Nothing to Hide

While I was working on the final draft of my novel, I mentioned offhandedly to my editor that the characters were all based on real people. He asked if I’d changed the names, “to protect the innocent,” and I told him no, and that I wouldn’t, because none of the people were entirely innocent. He wasn’t pleased with this, so I made a deal with him: I would find evidence of the guilt of all characters, then proceed to publish on that basis. He told me not to call him for a while, which suited me as I had a lot to be getting on with.

I set about researching and surveilling the named individuals around the clock. Encouraged by some early breakthroughs, I resolved to work on nothing else until I had what I needed to publish, but within weeks the more complex cases were dragging. Bound as I was to carry all investigations through to exhaustion, I took on unrelated cases in my spare time, to finance the core mission. Becoming a licenced private investigator and advertising my services online, I put the novel on the backburner for a little while.

I’m pretty sure that in the end, I’ll prove that everybody did something. My editor has remained mercifully silent on the whole issue.

Like Listener, But Wussy

Living with volatile BPD is kind of like living in a house that’s constantly on fire, that never burns down or goes out. When people come over, they’re normally pretty nice about the fire, but maybe they’ll ask you out of curiosity if you know how to put it out.

You’ll give them a detailed breakdown of the source of the fire, your theories about why it’s still burning, some charts and graphs about how professional firefighters handle their fires, and maybe even an amateur treatise on the physics behind housefires.

They’ll take all that in, nod politely, then ask if you’re going to put the fire out, at which point you’ll notice that you’ve put all your notes down on the floor and now they’re on fire too, and the jug you’re using to douse them is full of kerosene.

You’ll smile, a bit embarrassed, tent your fingers on the table, look sheepishly at the curtains you hung last Thursday spreading flames across the re-plastered ceiling. “Yeah,” you’ll say, “I get that a lot.”

Nothing to fear

Try to find a private spot to piss on Churchill Avenue. I guarantee you can’t. Suburbia is designed for reflexive surveillance, because everything that happens on purpose is meant to hurt people. You will only find relief in this world in the gaps between intentions.

“…with the greatest disgust, Fiona Flack”

I took my mother’s typewriter down tonight and tried to write this story. Once I’d cleaned the dust off, I slid in a sheet of A4 and tested the keys. The heads left nothing but dusty impressions on the page. Determined to extract something meaningful from the typewriter, I changed tack.

I took out a legal pad and pen. For the next several hours, I held the spool up to the light and read it in reverse. I noted down every letter, punctuation mark and space in order as I went, until the pad was full. By dawn, I had reconstructed the last letter my mother had ever typed, and copied it into a note on my phone.

The letter was headed:

“Catholic Diocese of Ballarat,”

And began:

“To whom it may concern.”

Frankfurt 2019

There is a woman here at the airport who is disappointed with Frankfurt. She has only seen the airport, but she blames the city.

Australians, you mutter, breezing past her. You are disappointed with the woman who is disappointed with Frankfurt because of the airport. Australians, you mutter again, fucking Australians.

The woman is falling asleep beside a small pile of wine spritzer cans on a cafe table, and really she is disappointed that the kiosk doesn’t sell cider.

Hazy

You’re not as big as you think you are. Or, more simply, your size is not a feature of your growth, but a bug. You are a lobster whose shell never gave up, a jellyfish who managed to live a quiet life. The clouds you stare at all day are further away than your mind is capable of conceiving. That tree is a flower that went rogue.

I plan to learn everything I can, then forget it and start over

I went for a walk to see some tall buildings that I had not seen in months. I knew them well, and was not unused to their scale, but I felt somehow smaller than before, or they larger. Novelty is a great thief of scale, and there is no great difference between things we have never seen and things we have forgotten.

Spring

This morning when you woke, your body was warm like a marathon runner’s in recovery, and the only tree near enough to speak coherently was whispering prayers through your open window. You wondered aloud, “which world is this,” not yet being entirely sure. A tickle of pollen cracked your face into a gentle smile as the answer came:

“It’s this one.”

1994

During the trial, one of the most frustrated Madonna-Whore complexes of the 20th century will grind its wheels furiously in the national press. Your face will give away nothing at all, driving the commentators madder still. Barbara Stanwyck’s cool indifference over the barrel of a gun, or (anachronistically) Winona Ryder’s vacant dissociation outside a Beverly Hills boutique? By the time the judges decide you were a stray lamb, nobody will care whether the devil or God were raging inside. Society has chosen for you. You will leave this place a caged nun, and those Quentin Tarantino posters will rot on the shelf of a police storage locker in Paris.

Orange

I have been waking earlier and earlier lately. I wondered this morning before sunrise how far this could go. By the time I’m waking as I fall asleep, what next? If I begin sleeping before I wake, perhaps the whole business could be undone. At night, I walk only on streets lit with sodium lamps and collapse indistinctly into the landscape.