7

I slept like I was falling into a pit. But something woke me. My alarm clock reads 5.41am and there’ll be no going back to sleep now. I’m on, that’s the way it always is. On till I’m off and have run out of hours in the day.

The darkness is absolute in my windowless room and immediately the light has to go on, too, or I’ll feel like I’m drowning.

I can’t just leave it to them to find her.

The thought makes me sit up. I fumble for my phone, speed-dialling Mum. I go straight to voicemail for, like, the fiftieth time. It’s a long shot—the longest—but I tap open the app, just to see whether she has played. In the absence of an actual life, I play Words with Friends a lot.

Mum’s one of them, one of the friends, that’s how hard up I am for mates. She’ll be sitting out at the meals table—working!—and I’ll be in my bedroom—working!—and we’ll be playing each other. I’d hear her shriek, right through the wall, whenever I got her a beauty.

Blinking furiously, I see that the game I’m playing with Vicki is open and she has sent through the word sluts for 22 points. Her message in the message window reads: You and me, baby!

She’s intersected it with her previous effort—nudes—because getting naked with anyone, anywhere, is on her mind a lot.

I’ve got great letters, I could get her in a million different ways right now, but I flick out of the game we’ve got going on and tap into the one I’m playing with Mum. With a catch in my breathing, I see that it’s still her turn. Nothing has changed.

Her last word was peptide and her message had been: You’re lucky I couldn’t use my Z, darl.

My screen is telling me to give her a nudge because it’s been two days! So I do. I nudge my missing mother, heart in my throat. And I know it’s completely irrational, but I actually hold my breath as I do it, in case she shoots something back. Which is crazy, right? Because she’d completely forget to come home, or even tell me where she is, but she’d keep on playing?

But there’s nothing; even though I wait through an entire chunk of adverts then the news and weather bulletins on the radio, praying over my screen for the sparkly bling sound that will tell me she’s sent me a word, that she’s back.

Disgusted at myself for even looking, I flick to the last game I’m playing.

Changeling_ 29 has sent through: qoph for 46 points. Hebrew alphabet, 19th letter. Classy.

Nice. I message him. But the day you beat me is the day the world ends, buddy.

Unable to stop myself, I stab the word teetered into the screen for 78, using up all of my letters in one hit on all the good squares, together with one of his.

But he’s right back with qat for 32.

I look at the clock. It’s 6.09am.

When I’m on, he’s always right there, ready to go, like he’s been waiting for me. He never seems to sleep. I think that if I didn’t live for our games so much, it would kind of freak me out: how much we play, how much time me and Changeling_ 29 actually spend together, our thoughts bent on each other and total domination.

I crouch over the small pane of luminescence in my hand, studying my options. It’s close this time, only nine points the difference. I wait for the taunt, the sledge, that any normal person would make. But it never comes, because Changeling_ 29 never writes me messages. He just plays.

I don’t know him. He’s just some random who challenged me to a game a few days after I started at Collegiate and we haven’t stopped playing since. We’ll finish a game and one of us will call an immediate rematch, setting up the first killer word for an early advantage the way a decent chess player will always go for white over black: to set the pace; to niggle and press and destabilise. It’s not that white is inherently better, you understand. It just always gets to go first.

The games with Changeling_ 29 are always close. But it’s been months, and he hasn’t been able to crack a win against me, and I love that it must be killing him. I think of him as a him, because deep down I’m as desperate as Vicki is: even if it’s just some lovelorn nerd-boy wanting to rub his consonants against me. I don’t know how he found me, it’s not like I have my gamer name—Cenna—tattooed onto my forehead, but I no longer care. He’s my longest relationship, ever. And he plays bloke words like pec and scrotum, so QED, right?

Bastard, I write absently into the message box, before setting my phone down. What am I doing playing games with ghosts?

I suck in a horrified breath. Take it back, take it back.

I roll over the side of the bed, landing on my hands and knees on the fat floor cushions lined up along the side. Mum laid those down for me herself the day we moved our belongings in. With the rocking, I often fall out of bed and she’d said: Soft landings for you, my darling, always. They’re red and orange, like a sunset. Or a fire. It always comes back to that.

Eyes welling, I jump under the freezing shower water that tastes of iron, scrubbing myself a raw pink as the water warms up. By the end, it’s always searing, and I give myself an extra five minutes because there is no one else to conserve the heat for.

I climb into the same passion-killing outfit from the night before, then shove my phone, wallet and Mum’s journal into my pack that still smells of bananas. It’s not yet 6.30, but it’s a Saturday, and Paolo will be opening up at the bakery on Swanston Street that I’ve designated as my local.

I have a thing for Paolo, with his coffee-coloured skin, curly man-bun and dancer’s body. Whenever I order a coffee and something loaded with custard, he makes me feel pretty, if only for the time it takes me to dig out the right change. That’s our deal: a little light flirtation for $7.80. Just seeing him is better than the caffeine, and if I don’t get my regular hit of him I get cranky.

I feel forward with my toes down three gloomy flights of stairs towards the pool of streetlight coming in through the glassed-in street door. After it slams behind me, I breathe out. A cloud that’s white, like dragon’s breath, against the dark sky.

‘Good morning,’ someone says beside me and I swear to God I leap two feet in the air. He’s leaning against the red-brick wall beside the bean sprout company plaque and his nose doesn’t look quirky or interesting in the streetlight; it looks broken.

‘What are you doing here?’ I hiss, already backing away. This must be an outer ring of purgatory, and somehow I’m stuck sharing it with Simon Thorn.

He’s wearing a heavy plaid Bluey jacket and grey knitted beanie, and he keeps pace with me easily as I power down Little Bourke Street, cooking smells already staining the early-morning air.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says awkwardly, ‘you know, last night? I didn’t mean to say—’

But I hold up one hand as my phone rings, knowing very well what he meant to say.

‘Avicenna speaking.’ My voice is clipped, unfriendly, spikes in all directions.

I pull the zip up higher on my hoodie and turn left towards the Three Kings’ Bakehouse as the man on the line says, surprised, ‘Did I wake you? I just meant to leave a message.’

‘Who is this?’ I reply, brushing off Simon’s outstretched hand as I stub my sneakered toe in a tram track and almost go down face-first. God.

‘Detective Senior Sergeant Stan Wurbik,’ the man responds apologetically. ‘We need you to come in to the St Kilda Road Police Complex this morning. Some questions. Need to talk options. Get more consents. And your laptop, we’ve looked at it. You can have it back. Expect you need it.’

Wurbik gives me directions as I duck into the bakery and breathe in the smells of super-refined flour loaded with lard, sugar and other goodies. Paolo sees me and waves from the back where he’s de-bagging coffee beans, pouring them in a tinking steady stream into the grinder. Like mine, still damp from the shower, his hair is out, all down his back in dark waves.

As Paolo comes forward, I catch this look on his face—when he works out that Simon and I are together—that is a shade more elegant than surprise. Paolo raises a speculative eyebrow at me in a perfect arch, and I grimace back, telling Wurbik hurriedly that I’ll be there by eleven: things to do first, won’t be late, see yuz.

There’s this feeling, tight in me as I hang up, that Wurbik’s going to tell me something I won’t want to hear.

I shove my phone into my pocket and Paolo stands facing me across the chrome and glass counter. We’re exactly the same height, and I’ve told him before that it’s a sign we were meant to be together. It always makes Paolo laugh when I mention it. But I can’t seem to bring it up today, or even remember what it feels like to smile. It’s like a nerve’s been cut, somewhere in my brain. So I stand, slack-faced.

‘Bella,’ Paolo says in his thick, not-from-here accent that’s so good you could bathe in it, ‘today, we are like the lions,’ giving his mane a shake for emphasis.

Then he comes around the counter and plants two kisses on me, one on either side of my face, the way he always does, even when there is a line behind me all the way to the door. As he does, his dark eyes never leave Simon. And it all feels a little off today, the flirting, because it’s difficult to pretend that Simon’s not Paolo’s type. He likes a hard body.

Paolo drifts back behind the counter and picks up a set of tongs, clacking the arms together lightly like the fairy godmother of pastries as he moves towards the cake display that runs almost the whole length of the shop. He slides a couple of miniature chocolate cannoli into a white paper bag then fires up the coffee machine. ‘Usual?’ he says as an afterthought.

I nod, and he slides his eyes in Simon’s direction. ‘No thanks,’ Simon replies, loud and nervous over the high-pressure hissing and squealing. ‘Already wired.’

Paolo mock sniffs then pushes my long macchiato across the counter at me, together with change from my tenner. ‘Didn’t I say you have the good taste in men?’ he reminds me archly. ‘But remember, I am the first.’

I jam the coins into my pocket, juggling the coffee and the little bag as I back up. ‘The one and only, Paolo,’ I say in a rush. ‘You can have this one; I can’t get rid of him fast enough.’

Paolo grins at the discomfort on Simon’s face. I turn and say over my shoulder, the way I always do, as if this is a normal day, ‘See you next week; have a good week.’ But my voice sounds joyless and mechanical, even to my own ears.

Paolo reaches out and stops me, hand on my elasticised cuff. ‘You tell your mother, the occhi di bue will be back on Monday, eh?’ He gestures behind him at the pastry display. ‘She was asking.’

My fingers go nerveless and I almost drop my coffee. Paolo can’t know, because if he did it would be cruel to say what he’s just said, and he’s the kindest man I know.

‘When?’ I say breathlessly. ‘When was she asking?’

Paolo’s head tilts right. ‘Tuesday?’ My insides loosen then tighten as he says, ‘No, Wednesday. Yes.’

He can see I want more and his head tilts further. ‘It was morning, not afternoon; she looked very tired. She bought the big one, not the regular.’ He points at the two sample coffee cups taped to a corner of the countertop. ‘She never buys the big one, and never a latte, only espresso—double, no milk—but it was a latte, I’m sure, two sugars. I wonder to myself, Will she finish it? She is like the doll, your mother. And she wanted three biscotti —you know, with the apricot jam—but we sold out.’ Paolo’s eyes rake my frozen face. ‘What? What is it?’

I shake my head, unable to answer, and he says more kindly, ‘You tell her; I will keep some. You tell her to come back, okay?’

I don’t remember leaving the shop. All I know is that I suddenly find myself halfway up the hill towards the State Library, bawling down the front of my jumper while Simon holds my coffee and cake like a trained circus animal.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I howl, snatching them off him, throwing both in the bin so hard that the coffee cup bounces up off the steel rim and splashes me with hot liquid. Mum never snacked. She didn’t like sweet stuff, and she ate like a bird.

She never had milk in her coffee.

‘What are you going to do?’ Simon says cautiously as I scrub angrily at my wet front, then at my face with the back of one sleeve.

‘Finish having a small breakdown,’ I mutter, too ashamed to look at him, ‘and then I’m going to copy the entire freaking j-journal…’ I wave my other arm uselessly in the direction of the balding, bird shit-infested lawns outside the State Library. ‘Because I can’t just leave it to people who don’t know her to find her. Then I’m going to hand it in to the police. That’s what I’m going to do and why do you care?’

It feels like there is a balloon just under my skin, slowly inflating. I stand here, clenching and unclenching my hands, struggling to get air into my lungs while the balloon goes up and up, squeezing me out of my body.

She told me everything: that was how things worked. Mum was a talker; you couldn’t shut her up. But she never told me that the eventuality would end up claiming me, too.

I feel Simon slide my backpack off my rigid shoulders. He barely touches me, but it hurts my skin; that he should be here, seeing me like this.

‘Give me that,’ I say fearfully, scrabbling in the air for my pack. ‘What are you doing?’

He leads me like a blind person to the pedestrian crossing, punching the button with one elbow. His voice is almost lost in the scattergun sound of the green man lighting up. ‘I’m getting you there. Somebody has to, okay? Move it.’

Inside his car, later, I’m surprised by lots of things. By the way he patiently positioned the journal while I was operating the copier. By the way he showed me the room where you can access old newspaper articles on the microfiche machine because it might come in handy, later, you never know. By the look and smell of his car.

I’m in Simon Thorn’s car, travelling across Princes Bridge down St Kilda Road, thin sunlight kicking up sparkles on the surface of the murky river that bisects this city. It’s a bomb, Simon’s car, the kind of car I might one day drive: an early model Holden with peeling maroon paint and bubbly window tints, black plastic louvres across the back window. It looks like a low-rent drug dealer’s ride on its second go round the odometer. On the inside, the car is OCD bandbox-neat the way Simon dresses—not a scrap of loose shit bouncing around anywhere. But it smells like stale hash browns. Like years of fried breakfasts eaten behind the wheel, with a throbbing bass note of male body odour.

I’d expected a late-model BMW with leather seats and chrome trims. And for Simon’s ride to smell like he does: fresh, sandalwoody, expensive. But I find myself actually trying to breathe through my mouth.

Simon gives me a quick sideways look then cranks down his window with the kind of dinky manual handle you see in retro TV cop shows. ‘It’s kind of disgusting, isn’t it?’

All I say, faintly, is, ‘I appreciate the lift. But you aren’t coming in with me.’

He shrugs and then says, ‘Pick one.’ He points at the poetry compendium, big as a brick, at my feet.

‘Are you dense or something?’ I say in an angry rush. ‘I’m not doing it.’

‘Just look at them,’ he says patiently, slowing down and craning his neck up at the numbers on the passing buildings, big and concrete and sprawling. ‘Looking does not indicate commitment to any further course of action.’

I lever the compendium up off the floor by its bent cover, turning to the single dog-eared page I myself inflicted on Simon’s once-pristine book.

John Donne (1572–1631)

Beside the chapter heading, Simon’s written in his anal, leaning script: Military service for the Crown, Dean of St Paul’s. Secret marriage (12 children!!) ended political career. Wife died of childbirth.

‘Well, that would be right,’ I mutter, disgustedly, ‘dying of childbirth. That’s something to look forward to, as a woman. Why couldn’t Dalgeish have given us Stevie Smith, or maybe Yeats or Auden or Whitman like some of the others? Even that guy who didn’t punctuate enough and loved himself sick some alliteration…’

‘Gerard Manley Hopkins?’ Simon interjects dryly.

‘Yeah, him. I could just about understand him. But she always saves me the poems and plays written in 400-year-old English. Crap. Not doing it.’

‘She saves them for me, too, remember?’ Simon says, easing his car into a service lane, still peering up at the buildings as we roll along slowly. ‘Just read one out. That’ll be the one, then we will—’

‘You will.’

‘—build the talk around it,’ he finishes, sighing.

When I say nothing for an entire block, he tries again. ‘There will be themes…’

‘And shit.’

‘Themes we…’

‘You.’

‘…can pull out of it— you’re very argumentative, did you know that?—and maybe discuss in more depth.’

Conscious that I’m pouting like a toddler but I can’t help myself, I stab my finger blindly into one of the pages and mutter:

If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’other doe.

‘Oh, the metaphysical poets,’ I snap. ‘If someone compared me to a compass, I’d fucking drop them.’

Simon slows the car and turns to me. ‘I would have picked that one, too,’ he replies evenly, and I can tell how hard he’s trying to be patient because he’s not patient—I’ve seen him in action reducing debating hard-arses like Catherine Dinh to tears. ‘It’s the best of the bunch, A Valediction forbidding mourning.’

‘They’re all about love,’ I snarl, ‘or God, or loving God. Not in the mood, quite frankly.’

‘This one was probably about his wife,’ Simon replies absently, pulling up the handbrake as the car shudders to a complete halt. ‘I’ll need to look into that. The whole secret marriage angle.’

‘Angle?’ I parrot, glancing out the window, distracted by the official signage and all the blank, black windows that allow only the looking out of, not the looking in. We’re here. Then it suddenly strikes me; what I’m groping for, in my head.

‘Compass,’ I say.

Simon looks askance at me. ‘Sorry, I thought we’d moved on from the whole compass thing.’

But I always play them, games of association: This word leads to this word leads to this word. Words are the only currency I have too much of. Simon has reminded me of my mother’s battered tin box of compasses. She’d left all her almanacs behind—that chart the stars and planets in their manifold phases across the skies and years and decades and hemispheres—tattered and taped-up from daily use, cobbled from sources everywhere, indexed by country, by date. But in my multiple ransackings of home I never saw a single one of her compasses.

She’s had them since childhood and sometimes even carried one around in the front pocket of her shirt; you’d see the silver tip poking through the weave, tiny but lethal, as she did the vacuuming, or picked at her dinner. Years after she stopped carrying me around, she still carried them.

She would only leave home with them if she was drawing a chart for someone in situ, in their own environment. In those cases, she had all the coordinates already mapped out in her head, memorised.

A parlour trick, she would call it, modestly, as she sketched out someone’s celestially ordained life map before their rapt eyes. Over cups of tea, someone would have their own little universe rendered live on paper.

The compasses had to be with her. I wasn’t sure if it was important, but I needed to tell Wurbik to maybe tell people, put it out on the wire, or whatever: that the crazy shaman lady had been packing her weapons. She had been on her way to see someone.

‘I have to go,’ I say breathlessly, chucking the heavy poetry book in Simon’s lap before turning and hooking my backpack up off the back seat.

‘Wait—’ Simon shouts, but I’m already half out the door.

‘That’s just it,’ I say, leaning in and actually looking him in the face, for once, in all sincerity. ‘Don’t wait. Write your talk, win your prize, live your life, be successful, ride roughshod over the dead bodies of your enemies to get there, Simon—only, I’m not going to be one of them. None of it means anything to me without Mum. She took care of me, and I was going to take care of her. She is the point, the way I was hers. Now I’m without point; I am point-less.’ I laugh, but my laughter sounds teary, edging hysteria. ‘That poem could have been about us. Mum and I never made a move without each other. We were—are, are!—joined at the hip.’ Simon has the grace to wince as I add gruffly, ‘Only a mother could love this face, remember? Now get,’ I tell him, slamming the door shut so hard the car rocks.

A group of police standing by the bushes near the front door stop speaking and move aside for me instinctively as I hunch my shoulders and enter the complex.