Furious Horses

>CURTAINS RISE on the stately interior of a Barouque-style palatial manor. Curtains, in the colours of certain South American nations, billow to the floor, lightly ruffled by offstage WIND MACHINES. Centre stage is a grand oak table, surrounded by fourteen chairs, luxuriously upholstered in glorious leathers and satins. At the head of the table sits JEREMIAS BANG, replete in flowing garbs of state of certain South American nations. ALVA DROSTE, A regal, erect woman in her forties enters stage left.

ALVA: My dear sir, are you still here at this ungodly hour?

JEREMIAS: M’lady, I shall remain at this table until such time as I see fit to leave it.

ALVA picks up an elaborate candleabra.

ALVA: I declare, Mr Bang that you are the most uncommunicative man I have ever had the pleasure of meeting!

ALVA puts down the elaborate candleabra.

JEREMIAS: My dear Ms Droste. You assume that silence equates to ignorance. That is a most diffuse folly.

ALVA: How so?

JEREMIAS: Simply because I do not describe with every waking breath everything that is going on in my head, you assume that I have no feelings. This is patently wrong.

ALVA: But how, then, am I to ascertain in what mood you find yourself in at any particular moment. You give me no verbal clue, fine sir.

ALVA pulls her left hand to the side of her face, much in the manner of the titular character of Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten By a Lizard”.

JEREMIAS: Aye, there’s the rub! The true way to a man’s mind is not through his words, but his actions.

ALVA: But how, when you give not the slightest movement with which to betray your emotions?

ALVA crosses down stage right, approaching SLIGHTLY RAISED PLATFORM.

JEREMIAS: My dear lady, you seem to conclude that life should be conducted in a series of staged actions, depriving those unique human traits of nuance, metaphor and suggestion. Such a life, I can assure you, is not one practiced on this sane portion of the earth.

ALVA steps up onto SLIGHTLY RAISED PLATFORM, lighting a cigarillo in a vexed manner.

ALVA: You do vex me, Mr Bang. Here am I, having alighted the stairs not moments ago to check on your wellbeing, and here you are accusing me of being some sort of … of …

JEREMIAS: Vignettist?

ALVA (exasperated): Oh!

JEREMIAS: For example …

JEREMIAS produces an ANTIQUE HANDGUN WITH POLISHED MAHOGANY HANDLE, and shoots himself in the side of the head.

ALVA: Well, that’s just typical. Always acting out.

CURTAINS FALL.

>It was revolutionary. But was this how revolutions happened? Saul asked himself this now, every three seconds or so. The idea had seeped out at the very bottom of a board meeting, an added piece of other business, and as such passed and seconded without a moment’s thought. Every pair of eyes was on the clock, which had ticked well past the usual time most people put up with a Friday before springing out into the unfathomable possibilities of a weekend. Beer? said someone, and they all agreed. It was only on Saturday afternoon, as Saul’s brain blithely received a game of televised football, that the thought drifted through his head. What was it we actually agreed to?

A few calls to those present at the board meeting confirmed nothing new. Something about a special promotion? Maybe a strategic push into a new market? Saul spent Saturday night in a club, letting thumping music and bad bourbon do battle with anything his head tried to tell him, so that it was Sunday night before his hangover had subsided, and with it any worries about work.

It was a surprise then, as he walked up to the front doors on Monday morning, to see three men in overalls waiting, it seemed, to meet him.

“You Saul?” said one.

“Yeah.” Saul was naturally suspicious of anything unusual, especially if it occurred before he’d had his morning coffee.

Another of the men stepped forward. “We’re here about the signage.”

Saul scratched an itchy patch on his cheek. “Listen,” he said, pointing upwards. “I’ve been through all this with the council. We’ve had those billboards up since before the new zoning legislation came through, so there’s no way I’m taking them down.”

The men looked nonplussed.

Saul craved his coffee. His body expected to have access to it by this time on a Monday morning. It would not tolerate council workers standing in its way. “You can take it up with my lawyer,” said Saul. “These billboards are part of my business. People expect to see movie stars above Saul Pincio’s cinema. It’s tradition.”

“We’re not here to take anything down, chief,” said one of the men. “We’re putting up the new signage.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder, and Saul saw a ute parked across the street, giant rolls of paper and rollers sticking out of its tray like breadsticks.

“What new signage?” Saul was careful to keep his tone static, avoid any sense of hostility that might come between him and a carefully poured espresso.

One of the three men took off his sweat-tinged cap and pushed a hand through his hair. “Alls I know mate is that someone from here rang us late on Friday arvo and paid extra to get us here Monday morning.”

“Can I ask who that was?” Saul grimaced.

“Mate,” said another of the men, “We just put up the signs.”

Saul’s head began to ache. “Wait here,” he told the men.

“It’s your time, chief,” said one of them.

Saul unlocked the front door and raced down to his office. Katie, the snack counter girl, however, intercepted him. She held up her hands like a traffic warden. She was smiling, and in that moment Saul already knew what she was going to say.

“Thank you again,” she said. Her hands changed from traffic warden to Busby Berkley in the blink of an eye.

“Thank me for what?” said Saul tiredly. He would never drink another coffee, he was sure of it.

“For agreeing to my idea!”

“Ah.”

“I just never thought I’d be a board member—” Katie’s hands were now award acceptance hands, “—let alone one who could contribute so fruitfully.”

Fragments of the board meeting glinted forebodingly at the edges of Saul’s brain. “It was a special promotion,” he ventured, “wasn’t it.”

“Of course it was,” said Katie. “That’s why I ordered the banners.”

“Oh shit.” All the colour drained from Saul’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your idea. It was bring something … to the movies … day.”

“Bring Your Dog to the Movies Day!” squealed Katie. “I couldn’t believe everyone agreed to it! It was just one of those thoughts that just came to me, you know? It’s going to be so cool.”

“So those guys outside,” said Saul, “they’re putting up a banner to this effect?”

“To what effect?”

“To the effect that we will be having a Bring Your Dog to the Movies Day.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, it’s going to be great. The banner will go across all those old billboards with Mel Gibson and Eddie Murphy on them. It’s going to make this place look so fresh.”

Saul said nothing. Just turned on his heel and headed to the nearest theatre, to sit for a while, to think.

>Across the timber-cracked boardwalk, under the sad sad twilight, there he is. Arms in a heartbreaking circle. Empty but for all the faces pressed beside him, looking up into the bright wonder of the sky. All those detonations below us, silent timed explosions down beneath the bridge, they shoot into the air. His face glows green for a moment, and the stars seem to rain down among us. His tears, tinged with glorious light.

>Grandpa would call us down with his weak and withered voice. Like a thin stream of steam, rising up the stairs. Heads and limbs of adopted siblings appear in stairwells and doorframes and suddenly we’re one hungry monster, tripping down hallways in slippery sock feet, pinballs to our impatience. And there he is. Sergeant Rory—Grandpa—sitting quietly in an armchair, as if as natural to our living room as a lamp or old rug. Ears hanging down like a Sherpa’s hat. We secretly touch the parts of our own face that we know keep growing even after everything else in our body has stopped. Sergeant Rory has told us stories of friends he’s known, older than him, eyesight and speech all but gone, with ears and noses down to their knees.

Today, Grandpa has a canvas bag, crumpled on the floor next to him, with a rectangle poking out inside. We take up spots around the lounge room, settling in crannies and planes like fallen rain, and as we settle back, Sergeant Rory begins a story. He tells us it’s not a story that runs from middle to end, but rather appears in many places at once. He leans over the arm of his chair and reaches into the canvas sack. In his brown talon fingers is a leather book—a photo album, he says. A few of us groan; this is what other old people do, not Sergeant Rory. We don’t want trips down memory lane. But Grandpa holds up a finger, growling at us under his breath. He looks at us, each of us in turn. His eyes tell us this photo album is very different.

When we’re all quiet, he clears his throat, in that way we all know so well. It’s like a bullfrog, we say to ourselves, shaking our heads like it’s something we hate. But we all secretly approve, because the Sergeant’s throat is a bell signifying an exciting beginning.

Prascovia, Grandpa tells us, is what I like to call a dying country.

We all shuffle forward, our ears straining, trying to get comfortable. The position we’re sitting in now will be the position we’ll still be sitting in when the story’s finished, hours later. This much is certain.

Sergeant Rory opens the photo album, but instead of turning it up and around for all of us to see, he keeps it in his lap, peering down into it with his old green eyes. Prascovia, he says, is where I was born.

>”The real secret,” said Plasky, drawing on his thin cigarette with grim reaper intensity, “is to shorten their names. Make them more familiar. So, Robert DeNiro becomes Bobby DeNiro. Robert Duvall becomes Bobby Duvall. Marlon Brando becomes Bobby Brando.”

“They’re all Bobby?”

“They’re all Bobby.” Plasky blew some smoke out across the skyline. The middle of the Chrylser Building disappeared for a moment behind the haze, then hastily reassembled.

Yves, whose last name was also printed on his name badge, but it wasn’t even near being spelled correctly, leant back against the side of the building, balancing on the balls of his feet and his wrists, performing curious backwards push-ups while Plasky watched with evident interest.

“So,” said Yves, “I just go right up to—I don’t know—the Alphabet Lounge, and I say I’m a friend of Bobby Gyllenhaal, and they’ll let me in?”

Plasky laughed, a gaunt, weedy laugh. “There’s something more to it than that,” he said. “But, if you put your mind to something, there’s nothing really stopping you except yourself.”

*

Yves waited tables, like they all did. Pushed up his sleeves the moment the last customer left the door. They were the real kings of this town. They propped up the powerbrokers: fed them coz they couldn’t feed themselves. Al Pacino was in last week. Yves got his table, not realising who was there until his black leather pad was out, taking orders. Bobby Pacino, he kept hearing, Bobby Pacino. Pacino ordered a house salad, talking on his phone the whole time. Yves’ mouth went slack every time he came back to the table. Extra water. Extra rolls. Bobby Pacino.

Backstage, fame was a surname:
“You’ve seen who’s out there?”
“Who?”
“Pacino.”
“Fuck.”
Yves knew that was real fame. Not even needing a first name. Sucked that no one could ever spell either of his names right. Maybe that changed, eventually.

>Jack had the most popular name in the country, said the newspaper in front of him. He imagined an army of little Jacks, then thought about an army of big Jacks. Jacks and Toms and Dicks and Harries. Jack grimaced. Whoever had read the paper before him hadn’t folded it up properly, and it didn’t feel right without the proper creases. Jack’s shirt-tail had rolled up like a scroll at the small of his back, so he stood up to tuck it back in.

All around him were properly tucked and folded people. Even the fat man sitting in the opposite row of seats had his little triangle legs somehow crossed, looking like the delicate ends of a French pastry. Jack sat back down and took a sip of his weak tea from inside its plastic cup. As the tasteless hot water trickled down his throat, he returned his eyes to the view outside the large blue windows. Flat land, tarmac clouds. Early morning planes scattered like seagulls. Landing strips, Jack still called them. Runways seemed too much.

When the announcement came through, Jack almost leapt from his chair. The usual Public Address fuzz, followed by Jack’s flight number. He looked nervously around at the others, some cocking their head slightly, others still engrossed in books and conversations. Had he heard it wrong? No, there it was again. A call for passengers with children or those with special needs. Jack had never quite understood what that meant. Did that mean a wheelchair, a missing limb? Such a sliding scale, really, when you thought about it.

He walked over to the service desk, where a young lady in a red coat stood wearing a headphone. Jack assumed it was she who had made the announcement.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘This announcement,’ Jack pointed vaguely to the sky. ‘These special needs. What exactly are they?’

The young lady brought out a wide smile. ‘Well sir, sometimes those with mobility problems or—’ her smile widened slightly more as she searched for a word, ‘—or those who need special attention, it’s nice to get them settled in a bit earlier, to save any discomfort.’

‘Discomfort, yes.’ Jack nodded, although he was really no clearer. He reached into his top pocket. ‘Do I need to go on earlier?’ he asked, producing his boarding pass and seniors card. ‘I thought I might have to, as I’m walking a bit slower than I used to.’

The young lady nodded. ‘Certainly sir. If you’d like to go and see Katie at the boarding check, she’ll be happy to sort you out.’

What a strange choice of words, thought Jack. Sort you out. ‘I don’t want to waste anyone’s time,’ said Jack, ‘that’s all. I called the airport yesterday, but they couldn’t really tell me how early I was supposed to get here, or—’

‘Katie will be happy to help you out,’ said the young woman, thrusting an open palm past Jack’s face like a swimmer, ‘just to your left there.’

Jack followed her hand and saw another young lady in a red jacket standing at a podium. A small queue of people had assembled in front of her. A man with a baby in a holster around his neck was first in line. ‘Thank you,’ said Jack, walking away.

It was going to be a long, long flight.

>We took care to step carefully over the jagged hilt glass that formed the tight welcome of our forced entrance—we had heard stories, after all, of small cuts left alone, festering, becoming hopelessly infected, months later poisoning whole limbs—and as we let our feet find purchase on the cold concrete floor, we had to hold each other, for balance, and not at all in a sexual way. When we had made it safely inside, Shania took off her balaclava, produced a plastic bag from her pocket and began eating what I eventually worked out—in the dim glow of that tea-coloured early morning light—were shavings of carrot, cut so thin that when she turned them sideways they seemed to disappear, so that it looked like she was gaping at pure air with her lips, which were shaped in a perfect cherry pout, which is how I would have described them if I had been forced to depict them in a sexual way.

I had boltcutters with me, because I had told Shania I knew where my brother kept them in his shed, and that they were easy for me to get, which wasn’t really true, as I hadn’t spoken to my brother for some years, and, despite the fact I had seen them in his shed, it was when I was only thirteen, and had gone in there after he’d just moved in to a new house and he had shown me where he kept his pornos, in an old toolbox at the back of the toolshed (they were tattered, wrinkled magazines, some even in black and white, like something from the war, which was not what I was expecting) and when I was there I saw these big boltcutters hanging up behind the door which for some reason I noticed because they looked like something a ganster would use to lop off someone’s toe and when I asked my brother why he owned them, his reply just reminded me why he was older and stupider than me, and much more inclined to see things in a sexual way.

Now Shania was saying Let’s get in there now, while we can, and all the while I watched her body shake with excitement, or fear, and I tried to make myself imagine her like one of those girls from my brother’s magazines: grey, crouching, crinkled, naked, with her face peering coyly from behind folded-up limbs: only I couldn’t do it, because try as I might, I just couldn’t see Shania in a sexual way. We had been friends since we met on a cruise ship—our respective parents having been offered, respectively, the trip as part of a time-share promotion that travelled from to different towns in a caravan that could fold up into a sort of showroom so that it could set up in the main street and immediately lend itself a sort of gravitas that inevitably convinced good, hard-working folk such as Shania and mine’s parents that time share was not only fun, but good value for money—and, during the cruise, thanks to us being pretty much the only kids on the trip, we spent a lot of time together and ended up sharing a cabin together, but only after asking our respective parents whether this was okay, so they would know that we were sharing a room in the spirit of cameraderie only, not in a sexual way.

And so, when Shania’s parents lost a lot of money because of the time-share company went swiftly bankrupt, they moved to my town, which was a lot cheaper to live in because of the high element of undesirable elements (the government’s word, not ours: most locals viewed the high numbers of gentleman’s clubs, casinos, and drug labs in our town an inevitable symptom of our town’s relative isolation coupled with its position as a geographical occlusion between two major ports—ie. an obvious stopover point where one’s future problems and one’s past worries tended to cancel each another out—and as such, were unusually town-proud), and this happily co-incided with my parents putting half our house up for rent—for they to had been financially shaken by the time-share meltdown—and led to Shania’s family and mine co-habiting, in a financially beneficial way, and not—as the phrase is so often made to represent—in a sexual way.

I managed to cut the thick chain-link fence with the boltcutters, but each time I snapped the metal my arms shook and by the time I had cut enough for us to bend back and squeeze through my hands were jarred and aching, although when I whispered this to Shanaia, she took my fingers in hers and rubbed them until they were warm, saying to me: You’re so cool to be doing this with me—I definitely couldn’t've done this by myself: and if I hadn’t, who would’ve freed all these poor rabbits from being tested on, not just being forced to test chemicals on, remember, but sometimes in a sexual way?

I quickly removed my fingers from her warm palms because she was always talking about that stuff—the sexual stuff they supposedly did to those rabbits here—and I always found it very uncomfortable as I didn’t mind freeing a few bunnies from a cosmetics research lab, but the thought of people doing those other things to them … I didn’t really want to risk getting caught by people who would experiment on animals in a sexual way.

You’re okay to do this, right? said Shania then, squaring me up by my shoulders, looking me right in the eyes, so that I had no choice but to smile and nod my head and she had no choice but to—sensing, I think, my sacrifice—put her arms around me and take me deep into such an adult embrace, so far removed from any affection she had previously shown me, that I was forced to press my body against hers and let loose a little sigh that had built up inside me ever since I had first seen her, walking towards me as a glimpsed shape suddenly made real against the shimmering sun-swamped deck of a cruise ship, and formed an instant pact with my fledgling mind, an agreement too precocious, surely, but somehow so real because of it: I can never let myself think of this girl in a sexual way.

>”Gentlemen.”

The room fell silent. The meetings had always begun this way, despite the evident discomfort of the female persons variously dotted around the giant onyx table, their faces stoically unmoved in the glow of the pulsating purple lights that sat impossibly deep in the thick slab of quartz. One female face was especially notable in its immobility, particularly as it consisted mainly of venemous bees. Her name was Eusociala, and she did nothing to display her displeasure of the ingrained sexism in the meeting other than gently nudge her coffee cup with mandibled fingers.

Professor Condemnation, the convener and host of the meeting, steepled his fingers together and stared down the table, making sure to shift forward slightly in his chair so that the purple lights lit him up form below to create, in his countenance, a sense of serious foreboding. It was a look Professor Condemnation had been practicing all week, mainly for the purpose of upsetting Admiral Doom, who was seated deliberately to his left, and whose illuminated nuclear zeolite chest cavity was cast from a vibrant green into a nasty fecal brown by the purple table lights.

“Thank you all for coming,” said Professor Condemnation, wishing he hadn’t used his evil finger-steeple quite so early in proceedings. “I appreciate your efforts in finding time to join me here in my secret sub-terrestrial haven, at the very heart of my Condem Nation.”

Someone sniggered.

The Professor arched an eyebrow, squinting slightly. Those lights were a little bright, if you came right down to it. “Is something the matter?” he intoned.

An orange tentacle whipped across the table. “Are we all really the heart of your condemnation?” said the vertical mouth-hole of The Squid. “Are you not pleased to see us? Or is it a Condom Nation perhaps?” Grey ink sprayed across the table as The Squid talked, spattering the hem of Icilica’s snow-gown. Icilica, for her part, made an all-but-imperceptible shudder.

“No,” boomed Professor Condemnation, “I do not condemn you. Nor do I envisage a principality based around prophylactics. Condem Nation is the name of my vast underground empire.”

“Oh,” said The Squid. “Two words?” He held up two tentacles, one knocking over The Anagram’s bottle of sarsapirella.

“Calamity with a cobra!” exclaimed The Anagram. Everyone knew how he loved his sarsapirella. Or, as he often called it, Real Liar’s Sap.

“Pardon?” said The Squid.

“I think what The Anagram was trying to say,” came the voice of Tierra del Cranium, “was: Watch it, Calamari Boy.”

“Who asked you and your shiny head?” The Anagram retorted.

Tierra’s head began to hum. Her curt answer was: “A hardheaded sinus honky, you, yow!”

Professor Doom winced. The meeting was rapidly turning into a worse farce than their last: a now infamous get-together aboard Minotaurus’s Electric Zeppelin, which ended in the unfortunate expulsion of Mole Man from the International Alliance of Supervillans, as well as a two-month ban from attending all trivia nights. Which was a shame, as Mole Man was so good at English Royal History.

It was then that the Professor’s purple table lights blew out, one by one, leaving the room lit only by Admiral Doom’s chest cavity, returned to its former gorgeous evil green.

>Goldtoe. That’s what stuck in my mind. The letters picked out with no real thought, or so it seemed to me at the time. As to who or what Goldtoe was, I had no idea, in fact this name was not what I should’ve been really focusing on, when it all happened.

It’s like when you’re flipping through a book, a magazine, a newspaper, and suddenly one word appears in your head. One of the hundreds you’ve flipped past and unconsciously processed. And of course, now, you have to go pack through the pages and find that one word. It’s that strange, lost feeling of unraveling your own thoughts: the detective already inside the mystery.

So Goldtoe was in my mind, those gold-on-black letters imprinted on the side of that groaning truck, the truck that knocked down Jerome Walden. Well, knocked down is something I said to people later, but really he was carried. Like some theme park ride, the truck’s front grill picked his body up and held it there. He was the figurehead on a diesel-chewing, brake, screaming ship, until it he magically detached, flailing out into the air. Those real human twists of his arms, that was when Goldtoe disappeared, and I realised it was a real person flying hard into the corner of a bank, crunching real bones against brick, scraping real skin against the concrete of a pedestrian walkway, coming to rest.

I stared at Jerome Walden’s body. He had come to rest under an ATM, whose screen was still blinking through a series of, I imagined, helpful messages. People were running to him now, or at least—and this was what I actually thought—running to what used to be him. Then I saw Jerome Walden in my mind’s eye, peering at me from behind a doorway, his white-gold thin hair shaking its way from the dreary grey of another office day. Susan, said Jerome Walden’s face, if you can’t do your own work properly, please don’t bring me into it.

Was I the last person to see his face making real, ugly, expressions? Was I the last person to hear him speak tawdry, human words? That joint report, to which Jerome Walden had contributed nothing and expected everything, was the last thing in on my mind before Goldtoe streaked across it. What was Jerome Walden thinking, what spiteful ideas was he stewing, before a truck wrenched him from the ground and then threw him back to it?

Whatever last thoughts he had were now smeared—with all the rest of gravity’s head-mess—onto the concrete underneath the ATM, where unsuspecting shoes met a pulpy surprise as they stepped from the bank’s silent sliding doors.

With all the excitement done with, with the sounds of sirens echoing far away, and with only 20 minutes now left for lunch, I felt it only right to walk away. Jerome Walden valued consideration—after all—above all else.

>The sound, outside, is either rain slowly dripping onto pavement, or clothes pegs being snapped off a clothesline. I would plump for the latter, as suddenly there’s an image of tiny fat toddler’s fingers unclipping plastic peg springs. I let the image play in my mind awhile, but I remain in my seat, facing the swathed blankness of my bedroom wall. Always slow to turn around, I wonder how much of the world I’ve missed, daydreaming, imagining.

It’s hot, sticky: bare flesh weather. The best I can do—even at the private confines of my own desk, is a black T-shirt with its sleeves rolled back at the arms. No shorts for me, either—I’m in three-quarter khakis, bare feet scrunching against the carpet. The dripping, the snapping, whatever it is, gets louder, and I’m forced to turn around to look out the window. I let out a little groan as I use my arms to shift myself in the chair. It’s hard, if you’re anything like me, to give up a comfortable position you’ve spent so long getting into.

Even moved, I still have to strain my neck to see over the bougainvillea that invades most of my window view. A few loose strands of my hair fall onto my cheek and stick there. Outside, of course, Seb, my little brother, runs senseless barefoot laps around the rotary clothesline. Scattered in the grass—or at least the brown crap that passes for grass in our yard—are mum’s new multi-coloured plastic pegs. Seb runs through this spiky, stippled rainbow without any evident thought. I picture his tiny feet, punctured with coloured plastic.

I sigh, loudly enough to make me imagine maybe Seb can hear it. He keeps running. I look down at the thick paperback in my hand. I’ve bent the cover back around, my finger holding my place. I had really pictured this afternoon as free of distractions. That glorious, uncracked birthday copy of Wheel of Time I had so looked forward to—it was in my grasp, half-read, begging to be finished. I had pictured reading the last few pages as the afternoon light slowly dwindled. I had read Magician in one day: why did my perfect record have to be in doubt?

But this afternoon, free from parental meddling, was conditional. I had to be the good older sister. I had to look out for poor, helpless Seb. I had agreed—why wouldn’t I?—because Seb seemed to spend every allowable moment on his Megadrive. That was where he should be. Why the sudden pact with nature?

I try getting up from my chair, but it’s just too comfortable. The whole afternoon’s inevitable procession plays out in my mind: getting up, finding shoes, fighting with Seb, Seb following me back into the house, making me make him afternoon tea, him pestering me when he realises that all I want to do is read my book. The Sunday would be gone, and then the dread of next day’s school would engulf me, and I’d not be able to exchange the book at the co-op on the way back from tennis on Monday afternoon, and then everything else would just fall apart from there.

I let my hand casually flip the book back open, let my eyes wander to the words, just for a moment. Caught, then, like a fish on a hook. At a chapter break, the white space snaps me back. I look up, letting blissfully forgotten thoughts wander back. Seb. Pegs. Mum.

I turn around again, with effort, and peer out into the yard. Seb’s not there. The pegs are in a little pile under the clothesline. Better than nothing. I noticed the sun, burnt half away over the top of our fence. It’s then I observe that unusual thing. Our house in complete, utter silence. The first thing I think, of course, is: No distractions. I open the book, holding the pages I have left. My fingers buzz them, flip through them, and it feels like no more than 150. Perfect.

But, as is so often the case, I still have—by my best estimate—only 20 pages to go when mum storms into my room, shouting, her makeup all lopsided from crying, blaring out phrases like how did you not and he’s so young and taken so quickly.

And all I can really think is: Way to ruin an ending.