If Sidney arriving had been a sort of life, then her leaving was surely death. The garden agreed. Autumn, again, as it was when she’d moved in. The vegetables that usually prospered through the cooling months were dying. The zucchinis had incurred a strange rot, covering the fat green fingers in a fine white mould that collapsed soft under his touch. The peas flowers died before they reproduced. The pumpkin had fallen in on itself, a sad shrunken head.
Bad crop this year, Tomas said to himself, as he imagined a vague ancestor had while standing over dry fields, looking at their puniest son and wondering whether he would survive the winter. Tomas continued to frown at the garden, then looked up to the sky, pleading with the gods for rain, as if he had not been the one that neglected the patch in front of him. As if it were not him in charge of uncoiling the hose and watering, fertilising, pruning, maintaining soil acidity, as if it were not him who would about-face and walk the 300 metres to the nearest grocer and select from the row after row of vibrant GMO vegetables of artificial colour and shape, not a care in the world whether they were in season or not.
Although, in a garden, from the rot of death came life. So maybe this was just another form of modern purgatory, with brief interruptions of beauty and wonder and irritation in the shape of his daughter, the house alive with her, as if it had a new paint job. But then, as she always did, Minnie would leave, and he would be there alone, the place dulled, walls scraped back, muted. In the last year he had forgotten about this: the house had stayed bright in the intervals of Minnie’s absence, kept alive by Sidney’s radiance. But now she too was gone, and in the last few months he’d been reacquainted with what it was to be alone in the dimming house.
Over the fence, in his peripheral vision, he saw his neighbour, Jeanine, fiddling with something in the backyard, navigating her way through long tufts of onion grass fighting its way through the cracks of her concrete-paved yard.
Jeanine slipped behind her car, a hatchback with a large Western Bulldogs mural over its bonnet. The decal was matt and faded, as if it were done—and Tomas suspected it had been—with acrylic paint. The inside of the car was likewise adorned with the team colours, a little bedazzled bulldog hanging from the rear-view.
Stretched across the girth of Jeanine’s shoulder, what had once been a bright tattoo of the team’s logo was a mess of blue and red. Today, Jeanine was wearing a leopard print top and her usual tight jean shorts. She swapped these jean shorts out for trackie-dacks—this was what she called them—only on the coldest winter nights. Her real bulldog, Westie, panted in his pathetic way at her heels as she approached the fence.
This was unusual: they were good neighbours, Jeanine had a sense for knowing her moment, didn’t bother Tomas when he didn’t want to be bothered. She knew to approach as he gardened, an activity he generally did for hours a week, slow-picking each individual caterpillar off his spinach, rehoming each snail that got stuck into his broccoli. When he’d moved in, he had offered her, over the fence, a tub of baba ghanoush he’d made from the eggplants in his previous garden. Jeanine: ‘No darl, I’ll stick to my Coles potato salad, thanks.’ Tomas was very fond of her.
But right now, he was busy, could she not see that? He was busy, having the kind of moment that he felt perfectly entitled to but after he finished, he knew he would not let himself indulge in again. This was, he thought, the exact reason he should never have let Sidney in the house.
Jeannie approached the fence and rested her considerable breasts on the metal rail. Great things, life-giving. They scared the living shit out of Tomas. Women of his generation did not have breasts like that. Ashley’s only resembled them in the eighteen months of breast feeding, long after he’d lost access to them. He laughed, then was disgusted in himself.
‘Right there, love?’
Tomas smiled at her. ‘Yeah fine, yourself?’
‘Oh, you know. Same shit, different day.’ From her jean shorts she produced a cigarette and a lighter. She lit the cigarette and sucked a third of it down in one breath.
‘No bub today?’
‘Nah, she’s with Ashley.’
Another third of the cigarette curled into ash. ‘Where’s your bird?’
Tomas allowed himself a sigh. ‘She left.’
‘And,’ he added, ‘she wasn’t mine.’ He regretted this confession as soon as it left his lips, returned his attention to the garden. Jeanine, who thought anything beyond small talk should be saved for therapy, frowned.
‘Came to tell you the dogs are playing tonight. She paused, and then: ‘You wanna join us?’
Christ, she must have felt sorry for him. She often told him when the footy was on so whatever flood of emotion that poured from her living room wouldn’t alarm him. He’d gone over for a game once when he’d first moved, he’d brought a tabouli that sat on the table, untouched, next to slabs of overcooked meat, bread and a coleslaw. He was awkward, sat on the only armchair, while Jeanine and Tim—Jeanine’s on/off boyfriend, who Tomas had never seen wear a shirt or consume anything other than beer, yet still had the tawny strained physique of a marathon runner—sat on the couch. Draped over their legs there had been a large knitted blanket with a bulldog in the middle of it. On the floor, Jeanine’s daughter sat with her own daughter in her lap, who at two seemed unmoved by the three adults yelling at the television. Minnie had been a newborn at the time and the sight of such restraint from a toddler had given Tomas the false hope that things would improve. Jeanine’s daughter refused the armchair and, when Tomas had insisted, told him to stop the gentleman shit. She was Jeanine’s replicant, and it was easy to see how Jeanine had looked in her youth, and, conversely, what age had in store for her daughter. Together the three of them—Jeanine, her daughter, and her granddaughter—had sat, staring at the television, three generations of babushka dolls.
Tomas had sat for the length of the game in silence, then, when the Bulldogs lost and the atmosphere became depressing, excused himself. The invitation had until now not been re-extended and Tomas understood this as a kindness.
‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
‘Alright.’ Cigarette finished, Jeanine dropped the butt on pavement and stood on it. Then she looked down, sighed and bent over to pick it up again, holding it up like a baton. ‘See what you greenies have done to me? I’m a changed woman.’
Tomas tried to smile at her.
As she was leaving, she said, without turning, ‘Probably better off without the trouble, love.’
Yes. On this they could agree.
The Bulldogs, it transpired, lost this game too, and the next day Jeanine attributed the loss, as she always did, to superstition—a forgotten ritual, unheeded omens. It was the only time she ever strayed from the concrete reality of the world and embraced the mystic.
‘Makes sense, what happened,’ she mused over the fence while he disposed of the rotting vegetables, ‘saw a magpie out front, squawking his head off. Should’ve known.’ She shook her head, before slamming her cigarette down and retreating indoors.
Tomas wished he could allow this sense of wonder in his life. Wished he could have known that the tree he saw when Sidney arrived in the early autumn last year, leaves green at the bottom, red at the top—no in-between with orange or brown—was a warning. STOP. But he did not, and even if he did, and had imbued it with meaning, he suspected it would not have changed the course of events, nor would he have wanted it to.
The tree was unimportant.
What was important now was that there were worms in the garden, that the soil was rich and had a good alkalinity to it, that it had been watered, that the seedlings in the greenhouse were ready for planting out within the week, and that he would be on time for his shift tomorrow morning. He should cook dinner, do something on a device without blue light—read a book, even—then go to bed. Instead, Tomas went inside, opened a beer, turned on the television and selected a movie from an independent streaming service.
In the movie, Robert Pattinson was in space. He was literally in space: he was fixing something on the outside of the spaceship. Inside the spaceship a baby was in a makeshift crib, crying. Through a baby monitor, Robert Pattinson tried to shush the baby. The baby wailed and Robert Pattinson dropped a spanner, it flew off the edge of the spaceship, then spun silently out into the universe. Tomas got another beer. The ship was losing power, Robert Pattinson disposed of his dead crew, their bodies fell down into space, which did not seem correct, scientifically speaking—they should have drifted off, slack, spread akimbo like celestial bottom feeders. But also, Robert Pattinson and the baby were not drifting around the spaceship, so there was synthetic gravity at play. Would raising a baby in zero gravity be easier?
Tomas thought back to the early days of parenting and figured there was something to this. If he could’ve left Minnie floating, for just a second, while he grabbed her dummy, her milk bottle, taken a piss, how smoothly this would have gone down. If the headaches of her early morning cries could have been alleviated without the added pull of the earth’s rotation, if the caress of buoyancy would have calmed her down. If she had not broken out of Ashley in a great wave of blood and horror, eardrum-thumping screams, coated in a thin slime of goo like a little alien, but popped out and floated upward with a cute giggle, ready to be plucked from the air and covered in kisses. This could actually have happened, Tomas would not know. At the hospital Ashley had not wanted him in the room, and then she did want him in the room, and then he had almost passed out at the tiny head peeking out, and then he had moved to be beside Ashley to hold her hand. He did not remember anything past this until he had Minnie, wiped clean, swaddled in a blanket and in his arms, the overwhelming fact of her. But Ashley, Ashley who had pushed a human baby out of her delicates, had later thanked him with a small, exhausted smile, ‘I’m glad,’ she said, ‘I can count on you.’
There was always the chance that, in zero gravity, Minnie would have slipped between his fingers out an open window, floated up into the sky, up and up and up, until she became a speck and then was swallowed.
Mia Goth had no eyebrows. Mia Goth possibly always had no eyebrows. Tomas grabbed another beer and texted Ashley to ask how Minnie was, Ashley obliged him and sent him a ten second video of her slamming a Peppa Pig doll on a plastic horse and saying, Ride pony, ride, and then making raspberry noises that were, he realised, meant to be the horse braying. Was the notion of pigs riding horses any more absurd than humans riding horses? Three tubs of toys in varying states of brokenness towered in the background. Mountains of plastic crap that Tomas’s righteous banning of had not prevented from finding a way into his house, becoming lodged into his feet, rehomed under the couch, breaking off into smaller and smaller pieces until they were ground into a toxic dust that settled on the bottom layer of the carpet.
What would anthropologists think, in the future, of this layer of history, how would they explain the detritus of bright plastic? Or would their only witnesses be aliens? Would the earth, half flooded, half burning, be dismissed as an uninhabitable planet?
Juliette Binoche went into a room and masturbated—or maybe she had sex with the room. This was unclear. There was a garden on the spaceship. There was kale in the garden. Tomas frowned, what had happened to his kale? It too must have died. There was a complicated backstory set on Earth involving trains. The crew members were all criminals, sent as guinea pigs to find a new planet. They were violent and needed to be subdued with drugs. They all had sex with the sex room except Robert Pattinson. The sex room was used by Juliette Binoche to collect sperm so she could make the women crew members pregnant, all of whom miscarried. Robert Pattinson would not have sex with the sex room, so Juliette Binoche drugged and raped him, collected his sperm and impregnated Mia Goth. Andre 3000 laid down in the garden and died. Robert Pattinson and his baby were flung together deeper into space. Everyone else was dead. The baby was a child, and then a teenager. There was another spaceship filled with dogs.
Tomas opened his phone and looked at a picture of his daughter, swiped and looked at a video where she was helping him garden. She picked up a spadeful of compost and then walked over to a garden bed and tipped the empty spade, then looked confused at the phantom throw. Her arm had slackened in the journey—the video panned back to the compost, revealing the dark trail left in her wake.
At the end of the movie Robert Pattinson and his daughter approached a black hole. The spaceship rattled. Tomas decided he liked the movie.
It was easy, when Tomas was away from his daughter, to become nostalgic, forget the moments of pain, the hours of tantrums, the insipidness of Peppa Pig, to blink them out of his memory, to edit for only the cute and wholesome.
Tomorrow, Tomas would work in the warehouse in the massive shopping centre near his house. The day after that he had to go to the other side of the city, a two and a half hour round trip. The day after that he was not rostered on. He would see Minnie that day. Upright on the couch, Tomas fell asleep.
On the morning after she moved in, Sidney slept until the sun was a pin in the middle of the sky. When she at last rose, she left the house and reappeared a half hour later with a chemist bag, disappeared into the bathroom for two hours, then remerged with hair that was cropped short.
She came out into the backyard wearing overalls over a green bra and smiled brightly at Tomas who was squatting down, pruning the garden. He knew enough about women to know a haircut this dramatic and impromptu meant something—a sudden change, a spiritual rejuvenation, a mental breakdown—and understood immediately his mistake at inviting Sidney to be his housemate. Whatever this woman wanted from him, he would give her.
Tomas sat back on his haunches. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘what happened to you?’ He remembered the oath he had made to her, to himself. Not like that, I promise.
Sidney laughed. ‘Rude,’ she said.
Then she came and knelt down beside him. ‘What are we doing?’
He handed her a pair of pruners and told her to get some gloves from the shed.
She went into the house and returned with a jumper on under her overalls.
She began to prune with no gloves on, soil working its way into the beds of her fingernails. They were sitting there together, on their first day as housemates, clipping yellowing leaves, when Sidney turned to Tomas and told him it was her birthday.
Tomas told her she was pruning the broccoli wrong.
Sidney mocked outrage.
Tomas took off his gloves, got up to go to the shed. In his head he quietly dismissed his oath, threw it into the sink with his gloves, then he went into the kitchen and retrieved two beers. When he came back out, he handed one to Sidney.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said, ‘what do you want to do?’
She paused, looked down at the beer, and then took a large glug. What she wanted to do was get drunk, order food and watch a movie. They got beers, pizza, and watched The Fly. Tomas asked how old she was. Twenty-nine. The same age Tomas had been when Minnie was born.
‘What a wonderful, horrible age,’ he said.
Then he went into the bathroom, turning on the light rather than relying on the slips of sunlight that filled it during the day. He saw in the florescence the remnants of Sidney’s hair, soft curls of auburn settled over the ground like the leaves in the garden, like a change.
He came out of the bathroom and gave Sidney a chewing out, letting his voice rise as if in disgust, but smiling, as she laughed on the couch. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ll clean it up later.’ Jeff Goldblum’s skin fell off like chunks of rotten fruit.
Tomas stood under the shower, looking at a thread worked into the groove of the tiles. One of Sidney’s hairs. He was still finding them everywhere. In the time he’d been thinking of Sidney, Tomas had wasted, he calculated, four buckets of water. Three ovals’ worth of Amazon rainforest had been felled, logging in the bushland of NSW matched its hand. The lost carbon sink of the trees, unable to be calculated, folded. He stood under the water and let it stream into his mouth. He held this memory of Sidney, and then let it float out of the window, up and up and up. He plucked the hair from the wall and fed it down the drain. He turned off the tap and got changed.
Sidney never had cleaned up her hair. She had never cleaned up anything very well. She left wet towels in crumpled heaps on the tiles, she was an Olympically good hoarder of cups in her room. If Tomas had been annoyed at the time he couldn’t reach that emotion now, had edited it out.
He could not just let himself be at peace. Instead, the clean house depressed him; Tomas had taken comfort in these small inconveniences. A jacket slung over a couch. The shoes he would trip over in the hall. Every cupboard in the kitchen left wide open as if the place had just been ransacked. They’d reminded him he wasn’t alone.
He went into the kitchen. The cupboard doors were closed, containing all the dishes in the house. He sat at the kitchen table. He had four hours before he could leave to pick up Minnie. He opened his book and read a story about aliens who came to earth to teach humans their language. If you learnt the language, it changed your concept of time. In it, the protagonist decided to have a child even though the child would die from falling off a cliff as a young woman. She knew this because she was a linguist, and learnt the alien language, and chose to have a daughter anyway. Because of this, a chasm opened up between the protagonist and her husband/ex-husband, who did not know the language, and did not know his daughter was going to die/was dead.
When he was finished the short story, Tomas watched the movie based on the short story. In the movie, Amy Adam’s daughter died of cancer when she was still a child. Who, Tomas wondered, decided that. Who in the boardroom said: we should make her die younger, from cancer. Cancer is much more sympathetic, cancer could not be stopped. No, thought Tomas, some cancers could be stopped, if caught early enough. But there was a point of no return, when it reached critical mass, ran away with itself. It was time to go pick up Minnie before the movie finished, but he had watched it many times before, and as he found his helmet, attached the child carrier, and rode over to the north of the city, he let the rest of the scenes play out in his head.
Tomas was called into work at the last minute and had to ask Jeanine to babysit. With Sidney no longer paying the extra rent he could not say no to the shift, and he knew now he would never say no again. He rode to work, he moved boxes of things from trucks to the warehouse and unpacked the things into other boxes or removed them one by one and stacked them in neat rows. Then he went back to the truck. He did this for eight hours and when he was done he rode home. Thanked Jeanine profusely. Got Minnie home and fed. Minnie claimed she was not tired, and refused to go to sleep, or to be read a story, her eyelids drooping. Tomas picked her up and held her, where she continued mumbling that she was not tired for half an hour before falling asleep mid-sentence, after which he put her down on her bed. He went into the kitchen. The sun was still out, although soon it would start setting before his shifts finished. A breeze came through the kitchen window, and then Sidney was there, wrapping her jacket closer around her instead of closing the window, squinting into her laptop. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that even if we reach the Paris agreement, the reef will still die?’
‘Yes,’ he said, remembered himself saying, ‘I do know that.’ Then he’d gone over and closed the window.
‘Oh,’ she said, and left him.
Tomas in the present mimicked himself, went over and closed the window again. Yes, he thought, he did know. Cancer could not be stopped, after it reached the precipice. He sat down on the couch, opened his book but did not read. Wind battered at the roof. Again Sidney appeared to him, waking from a nap on the couch to the sound of sycamore tree seed pods falling the roof. ‘What the fuck was that,’ she said. The wind stopped, and she was again gone.
Tomas lived his life in the seasons. Ever since he was a child, his brain had worked this way—he found it close to impossible to recall winter in the middle of summer, and likewise became hopeless in the middle of winter when he forgot it would be warm again. Instead, he remembered things that happened at the time of year he was occupying, the scents and images of the season rousing ones from times before. Of his childhood, he did not remember much in detail. It had been a lot of the same, a cosy routine in the background while he had gotten taller. He wondered sometimes if he was causing Minnie irreparable damage, how he had managed—despite issuing from the perfect example of a cookie cutter happy family—to be such a fuck up. But Minnie was sturdy, could withstand change, and to her, having separated parents—parents who had not really been together in the first place—was nothing. A few weeks ago, Minnie had asked what happened to Sidney, and when he told her she left to go back to her family, Minnie had not asked again.
Minnie would be fine.
Tomas was another story.
None of the clichés were true. The random algorithms people assigned to getting better; that the number of months it took to get over someone could be calculated by the number of years of the relationship, halved. By this logic Tomas should have taken at least a month to get over Ashley, and not been immediately and noticeably relieved when they decided not to bother playing happy family.
Anyway, Tomas and Sidney had not been together at all. Not in the traditional sense, but he knew, Tomas understood in his soul, that he was doomed to live the year ahead of him thinking of the last, both years played out side by side, autumn into winter into spring into summer. He understood this as surely as he understood that he was left handed, that each year the seasons would become more obsolete, that Jeanine would appear on the first cold day of winter in ugg boots, saying, fuck it was a cold one, as surely as the sun would breach the horizon, birds would sing, tides would go out and so on and so on—but then the year would be over, and as it played out he would let everything go, float out the window. Up and up and up.
Minnie was standing in the hallway. She looked confused. ‘You didn’t tell me a goodnight story.’
‘You fell asleep.’
Minnie began to run on the spot. Was she trying to stamp her feet?
‘What happened to your manners?’
‘Please!’
‘Alright, I’m coming.’
Minnie tucked herself under the covers. Tomas read her a book about a pug, and then one about a princess with a dragon. He opened one about alpacas with maracas. Minnie told him that book was for babies. He put it away. ‘No,’ she said, ‘read it, just to check.’
When Minnie looked like she was asleep, Tomas moved to leave. ‘One more,’ she said. He went to the bookshelf.
‘No,’ Minnie said, demanded what she demanded of him most evenings, ‘make one up.’
‘Okay,’ Tomas said, ‘give me a minute.’ Then took a big gulp of water from the cup on her bedside table, winced at the residue of her saliva, inhaled, exhaled, and began his story.
One day, on the outer rim of the milky way, a saucer sped through space. Two aliens were rushing toward earth. They sent a signal, a bright green flash to alert any possible citizens to their arrival. The aliens had sophisticated technology that could detect the curves of the planet, its history, lay it all out before them.
On their journey through the universe they’d watched as the planet had cooled and warmed, finding equilibrium, but in their recent travels they’d discovered something. The planet that was supposed to be cooling, was supposed to be spreading its ice sheets slowly over the ocean, was warming at alarming rates, the ice falling into the water in great slabs.
When they got closer they realised that the planet had a diversity of intelligent life forms, which resembled, to some degree, the species that had inhabited their own in the time before. The dominant species was bipedal, like themselves.
On closer inspection, it looked as if these creatures were responsible for the warming of their planet—the way they farmed the four-legged animals and the rate at which they took large quantities of the slick things from the sea was alarming.
The closer they got, the more horrors they discovered. The dominant life form dug deep into their planet and removed the ancient layers of it to fuel the continuation of their species; they used their planet as if it were an infinite resource.
Altruistic and distressed, the aliens were determined to alert the species to the damage they were causing.
On their trip between the orbits of Pluto and Neptune they began to learn the primary language of the creatures. They beamed a message to prepare the Earthlings for their arrival.
They landed on a part of the planet alight from the star, where the earthlings were awake. They stood next to each other, closed their immense eyes and clicked with grief and hope.
The Earthlings had gotten their message and the leaders had gathered together to receive them.
The bigger and gentler alien put on a helmet and beamed down into the middle of their circle of leaders.
‘Greeting Earthlings,’ the alien began. ‘We mean you no harm. We have a message. Your Earth is dying, and you are the culprits.’
‘What do you mean?’ said one of the leaders, who had a pink complexion and a fat layer of blubber on him.
‘Your Earth is dying,’ the alien repeated, ‘and you are the culprits. Your Earth is warming when it should be cooling. Soon this planet will be in ruin.’
‘Oh,’ said the human with the blubber. ‘Can you give us a minute?’
The alien was confused, but returned to their ship. Together the two aliens watched what was happening below. After a time had passed, a human waved at the ship. This time they went together, confident that the Earthlings’ weapons had no power over them.
The leaders gasped. ‘How many of you are there?’
‘This is not important. We have a message. Your planet is warming—’
‘Yes,’ said an Earthling with long hair and a dark complexion. ‘We know.’
‘What?’
‘We know. What do you want us to do about it?’
The aliens inhabited each other’s emotion, uncomprehending.
The aliens beamed back up to the ship. They were wracked with mourning, hiccupping into sleep. When they woke, they commenced their research. They must have missed something, they realised, in their trip racing through the solar system. They had been so focused on delivering their message that they did not stop to see if the information had already been known to the Earthlings—it had seemed obvious to the aliens that it was not. The aliens went over their interaction with the Earthlings and began to understand the problem. They did not understand this word, ‘know’, as it was used by the Earthlings. Something in their translation had become lost, buzzed to static. To them, to know something and do nothing about it was to not know.
It occurred to them in the night that perhaps they were mistaken, and it was the mooing creatures that were really in charge. They quickly learnt their language and went to them in a great field.
‘Your planet is in danger.’ The aliens said. ‘You must do something.’
‘Help us,’ said the cows. ‘Help us help us help us.’
The aliens retuned to the ship and redoubled their efforts toward the humans, but didn’t have any luck.
The aliens could not understand. They did not know. The two of them had travelled widely and come across many different species. Some were like them, and they found inroads to communicate with their devices. Others were nothing like them, and no bridge they tried to build could be crossed. Their appearances on these planets had been treated as visits from gods, their faces were imprinted on their stone and land, cultures had been built around them. Sometimes they went to check up on them, these cultures, looked down from a distance, to see how the deities made in their image had changed, evolved, been discarded.
Others still were not yet sentient. On the edges of space, near where the universe glimmered and rushed, they had come across creatures that breathed and moved but did not recognise them, had no self-awareness.
The aliens noticed that in some areas of Earth you could look up an see the clear rim of the milky way, stars spattered in the sky, while in others the smog of their industry obscured it. These industrial areas were where the vast majority of the humans lived. Maybe, they thought, without being able to see the distant stars, the earthlings had forgotten about their own place in the universe. The Earthlings could not see their own vulnerable planet, alone in space, could not imagine it as unique, indispensable. They had lost their perspective. What was certain was that the Earthlings would not develop the technology to find a new suitable planet before they ruined this one.
The aliens knew. They had been looking for millennia.
This species divided themselves. They knew and yet they did not know. They did everything, and yet they did nothing.
The aliens flew the solar system, continuing their doomed search for somewhere they could call home.
Many laps of the universe later, they would visit again, look down on to the ragged Earth, and contort themselves into sorrow.
That was autumn, this was winter. The deciduous trees had shed their leaves, looking to Tomas, as he rode across the bridge over the Maribyrnong, like skeletal hands, not reaching up to the sky, but clawing their way through the ground, things that had torn their way up from hell. His tyres cut trails in the sludge of congealed fallen leaves and flicked mud at his back, sullying the branded cooler bag he carried with dribbling lines. Bad week for the factory work: two shifts when he normally got between four and six. His boss had shrugged at him, something about delays with shipments, something about winter slowing down demand, one of the outlets being refurbished. It had happened before. If this time it did not seem right to Tomas, had a whiff of impending cutbacks about it, he didn’t worry, found it impossible to worry about losing something he did not enjoy, even if that something supported himself and, however peripherally, however insufficiently, his daughter. More work would come, or it would not, and he would keep on inhabiting space, recycling air, enacting his life, battling the exhaustion—mental, physical—of existing as a cog. Wondering if he’d ever find the will to be angry again.
Hoping that tomorrow, despite himself, a warehouse shift would come.
The morning curled, Tomas’s breath came out of him in a large huff. Minnie liked these mornings, would run out of her room and into the backyard without shoes, shrieking with delight, breathing out emphatically as the sun leaked yellow into the sky and her feet became cold with dew while she ran back and forth along the fence, whipping Westie into a state.
Sometimes Jeanine would come out and calm her down. ‘Got to be gentle with him love,’ she’d say. ‘He’s an old boy like me.’
Tomas would let Minnie play until she wore herself out and had to be situated in front of the heater to defrost her toes while he made porridge.
But Minnie wasn’t there that morning. Instead it was Sidney who came to him, a visitation. Walking out of her room bleary-eyed, a soft blanket wrapped around her while she made coffee. She looked at his bare feet and shivered. ‘Put some socks on, for the love of God.’ In all her years down south she had never, she’d told him, gotten used to the cold. She missed the Brisbane winters which hinted at frost, and then snapped to spring. More of a practical joke than a season. She yawned, asked him what he was up to today, and then, like always, disappeared.
It was parent-teacher afternoon at Minnie’s kindergarten, and Minnie would come home with him afterward. Last time he’d picked her up on the bike she’d wailed like he’d sentenced her to hard labour. In truth she was getting a little big for the carriage, and her four-year-old legs could not be reasonably expected to ride on her own bike all the way to the west, not in this cold. So: the car, if it would start. And it did, with a little cajoling, the engine unimpressed with the frost. As Tomas left he saw Jeanine in her Ugg boots, pulling up the onion grass in her front yard, at once finishing and lighting a cigarette. As he reversed down the driveway, she lifted her hand. In the space between her fingers: the sky—miserable, white.
The kindergarten was one of those schools with Child-Led Learning. The children ran around with chickens, constructed large abstract shapes with miscellanea and lost their shoes. More than once, Tomas had picked Minnie up wearing a shirt he had not dropped her off in. One time, she had come home with a haircut from a pair of zig-zag scissors, her hair standing up like an echidna. What he’d said to Ashley when he dropped Minnie off the next day: ‘Our daughter, the leading avant-garde fashionista.’ Ashley was unimpressed.
Through the gate with his phone in hand, one of the mothers with dark fashionable eyebrows accosted him.
‘Oh, so you do check your phone.’ Katrine, her name was, Tomas remembered.
Before he could answer, Katrine stormed off toward the playground, sniffing in the same dramatic way she had in his bed the morning after.
What nobody told Tomas when he’d first entered the world of other school parents, and in doing so the world of single mothers, was that if he slept with one of them, he would have to go on seeing them for months, possibly years, after, and they would invariably not be cool about it.
He saw Ashley by the water bubbler, noticed her looking, hoped she hadn’t seen the whole interaction.
As he approached she raised her own impeccable eyebrows.
‘Single dads are hot property, I can’t help it.’
She pulled a face that made him laugh. Even trying to be ugly she was beautiful. Minnie emerged running from a group of children to hug his leg. Ashley knelt down to wipe dirt off her face. Minnie whined at her in Vietnamese. She looked up at him and said in English: ‘Dad, come see the garden.’
Minnie held on to his hand, pointing and misidentifying plants. In the middle of winter the class garden had not fared much better than his own. The spinach remained small and sparse. The broccoli refused to budge over a small nub nestled among the leathery leaves. These foods required too much cultivation, too much hand holding, became stilted in frost.
It was the onion grasses of the world, Tomas knew—things that burst through cracks—that would prevail.
Waiting at the gate for Minnie to kiss Ashley goodbye, a brunette mother who had been eying Tomas all afternoon approached him. She introduced herself as Clara, handed him a piece of paper, then walked on in one swift motion.
He was by the gate looking down at the phone number scrawled on the piece of paper when Katrine marched up, child in hand, and hissed, ‘You know what your problem is? You like the idea of women, but you don’t actually like us.’
‘Minnie,’ Tomas called, ‘it’s time to go home.’
As they pulled into the driveway, the car bumped over strong tuffs of onion grass.
The relaxing mess of Minnie: a lunch box open on the couch, lid leant against the television; two socks, un-matching under the dinner table; toys—garbage truck, plush narwhal, creepy wooden doll—used to anchor the curtain to her space down. It was late, Minnie had stayed up, unknown to Tomas, terrified of the gentle swaying curtain, the things that lived behind it, until she’d overcome her paralysis and called out. Now the curtain was still, her fears allayed, her question, Where is God, Daddy?, hushed in it being Very Late and Time For Sleep.
It was two a.m. and Tomas was supine in bed, his computer bent into an obtuse angle on his thighs, watching a movie in which Ethan Hawke was a priest. Although he kept one earbud out so he could hear Minnie if she woke again, in truth he didn’t need the audio, had watched the movie enough times to mouth along with the dialogue, intuit the mood of the soundtrack.
Ethan Hawke was having a crisis of faith. His congregation had dwindled, his church was used a as a commodity to tourists.
Probably, Minnie would be happy with an answer like In Heaven, or even On a Cloud.
Amanda Seyfried needed Ethan Hawke’s help. She was pregnant, her boyfriend wanted her to get an abortion; he was an environmental extremist and spent hours a day on his computer researching.
He, Tomas, could not reasonably be expected to explain where God was, metaphysically, to a four-year-old, especially when he was uncertain about—or in truth unbothered by—the existence of God in the first place.
At some time in the recent past, Ethan Hawke had slept with a nun. Amanda Seyfried found a bomb her husband made and showed Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke was both worried about the husband and attracted to Amanda Seyfried, a situation any viewer could sympathise with. Amanda Seyfried’s husband, an actor who Tomas could not recall the name of, texted Ethan Hawke with instructions to meet him in the woods. Ethan Hawke found the husband after he had blown his brain out, blood stained deep into the snow.
Tomas fell asleep and when he woke again the credits were playing. He closed his laptop and rolled over.
Clara either did not clip her toenails or drank a lot of milk: the sharp jagged weapons that extended from her feet stripped skin off Tomas’ calf. He groaned in pain. Clara said, ‘You like that?’ and then began her own exaggerated groan. Tomas adjusted himself into a sturdier position and thrust deeper into her. If children are in a sour mood, sometimes no amount of cajoling or bribing or yelling can convince them otherwise, and his day had taken on the viscosity of Minnie’s sulk, which had oozed into his evening and remained long after she’d been handed over to Ashley. Clara twisted sideways, throwing her leg over Tomas’s shoulder, the toenail in question now threatening his neck. Did this count as coercion? The historical understanding of God was that he was wrathful. That humans would pay/were paying for their sins. One of Tomas’s earliest memories was of his grandmother, writhing on the church floor speaking in a mix of tongues and bible verses that reinforced this ideology. His own lapsed Presbyterian father had removed the giggling Tomas from this display, and he had not been required to return to church again. Of course, there was also the benevolent God, the one that forgave and encouraged forgiving, but he had not seen this sort of Christianity in the practice. Clara flipped him onto his back, got on top of him, slipped her hand around his neck and began to ride him with approximately the rhythm of a jackhammer.
Maybe God was the wind, neither wrathful nor forgiving but just there, always, whispering through the trees, convening in tunnels to yell. Where did wind come from anyway? Clara continued to ask him if he liked that, although her hand had now thrust his head up and locked his jaw, preventing him from witnessing the act or being able to comment on it. He liked the idea of Neptune, the Roman god of water. In the tides of the sea, in the bend of rivers, Tomas could concede there was something of the inexplicable, the benevolent and wrathful—and that these things were controlled by something remote, celestial, something so large as to be ungraspable.
It seemed unreasonable to him that he could not simply say that God did not exist, not to him, and that it was up to Minnie to make up her own mind, but this was, according to Ashley, too persuasive, and—until Minnie was older and capable of forming her own thoughts on the matter—forbidden. As with Santa, the Easter Bunny, or meaningful employment, there had to be room for imagination. Did Ashley believe in God? She had always been evasive on the matter, although her mother was a devout believer in the Church of Jesus Christ. This was the woman who had, that evening as he handed Minnie over, been rhapsodising—in English, as in, for his ears—about the man, the hypothetical man, Ashley would marry, a nice man with a good job (the implication: a man with a university degree and three different shades of chinos and a consistently working car and regular paycheque—a man who could provide). He had felt then his own presence in Minnie’s life flicker, saw himself phasing out of Minnie’s memories. Who was that man? She might wonder of Tomas, was he God?
Trust a man to think himself God in the throes of copulation.
With only a passing understanding of Christianity, Tomas did not know enough about religion to teach Minnie anything beyond the rough outlines. Clara had not slowed down in pace nor quietened in vocality, although her dryness implied this was perhaps a show. Tomas took charge again, twisting her back around under himself, bent over. During the transition he kneed her in the shin and apologised. Clara either did not hear or chose to ignore him. God created the big bang, and then afterwards, did not have much to do with the matter. God existed in stardust, forming great storms bigger than he could conceptualise, bigger than Neptune. S/he was just very busy being God. There was a lot going on, in the universe, didn’t you know?
Tomas slipped one hand around to Clara’s clit and began a more consistent, slower rhythm. Certainly, God could be found in the comfort of a woman, although this experience was far from holy. After he discovered the suicide of Amanda Seyfried’s young husband, Ethan Hawke was compelled to watch a documentary on climate change. The scene alternates between images of environmental destruction and the expression on Ethan Hawke’s face, lit up by the screen in the middle of the night, fire and oil and dead animals flickering between shots of Ethan Hawke’s alarmed face as he’s drawn in to the documentary, as if he were discovering climate change for the first time, as if he had finally stared into the face of God, and been horrified; as if, after years of doubting his own faith, he had found out—as he watched the earth burn and crumble—that he had none.
Clara’s moans became smaller and more genuine.
The scene was the moment of revelation, Ethan Hawke had finally discovered his own religion. He seemed, from his sheltered position in the world, from his perspective of apparent climate change blindness, to grasp the scale of the problem immediately and viscerally. He did not need to see hundreds of infographics or statistics. Clara became quiet and then squeaked like a hamster as she came.
Ethan Hawke had seen the stardust monster of God and understood its might.
Tomas continued pumping, and, after seven days, created light.
Certainly, God was in the flowers that bloomed early as spring snuck up to drape the trees in festival, in the sweet fecund smell in the air, the whistle of bird calls. Or had been for a second, before God dissipated and the devilled hand of winter grasped its way back into August, thick coats pre-emptively put into their cupboard graves retrieved. The ninth circle of hell, after all, was frozen, not burning. Still, it was sunny, and neither the stress frequency emanating from Ashley as she rushed back and forth from her kitchen to the makeshift table outside, nor the instructions her mother called out to no one in particular, could pull him out of his good mood.
Tomas sat on the tiles warmed by the morning sun, his coat thrown off, drinking a beer as he constructed Minnie’s costume for the spring carnival in two weeks’ time. Both sufficiently caffeinated and well rested, Tomas nevertheless felt a bone-deep exhaustion, and wondered if he would ever not feel that way. It was Minnie’s birthday party, although her birthday would fall the week after, and today Ashley’s house would be filled with four- and five-year-old’s becoming hysterical on cake and cordial. Minnie was herself in an enforced mid-morning nap.
Nothing was ready. Tomas sipped his beer.
‘It’s ten a.m.,’ Ashley said as she passed him.
The doorbell rang. ‘It’s ten a.m.!’ she screamed at the door.
Because Ashley was currently fixing fly-aways, or because he had laughed at her doing this and then felt bad, Tomas heaved his way up from the tiles and answered the door. It was only Luke, Ashley’s brother, bearing gifts and an insatiable grin.
They one-armed hugged each other.
‘There you are.’ Ashley grabbed Luke’s arm and began to list the things that needed to be done. Luke gave Tomas an apologetic smile and went to help.
Tomas resumed his position.
The theme of the class spring carnival this year was religion (the context of Minnie’s theological questions answered, although the questions themselves—Where is God? Why is God ruining the planet? Is God angry?—not so much). Tomas was affixing four blue arms to a black dress that had been altered to look like a priest’s cloth. (She had not been able to decide between Vishnu and a Man of God, and had settled on a gruesome hybrid). The whole thing struck him as vaguely offensive, but this is what Minnie had made, or begun to make, before abandoning it half-done, as she had with her costume the year before. Four-year-olds were not capable of cultural appropriation, surely?
Last year her costume was an astronaut. They had made it the day before Minnie’s birthday. The plan was that Minnie would spend the day before with him, her birthday with Ashley, and then Tomas would join them both, as he was this year, for her birthday party on the weekend.
But then there had been the factory fire.
A government warning had been issued: Stay Inside. Ashley had turned up and rushed Minnie away. The smoke filled the air of Footscray in large doomsday plumes. Tomas had been left, inside, a day off work, with the remnants of a costume strewn out before him, outside the apocalypse.
Then there was Sidney, kneeling.
He’d been drinking beer then, too.
‘Minnie was born on the cusp of a season, like me,’ she said.
He grinned. ‘What do you think it means?’
‘Oh,’ Sidney frowned, ‘it’s terminal flightiness, I’m afraid.’
Ashley now, in the kitchen, after telling Luke to slice watermelon, came back and relieved him of the task; he was doing it wrong.
Luke came to sit with Tomas on the floor.
Tomas handed him a beer and a blue arm.
Luke was wearing shorts. The ink of a new tattoo shone across his calf, under cling film.
‘What have you got there?’ Tomas pointed to the tattoo, looked around for another beer.
‘Octopus.’
‘Great, then you’ll know all about extra arms.’
Luke smiled. As they worked on the costume he told Tomas about his work at the nursing home, the long hours, that he was moving in with his girlfriend. They’d signed a lease. Tomas smiled, nodded along, tried to pay attention, but he was thinking of Sidney, how she’d sat next to him and helped with last year’s costume. Taken over really. He’d been drinking but she had not; after that first day together, she had not drunk at all, saying only that she was sober—her birthday, a lapse. Tomas had not probed, but he’d come to understand over the course of their time together that she was an alcoholic, or was trying not to be. He understood, at least in a nebulous way, how easily one can fall into a substance dependency. He himself had not quit smoking until Minnie’s third birthday, when he could no longer convince himself that she’d forget the image of him hunched over an ember in the garden. He had quit cold turkey and there had not been one day since that he hadn’t craved one. Each time Jeanine lit up over the fence was like a test where, no matter how much he went over the subject matter, he never got better. It was there, always, the craving for nicotine, a permanent imprint.
And then there were people like Luke. Up until the age of twenty-one Luke had been a massive stoner, unmotivated and uncaring, until he had quit one day and become the sort of man who rose at five a.m. to go to the gym and worked fifty hours a week. The way people could change like that, all of a sudden. Tomas found it impossible to imagine, thought himself always facing the same problems, over and over again. But he had forgotten his own transformation; it was so total he could no longer conceptualise the man he was before. Perhaps if he had confided in him, Luke would have reminded Tomas of the man who wore his clothes before Minnie’s birth.
Tomas had wanted to kiss her, Sidney, that evening, lying on the loungeroom floor, tipsy, as she took over his craft duties while they talked of life.
And maybe if he had things would have gone differently. Instead he’d seen a series of women he had known intimately: lying post coital, leant against a doorway, standing with one leg of their sweat pants pulled up, hair in a messy bun. The women looked at him. What do you mean, you didn’t study? one of them asked, propping herself up on her elbow. You got fired again, for chaining yourself to some sacred tree instead of going to work! It’s a fucking tree. What’s the long-term plan here, Tomas? another enquired, not letting him through the door. It’s like you don’t even want to fucking contribute! the mother of his child screamed at him, pulling her hair loose.
How to tell them they were wrong, that the endless wanting for more was wrong; how to tell them all that small quiet moments were enough?
‘Tada,’ Sidney, holding up the astronaut costume made out of silver paper and plastic bags, complete with a realistic NASA sign on the tank.
‘Ah,’ Tomas said, ‘this is awkward, she actually wanted to be a cosmonaut.’
Sidney laughed, and then—he was not just tipsy—looked at him liked she’d wanted to kiss him too. But maybe it was just the environment: stuck together, inside, with the day outside seeming to be at an end—a blanket of thick grey coasting above their heads. Or maybe he really was drunk, had imagined it. Sidney, after a long pause: ‘Goodnight Tomas.’
Would he keep meeting the threshold of himself, passing it by? Unnoticed, unlearning.
Now Ashley’s house and courtyard were full of children. Men in the backyard talking in the voice men use with each other. Dreadful conversations about stocks and clearing out gutters. Clara smiling, Katrine frowning. Tomas busied himself. He refilled cups, put out snacks. He supervised the apple bobbing, then the musical chairs, then mediated an emotional pass-the-parcel. He went and bought ice. He nodded along to parents’ veiled brags about reading levels and school applications. He listened to and heard himself say on multiple occasions that at least the winter seemed finally to be ending. He looked up into the sky, clear, blue—no black toxic monster billowing across it. Doomsday somewhere else, breaching a different horizon.
The question could no longer be evaded. The sugar and morning nap had worked Minnie up and now, after the last child had finally been picked up, with Ashley having declared the mess tomorrow’s problem, Minnie would not fall sleep. Ashley was passed out on the couch, Tomas’s jacket draped over her. Tomas sat on a pillow on the floor in his daughter’s room, finding that it had become foreign to him.
Where is God? Is God angry?
It was time for answers, but Tomas didn’t have any. Not the ones she was looking for. His brain was hollow as the beer bottle at his feet. About God, he had nothing to say. He wanted to tell Minnie not about God’s wrath or lack thereof, but about chance and luck, and things that appear God-like—that seem like divinity—but aren’t. How small, impossible coincidences presented themselves as holy, but it was in fact these things that life was predicated on in the first place—that had placed our great blue planet in the orbital Goldilocks’ zone, that made cells divide and fish crawl out of the ocean, that caused humankind to raise her hand and paint on the cave walls. It was best, he wanted to tell her, to understand these moments not as miraculous, but as if they were inevitable. Instances that could be counted on to happen, over and over again. To not put too much stock in the things that amaze you. Tomas wanted to tell Minnie how sometimes when you meet someone it will seem like God is smiling down at you, even if you don’t believe in God in the first place. He wanted to say that sometimes you meet a woman at a party—or don’t meet a woman at a party, but you spend the whole night looking at her. And she spends the whole night looking at you too. He wanted to say how you can become, at the party, uncharacteristically shy because her prettiness is so seamless and graceful as to be unapproachable. And maybe at another party if you meet this woman, or don’t meet her (because there is always another party and another woman) and see her looking at you looking at her, you will have built up the courage to go talk to her. But this time you have a flight in the morning. You are going overseas and have to leave the party early. And then the next day—although it will seem much further in the future—after you’ve sat on a plane looking over the wide landscape of Australia, its endless interior like the hide of a great wild animal, over the churning ocean, and the lush green vegetation of a foreign country, and landed among its neon city, after you have checked in and freshened up, and tried to adjust to the season, opposite to the one you just left, and taken yourself to a restaurant, you will see the woman again, unbelievably, eating dinner by herself, just as graceful, just as pretty, but the coincidence will be so shocking it will break through the impossibility of approaching her, and you will walk up to her and say—although she will be the one that looks alarmed—are you stalking me? And she will laugh.
Tomas wanted to tell Minnie that moments like that can seem like divine intervention, appear to be love, but aren’t. Weren’t. Just extreme coincides, and not that extreme when you take into account that it was tourist season, and you both went to see the cherry blossoms. Cells divide, fish crawl out of the ocean. But you will only realise this later, after you have tangled yourself together in the way that is unknottable. After you take her home, and in the kitchen make a joke, to which she will only reply, blank faced, ‘Where do you keep your glasses?’ When you will find out jokes, apparently, are for holidays only. After you find out she is destined to become another woman who is thoroughly unimpressed with your lack of ambition. Lack of qualifications, lack of yuppie-approved urgency, lack of upwardly-mobile direction. After—long after—she’s already pregnant. But he couldn’t very well tell her that.
Tomas wanted to tell Minnie other things too. He wanted to tell her sometimes you will meet people in a different way, sometimes you will meet a man wearing a faded emerald cap, who has a job for you, and only for you. He wanted to tell her that it will seem at the time, like a revelation, like, finally, a calling. But he could never, ever, tell her that story.
Tomas wanted to tell her that these are false moments, false Gods, these moments that seem like lighting striking one place, twice. But they will happen. Monkeys climb down from trees, man invents tools. He wanted to say that it was only, much later, in the quiet of a bedroom you don’t know the contents of, sitting with your daughter, in a moment of ordinary existence, trying to explain the world to her, that things will really matter. But he couldn’t tell her that.
Tomas took a sip of his empty beer, smacked his lips, and tried to begin.
‘All across the world there are many different people, all different types of people, living all different kinds of lives. They all want to know one question. Where is God? Why hasn’t God helped me? There seems to be a lot of trouble in the world, why hasn’t he done anything?’
‘How many people?’
‘Seven billion.’
‘Seven bill onion is that a lot?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘A lot.’ Did Tomas know, himself, how much seven billion was? Could he grasp it? Not properly. It was harder to tell her a story when she didn’t fall immediately asleep.
‘Imagine all those people, right, and they’re asking God for all those things.’
‘That’s a lot of things.’
‘Yes. Now all the different prayers get written up by angels. Angels can do some of the little things. “Dear God, please can I have candy on Saturday,” “Dear God, please I would very much like a puppy”. They can approve that, but most of the time, God has to go over the details.’
‘But God has superpowers.’
‘Even with superpowers, imagine all those requests, imagine if everyone on earth was talking all at once.’
Minnie paused.
‘It’s a lot of paperwork.’
Minnie nodded.
‘God—God is very busy.’
‘Busy?’
‘Yes, busy.’
‘Busy like Mummy?’
Tomas laughed. ‘Sure, busy like Mummy.’
‘What about the earth getting hot and the ocean getting bigger. And the dying turtles?’
‘Who told you about that? Did you learn that at school?’ He should have gone with the Big Bang. Creator but not controller.
‘About the turtles?’
‘Sure, about the turtles, but about the sea level.’
Now Minnie laughed. ‘You did.’
There he was again, Tomas, passing himself by, without the faintest hint of recognition.
Tomas lost the thread of his bureaucratic God. The details of the heavenly office dissipated.
‘Daddy?’ Minnie’s eyes became moist and her voice wavered abruptly.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Are the turtles really going to die?’
‘No—no, of course not. The turtles are not going to die, I promise.’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, sweetie?’
‘Did you finish my costume?’
How could he justify the end of the world in spring? When the seedings, having pushed themselves through the soil, bloomed in such abundant glory. When the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine that lined his street—pheromones combining with the fecund puffs of marigold and wattle, conspiring to lift more than spirits in the houses they surrounded. Who could deny that sultry aroma? Tomas found it close to impossible to imagine the end of things when sun showers rained down on Melbourne, when women started to wear beautiful little tops and dresses, the tang of sweat, the flash of arm, the tiny flowers carried absent-mindedly in hand. At the start of the season he always felt this way, forgot himself, the uptick in weather lifted his mood to an unsustainable optimism that engulfed and then overtook him. As his garden came up, as the trees coloured the skyline in green, white, purple, red, hues of every colour, he became almost existentially light-headed, found it close to impossible to imagine the climate crisis, the extreme weather, impending. It seemed to him too distant, too far away to conceive, like a metaphysical boogie man he had weaponised to get Minnie to behave, and he felt, underlying his euphoria, an undercurrent of something approaching guilt that would then harden into a doubt in his own beliefs—his own yearly crisis of faith—before the levels of pollen settled, the heat of summer, upcoming, presented itself as an aperitif with hidden spice, and he came to inhabit himself again, spinning, a lanced balloon, down into his own size.
But this year Tomas would be winded back into himself much earlier than usual, when the birds were still in choir practice and his tomatoes had started to blush, then—all at once—coloured to red. He had grown a variety of tomatoes, but it was the roma that took best and it was this ripe red that he kept seeing, repeated. It was the colour of his favourite banksia, it was woven into trees in hibiscus. It was, along with a light green and violet, the colour that had dominated spring fashion, and so he saw it on every shift at work, many times over, as he unpacked thousands of the same dresses and pants and tops—tops with sleeves and without sleeves and with buttons, tops cropped with embroidery and without, all the same colour. He unpacked these countless garments, in eight different sizes, then lined them up on a trolley that a young makeup-caked girl came and collected either without acknowledgement or with an insipid remark that made Tomas feel very old and very male.
It was also the colour of a mass-produced hat, white-lettered slogan emblazed across it. A hat popular with a certain subgroup of Americans, determined to make their country Great Again, but through the miracle of global shipping, one of the hats had made its way to the opposite side of the world, propped up on the knee of man who Tomas would, if pushed, probably call his best friend—although Tomas had not yet seen it.
Tomas reached the table with a jug of beer, laughed as he put it down; Joe had his own jug before him. They greeted each other in faux disappointment—how they were possibly going to get through it all?
It’d been a long time since they’d seen each other, yet they did not rise to hug, or even slap one another on the back. That level of affection was withheld, saved up for the death of a parent or unexpected diagnosis—or at least until they were intoxicated. Instead, they nodded and said, ‘Hey mate.’
Tomas asked Joe what he’d been up too, and Joe responded not much.
They swapped roles. They looked up to the bar television and pretended—at least Tomas did—to be invested in the footy.
Now they had established that nothing much was going on, they could get on with talking about what exactly had been going on, which, being life, was a lot.
Tomas liked Joe because he was practical and easy going. Because he did not, as far as Tomas was aware, complain about women in the same way he had found was a problem with other men he had tried to forge friendships with. Although it was true Tomas had not tried hard, throughout his life, to be friends with men, preferring the company of women, and it was also true that Tomas did not have access to Joe’s internet history. Tomas liked Joe even though he had shit taste in movies—Joe could talk for hours on the bright big-budget superhero movies that spawned each year like fungi after rain if Tomas let him. He liked Joe because he hated the government as much as Tomas did and because he didn’t care about what people thought about him—it did not, as far as Tomas could tell, even occur to Joe to care about that. He liked Joe because they could meet as they were now, get steadily drunker, talk with no expectation or pressure, and that would sustain them for months—years sometimes—before they would feel the need to repeat the experience, only to find that nothing between them had changed, the level of intimacy maintained.
They got on with it.
In the time they had not seen each other Joe had split up and got back together with Christina, twice. They had put down a house deposit. They were thinking of getting a dog.
‘What kind of dog?’
‘Kelpie.’
Tomas nodded.
Joe asked how Minnie was and Tomas gave him a half nod, half head shake. ‘Good, just had her birthday.’
‘How old was she now? Four?’
‘Five.’
‘Shit, has it really been that long?’ Joe said. ‘Ashley giving you grief?’
‘No, no of course not.’
Both men raised their beer glasses for a sip.
Tomas liked Joe, most of all, because they grew up in the same suburb, had been friends since primary school, and liking him was, above all, a habit.
Of all the people they knew, their lives resembled one another’s the most, so it would hurt even more, what was about to happen. The pain would be one of cleaving, a splitting not just from his own roots, but also from other men of his generation, and his ability to understand them.
Both of them were drunk enough to pixelate their peripheral vision. They had bought three more jugs, and were approaching the end of those too. They had, or were about to, run out of things to talk about, when Joe remembered something.
‘How was your trip up north? Where were you going? Just to New South Wales, or all the way up to Queensland?’
It really had been a long time—two years. Tomas took a sip of his beer, shook his head no. ‘Didn’t end up going.’
‘So you’re not caught up with all those whack jobs anymore?’
Tomas frowned, he couldn’t remember how much he had told Joe about the trip and felt a zip of anxiety running down his spine. His knee began to bob in quick pulses.
‘They’re alright, those whack jobs. But no, not anymore.’
‘They seemed pretty fucking whacky to me.’ Joe looked at him. ‘You don’t really believe that shit, do you?’
‘What shit?’
‘It’s just,’ Joe’s eyes glazed over, ‘just a little convenient, all that global warming shit, don’t you think?’
‘Jesus Christ Joe, next you’re going to tell me you’re a James Lambert fan.’
Joe went quiet, rubbing his thumb against the condensation of his beer. ‘He actually talks quite a bit of sense, I reckon.’
Tomas took a too-big a gulp and felt his eyes water in pain.
‘Ah well, mate.’ Joe looked at him, finished off his beer. ‘Time for me to be off, I reckon.’ And then, with no warning, Joe stood up and collected his belongings. Folded his wallet into his inner pocket, then put on his cap.
There it was, the hat: red—spring in ruin.
A text: Can you work today? Outside the window: sunlight, birds flirting. Tomas was on the couch, although he did not remember crawling up there from the floor he’d passed out on. He texted back that he could and then his phone went dead. He flung off the blanket and got himself into the shower, cleaned, changed. Outside, he hopped on his bike. There were large bruises on his right knee and ankle and a scrape along his bike handle.
Tomas did not feel fully awake when he arrived at work, and the pain in his knee was not insignificant. He bought himself a coffee, walked into the warehouse where he was confronted with a wall of red—the memory of the night before hitting him in a tsunami of vertigo. He was filled with an acute anxiety. His stomach churned. He wanted to call Joe with a violence that could break his friend’s nose. He pulled out his phone, but it flashed a low battery symbol and then went blank again. He looked up into wall of red, and everything it represented.
Vomiting into the toilet, Tomas’s eyes burst with light. In the clarity of the hangover, with the contents of his stomach before him, he felt anger not toward Joe, but toward himself, for his ignorance, for his failures, for how this past year, since Sidney had left, he’d let his activism slacken until he barely resembled himself.
It would not be wrong, Tomas thought, if Minnie never forgave him.
One day, a young man had a child. In the years when he was a man but not yet a father he had sustained himself on odd manual labour jobs—unqualified, compared to many of his peers, his privilege came in his body, his ability to lift and move things with dexterity. He was employed on a regular basis, and widely liked. The jobs by their very nature required a physical exertion that often allowed him to keep his mind pleasantly blank, the motions repetitive and soothing—he could work himself into a meditation where he observed the shape of his thoughts, but not their actual contents. In this way for many years he worked and lived—although it was also true that when he had worked at a job too long, when it had carved the same neural pathways thousands of times over, boredom could sear as bright as a burning sword—a sword so hot it could be wielded to break open the quantum realm, make time appear to act in reverse.
Although he knew this was no way to live, the man understood this was a symptom of the historical era to which he belonged. Very few people made a lot of money, and the rest worked for the few who did. He had no interest in working jobs where there was a metaphorical ladder to climb. Most people, throughout recent history, had worked to live, and this had been enough to sustain a life that could be described as happy. His father had been a bus driver, his mother a teacher’s aide. His parents had instilled in him this message: a job was a job, and it was the other things you built around you—a family, a house, a small life—that mattered. But his parents did not grow up in the world they had made, and so could not understand that these things were almost impossible to attain for people like him, insisting that if he worked harder life would open itself to him like a flower in spring.
Over the years he lost and found many jobs in factories and warehouses. He smelled, variously, throughout these years, like toluene, trimethylamine, and formaldehyde. These were smells he scrubbed off himself diligently so that he could indulge in women—they had always fascination to him, beautiful and terrifying—and one of the few pleasures that, along with films and gardening, he filled his life with. His best memories came back to him with the smell of forest, the mist of a waterfall, water hitting water, water hitting rock. He admired the ability of life to push its way stubbornly through the earth, and always kept a garden—even in his dingiest share house, where the soil had to be aerated, and the seedlings were constantly trampled under the drunken boots of housemates—subconsciously these subjects, nature and the female body, were to him entwined, lighting up the same part of his brain in something that resembled worship.
Had he thought of studying in the years before he became a father? Perhaps he had considered a sort of botany, but he was no scientist. The prospect of studying film was, to him, so absurd he had not even considered it—his parents would have thought the suggestion hilarious.
Parallel to this, the earth, which the man loved so much, was not doing well. Humans had wreaked havoc on the planet for dozens of rotations around the sun and the climate had become increasingly severe, though not increasingly unpredictable, as scientists invented many instruments that could predict the weather, and could point to the next flood or fire season with an accuracy that would send a shaman’s spine shivering. The seasons changed rapidly, heat records broke and then were again broken. Even those who had turned their heads in defiant denial could no longer pretend they didn’t have a bleeding hand in the Earth’s sickness. Terrifying winds whipped through the deserts, thousand-year-old storms and once in a lifetime fires and floods leapt and swept across the earth in rapid multiplication. The end of the human age was coming. All around the world people had begun to gather, in greater and greater numbers, to demand immediate and permanent change—it would have to be done soon, they yelled, as great chucks of permafrost melted, or nothing would be left.
It was around this time that the man had a child. If he had considered these problems before it had been from a distance—as if he were looking the wrong way through a telescope. Everything appeared further away than it was. After the birth of his daughter, however, he threw himself into the cause of a liveable future. He attended protests, signed petitions. Did the people who wreaked havoc on the environment understand the world they were leaving behind for their children—did he understand it himself?
He soon became wrapped up in organisations that required total devotion from their participants, who were expected to lend their spare time to protesting, raising awareness, legal- and guerrilla direct action. What was required of him, in essence, was to place his body in spaces where it would be an inconvenience to those who wanted to ruin the planet—whether through evil, malicious means, or through the insidious ways of the wilfully ignorant. He chained himself to trees, to statues. He stood with others in front of bulldozers, police horses, parliament buildings. He marched through the streets and chanted as tired-looking citizens beeped horns and complained about the traffic. He protested but he did it peacefully—as was the way of the group he belonged to. But he craved something bigger and more explosive.
The man finally had an engulfing ambition, something volatile that felt as if it could burn a hole in the ozone. He wanted to risk his body and send his heart into the freefalling beats of adrenaline. It was unfamiliar, this feeling that propelled him forward, and the peaceful group soon became weary of his energy. A kind woman who sometimes let him share her bed noticed this ember within him. She introduced him to another man. This man had a large stick-and-poke tattoo of a circle on his upper arm and introduced himself as ‘O’. He had been kicked out of the group when even the most malleable of imaginations failed see how his actions could be called peaceful.
O had a special interest in water protection, and focused his energy on the nation’s rivers and natural water supplies. O had a job he might be interested in, he said.
The man had recently lost his job carrying couches down awkward stairways after skipping work once again for a last-minute action, and he had landed a factory job shifting mass-produced fashion from trucks to retailers. The job filled him with tired anger. He understood the mechanics of the industry and the impact it had on the planet, it made him feel a fool, as if he had nullified all his activism, as if, in fact, none of it counted for anything.
So when O presented the job to him it was not just something he was willing and able to do, but his own personal salvation: for O’s plan was to sabotage a great cotton producer, toward the north of New South Wales. They met on a bright morning in a park and lounged next to each other, a map splayed out before them. O wore an emerald hat and grey shirt holed and faded with sunlight. The cotton producer, O explained, lifting his middle finger and jamming it near the border of Queensland, took water from the great river that ran down the country, here, he said, like lungs. The Murray-Darling breathed life into the offshoots, seeped into the entire basin—supplied farmers with water, brought colour to the southeast of the country. But in the branching lines that represented water, the man was not remined of lungs, but veins. A vision came to him: the water of the river running down across the stretch of southeast Australia in great rolling waves of blood, breaking off into smaller branches, filling dams, snaking itself into the earth. Rivers of blood, rolling down the country.
South of cotton country, O said, now, more often than not, the river ran dry and barren. Families played cricket in its bed, small towns imported drinking water. Meanwhile industrial cotton farmers to the north had lush year-long crops. The water they took was pumped under dubious regulations, with dubious legality, overlooked by politicians with pockets flush from the cotton fields. Soon the cotton industry would have a monopoly in the area, diversity in the farmlands surrounding the Murray would be virtually non-existent. The plan was simple. To destroy two of the pumps—pumps that O and his fellows knew to be illegal—that were used by the biggest cotton producer in the country. The plan was already laid out. O would do two days’ worth of driving to this spot. He placed his finger on a dot on a map. They would leave in three weeks’ time at the crack of dawn, arriving just after two a.m. on the night of the new moon, when darkness would protect them. There he would meet another man, named Jamie, who belonged to the local mob and knew the area, the contours of the landscape. Together they would walk up a private road to the pumps. What they needed, O and Jamie, was a lookout. Someone to wait here, he said tapping his finger back on the map, in the car, to radio them in case of trouble.
He said yes and spent the next three weeks in a state of giddy elation, no longer sick with melancholy, for his energy had finally been channelled in the right direction.
But then, when he left his house the morning of the job, riding his bike across the city to meet with O, a phone call came. It was the mother of his child; she was in the hospital. His daughter had an ear infection that could leave her deaf if it was not attended to immediately.
At the cross section of the city, without thinking of the metaphor, the man turned his back on the job, pedalling as fast as he could back home.
Weeks later, after his daughter’s ear had healed, the man, Tomas, attended a rally in the city. As he moved among the crowd, he saw before him O’s familiar green cap, a line of sunburn resting a centimetre below his T-shirt, revealing a pale ring of flesh. As he pushed through the crowd, he saw on O’s jaw a bloodied bruise that spread and deformed the left side of his face. O looked at Tomas as he went to approach him. He turned his head, and Tomas saw a red opening where there had once been an eye. O only shook his head as warning, turned, and walked away.
In the premature heat, a memory of summer came early, then slipped away before he could grasp its particulars. Tomas felt the texture of sweaty skin, the smell of Sidney, something citrus in her hair, the sound of the front door closing, the house empty of her and her things in the morning, but before he could experience it all, it ran away from him, slipped out of his body. Like a trick vending machine—he could see it, but he couldn’t grasp it.
He was moving Minnie’s bed into the spare room. Minnie was with Ashley, and he wanted to surprise her with her new room, but he had left it until the last minute, and now in the heat he became distracted and dizzy with memory and had to rest on the mattress, low to the ground, his head between his knees.
One thing he had not anticipated in acting like himself again: the memories of Sidney would be worse. He now spent his days off picking up rubbish with Minnie at the beach, finding local causes to help out with, going to the trades hall or town meetings. He had spent September and October getting soaked in the downpour at climate marches in the city. These protests had become overlaid with the ones he went to with Sidney in the preceding year—instead of being present in the crowd, he would see her in the distance, hear her whispering in his ear, feel as if they were chanting and clapping together. Once with Minnie between them it had grown hot and he had begun to worry. Sidney had offered to take her to the park, meet up when he was finished. He’d been hesitant, she’d insisted. When he met up with them after, he’d sat down next to Minnie and she’d anointed him with a jacaranda crown. The presence of a jacaranda in bloom that morning had threatened to unseat him. Change, he had realised, he needed a change.
So here was, finally, doing something about the empty room.
But, in the beginning of November the memory of Sidney naked in his bed came to him, out of season, out of time, rudely early, and he was unprepared. He understood at once that this would happen more and more. That as the heat came earlier and earlier the memories would too, that as the seasons became obsolete and the temperatures continued to climb his time with her would take over whole months, eventually years, of his life. He had been an idiot to think he could relive the year and then let it go.
Stopping it was necessary for his survival, for his sanity. He would have to go to Queensland and find Sidney, he would confess his need for her, as pathetic as that was. He would not do this in expectation of anything. He would be embarrassed by his own earnestness and knew that he would not be able to hide his desperation—he could have no other reason to be in Brisbane, and to lie would make him an even bigger coward. He knew all this, and would still do it, simply because he had to. He needed to have something else of Sidney, a memory that would collect all the memories of her that spread in his mind like droplets on the fronds of palms after rain—he needed something that would cause them to run together, grow heavy, bend the stem, then fall to the earth.
He stood up and felt light. He saw ahead of him not the meeting with Sidney, whatever it would bring—rejection, confusion, anger, humiliation—but the journey that he would have to take to get there. The crossing of states, the countryside. He knew he had to do it and he knew he had to drive. He would wait two days for Minnie to come and go again, and then he would drive up over the landscape, completing the journey he should have taken two years ago, and then surpassing it, overcoming it. And then he would try his luck.
Because if he was going to fight for a liveable future, shouldn’t he also be fighting to not be miserable there?
Here, then, was the memory of summer: early February, Tomas shirtless, wearing ruggers. Sidney in a singlet that rode up her hips, cotton shorts verging on transparent. Sidney in the kitchen eating watermelon with one leg flamingoed onto the other. The sun had set but there was no relief from the heat. Tomas put on a movie. He felt too warm for dinner and was drinking a beer and trying his best not to stare at her, hoping the heat could explain the red blush of his neck. On the television: black and white, subtitles. Sidney asked something and he answered, she drifted over and joined him on the couch. He could smell her shampoo. The two of them soon became distracted in conversation, the movie playing out in front of them, the plot lost in another language. They continued talking, him making her laugh for so long they did not realise, at first, that the movie had finished.
Tomas had not watered the garden, and rose to complete the task in the dark, a headlight strapped on, surveying the damage of the hot day. He had finished his beer and was hoping to grab another, to continue talking to Sidney, but when he re-entered the lounge she was gone. Dejected, he took himself to bed. Where she already was, of course. Sidney, on his bed, waiting. She smiled at him and he laughed.
He pulled her to the end of the bed, then knelt before her, as if in prayer.