of Thrones.’ Caitlyn smiled.
Betty elbowed Caitlyn, and said, ‘so mainly Game of Thrones. Caitlyn covers all things Aussie, I guess.’
‘Sports, slang, you get it.’
‘But aren’t you—’ Fi stopped herself, she was sure Caitlyn spoke in a slightly unfamiliar twang.
‘Only half British, I swear!’
Fi laughed.
‘And Justin—’
‘I’m the resident queer!’
‘He’s not actually the only queer person in the office,’ Caitlyn said, a little stiff.
‘Sure, but I am our queerest queer.’
Caitlyn rolled her eyes.
Fi’s knot loosened again, a warmth spreading through her body. She was quite certain this jovialness, the ribbing, was affected. Whether they were doing this to perform just how different they were from other nine-to-five office workers, or to make Fi feel more included, she didn’t mind. The place that had a moment ago felt intimidating took on a joyous new intrigue. In the corner was a bubbler filled with lime cordial, and in an open space across the room were bean bags for napping and a foosball table, which, Fi soon learnt, you did not play unless you wished to stay back the number of minutes you indulged spinning the little skewered men, imprisoned in perpetual game.
‘So. What’s your thing?’ Justin spread his legs wider.
‘Not that you have to stick to it.’ Caitlyn smiled.
‘No not at all, it’s more that you have your thing, but then go wherever creativity takes you,’ Betty clarified. The three of them together, seeming well rehearsed.
‘Oh, ugh.’ Fi paused. In the few months since she’d lost her job, she had found The Thing, What She Was Put Here To Do, her Life Calling. It had been, she realised, right under her nose the whole time: she wanted to do good. She wanted to be a good person, and she wanted, now she understood that, to play it cool. ‘Politics, I guess? The environment? Like climate change and social justice stuff, I mean I guess that’s what I talked about in my interview.’
‘Oh my God.’ Justin slapped both hands to his cheeks. ‘I thought you looked familiar! Are you that tweet girl?’
To Fi the party had had a quality of liminality—it existed between, she felt, a distinct time and place, both four months past and in its effects at least (as Fi sat in the office, blushing in her infamy) still present.
The first party of spring 2016, in some eastern suburb she’d never been to, notable for its density of Real Housewives of Melbourne residents. The sun was well sunk—in danger, if anything, of rising. Fi stepped out of the back seat of the Uber, chunked heel getting stuck in a grate. Brendan took her by the forearm and yanked. An hour before she’d been at home, quite drunk thanks to Phoebe, when Brendan, one of Phoebe’s friends who claimed to be a photographer (although no one who knew him had seen any evidence to support this) had turned up at the house with a bottle of tequila and announced: ‘We’re going to a party!’ Fi assumed this ‘we’ did not include her and had been on the verge of taking herself to bed, when Brendan looked down at her and said: ‘Are you going to wear your pyjamas? I mean I won’t stop you.’
While getting dressed and plastering on a shellac of eyeshadow, she’d downed three shots of tequila to quell the excitement and hide the anxiety. As a consequence, on the trip over Fi gazed up at the car’s roof with the beginning of a headache sparkling behind her eyes, realising as she did so that in the rush of going she had not actually stopped to ask herself if she wanted to go. She wondered if she might ask the driver to take her directly home. But, after the car ride wedged between Phoebe and Brendan and their loud conversation, looking up at the car ceiling as the devoted look to God, Fi stepped out into the world, and through the threshold of a house, in which time itself would disintegrate before her, and with it her headache.
Why on earth had she wanted to go home? This was brilliant. Fi was completely awake. She followed the beacon of Phoebe’s blue dress through the crowd and found herself in a kitchen where she helped herself to the large bowl of punch.
Substances had so taken a hold of the partygoers that they had either forgotten about—or were too drunk to operate—their iPhones, and this was what gave the party its uncanny lack of era, the feeling of collapsed time. Around her, too, the décor and plants throbbed with mixed messages. The mid-century furnishings sunk them into a clean impersonal ’60s, but the birds of paradise, peeking out from vases around the house, oriented them nearer the equater. The nonchalance with which people smoked indoors, ashing into said vases, dated them again well into the last century. The partiers Fi could see—rake thin with eyes entirely pupiled, feet chunky with large boots—slid them forward again, positioning them squarely inside the ’90s New York club scene.
This was a party party; the type she had complained about never being invited to in high school (Camila: ‘Well why don’t you ask to be invited—I can call the parents if you want me to.’ Fi: ‘Do not even THINK about it.’). Fi took a huge, messy sip from her cup and wandered through the throng. She didn’t know a soul; could be anywhere, anyone. Fi felt, for once, incredibly, not weighed down with the burden of her body, the perception of others; she felt like she did not have to try and fit in, to gain acceptance, instead that she was already a part of it all.
She levelled out onto the first floor and found her friends, Brendan gripping her arm to steady her.
Phoebe and Brendan were talking to a pair of—what were they? The short one, Fi supposed, was a woman, with her long auburn hair clipped up, her heeled boots, but there was something androgynous in the angular shirt she wore, her flat chest and suit pants, something about the set of her jaw and close-set eyes. The other, tall, sans eyebrows, familiar in some way, was smoking a cigarette, and was not androgynous precisely—it was more that Fi could not tell at all if this person was a man or a woman. They stood tapping the cigarette directly over the balcony, ash falling below, silting drinks, snowing shoulders.
What on earth were they, Fi wanted to know, and opened her mouth to ask, but instead let out a tiny little gasp of recognition, and—the only thing Fi would thank herself for the next day—managed to otherwise stay silent.
The one smoking the cigarette, Fi realised, was x_fiend—or that was their Instagram name. An artist: painter, sculptor, musician. The artist who painted the brown-skinned, koala-cuddling woman that Lexi had so narcissistically acquired. Fi remembered a Twitter thread she’d read a week or so ago, penned by a gender nonconforming activist, where she’d learnt first what nonbinary meant, and then how intrusive and entitled it was to insist on knowing someone’s gender, one way or the other. She’d even retweeted it with the little clapping hands emoji, and accompanying two cents, RESPECT PEOPLES PRONOUNS—which it turned out was harder to do when (she felt it suddenly) very drunk.
The party’s atmosphere of colour and compressed time, garrulous and welcoming before, took on a threatening quality, a clown presenting a valentine’s in a dark ally. Fi felt that the people around her intuited her thoughts, would turn on her any second, she felt the vertiginous re-entry into self-consciousness: she was too childish, to unworldly, too naïve—and everyone there surely knew it.
She stood beside Brendan, silent, sipping her punch.
The boyish girl standing next to the artist addressed Fi, but Fi was too busy with her own sloshing thoughts to hear what she’d said, and assumed the defensive.
‘What?’ Fi demanded. Then felt like hurling.
The girl must have asked for a light; Brendan reached into his pocket to oblige, lighting her cigarette for her. She raised her hands in surrender, and said, ‘Never mind,’ before turning to x_fiend, Brendan, and Phoebe. Fi tried to do the same.
She did not know why this happened to her, the flipping of things from one extreme to the other. Her anxiety, at any provocation, was culpable for invoking this little backflip: innocent looks from strangers perceived as menacing judgement, small talk cross examined into personal affronts. In the late spring of 2016, it had not quite occurred to Fi that she was her own worst enemy. That she’d made high school and university hard for herself, that, insecurities unchecked, she’d stifled many possibilities for friendship, for acceptance. As it was, the only person she talked to from uni was Phoebe, and they’d not met in class (Phoebe had done an arts degree, and had a seemingly endless rotation of arts friends coming in and out of the house) but through a ROOMMATE WANTED sign Fi had found in a hall.
Four months after the party, when Fi is relating this story, or a version of it, to her new work colleagues over beer, an uncomfortable feeling will settle over her. She will wonder, or begin to wonder, if she might be the one getting in the way of the very thing she craved. Sometimes, when confronted with this feeling, Fi would look back at a social interaction she fumbled and wonder whether the problem was that she acted in the way she thought she should, saying what she thought might be the right thing—but was that the same as saying what she actually thought? What if what she thought was the wrong thing? Did that make her a bad person? As it was, she was not ever sure, when she looked back on a situation, that she knew exactly how she felt at the time. Had she suspected on the night of the party that Phoebe didn’t really want her there, or did that sense come later, with the dizzying shame and regret? Did she think then about the cause of the strange feeling in her gut, or just the quickest way to make it stop?
The boyish woman was looking at her again. Fi looked down at herself, too—into her drink, down to her breasts almost lifting out of her top, her displayed legs, the amount of glitter smeared on her body.
Whatever the motivation, Fi found herself moving upfield, on the offensive.
This bitch, thought Fi, must think she looked ridiculous. This skinny bitch in her shirt, what was she even doing there? Fi attempted to glare at the girl, but almost lost her balance. She noticed then that the girl’s eyes, unlike those of x_fiend—or pretty much anyone else at the party, for that matter—were not eclipsed by pupils. In fact, in the bright lights they were reduced to pinpoints, circled in a clear rim of hazel. She wasn’t even drinking anything. Fi tried to ask her why she’d bothered coming, and if it was just to judge people.
Then the skinny bitch asked: ‘Are you okay?’
This made the room spin. Fi nodded, sucked on her teeth, but then sunk down to the floor, leant her head back onto the railing and closed her eyes.
‘Hey? Sweetie, are you okay?’
Sweetie! What was her problem. Fi felt she was spinning and giggled again, squeezing her palms into her eyes so she could be in the dark.
‘I don’t think your friend is doing too well.’
‘She looks alright.’ That was Brendan, dismissive. Fi would have to be careful with him. It came to her in the clarity of darkness: the arm grabs, the compression of his body against hers in the back of the Uber, they were more than a friendly gestures, more than comfortable proximity.
‘God, she didn’t drink the punch did she? Maybe it’s time to go home.’ This was a voice she didn’t recognise, which meant—Fi couldn’t believe it—x_fiend, had noticed her.
‘Fi?’ That was Phoebe’s voice, much closer than she was expecting: ‘Fiona? Are you okay?’ A hand touched her shoulder.
Fi nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
Fi nodded again, steeled herself to talk and said, ‘I’m sure.’
‘We’ll get you home soon, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I can take her home.’ Brendan did not clarify what home, and Fi felt like she was going to be sick.
‘No.’ Phoebe, good Phoebe, who would never let anything happen to her. ‘I’ll take her back to ours soon.’
‘Just give me a little bit,’ Fi said to her knee, but they did not hear her. The conversation had already moved on. Fi’s world, now confined to her kneecaps, went dark. Words flowed over her, most of which she let pass, some of which she caught and considered for a moment. ‘Surprised.’ ‘Professional Wanker.’ Did she have her phone? Her phone was in her hand. Her bag? She’d check in a minute. ‘Homophobia.’ Someone ought to kill themselves apparently. ‘Love boats.’ ‘Lambert.’ Who was Lambert? She knew Lambert! Lambert was evil old white guy of the national radio variety who actually should kill himself—she slurred something out loud to this effect, and then there was laughing, at her or with her, for once it didn’t matter. There was laughing and she was laughing too—she wasn’t fully conscious, but she could still get a joke. She was at this amazing party with these incredible people and she could still get their jokes because she was a part of the party—it was so funny! This was where she belonged. She had to let people know she was there, she was a part of it.
Then, there, drunk on the floor, Fi groped around in her bag, and, shattering any remaining illusion of timelessness, pulled out her iPhone, opened Twitter, and performed—considering her state of inebriation—some truly remarkable linguistic feats.
Outside, as if knowing the trick was up, the sun crested over the horizon, brought forward the morning, as solid as it always came.
Her first day in the new office had gone fine. The clouds opened up and blessed the rooftop bar with golden autumnal light. The beer looked like honey, or egg yolk cracked open, crystalised. It tasted like the beer of Fi’s imagination—the remnants of summer, apricot, and something sour. No, her first day had gone well. Very well, even. Fi had finished the first day at a new job with a pint in her hands, and three of her new work friends sitting beside her. She had never had work friends before. The end of the working day sent the city’s occupants all at once into traffic, back to urban sprawl, like ants fleeing the nest as it filled with water.
‘So, I made the initial tweet on the Sunday morning, right? Like I don’t know, I guess I just woke up really angry.’ Fi took a big gulp of beer, forgetting the promise to pace herself. These were not, she assured herself, real lies as such. She had fallen asleep at the party. ‘But then I just got on with my day.’ She’d been sleeping off her hangover, but there wasn’t any need to specify why she hadn’t looked at her feed, or that by the time she woke up there wasn’t much she could do about the tweet either way. And so what if she left out the fact that the joke, if you could call it that, wasn’t her original idea? As far as Fi knew, it could have been. With each retelling it became easier. Sometimes, she even convinced herself it was her own bitchy little quip. Who didn’t hate James Lambert? The self-appointed shock jock was a literal caricature of evil.
‘So, I look at it again, like that night, and it’s gone—’
‘Crazy. I remember. I actually retweeted it,’ Justin said.
Fi flapped her hand forward, a gesture like aw shucks, and continued. ‘Like crazy crazy, like wild. I don’t know, I guess I’ve never gone’—here she made bunny ears—‘viral before. And I thought it was good, like just to take the piss out of a—’
‘—Raging homophobe?’
‘Disgusting old man?’
‘Right, like some gross bigot. But then the next day I get fired.’
‘I can’t believe that. Weren’t you employed by some super hippie chick?’
‘Alexis Bostik.’
Betty let out a little gasp, but Justin and Caitlyn remained impassive.
‘You know.’ Betty waved her hand in a circle, impatient. ‘The sign girl.’
Justin frowned, and Caitlyn tilted her head. Betty already had her phone out, googling. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting her phone forward.
They put their heads together, Caitlyn still looking confused and shaking her head.
‘No fucking way,’ Justin said, pulling his glasses down to the tip of his nose and grabbing the phone to zoom in on the photo.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, she was some activist in the seventies—eighties?—I don’t know.’ Justin waved his hand dismissively, handed the phone back to Betty. ‘That’s wild though.’
‘I know, and apparently the next morning, I didn’t realise at first but he’d—like James Lambert—had gone on the air and given me this full blasting, calling me a spoilt brat and a whore.’
‘Urg—’
‘That’s so gross, I’m so sorry.’
‘I know, a fully grown man, just ripping into a twenty-one-year-old.’
‘God, you’re so young.’ Caitlyn shook her head.
‘So then, obviously, with Lexi firing me it looks like—’
‘Oh right.’
‘So now, I guess no one is willing to work with her. Because she—’
‘Sided with a raging racist homophobe?’
‘Right.’
‘Oh my God, it serves her fucking right! I don’t know what’s wrong with people.’ Betty said, finishing off her drink.
They all agreed they did not know what was wrong with people.
‘Another round?’
Fi nodded, finished her beer, then went to the bar and bought another, not even flinching at the thought of paying her rent late—or truthfully, of the call she would make to her mother to ensure it wasn’t.
Back at the table, the talk turned not to gossip, or local politics, but, as it always did in early 2017 when it was still a novelty—and a natural segue from James Lambert—to the man, ridiculous, orange, raging through every news program. The four of them sat, making bets on how long his presidency would last, how quickly impeachment would come, the joke not yet having worn thin.
An hour of time concentrated: the leaves of a mimosa plant, opening and closing like a butterfly. A day: a patch of sky, heating up, cooling down, flushing into night. The week sees every colour pass through it. Sunflowers spin in giddy circles. In a month the whole city is embarrassed, blushing itself naked into frost, the routine of winter. Circuits of days spent in repetition, the lap of home, work, home, turns people into cartographers, sketching lines. The warmth of a gas heater in a bar, returned to ritualistically. The river runs high and still, becomes a perfect reflection of the sky, undisturbed, even more inviting, perhaps, than its blue double.
From this perspective, it’s easy to see the grass taking breaths, ants drawing abstracts in the grit, the land, living. Citrus comes: and with it a balmy week, for winter, at least, which tricks the birds into a premature spring. Winter eases and then comes the rain and sunshine both: rainbows sprouting one after the other, showing off. Then spring arrives with more commitment, and with it the plum trees and cherry blossoms flower in a blink, petals scattering in the wind. The fluff of cygnets’ feathers mature and slick themselves down into the majesty of black swans, their elegance a gift of puberty.
From here there is perspective, we can map the place, predict the future, see how the riverbed will change, encroach, be redirected. We can see the plants dying, soil eroding, reefs bleaching, land clearing, ice caps melting, debris spreading—we can see the landscape losing its verdancy in felled trees, black shadows of pollution leaking like octopus ink, temperature rising in the blue of the ocean, everything expanding, roads—human progress—spilling out from the cities like capillaries.
It’s easy to see the movement of things, with time in our ear, whispering our history. But for those of us who are standing too close to time, it is destined to pass at the same rate it always has, one second after the other. For without history to root us to the land, a second, an hour, a day, is a significant amount of life, a significant amount of time, passing.
What then for those of us who dwell on the land without stepping into it—how might time be manipulated so as to be seen?
It was spring again and the weather was outrageous, either oblivious to, or in jest of, the tone of things: across seas, over the earth plates slowly grumbling, the ocean floor reshaping itself, the ridiculous president remained. Closer to home, when Australians did bother with their own politics, a question had been asked: Why can’t some people get married?
For Fi, the change of seasons had altered almost nothing materially about life. Living—as she wrote listicles and articles on the once again record-breaking heat—between the air-con of the office and the air-con of her apartment, outside of seasons. The only significant change was in her attire, the shedding of a large green coat and the addition of some lurid earrings declaring the double positive. The office too, usually grey and indifferent, had taken up the rainbow; around her there was a palpable buzz, a feeling of momentum—Fi and her coworkers had committed themselves to creating content on the obvious moral imperative of a YES vote. That they were read and watched exclusively by people who already agreed with them was something that Fi thought irrelevant. It was just as important to let people know they weren’t crazy, that there were others like themselves. To foster a sense of belonging, acceptance. Hadn’t Fi finally found a place where she felt just that? Everyone who knew it to vote yes, knew it, and everyone who didn’t was wrong, anyway.
After Fi had gotten the job things had moved quickly: she realised, for instance, that she was not particularly suited to share-house living, not the type of share house she was living in, anyway. It smelled. It leaked. It moved. Summer was spent draped over outdoor chairs, melting; winter under three blankets. Nobody could get a handle on the recycling. Yasmin stole the projector. Fi, being so busy, began to eat more takeout and hoard bowls in her room. While the differences between Fi and the social butterfly Phoebe made a bit of sense, it was less clear why she had so much trouble with Hannah. Hannah with her shaved head, who listened to admittedly grimy punk music that Fi couldn’t really stand, but who wore badges for humanitarian causes pinned to her singlet, and spent her free time handing out pamphlets to socialist reading groups. Fi felt there was obvious overlap between them, that they should be friends, close friends, but their interactions always felt like changing gears on a rusted-over bike. Once, Fi had asked when Hannah’s next reading group was on and asked if she could join. Hannah had nodded absently and said, ‘Sure, Fi, but you know the point of discussion groups is that you have to listen to everyone.’ (What the fuck!)
One too many silences invoked when she walked into the kitchen had Fi convinced that Phoebe and Hannah had allied against her, and she began to read into every interaction, relating her findings on calls home to her mother, who, as always, made the mistake of offering practical advice (‘Have you tried talking to them?’) rather than an attentive ear, while Fi tried not to sob too loudly.
So, when Betty’s roommate moved out, Fi moved in before she was officially kicked out. She quietly deleted Phoebe and Hannah from Facebook, blocked them on Instagram, turned firmly toward her new friends. These were the people she worked with, lived with, spent her free time with, the people she wanted to surround herself with: people who were going somewhere, who were upwardly mobile. Not the trendy party girls who engaged in leftist politics because it was in vogue (Hannah) or didn’t even care about the state of the world they were living in anyway (Phoebe). When Fi had tried talk to Phoebe about politics, she’d see her eyes begin to glaze over, and on more than one occasion, when Fi pointed out to Phoebe that one of her dim, shallow, trust-fund art friends was dim and shallow, Phoebe had frowned and said: ‘She’s really sweet, actually.’
(Two years in the future, Fi would walk past Phoebe at a supermarket. They would not stop to talk, but the latter would offer Fi a small, warm smile. Only then would it occur to Fi that her presence might have felt as oppressive to Phoebe as Phoebe’s had felt to her. Maybe Phoebe wasn’t a shallow social climber—or, not exclusively—maybe she just valued the comfort of friends. And wasn’t trying to find real friends like groping around in the dark—and hadn’t Fi spent her adolescence, desperate for a light switch?)
And then there was her mother. Increasingly unable to hear about things going wrong—and hysterical at any mention of climate change—Camila’s phone calls to her daughter now almost always ended with A) Fi crying, B) Camila crying, C) Fi yelling, D) her brother’s voice yelling in the background to leave Camila alone, or E) all of the above. But Fi had found her thing, the Reason She Was Put On This Planet, and she had found, just as importantly, that she was good at it, and a mother terrified of reality was not going to stop her.
It was true that the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Betty was a lot more modern than anything she’d ever imagined herself in—clean tiles, economical grey carpet, large TV in the lounge. But it grew on her, and with time she realised she was suited to it. Suited to covering the large couch she and Betty could both comfortably lie on with bright-coloured throws, binging series together in their pyjamas while Betty lay catatonic on weed brownies, or speaking in a strange mix of Farsi and English on the phone to her parents. Suited to the microwave oven she could make mac and cheese in. Suited to the miracle of her own bathroom where she spread out, threw towels over every surface, had an entire drawer just for earrings (cacti, owls, sheep, fruit—every kind—each one with a corresponding outfit and necklace). In the groove of grit between the bathroom tiles, eyeshadow glistened in pearlescent lines.
They fancied themselves opposites—Betty with her lace dresses and black lipstick, her proclivities for music that growled, and Fi with her bubble-gum brightness—and played it up for the amusement of strangers. But really they lived symbiotically, and were, at best, two ways of looking at the same thing. True difference—a life without aircon, dishwashers, multiple streaming services—was not something Fi could cope with. She’d tried it out.
Fi felt Betty understood her in a way no one else had; it would take years for Fi to realise she’d mistaken shared cultural interests for a deeper soul-level bond. That’s not to say cultural bonds didn’t matter—together they covered the apartment in knick-knacks, and posters of their favourite bands and series: My Chemical Romance, Lana Del Ray, Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars. They borrowed clothes from each other without needing to ask. Fi had even gotten hooked on the impossibly long (and disturbingly sexual) fantasy series that Betty loved. She had begun to wonder, too, if her feelings for Betty didn’t border on the romantic, and although the idea of sleeping with her friend was not appealing, Fi could not precisely say if the idea of sleeping with anyone was appealing. When Betty did have a guy over it always left Fi with the sensation of swallowing a mouthful of too-hot tea.
As it was, Betty didn’t have guys over often; most nights they drank hot chocolate or ate pasta and dissected the day together. One night, early on in their shared living, as Betty lay face down on the couch, sipping orange juice from a straw, Fi had related the whole Lexi saga in greater detail. Betty was the perfect audience, widening her eyes, gasping, saying, That bitch! at all the right moments. When Fi finished with a dramatic sigh and said, ‘So that’s what happened,’ Betty grew silent, then stage whispered: ‘Do you know where she lives?’ And when Fi said she did (although she probably shouldn’t) Betty leapt up and declared: ‘Now for the craft section of the evening!’
At three a.m. the two friends jumped on their electric scooters (purchased together, one black, one pink), and rode for thirty-minutes, shrieking and laughing, waking up three successive neighbourhoods. It occurred to Fi only as they were approaching that they were both too sober; in fact, Fi no longer got drunk really, they’d both decided they didn’t enjoy the out-of-control feeling that booze gave them. Right then, though, a few drinks would have helped. Turning onto the street and quietly whizzing down a hill, Fi felt she might be sick and shushed Betty anxiously. When they approached the right number, both of them became silent. Confronted with a huge timber home clothed in jasmine, it was Betty’s turn to shush—Fi had begun to giggle nervously.
What exactly they were going to do with the bucket of fake blood, what they were going to write on the walls of Lexi’s house, they would never find out. At that moment of paralysis, a lamp in the front room came on: a silhouette of a woman framed in the window, looking down upon them. They both shrieked, hopped back on their scooters, and fled. In the confusion, the bucket was left behind. It had happened so quickly Fi had almost forgotten the whole thing. Or, no: whereas Betty liked to retell their adventure for the amusement of friends—Justin laughing, declaring that Lexi deserved it, that they should have flung the bucket over the fence; Caitlyn offering a closed lipped-smile—Fi avoided the subject, excused herself to the bathroom intent on ignoring whole-body discomfort she associated with the excursion. It opened up too many eddies at once—public shaming, job loss, jail time. So, Fi left the memory alone, and, like a jacket forgotten in the back of a damp cupboard, let it grey with mildew.
Despite the pleasures of her work and domestic environments, Fi often felt her real life was online. It was there she lived fully, enthusiastically, and with a sense of total control. It was there she felt most understood, where she found other people like her, righteous, pissed off, not afraid of saying something. There was nothing there she could not conquer: this was where she spent all her free time, where, in fact, her time happily dissipated under her fingertips. It was where she was in the morning before Betty woke up ten minutes before they had to leave for work, and began rushing around like a maniac. It was where she spent her rare evenings alone, and where she was on her lunch break as she sat next to Betty and Justin, each one down their own holes, occasionally talking to say out loud that they liked one another’s tweets, before liking them again on-screen. Sometimes they would have whole conversations on Twitter, sitting next to each other, watching an audience accumulate in views.
And it was how she knew that neither Lexi Bostik, nor her organisation, had suffered any permanent damage. Fi had, she felt, failed. Lexi Bostik had been allowed to continue with her bullshit performative politics, and nobody (nobody!) saw through it. It had been almost a year since Fi was fired and Lexi’s resulting public trial, but now Fi could see that nothing, in the end, had come of it. Despite her downfall, Lexi released public statements, ran successful campaigns and protests, while Fi’s cryptic tweets about positions of power being abused, urging people in so-called radical spaces to speak out about mistreatment, were sent out and then flailed, soon forgotten to the tune of half a dozen likes. Putting her phone down she’d find herself on the couch, alone but for the murmur of Netflix in the background, realising she was cold or tired or uncomfortable, she’d open another app, and plunge.
And it was like this, alone in the apartment, online, her feet going numb tucked up underneath her, that she found a creative solution. Clicking through, scrolling, finding connections, she felt (she imagined) like the handler on a sled: deep in complete concentration and mastery as she navigated the terrain. But, on a whim, she’d taken a new turn—she found and clicked on x_fiend’s profile on Instagram. And over again to their tagged photos. And there, eventually, she found a picture from the party, the Tweet Party. It was a photo of Brendan, x_fiend, the other woman, and—Fi realised with a sick little thrill—she could see her own feet, sparking in high heels, stretched out on the ground, like the wicked witch. Only x_fiend and the woman were tagged in the photo. Fi clicked over to the woman’s profile and actually gasped.
And here was the subject of Fi’s next article: Inappropriate age gaps. No: Sus age gaps. For—as Instagram innocently revealed—Sidney (that was the woman’s name) and Lexi were dating, or had been eight months ago when a picture of them in a park together was taken, Lexi smiling to camera, Sidney planting a kiss on her cheek, arm around her waist. If that left some room for interpretation, another picture, a few posts down, more explicitly showed Lexi in a nightgown, leaning against the kitchen counter, come-hither-like.
If Fi was being generous, she calculated, there were twenty-five years between them. Thirty, if she wasn’t. Lexi had lectured at university. Had Sidney been a student? That was really fucked up. So, Lexi was exactly the person Fi thought she was: someone who abused their position of power. Lexi Bostick was a Bad Person.
Heart thumping, Fi wondered if Sidney had been the silhouette that had thwarted her and Betty’s attempt at vigilante justice. In her mind it was always Lexi, hand still outstretched to the lamp switch, but the memory was blurry: could it have been Sidney?
For now, it didn’t matter. For now she knew something about Lexi that others had refused to see. With this new revelation, Fi locked herself in her room, sat on her bed cross-legged. She would write an article tomorrow, but fingers itching, she knew she had to do something immediately. Fi pulled her blanket over her head like a tent, and, with only the faintest whiff of deja vu, took to Twitter.
In the summer, same sex marriage passed, if not with flying colours, then with thousands of people around the country flying multi-coloured flags. Lexi Bostik briefly trended and then disappeared from Twitter. Her NGO soon dissolved for good. Betty started dating a DJ. Together, the five of them—Fi, Betty, Connor (the DJ), Justin, and Caitlyn—attended pool parties and pub crawls and drag nights smocked-out in rainbow colours that flashed and glittered. The weather promised a good summer for partying. The Twitter word count had doubled. Fi was on top of the world. Second wave feminists like Lexi were out. And Fi, Caitlyn, Betty, Justin? Well, they were going to change the world.
Waves roll in, strips of seaweed twirl in the shallows like a gymnast’s ribbons. Kaleidoscope specks of sand, pink and blue and yellow and green, seen microscopically: spiked and swirled and arrowed, like candy, like the toolkit of an extra-terrestrial, together form a golden beach as they shift and rearrange themselves, fall back into the ocean. Lichen slow-crawls across the rocks at the sea line—a green rim edging up. People frolic in the heat wave, throwing their bodies into the water and basting them on the sand in equal bouts of enthusiasm. A wind change: umbrellas unstick, children become cold and begin to fuss, car boots slam. The sun sets. The tide swells, lifts off. The water, salt and blue and green and grey, swirls, moves, rushes in a different direction, collecting somewhere new.