PARADISE ESTATE

Also by Max Easton

The Magpie Wing

MAX EASTON

PARADISE ESTATE

FICTION

First published 2023

from the Writing and Society Research Centre

at Western Sydney University

by the Giramondo Publishing Company

PO Box 752

Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

www.giramondopublishing.com

© Max Easton 2023

Cover image © Shay Azzari

Designed by Jenny Grigg

Typeset by Andrew Davies

in Tiempos Regular 9/15pt

Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers

Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the

National Library of Australia.

ISBN 978-1-922725-84-4

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Written on the unceded land of the Gadigal, Darug, Bidjigal, Dharawal and Yuin peoples.

The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Our motto is still alive and to the point: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo, 1921

Life!Life!Life is the only thing worth living for!

Flipper, Album Generic Flipper, 1982

‘SOME PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BE FOUND,’ Suze said, wanting the problem to go away. Helen stayed silent, unwilling to fight with her girlfriend in a time of duress. Her brother Walt was missing. First for weeks, and then for months. She was frustrated at his going off the grid, communicating only through the post, speaking only by landline in the ‘office hours’ he failed to keep. She reached his voicemail, which answered again: ‘You have reached the office of the OCPL. Since we are busy plotting the revolution, please leave a message, or write to: Unit 2, 224-238 George Street, Liverpool, New South Wales, 2170.’ She contacted the few people who might have heard from him, and got word only from Sunny, who she knew had occasionally slept with her brother, who maintained his claim of being ‘openly closeted’. Her brother the clown, who would live a gag until it was made clear that it wasn’t a gag at all. Sunny said they hadn’t heard from Walt either, admitting that with all that was going on, they hadn’t thought to check in on him. No one had. Helen fretted, unable to investigate further: locked down in the St Peters apartment she shared with a partner who was sick of her, their lives on hold until things were declared safe. Then one morning Helen woke up to a sick feeling inside of her. She heard no bird calls, no traffic sounds through the window. When she went outside, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and no pedestrians on the street. There was no sound, no detail, no texture. Then she got a phone call, and later that day, a visit from an idiot cop who organised for her to be delivered a box of notebooks and journals with a letter on top that said: ‘Hey Helen, does “these are the hills I would have died on” work as last words? Or is “this is the hole I chose to die in” a bit punchier?’

How to Start Again

The four-bedroom rental sat halfway down a side street off New Canterbury Road. It was advertised as ‘conveniently located’ when Helen saw it up for lease, but that was an oversell: the arterial road she drove in on doubled on itself at the whim of a bent Sydney town planner. There were two train stations within walking distance of each other (both skipped on every second trip), and a tram line that terminated around the corner in Dulwich Hill, indefinitely out of service after cracks were found in the chassis of a tram, the fleet shipped back to Spain for repair. The KFC at the end of the street closed at nine p.m., and the rows of vacant shops that marked a ‘changing’ neighbourhood lent the feeling that all roads led away from the house. As Helen pulled into the driveway in the ’91 Corolla she’d inherited, she accepted that all this inconvenience was why they’d been able to secure the lease in the first place. Even in a housing crisis, each flaw of architecture and urban planning that lay before her made this building a slow mover.

Helen headed straight to the For Lease signs spiked into the patchy lawn by three different real estate companies. After flinging them one by one at the wheelie bins, she examined the house for the first time since the inspection, now with the gaze of a tenant. She saw white paint flaking off the cladding, timber steps gnawed at by termites (their tracks through the timber painted over), and a concrete front porch that she remembered as a highlight, but now looked sad and uninviting. She realised then that she and Sunny had treated the inspection as more of a contest than a critical assessment.

Helen fumbled the envelope she’d picked up from the real estate agent in Ashfield, found the front door key and pushed her way inside. Her reward was the smell of forty-year-old carpets, long trapped in a mid-century house. In through the corridor, she recalled the inspection where they were guided past the master bedroom with the splintering built-ins, the damp second bedroom with a south-facing window, and two more rooms that, while large enough to hold a bed, were questionably categorised as bedrooms. She opened the windows as she went: through the living room, which, though spacious, had a window that looked directly into the kitchen of a neighbouring apartment block; past the bathroom, the upside of a bathtub accompanied by a rich spectrum of coloured moulds between the tiles; through the kitchen, with the peeling laminate surface of what was once a breakfast bar; and then into the yard, which stretched out to the size of a rugby league field. When the real estate agent had walked them into that yard (past the concrete laundry and its walls of cheap masonite tacked to flimsy timber frames), she had asked defensively if they had concerns about privacy, and Helen had murmured, ‘I guess you wouldn’t want to.’ She had reeled then at the three new apartment blocks that flanked the house, with all their balconies and sightlines into the yard. Helen remembered that moment as a victorious one, knowing from the agent’s sheepish glances that the young families and secretly wealthy youths at the inspection had baulked at the idea of being watched by the neighbours. When they left the inspection with the spare parts of an application handed over, Sunny said they were certainties, claiming their insurmountable advantage was their ‘vibrant personalities, low standards, and fifteen-year rental histories’. She had struggled to match their enthusiasm.

Helen wedged the door open and came back through the house, examining the room they’d all decided would be hers: the second largest, because the couple would need the master bedroom, and that by finding the place and doing the legwork, she was owed the next best as a finder’s fee. She brought her things in from the car, committed to setting up her room on the first attempt. Stuck until the larger furniture arrived, she worked backwards instead, hanging her pictures and finding places for small pieces of furniture, running power boards and extension leads from the sole outlet in the corner of the room. She began the awkward assembly of her bed frame, that she had bought for her and her ex’s spare room, a bed that was never slept in until the last few months of their relationship when Suze suddenly claimed to be unable to tolerate Helen’s snoring. She shook that off and pictured different layouts of bookshelves and side tables until she could imagine the formation of her routines. Fishing through her boxes, she found a temporary spot for everything that could be homed without the rest of the furniture, and then sat on the floor. She waited on the removalist she’d paid to bring around her mattress, desk and wardrobe from the apartment that Suze could now call her own.

Beth arrived, driven in loudly by two of her brothers in a muddied Hilux with a broken muffler. The men unpacked wordlessly, nodding at Helen on their way through with Beth’s mattress, her bookshelf, and her favourite set of drawers, all dropped indiscriminately in Beth’s tiny room. Helen went to introduce herself, but they moved quickly, unimpressed by the house as they continued bringing Beth’s things in, shooting glances of concern at their sister until they were done, smiling, leaving back to their family home.

‘Everything okay?’ Helen asked from the hallway, leaning on the doorframe to Beth’s room, which was smaller than either of them remembered.

‘They spent the whole drive trying to guilt me into staying in Leppington,’ Beth complained, kicking off her jeans and digging through her bags to change clothes. ‘They’re so selfish! They want me to stay at the farmhouse to look after our parents, but they don’t get it. I broke my fucking leg, and they were happy about it, because I had to move back home, because they thought it would get them out of looking after Dad. But you can’t get good bar work out there, and they don’t want to think about the fact that I need some privacy.’ She pulled lights, a microphone and a webcam out of a box which she dumped on her desk. ‘They’ve never lived out of home; their growth is stunted.’

Helen watched Beth move around in short, fast movements, flicking her long straight hair out of her face at each shift in position, clouds of sweet-smelling smoke coming in intermittent bursts as she vaped while changing and unpacking. Helen was struck by Beth’s impossible pace, which only slowed when she finally reckoned with the scale of the job before her.

‘They don’t understand the kind of lives people like you and me lead,’ Beth added.

‘Yeah? What kind of life is that?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Beth replied impatiently.

Together, they moved Beth’s furniture into position, dragging across the fold-out couch she planned to use as her bed. They yanked on the steel bar embedded within the couch to reveal a thin mattress folded up in its rickety structure. Beth used the frame as a guide for a set of sheets, dumped a doona on top and then strung up her lights and placed her coloured lamps. She tested them, splaying purples, pinks and blues onto her bed, which was set up across from her computer. She examined the angles from the desk backwards, imagined the framing for her camera, and when satisfied, moved her boxes and pictures and plants to the corners of the room.

From the backyard, Beth and Helen heard the crashing of Sunny trying to clear out the shed. They were hauling all the landlord’s junk to clear room for their workspace, tossing out rusted fuel cans and empty paint tins, struggling with the weight of an old car battery, dragging it all out the roller door and into the back alley. The flammables (old newspapers, a timber ladder, old wooden tools) they tossed into the yard for a bonfire. Sunny kept kicking at the abandoned detritus, clearing room for the live-in office space they’d negotiated with the others, a substantially smaller rent contribution to host their many creative projects.

‘How can you tell if that’s asbestos?’ Sunny asked when Beth and Helen joined them in the shed, picking through large clumps of debris, weighing up whether to hose the shed down before sweeping.

‘I’m not sure,’ Helen replied slowly, googling ‘asbestos identification’ while Sunny inspected the ceiling they wanted to demolish to make room for storage in the rafters. ‘It says that asbestos is fireproof.’

‘Try setting it on fire,’ Beth suggested. ‘See what happens.’

‘Funny,’ Sunny hummed, leaning on a broom, squinting into the ceiling space before tying back their bleach-stripped hair and adding, ‘who gives a shit’ while whacking and poking the gyprock and scraps of building materials that fell to the concrete floor. They took to the rest with short, sharp strokes: sweeping the flakes, chunks and particles into a pile before pushing the mounds of dust into the alley with the rest of the junk.

‘You sure there’s enough space in here?’ Helen asked.

‘You should’ve seen what I was working with before,’ they exclaimed, pointing at likely locations for their desk, photocopier, tape duplicators, sewing machine, shelves, and the newly made ceiling storage, all of which would house their production facility. ‘No, I mean where will you sleep?’ she interrupted.

‘I’ve got a futon I’ll roll into a corner,’ they said, conscious of the eyebrows of judgement that shot up at them. ‘What?’

The clunks of a stalling car rang through to the yard from the driveway, followed by the sounds of an argument that got louder and then halted as the couple came in around the side gate to see them crowded around Sunny’s shed. Nathan (dressed in a cotton polo with two pens in the breast pocket) and Alice (dressed in would-be work wear: clean Blundstone boots and a spotless KingGee shirt tied off at the waist) brought around a mass of gardening tools, pots, and parts of Alice’s disassembled greenhouse.

‘I’ve never had this much space to work with,’ Alice said excitedly, flitting around the yard before turning to her new housemates. ‘There are so many options for how we do this.’

‘It is very large,’ Nathan observed.

Sunny looked to Helen for a response but could see that she had drifted off, staring worried into the neighbouring apartments. ‘You really think you can turn this shit into a garden?’

‘Alice has turned worse than that into a veggie patch,’ Nathan said, speaking for her. ‘She’s very good.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Alice smiled, kicking at the grasses for a guide of where to start as Nathan returned to the car. She waited for him to leave before continuing. ‘I’ll admit that this one will be a challenge.’

‘Can you make sure there’s some space around here for a bonfire?’ Sunny asked, gesturing with waving hands at the space between the outhouse and shed by the back fence.

‘There’s heaps of room,’ Helen said quickly, pre-empting Alice’s protests, but distracted by a neighbour who had settled onto his apartment balcony to smoke, expressionless and half naked, his eyes fixed on them.

Alice followed Helen’s gaze and suggested that a green wall could be established as a screen, explaining that an outer ring of native trees was a principle of permaculture she’d never had space to experiment with. The others nodded. No one was willing to point out that they wouldn’t be there long enough to see a tree canopy outgrow them.

Nathan brought a series of small boxes inside: computers and keyboards, lamps, posters and feature pieces that had been packed into Alice’s Holden Astra. He stacked it all in the living room, claiming that he’d move it once their new mattress was delivered in the afternoon, or after the last of their large furniture came packed in their friend Dale’s panel van. Soon, he was bickering over the phone with Dale about what address he’d been given, walked out into the street and was almost taken out by his friend’s impeccably restored Falcon Longreach. Dale found a park, and the two started bringing in Nathan and Alice’s remaining things. Nathan showed Dale through the house as though he’d lived there for months, bringing him to meet the others in the backyard. When Helen watched the two men interact, she knew immediately that Nathan had promised Dale the remaining room despite the five of them agreeing that they’d interview for it.

‘Hi everyone,’ Dale nodded with a nervous smile, removing his cap to run his hand over his hairless head. ‘Hi Alice.’

She smiled back with an expression so visibly forced that Helen felt embarrassed for him, and on feeling that, saw that Dale got by on pity.

‘What do you think?’ Nathan asked, gesturing to the house, treating the event as Helen had suspected: as an orientation.

‘It’s good,’ Dale shrugged. ‘Better than sleeping in the car.’

As Helen tried to ask how Dale had been given the room without a discussion, a neighbourhood cat leapt off the fence and sidled towards them, making favourites of Alice and Dale as it moved between their legs.

‘Must belong to the neighbours,’ Alice frowned, looking up at the balconies around them, all now empty. Dale kneeled down to greet the pet, and said it was too shabby to have a permanent home.

‘It’s a stray,’ he said, scratching its back and looking up at Helen for approval. ‘You can tell by the look in its eyes.’

They inspected the cat, who suddenly averted its gaze.

‘We can name him Dale,’ Dale added strangely.

Helen returned to her room, suddenly overwhelmed by the pace of change. She moved around the room restlessly, stopping her busying when she realised that her job here – finding and filling a sharehouse in two weeks after being kicked out of her ex-girlfriend’s apartment – was complete. She laid back in her bed and eavesdropped, listening to the clattering of furniture, the exasperated groans of moving boxes and bags, the whoosh of air that accompanied Alice and Nathan opening their newly delivered mattress, the sound of its cardboard box being dragged out to the bins to rest atop the For Lease signs. She listened to the others helping each other in their rooms, gathering clues for the kind of people they were, piecing together their backstories. Beth explained again that she’d had to move back home after breaking her leg in a car accident in mid-2021, that she was only now moving freely enough to bartend again. The couple explained how their situation was similar, having been ‘forced’ to move back in with Alice’s dad when the lockdown hit Sydney, Alice adding uncomfortably that her dad’s place was in Woollahra. Helen became sullen then, thinking about her brother Walt, who had been obsessed with Sydney’s suburban divides, writing frantic unpublished essays about the western parts of Sydney that dealt with curfews and police choppers and military interventions while the rest of the city complained about the monotony of their daily strolls. She tried not to think about him.

Helen was stirred into leaving bed when she heard a smash in the kitchen. She found Beth searching for a dustpan and broom to clean up the shards of glass, but no one had brought one. They wrote a list, Beth scooping the fragments into a box, intermittently warning whoever came barefoot into the kitchen. When they grew hungry, Alice suggested they collect all the scraps of food they had on hand to cook on their barbecue, which Nathan set up in the alcove of the back porch. Alice found a bag of bamboo skewers which she used as a backbone for their pooled resources: haloumi squares, a couple of good zucchinis, chunks of thickly diced onion, cherry tomatoes, and some out-of-date tofu. She finished the skewers with some salt, cumin and the juice of a shrivelled lemon. Helen eyed off the platter, remembering that with sharehouse cooking, you had to take what you could get. In an awkward semicircle around the bench top, they exaggerated their stories so that their various incidents – breakups, car accidents, lost jobs, familial spats – all led to this home, as though fated. Nathan clumsily ran the barbecue, Beth found a chair to take the weight off her bad leg, and Alice created a pile of dishes for someone else to clean, for she had done the prep work.

Their conversations slowly splintered. Nathan outlined a list of socialist magazines that he helped edit and contribute to, before trying to figure out how he knew Beth. Alice explained the research focus of her chemistry PhD, and Sunny explained why they’d quit their own PhD program. Helen watched them talk, feeling excited and at the same time deeply troubled at the prospect of returning to sharehousing in her late thirties. She told herself that this wasn’t a failure, nor a market reality, nor a regression to a past lifestyle: but an opportunity to start a new phase in her life. Lost in thought, she noticed too late that Dale was staring at her, trying wordlessly to get her attention.

‘Do you remember me?’ he whispered to Helen, who frowned quickly.

‘Should I?’

‘I remember you from when you were younger,’ he added, food trapped to the bottom of his moustache.

Helen thought to say, ‘well you wouldn’t remember me from when I was older,’ but that was the kind of joke her dad used to drop on her, and she’d long been trying to shed those learned traits.

‘I used to work at the Courty,’ Dale continued, and Helen had vague memories of someone like him flirting with her when she used to drink there underage.

‘That rings a bell,’ she lied, but then she did remember: fragments of him collecting glasses and pouring beers, the occasional small talk that would vanish from her memory in the morning, and once, after the pub had closed, seeing him stumble down a back alley of Newtown in a stupor, slugging a longneck and then smashing it against a wall in defiance of the still night air. Dale fell into step with Sunny and Alice’s conversation, as Helen took stock of him. She took in his sunken eyes that projected a tired, tortured quality, but when the light fell, made him look distant and disturbed. She found him interesting in the way that a straightforward person couldn’t be: like he’d worked on and corrected a grievous error. She didn’t need the intrigue. Helen observed the others too, already suspicious of Nathan and the way he held himself, overhearing his reliance on the royal ‘we’, which she thought of as the sociopath’s first person. She liked what she knew of Beth, and it helped that Sunny had vouched for her, but Beth was younger, and seemed unknowable: carrying with her an aura of unpredictability that made Helen nervous. Alice appeared not to know that she was under her boyfriend’s thumb, which was concerning since she seemed too sharp for that – something to do with her work (and Helen guessed, a wealthy upbringing) that paired her confidence with a social naivety. Sunny she knew and loved already, closer by nature as they had both been members of similar music scenes, bonded by being the only ones in the house who had known her brother. She watched them talk some more, and piped in where she could, but she tired quickly, the first to go to bed. Exhausted by interaction, she knew that a part of stepping out of her postrelationship bubble meant having to understand the eccentricities of others. She felt uninteresting, as though the eight years of her last relationship had been little more than a process of unlearning herself. She felt in need of re-education, laying atop her sheets and begging for a breeze through the front window. She supposed 2022 would be the year to find out if she was still interesting enough to have eccentricities of her own.

‘YOU JUST WANT TO BREAK UP THEN? Save us both some time?’ Helen said this on the morning of New Year’s Day, in response to Suze’s suggestion that they try living separately. She hadn’t expected Suze to say yes. Helen kept dwelling on this, confused because she knew that Suze had broken it off, but when she thought back to that morning just a few weeks ago, all she could hear was her own voice offering up their split on a platter. And what cruelty to break up on New Year’s Day: their whole relationship kicking off on a new year’s eight years prior. And what a way to end things. Helen finding Suze in the back room of a new year’s house party with her hands in her ex’s pants after the countdown. Sounding so fucken stupid now, because they’d fluctuated in and out of ‘non-monogamy’ so many times over that eight years that Helen had to admit she couldn’t remember what their status even was on the day of the break-up. Suze had taken it so easily, so unaffected, just resting back on the couch and pouring a glass of wine from the night before, turning on the TV while Helen packed her bags, exasperated, feeling both deeply hurt and untethered. She went on the kind of bender she thought she’d left in her twenties: living in a cycle of argument, then partying, then sleeping in someone’s bed or on someone’s couch, then waking up to ruminate, all until Sunny reached out to her, telling her they had a house-sit she should take advantage of as a way to avoid Suze. And a few weeks later, they were living together in a sharehouse with four people who seemed to Helen to be deeply untrustworthy.

Enter Round Back

Helen inched through the boom gates to the Broadway Shopping Centre car park, stopping and starting in the traffic, struggling with the driver’s-side window of her brother’s Corolla. She followed the cars up the first concrete ramp, and found all the spots taken. She kept snaking all the way to the rooftop, and got out of the car for a brief view of the city. A breeze shot through the air and carried a spray of rain with it, surprising her to be on the verge of shivering on a February evening. She popped the boot and hurried around the back, digging through the bags of Walt’s clothes that she hadn’t yet sorted out. She found a faded cotton jumper and turned it inside out to reveal a screen-printed design for a record label she forget had ever existed. He’d worn it down to a rag. When she put on the jumper and descended the elevator, she grew self-conscious of the way it fit her, bunching at the arms and sitting too high on her stomach, like it had moulded to Walt’s odd dimensions. She navigated the harsh light of the shopping centre and negotiated the packs of people darting back and forth. Overwhelmed by the lurid sensations and the sea of noise, she made an escape: taking herself down another run of escalators and exiting onto the street. She went down again to the sub-basement level where the Off Broadway Hotel (a pub that betrayed the glamour of its name) was carved into the footprint of the shopping centre. The entrance was flanked by faded cut-outs of unrecognisable UFC fighters and homemade A4 posters for Wednesday-night tango classes. The room opened to a circular bar in the centre, and a bistro on the mezzanine. She ordered a beer, feeling and then seeing the eyes of the men in the TAB section shift to her from the teletext form guides and racing schedules. Whatever impulses ran through middle-aged men seemed to go as quick as they came. They nodded at her politely if she caught their gaze, returning to their silent viewing.

She finished her next couple of beers unbothered, glass in one hand, phone in the other, a book that Alice had recommended to her resting face down on the table. She spoke only via beer orders, and after her fourth, returned to the shopping centre to collect the items on the house shopping list from Liquorland and Coles. She returned to her car where she sat listening to the radio, tuned to the AM station it had always been dialled in to. After a moment’s pause, she started the car, and began circling down the ramps at all the required angles, past tyre scuffs on concrete edges, coloured scratches scraped onto concrete pylons and steel guardrails where cars had misjudged their turning circles. The radio cut in and out at each floor as she descended, an astronomer being interviewed, responding to a presenter who said through a smile: ‘And the satellites...I hear they’re falling out of the sky now,’ to which he laughed and replied in radio voice: ‘Yes, that’s quite a funny story actually,’ and then nothing but radio hiss until she was spat out again at the Bay Street boom gate. The interview returned in time to hear the presenter change topics, now unconcerned by satellites falling out of orbit to ask about how to utilise moonlight for her sculptor friend’s art project. The astronomer chuckled politely to dismiss it, but the presenter held him to the question nonetheless. Helen pulled over and screamed. She smashed the steering wheel with her fist, turned off the radio and reached into the back seat to wrestle a VB out of one of the cartons she’d bought on a 2-for-1 deal. She drove home slowly, remembering that she didn’t know driving with a beer in your lap was illegal until her mid-twenties; her parents had done it consequence-free her entire life. She zoned out through King Street and missed her turn, gliding from Enmore Road to Victoria Road. Then blue and red flashes by the traffic lights downhill made her panic. She yanked the steering wheel and jolted into a side street where she parked between factories. She steeled herself and tried to look innocent, leaving the car calmly to walk in what she thought was a sober gait. The cops at the breath test station motioned to follow her, but she stepped into a warehouse where her first band used to practise, and was now a craft brewery. She slipped inside to hide, ordering and drinking a foul-tasting beer, and then following a group as they left, hoping to blend seamlessly into their departure.

Helen walked home via the main roads, hoping to find new shortcuts on her way. She found herself alone on Marrickville Road, flanked on one side by a neon blue cross that sat atop the church, standing on one of the last free and open spaces in the suburb. The crucifix shone its blue light opposite the new Marrickville Library, which sat at ground level, towered over by an attached apartment block. This library was the developer’s compromise, a way of distracting from the penthouse apartments above, looking down on the streets beneath. She fantasised about a penthouse life as she kept on up the road, past a family of ibis who honked gently in the palm trees, then past the hallway and front door of a halfway house, its nooks and crannies all lit with blue light to discourage local users: because in Marrickville, she thought, the blue light will show you where to find Christ, but it won’t let you find much else.

The others were frustrated by the logistical complexity Helen had introduced to their housewarming. They now had to retrieve her car from one of five alleyways she thought she might have parked in, rushing to get there before the beer, sausages and tofu burgers heated up in a hot boot. By the time they had sorted it out and started thinking about where people were supposed to sit at the party, or where Sunny’s proposed band performance was supposed to go ahead, friends and strangers began to arrive. Each could be categorised by appearance as to who invited them: Sunny’s punk friends in their jeans and band shirts, Nathan’s friends in their slacks and trade-union shirts, Alice’s colleagues from the research lab in unremarkable casual dress, and Beth’s friends with their oddly shaped shoes, tops and accessories all tailored with strange cuts and features. Helen didn’t think to invite anyone to the housewarming, looking at the attendees to note a homogenisation of their seemingly disparate costume, bleached hair to dyed hair, Doc Martens in various states of distress. She wanted it to be over.

Beth and Helen played host to second-hand acquaintances, falling into the role naturally but unwillingly. They were both annoyed at Dale, who was sitting on the couch, drunk and attempting the day’s Wordle while complaining about the sale of the game to the New York Times (and how it ‘perverted’ the experience). He typed P-I-O-U-S in as a first guess and ranted when it came back with no letters. Alice had retreated to the kitchen to prepare food (which Helen clocked as an inherited coping mechanism to make herself invisible), and Sunny struggled to break up bags of ice on the concrete out back. Beth and Helen led people through the house: to couches, to the fridge, to the porch and yard, staring each other in the eye for a moment of unity.

‘Do you know these people?’ Helen asked her.

‘Only that crew,’ Beth said, nodding towards a group of five who took up the couch, immersed in their own conversation. ‘You?’

‘I don’t know anyone anymore,’ Helen claimed, searching the yard with her eyes. ‘You invited them?’

‘I posted about it,’ she shrugged, surveying the groups of people in their yard. ‘This party reflects poorly on me.’

Inside, they took a lukewarm beer each from a carton that had been left against the kitchen wall and were immediately confronted by someone that presumed to know them. A short man with oversized glasses who spoke too loud and laughed at his own jokes, who went straight past small talk to claim that he invented the use of the journalistic reaction gif, insisting when they mocked him that he had the emails from the editors who commissioned his listicles to prove it. Helen ran out of patience when he tried to find them in his phone, telling him that she ‘had no time for this 2006 Vice magazine bullshit’ and backed into the yard with Beth, where Sunny was trying to tell a joke they were working on. It started with: ‘So you take the singer from U2, the guitarist from Guns ’n’ Roses and the bassist from Red Hot Chilli Peppers –’ but they had no punchline. Helen and Beth turned down Sunny’s offer of mushrooms from the top pocket of their tie-dyed blouse, sleeves removed and cropped at the stomach. They ignored the circle as Sunny continued testing punchlines.

‘Was I rude before?’ Helen asked, looking to Beth.

‘No, I’d say you were uncouth,’ she said. ‘But that’s good. Submit an article to one of Nathan’s magazines,’ Beth continued, framing a headline with her hands: ‘The left must embrace radical uncouthness.’

Behind them, Dale and Nathan had been talking closely with a group of their friends who’d been introduced on entry as ‘comrades from The Centre’, with Sunny later explaining that Nathan was the founding member of a socialist research hub based in Rockdale. Helen thought she should talk to Beth about something personal, but didn’t know what to say, and just as she was about to try, Nathan motioned for his circle to join in with the others. The other group spoke over the top of them.

‘I was talking about sex negativity,’ Dale explained loudly, continuing unabashed when they cringed. ‘These days, no one wants to talk about sex. And people aren’t fucking as much either...’ he swallowed a burp and panicked at the dead response that faced him, ‘there have been studies. And sexual freedom is mostly symbolic at this point. I was saying it’s interesting that our generation grew up in a time of sex positivity, but you can’t ignore that we’re in the middle of a wave of sex negativity now.’

Sunny stared at him strangely, in part because these were confounding things to say with no context, in part because their shrooms were kicking in.

‘If you don’t think it’s true,’ Dale continued, ‘then how come people don’t hit on each other anymore?’ He charged on through the silence. ‘You just can’t do it. With the apps... they give the illusion of sexual freedom, but what happened to like, sixties free love? It’s 2022! Nathan was telling me there’s a book coming about abolishing the family unit, to build communities that aren’t based on churches and monogamy. But that’s just talk right? Culture is so conservative too, so if there’s books about abolishing families, but there’s no casual sex... the problem is that no one fucks anymore.’

‘That’s one way to abolish the family,’ someone joked from over his shoulder.

‘No, I’m serious,’ Dale slurred, drunker than he looked, growing agitated. ‘No one can talk about fucking without it being awkward. Look at you two,’ he said, looking to Beth and Helen, who were glaring back at him. ‘The world hasn’t been this opposed to casual sex since like, the 1950s.’

‘No one’s “opposed” to casual sex,’ Helen interrupted.

‘Then why is everything so sexless now?’ he replied belligerently. ‘All of culture is sexless: there’s no sex on TV, there’s no sex in movies, there’s no sex in books...’

Nathan interjected in his particular manner of performative rationalism, re-wording Dale’s argument about a wave of sex negativity, to one of a ‘new puritanism’, as though drafting an essay out loud. Alice had just joined the conversation, but glanced quickly away to hide her embarrassment as Dale described ‘the sexual zeitgeist’ as ‘frigid’. Beth and Helen took Alice away by the arm.

‘Thank you,’ Alice said weakly as they led her into the house.

‘I don’t need to hear Dale and Nathan theorise about fucking any more than you do,’ Helen replied.

‘Take a break in my room for a bit,’ Beth demanded, pushing past a collection of Alice’s colleagues who were standing shy and uncomfortable in the doorway, nursing their drinks from a sixpack split between the four of them. Beth kicked the worst of what was strewn across her bed into the corner. She motioned to the cleared space, which Alice and Helen crawled onto, the door closing behind them.

Alice was upset and silent, still trapped in the last discussion as Beth looked busily for something in her drawers, and let it all out before Helen got the chance to change the subject. She was angry at Nathan and his sudden opinions on sex, since he’d been silent on the topic for the last ten years of their relationship. She told them that in that time, he had cheated twice (that she knew about) but she kept it silent for his social benefit. That when she had finally requested an open relationship to explore things herself, Nathan was so hesitant about it that he strung the opportunity along for years until the pandemic hit, when he declared that it wasn’t safe to see other people. He’d conveniently failed to open the conversation since. She said she was stuck, because she knew he made all these decisions to maintain control of their relationship, but that she felt committed to him nonetheless. She said there were times she considered leaving him, but whenever this happened, he would redeem himself. Like in 2020, when Nathan’s schedule of leaving the house for his meetings and marches and postering sprees stopped, no longer spending all his time with Dale or the people at The Centre. During the lockdown periods, Alice said he had become tender, had gotten to know her family while living with them, had put all his energy into caring for her, and had even told her he loved her in a way that felt genuine, not extracted. Only when it felt like the world was ending did he become a good boyfriend. And then everything opened again. And the meetings returned. And he went back to his projects and reading groups. And now, he didn’t talk about anything with her that mattered to their relationship, nor did he even touch her, but was seemingly happy to theorise with Dale about the rise of sex negativity, ‘which is a bit rich’, she said, admitting they hadn’t had sex since moving into the house, even though he promised that living away from her dad would improve their sex life. Helen had zoned out some way through Alice’s revelations. She worried that she’d said ‘hmm’ and ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ too many times to give away that she didn’t care, aware that Alice showed all the signs of someone who needed to walk away, but was never going to.

‘Forget all that,’ Beth said, finally finding the bag of ketamine she had stowed away in the move, ‘let’s just relax, sit back, and wait for this shit to be over.’

Alice hesitated, but submitted when she was passed the bag with the house key that Beth hung from her necklace. They sat back and slowly sank into the mattress, strangers opening the door in search of a bathroom, popping their head in to say goodbye on their way out, and informing them that no, the band hadn’t started, because Sunny was tripping and couldn’t figure out how to set up the PA, and that yes, they were still fixated on their joke about Bono, Slash and Flea. Helen, Alice and Beth showed each other photos of the housewarming that people were posting, commenting on how complete the house looked on camera. They remarked on the good flow and furnishing they’d established for the common areas, and Alice didn’t even complain when videos of people smoking in the living room appeared before them.

‘Are you high?’ Beth asked Alice, smiling.

Helen interrupted in mock baritone, bellowing: ‘Noooo, I’m lowww.’

Then Nathan rushed into the room in a panic, hysterical at seeing the three laughing together in Beth’s bed.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked Alice. She sat mute. ‘Dale isn’t answering his phone,’ he continued, glaring at his partner, ‘and his car’s gone.’

‘He shouldn’t be driving in his condition,’ Alice drawled from the bed, squinting inquisitively across the room at Beth’s professional webcam and microphone set up. ‘He’ll be okay,’ she said.

‘He will not be okay,’ Nathan scolded, rushing out of the room tense and charged, leaving them in a long silence.

‘He acts like Dale’s our baby,’ Alice said. ‘As though we have to protect him, but Dale just has his vices. And he likes to be alone, so he goes missing all the time.’ Beth sensed a shift in the room’s energy, and tapped on Alice’s thigh in an attempt to stop her from talking. ‘I tell Nathan all the time that his problems aren’t our problems, that he has his own way of coping with things...’

‘Alice,’ Beth whispered, sensing Helen begin to shake next to her, remembering what Sunny had told her.

‘What?’ Alice snapped. ‘I’m just saying that Dale’s mistakes are his to make.’

Helen started sobbing, struggling to leave the bed but trapped under the weight of what seemed like an enormous distance to the door. She managed only to roll over the side of it, as Beth finally got Alice to stop. The room went quiet. There was only the sound of muffled chatter from the hallway, interrupted by Helen’s cries from the floor.

THE WOMAN AT THE COUNTER glowered at Sunny as they moved among the racks of the op shop. Sunny wanted to tell her she was acting the archetype: blue-rinse hair and mountains of necklaces and chains, jangling bracelets and a death stare based on appearances that came from some ‘deep and evil place’. They weathered the glances, looking through the racks of clothes for sizes that might hold onto their thin limbs, going through pants and skirts, blouses and polos. They winced at the price tags, the corporate office of St Vincent de Paul now less concerned with providing clothing to the masses as they were with reporting record profits from them. They pushed past a group of teenagers with armfuls of clothing, and moved down to the back for what had become a kind of ritual. Searching for the books that were the clues to the puzzle Walt had created over the years, planting his pamphlets and zines in what seemed to be almost every op shop in Sydney. Haunting Sunny since they’d first discovered it, they would find Walt’s work wedged next to ever-present op shop titles that would never sell. With the woman still staring at them, Sunny found it: the thin, red, unlabelled spine next to a copy of Michael Crichton’s Prey. They slipped it off the shelf and dropped it into their tote bag to avoid an interaction at the front counter, the booklet with the cover that read: THE MANIFESTO OF THE WESTERN SYDNEY SEPARATISTS (THIRD REVISED EDITION).

Archive Memory

Before the place in Hurlstone Park, Sunny rented the third room of a three-bedroom house on which their married friends held a mortgage. It was a tense arrangement, even though the couple’s homeowner’s guilt was enough to keep the rent at a figure Sunny could afford. As the married couple worked their office jobs from the spare room, Sunny embarked on a large project to alleviate the repetition of their research. Sensing an opportunity during the temporary end of live musical performance, Sunny announced that they were creating an archive to collate unreleased Sydney DIY recordings of ‘the first twenty-one years of the new millennium’. They sold the concept as a way of reflecting on what had been lost to both the lockdown and the attention economy, setting up a digital portal for artists to submit their artwork and audio files. They took hundreds of submissions and filed them by band name, with metadata fields for information like band members (sorted by alias) and genre (formalising meme-derived categorisations from ‘dolewave’ to the egg-punk/chain-punk continuum). The digital archive grew quickly, but their biggest roadblock was a misunderstanding of the project by many who submitted to the portal. These submissions came with long entries in comment fields which said things like: ‘Here are some early mixes for now but let me know before you do anything with them so I can get them up to scratch.’ Sunny told them every time that this missed the point, and when pushed, sent back in all caps: I’M TRYING TO PRESERVE THINGS AS THEY WERE NOT HOW THEY COULD HAVE BEEN!

Many contributors saw Sunny’s project not as an archive for the preservation of lost recordings, but as a chance to make things right. These artists felt that rather than rediscover their history, they could reshape it, which was counter to Sunny’s poorly communicated plan. They had seen so many bands disappear with no record of their existence, waiting in vain to record ‘properly’, leaving behind only practice recordings, tucked away in phone storage and untouched laptops. When uncovered and separated from the anxiety of performance and release, these recordings revealed new insights into the times they were played in: the opening of a time capsule, untouched evidence of the past. Sunny struggled to convince them of how this was uniquely thrilling, baulking at the well-meaning offers from people who offered to volunteer their time to re-mix or remaster the submissions. It was also inevitable that when members of the community found out Sunny was generating an archive, they came to them with boxes of records, t-shirts, tapes and artefacts that had been kept beneath their beds. Then the requests to offer Sunny such library copies became so common that they felt the need to encourage it. Then the third room they’d been leasing from their married friends ran out of space.

Sunny exchanged their bed for a thin futon that they would roll up at the start of every day, filling its footprint with the equipment they used to build the archive. The project had received donations of unused equipment which led them to expand its scope: a set of tape-duplication units came first, which Sunny stacked in shelving units made from milk crates and a pallet from the local IGA they had picked apart. They made cassette bootlegs of the digital submissions, selling them to fund the archive by mail order. They became so busy that they dropped out of their research program, exchanged their stipend for the dole, and dedicated themselves to the twofold project of digitising analogue recordings, and producing analogue versions of unreleased digital recordings. They continued with a head full of steam until Sunny’s housemates suggested that the clicks, clacks and whirrs of the tape duplicator through the night wasn’t a ‘sustainable’ way for them all to cohabit. The couple suggested that something needed to change on their way to the airport, planning an extended family visit to their hometown of Perth since the borders had re-opened, and then, once on the other side of the country, gave Sunny two weeks’ notice, claiming they were ‘trying for a baby’.

‘Trying for a baby?’ Helen had asked Sunny when she went to visit. ‘What a euphemism.’

‘They want to fuck in peace,’ Sunny shrugged. ‘Who can blame them?’

Sunny then posed this setback as an opportunity, suggesting that with Helen now sleeping in her own spare room after being dumped by her live-in girlfriend, that she use this mortgaged home as an interim measure. She packed her stuff in the Corolla, and moved in with Sunny while searching for a rental of their own.

Helen was buoyed by the chance to spend time with Sunny, one of the pre-pandemic punk acquaintances she’d neglected in recent years. She had fallen in with Suze’s extended circles of friends and co-workers instead, all of whom made a show of liking Helen, but made her feel like a novelty: always laughing at her comments and quips which they treated as jokes and naiveties. Helen looked forward to being alongside Sunny. She could talk to them about wide-ranging topics that Suze would never have time to entertain (she would have thought very little of Sunny’s archive of underdone music). And although Helen had ignored Sunny’s project since she first saw it mentioned, she felt renewed, and gave them permission to store whatever recordings she could find of her old garage band Lint, and experimental synth duo Look@Us, both of which she had played in with Walt. She went through her files and sent them any errant recordings she could find from the handful of short-lived bands that only ever practised, imploded after a couple of shows, or got right to the precipice of recording professionally before everyone’s work lives got in the way.

Helen was one of the few who understood Sunny’s rationale. She may have been cynical about their claim that the archive could charge subcultural players with a countercultural impulse, but she thought it had more utility than just a reservoir of wavs and jpegs. For years she had seen the way contributors to the punk community cycled over in waves, evolving with no memory of the groups who built everything from scratch only a few years prior. Every time a group of enthusiastic new contributors came along with eyes set on discovery, they were oblivious to what the old heads had just abandoned. These micro-generations would need to rediscover DIY as a concept, go see it performed, then become involved, find a new way to do it to their taste, then see it become co-opted in some new and strange way fitting of the times. And finally, when the existential dread or grudges and personal beefs took over, would necessarily break off into groups who all spoke of the death of their chosen subcultural pocket. Then they would quit, just as a group of enthusiastic new contributors came along to restart the loop. She told Sunny that the archive could act as a reminder of lessons learned, a way of maintaining some momentum, and Sunny took any compliment they could get.

In the shed, Sunny waited for the clicking of the tapes to indicate a completed run before switching off the duplicator. Their photocopier took over as background noise, piling up issues of their new zine in the output tray. They swivelled on their stool and watched Helen poking around their works in progress, noticing her shoulders drop on seeing that much of Sunny’s new material for the year was going to be discussions of her brother’s writing and music. They were attempting to transcribe and summarise the content of the barely legible notebooks and dictated recordings Walt had left behind. Helen picked up one of the journals she’d given to Sunny, knowing they were the type who benefited from looking for answers.

‘I’ve been organising them by form,’ Sunny explained to break the silence, indicating the sections they’d been setting up in piles. ‘There’s the journals here, there’s the published booklets, and there’s, I suppose the visual artworks...collages and drawings and maps. I’m just sorting them for now, but I want to reconstruct it all into a themed series, or maybe I can turn it all into a book.’

Helen tried to decipher one of the pages of Walt’s notebooks. ‘None of this is any good though, right?’

‘It depends. If you pick it up like that, probably not, but maybe once it’s all brought together. There’s some interesting stuff, some weird detours, a lot of ideas that don’t go anywhere, or go off track –’

‘Well he wasn’t in a very good place obviously,’ Helen interrupted. They went silent, attuned to the sounds of the photocopier and a rising hum of rain that began to fall on the tiled roof.

‘There’s just so much in there,’ Sunny continued. ‘It’s going to take a while to make it all coherent. It’s funny, this sort of thing isn’t really done for people like us. Someone like Mark Fisher had publishers who cobbled unfinished things together, or something like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, how they’ve been reprinted, decoded, and translated over and over, just constantly deciphered. Maybe that’s the experiment, to show that Walt had a life’s work, even though not many people knew about it.’

‘Okay, but why should anyone care about it now if they didn’t care about it then?’

‘Walt had a small audience, but it was still an audience.’ Sunny went looking through the piles they had made, trying to find the relevant passage. ‘He wrote about that too, somewhere...’

‘Yeah?’ Helen asked, still flicking through the pile of Walt’s scrawled notes and illustrations. ‘Was that before or after this diagram that redraws the boundaries of the New South Wales and Queensland Rugby League competitions...in order to create a two- conference system of expelled clubs to replace the National Rugby League?’

Sunny felt deflated. ‘You don’t feel good about this?’

‘You know the phrase history is written by the victors?’

‘Sure,’ Sunny said, now agitated, ‘but any loser can write their version of events.’

The photocopier finished its print run, collating stacks of Walt’s writing, accompanied by Sunny’s best attempts at analysing their deeper meaning. Helen took a copy and thumbed through its contents, wanting to concede to Sunny’s enthusiasm, but failing to see how their grand plans started by picking through the dregs of her brother’s thoughts. She stared through the fluorescent light of Sunny’s ‘archives’ which she suddenly saw as the shed of an eccentric hoarder. She thought that Sunny was running out of time for a life like this to retain its charm, knowing that if they were twenty years older, she’d find this all pathetic.

‘I’m sorry, Sunny. I appreciate that you need to do all this,’ she said, gesturing at the brightly lit room, ‘but why don’t you write something new, something that’s forward looking?’

Sunny stared at Helen in a way that was almost pitying. ‘Hel, this is forward-looking. It shows that anyone can be significant if taken seriously. But it’s also not the only thing I’m doing with my time. I have my band, the zine, the archive, these tapes... if anything you should be offended that I’m treating Walt’s work as a side project!’

Helen didn’t react, lost and distracted by the chaos of Sunny’s assembly line. They tried to convince her that a part of the project was about caring for those who were lost, how it was an opportunity, almost an X-ray of Walt’s brain, revealing all kinds of incomplete information from his many lines of thinking, but Helen kept her distance. She replied to Sunny’s questions about Walt’s collages with lines like, ‘Walt was never much of an artist,’ and of whether some of the things Walt wrote were allegorical: ‘He never did anything without making the point abundantly clear by the end.’ And then refused their offer of recording a Q&A as a way of working through it.

‘If you have to do this shit, then go ahead,’ Helen said tersely. ‘But please don’t bring me into it. I love you, Sunny, I really do. But I’m not going to be a “source” for you. Walt was the only family member I had who I liked, and now he’s gone. My whole life with him since I was a kid was loud, and busy, and fucked up sometimes, sure, but at least it was exciting. Then one day, life just went stone cold fucken quiet. Now I have to live this, in this silence. So this idea of reconstructing his life’s work? It just makes me sad. It’s a really sad echo of my brother’s life, and I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want to remember.’

‘I understand,’ Sunny said.

‘I don’t think you do,’ Helen said finally. She stepped back outside and hugged her cardigan to herself, an ineffective shield from the rain as she took the five stepping-stones away from the shed before trudging up the muddied path into the house.

Sunny looked at the mess of paper on their desk and felt defeated. Having started the day so enthused for their work, they now felt tense and dispirited, held at arm’s length from completing any of their projects. This community archive was meant to demonstrate how Sydney had lived through a golden era for underground music without even knowing it. This collection of Walt’s work was meant to rescue his written pipe dreams from the obscurity they were condemned to. Both projects felt unappreciated. Sunny took a pile of notebooks from the desk and collapsed on their mattress to browse through them idly. They skimmed one of Walt’s more reactive unpublished works, a ‘manifesto for the hypocrite’ written in the wake of his ‘Manifesto of the Western Sydney Separatists’, a short-run booklet that saw him criticised for failing to acknowledge the impact of settler-colonialism in his ‘reclamation’ of the western parts of the city. They examined the visual essays on rugby league competition structure that Helen had found, and then pages of what were either band names or thesis questions (‘Compromised Positions’, ‘Gentrify This’, ‘Quick PSA’, ‘Do Better’). Sunny closed the shed’s side door and brought Walt’s old dictaphone back to bed with them. They pulled a sheet up over their chest and played one of the tapes they’d recorded together in one of the secretive, interim periods between Sunny’s more stable relationships when the two were lovers. Their lip twitched, a tightening in their chest on hearing Walt’s voice through the tinny speakers of the machine. Walt’s shaky giggle that followed his own jokes. Sunny’s chuckle that they barely recognised any more, the sound of their being charmed.

Not now. Walt pleaded on tape. I want to get this recorded first.

Okay okay. Sunny laughed. You wanted to talk about poptimism? Yes, I want to know when it became acceptable for punks to listen to like, Cardi B.

Why Cardi B?

Because I don’t know who it is, and it feels like an abstraction. But I feel like I’m right to not know who it is, even though it seems to upset people when I say that.

So you feel like you’re right about being ignorant to one of the most prominent pop artists of our time?

You’re getting distracted by the Cardi B thing. Like picture some industry construct that you don’t like...picture Post Malone or something. What I want to talk about is that I think the boundaries of the underground broke when the music of the Top 40 became acceptable to play between bands at a punk show...

That’s just a 2019 way of saying ‘Disco Sucks’.

Okay. The tape hummed as Walt thought on that point. But disco was a force that galvanised the late-seventies punk communities. When rock clubs found it more profitable to put a DJ in their venue, bands ran out of places to play and the DIY ethic was pretty much born from that. They built their own venues so they didn’t have to depend on the rock clubs, started working outside the industry. That’s what’s missing now: punks are allowing the Top 40 in, rather than setting themselves in opposition to it... The tape whirred and crackled, obscuring something that Sunny said in response, then more laughing from Walt. What? What did I say?

You really don’t know who Cardi B is?

I put constraints on my listening and reading and viewing habits. That’s how you find what’s good and real. Everyone who is a part of this kind of underground music project should do that. You let a Top 40 musician into your ears and then you become like, poisoned by it. You open the gates to co-option.

So…we get everyone to stop listening to pop music...

Or at least make them acknowledge that it’s no different to watching an Avengers movie...

Okay, sure. And then what?

Like... I think I stopped playing music because the project of underground music in this country, and maybe everywhere in the world, is broken. And the only way to fix it is to create something that sits completely separate from the industries that we’re supposed to be in opposition to. So yeah, we listen to each other’s music, and we need space that’s our own.

Like, time? Room to move?

No, I mean space! A building. Like the old warehouse spaces, only one step further: not just rehearsals and shows, but a factory. The music industry cottoned onto the vinyl revival and now everyone’s shocked that pressing plants are clogged up by Ed Sheeran and Adele records, like we can’t even get our records pressed on time anymore. So we should have our own plant. Maybe in the warehouse there’s a library in there for all the records we’ve made, a printing press, tape duplicators, the whole structure in the one place, like, real independence...

A one-stop shop.

Exactly. A place with so much promise and so little bullshit that any punk who comes to town goes straight there to see what’s happening. And in real terms, in the scheme of things...it’s not even that crazy. The whole country’s punk community could be supported with what, a million bucks?

And where’s that gonna come from?

I mean, you could start with Cardi B’s next advance.

Walt giggled, Sunny chuckled, and the tape played back muffled hints of that night in 2019, Sunny staring devastated out of the only window in the shed.

‘I PROMISE YOU, SUNNY, I’ve never once double booked a practice or a show in my entire life, and I’m not about to start now. ’ Sunny admired Sio’s confidence, a drummer who seemed to show up in every second band in Sydney, yet constantly agitated to be a part of something new. Sunny thought that if they brought Sio into the fold, then Maria would finally commit to playing bass, her enthusiasm growing and waning in intermittent cycles, sending Sunny the occasional riff, brainstorming band names by text message, complaining about the band she was trying to quit because none of them were dedicated enough. She ended up wary of bringing Sio into their proposed band, Sunny and Sio only recently becoming ‘platonic’ after a tumultuous time trying to figure each other out (‘We’re good with boundaries now,’ Sunny said, Maria replying: ‘Since, when, last week?!’) But Sunny wasn’t ‘playing with fire’ as Maria suggested. Sio became the glue and the motivator, a man with impossibly good timing: not just as a drummer, but as someone who really did maintain the perfect scheduling that he promised. They named the band HDPE, with Sunny explaining to friends: ‘We named it after a plastic, but I think it looks kinda threatening. Like: don’t you dare give me HDPE!’

The Great Resets

People told Helen that a fresh start could do her some good, but the allusion felt gallingly insensitive. ‘What a great chance to find out what being an only child feels like,’ she snapped at a co-worker, realising immediately that he’d been referring to her new house. She tried to take these well-meaning platitudes to heart, thinking they did have a point. ‘Fucken...look on the bright side,’ she thought, searching for a car park on Alice Street, on her way to sell parts of her stowed-away record collection to Repressed, ‘you don’t get a cleaner slate than this.’ She hoisted a box out of the boot of the Corolla, and walked it onto south King Street, struck by the reminder that she’d ever agreed to move in with Suze down the road in St Peters. That micro-suburb that cleared out all its grocers and tobacconists and restaurants in favour of corporate getaway traps – an escape room, a wine-tasting and painting class, deindustrialised streets where warehouses were turned to distilleries and breweries and axe-throwing centres – all catering to the booming business of the unwanted office bonding experience. None of it was necessary. She felt sick about having compromised everything to live in Suze’s apartment, losing the best part of her thirties to living the way Suze wanted her to. She hauled her box of records uphill, revisiting the arguments she had always seemed to lose. She now agreed with her co-worker’s empty platitudes. This ‘fresh start’, as he called it, was an opportunity to break out of the shell she’d formed among her ex and her friends. Their bubbly dispositions and clean-cut sensibilities that made her feel the need to always talk up to them. Their dinner parties with all the showy food, the cocktail dresses and the pressure to perform, and the introduction by rote of cocaine at some point in the night, which they’d sample with dessert and then just sit there in heightened conversation. Or Suze would turn up the volume on a Spotify mood playlist before demanding like a despot that everyone dance. And the company Suze kept, who would pull Helen aside to check if she was okay whenever she made a self-effacing joke, saying ‘I’m always here if you need to talk.’

In the record store, she browsed through the shelves of tapes while the clerk priced her records, feeling a sense of hope. She was moving away from those cocaine-fuelled dinner parties and back to a life of cobbled together amphetamines and hallucinogens, in the company of people who accepted mutually agreed cynicism as a social bond. The owner put on a Swell Maps LP from her collection and told her a long story about the first time he’d heard it, which convinced her not to sell it. She felt like she had locked herself away for eight years, repressing the creative and social self that she formed in her twenties. Helen endeavoured to reinvent herself now, not as someone new, but as this person she left behind. Then the clerk gave her a couple hundred bucks in cash for her efforts, and before she even had time to think about what she wanted from life other than to rediscover herself, she checked the time to find that she was late for work.

For what was a front-facing job, it surprised Helen that she could often go entire workdays barely needing to say a word. She would get up, shower, get dressed, leave the house, climb aboard the bus, tap off out front of the looming UTS tower, cross the road, enter through the automatic doors and ride the escalator to open the shutters at the cinema. There, she would prepare the popcorn machine, check the syrups for the soft drink fountain, uncap the liquor bottles at the bar, check the state of the toilets, and finish the re-stock of the snacks if she’d thrown the towel in halfway through the night shift. Then she would wait for customers to arrive. These were mind-numbing tasks that were only made worse by the type of adult who came to the movies for her to serve. In years of working in theatres, she had never felt anything but mind-numbing pain from overhearing people discuss the meaning of an end-credits scene. She just smiled as best she could, feeling it get less and less convincing. People who hadn’t been to the movies in two years called her to ask if ‘the cinemas were still cold’ and if they ‘needed to bring a blanket’. Or she would stand at the till deciphering the orders of people making a show of how they didn’t know what size soft drink to get, saying: ‘Can I order like an uber, mega, extra size or whatever?’ Or, bewildered by alcohol sales at the movies, asking about the volume of the ‘feature-length’ wine pour, saying with a wink: ‘Maybe I’ll get the hubby to drive.’ She lost the energy to laugh along with them, but whenever it felt necessary to quit, she struggled to think of an alternative that could shield her from these kinds of interactions. Most days, she realised she was waiting for the cinema to go bust so she wouldn’t have to make a decision.

One night on the week Suze dumped her, she packed down the theatres, checked in with her staff, emailed a copied and pasted report to her superiors, and cleared an influx of notifications responding to her call-out for a place to crash. Rather than being touched by the generosity of an unprecedented response, she stressed about sifting through the replies. Offers arrived: couch spots from lonely friends in tiny apartments, unrentable rooms in expensive sharehouses, questionable advances from exes leading with ‘you can stay with me’, and links to ads for units she’d never be able to afford. She responded only to Sunny, who had texted separately and directly, and began by asking how she was going (rather than ‘hoping’ she was okay), which in that moment was all she needed to hear.

Sunny was the key to Helen’s moving on. While she had never known them all that well, she’d always felt close to them, proving over the years that even as acquaintances, they could be there for each other when they needed it. It had been an easy friendship, one that wasn’t obvious to them until the arranging of Walt’s funeral, where they found they could calm each other in acute moments of stress. Helen had been sucked dry by grief, the organisation of the event made needlessly difficult by the fact that Helen and her mum Dianne hadn’t spoken for years. They’d barely communicated since having to identify her dad’s body when he died years prior, both choosing not to attend the funeral of the man who ran both their lives aground. Having to then speak to each other with the weight of a more heightened tragedy felt to Helen like an emotional challenge that couldn’t possibly be overcome. But Sunny was a calming influence. They helped Helen find an appropriate venue, they helped her communicate with her mum, and helped her on the day itself when all the expected issues arose. Sunny convinced Helen to hold the wake at the Wests Ashfield Leagues Club to honour Walt’s rugby league allegiances, convincing her that even though he was a loyalist to the western parts of the city, his only friends lived in the inner west. Helen thanked Sunny for the idea, but when they got there, everything felt discordant. Walking through a sea of poker machines, past two restaurants, a café and a sports bar, only to be seated in a wide- open function room with towering ceilings. In there, they were expected to mourn in public under fluorescent lights, which made Helen realise the significance of the event, one that she would remember for the rest of her life. Nothing felt right, so she started work on draining the bar tab. Every person in the room (many of whom she’d never seen before) seemed to treat the wake as their important life event, as though it were a social calling. There were people who Helen knew hated her, who suddenly pretended to like her, making her feel as though she’d gained social capital by being the sister of the main event. She glared at people who had left Walt’s life, who had white-anted all his work with endless (usually justified) critique. She tried to let these things go, to understand the complexities for what they were, but by then, she had lost her capacity for empathy. Helen ran out of patience when Dianne began to take control of the proceedings, staying too long at the podium, ensuring that everyone knew it was her funeral to watch over. For the rest of the night, she tried to dodge the sea of people in the building, spending a good twenty minutes agitated and trying to avoid their childhood friend Duncan and his parents, and his girlfriend he had bizarrely brought along for the ride. She tried to respect the fact that they too were grieving, holding back her annoyance at the audacity it took for Duncan’s family to show up, considering the rifts they’d caused among her own. But Helen was the kind whose feelings always showed. Through the day, over and over, she would offend someone and then quickly find her way back to Sunny, who knew exactly what to say and what not to say, exactly who to draw her away from, and exactly who to manoeuvre her towards. They became the refuge that Suze wasn’t, who was causing problems by refusing to talk to Dianne, and scowling at everyone in the room that she disliked based on appearances. After a few hours, Suze had gotten up from tables and walked off so many times that Helen asked her to go home, making up something about needing to be alone, which precipitated its own fight in the morning. Helen drank through it all as the afternoon progressed into night, and drank even more as the wake splintered off to the three different pubs in the area. She found herself in the smoking section at the Ashfield Hotel with Sunny, Helen’s old bandmate Carol, and a handful of Walt’s friends she’d never spoken to before.

‘What was your girlfriend’s fucken problem?’ Carol asked Helen, doling out glasses of beer mixed from the jugs that had collected on the table.

‘She hates my mum,’ Helen explained, pleased she didn’t have to tiptoe around it. ‘Mum stopped talking to me after I told her that Suze wasn’t actually my “flatmate”. She said she didn’t approve of my lifestyle.’

‘Wait...’ Sunny said in disbelief. ‘She didn’t approve of your lifestyle?’

‘Yeah,’ Helen nodded, laughing. ‘She didn’t approve of my lifestyle.’

Carol and the others sat silent and confused.

‘My mum was a swinger,’ Helen explained.

‘Holy shit,’ Carol laughed, ‘Dianne?’

‘Yes, but it’s okay,’ Helen confirmed, raising her glass. ‘She’s repressed now.’

‘And you don’t talk?’ Carol asked, who had such a large and dedicated family that drama like that was impossible for her to comprehend.

‘It’s fine. She doesn’t call, I don’t call. We’re both independent women, we don’t need each other.’

‘You’re spinsters,’ Carol suggested optimistically.

Helen went to argue, but then stopped. ‘I don’t mind that.’

They drank at the Ashfield Hotel until they couldn’t stomach it. Then Helen had gone home reticently to face Suze. And Sunny had gone home to their life as a married couple’s mortgage dampener. And six months after that, they were living together in a house that Sunny was trying to nickname the ‘Paradise Estate’, after that week’s obsession with a Television Personalities record.

Beth took an immediate interest in motivating Helen to date again after finding she was single. Beth insisted that the only way to break up the irritations of sharehousing was to fill the week with overnight visits elsewhere. She said this as though Helen hadn’t already learned that lesson a decade ago, but Helen let it slide, listening to Beth’s justifications for fucking around as a means of escape. Beth spoke proudly of the list of contacts in her phone that she kept for these reasons, internally logging people who had climate-controlled housing, or a comfortable car with modern features. Then Sunny piped up, recalling car ads of their youth that screamed AIR CONDITIONING, CD PLAYER, POWER STEERING, to which Beth added the features of seeing someone who lived alone, like CLOTHES DRYER, SEALED WINDOWS, LOUD SEX. She went along with it: agreeing that she should try to move on despite her better judgement, and agreeing to leave the house to see Sunny’s new band play a late show at the Lansdowne.

Sunny texted Helen to come to the show at eleven, and when she got there, it was filled with people she didn’t recognise. She felt timid walking around the band room; the playlist was deafeningly loud. People watched her out the corners of their eyes as she passed. She used to think people like that were perving on her, but now it felt like an assessment of her appearance, feeling defensive and angry, wanting to yell: ‘I’m sorry this shirt isn’t cool enough for you kids!’ She was too nervous to talk, pressed up against the brick wall with a beer in hand, unable to depend on Sunny, who darted back and forth from the stage to set up ahead of HDPE’s second show. For a moment, Helen feared that someone at the Lansdowne would recognise her. No one did, which was depressing in its own right. Then, with an exaggerated wink, Sunny introduced her to Maria’s friend Valerie, who was also there on her own, in a green dress with a perfectly cut fringe. They stood against the wall together, feeling a comfort at being at least five years older than everyone else in the room. By virtue of their seniority, all they had to talk about was how much the venue had changed.

‘A beer costs eleven dollars here now. That’s crazy!’ Valerie started. ‘At uni, I used to come here for five-dollar steaks!’

This made Helen explain by reflex that she hadn’t gone to university but had left high school early to start working. Valerie smiled and nodded enthusiastically, but that didn’t leave her much to work with. So Helen continued, opening up because she knew she was drowned out by the sounds of HDPE starting their set, explaining that she left school because she was kicked out of home after falling pregnant at sixteen, how she’d been disowned by her dad, how her mum took her in and then stopped talking to her when she moved to Newtown a couple years later. She could have kept going (and explain how her dad had killed himself on a boat, how her brother went missing in the year just passed, that she and her mum didn’t speak anymore) but she stopped herself. Valerie nodded and squinted, explaining later that she had lost her contacts.

‘What do you do for work then?’ Valerie yelled when Sunny broke a guitar string, reducing the ambience to feedback and audience chatter.

‘I’m a part-time manager of the Central Park cinema!’ she yelled back. ‘It’s really shit!’

‘That sounds cool though!’

Helen restrained herself this time from going on a tired rant about how the only movies people were watching that week were reboots of Batman, Scream and Ghostbusters, or sequels to other reboots and adaptations, like The Addams Family and Sonic the Hedgehog. She wanted to complain about how it felt like everyone at work was a developmentally stunted teenager in a young professional’s body, and that it was especially weird because she’d first encountered all those franchises before she hit puberty. Instead, she said what she sensed Valerie wanted to hear (that she had always loved the movies). She went home with Valerie that night, spent the next few weeks sleeping at her apartment, and avoided her own house for everything but changes of clothes.

Helen returned to Valerie at her apartment in Potts Point, which was really in Darlinghurst, which was where people like Valerie said they lived when they didn’t want to say they lived in the Cross. She lay across a day bed by the open window, her head on Valerie’s stomach, the air filled with the sound of cicadas until a short afternoon thunderstorm cleared their song. Helen lay listening to the tapping of raindrops falling from where it had pooled on tree leaves and gutters. She listened to someone practise scales on a piano in a neighbouring apartment while Valerie stroked her hair intermittently, reading a book she held in her other hand. Helen had never learned her scales, but always thought that was to her advantage. She subscribed to the theory that it was her lack of formal training that enabled her to play in all the bands she’d been a part of. But in this gentle moment, she thought about how she’d never be able to play a piano if she didn’t try to learn the instrument’s secrets. If she had a different upbringing, growing up here – where unlike the south-west, the money flowed in instead of out – maybe her bookshelf would have been crammed with sheet music instead of punk and hardcore zines. If that were the case, she could be ‘stealing a wage as a seated musician in a glorified cover band at the Opera House’, as Walt had been fond of saying. She couldn’t discuss this with Valerie though. Valerie was a season subscriber of the Sydney Symphony.

The heat lingered through the rain, so they took a bus to Clovelly to swim in the ocean, Valerie bringing two sets of snorkels with them that went unused. They laid back on the concrete by the water, the hard surface flaring up the pain in Helen’s neck that had followed her like a black cloud for a decade. Succumbing to the sun, she took off her shirt nervously, revealing the scars and faded homemade tattoos on her arms, thighs and torso. She felt exposed to the public, but no one seemed to notice, not even the men who looked at women while pretending to themselves that they didn’t look at women. She laid back and tried to make some progress through a book of so-called radical poetry Alice had loaned her, but she was distracted by the coughing of strangers over her shoulder. Everyone was packed onto the sides of the beach. She supposed this was the kind of ambience she’d have to grow used to; evidence of a diseased generation, a marker of the new roaring twenties, the consequence of which they may never live to know. She wanted to turn to Valerie and make a joke headline at her new housemate’s expense: ‘COVID subvariant infection is the asbestosis of Gen Z,’ but she just turned to her and smiled instead.

‘How’s the book going?’ Valerie asked.

‘I can’t tell yet,’ Helen admitted, squinting in the heat, knowing she was missing the point by flying through the booklet to get to the end. Each delicately selected word (and its supposedly precise placement) served only to annoy her. She resented that the form was trying to slow her down, and resented Alice for thinking she’d like it. ‘Maybe I’ll understand it when it’s over.’

‘You don’t have to read it you know,’ Valerie said, annoyed.

‘I know, but I thought reading could take my mind off things.’ Helen sensed Valerie’s frustration and slapped the book down on the hot concrete. ‘It’s just that everything feels full of shit. And these books, they keep getting sold to me as being rich, or vibrant, or you know, “an urgent call to action” or something, and then you read it, and it’s just twenty-five words about someone’s cat, only the cat is meant to be a symbol of protest or hope.’

‘Well, maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s the poem. Maybe it’s missing something.’

‘Yeah, a sensitivity reader,’ Helen said, picking the book up just to throw it on the ground again and sounding like her brother, ‘from the working class.’

‘Maybe you could send some feedback to the publisher,’ Valerie suggested, already seeking solutions to Helen’s jokes and petty complaints, just as Suze and her friends had done. ‘They might ask you to proof the next one.’

‘But that’s just the problem,’ Helen deadpanned. ‘I never learned to read.’

Valerie didn’t laugh, and reacted anxiously, as though insulted. Helen read between the lines and felt a hint of condescension in the air, and then there was a tension between them. They looked towards the sea, distracted by a drone hovering overhead.

‘How are you going with all of this?’ Valerie asked finally.

‘How am I going because of the break-up?’ Helen asked, still worked up. ‘Or how am I going because my brother’s dead?’

Valerie’s expression dropped. ‘I meant how are you going with us seeing each other...but maybe that answers my question.’

Helen looked at her blankly, trying to understand what had happened and then saw they were ending their short-lived coupling.

‘I’ve been thinking again about being alone,’ Helen admitted.

‘Okay...’ Valerie sighed.

‘Not like that, but how being alone could be something to reclaim. Like spinsterhood. You know, I come home from work, I sit on the porch and smoke on my own, I drink wine on my own, then maybe I go see some friends. All the women I looked up to lived like that. The club secretary at my footy club, my high school drama teacher, the neighbour at my first sharehouse...they were all tough women. But people treated them like black sheep, like they were in need of fixing. The difference is: that can’t happen to me if I choose to be a spinster.’

Valerie collected her things and got ready to leave the waterside. ‘Do you really think all those “spinsters” didn’t just have someone behind the door they never introduced you to?’

‘I don’t think you understand,’ Helen said, now content to watch her go. ‘I’m not saying this as a euphemism. I genuinely want to be a spinster.’

‘Whatever, Helen,’ Valerie said, hoisting up her oversized leather bag. She left her sitting cross-legged on her torn and bleach-stained towel, their bottle of wine sitting untouched in her tote bag.

Helen arrived home after crying at the beach while finishing the bottle. She strung together two hours’ worth of buses to get back to Hurlstone Park, and saw the light from a bonfire in the backyard. She stumbled around the side gate to join Sunny and Beth by the flames.

‘Jesus, where have you been?’ Sunny asked, and Helen explained everything. She stood closer to the fire than anyone, trying to undo the effects of trekking home in damp clothes.

Sunny listened intently. ‘Do you think maybe you rushed into it?’

‘Fuck me dead,’ Helen groaned, throwing her hands into the air. ‘This all started because you two told me to move on! And now you’re telling me I move too fast?’

‘We didn’t mean move on, move on,’ Sunny replied with a raised eyebrow, ‘we meant to get laid...’

‘Didn’t you hear? We live in the age of a new puritanism.’

‘So go back and get married then,’ Sunny said, peeling apart sticks to throw in the fire.

‘She could be your lawfully wedded wife,’ Beth added, whipping streaks of red through the sky with a burning twig.

Helen stood unmoving, her shins stinging from the heat of the flames. ‘That ship’s probably sailed, hey.’

‘Well, who needs a wife when you have all this?’ Sunny exclaimed, gesturing towards the outhouse and shed, lit up by the fire in reds and oranges. A neighbour above cursed them, dragging in their bed sheets from a makeshift clothesline being enveloped in smoke.

THE NEW HIRE STOOD FROZEN at the bar, reading the convoluted recipe for the signature cocktail Beth’s manager had surprised them with. Beth noticed him struggling, and yelled out the ingredients while finishing four margaritas, a shaker in each hand. He thanked her while she moved smoothly across the bar, running an impatient old man’s order through the till, listening for the beep confirming his payment while pouring his drinks into coupe glasses. The man complained that they weren’t appropriately chilled, and Beth managed to act out a sincere apology, take the order from someone waiting behind him, and begin to prep a whiskey sour all in a controlled flurry of activity. She kept working until he gave up on his complaint and walked away, shaking his head, Beth keeping a lid on her fury until she stole a two-minute break after the dinner rush. There, she grabbed her phone, chugged a bottle of water and sucked the life out of her vape until she felt briefly calm. She swiped through her dating apps, refreshed her saved job search (no new results), and checked her Twitter notifications. Then the kitchen hand came through the swinging back door and she saw the new hire inside, standing dumbly at the bar with a bottle of Kahlua in one hand, looking for the espresso stored in the fridge. She grunted and limped back to the bar to help him, conscious of her aching leg now that it had cooled down. The new hire apologised as she made his cocktails for him. Over the next four hours, she cleared tables, cleaned surfaces, settled the till and then sat at the bar with the head chef and the new hire to complain about that old man (who had left a one-star review about her on the bar’s Google entry). She drank the ends of the bottles of wine that needed to be thrown out, feeling drained and disgusting, coated in sweat and the sticky residue of cocktail ingredients. Needing something to make her feel human again, she thought about chatting up the new hire, but walked home instead.

Praxis After Hours

Beth didn’t remember much of the crash that forced her to move back home in mid-2021. She could recall an image of the imported Ford F150 overtaking her in a fury, then slamming on the brakes in front of her to make a point. She remembered being wedged under the truck’s tailgate, her steering column crushing her left leg, drawing on the green Penthrox pen through the smashed driver’s-side window, and the hospital, where they told her she was lucky she didn’t sever her femoral artery. She hadn’t much time for being told about her luck. Up until that accident, she was happy building a reputation as a student artist, content in the Stanmore flat she lived in with a friend, and comfortable as the main bartender in the taproom of a Marrickville craft brewery. She had felt for the first time as though her life was established, but after the car crash, that had all come undone. She spent the better part of a year recovering in her family’s farmhouse in Leppington.

Beth felt as though the farmhouse and the property it stood on were cursed. Everything around it had been sold up and turned into logistics facilities awaiting the opening of the Western Sydney Airport. When the sun was low, the house would be lit up by the reflections of the silver panels of the mega-warehouses that dwarfed it, as though to remind them that their disappearance was inevitable. But her dad refused to sell. It was the last asset in her family after he threw all their savings into running a business distributing compact lawnmowers in the mid-2000s. He went bankrupt soon after, investing heavily in outdated models just as lithium battery packs made his inventory redundant. They were forced to sell off their first home in Campbelltown, moving the family in with Beth’s ailing grandparents in their dilapidated farmhouse. The difficulty of living with three younger brothers, their parents and grandparents in a four-bedroom home led her to move out at seventeen, leaving behind a family that resented her for the move. So it was not good for her to be sent back there for lack of another choice, rendered immobile with a broken leg, limping around the inner paddock, waiting for the wheels of progress to bulldoze her lineage.

By the end of 2021, Beth had completed as much physiotherapy as the public health system would provide her. It involved a handful of impractical Zoom sessions trying to visualise her progress via webcam, being instructed through movements on camera to expand her range of motion at the hip and knee. The moment she could walk freely (and thus work again), she searched for a sharehouse the same way she searched for everything else: by posting constantly. Sunny was one of the few who replied, telling her they’d inspected a house with Helen Coleman, and was in the process of cobbling together enough people to make the rent affordable, including a couple they met at a rally.

‘I’ve heard of Helen,’ Beth said over the phone with suspicion. ‘Can I trust her?’

‘Of course you can trust Helen,’ Sunny said, explaining what had happened to her over the years. ‘She’s been through a lot of shit, but she’s never fucked anyone over. And she’d have every right to!’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard...’

‘Why, who’s spreading shit?’ Sunny asked defensively, but Beth thought better of elaborating.

‘What about this couple?’

‘They’re vouched for.’

‘Sure they’re vouched for, everyone’s vouched for. But who vouched for them?’

‘Some friends – not punk friends if that’s what you mean –’

‘– thank fuck –’

‘– but through some anarchist friends; I think they’re democratic socialists.’

‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ she groaned, knowing she didn’t have much of a choice but to put her faith in them.

Beth had been surprised to receive a message from Sunny at all, remembering that at some point they had drifted apart, but unable to remember where their paths had diverged. They’d met at a gallery opening in 2019, bonding over their cynicism towards a student photography exhibition (that hinged around a piece in which a woman panhandled out the front of the former Dreamgirls location in Kings Cross). They shared a disdain for the others in the room, Sunny asking how the people in the gallery all managed to look so clean – the linen shirts and spotless leather sandals, the smooth skin and immaculate grooming – and Beth saying they all benefited from a skin and hair routine that wasn’t based on free samples. These kinds of discussions marked their friendship whenever they crossed paths as undergrads – where Sunny had begun a PhD program at UTS, and Beth battled to major as a sculptor at SCA – but that friendship was muddled by their differing artistic outlooks.

Beth was determined to achieve something as an artist, and was drawn to sculpture and pottery. With her hands on tools and in clays, she felt like she was intervening with physical materials to turn them into impossible figures, as though this intervention proved her humanity and her realness. But a tutor was always trying to rein her in, criticising her for attempting the large and complex before learning her basics. They told her she had to understand the rules before she tried to break them, and though she tried to listen to their advice, she felt less like she was learning how to develop as an artist, and more like she was being domesticated. They didn’t understand that it was the process of intervention that was important to her. She was unconcerned by any notion of a ‘failed’ experiment.

Sunny claimed to have a similar issue with their superiors. They’d planned to write a thesis on the echoes of the anti-art movement in the twenty-first century, but as they studied and wrote, they got stuck in a loop of critique. Looking at the seeds of anti-art’s reactions to realism, then to the reactions to anti-art in stuckism (or anti-anti-art), and then the birth of anti-stuckism (anti-anti-anti-art), they tried to argue that all these contributors were missing the point. To them, the only way out of that cycle was not to react to the preceding artistic movement, but to ignore the world of art all together, proposing the conclusion that advancing anti-art in the contemporary required the adoption of ‘a new philistinism’. When Sunny sent an outline to their supervisor, he replied in a lengthy email that he considered Sunny’s suggestion an insult to the program and the university, writing: ‘There is no way on earth that I will allow you to produce a thesis that calls for the death of this very department and all the work we do. And not just for the obvious hypocrisies of you being given the gift of my time and the department’s resources to write it.’

When Sunny took those complaints to Beth, she was perplexed at seeing them fighting an unwinnable fight and even glorifying the inevitable defeat. Beth’s struggles with the institution were in pursuit of her artistic honour, unlike Sunny’s fight, which seemed to be about making a point that no one could possibly believe in. That was enough contention to see them drift apart, and they fluctuated between being friend and acquaintance. They stopped catching up, then stopped making false promises to catch up, then barely saw each other until they found themselves living in the same house.

Beth and Sunny picked up where they left off after they moved in together. They rarely clashed, running on the same wavelength and feeling like the youngest siblings of the household. When they broached the topic of their younger selves, they even began to think of their university years fondly, and convinced each other to collaborate for a house show for the coming weekend. They worked together in Sunny’s shed, devising an erratic poster that riffed on the UK Free Festivals, inspired by the hippy and raver sets who once gathered at summer solstices at Stonehenge (ignoring the fact that for their show, they were split somewhere between the two solstices of 2022). They cherrypicked from the Free Festival poster art stored in internet archives, finding illustrations of pagan runes and rituals, which Beth turned into clay sculptures, photographed and scanned to appear on a poster alongside a tagline reading: ‘Does a mass movement mean...something for everyone?’ Further inspired by the bringing together of hippies, punks and ravers in the Free Festival’s final days, Sunny arranged a mixed bill, adding their own flourishes to the poster, from ‘Hurlstone Park’s cultural revolution begins today!’ to ‘Peace punk arrives at Paradise Estate!’

Sunny and Beth rushed the poster out and dealt with their housemates’ complaints later: Helen had to work and couldn’t be there till late, Nathan was on deadline and was annoyed by the activity that was due to arrive in the house, and Alice began to fret about receiving a noise complaint. So Sunny lied a little, and promised there was to be no drum kit that could irritate neighbours (claiming that Sunny’s band would play with a drum machine without ever having practised in that format), and talked up their selection of gentle experimental groups who wouldn’t challenge the small PA they had borrowed.

When the night came, Sunny set up a large tarp to protect the equipment, and set a bonfire further into the yard, which they loaded up with fuel enough to rage through the intermittent showers. The first band based their sound on finger-picked acoustic guitars with the obligatory odd instrument from horn to harp. While the acoustic experiments didn’t feel like an antagonism of the establishment to Sunny, it came with a mysterious allure they couldn’t place. No matter their genre preference, there was something about the art-school experimental musician that drew Sunny in, seeming to bring them back to a time when the art bands came with an added conceptual component, which was sold as a radical element, both of which were, on interrogation, absent. Sunny thought these bands spent too much time playing at university-funded performance spaces to build anything worthwhile, but it didn’t go over well when they tried to discuss this tactfully with a friend of the first band on the bill. Sunny outlined their discomfort with the arts-loving lobby, which they described as an ‘intelligentsia’, and when the man they were now arguing with began to talk about how poorly paid they were as artists, Sunny joked, ‘First they came for the grant money.’ The man walked off, drifting towards the second act that Beth had asked to put on for the night: a group who put ambient experiments to their collectively written poetry, reading over the tones of homemade instrumentation.

Sunny had invited Pat along to help with the sound for the event, a veteran of the nineties hardcore scene who was universally respected after decades of giving his energy to the Sydney punk communities. He had played drums and done sound, run a DIY venue and a record label, and now he was confounded by what he was watching.

‘Why am I here, Sunny?’ Pat asked after the band finished playing. ‘Did I misread that zine of yours about hardcore being the final countercultural genre?’

‘I couldn’t think of a good hardcore band who’d want to play the show,’ they admitted.

‘That’s a problem,’ he said, adjusting the sliders on his mixer to bring up the volume on a baby’s rattle played by a man in a paisley shirt.

‘It would be,’ Sunny said, eyes twinkling, ‘but I did book a bad one.’

‘Your band?’ he scoffed. ‘You’re playing with a drum machine.’

‘No, we’re playing with Sio. Who we would all agree is a drumming machine.’

‘Good,’ Pat nodded, impressed with Sunny’s charade as Sio and Maria moved into position. ‘Very good.’

‘Can you record it?’

‘Of course,’ Pat smiled, connecting his digital four-track to the mixer at the sound desk.

From the bonfire, Alice watched in horror as Sunny pulled back a drop sheet that had been acting as a curtain for a ‘green room’. It revealed the drum kit Sunny promised not to use, and two amps that towered over the people sitting cross-legged before them. The squealing of the guitar amp started at ten p.m. Sunny tested a microphone by shouting ‘and I said nothing’, and then the thumps of the kick drum, the sounds of bass humming through the earth and up into the apartments that surrounded the yard. It drew neighbours onto their balconies. As the simmering feedback began to coalesce into an extended intro, one man yelled down at them to ‘shut the fuck up’. HDPE responded by kicking into their first song.

The noise quickly divided the yard into those who gravitated forward, those who headed inside to escape the noise, and those who left the party completely. Fifteen minutes later, when Sunny had announced their last song, a row of torchlights came in through the side gate. Four police marched down the side of the house and went straight to the band: one cop grabbing the neck of Maria’s bass, another laying a baton across the snare drum just as Sio struck it. The song collapsed to a finish, with Sunny caught in a compromised position: the urge to keep talking for the benefit of the recording, and fear of resistance, settling instead on glaring at the intruders as they brought everything to a close.

The cops shuffled everyone out the side of the house, and when the crowd was whittled down to a handful in the yard who helped to pack up and extinguish the fire, an officer attempted to enter the kitchen. Alice called to Nathan and Dale to block the door, but Dale was wasted and immobilised on the outdoor couch, trying and failing to speak. Nathan backed away from the constable, shrugging as if to say, ‘what could I possibly do?’ Alice took it on herself, power-walking to the porch and stopping the lead officer sharply. The cops peered past her and into the kitchen, examining their wall hangings: a poster from the first HDPE show, a flag comprising a black-and-red rectangle sliced in half, a flag with a hammer and sickle.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice stuttered, ‘but you cannot enter the property.’

‘We’re following up on a noise complaint,’ he reminded her firmly.

‘The noise complaint was for outside. And now there is no noise. You have no reason to come in here.’

The cop with the blond buzzcut shone a torch up the hallway, craning his neck to inspect the flags.

‘You know we could enter the house if we wanted to,’ he said.

‘I don’t think that’s true. Regardless, I would ask that you respect our privacy.’

He looked her in the eyes and waited for her to falter, but Alice didn’t budge. He took a step back and nodded to his colleagues, who adjusted their postures and walked through the yard, shining torches into corners, at trees, at piles of garbage, back at the stage set-up under tarps, and then proceeding around the side gate. Alice shepherded them from a few steps behind.

‘You should take those flags down,’ the blond cop said to her when she finally got them out front.

‘That’s not your place to say.’

‘Just saying,’ he said, following his partner to the car. ‘It’s not very Australian.’

‘You should be careful who you get mixed up with,’ his partner added, before getting in the driver’s seat, soon speeding up the road with their tyres screeching into the night, leaving a cloud of smoke behind them.

Alice went inside to where Sunny and Pat busied themselves over a laptop, sitting with Beth, who was making eyes over the table at a man none of them knew, a towering figure who had hung around to help clean up the back. He introduced himself as Rocco, and apologised for loitering, but said he wanted to stick around in case there was any trouble. Alice sat at the table with them and deflected questions about where Nathan had gone.

‘I see you have a way with cops,’ Beth said to Alice quietly, which annoyed her.

‘How long was the recording?’ Sunny asked Pat, who had clipped a rough cut of the audio from a starting point that included the neighbours’ shouts, to a finish that included the cop’s voices and the crowd resentment – cutting out at the point where everyone went home, quiet and well behaved.

‘Nineteen minutes, twenty-two seconds.’

‘That might be enough,’ Sunny hummed.

Pat listened through his headphones. ‘I don’t know if it’s good enough to press to vinyl, Sunny.’

‘Come on egghead, the quality is fine.’

Pat left it at that; he wasn’t talking about the quality of the recording. He packed up his computer and said his goodbyes, leaving for the door and telling Sunny within full earshot of everyone else that he’d do sound for them again only if they dropped their ‘wishy-washy art-school shit’ and returned to hardcore. Beth rolled her eyes then, and it seemed to stir something in her from her past.

‘What is this obsession with that hardcore punk thing?’ she spat. ‘I’ve heard so much about toxic masculinity in that kind of music, but it’s not that at all: it’s toxic boyhood. All these people who grew up on contact sport and backyard-wrestling DVDs...hardcore is just the age-appropriate alternative until everyone turns forty and gets into weightlifting, or cycling, or craft beer, or Man vs Wild nature treks. It’s fucking pathetic.’

While Sunny was shocked, and even offended at the outburst, Rocco just nodded at the table and said: ‘You’re right, but everyone knows that. You learn that lesson the first time you see a grown man slam-dancing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Beth said glaring at the man in her kitchen, ‘but who the fuck are you?’

‘Good question,’ he said, nodding appreciatively at Beth’s direct line of questioning.

‘Very cute,’ she smiled. ‘Now get the fuck out of my house.’

THE LEAD SCIENTIST from Alice’s industrial collaborators watched her entire presentation stone-faced. He didn’t ask a question, didn’t make a comment, just stared straight into his camera, Alice staring back at his round head that floated in a box at the corner of her laptop screen. She pressed him for a comment and he said the same thing he always said: that ‘people’ had worked on the sulfation problem for decades and had never come up with an answer, that he wasn’t interested in seeing any more lead sulfate crystal structures, and reminding her that he entered into this funding arrangement in good faith, expecting that her lab would work on the things he wanted them to work on. She smiled politely and closed her laptop, swivelling in her chair to face her bedroom, it’s weird- looking carpets, the built-in wardrobes that she couldn’t remove the smell from. On the one hand, she had this man who actively wanted her to stop her work, and on the other, her supervisor who spent all day telling her how ‘wonderful’ her work was: ‘such a talented crystallographer, and at such a young age!’ She ignored a call from her supervisor and went to the yard, trying to imagine what her garden would look like, explaining her issue to Sunny who said: ‘must be hard to have one guy blow smoke up your arse while another tries to put out the flames.’

Luddites for Progress

Alice assessed the soil covered by grass. Invasive grass, she thought, walking across what most would have called a lawn. In the back of her chemist’s mind, she knew that she could kill it all with a moderate dose of glyphosate. It would be unlikely to expose anyone to enough of the chemical to cause any harm, but she was more concerned about what her housemates would think. How good a gardener would she seem if she reached straight for the Roundup? Over the fence she spotted a woman tending to the cherry tomato plants she grew in a pot on her balcony, smiling and nodding while tying new shoots to a trellis. Alice nodded back, and returned to eyeing off her proposed garden, thinking bitterly that this was a problem her neighbour would never have to contend with, this grass that had latched onto the earth. She supposed it was too large a task, and gave up on her dreams of using the soil beneath the weeds. She would have to build up, thinking about the cost of trucking in tonnes of soil, spreading it on sheets of cardboard and constructing garden beds with lengths of timber. That was a process that would be confined to small patches of the yard, negating the advantages she once saw in the big, sprawling space that caught her eye on moving in. She moved over to her makeshift greenhouse, sat down with her packets of seeds and potting mix and pots, and prepared her next batch of seedlings to plant out in the world instead.

Much of Alice’s twenties had been spent gardening. Travelling between semesters as a volunteer on organic farms, even taking Nathan along who, back then at least, took an interest in these hands-on environmental applications. She enjoyed spending her weekends and holidays on growing things. It was a way of countering the cold reality of her work as a research scientist: standing all day at laboratory wet benches and fume hoods, operating convoluted scientific instruments to extract hard, formless data that she’d spend weeks deciphering at a desk. Then in recent years she’d been forced to live with Nathan in apartments, or with her dad, whose garden was immaculately landscaped by a professional, leaving no room for even a veggie patch. This new sharehouse and its sprawling yard held so much promise, she just didn’t know where she was supposed to find the time to get started.

Alice regretted telling anyone about her guerilla gardening plan, even as she pressed her seeds into the pots and set them in her greenhouse to grow. At the housewarming, telling her colleagues about how she was going to take over the vacant soil of Hurlstone Park, there still being time to leave sprawling zucchini patches along the empty beds of dirt next to footpaths, nasturtiums in vacant blocks, even potatoes in forgotten pockets of the suburb that she could come back for later in the year. She felt overwhelmed by her premature ambitions, and focused on the task at hand: settling three seeds in a pot, covering it lightly in the soil, moving on to the next one, then watering them all in.

For Alice and Nathan, this attempt at sharehousing was a way to get back out into the world. While they had saved a good amount of money living rent-free and working their jobs from one of the many spare rooms at her dad’s house, they both admitted to feeling a growing disconnection with what Nathan called ‘real struggle’. They were once key figures of socialist groups at the universities they’d studied and worked in, but with Nathan overworked as a casual tutor in the history department, and Alice busying herself in the chemistry school, they both felt like they had lost their way. They wanted to build new political projects now, ones that weren’t stuck behind the wrought-iron gates of the academy. And where Alice wanted to use gardening as her way of sending a message about reclaiming the necessities of life, Nathan thought his contribution could be a reassessment of the way his own messages circulated. He felt that not only had digital communication methods progressed too quickly, but that they couldn’t possibly be as effective as they were made out to be. This was why he had a quiet appreciation for Sunny’s analogue resistance; appreciating the charm in their tangible processes of printing and copying, dubbing and duplicating. Inspired by them, Nathan took an analytical approach to understanding the black box that represented web 2.0. He tracked the behaviour of people’s social media accounts, logging the types of posts and their engagement statistics to examine their role in ever-expanding networks. He tracked and cross-referenced individual profiles in a spreadsheet that he constantly tinkered with, trying to pick up points of interest and utility. He analysed the types of posts (from infographics to personal communications), and normalised engagements to follower count, determined to find out whether he needed to adapt to the realities of contemporary communication, or if there was indeed another way. He was unprepared to discover that of all his metrics, and of all the people in his networks that he tracked in secret, it was Beth’s approach (of firing off images in various states of undress with politically charged captions) that trumped them all. He ignored the results, and drafted a new essay for one of the websites he contributed to, writing that, ‘The tools of late web 2.0 instigate a violent surrender to the deeply embedded circuits that run the motherboards of capitalism.’ He argued that though these technologies were now unavoidable, they must ‘reckon with the fact’ that all communication was sent through platforms controlled by conglomerates and tech monopolies, rendering everything they said online immediately compromised. He dwelled on his hatred for this new, user-friendly world, where small businesses were offered access to a combination of branded, templated services: Square terminals paying into Shopify pages, PayPal transactions for items advertised on Facebook, MailChimp newsletters littered with images designed on Canva, all of which carried mountains of tiny fees if you wanted to get the best of them. Having grown up teaching himself to program, he missed the warmth he used to feel beneath the cold circuits. He missed people coming to him for help to code secure e-commerce transactions. These third-party services had taken that from him. And as he built his spreadsheets and tracked his friends’ behaviour and spent night after night in front of the computer, he missed the years when he got to log on, rather than needing to log off.

Nathan’s version of Alice’s connection to the physical world was an office suite that he rented with some of his collaborators as a meeting place. They had dubbed it ‘The Centre’, a headquarters that took up the floor above the Adult Superstore by Rockdale Station. They found the suite during the rental crash of 2020 and were able to cover the modest rent as a collective of a few key founding members. And when the market shifted and commercial rents began to climb again, they found themselves lucky. The Centre was forgotten about by real estate. Each fortnight, the rent was transferred automatically, and no one ever came to check on them. It was as though they didn’t exist at all.

The Centre was born from the work of Nathan and his comrade Omar, who had brought a project to one of Nathan’s writing groups on a day when no one else had shown up. Omar had been working on a discussion about the symptoms of a rise in Australian fascism, hinging around some parliamentary activity he’d noticed in 2019. He cited the neo-Nazi march in the Grampians as a highly publicised event that seemed to mainstream this once fledgling white nationalist movement. He noted that from opposition, the Labor Party attempted to formally condemn the fascists in parliament, but the LNP refused to endorse the statement, suggesting edits which added ‘communists’ to the list of extremists that parliament then signed off on. This development, where right-wing hate groups were acknowledged as on par with left-wing action, convinced Omar of a coming anti-communist wave. Nathan was excited to hear about the project. He agreed to help Omar develop his work, and convinced him to keep his essays unpublished until they could turn the work into a book manuscript. He added his name to the title page of a working draft and began to bring others into the fold, forming a group of four who would later open The Centre. Alongside himself and Omar, the founding members included Sara (an administration assistant by day) and her brother Clive (an IT consultant), each tasked with growing the group by bringing others along if they expressed interest. While Nathan never asked Alice to attend (wanting to hold onto the office as his escape from their relationship), he tended to use an invitation to The Centre as an olive branch, giving the honour of attendance to those he needed to smooth things over with.

Nathan invited Beth to The Centre after an argument they had in May (he’d accused her of drinking the scotch from his decanter, though Dale ended up being the culprit). Beth accepted, thinking it would be a funny story to tell on her Twitch stream later, but the night proceeded slowly. Bored by watching a series of discussions on key events of contemporary anti-communism, they arrived at Nathan’s formal presentation. There, he described how he’d been alarmed by the flying of the South Vietnamese flag along the shop awnings and flagpoles down Illawarra Road for the International Day of Mourning for the Vietnam War. He wanted to explore its presence in Australia despite being a symbol that Vietnam itself had rejected since the war. He presented the research that Omar had done at Nathan’s request: a year prior, an eighteen-year- old Vietnamese international student had torn down the flags in protest, enraged that this defunct flag signifying US imperialism was being flown in Sydney. Nathan presented more research, on how the Vietnamese Community in Australia organisation collected eight thousand signatures to have the boy’s visa revoked, and that the student had never been heard from again. He told them how in the wake of this event, the Vietnamese government contacted councils Australia-wide to condemn the ‘inappropriate use’ of the South Vietnamese flag, the Vietnamese foreign minister appalled that the hard-won battles of decolonialism – first from the French, then from the United States – were being ignored uncritically across Australian capital cities. Nathan said that this flag (which had been flown at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, and at the storming of the White House in 2021) had become a global symbol of anti-communism in the west. And when Nathan turned to Beth, who he seemed to have addressed his entire presentation to, she sat there visibly agitated, watching him try to rationalise something he was incapable of rationalising.

‘Nathan,’ she said firmly, ignoring the others, ‘why did you bring me here for this?’

He tilted his head in confusion. ‘I thought you might be interested in helping us frame this issue.’

‘Maybe you don’t understand my question,’ she said impatiently. ‘Why did you ask me here?’

‘I thought you might have the personal experience...’ he continued, shifting his tone when he saw her expression, ‘to develop a nuanced conversation around this.’

‘Because the Vietnamese diaspora is just clamouring for “nuance” right now,’ she started, sensing the others tense up in response. ‘Getting harassed in the street by racist thugs, thinking, “gee, I wish that neo-Nazi that just showered my kids with abuse did that with a little more nuance”. You ever heard of staying in your fucking lane?’

Nathan struggled to shake off the embarrassment of Beth’s visit, disappointed in his failure to bring her into the fold of The Centre’s research. He thought that she was the missing piece for them: young and understanding of the new digital ecosystems, able to give new life to their projects. He had come to admire her skill of curating a consistent social media presence, that expanded from Twitter and Instagram, which drew people to her TikTok, which led people to her Twitch stream, which led people to her OnlyFans. And though he forgave her for the ideological flaw of monetising her activities, he had to admit that she had granted the socialist ideal more reach than he ever had.

The day after the embarrassment at The Centre, Nathan brought his laptop to his armchair in the living room, stepping over Dale, who was passed out on the floor. He’d heard Beth and Sunny laughing from the hallway, but they went quiet when he entered the room. He sat in the corner and pretended to write as he watched them text each other, their smiles barely concealed as they traded their jokes, most likely at his expense.

‘Twitter is insufferable again,’ Beth said after a while, seeing on her phone that Nathan was replying to tweets by the people who fawned over him (those who wanted desperately to be published in one of his magazines, she thought). She stopped talking for a moment so she could mute him. ‘And it’s not even the threat of Musk trying to buy the thing, it’s the complaining about it, as though it’s the moral issue of our times, but they’re missing the point completely. Why does Elon Musk, billionaire lunatic, want Twitter?’

‘Because it’s a very large asset with limitless information,’ Nathan interrupted.

‘It’s more than that,’ she replied, annoyed. ‘You remember all the research programs Silicon Valley types were funding to see if they could figure out whether we lived in a simulation? And everyone just laughed at them. But at some point they realised they’ve got everyone’s consciousness in a stripped-down form. That is the simulation: our accounts are the skeletons of our consciousness. So Musk wants to buy the database with all the shell people. He wants Twitter, and Zuckerberg has his metaverse thing, sinking money into this platform no one wants...these bad avatars and animations, but that’s not the point either. You know, for the billionaires, the cryogenic chambers from the eighties didn’t work, so now they’re on their digital transcendence trip, because when the planet burns up, where do you live? They want to upload their consciousness to a higher form of life and live forever. And look at us,’ she pointed at Dale drooling on the carpet, ‘we can’t afford that. So they’ll leave us behind in the world they torched to the ground. But we’ll still need to work, and the only jobs left will be shovelling shit at the server farm.’ Sunny hummed in agreement, but Nathan kept typing at his laptop, panicking in his armchair after someone had screenshotted one of his tweets, sharing it around as evidence of one of his inconsistent positions.

‘Nathan!’ Beth yelled at him. ‘You don’t think that’s fucked up?’

‘I’m sorry, Beth, I wasn’t listening,’ he said, hands shaking. ‘I’m on a deadline.’

‘I was asking: don’t you find it weird that no one has tried to blow up Silicon Valley? At least the Luddites knew when to strike a blow.’

He closed his laptop and paid Beth the attention she was seeking: ‘And how are the Luddites faring these days?’

DALE BOUGHT ANOTHER ROUND for the old fellas at the Crystal Palace Hotel. He’d been roped into their conversation about former State of Origin greats, and while he usually liked to drink alone, appreciated the excuse to keep drinking. After some hectoring, he told them about the circumstances that led to him being made redundant (‘Who doesn’t wank at work?’ the eldest at the table said, and when the youngest was hesitant to support Dale, yelled: ‘What are you a priest?’) Dale laughed meekly with these older men, who he felt a comfort with, a generation who had never picked him up on his behaviour. With people his age, he suspected that he didn’t come across as ‘likeable’, and it showed. He’d react pre-emptively to the distaste he saw people feel towards him. It made him sensitive and jumpy, and when stretching that energy over a day, he became tired, and gaunt. And that made him look unwell. If he told friends about this anxiety, they’d try to reassure him by saying, ‘it’s all in your head’ but he would reply: ‘I know! That’s the problem!’ Then his friends would run out of patience and advise him to seek ‘professional’ help, which ended up yielding the same advice delivered over several hour-long sessions – only it came with a bill attached, and sometimes a prescription. He was constantly humming with this energy, his eyes darting, his breath short and laboured, trying to take his ex-girlfriend’s advice, that ‘no one could possibly hate you as much as you hate yourself’. That had never helped either.

The Interloper

Dale never found his feet in the house. Sunny said it was because he was the last to fill a room, so felt like the least important part of the house’s origin story, while Helen said that it was because he seemed to have formed an identity as a black sheep. Beth said it was the way he got the room, with Nathan and Alice almost sneaking him in without consulting them, but Dale didn’t help himself. He was first sold to them as being down on his luck – having been fired, evicted from his last house and then sleeping in his car – but this version of events unravelled quickly. By the time they got to know him, he revealed that he hadn’t lost his job, but been made redundant after his manager discovered him masturbating at work (it was easier to pay him out than fire him). They found out that he wasn’t evicted, but kicked out of a sharehouse for his antisocial behaviour (of which they were all now witness to); and that he wasn’t so much ‘living in his car’ as sleeping occasionally in a well-restored $20,000 Longreach panel van purchased with the help of a generous redundancy payment. When the curtain fell on Dale’s circumstances, Helen and Beth and Sunny began to feel hoodwinked, but anyone would agree that his lifestyle was an issue. He brought with him an aura that made everyone uncomfortable, possessing an innate ability to create tensions between people. And he always needed saving.

One morning, Helen was convinced to drive out to find Dale after he had yet again driven drunk into the night. He had finally answered Nathan’s calls and admitted that he was too drunk and stoned to drive his panel van home from his friend’s squat in Maroubra. Helen tried to nap on the couch, and pretended to sleep while the couple bickered about the logistics of how to get Dale home, the Astra having broken down after Nathan drove it through floodwater. Helen got sick of it, stood up to get her keys and told them that she’d take them across the city if they ceased their bickering.

Alice and Nathan continued their fight by sitting in terse silence in Helen’s car. She shoved a cassette in the tape deck to break the tension, and was pleased to find that the sounds perplexed the couple. They asked what ‘kind’ of music it was supposed to be, and she felt even more satisfied then, knowing that the music belonged to a genre that was unclassifiable in a way she thought was very specifically a mid-2010s phenomenon. She would never have been able to explain it if pressed. She wound down her window a crack despite the spitting rain and thought of how her cultural touchstones could only be appreciated with context. She liked that this was what made her so close to friends like Sunny, yet so distant from Nathan and Alice, and relished making them feel unwelcome in one small part of the world.

Helen pulled into the driveway to find Dale lying across a concrete step with a bottle of Jim Beam hanging limp from his hand. Nathan rushed out of the car and stooped next to him, whispering in his ear.

‘Is he okay?’ Helen asked Alice, who sat patiently in the front seat, the sound of the blinker ticking repeatingly between them.

‘It’s a long story,’ Alice said finally, stepping out of the car to tend to the two men. Helen watched a leering grin spread across Dale’s face as he handed Alice his keys, visibly annoying Nathan. Through the rain-streaked window, she watched them lift Dale to his feet, set him in the bench seat of his panel van, and leave for home. Helen kept her car running, her head pounding through a hangover. She saw the curtains move in the house, and felt disturbed at being watched. She pulled out of the driveway and followed the panel van until, stuck at the traffic lights past the Souths Juniors club in Kingsford, she had a full view of Dale leaning out the window to vomit. She overtook them and beat them home by half an hour, ending up talking to one of their neighbours, who stood in the gutter, shovelling leaves to free the pooling water from the storm just passed.

‘Big party last night,’ he said warmly.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said, tired and worn by being a pawn in someone else’s drama all morning.

‘It’s fine, it’s nice to have some activity on the street again,’ he smiled. ‘If a noise complaint ever gets you in trouble, send them my way, I’ll let them know I didn’t hear a thing.’

Helen barely had time to dwell on that comment (she didn’t even know which apartment he lived in) when Dale’s panel van came stuttering up the street. It stopped at the driveway to let Dale out, who fell onto the footpath in front of her. Then Alice tried to squeeze the car into the driveway, riding the clutch while Nathan chastised her through the wound-up windows. Dale looked up at Helen and gave her a knowing wink, reaching into his jacket pocket where he’d stowed away a hip flask.

Helen awoke to the slamming of a door during one of the afternoon naps she took to alleviate her neck pain. She adjusted to the light, and was shocked again by a gust of wind slamming the same door against the jamb. Since everyone in the house was stunted when it came to closing doors and windows, Helen went through the house to close it up, finding letters and cigarette filters blown off tables and scattered across the floor. The house shook with the vibration of the back door banging shut, locking Beth out of the house after she had rushed outside to take clothes off the line. Helen let her back in, and then went through the hallway for a final check, feeling frazzled from the wind and rain. She laid back on the couch and found a comfortable spot when another sharp bang rang out through the corridor. Startled, she opened her eyes to find Dale crashing through the hallway and into the bookshelf before collapsing into a pile of limbs on the couch opposite. He sat there, blinking, until he noticed Helen staring back at him.

‘When I was a kid,’ he sneered, pointing at their television, ‘people broke into our house and stole our TV. But they can’t do that kind of thing anymore. Nothing...nothing has any value.’

‘I suppose not,’ she replied, propping him upright, concerned by his dry lips and the blood at the corner of his mouth.

‘They used to be able to steal your stereo or your CD collection,’ he continued. ‘Now? They can’t steal anything, because nothing’s worth anything. Only thing they can steal is your identity!’

‘Who’s stealing your identity?’ she asked him.

‘Thieves,’ he drawled, before shouting again: ‘Bad actors...and fake friends!’

‘Dale,’ Helen asked calmly, ‘where have you been?’

He slumped on the couch, a sideways grin crossing his face as he began to slide down in his seat. ‘I had an appointment,’ he said, tapping his temple with his pointer finger and laughing to himself. She helped him onto his side in something close to the recovery position, and went up the hall to tell Nathan and Alice that their friend was in a bad way.

The worst days with Dale weren’t when he needed rescuing or when he was disrupting daily routine, but when he tried to live normally among them. He had a unique talent for taking up space. One morning, Helen walked past Dale in the living room to make herself a coffee, moving across the cold tile surface with upturned toes to the stove. He had set up his early-model PlayStation on the TV, and while the game was loading, joined Helen in the kitchen. He dropped two pieces of her bread into the toaster, peered past her to see if her coffee was done on the stove top, and then topped up the bowl he kept by the door for the sickly stray cat he’d been domesticating with dishes of milk.

‘How are you holding up this morning?’ she asked him, leaning on the sink, impatient for her coffee to finish so that she could leave.

‘I think I had a pretty big night,’ he smiled.

‘Yeah, no shit,’ she said. ‘You were trying to get the key in the door for fifteen minutes.’

He ran his hand over his freshly shaved head, seeming to recall his issues entering the house. Helen squinted at the floor by the cat’s bowl, its old food strewn across the tiles. She came around the kitchen island, and crouched down, blinking to focus on the speckles of white, writhing slowly around the pieces of cat food.

‘Can you see that?’ she asked him.

‘Maggots,’ Dale replied, before chugging from a glass of tap water.

‘Maggots?!’

‘Yeah,’ he said, breathless from drinking so quickly. ‘That’s what maggots look like.’

Helen marched through the rain and out to the shed to complain to Sunny, returning later to find her coffee boiling over, hissing on the electric stove top. She found Dale back on the couch, playing his childhood copy of Resident Evil with his toast on his lap. She watched him shoot a pixelated zombie until it collapsed, manoeuvring his character to the fallen corpse, running through the menu to equip a lighter, then setting it on fire. Dale chuckled. She waited for him to say something to her about the maggots, but he reached into his trackpants for a bottle of amyl that Sunny had loaned him at the party, only for Dale to squirrel it away. He took a deep breath of its vapour in one nostril, held it, and on-screen, started to shoot handgun rounds into the body of the burning corpse.

Dale was not just a housemate who parked himself in front of the shared TV to play nineties videogames for hours at a time, but the kind of housemate who could be heard watching porn on the toilet, and the kind of housemate whose party talk about sex negativity went over so poorly that he later claimed to be a recovering sex and love addict. This was a man who said things like ‘people who talk too much leave nothing in their heads’ when Helen or Beth complained about work (to which Helen had said: ‘If our heads are empty from talking too much, what does that leave you full of?’) So while Helen was surprised by the speed with which Dale was kicked out of the house, she wasn’t at all upset.

Helen came home late from work on the night Dale was told to leave. She found Nathan and Alice standing uncomfortably in the corridor, with Beth in the lounge room wild-eyed and pointing at him.

‘I want him out!’ Beth said, postured like an exclamation mark and looking to Helen for a response. ‘These fucks aren’t listening to me.’

‘What happened?’

‘I can’t live with him anymore! He’s fucked to live with anyway, but now I’m sitting in bed and he’s liking all my old posts from the other room. Then I go to make a fucking drink and when I walk through the hallway he’s right there in his room jacking off with the door open!’

Dale groaned. ‘I told you the door opened on its own.’

‘Bullshit!’

‘It’s the latch,’ he pleaded, also looking to Helen. ‘It was an accident.’

‘How the fuck do you jack off by accident?!’ Beth shrieked.

Nathan looked to Helen for guidance, who was trying to understand how Dale found masturbating so challenging, and then became annoyed that everyone was looking to her for answers. But as she was about to say what everyone wanted her to say, Alice spoke instead: ‘Maybe he should go.’

‘He’s our friend, Alice,’ Nathan said sternly.

‘It’s because I’m his friend that I want him to go,’ Alice snapped. ‘What sort of life is it to live in a house where no one wants you around? How could he possibly be happy here?’

Nathan motioned to argue but Dale cut him off. ‘It’s fine, I understand,’ he said, and then strangely and sarcastically: ‘This isn’t my first rodeo!’

The four of them stood in the living room, the silence covered by the falling rain and the sounds of Dale getting his affairs in order. Helen texted Sunny to come inside, and the group spoke in tense whispers, worrying now about how they were supposed to make rent.

‘What did I miss?’ Sunny asked as they approached the living room, before seeing Dale walk down the corridor with his bedside table. ‘Ooh, I see.’

‘Yes,’ Helen replied. ‘Right, let’s have a think and see if anyone we know needs a room, then meet back here in the morning.’

Dale didn’t have a whole lot of belongings to carry between house and car, but he made a show of the effort, stopping to smoke in the kitchen as a parting shot, ashing on the table when Helen went to check on him.

‘You don’t have to go right away,’ she said unconvincingly.

‘Sure I don’t,’ he scoffed, staring at the overflowing cat food on the floor.

‘Do you have a cat carrier?’ Helen asked him, which made him laugh.

‘Why would I have a cat carrier?’

She restrained herself from pointing incredulously at the cat he had inexplicably named after himself before encouraging it to make their house a home. ‘What do you plan on doing about Dale then?’

‘I’m not going to do anything about Dale,’ he said petulantly. ‘I don’t live here anymore.’

He dropped his cigarette butt in a glass on the kitchen bench and collected Nathan, who gave him a hand waddling his mattress out to his panel van. Dale slammed the car doors, and handed over his house keys as the others joined Nathan on the porch. The cat appeared from around the side of the house and sat in a puddle, sodden and meowing and sick.

‘You can give him a new name if you want,’ Dale said. ‘I’d take him with me, but my new place can’t have pets.’

He smiled annoyingly, then hoisted himself into his panel van and turned over the engine. His car stereo stuttered to life, picking up where the CD had left off, Helen shaking her head at the sounds of AC/DC coming through the windows of the Longreach. He reversed blind into the street, the sound of rain and meowing and muffled music left behind him.

‘What a fucken liar,’ Beth spat. ‘How could he have a place if we only just asked him to leave?’

They watched him drive shakily down the street, as Dale the cat sat dripping wet on the step, staring dumbly past them and into the hallway as though waiting for Dale the man to return through the backyard.

‘NATHAN, I’M SORRY to bring this news to you, but we’ve received another complaint about one of your essays. It’s an anonymous one again, so we’re not sure how to take it. It’s...another plagiarism accusation. If you can call me back when you get a chance...that’d be great. Thanks.’ Nathan knew this one wouldn’t stick. This ‘anonymous’ member of the community going to each of the editorial committees he volunteered his time to, picking apart every word he said and claiming it was someone else’s work. He was no more a plagiarist than anyone else. Sometimes he’d receive a good pitch, reject it, and write it up as his own, but no one could pin that on him as far as he could tell. This complaint suggested that his recent article (criticising the She-Hulk production team for deflecting criticism of the show’s low-quality CGI by claiming it was ‘body shaming’ the titular character) had an identical argument to an essay published years prior (a defence of the Joker movie’s location shoot at a stairwell in Harlem that since became a tourist destination, stating that any critique of a unionised location shoot gave fuel to the push towards all-CGI sets). The editorial board had to throw out the complaint; Nathan had published the She-Hulk essay under his own name, and the Joker article under a pseudonym.

How to Rent a Commune

‘It’s no secret that I’m not happy with how things went,’ Nathan began, holding court at the head of the kitchen table the morning after Dale’s departure. ‘But I understand how we got here, and I just wanted to start by saying I’m sorry for being a part of letting it happen.’ Beth held her tongue, knowing it was a false apology. ‘But I do think we need to have a better idea of what this house is before we bring someone new in. I don’t think it’s okay for something like this to happen again. We talk about rental conditions, but we’re no better if we keep asking people to look elsewhere. So, I wanted to propose something.’

‘One thing: I don’t do house rules,’ Sunny interrupted, shivering at the breeze coming inside from the open back door. ‘No house rules after thirty.’

‘No, not rules. More of a guiding vision.’ When no one said anything, Nathan continued. ‘I feel like it’s easy to just be in a sharehouse and watch it fall apart...but we could do more with all this space. Instead of being a group of people who are all sharing a house, we could make this place something that’s a bit more collectively minded.’

‘Yeah, see? That’s step one towards house rules, you’re talking a chore roster, like we’re children.’

‘He’s not making house rules, Sunny!’ Alice yelled.

‘Even though this place is rented,’ Nathan continued unperturbed, ‘and even though we’re giving our wages to a landlord...we still have a stake in this place, however temporary. I think there’s a way to make this operate communally on some level. With collective decision-making, a feel for the community around us. Not with an open-door policy, but open-minded. If we thought of it like a commune... Sunny, please don’t laugh. Last night we made a collective decision around Dale in the end. But the tension was that no one knew the boundaries for what was or was not an appropriate decision, so we’ve lost a friend, because we weren’t clear...’

‘Oh I think I was pretty clear,’ Beth said.

‘Yes, sorry,’ Nathan breathed impatiently. ‘I just think that before we bring in someone new, we could rethink the way we do things. Propose a method for making big decisions like that: have meetings, get involved in each other’s things, be responsible for each other. Because if we have an internal logic to the house, that reflects our world view, that’s community focused...it could be more than just another sharehouse that breaks up in a year.’

Helen listened attentively to the others argue. To Beth claiming that Nathan wasn’t proposing anything ‘material’; to Sunny agreeing on the condition that the house have some connection to the subcultures (by hosting gigs and band practices); to Alice suggesting (and immediately being shot down) that rather than focus on guerilla gardening, she could invite people in to construct a community garden; and finally back to Nathan who used the positive propositions as evidence that his idea had merit, and thus, proposed something ‘material’ after all. Beth went off on a tangent, complaining that with Sunny dedicating a portion of the house’s social interests to punk music, Alice to gardening, and Nathan to ‘socialist nerd shit’, she wouldn’t have a ‘thing’, and that Helen wouldn’t have a ‘thing’ either. But when they all looked to Helen, who until that point had been silent, they were surprised to see her nodding along with them.

‘Just do it,’ she said.

‘Really?’ Beth sniffed.

‘Yeah, why not? Not to pour cold water on the scope of your plan, Nathan, but even if we say yes, what changes? It’s already better in the house. It hasn’t even been a day of a Dale-free household, and look at us. I don’t mean to be cynical, but it really is just switching “fucken hell another house party” with “fucken hell another reading group”. Like I think it will feel the same, but for some of you it might mean something. Or at least spark something. Which generates, what, Sunny?’

‘Good energy,’ they said by rote.

‘Exactly,’ Helen said, satisfied.

‘Thanks Helen,’ Nathan added, making a visible attempt to be unoffended by the minimising of his grand ideas.

‘So, now that’s done,’ Helen continued, showing her hand, ‘and in the interest of being very stressed about how we make the next rent cycle: who’s moving in to pay what Dale was paying?’

There were three candidates. Two were vetoed after a quick search revealed that one had posted favourably about the new Disney streaming service, while the other had left a questionable trail of infographics from 2020 on their Instagram profile. The third candidate explained in his message that he’d already been at one of their parties, and knew of Sunny’s band ‘through shows’. But he seemed questionable too, his profiles revealing that he was born in Sydney, lived in Italy for a few years, and then returned (‘He must have done something fucked,’ Beth postulated to Helen’s annoyance). In his message, he explained that he was living in a studio apartment in Croydon and was looking for a place to live that was more social. He said he worked tradie hours, from seven to three, and had football training twice a week and games on weekends, so wouldn’t be a ‘burden on the house’. Despite all Nathan’s talk about ensuring the right ideological fit, this was the only person they could agree upon to be worthy of an interview.

The candidate arrived to inspect the house at four in the afternoon, tapping gently on the screen door accompanied by a polite, elongated ‘hello’ down the hallway. Nathan peered out of his room to answer the door and was struck silent by the man’s size, his frame shading out the sun as he stood tall and broad on the front step.

‘I’m Rocco,’ he said. ‘For the room?’

Nathan opened the screen door and began to introduce himself, but was intimidated by Rocco’s height and musculature, all popping out of his black-and-yellow training singlet.

‘Sorry about the outfit,’ Rocco said self-consciously, noticing Nathan’s eyes wander over him. ‘I’ve got to be at training in Liverpool later.’

‘Oh, if you have to head all that way, we won’t keep you too long.’

Rocco looked at him strangely. ‘The drive only takes forty minutes.’

Nathan led him through the corridor, opening into the kitchen where Sunny’s eyes lit up on seeing the branded training shirt.

‘You play for Mounties?’ they exclaimed on seeing Rocco’s training kit, then recognising him from the house show, and calling Alice into the room. She remembered him too.

Rocco looked surprised. ‘You know my footy team?’

‘I played for Greystanes when I was a kid,’ Sunny said. ‘We hated Mounties, they had all the money.’

‘What’s Mounties?’ Nathan asked uncomfortably. ‘A rugby team?’

Sunny looked at him like he’d farted. ‘Rugby league team,’ they said. ‘Mounties are probably the strongest club in the Parramatta district.’

‘Maybe between us and Wentworthville,’ Rocco clarified, distracted. ‘But we field a team one level under the NRL... I’m playing a level below that at the moment.’ He examined the cornices and picture rails of the lounge room. ‘This house... great era for Sydney interiors.’

Rocco kept inspecting the room, guessing that the roof was in poor health, the first signs of black mould appearing in the places where water must have been pooling. It was nothing he couldn’t fix of a weekend.

‘I liked this place the first time I saw it,’ he continued, ‘it’s special.’

‘It’s run-down,’ Alice admitted, joining them in the hallway, ‘but you know, that’s why it’s affordable.’

‘It’s perfect; it’s a real Sydney house,’ Rocco smiled, following Nathan’s gestures back to the empty room that would be his if he moved in. Rocco tested the window and found it wouldn’t hold open on its own accord, then noted the holes in the flyscreen. He ran a hand over the carpet to test for damp, and found more than he hoped for. Then he tried the door, which needed fixing too. ‘Do you know if the landlord would mind if I made some repairs? Just small things. The window and flyscreen, replacing this door handle...’

Alice’s heart sank. ‘What’s wrong with the door handle?’

‘Bolt’s worn down,’ he said, opening and closing the door to demonstrate. ‘It won’t hold shut.’

Alice glanced at Nathan who tried not to let his feelings show. She walked Rocco into the yard to show him the space, apologising for the state of the laundry, still piled high with storage boxes, and the yard, which she hadn’t gotten around to clearing. On an adjacent balcony, a woman bounced a baby under her arm, filming the child and turning away when she saw the others gather around each other. Alice motioned to the lawn, the weeds growing over, explaining how she was raising seedlings while she looked for ways to revive what looked like dead earth beneath the sprawling weeds.

‘We need to clear all of this,’ she stressed, ‘or build up, but we’d need a few tonnes of soil for that.’

Rocco kicked at the grasses and weeds. ‘You don’t need soil,’ he argued. He reached into the grass, peeled back a handful and then kicked underneath it, revealing a concrete pathway that ran from the clothesline to the outhouse that only Sunny ever used. Rocco kept searching, finding more concrete paths before peeling back a half metre of turf, exposing the edges of a grown-over garden bed. The others moaned in appreciation.

‘Underneath all that is good stuff,’ he exclaimed, picking through it with one hand and holding up half a handful of dark loamy soil. ‘When I moved to Italy, I helped my coach clear ten times as much grass as this. You can do it by hand, but he borrowed goats to eat the last of the grass, then chickens to peck through the weeds and fertilise the soil –’

‘Permaculture,’ Alice added.

‘Just old-time peasant shit,’ he frowned, ‘didn’t need a word for it. If you want, we could just pull up the grass and go from there.’ Alice looked out at the yard and reeled at the amount of labour he was suggesting.

‘I’d do it all for you if I moved in,’ he added. ‘It’d be like extra training for me.’

The others looked to each other for guidance.

‘On that,’ Nathan added, ‘I mentioned that we needed someone pretty soon...’

‘I can move in on Friday,’ he said abruptly. They stood uncertain in a circle. Two currawongs called out to each other from across the yard, which Rocco said was a good omen, claiming that when love birds ‘talk to each other’, it’s a sign of a positive union. Sunny screwed up their face at this assessment. ‘Have a think about it,’ Rocco continued, ‘ask the others. I don’t want to come off as desperate, but this place is perfect for me.’

After Rocco left for training, the others traded concerns about his bullishness, his presumptions, and his superstitions. They questioned whether being able to move in with a couple days’ notice was or was not a red flag. Helen came home and agreed with Sunny, who kept repeating that Rocco should be allowed in solely because he knew about their band. When this reasoning failed, they said they all had to admit that discovering a concrete path to the outhouse before you’d even moved in was as impressive an achievement as anything they’d done in four months. Beth, still at work, replied to the group chat’s assessments on her break, saying she would be ‘fine with it as long as he doesn’t whack off in the hallway’. By ten, they confirmed in the chat that Rocco was to be their new housemate. They typed in various platitudes and crass comments, only to fall silent when they looked back to their phone to see an oversight at the bottom of the chat. In a greyed-out font below their streams of congratulatory messages, the note: Dale has left the conversation.

The morning after Rocco’s move-in date was confirmed, Helen fished through her clothes to discover that the weeks of rain had instigated a deeper change in the house. Reaching into her wardrobe, she spotted shades of green crawling up every item of leather. She groaned in revulsion at the patterns of mould that took over belts and boots. She dressed herself in clothes as far away from that section of the wardrobe as possible, and informed the house of her discovery. This sent them all looking through their rooms. Sliding back furniture, they found floorboards crumbling under the rising damp, the underside of drawers turned green, kitchen cabinets with hinges that peeled away from the timber. They found mould creeping up the chipboard backings of their nineties-does- seventies second-hand furniture. They found that the ‘dust’ on the ceiling was actually the first speckles of a black mould outbreak. As they looked for other sources, Helen went back to her room and yanked open the front windows to get some airflow. A family of magpies picked through the sodden mud seeking drowned bugs and lizards. They looked up at her as though she were intruding. She emptied the drawer’s contents and wiped the surfaces with a vinegar solution before stacking them in front of a pedestal fan, while her clothes took on their own lives as mould hosts on the floor, ready to be washed and dried whenever there was a break in the weather. It started to rain again.

They notified Rocco about their discovery, but he was unperturbed. He said that considering the La Niña phase they were entering, mould was probably the least of their problems: ‘you just have to get out in front of it,’ he said, arriving in his ute with a tray full of solutions on the day he moved in. While he found them all staring and pointing helplessly at newly discovered mouldy horrors, he pottered around the house making quick assessments of the situation. The following day he got to work. He brought inside some floorboard offcuts he stole from a home extension he was working on as a scaffolder. He found where the rotting flooring was at its worst and smashed through them with a mallet from his toolbox, cut the boards to size, and patched in new, dry, sturdy timber. He offered to tear up the worst of the damp- ridden carpets and polish the floorboards underneath, and when he got no response, cleared his room, the hallway and living room, to Helen’s chagrin (already stressed about one day getting the bond back). He squeezed his enormous frame into the crawlspace under the house and cleared the pooling water. For the windows that didn’t open due to the landlord painting them in, he cleared the cracks with a Stanley knife and a sharp chisel, then jimmied them all wide open. He went through the house in a steady stream of activity, with no boundary in mind for what was a communal space, what was his responsibility, or what was someone else’s, even coming through the kitchen to wash every ignored dish in the sink – plates of discarded olive pips, bowls with a green film at the surface of a lazy soaking, piles of lemon peels with the zest stripped off for Beth’s after-work martinis. These all seemed to be a personal affront to him, and in the first days of his residing there, he reset weeks of storm damage, and months of passive-aggressive sharehouse inaction.

Beth had made herself scarce during Rocco’s cleaning spree, visiting Sunny out back to check in on their feelings about the new housemate.

‘It’s kind of terrifying to see a stranger tear through your house like this,’ she admitted.

‘It’s great,’ Sunny countered, looking out the shed window as Rocco hauled the lawnmower out of the junk pile around the side of the house to make a start on the overgrown grass. ‘He’s like... the anti-Dale.’

‘Does he want a fucking medal or what?’ Beth watching his body move effortlessly around the machine and the earth.

‘No, you can tell when someone’s cleaning for show, they sniff around for approval. Watch.’ Rocco ran down ten metres of knee- high grass then stopped when he’d filled the catcher, ripping it off and continuing the mow without it, preparing to rake the mulch later. ‘He’s all nose to the grindstone.’

‘It just seems a bit audacious don’t you think?’ Beth asked, suspicious, having observed that Rocco only popped his shirt off when she came into the yard.

‘What’s the alternative? You’d rather him huff glue on the back porch, drink all your booze, dump cat food on the floor then pass out on the couch?’

‘You’re right,’ Beth said, still watching this stranger mow the lawn topless, ‘that’s my job.’

‘I DON’T GET HOW this is supposed to stop people from voting for him, ’ Sunny giggled, leaning forward and staring at the corflute sign of Scott Morrison in a Hawaiian shirt with the caption, ‘Doesn’t hold a hose’. ‘It just looks like he had a nice holiday.’ Helen pulled them away from the signs, running out of patience for Sunny’s decision to ‘vote on acid’, having spent most of the walk pointing at signs and banners and how-to-vote cards, while whispering to her: ‘There’s ephemera...everywhere.’ They rounded New Canterbury Road together, passing red-brick houses and oversized cars as Hurlstone Park became the old-money haven of Summer Hill. Sunny stopped again, now at a stylised print of a young Anthony Albanese propped between the glass and venetian blinds of a street-level window. Sunny stared at it, called it ‘A Portrait of the Centrist as a Young Man,’ and then corrected themself, yelling: ‘He matters!’ Helen took them by the hand and tried to get them home, thinking about all the losing candidates Labor had put up as options in failed election after failed election, about her dad’s hatred of Kim Beazley and his love of Mark Latham, of the Rudd–Gillard leadership disputes that gifted a decade to conservative power for the sake of ego and ambition, of Bill Shorten’s stumbling into the role just after the party had altered the rules to prevent destabilising leadership challenges, and now: Anthony Albanese. Then Sunny stopped her again, reeling at two neighbouring houses with the same stylised print posted in their lawns, and said excitedly: ‘What about a band called #HETOO?’

Rising Tide

Alice scrambled to collect the potted seedlings she’d left out in the yard, panicking as she saw them collapse under the weight of the rain. No one in the house remembered a time when it rained this hard for this long. They were barely able to hear each other speak over the crashing storms. They stopped at windows and doorways to watch in awe together as the yard filled with water. Sunny spent hours standing in their shed looking upwards, fretting about whether the tiles would withstand the force. The gutters pooled with water, which gushed off the roof and slapped the concrete paths that surrounded the house. The inaction of the others made Alice feel desperate.

‘We need to tell the real estate,’ she said, unable to sleep and shocked at the overflow around the building, ‘those gutters are terrible.’

Helen worried about her housemate’s resilience, and correctly predicted the ensuing argument (‘You don’t complain to real estate until after the first renewal,’ preceding Alice’s ‘Well what are real estate agents even for then?’). From the kitchen, Helen waved at Sunny through the rain just as a champagne cork dropped out of the gutter, the downpipes blocked not just by the accumulated gunk and dust from the surrounding apartment projects, but the celebratory drinks of those above them.

‘I am so sick,’ Sunny yelled back at her through the rain, ‘of this fucking monsoon!’

Helen shrugged as Nathan appeared next to her, taking the place of Alice, who’d stormed out of the room. ‘It’ll rain itself out by morning,’ he assured her.

Helen was intrigued by the way this weather felt like a fleeting condition, even though they were being told the rain was here to stay for the year. She supposed they were all of a generation conditioned by drought, a drought that seemed to have been blinked out of their collective memory when the entire country was set on fire, only to be extinguished by the first floodwaters in 2020, then forgotten by the spread of a pandemic that still ran its course. As the mould rushed through their house, and the news carried images of Lismore being washed away, she felt the same oblivious complacency: that everything catastrophic would end as quickly as it started, a return to regular programming.

Rocco returned home sodden with water and mud after an opposed session, stepping out of his ute in nothing but his footy shorts. While the house had become used to seeing him in a state of semi-nudity, it was not any less impressive to Sunny and Beth, who stood on the front porch with glasses of wine to watch the storm rage on. He lumbered through the muddied front lawn, his work boots and footy boots pinched together in one hand, a bag of servo ice gripped in the other.

‘Does he just work and train in the nude or what?’ Beth whispered after he passed, stretching the muscles of her bad leg that tightened the day after every shift.

‘I suppose he could tone it down a bit,’ Sunny said, sipping at their drink.

Rocco dumped the ice under running bath water, and slipped into the harsh conditions, breathing in loud, sharp bursts while submerging as much of his body as possible. The sting of the cold took over the aches from a long day of labour and training, hands and arms sore from hoisting scaffold parts, torso throbbing from the night’s contact, legs burning from the sprints tacked on at the end of the session. He felt a helpless mix of pain and exhaustion as his body adjusted to the icy conditions. He relaxed, then felt the hum of lust and desire run through him. He tried to quell it immediately. While it was true when he told people he left Sydney in pursuit of an opportunity in Italy, he’d been running from a social life that was being ruled by the aftermath of a series of bad break-ups. On arriving in Turin, he’d made the same mistakes all over again, forming networks that he wasn’t equipped to deal with. Alone in the bath of this new home, he felt nostalgic for the good parts of those years, the simpler prepandemic times, with the people who would invite him around in the middle of the night, the people he could text with an hour’s notice for on-call intimacy. Now he felt uncertain about how to restart this side of his life. In both countries, he’d slept with people he shouldn’t have, caused rifts that he could have avoided, damaged his friendships, threatened the livelihood of his band; and for what? He tried to extinguish the fire within him, to be at peace with patience and solitude, but even in an ice bath his body knew better. He closed his eyes, slipped further into the water to submerge his torso, and tried to silence his fantasies by running attacking plays in his head.

Rocco contorted himself to sink further in the water when he heard someone struggling with the doorknob. Alice apologised when she heard his splashing, and then her stomach churned. Feeling clammy, she walked calmly at first towards the outhouse, and by the time her foot hit the kitchen tiles, she was running. She fled into the backyard through the torrents of rain, splashing through the flooded pathway and down the long stretch to the brick toilet at the back, running past the shed, where Sunny was assembling cassettes for another mail-out, listening to some submissions to their archive at top volume to drown out the rain. Alice flew past the open doorway in a flash.

‘Woah, are you okay?’ Sunny called. They sat up to watch her as she splashed through the mud into the outhouse, slamming the door shut. Sunny yelled an apology through a thunderstrike as Alice slapped at the light switch (which was non-responsive, the bulb fried) and then flung down the toilet seat, hiked back her sodden nightdress and hovered over the bowl as lightning lit the cubicle for a millisecond. She cried, and let her body take over. When Alice thought she was done dealing with what had revealed itself as a cruel bout of diarrhoea (blaming Helen’s chicken casserole), she reached for the toilet paper only to find it turned to a damp mess by the water that had sprayed and billowed around the bricked-up stall through the storms.

‘Sunny!’ she screamed in futility. ‘Can you help?’ But the noise of rain and thunder was too loud for her calls to carry.

Alice did what she could with the damp resources at hand, and walked back through the rain, broken and drained. A flash of lightning lit up the yard, then the wind howled as she heard a yell from a balcony above. Then what sounded like the creak and crack of more thunder before she felt the whoosh of a falling branch. She screamed and looked at the woman on the balcony who tried to call out to her from across their distance. The branch laid collapsed just metres behind her. She plodded through the mud and into the kitchen, drenched so badly that when Helen saw her, she couldn’t discern water from tears. Alice knocked again at the bathroom door and Rocco yelled back at her, but she didn’t understand him among the noise outside and the shifting of his ice.

‘Have you noticed he yells in Italian when he wants to scare people off?’ Helen called from the kitchen.

Alice ignored her. ‘I need a shower, Rocco!’ she yelled through the door, thumping at it again.

‘I only just got in!’ he yelled back at her. ‘You need a shower? Go stand in the rain!’

Alice continued up the hallway before stripping off her heavy clothes and letting them fall to her feet. She sifted through the towels which were all damp, sniffing for one that might have some hint of cleanliness and threw herself down on the bed. Later, she heard the door open, Nathan having returned from his meeting at The Centre: bone-dry, having been given a lift, his face flushed from the car heater. He removed his gumboots, folded his clothes, and looked down to notice Alice’s mood, holding himself back from complaining about the mess she’d left on the floor.

‘I want this to be over!’ Alice cried.

‘What now?’ he sighed.

‘I want to live in a real house – I want things to be better!’

‘This is a real house,’ Nathan said tersely, ‘and it doesn’t just “get better”.’

‘It’s supposed to! How long am I supposed to keep doing this?’

‘We’ll get there,’ he said, ‘but we need to build this thing first.’

‘What are we building, Nathan?!’

He looked at her blankly. ‘We’re making this house a commune.’

Alice threw her discarded dress at him, slapping wet against his neck and falling to the carpet. She watched the thought form in his head as the dress fell to the ground. Uncharacteristically tactful, he caught her eye and restrained himself from admonishing her for letting dirty clothes pile on the floor. Instead, he took one of the damp towels from the desk chair, and dried her off as though she were a child, overly rough, with the half-heartedness he used in moments of giving.

Sunny woke to the sound of rustling just outside the shed window. They stretched up from the floor to peer through the curtain, and saw an old man on an aluminium ladder leaned up against the lemon tree, pruning shears in hand, lopping down full, leafy branches. They fell among the thickets of nasturtiums. Sunny laid low, and texted the house group chat that some old guy is destroying the lemon tree, then listened to Helen come outside yelling with Rocco, then Alice in pursuit, with Beth trailing in anticipation as a spectator. Sunny heard the man on the ladder introduce himself as ‘the owner’. They heard Alice apologise to the others: in front of the landlord, she said she’d been too busy finishing a paper submission to remind them of the visit, but admitted afterwards that she’d contacted the real estate in secret, wanting to ensure the tree that had dropped a branch was safe.

‘It wasn’t the lemon tree, it was the gum,’ Alice reminded him, trying to get the man to deal with the fallen branch instead. The landlord explained the need for a good citrus prune at the end of every few winters, and then went off on a tangent about how much he loved the property. It was the house he raised a family in, he said, and though his three kids all wanted to sell off the land, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He said the carpets were the surfaces his kids had learned to walk on, and it brought him great joy that after all these years, those carpets, and their fantastic patterns, still covered the floors he had laid himself, forty years prior. Rocco did well to conceal the fact that he’d already torn them up and dumped them in the KFC skip bin.

‘You’re good kids,’ he said, bundling the branches.

‘We’re in our thirties,’ Helen replied.

‘You live like kids,’ he said, looking around at the state of the yard, and porch, and laundry. ‘Do you like it here?’

‘Yeah, we do,’ Helen said weakly. ‘It’s a nice house. We like the space.’

He seemed hurt by her lack of enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get my chainsaw from the car now, and I’ll cut up this branch, okay? Then I’ll go home. The lemon tree will look good in a few months,’ he added to Alice who was fixated on the skeleton he’d left behind after the prune. ‘Don’t be too sad about it.’

‘I’ve always struggled with pruning,’ Alice said.

‘You like your plants?’

‘I do,’ she said earnestly.

The man nodded, half-looking in the direction of Alice’s gardening failures, before leaving to fetch his chainsaw.

‘He’s a nice man,’ Alice said, immediately feeling silly.

‘He should be nice,’ Beth said with venom, ‘he gets half my wage.’

The landlord came back with his saw and set it down just as Dale the cat came to inspect the gathering, heading straight for the landlord who patted him under the chin.

‘He likes you,’ Alice smiled.

The landlord took some kibble out of his pocket and fed him. ‘This one knows where his bread is buttered.’

He reminisced again about their family fires, their cooking on the coals, and the way the neighbourhood used to sprawl instead of climb. He was in a mood to talk, and rambled about this rosy past, and how he was constantly fighting his children to keep the house going, to keep the street feeling like a neighbourhood. He said he felt a sense of pride that he was taking a stand, even though his kids (who he explained were ‘two policemen and a builder’) were constantly pushing him to sell or develop: he claimed to be saving Hurlstone Park from itself by leasing the house to them. Beth and Rocco stared in awe at his delusions. After he left, they all turned on Alice, admonishing her for reminding the landlord and real estate that they exist, which was a sure way to get their rent increased at the end of the year.

‘But that branch almost killed me!’ she yelled, incredulous at being attacked.

‘Alice,’ Beth said, ‘a rent increase would kill the rest of us!’

‘If I hear some dickhead say the words “democracy sausage” again, I will shoot the prick,’ Helen ranted, coming through the door after voting at the primary school, releasing Sunny into the house who was treating the day as a spectacular adventure.

‘You didn’t eat a sausage?’ Alice asked gently, feeling attacked.

‘No, that was my protest vote,’ she replied, explaining that her second protest vote was to tick off the Greens despite living in the safest ALP seat in the country, but that ‘maybe Albo will learn a lesson’ if the Greens eat up some of his percentages.

Alice followed Helen to the living room where Sunny started playing records over the top of the ABC’s election coverage. Alice and Helen ate together and watched the footage on mute. By early evening, it seemed certain that alongside the rise of the third- party candidates sprinkling around the cities, the LNP would lose enough seats to cede power of the country.

‘We should have done an election night show,’ Sunny said, exasperated, staring intently at the TV screen.

‘People don’t do election parties anymore do they?’ asked Beth.

‘I guess they went out of vogue when they got so close it took two weeks to count,’ Helen remembered.

‘Election night,’ Sunny said, leaving the house to retrieve more records. They returned with a copy of a Toe to Toe EP Pat had loaned them, a lathe-cut 7” recorded on the 1993 election night won by Paul Keating. ‘Look Helen, more ephemera.’ They handed her the record sleeve and started complaining again about how they should have organised a show for the evening. ‘We could have recorded it, ripped off this cover art and everything.’

The 7” played over the top of Anthony Green’s uncomfortable gesticulations at incomplete datasets, the record opening with Toe to Toe setting up, saying into the microphone: I suppose everyone voted today, to pick a new party who’s gonna give it to us for the next four years.

Before switching into heckling a skinhead in the crowd.

You’re alone Honcho, tonight...where’s the fucken rest of ’em?... I hear the Nazi party were here last week trying to celebrate their victory... You gotta remember when that shit happens, everyone’s gotta stick together. Wanna let ’em ruin the scene again?

Sunny was distracted by how HDPE had missed the opportunity to riff on the ’93 Toe to Toe commentary with their own, reaching back a generation to the same issues that cycled in shared histories. So many missed opportunities, Sunny thought, then sat on the couch when Beth requested a raising of the TV volume ahead of a preliminary result.

‘Like, I want Labor to win,’ Sunny started, ‘but mostly so I can call out Albanese’s shit without worrying about feeding the right.’

‘It’s the same every time,’ Beth added, ‘if the ALP win, they think their bunk strategy worked and they continue to kiss ass to racists and big industry to win the centre. Then they get found out for taking everyone for granted and lose. But if they lose today? If anything it like...saves us some time.’

At eleven o’clock, Scott Morrison conceded defeat, and the coverage cut to Labor’s victory speech, which had been set up at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL, a short walk from the house.

‘What’s this?’ Rocco asked when he finally came out of another bath. ‘Did we know the campaign was going to finish up around the fucking corner? Wouldn’t Nathan have known?’

‘He doesn’t have anything to do with the ALP,’ Alice said on his behalf.

‘His group doesn’t keep tabs on them?’

‘They have no reason to,’ Beth suggested, realising that Rocco had the wrong impression of what Nathan did with his spare time.

‘We should go up there and crash their party,’ Sunny said standing up. ‘We can walk in through the pokies room and sneak around to the function, it’d be so easy...’

‘What would be the point?’ Beth asked, fixated on the screen. She ignored the others in the room, quiet in concentration, watching Anthony Albanese attentively, as he came to the close of his victory speech, saying from his podium: and I hope there are families in public housing watching this tonight, because I want every parent to be able to tell their child no matter where you live or where you come from, in Australia the doors of opportunity are open to us all.

‘Doors of opportunity my ass. Doesn’t he rent out like four houses?’ she said, throwing a pillow at the TV in disgust. ‘The next three years are gonna be a complete load of shit.’

‘I THOUGHT YOU WERE A SCIENTIST,’ Rocco said to Alice, leaning into the engine bay of her Astra and tugging on a lead. ‘I am,’ she replied, as he turned around to show her a loose spark-plug boot that was damp to the touch. ‘Then how come you didn’t check your spark plugs after Nathan drove the car underwater?’ Alice reminded him that she wasn’t a mechanic, and went with him to the Supercheap Auto in Ashfield where she followed him to the counter, retrieving the parts he was convinced would get her car to start again. In his ute, she explained her job to him, trying to simplify her work as a crystallographer to the act of ‘controlling the way that solids are dissolved and undissolved’, but he seemed annoyed at her for dumbing it down for his benefit. He asked her if her crystals ‘did’ anything. She tried to explain her tensions with the lead-acid battery company who weren’t interested in her insights on the major fault of their technology. In the end she could only say that ‘R&D money is hard to explain.’ Then she watched him replace the Astra’s spark plugs. Angry at Nathan for driving her car through Cooks River floodwater and leaving it in Wolli Creek. Angry at having to pay to get it towed home, and now depending on someone else to fix his mistakes again. ‘Try it now,’ Rocco yelled around the bonnet as she sat in the driver’s seat. She thanked him when the engine grunted to life. ‘Now you can do it,’ he smiled, wiping his hands and going inside, pleased that he’d finally be able to use the driveway again.

A Game Played by Thugs

‘So...’ Rocco said over his shoulder, feeling Helen’s presence, ‘is the CIA funding the Oscars?’

She laughed, watching him set up his home gym in the semi- outdoor storage area around the side of the house. They had both snuck out of the living room to avoid Nathan’s new point of contention – that Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock was staged to create a media storm, distracting from the extra sixty billion dollars of military funding that was being spent on arming Ukrainian troops – and she appreciated this opportunity to bond over their mutual escape. It was the first night the two of them had a chance to introduce themselves. She felt guilty about her absence, watching Rocco assemble his power rack with effortless wrangling of nut, bolt and spanner. His hands strong, calloused and precise; they reminded her of a mechanic she once dated, which made her shiver.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around to say hello properly,’ she said eventually.

‘It’s a sharehouse,’ he said gently, ‘I didn’t expect a site induction.’

He put his tools down and sat on his weight bench, Helen finding a milk crate which she flipped on its side to use as a seat. Neither knew how to start. Rocco smiled at Helen, and tried not to show how impatient he was to get to know his housemates, and for them to get to know him. He wanted to get all the details out in one go – this is my story, this is why I’m here, this is how I moved from Sydney to Turin, this is why I returned – but when in a casual conversation could you get to all that? It was like he wanted to be interviewed, and at Helen’s questions that night while his home gym was under construction, wanted her to dig deeper. He wanted to tell her that he was once part of a hyped cohort of Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs juniors as a teenager, but missed out on the most vital youth squad at eighteen. Maybe he could continue, and explain how he went and played for an Italian under-eighteen’s exhibition squad instead, falling by the wayside and going backpacking for a year, discovering punk music in the squats of Europe. Then returning to Australia to resurrect his career, being led along by false opportunities as hype youngsters and rich kids with influential player managers overtook him. Helen only prompted him to describe the recent years: how a small club in Italy at the outskirts of Turin had switched codes from rugby union to rugby league in 2017, had fielded a team in the established French winter competition, and how Rocco (in wanting to be a part of something historically significant) left Sydney and relocated to Saluzzo to help set it up. There he found it was a historical aberration: in-fighting and logistical complications had Saluzzo switch back to rugby union at the end of 2019, leaving Rocco stranded and regrouping as the pandemic locked him in the north of Italy. Helen picked up a football out of Rocco’s pile of training gear with one hand and stood up to play with it, asking him how long it had taken for him to get back to Australia.

‘People forget that Italy was a horror show in 2020, so I was properly stuck there,’ he started, standing up and gesturing for Helen to pass him the ball, which she did expertly despite barely touching a football for twenty years. ‘I felt like I was ready to quit footy too, so I moved to Milan where I had some friends I was in a band with. It was fun, but I was just fucking around. I thought I was retired from footy, I was careless...but maybe six months into the Milan move, when the band wasn’t working out, I got the itch to play footy again. And I got homesick. There was a Rugby League World Cup scheduled for the end of last year, and I still knew the Italian coach from when I played in some qualifiers for him to make up numbers back in the day...’

They spoke in sync with their motions as they passed the ball back and forth, Helen just on the edge of panting, Rocco solid and effortless.

‘So you played in the World Cup?’

‘It got postponed. The Italian coach told me to stay in Sydney to play in the lower grades where he could watch. He said I’d be a chance for the World Cup if I put some form together. Took me six months to nail down a spot for Mounties in third grade...then the competitions got cancelled again when Delta hit. So, I wasn’t even in the picture really. Until they moved the World Cup to this October...’

Helen booted the ball at his head to test his reflexes, which he caught with one outstretched hand. ‘And you have another chance?’

‘One last chance,’ he nodded. ‘I’m thirty-two, that’s the end of the line if you haven’t made your name yet, but Italian rugby league is still building you know? There’s not that much to pick from, and they want to be big on loyalty and commitment, so...’ he trailed off and dwelled on a decade of lost opportunities, ‘...so, I figure that after sacrificing a couple years to build the game over there, even though it was all for nothing, it makes sense that I’d be given a spot to travel to England.’

‘Surely you’d get some kind of reward for picking everything up and trying to get something going over there?’

‘It’s hard to say because it was such a mess,’ he explained. ‘The French competition we played in was really low standard, and every second game was postponed because the French clubs couldn’t be fucked driving to Saluzzo, and if we ever did get a game? We got pumped by sixty points. It was a bust. It’s a fucking miracle I found a way back in through Mounties. If I stay fit, stay out of trouble, and find a way up to NSW Cup instead of being out of sight in third grade...I feel like it’s likely. And if it works out, there’s every chance my last ever game of footy will be playing against the Kangaroos in England, against the best in the world. Then I think I’ll be happy to retire, because that would actually be significant. I would have been a part of something...and everyone wants that right?’

‘I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life saying that’s not the case, but it is,’ she felt light-headed and sat back on his weight bench to breathe. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’

‘Sure.’

‘You know Nathan is trying to rebrand this house as a commune?’ she asked, breathing heavily.

‘I overheard something about it, yeah.’

‘I felt good when he said that. I should know better.’

‘Helen...in this country? A sharehouse that even pretends to be a commune is about as good as it gets.’

For years, Rocco had found himself in organisations in the process of change, the failed Saluzzo rugby league experiment being just one of many. Even the new opportunity he was given by the Mounties rugby league club was something of a mirage. When Rocco signed a playing contract with them in 2021, they were a key component of the NRL system for the Bulldogs, who outsourced their senior pathways to cut costs. Mounties acted as the feeder club that sent players up to the highest quality rugby league competition in the world, but as 2022 neared, the Bulldogs walked out on their agreement and formed their own feeder side just as Rocco began his training. Mounties got stuck in limbo, and though Rocco had cemented his spot in third grade that offseason, he gave up on the idea of an NRL debut at thirty-two. Then the house of cards that comprised the Bulldogs structure collapsed in mid-May, and Rocco was surprised to find that he’d benefit from it.

When Trent Barrett stepped down as the Bulldogs’ head coach after a historically poor run in the position, a reshuffle had to take place: Rocco’s third-grade coach at Mounties was promoted to run the NSW Cup side after their coach was pushed up to the NRL. Rocco had done enough to be one of the few players his coach brought up with him, who said he needed a front rower with a bit of experience and intimidation factor, who ‘had half a brain and a decent offload’. And though he admitted to Rocco that he’d been selected ahead of his front-row partner because he lived around the corner from Henson Park where they were due to play that weekend, Rocco assured him he could fill the required role. Moving from third to second grade meant his match payments would go up by a few hundred bucks, which meant he could drop a day of scaffolding to lighten the load on his body. More importantly, playing a higher standard against NRL-quality opposition would raise his profile heading into the Italian squad selection at the end of the year. He felt for the first time in a long time as though his ship had steadied.

Sunny and Helen cancelled their Saturday plans when Rocco told them the news after training, excited to see their new friend play close to home. That afternoon they walked to Henson Park early so they could see Rocco warm up on the field, and settled on the hill in the sun before kick-off. They were both nervous, as though they were his parents, and fetched can after can of the Newtown Jets’ underwhelming beer from the bar at the top of the hill. When Rocco was interchanged onto the field, they screeched their approval. And when he lumbered across the grass and snapped into game mode, they saw a new side of him. Rocco the jock: colliding with other giants at full force; harassing opposition players; showing an aggression in attack and defence and demonstrating what Helen told Sunny was a ‘good front rower’s skill set’. Sunny kept yelling, ‘That’s my housemate!’ until there was a stoppage after a penalty was blown. It was followed by a rush of players into the mock fighting position that cursed contemporary sport. Rocco took offence to his halfback being bullied off to the side, so turned the grapple into a brawl, flinging the opposition players to the ground and then landing a headbutt on someone who dared pull him up on it. The crowd was enraptured, booing Rocco off the field when he was sent to the sin bin. When the post-match committee watched the video during the week, he was suspended for three matches, halting his rise through the ranks.

Nathan and Alice couldn’t understand why everyone in the house seemed so invested in this sport. Whenever Sunny attempted to give a historical view of ‘rugby league’s unique working-class alignment’, it was too lightly sketched for Nathan or Alice to buy into. They didn’t pay attention to the games Rocco played on the outskirts of Sydney until months after his promotion, when Nathan overheard from the living room that the next game was to be televised. He waited until Rocco was alone, on an afternoon where he requested full run of the kitchen to prepare one of his laboured, slow-cooked dishes. Nathan took a seat by the kitchen island and accepted Rocco’s offer of a pour of his wine. He watched Rocco turn the mixed cuts of meat in the stock pot, smelled the grease in the air, and began to describe his work at The Centre to Rocco. Nathan concluded by saying that it had been some time since a comrade had been that close to a national audience, and suggested they find a way to ‘send a message’ when he ran out on TV to take on the Penrith Panthers’ reserves.

‘No, I can’t get involved in that shit,’ Rocco muttered while pressing the meats into a bath of lard and oil with his wooden spoon. ‘Next year I’ll do whatever to help, but this year’s too important. I haven’t played on TV for a decade. It’s an opportunity to remind people I exist.’

Nathan tried not to wince at the layers of tannins that coated his mouth from Rocco’s choice of wine. ‘A televised opportunity is what we need too, Rocco. We’re desperate for a larger audience.’ ‘This isn’t what you think, Nathan. This is just reserve grade. Sure it happens to be the match of the round so will be on TV, but no one really watches these games.’

‘I’m confused. You and Sunny both said it was nationally televised.’

‘I mean, what do you think “nationally” means?’ Rocco cracked open four tins of tomatoes and dumped them in the pot. ‘It’ll be on TV around parts of New South Wales and Queensland at like, one in the afternoon.’ Nathan blinked back at him, confused and disappointed. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

‘I understand the opportunity that’s presented when someone I know is on television.’

‘What would you want me to do anyway? Pull a banner out of my arsehole and wave it around at half-time?’

‘Maybe,’ Nathan replied, ‘but I’m sure we could think of something more sophisticated.’

‘And then what happens? What happened to that German kid who got deported for sitting on a crane by the docks, or that Lismore kid who got locked up for holding up traffic, or the guy who stormed the footy and has been in gaol all year? If I’m going to throw my career away and end up imprisoned or deported, I want it to be for something good.’

‘If there’s any way I can change your mind,’ Nathan said slowly.

‘You’re not changing my mind,’ Rocco said firmly, massaging his wrist. ‘You are not changing anything at all.’

Rocco left early to drive to Penrith for game day, and the others went around the corner to the Hurlstone Park Hotel where the publican was committed to playing rugby league on the big screen. Helen and Sunny pushed their way into the pub as though it were second nature, but Nathan and Alice approached the main doors cautiously, feeling like outsiders. They settled in around a table and jumped when Sunny and Helen cheered as the camera cut to Rocco sitting on the bench. Nathan and Alice couldn’t feel the moment like the others could, who were already at the bottom of their schooners and perched on the edge of their seats. Nathan looked back at the live TV feed. It had as much meaning to him as a screensaver.

‘Rocco said this wasn’t a big deal,’ Nathan told Sunny, almost gossiping. ‘I don’t understand why he’d downplay it; this is quite impressive.’

‘I suppose to him this isn’t getting him anywhere,’ Sunny thought out loud, ‘but you’re right that he’s underselling it. If he can play well on feature games like this, I imagine it helps his chances of travelling with Italy.’

Nathan tried to limit his enquiries, having observed that the people who were accepted among these circles tended to have more answers than questions. ‘Rocco is already selected for the Italian side,’ he said.

‘No, he’s been promised a spot,’ Sunny said, correcting him, ‘but there’s some politics,’

‘What do you mean?’

Sunny paused for a second. ‘I’m not sure, but that’s what Rocco always says. I guess some NRL players haven’t decided whether to put their hand up for Italy or to stay home and rest, or there’s something between the Australian Italians, and the Italian Italians. He’ll probably play because he’s well connected in the international rugby league world, but you know...anything can happen.’

The camera cut to Rocco warming up on the sideline, the commentators mispronouncing his surname and Sunny yelling ‘That’s racist,’ a joke that no one around them seemed to appreciate.

‘I didn’t know they played anything but soccer in Italy,’ Nathan continued, ‘until we met Rocco.’

‘There’s a lot to it,’ Sunny explained, agitated by Nathan and trying to watch the game, ‘but they don’t really play league there anymore, I think league was more or less banned in Italy in the sixties –’

‘Why? Because it was too violent?’

Sunny looked to Helen for help, who ignored them, taking stock of Rocco’s poor positioning in defence.

‘No, for structural reasons. I’ve told you before: Rugby league was created by trade unions in the north of England to get players paid; rugby union is who they broke off from. League had to escape all these old-money elites trying to strangle the working class out by not paying them. League is strong here, but in Europe, rugby union had enough power and influence to stamp us out.’ Nathan looked at them dumbly. ‘How do you not know this? Rugby league is probably the highest profile socialist victory in the country, behind like...the weekend.’

‘Excuse my ignorance,’ Nathan said, nodding at the Sportsbet ad playing on the TV, ‘but you can’t blame me for not seeing it.’

‘Yeah, well...your fucken loss Nathan,’ Sunny said, moving their chair over to Helen, leaving Nathan to stew on what he saw (corporate sponsorship, extended ad breaks for the benefit of gambling conglomerates, and promotions projected onto every corner of the football field) rather than what he felt: an unbreachable divide between himself and Alice, and Sunny and Helen.

If anyone had told Rocco he was in denial about the injuries he’d accumulated through the season, he would have argued it was more like an act of repression. His right forearm was in bad shape from elbow to wrist. He tried not to let it show in case it affected his chances of going through to the World Cup. Yet every time he used his hammer at work, the shock vibrating through his wrist sent him wincing. Pain shot through joints whenever he twisted scaffold parts, and it worsened when he scrubbed the many surfaces and dishes that had become his to look after at home. In the gym, his elbow twinged through his bicep curls and his wrist faltered through his triceps extensions. He let the lawn grow, too sore to wrestle the mower, and his in-game performances suffered. He gave up on his one-handed offload due to the pain and got lambasted by his coach for not moving the ball in good position. He was impatient for a fix, pacing between specialist appointments that drained his savings, furious at what he could feel unfolding: carrying an injury with no time to recover, in a time he couldn’t afford to rest.

Feeling cornered, Rocco rushed to a squad meeting with the Italian Rugby League at the Marconi Club in Liverpool, speeding in his ute from a physio appointment to the car park, almost running over someone from maintenance when he sped into a space. He sprinted through the doors and waved to the usher who pointed to the function room on seeing his polo shirt. He power-walked into the room just as a Zoom call with the Italian directors was projected onto a big screen. He found a spot at the back and waited, watching a projector screen that featured a who’s who of the organisation’s computer illiterates yelling ‘Sei muto, sei muto!’

Rocco went through the suite of hand, wrist and forearm stretches he’d been given, and stared into the space between his potential teammates and the screen, silent throughout the talks: the Italian coach’s speech about effort and loyalty; the administrator’s updates about what parts of the trip to London they could afford to pay for; and a cultural organisation’s introduction to Italian migration in Australia. There was some discussion of their road to the World Cup, now featuring two hastily arranged trial matches in Sydney against Lebanon and Malta in successive weeks in September, from which parts of the squad would be selected. He couldn’t focus, his mind racing about injury and opportunity, pain and boredom, and came to attention when the group clapped politely. At the meeting’s end, fifty pizzas were brought into the room to serve the thirty people who had shown up.

‘Rocco,’ his potential coach said by way of a greeting. He noticed his front rower failing to eat his share, and thrust a pizza box in his hand, which aggravated his wrist. ‘I’ve been watching your video,’ he continued, ‘very happy to see you’re still playing in Cup.’

‘You’re watching the games?’

‘Of course mate, I keep an eye on all of you.’

Rocco tried to stay calm, fishing through the box for a slice. ‘Do I need to work on anything?’

‘Maybe try not to get yourself suspended again,’ he admitted, checking to see if they were alone, and then dropping to a low murmur, ‘but I like that you didn’t back down. I can argue for that when it comes to selecting the side.’ He stopped for a moment, looking over Rocco’s shoulder at one of the halves options who was about to leave the room. He patted Rocco on the arm and said finally: ‘Just stay on the field, keep working, keep playing to your strengths, and the rest will sort itself out.’

‘About the World Cup,’ Rocco said in a hurry, pausing when he saw the stress rise in his coach’s face. ‘I was looking at flights. They’re getting expensive.’

‘Forget about that for now. Like I said, if you play well...’ he seemed to sense Rocco deflating, so changed tactics. ‘I need you to make yourself impossible to leave out. You understand?’

Rocco nodded.

‘Don’t book your flights until I say so, but you need to show that you offer something we don’t have. And you need to show it every weekend, okay?’

‘I can do that,’ Rocco said.

‘You know there’s politics involved so I can’t promise anything... but you have to focus on the things you can control. That means being the quality of player you think you should be.’

Rocco nodded and tried to consider his coach’s erratic comments as motivation, encouraging him to prove his worth, encouraging him to make himself visible.

ALICE SAT AT HER DESK with headphones on, exasperated at Sunny and Helen’s Wednesday night behaviour. The two were pacing up and down the house with beers in hand chanting nonsensical slogans like ‘mate vs mate, state vs state,’ then turning the TV to full volume in the living room while some unrecognisable old men repeated a series of canned sentences. Agitated, she tried to avoid them, ignoring their pleading requests that she sit down and watch the game that was playing on TV, justifying their insistence by saying ‘because it’s State of Origin’. Alice listened unwillingly from her room. The game was broken up by thunderously loud advertisements for a new Kia in breaks of play. Then all the vitriol: Sunny screaming about how ‘the lip fillers must have gotten into Botox Freddy’s brain’ as the NSW Blues coach spoke sadly on camera after the team he’d selected was soundly beaten. The noise continued. Alice sat at her desk fighting the Word template that Angewandte Chemie required for submission, her figures and graphs bouncing all over the document while Helen yelled in strings of words she couldn’t comprehend, whining about ‘the non-selection of Addo-Carr’ and ‘wasting Murray on an edge’. She finally had the bones of her paper ready to proof when the door slammed and Rocco stumbled in, bouncing off the hallway walls, drunk from a player function and starting Sunny and Helen back up again.

Live in the Alley

Pat said it was in his interests to get the flames of Sydney punk burning properly, since he was employed as a sound tech, and could no longer tolerate ‘the shit’ he was hearing. In the renovated front bar of the Townie, Pat spoke at length to Sunny about what they needed to do to right the course, stabbing the table with his index finger while addressing matters of compromise and co-option. With beer spilling from his thin lips, Pat said they had to start pulling together a crew of bands who wore their principles on their sleeves. The kinds of bands who prioritised the cause over a playing fee, those who’d never shown signs of sniffing around for a branded sponsorship, or a manager, or a booking agent. He said he’d had to suffer two forms of contemporary punk: one set who were too professionalised (he suspected their parents had paid for them to attend private music academies), and another who were too complacent (satisfied to take any offer they received to ease the burden of ‘actually organising something’). Pat said he was determined to get them thinking about events in unapproved spaces again, to think about taking risks. ‘And the only person I know who can facilitate this shift,’ he finished, leaning back on his stool with hands in the air, ‘is sitting right in front of me.’ Sunny was all ears.

Together they decided the first step was to organise an alleyway show, the kind of event that both were nostalgic for, even with their fifteen-year age difference. They sat in the window over jugs of Reschs, brainstorming and messaging around for three bands who could pull off back-to-back ten-minute sets without being precious about it. By two in the morning, they had a line-up booked, a date confirmed, and a four-stroke generator bought click-and-collect from the BCF store in Auburn.

The alley show went ahead the day before the return of a twice- postponed music festival that once marked the call to action for Sydney’s DIY community. It would be a kind of warm-up, not just for the bands, but for the attendees too, who had lost the habit of mingling in a crowd. That Thursday night in Annandale was a preparation then, for the biggest weekend many of them had had in a couple of years. Sunny wrote a zine the morning of the show to meet the moment, justifying their selection of bands, who: ‘appeal to the populace, but are not emptily populist / that give off subconscious recognition as a frightening affront to the industrious and institutional / a call to arms to remind the lost punks around the edges of the cities that we used to contribute to a whole’.

They continued: ‘By going underground, we dig afresh the tunnels that run under the city, using the damp of neglect to grow like mould in the foundations of the cultural high-rise’.

Sunny left the zines stacked up on a table at the entry to the alley, free of charge, which only a handful of people wedged into the guts of their tote bags to sit next to the sweating longnecks and wine bottles they’d brought along to the show.

The first band was punctual: playing quick and panicked, conscious of keeping the event to schedule. They had the best fill- in drummer in town to hold court in Sio, who could keep time with a brain full of amphetamines while reining in the other members if they strayed. After their set, he stayed seated at the kit, drinking, waiting for his bandmates from HDPE. Sunny fretted around their digital four-track, plugging in their headphones and playing back the sound file, breathing a sigh of relief when they found the first set had recorded fine. They pressed record with Pat minding the device this time, pushing through to the front to where Sio waited at the kit and Maria readied her bass. Sunny hurried to their guitar and the mic just as Rocco arrived and waved through the crowd that was assembling. He had driven to the alley in a rush after a harsh training session, skipping his cool-down routine to make time to pick up a bottle of wine on the way, which he was already halfway through. Dehydrated and fatigued, he fell into a drunken state that was unusual for him, wide-eyed and excited by the people crammed around him. He parted the crowd and walked straight to Pat’s makeshift sound desk to take the scenes in proudly. He asked Pat if he had a ladder, but he just frowned in confusion while fussing with the PA. HDPE started their intro. Rocco elaborated, insisting that at one of the Milan squats he used to play in, they’d pull out a ladder to drop in the centre of the mosh as ritual, people leaping off it into the crowd, front people crawling up it and screaming into the mess beneath them.

‘You want a spectacle, no?’ he yelled over the howl of Sunny’s guitar, their riffs made up of a mix of flubbed notes and improvised flourishes.

‘No, we want a recording!’ Pat yelled back to Rocco, pointing violently at the set-up, and only just recognising him from the Paradise Estate house show.

After their set, Sunny arrived back at the desk thrilled at what they were pulling off. They hugged Rocco and told him about the next band, who despite it being their first show, had managed to raise some anticipation around their performance due to a studied maintenance of their social capital through the lean years of gig- going of 2020 and 2021. The group’s other bands had been willing to play the shows that no one else would: between outbreaks, in bad venues, with crowds restricted by number and forced to stay seated to minimise intermingling. And while Sunny was sceptical about the true intentions of the band (convinced that their singer was ‘using the community as a stepping stone’), they’d invited them anyway, in part because Pat said they needed a draw, in part because Sunny’s suspicions weren’t concrete enough to disqualify them.

Unlike the others, the final band took their time to set up, having added a synth player to their line-up without telling Pat, demanding adjustments to its presence in the PA that couldn’t possibly be made in the rush they needed to avoid the cops shutting down the show. When they finally started, the anticipation boiled over and a quick and flurried mosh began, bodies knocked back and forth from the warehouse wall to the brick fence opposite. The guitars were shrill yet precise, each riff stopping and starting as the whine of the high-pitched synths cut through the mix. And though Sunny was annoyed by the band’s aesthetic preferences, they felt a relief come across them, and then across the crowd, grinning with Pat as the mosh picked up in intensity, sending Rocco (without a ladder) into an excited haze, tearing through to the front, parting a sea of fifty.

The bands packed up their instruments and left after empty offers to help clean up. They kicked cans of beer into piles and pretended to look for bins and garbage bags. Rocco had commandeered the broom, and just like at home, worked like he was on a mission. Pat and Sunny collected and bagged the piles Rocco swept together, dragging them out of the alley and into a skip bin around the back of the warehouse. In the process, the three got to talking, turning to the donation jar (forty-three dollars contained therein) and the pile of free zines in Sunny’s stack that had gone largely unnoticed (only thirteen had been taken). They dropped the tools in the back of Pat’s station wagon, before sitting under a streetlight to share a joint and breathe in the cool, calm air of an event completed.

‘You know who would have loved that?’ Sunny said after a long silence.

‘Walt,’ Pat said, tucking a loose mess of grey hair behind his ear.

‘I miss him,’ Sunny said, reaching for the joint. ‘I miss his pep talks.’ Sunny started doing an impression of Walt, mimicking his short, jerky movements and his desperate, pleading tone: ‘Sure the last band was fucken horrible but it doesn’t matter! All we need to do is influence one person to start something good and that undoes all the bullshit we just had to suffer!’

Pat laughed. ‘That enthusiasm! I’m glad you’re picking up his energy Sunny. It’s good too that you’re more...rational.’

Rocco smiled uncomfortably, feeling intrusive at the mention of this person he’d heard about in passing at the house, forced to guess after his fate.

‘Do you think it’s a problem that barely anyone from the younger crews showed up?’ Sunny asked.

‘Something to think about maybe,’ Pat admitted. ‘Maybe we need someone younger and dumber to push us out of the way, to make something better. Maybe you’re the interim step, Sunny...’

‘Love to be a transition fuel,’ Sunny said listlessly.

‘The youth culture’s too complacent,’ Rocco tried. ‘This country, these people. Maybe punk and hardcore isn’t the way anymore. Maybe it’s bogged down in a tradition these kids can’t comprehend.’

‘Well culture isn’t complacent; it’s dead. But punk and hardcore has a role,’ Sunny said defensively. ‘All these local government lines around supporting live music, and they use the funds to put on an old-man jazz band in the town square. Or they clear out the front bar of a good pub, put a stage in there and bring in a ukelele trio. A new wave of hardcore can unsettle these things, because it’s rude and loud, but also because it has a rule set. It means you can keep the people who don’t meet the sensibility on the other side of the door. It’s the only genre left that can’t be co-opted to scale, because no one playing in the tradition would dream of being sucked in by the drive for profit, or fame...’

‘No, they’ll find a way,’ Pat interrupted. ‘I guess it’s been a while for Sydney bands, but you’ve seen it... Someone gets a bit of a roll going, then you see a member in a Converse ad, or in a Jack Daniels campaign, or they’re modelling in front of free Sabian cymbals in a sponsored post, saying, “This is a dream come true!” Nothing is sacred, especially now.’ He took a long swig of warm wine and grunted at the flavour. ‘It happens when the economy gets tight. These bands build a name off the back of people like us and then they start making excuses for the sponsorships, for getting a manager to look after their affairs, bragging about manipulating a good guarantee out of someone. You can’t underestimate the power of an ascendency narrative in precarious times.’

Rocco passed the joint straight on to Sunny, paranoid about being drug-tested.

‘You think we’re coming into another co-option cycle?’ Sunny asked.

‘We’re in one,’ Pat said. ‘We’ve been stuck in one for years. But at least twenty years ago, you could shake your head and say: “Man, people will do anything for money,” but this generation is weirder. They’d do anything just for recognition…’

Pat trailed off when red and blue lights struck the walls.

Rocco stiffened, ‘Are you two okay?’

‘Yeah, there’s nothing on us that can cause a problem,’ Pat said.

Two cops came around the corner brandishing their torches, walking past the overfilled skip bin and rounding the corner to the three of them, sitting tired under an alleyway streetlight.

‘We got a call there was a racket down here,’ one said.

‘We were cleaning up the alley,’ Pat explained.

‘Cleaning up the alley?’ she repeated suspiciously.

‘You ever seen an alley this clean?’

She shone the torch on the freshly swept concrete, sniffed the air for spray paint that wasn’t there, and examined them suspiciously. ‘You want to tell us why we’re here then?’

Pat held Rocco by the elbow to calm him down. ‘We were catching up on some things,’ he said vaguely, adding: ‘Personal things.’

The cops looked at each other and then smirked at Rocco, covered in sweat and dirt from training.

‘Maybe keep it inside the house next time,’ her partner said, as though he were doing them a favour. They turned and marched slowly back around the building, got into the squad car and drove towards Parramatta Road.

‘They thought we were cruising?’ Rocco asked.

Sunny shook the dust from their skirt. ‘Lucky me.’

Helen couldn’t get out of work for the alley show, but she realised the next morning that she could have used a warm-up to social interaction. Other than the show at the Lansdowne that Sunny made her go to, she hadn’t been in a full room of people for almost two years, and panicked on hearing that the Marrickville Bowling Club was sold to capacity. Sunny had to soundcheck early for a band they’d agreed to help, which meant that Helen would have to arrive on her own. So, she didn’t go. She told Sunny she’d see them down there, and instead started watching the six p.m. match between Canberra and the Bulldogs on the living room TV. She didn’t move from the couch, even though both teams were in an early-season form slump owing to some kind of unrest between coach and squad, resulting in one of the worst games of rugby league she’d ever made herself sit through. She shivered, noticed the fog from an out breath in front of her eyes, and went marching through the house looking for the source of the cold. In the living room, Helen inspected the wall vents that allowed airflow from the outside. Then she pressed her hand to the cold flooring in the corridor. Then she found the back door left open and the troubled cat sitting in the doorway, absent-mindedly and bizarrely licking the door jamb. She closed the door, but it didn’t stop the draught.

She was annoyed at the lack of reprieve from the weather. The Sydney winter was descending, its mild conditions betrayed by poorly built homes. For comfort, she would soon rely on a pair of trackpants so unflattering that she’d have to avoid the hallway mirror, and the woollen blanket she’d dragged from sharehouse to sharehouse that though warm, inexplicably gave her a rash. As she ignored another of Sunny’s texts (and a call, and a voice message saying, ‘Heleeeeeen, wake the fuck up bitch,’) she wondered how it was that every year she went through a re-learning process: that a house that baked in the summer and leaked in the autumn had no answer for the cold. Thinking life was just about modulating temperature, she took a swig out of Nathan’s decanter for the warmth of his scotch, pulled up the stream for the much-hyped match between Penrith and Parramatta (which ended up one of the better games of rugby league she’d seen) and fell asleep during the post-match interviews.

In the morning, Helen made a baked breakfast, guilty about ignoring Sunny’s texts, hoping to also warm up the kitchen with the heat that leaked from the oven. Everyone slept in but Rocco – who was working in his home gym, relaxed at being given the weekend off training due to Mounties having the bye week – and Sunny, who was lying on the concrete floor outside watching him, still awake from the night before. Helen apologised when Sunny shuffled into the house with sunken eyes. While fetching bowls and cutlery, she explained her anxieties, and how it wasn’t so much the health risk – which was a factor – but that she got stuck fretting about how many grudges she’d walk back into. She pictured issues and conflicts that had stewed since 2019, that while they had become insignificant for her (considering everything that had happened), she thought remained front of mind for these imagined others. Though she agreed with Sunny that it was ridiculous to hold a trivial personal grudge through a global pandemic, it didn’t help her headspace. She said she could sense these interpersonal disconnects without being able to see them, that the imagined sea of people who ‘hated’ her felt attached to her like phantom limbs. Then she admitted that she was scared about people asking, ‘Where’s Walt?’ or ‘I’m sorry about Walt,’ or worse still, no recognition of his existence at all. They sat quietly together, and then smiled at each other weakly.

‘You should come this afternoon if you can,’ Sunny said eventually, remaining enthused. ‘Because this will always be a problem for you –’

‘I know.’

‘– and I know you don’t think so, but everyone loves you –’

‘Not so sure about that,’ she said, visualising those who didn’t.

‘They do,’ Sunny said, stopping short. ‘In their own way. If you’re going to put yourself through the “first event back”, which you will eventually, it might as well be at a good event, instead of a shit one. And this is a good one.’

‘Is it though?’

‘Yes, Hel! You’ll have a good time, and sure, for some of it you’ll have a bad time, but you can’t just sit on the couch watching the footy. At least not every night. And if you want,’ Sunny continued, gesticulating with a piece of toast, ‘take one of my caps, or one of Beth’s dexies, or microdose some shrooms, and if you come across as awkward you just do what the rest of us do.’

She poked at her bowl of oven-baked shakshuka. ‘And what do the “rest of you do”?’

‘We apologise for being high.’

Helen poked at the last of her food. ‘Okay.’

‘Yeah it’ll be good!’ Sunny exclaimed, getting up to rub her shoulders. ‘I’m gonna take a nap, then we’ll head down together?’

‘Okay,’ she said again, forcing a smile.

‘And the shakshuka was good too,’ Sunny called from the couch. ‘Tasted like 2010.’

Helen regretted following Sunny’s advice the moment she walked into the bowling club. The hum of her nerves rose up her spine and swarmed through to her scalp, a visceral tingling leaving her short of breath. But all through the day, band after band, she received warm hugs, and a sympathetic reception. She realised that she was not the main character of the room of three hundred, but that everyone there had been convinced by the isolation and resultant digital mania that they were in fact the unwanted protagonist of the weekend’s festival. She noticed patrons staring at their feet to avoid glances of recognition, and only a small collection of figures glaring from the corners of the room, who the rest of the venue avoided. She might have sensed a decade of unresolved drama in that building, but she didn’t fall into a state of rumination until it was over, and for that, Sunny’s prescription probably helped.

Helen danced slowly to a post-punk band; pushed some overzealous moshers out of her way during the HDPE set; sat relaxed and blissful to the side of a folk band; played pool with Rocco during a garage set; and talked excitedly and cynically with old acquaintances on the outdoor tables while a by-the-numbers Melbourne rock band performed inside. She began to feel calm. Her concern about finding who had gone off the deep end or not was alleviated by the fact that anyone who had gone down a rabbit hole was probably too busy stewing in their own sense of injustice at home to bother them. The kind of stewing of which, she realised reflexively, she’d almost been resigned to herself. As she floated around the venue in this buoyant state of freedom and positivity, she not only hadn’t needed Sunny as a crutch, but hadn’t spent any time with them. So she went over to find Sunny alongside Pat, setting up a desk recording and enjoying a deep, triumphant sip of a schooner as they prepared for the last band to come on stage.

‘Pat!’ Sunny yelled, taking Helen by the shoulder. ‘Remember Helen?’

‘Of course I remember Helen!’ Pat smiled, hugging her firmly.

‘Thank you,’ she said, nodding as though receiving a medal. ‘Thank you for remembering me.’

Pat brought the sound up on the final band’s mics. Helen grew conscious of her heart thumping, beating in time with the drummer’s kick pedal, then the noise around her was overtaken by the others in the band. They were an avant-garde group inspired by proto-punk methodology, with jangling guitars and keys and horns all played roughshod. The beat drew the people slowly together, merging their distanced units into a herd that floated to front of stage like a procession. Helen was drawn to them too, and out of habit, pushed to the front row until she was leaning over the stage holding the weight of the others on her forearms. The band hit a recognisable chorus, the crowd swarmed, then she was hoisted up onto Sunny’s shoulders and passed back over the room. She smiled when pushed up close to the art deco ceiling, and was twisted over to face down at the people who passed her back with broad grins. Then she caught the eye of one of Suze’s closest friends, who scowled at her and backed away. Helen fell face-first into the space that opened up, thudding to the timber dance floor on the top of her head. Her neck twinged, something pulling from the base of her head all the way to the back of her shoulder blade. She stood up quickly to make it look like she wasn’t hurt.

Helen backed away gently, feeling her neck spasm, and saw in front of her that Rocco had become the crowd’s centrepiece. He writhed around them as bodies responded to other bodies, physical efforts all running in a chain leading back to Rocco, who dragged them back and forth. He helped hoist people back up off the ground when they stumbled, wrestled people into line when their fists or elbows flailed. He moved as though the mosh was there to make up for a week off footy, manipulating the ruck in his black-and-gold number ten jersey. And then the band stopped, and the night was over. They were shuffled out the door by tired bar managers and evergreen security guards. Helen waited for Rocco, but he walked past fuming, being challenged to a street fight by a next-gen skinhead who claimed that by dragging him into place whenever he tried to windmill, Rocco had prevented him from ‘expressing himself’. Helen let Rocco chase after him and, still trying to hide her neck pain, went to find Sunny, whose pupils were the size of fists, and who, when she arrived in the circle they’d formed by the door, yelled: ‘Hey everyone, remember Helen?!’ They cheered, but the attention made her feel like a specimen. She waved, then pretended she had to piss, then slipped out the main doors with a crowd of strangers.

Helen walked home via backstreets to avoid a run-in with anyone who might try to bring her to the Royal Exchange to keep drinking. Thinking she could use a walk to loosen up her shoulders, she instead spent the whole path home shifting her tote bag from arm to arm trying to find a comfortable position. She lost ten minutes on the way, stopping abruptly in a back alley where the body of a rainbow lorikeet lay stiff and opened up at the stomach in a gutter. She made a note to keep this quiet from Rocco, who had claimed to have seen two birds in such a state that week, blaming the neighbourhood cats. She knew if he heard of this third, he would identify another ‘omen’, so she ignored the bird and kept walking, confronted in passing by a practice space she used to jam in with Walt. She recalled dozens of moments bumping into Walt in the early hours after events like these. These were moments when they had their closest conversations: regrouping to talk through some panic attack or meltdown or crisis of confidence. Retracing her steps, she felt out of phase, thinking about the bowling club and all the times she’d played there. She once hated that she lost her anonymity by playing in bands, but was now bemoaning the fact that she’d become anonymous again, or at least forgotten. ‘Caught between worlds,’ she thought to herself, the phrase from her past playing in her head like a mantra. As she walked past three teenagers filming a video of themselves vaping in the Dulwich Hill skate park, she decided that instead of lamenting this displacement, she was going to embrace the non-place, that her belonging would be found not in anything or anywhere in particular, but by remaining defiantly in-between.

‘IF YOU NEED TO GO, you should just go; it doesn’t feel great watching you fidget like this. ’ He said this to Sunny as though he was doing them a favour. It was a shame that he was the most uptight of Sunny’s partners; he was also the most tactile, knowing his way around their body without concern for causing some kind of offence. ‘Old school,’ Sunny told Beth. It wasn’t that Sunny wanted to leave after they fucked necessarily, there was just too much to do. They were running behind on everything, each new project interfering with the progress of the last: the band taking up time they should have spent on the Walt Coleman compendium, that took time from their tape label, that took time from their zine writing, that took time away from finally getting that live LP right (both the sense of occasion and recording quality eluding them). Only a couple of Sunny’s partners could tolerate their restlessness, the ones who’d come over to Paradise Estate, in via the roller door, and lay back to sleep on their futon while Sunny busied themself at the desk: making tapes, banging away on the typewriter, filing and scanning Walt’s writing. They hated visiting other houses, trapped there unable to sleep, unable to work on the things they needed to get done. Beth’s whole spiel about ‘dating to escape sharehouse reality’ was their antithesis; Sunny wanting to yell at the world: ‘Just let me shit where I eat!’

Keep Off the Grass

Beth and Helen sprawled under blankets at opposite ends of the living room couch, the sun shining outside after a week of dry days. Both stared blankly between their phones and the TV as Rocco walked impatiently through the house. It was rare for the three of them to have a day off together, but Rocco seemed to be the only person excited about it, and as though he was their caretaker, convinced the two to join him at the Canterbury pools. They slid along the bar seat in Rocco’s ute, and on the drive to the aquatic centre, he detailed how he used the pool for recovery sessions: to keep his body rolling over gently between work and footy. Beth refused to believe that swimming could be a recovery method, describing how hard she was pushed as a kid when her parents sent her along to swimming squads, spending mornings before school training at the Whitlam Leisure Centre because they were convinced that with enough pressure, she would be moulded into an athlete.

‘They were deluded,’ she said, her legs pushed uncomfortably to Helen’s side of the stick shift by Rocco’s spread. ‘They saw Susie O’Neill at the Sydney Olympics, then looked at my six-year-old ass and thought they could turn me into a national treasure. They put so much time and money into me becoming a pseudo-celebrity, all this money we didn’t have, and I sucked at everything! Couldn’t swim, couldn’t play piano, couldn’t do anything but draw and paint.’

The others hummed in understanding.

‘I can’t do laps,’ Helen said, squinting into the low afternoon sun. ‘But you know at swimming lessons when you had to float for two minutes or whatever to go up a level? I was like the floating queen, they had to jump in the pool to get me to stop.’

‘Everyone has their skill set,’ Rocco said, gearing down and pulling into the car park, the three of them jostling as the hard suspension struck driveways and speed bumps.

The pale-blue paint and red-brick walls marked their arrival at an aquatic centre stuck in time like a picture of the nineties: set next to Terry Lamb Reserve, exposed to the sun beside the Cooks River, tucked behind the Bankstown Line. A train carriage rattled behind them as they set their things down and undressed: Rocco down to a team Speedo and Beth down to a bikini. Helen looked at their tight and muscular bodies glistening in the sun. She shuffled coyly out of her jeans.

‘You look like you’re on the set of a porno,’ she said glibly.

Beth laughed, screaming: ‘Who says porno?!’

‘It’s our vintage,’ Rocco said, his chest glowing in the sun. ‘We watch pornos, you watch porn.’

Helen took off her jumper as the two bickered like a couple, but remained in the oversized HDPE shirt Sunny had given her, suddenly conscious of revealing her teenage tattoos that had smudged and faded years before the stick-and-poke became a fashion choice for the general public. She padded to the pool’s ramp, and slipped into the water, immediately stretching out and floating at the surface. The pain in her neck grabbed and tore at her, radiating through her shoulders. This relentless pain that had taken on a new intensity since she was dropped on her head. She closed her eyes and let the still water hold her weight, hoping for the cool sensations to overtake the pain signals.

On towels on the freshly mowed grass, Rocco and Beth stretched back in the sun and felt their tensions dissipate into the earth, left with the aches of work (Rocco’s hands, Beth’s feet and the hip of her good leg, which a physio said was ‘compensating’). They discussed the sources of their minor injuries, the root causes, and were relieved to find that both were able to complain absent-mindedly about it all without feeling the need to offer potential solutions, joking after every complaint: ‘Have you tried acupuncture?’ Beth was waiting to be heated up enough to get in the water, but the breeze broke through the waning power of the sun. She fidgeted in place, talking to distract herself.

‘Have you ever used a nail gun?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Rocco replied, ‘I did half a carpentry apprenticeship after school.’

‘You didn’t finish?’

‘I thought I needed to save my body for footy,’ he said, playing with his towel. ‘I should have stuck with it.’

‘You used one of those big mechanical saws?’

‘A drop saw? Yeah, during the apprenticeship, and for some builder’s labourer jobs.’

‘Jackhammer?’

‘A couple times.’

‘Do you use them now?’

‘No. You only really need a spirit level and a hammer to put up a scaffold.’

‘Seriously?’

‘For my work, yeah. You take the pieces, you line them up, and then you just whack the pin on the couplers, move on to the next section.’

‘You have all those tools in the back of that ute, and you only use two of them?’

‘Pretty much, but –’ Rocco paused. ‘Didn’t you write essays at uni?’

‘Yes...’

‘How much essay writing do you do behind the bar?’

‘I take your point,’ Beth said, offended. She propped herself up on her shoulders and checked on Helen, who was still floating in the free-swimming lane, unaware that she was drifting towards a group of boys imitating wrestling moves in the shallow end. ‘So you’re working a dead-end job,’ she continued, ‘to support a dead-end sports career.’

‘A harsh assessment, but yes.’

‘And you’re getting old.’

‘I’m thirty-two.’

‘Getting older.’

Rocco could see that Beth was baiting him.

‘Am I wrong?’ she continued.

‘Not completely,’ Rocco replied calmly, explaining how things had changed now that he’d been promoted up a grade, that since he was proving himself capable, and with a former Mounties coach in the Bulldogs NRL system, and with injuries and COVID policy the way it was, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d luck into some NRL game time before he went off to the World Cup. ‘Which is all possible,’ he added, ‘but I’m also not stupid. I know I’ll probably look back and think it was a mistake to put my life on hold for this. But this is all I’ve got. Maybe all I’ll ever have. Footy will be over for me soon. My body can’t handle labouring forever either. So, I have to give myself this at least, focus on the next six months, then start planning from there.’

Rocco felt self-conscious and adjusted his Speedo, turning over onto his stomach. Beth responded by turning over onto hers, looking into his eyes and enjoying the effect she had on him.

‘And then what do you do?’

‘I can’t think about the future. I need to focus on this opportunity, and trust that something will flow on from that,’ he said, losing his train of thought. ‘It’s like...I used to work with a guy who got into Perspex. By chance, he got a shit job at a Perspex factory because he couldn’t find anything else. He cut signs to size, that kind of thing. He worked at this shop on the Princes Highway for ages, but the business was bad and the work was boring, so everyone started quitting. Then all of a sudden he was managing the place. Then his boss wanted to get out, so he borrowed money and bought a stake in the business for fuck all. And just as they were about to go under, everything goes crazy in 2020 and business got really, really good. Like he bought a house good.’

‘How could any business thrive in 2020?’

‘Remember when shops and supermarkets started installing all the plastic screens over the counter to separate customers and staff? All made from Perspex. He made screens for half of south Sydney. But then I guess they found out the virus was mostly airborne and the screens didn’t really do anything.’

‘Then what happened? He went broke?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t been paying attention,’ he said, hiding the fact that the story had been told to him second-hand. ‘You know the other side of it is, I used to play footy with a guy whose dad got into umbrellas and emergency ponchos in the nineties. It must have been for the Olympics. I don’t know if it was a factory thing or an importer-exporter thing, but he was setting himself up to be a big supplier of rain wear.’

‘So?’

‘So then Australia went into drought for twenty years and he had a warehouse with all these umbrellas.’

Beth fidgeted, thinking about her dad’s botched lawnmower business. ‘I don’t understand the point of this story, Rocco.’

‘We were talking about opportunities.’

Beth flipped over onto her back as a train went by behind her.

‘So does that make you a Perspex guy or an umbrella guy?’

Rocco thought on that for a moment, as Helen appeared out of the pool, water dripping from her black cotton shirt, unsettled after yelling at the group of boys in the shallow end.

‘I’m in scaffolding,’ Rocco said finally.

The light faded quickly as they drove home from the pool, on the verge of darkness by the time they draped their towels and swimwear over the clothesline and sat on the outdoor couch. Helen fetched her woollen blanket and threw it over her and Beth, who complained about its weird texture while rolling cigarettes from Helen’s pouch. Rocco sat back in the armchair, run down and relaxed after a day off. Something about contrasting the warm day at the pool against the cold night had them dazed. They sat back and spoke in muted tones, focusing on the columns of apartments that surrounded their yard. People cooked by brightly lit kitchen windows, the blues of TV screens flooded others, and there were the usual balcony sitters: in trackpants, or dressing gowns, Ugg boots or slippers, staring down at their yard and smoking or talking on the phone. Far below, Rocco, Beth and Helen shivered in their damp clothes, looking back up at them.

‘Sixth floor,’ Beth started, pointing with an unlit cigarette: ‘Rajesh, forty-three, part-time IT specialist, plays Cyberpunk 2077 while house-sitting for his colleague.’

Helen looked across to find him, and offered her own assessment. ‘Building two, fourth floor: Leanne, fifty-six, payroll officer, visits her neighbour in the apartment next door to drink exactly three glasses of wine before calling it a night.’

Rocco didn’t look up.

‘Floor underneath Leanne,’ Beth continued. ‘Mo, twenty-four, Guardian columnist, taps his pencil while trying to figure out how to publish a nuanced thinkpiece about hating the poors.’

‘Same floor, building to the right,’ said Helen. ‘Peter, thirty-nine, administrator, sits at his laptop to subtweet his imagined enemies, unaware that all his friends have muted his account.’

They laughed together as Alice came outside to water the garden, which she’d barely had to do in months. Earlier in the year, she hoped the rain-watered veggie patch would be full and vibrant. But she stared emptily into the garden now, which had become little more than a collection of sodden plants with spindly stems. The wet brought with it a legion of snails and slugs who tore the leaves apart, while the thick clay soil, which Rocco had claimed would be ‘fine’, had failed every plant that tried to live within it. Any progress that had been hinted at through the early months of 2022 had undone itself as the days got shorter. And though Rocco tried to encourage her, it was futile.

‘What’s wrong, Alice? Can’t find the end of the hose?’ Beth joked, but Alice didn’t react. She went over to her seedling shelf that she’d set up against the side of Sunny’s shed, hoping it would be warmed by the sun, but the pots were all knocked over. She attributed this to the wind, but Rocco knew it was the senseless destruction of the cat she was always defending. He got up and went over to her for support.

‘I can’t grow anything in this,’ she admitted, smiling at him sadly.

‘It’s off-season,’ he replied, ‘you have time to get back on track.’

‘It’s been almost six months; I should be harvesting something by now. The patch is dead, and these seedlings aren’t strong enough to plant out anywhere. It’s just been a waste of time and energy.’

They examined the failures in front of them.

‘Nothing can grow in these conditions,’ Rocco said, ‘it’ll be okay.’

‘It’ll not be okay. Look,’ she traced the path of the winter sun that had already dipped behind the apartment blocks. ‘Everything I planted is in the shade all day. Everything.’

‘It’s four o’clock Alice, this is normal –’

‘– you don’t understand, I didn’t think about the angle of the sun. I mapped it on the weekend: only four hours of full sun and getting constantly pelted with rain. It’s useless.’

‘Be patient and stick to your plan,’ he insisted, and when she didn’t seem convinced, tried again. ‘You can only play what’s in front of you.’

‘Please don’t try to comfort me with a rugby cliché, Rocco.’

‘It’s a cliché because it’s the truth,’ Rocco said.

In the weeks following her surrender to the weather, Alice seemed to regress to a childlike state. She started wearing patterned pyjamas at night, at first just for quick ventures out of her room, but then it was on the couch in pyjamas, drinking hot chocolate in her pyjamas, giving Nathan a lift to The Centre in her pyjamas. She became increasingly erratic, oscillating from demonstrations of performative adulthood – reading theory and marking up journal articles – to evidence of stunted growth – reading novels written for teenagers, sitting on the floor with colouring-in books for adults. She started snapping at Nathan in moments she used to tolerate. She stopped leaving the house to work at her laboratory, claiming to be in a ‘writing phase’. She spent all day on the couch instead, watching and re-watching the Lord of the Rings DVD box sets from her youth. These behaviours appeared as warning signs when Helen spotted them, watching her housemate coil inwards, and hoping she wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of allowing the spiral to happen.

After a month of this, Helen pulled Beth aside to ask if she’d seen Alice eat, but neither could confirm that she had, so they drove to Faros Brothers to collect an assortment of fresh seafood, thinking of how much Alice had enjoyed their summer barbecues. Beth and Helen returned, cooked and served up a series of platters at the dining table for the house. And everyone ate, except for Alice. Sunny scooped up spoonfuls of mixed seafood, which Alice just stared at quietly from the end of the table. She picked up a baby octopus and immediately returned it to the plate, eyeing off the platters of seafood selections that had been cooked for her. She sipped at the sickly sweet wine Rocco had stolen from a player function, screwed up her face, and picked at the green salad. Sunny played with their food, calling a baby octopus their ‘friend’ before telling it to ‘go for a swim’ and swallowing it whole. And everyone laughed, except for Alice.

THE AMBIENCE OF SHARED HOUSING was hard for Helen to get reacquainted with. Doors slamming, muffled arguments, TVs and laptops murmuring behind closed doors. And incidental breaches of privacy. Hearing through the thin gyprock wall to Rocco’s room, where she could hear the unmistakable sound of porn played at low volume in the dead of the night. She didn’t sleep much anymore. She watched the shadows cast onto her walls and ceiling by the streetlight, sending distorted images of the trees in the front yard through her window. She listened intently, trying to discern whether he watched porn in Italian or English, whether his algorithms had been embedded in his Italian viewing habits, or had geolocated him to Australia by now, homing in on whatever this country’s perversions were. Would he enter ‘Italian’ as a search term? Is there an instinct to get off to a production value that can only be found in something filmed in the anglosphere? Or was it all one and the same? She wrote another headline block for Nathan’s website in her head: ‘All nations under late capitalism have reached an erotic singularity.’ She wasn’t repulsed by hearing Rocco wanking, but it depressed her: another one trapped by their hormones and the algorithm, his libidinal drive satiated by the seat of a digital porn empire headquartered somewhere in North America. She crawled under her blankets without undressing, feeling exposed and shamefully voyeuristic: eavesdropping on her housemate’s pursuit of cheap pleasure, looking for intrigue in the banal.

Fulcrum

Beth began to feel a kind of displacement that she’d never noticed before. Maybe she’d been shielded from it after returning to live at home, but now in this sharehouse and at work and at social events, she felt caught between everyone else’s frame of reference: an isolated point that lay between them all. Anyone she talked to seemed either too naive or too jaded for her to connect with. She’d be looked up to, or looked down upon, easily dismissed, and just as often looked to for direction. When she fucked Eric, he joked that he’d never been with an older woman before. When she fucked Sam, he made a dozen pre-emptive check-ins and begged for assurances that he wasn’t being predatory despite his age (ludicrous to Beth, since he was just five years older). She felt that rather than being taken for who she was, everyone used her to find their own balance.

Beth figured she was of an age that left you right at the precipice, feeling both only and already twenty-eight; a youth in the sharehouse, but a stalwart in the company of her art friends. If she raised the point, people told her it was probably the nature of her work and her interests, charging off to a bar shift, resting through the day, disappearing to art shows, arriving at protests and meetings, camming into the early hours of the morning. Her life was dictated by short interactions and her relationships were brief too, informed by the impatience of the app-addicted singles. She needed something concrete, and when no one in the house seemed to be responding with the level of understanding she knew she deserved, she turned to joking with them instead.

‘I’m pregnant!’ Beth yelled from the toilet when Nathan knocked impatiently on the bathroom door.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said I’m pregnant!’

‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Aren’t you gonna ask me if I need anything?’

She could sense him hovering at the door. ‘...do you need anything?’

Beth got up and flushed the toilet, washed her hands and walked briskly out of the bathroom, knocking Nathan out of the way as she passed. ‘I’m not actually pregnant, but thanks for your concern.’

He looked crazed. ‘Why would you joke about that?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be pregnant?’ Beth shrugged. ‘When you think about it, if it takes two to tango, I’m halfway there.’

Only Sunny had any time for these gags, egging her on by kissing her stomach whenever she passed, and constantly remarking on how she was ‘glowing’. These jokes turned to a hypothetical when, stoned on the outdoor couch one night, Beth turned to Rocco and asked: ‘Fuck, what if I was pregnant?’ Helen grew tired of the charade almost immediately, while for Alice, it seemed to set off all her anxious ticks. It was only Nathan and Rocco who treated her seriously, and this pushed the evolution of the joke to a thought experiment, and at some point in the month, a mock proposal that fell over the end of a house dinner like a dead weight.

‘So what’s the barrier to having kids today?’ Beth asked with a mouthful of food. ‘I don’t have a partner, but that’s a made-up old- fashioned problem. And I can’t afford to raise a kid on my own, which ties back to the need for a partner, which ties into some bigger ideas around the need for community in place of traditional ideas of family. Like, we’d all agree on that.’

The others mumbled impatiently.

‘What’s your point?’ Helen asked.

‘If we view the way we live as “cohabiting” rather than share-housing as Nathan suggested, then I think that in the interests of building for a better future, why shouldn’t I just have a kid? And the baby could be something we raised together.’

The sounds of knives and forks on cutlery covered the silence at the table, everyone trying to tread carefully.

She continued. ‘Doesn’t it worry you that none of us are going to have kids? You do all these activities supposedly for a better future, but no one here wants to create the next generation.’

‘You set things in motion, and build collectives and movements to pick up the struggle,’ Nathan argued. ‘It’s not for one baby to continue on with.’

‘You’ve got no plans to have kids?’

Nathan looked into the distance in thought, as Alice held tensely still. ‘That’s a personal choice,’ he replied. ‘It’s not something that can be reasoned into being.’

‘So all the neo-Nazis out there in their little nuclear families ploughing each other stupid, birthing seas of white supremacists while we’re busy umming and ahhing about the prospect of a kid aren’t of any concern to you?’

‘I guess my issue here is that it’s a very personal decision,’ Nathan interrupted again. ‘If you want a child, then you can just have a child.’

‘You said this house could be more than just a sharehouse. That we were going to be “collectively minded”, that you wanted for us all to get involved in each other’s things.’

‘Yeah, and we do that.’

‘No, we help Sunny put on a show, or we clean up after your reading group, or we weed Alice’s garden...what if this is my thing?

Like it’s no more or less an important project than anything anyone else is doing.’

‘A project,’ Helen echoed, dumbfounded.

They argued, Nathan resenting his words being used against him and becoming increasingly firm in his disagreement.

‘That’s enough,’ Rocco interjected. He reminded them of how often they’d spent listening to Nathan make over-enthusiastic propositions. ‘Let’s give Beth the benefit of the doubt of talking about this rationally. It’s simple if we go through it step-wise. Beth, how do you find someone to get you pregnant under these conditions?’ The room looked at him. ‘That’s all it is, isn’t it? Beth wants to fall pregnant, and she’s asking us for help: she has ovaries and wants a baby. All she needs is sperm.’

‘Gross, Rocco,’ Alice interrupted.

‘Come on, Alice. Do we sook and argue? Or do we help out here?’

‘I don’t think this concerns you,’ she said through her teeth.

‘I care about Beth,’ he said sternly, ‘and if she wants to discuss this, we should discuss it.’

Helen pressed at her temples. ‘I don’t understand, isn’t this just another one of Beth’s jokes? She can fuck whoever she wants. Who are we to say? Let’s drop it – if this isn’t just a gag and there’s actually a baby in a year, we’ll deal with it then.’

‘No, I think that if we were to communally raise it,’ Beth interrupted, ‘then it’s not my personal choice. We would need to decide who is acceptable as a donor, and think of a way to come to a decision.’

‘You would want us to tell you who you can fuck?’ Helen grunted.

‘Not in those words, but if we raised the baby together, sure, maybe I would want you to have some say in where half its genetics were coming from.’

‘Fuck this,’ Helen said, getting up and leaving through the hallway, slamming the front door on her way out. The others looked to Rocco to patch things over.

‘I’ll get her,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked when he caught up to her. ‘It’s just a conversation, it’s hypothetical...’

‘Yeah maybe you’re too dumb to see it, Rocco,’ she scowled, ‘but that’s not hypothetical, that’s what testing the waters looks like.’

‘Who cares if it is?’

‘You’d be okay with it? You’d let her walk across the hallway, get the job done, hang around as a co-parent with these other weirdos.’

‘If that was the decision she made...if she really wanted to...’

‘Oh god, have a spine, Rocco!’ she said. ‘This idea of hers will go the moment the hormones kick in and she’ll decide that “actually, you know what, a nuclear family is more aligned to working-class values both historically and in the present, and like, love is an expression of solidarity, and when you splooged inside me I felt a form of solidarity I had never felt before –”’

‘– why are you acting like this?’

‘Because it’s objectively insane!’ she yelled, throwing her arms into the air.

‘No, Helen, it’s just something to think about,’ he said gently.

‘Rocco, please be normal for a second.’

‘Be normal? Fine, let’s say it is a serious proposition then. Beth is almost thirty and she wants to have a kid, that’s so “normal” that it’s bordering on stereotypical.’

‘Yes, and I’m almost forty and I don’t want to be listening to the crying of my housemate’s “hypothetical” baby. I need my friends to be like anyone else would outside of this place, not tolerating these fucking flights of fancy. I hate this house,’ she mumbled while walking from him: ‘I hate it so much.’

Helen looked for open space, venturing through the streets until she met the last of the evening sun across the tram line in Johnson Park. She slumped onto a park bench, an exposed bolt catching at her jeans as she tried to get comfortable. She watched a woman in the playground scroll through her phone in one hand, absent-mindedly pushing her toddler on a swing with the other. Slouched and tense behind the swing set, she only broke the trance when her daughter shrieked from her seat, demanding to be given new momentum, too small to keep the swing going alone. Her other toddler stumbled further out of view in pursuit of a nervous ibis. Following the bird, the kid stumbled past Helen, and ever closer to the traffic of Constitution Road. She thought of herding him back towards his mum and sister, but got up and left instead, thinking to herself that the ibis would be as good a protector as she’d ever been.

When she returned, Nathan and Beth’s argument had risen in intensity, evolving from a debate to a personal attack.

‘I hate to say this,’ Beth spat, ‘but it’s true, and your girlfriend probably knows it but is too much of a pussy to acknowledge it –’

‘Hey! Hold on,’ Alice yelled, but was immediately talked over.

‘– you don’t want kids because you want to wipe your hands of what’s coming. A kid holds you to account to the future. And since you’re so big on socialist futures or whatever the fuck your last garbled essay was about, you’re expecting someone else to have the kids to provide a future for you. You are pissing your pants that if you had a kid, you might have to sacrifice on the quality of your scotch. Like fuck: you never even acknowledge that you’ve been in a monogamous cis-het relationship for fifteen years. Poor Alice sitting there waiting for something to happen while you tread water.’ Nathan sulked in his chair as Alice sat silently next to him, gripping the table with her hands as Beth continued. ‘You reject new life. You’re afraid of new life. You’re spiritually impotent.’

Alice took Nathan by the arm and dragged him to her car, slamming the door behind them and driving into the night. Rocco saw Helen return and went to his room with a nod, leaving Helen and Beth together in an uncomfortable silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said.

‘What for?’ Beth frowned.

‘For being an arsehole.’

Beth looked down at the table covered in plates for a while, and then shook it off with a smile, saying: ‘I mean, it was just a joke.’

The house never found time to unpack what soon earned the nickname of Beth’s ‘modest proposal’. With their schedules misaligned, and each preoccupied, it was easier to wait for the confrontation to be forgotten. The only lingering tension was between Helen and Beth, who struggled to breach the silence between them until Helen took her out for a beer. It was a short walk from the house to the Hurlstone Park Hotel, but it had its landmarks: from the convent on the corner to the Pontian Society building that seemed to specialise in hosting rowdy school formals. They passed the house with a series of decommissioned taxis squeezed into the front yard in a majestic feat of parking, each of the cabs filled with plastic bags full of recycled cans ready for return. Beth told Helen about a time that she and Rocco came home from the pub and were chased off by the owner of the house. He’d yelled at them to mind their own business after hearing them discuss his life as a remarkable symbol for the evolution of the taxi industry. This stretch of New Canterbury Road was like the edges of all middling cities, a neighbourhood undercut with development and renovation, its local pub set into the ground level of a new apartment block like a hotel lobby. They entered the pub and Beth told another story about Rocco, how the ‘old boys’ at footy claimed the Hurlstone Park Hotel used to be a drinking spot for Bulldogs first graders back in the eighties. They settled at the window with their drinks, trying to find things to talk about while staring across the road at a block of mid-century shops in various states of disrepair. There was a busy veterinarian office, a decommissioned watch repair shop and a long-lasting upholsterer with an intricately hand-painted stained-glass sign reading: Curtains, Pelmets, Swags.

‘What’s a pelmet?’ Beth asked, googling ‘pelmet’.

‘Who knows,’ Helen replied, still irritated by the bar’s charging a service fee to use the EFTPOS terminal. ‘Not to sound like a fifty- five-year-old man, but back in the day if a pub was weird about bank fees, they’d just let you pay for a few beers at a time to reduce the transaction fee.’

‘A pelmet is a framework placed above a window, used to conceal curtain fixtures,’ Beth read. ‘Do you think there used to be a roaring pelmet trade in Hurlstone Park?’

‘There used to be all these unwritten pub rules for alcoholics,’ Helen continued. ‘The Crystal Palace in the city, there’s a good pub: you could pay for a few beers at a time to get past the $15 EFTPOS minimum and all you had to do was nod at them over the counter, and they’d just pour you another one you know?’

Beth started paying attention. ‘When was this, like 2001?’

‘That was last year!’ Helen exclaimed, finishing her beer and sensing a metallic taste in her mouth. ‘Progress has fucked everything, made everything too easy, killed off all the tips and tricks we had to come up with to get by.’

In their reflection, four men disappeared behind an automatic door by the water feature, which frightened Helen, and when she turned around, realised it was the elevator leading to a car park shared by the pub and the apartment block.

‘How have we never noticed how fucked this place is?’ Helen asked slowly, now fixated on a LED sign that played a video of Mona Lisa drinking a Red Bull. She looked back at Beth who was grinning from ear to ear. ‘What?’

‘I spiked our drinks back at the house,’ she smiled, her eyes bugging open.

‘I see,’ Helen said, biting her lip.

‘We have a night on acid to work through this thing between us,’ Beth said earnestly.

Helen nodded slowly, thinking about her former self. ‘That’s okay...I probably would have done the same at your age.’

‘Let’s start there,’ Beth said, already insulted.

‘DO YOU EVER SHAMPOO YOUR CHEST?’ she asked Rocco, tugging his thickets of body hair. ‘Sometimes I do it for fun, ’ Rocco admitted, pushing her hand away, ‘but I don’t know if you’re supposed to.’ She spoke quietly in his room, even though they had the house to themselves, the others at work, or meetings, or band practice. ‘Is it an inherited thing?’ she asked, rolling onto her back and reaching for her vape. Rocco watched the plume of artificial smoke rise above them. ‘Well, my dad and nonno are both dead. But nonno was one of the hairiest men I ever saw.’ She nodded, feeling lazy until she started to fret about the time moving faster than they thought it was. ‘I should go back to my room,’ Beth said, getting up quickly. ‘Okay,’ Rocco nodded calmly, pulling his blanket back over him. ‘You know where to find me.’

Vectors

Sunny had hosted another house show, the weather forcing HDPE to play in the living room to the fifty who received the secret invite. The others had gone along with the idea reticently, conscious of their agreement to support each other’s ventures. And on the Monday after the event, the house only just cleaned up, Rocco noticed something wrong. He struggled through his workout, desperate to train his shoulders after looking in the mirror, swearing he could see an imbalance in his musculature. He took some plates off his barbell and went back for another set of a military press, but failed early despite the conservative loading. He’d neglected his shoulders worse than he thought, and sat back on his bench under the carport to take long, laboured breaths, shivering as a cold breeze cut across the yard. Confounded, he returned to his workout, switching to a set of strained lateral raises, but weakened, he couldn’t stop himself from cheating. He failed unreasonably early and collapsed. He got up to walk around the yard, examining the scattered seedling pots, the veggie patch laying limp and part submerged under pools of water. On closer inspection, the odd pile of cat shit sat high on the mulch. Rocco felt bad for only ever helping Alice with the occasional encouragements, or defending her when Beth claimed that the abandoned plan of bringing guerilla gardening back to Sydney was ‘posting cringe anyway’. In the spitting rain, he replaced the pots on their shelves, pulled up some dead plants, and removed the piles of shit (hissing at the nearby cat, who scurried pathetically behind Sunny’s shed). When he stood up, he swooned, and when he sat back down, he coughed.

Inside, Beth and Helen had come up with a rational explanation for their body aches and sore throats, and were hunched over the kitchen table to run through the mild intrusions of an antigen test. Rocco poked his head inside and saw them spluttering over the array of plastic parts, joining them to do the same, joking that Sunny might have been right about their house show being a moment of collectivity. They waited for the test results while describing their first COVID infections: Rocco’s in the first wave of 2020 when the virus ran rampant through Italy; Helen’s when the cinemas reopened at the back end of 2021; Beth unable to discern one infection from the other over the past two years. They sat anxiously around the table, messaged the house group chat as a warning and watched the purple lines appear slowly in front of them. As the results were confirmed, Sunny came inside to hear the news (asking if their ‘faces’ were ‘pregnant’). Nathan stormed through the corridor in a face mask, demanding answers.

‘Well?’ he spat.

‘Fuck me dead,’ Helen yelled back, Nathan’s abruptness snapping her out of an acute depression. ‘We’re doing fine, thanks for asking. How are you, Nathan?!’

‘The bad news is that we’re sick with the virus again,’ Sunny interrupted, smiling. ‘But the good news...is that we’re all in this together.’

Nathan shook his head in disgust, and ranted about ‘consenting to exposure’ before heading back up the hallway to tell Alice to pack their bags. They took off in her car, leaving the others to face down a couple weeks of compulsory coexistence.

The four left at the table went quiet, each struggling with their own stresses. Rocco would be unable to maintain his on-field momentum after a strong game the week before; Sunny felt too exhausted to pull the required all-nighters to get the new issue of their zine out in time; Beth was forced to miss the week of double shifts she’d arranged to get her debts back in order; and while Helen had enough sick leave so wasn’t too worried, she fretted about being unable to escape the house to find a pub to decompress in.

‘Fuck ’em, I’m sleeping in their room,’ Sunny said, irritated by how easily Nathan and Alice had fled the situation.

‘They’ll know you were in there,’ Beth replied, waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘I’m not the type to be busted,’ Sunny smiled cheekily, having seen her slink out of Rocco’s room only a few nights prior. She looked back at them, stone-faced. ‘Anyway, what are they gonna do? Make me un-sleep in their bed for a week?’

They sprawled across the couches in the lounge room, coughing in waves and forming a pharmacy on the coffee table with their various medications that would alleviate their symptoms. Sunny organised all of these into what they called ‘the spectra of cures’. From paracetamol and ibuprofen to pseudoephedrine (all from the chemist), a range of what Sunny called ‘doctor’s uppers’ (from Ritalin to dexamphetamines), and back to codeine, oxycontin and valium (that Sunny called ‘doctor’s downers’), before forming a ‘recreation section,’ comprising the ketamine that Beth had on hand and a range of hallucinogens that Sunny kept stockpiled, assembled at the outermost region of this coffee-table display. Helen was too tired and sore to give it much time, and despite Sunny’s efforts, no one touched anything harder than the Codral. They shared in the tea and lemon juice that Beth prepared for them and brought in the oil heaters from their bedrooms to try to make a communal space bearable for the night ahead. They felt an uncanny sensation with the couple removed: the warmth and comfort of a makeshift family unit.

Sunny told the others what they were working on (their zine about Walt’s body of unpublished writing), then probed Rocco on his past in a band overseas (which he said was a Milan-based concept band called I Pentiti, where he would sing in broken Italian and point out the building code violations he observed in each venue they played in). They argued about whether Twitter was a real space or a fake space (whether there was one politics for the chronically online and another for the blissfully disconnected). They continued to critique the people who wielded power in niche online social circles (those who dictated the terms of who was in or out, posing as powerless while constantly creating strawmen of people they didn’t like). Their conversation finally dissolved when Rocco extended discussions of the ‘touch grass lobby’ to complaints about the ‘drink water complex’, saying: ‘I don’t get how a job could be so easy that you can’t raise enough thirst to stay alive. I drink ten litres of water a day!’ The evening fell, and they lay restlessly under blankets that they kicked off and pulled back on with their fluctuating temperatures, groaning, coughing, and laying in an agitated silence.

‘Fuck,’ Beth groaned, ‘we exhausted our human-interest stories on day one.’

Sunny, Rocco and Helen spent the week pacing through the house or hanging out in Sunny’s shed while they duplicated tapes and printed zines. Rocco read through all of Sunny’s back catalogue, increasingly enthused by their work. On one night, the three of them jammed together in the shed, urged along by an impassioned conversation about Sydney’s new wave of punk bands being gratingly treble-heavy, jamming with Helen and Sunny both on bass, but were shut down by a neighbour banging on the roller door, a neighbour that Sunny had been feuding with about noise for months. They tried again, this time with Helen and Sunny both on guitar with the bass channel turned right down (now a parody of Sydney’s high-pitched punk bands rather than a counter), but it broke down too; Helen realised with a pang that it was the first time she’d played guitar since she last jammed with her brother. They stopped, and sat together on the back porch, and tried not to talk about it.

The three of them had deepened their friendship after only a few days, but while they bonded, Beth had barely left her room. She said she had lost a day to fever-induced sleep, and then the resulting exhaustion, but by day three she had grown overwhelmingly stressed about getting back to work (they hadn’t been answering her texts about the upcoming roster, meaning they were reallocating her shifts to another new hire). She spent more time on her cam channels in an attempt to fill the financial shortfall, but she couldn’t focus, distracted by a conversational thread that had started on her Twitch stream. One of Beth’s subscribers kept asking her opinion on a leak from a Google employee about the company’s AI becoming sentient. She tried to dismiss it, but when she looked into it to humour the guy, grew uncomfortable by the claim that the Google AI had identified its own mortality, and then declared its fear of death. When she brought this up while killing time on her other stream, she was asked what she thought about the new advances in sex doll technology, told about a company that was fusing an AI chat protocol with a Real Doll, allowing it to interact realistically with the end user. Then she and her subscribers read and discussed further, finding a Silicon Valley research group that printed skin capable of feeling and responding to sensations, designed for medical purposes, but upselling the tech as a way of making androids more responsive, and thus, she thought, better functioning in bed. Beth was concerned about these possibilities, because the combination of those three things just meant that soon – like customer service and art and trains and parking – sex work would be automated too, its proceeds funnelling off towards engineers and their investors. As she said on her live stream: if a robot can think, and make art, and feel, and be put in people’s homes, they were vulnerable. And if they were truly sentient? They would be capable of being traumatised. But no one in the chat seemed to be interested in her pressing this point. Those who didn’t leave the stream claimed that engineers would never program the capacity for trauma in that form, which she argued was part of the problem. She watched the people in her room disappear, either logging out entirely, sitting there silently, or asking her to do what she had done the night before.

Beth eventually emerged from her room and told the house about her concerns, but the others could only offer sympathy, unable to feel the ramifications of progress that Beth had discovered and studied for nights on end.

‘It’s okay, Beth,’ Helen said, having once been thrown down a similar path when she first saw computer-generated greyhound racing in the gaming area of her local pub. ‘I’ve been there. You feel a bit nuts for a day or two, but you’ll adjust.’

‘You don’t know anything of what I feel right now,’ she said bitterly, pausing suddenly in a burst of regret. Helen took a pouch of tobacco from her room and motioned for Beth to follow her.

‘It’s all the vape juice fucking with your head,’ Helen claimed, rolling Beth a smoke. ‘You’re worried about a takeover of artificial intelligence but you keep smoking digital cigarettes. Take this: it’s natural.’

Sunny reached for Helen’s pouch and created a slogan: ‘Touch grass: smoke tobacco.’

In Woollahra, Alice pleaded with Nathan to stay longer. She said she needed to focus on her new paper (her supervisor suggesting that her latest crystal structure was interesting enough to publish as a communication), but in truth, she wanted another day in a warm house: another day with her dad’s cooking, or the generous serves he had delivered to the door from the restaurants of the eastern suburbs. She enjoyed that the house was always well lit, that she could comfortably walk barefoot again, soaking in all the surfaces that she’d touch absent-mindedly as she floated around the house: flooring laid so tightly that you couldn’t sense the gaps between the boards or tiles, carpets that weren’t hosting microbial life, bedsheets that were crisp, couches that were appropriately sized and spaced, fabrics that fit the look and feel of the room. There were no reminders of chores not done, no crevices for food to fall into, tile grout so spotless you barely knew it was there, no gap beside the oven for food to rot inside. And there was no one watching over her life: no neighbours peering constantly into the yard, no broken cupboards that your housemates wouldn’t let you ask the real estate to fix, no invisible landlord as a quiet threat to her livelihood. And if there were issues, they fluttered away at her dad’s request: cleaned and repaired, maintained and paid for.

The problem was that Nathan had chosen to be argumentative and unappreciative, something she didn’t expect considering how much they were imposing on her father. There was tension from the moment they showed up at the door and went through their customary greetings (taking their shoes off and hugging her dad and his girlfriend, who performatively showed them to the guest room as though they hadn’t lived in it for two years). Nathan had come prepared to argue, and at sixty-eight, Alice’s dad Ivan had the lived experience to weather it.

Nathan chose his first inflammatory point to be a reaction to Ivan’s discussion around the violent censorship of anti-war sentiment in Russia, which made Nathan recite a list by reflex of Ukraine’s own injustices: of their banning the Ukrainian Communist Party, Zelensky using the invasion as an excuse to seize all property belonging to communists and socialists to hand it to the war effort, while allowing the many neo-Nazi groups to continue operating, and indeed, arming them with weapons paid for by the west, who were content to keep the war running to weaken the region.

‘None of that sounds like it came from a very reliable source,’ Ivan said after humouring Nathan for the length of his speech. ‘The denazification myth is Putin propaganda in any case; it’s a smokescreen.’

‘Putin may have co-opted that to manufacture consent for the war, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’m not saying Putin isn’t a dangerous imperial psychopath, but it should be concerning to you that the west is sending money and weapons to Ukraine, who are arming white supremacists. It’s true that there’s almost no oversight, and it’s true that the US is sending those resources to Ukraine because it serves their strategic interests. And in the meantime, Ukraine is using that to kill off what’s left of their workers’ movements, the very people who would be out there helping the working-class families getting pulled apart by conscription...’

‘Maybe they’re just using this as a way of turning things back to the way things were,’ he replied, ‘the way things should always have been.’

‘How can you not be appalled by that?!’

‘You don’t understand,’ Ivan sighed, ‘you’re young –’

‘I’m thirty-four,’ Nathan said to which Ivan chuckled.

‘– okay, so you’re idealistic. You know, before my parents escaped Yugoslavia, the state took all their family businesses. Just took them. Can you imagine? Generations work to grow their business, to get their homes, to build something for themselves... and the government just takes it away.’

‘Yes, but why did they seize that property, Ivan?’

‘They were making money, Nathan. Which as you’ll see,’ he said, gesturing at his home, ‘by this dining room, and the guest room you are staying in with my daughter...is not a crime in a democracy.’ With each day, the two would goad each other, using the global conflict as their proving ground. Ivan brought Nathan a newspaper reporting that their local council, which housed the Russian Consulate, had proposed a renaming of Fullerton Street to ‘Ukraine Street’ as ‘a constant reminder of Ukrainian sovereignty’. He added that they’d already revoked parking permits for consular staff across Sydney in any case, but that you couldn’t see that empty gesture like you could a new street name. Nathan then returned with a note that not only did the Woollahra council not pass the motion, but that it was just a weak rehashing of what London had already done, renaming the street housing their Russian consulate to ‘Zelensky Street’. Then Ivan told Nathan that he’d instructed the record label he ran to cease streaming music into Russia.

‘Whose interests do you act on behalf of when you say that the people of Russia can’t listen to music during a war?’ Nathan eventually yelled. ‘Who is the aggressor here?’

‘I think you’ll find that his name –’ Ivan grinned, savouring the gamesmanship ‘– is Vladimir Putin.’

Nathan came to a point where he could no longer weather the needling, and cracked when Alice’s dad purchased a large blue- and-yellow flag that he attached to the front fence for Nathan’s benefit. Alice packed their bags calmly while her father and boyfriend continued to argue in the kitchen. In the car, she cried the entire way home, Nathan oblivious in the driver’s seat, turning up the radio because Peter Fitzsimons was blabbering pompously about the Australian Republic ‘Movement’ which he’d inexplicably been appointed to lead. Alice looked out the window through the rain, her bags of clothes still smelling dry and crisp in the back seat, holding back tears and drying her face as they arrived at the house. Nathan walked ahead of her with his bag, and she fetched her own, following him up the porch and hearing Sunny yelling through the house – ‘I fucking told you! Ukraine won Eurovision!’– which drew Nathan in immediately, rushing out the back to involve himself in their discussion.

Alice brought their things inside silently, folding away their freshly washed clothes, and overhearing snippets from Sunny and Nathan’s conversation that came in echoes from the hallway. Discussions about soft power, the manipulations of US empire, the shifting of a global consciousness, adopting the language of sovereignty and social justice, and the ambitions of an expanding NATO. She felt a kind of internal victory by ignoring the conversation, since she had a solid understanding of Eurovision history (a result of bonding between the various international researchers at her office) and could have fed Nathan all kinds of supporting information: starting with how the Ukrainian singer initially selected to perform was forced to withdraw her entry under state pressure due to her having visited Crimea five years prior. But instead, she tidied their room, noticing something unusual about the way the bed had been made, sniffing the air in search of a mystery odour. She overheard Helen deliver one of her summarising takes, with the words: ‘so if the rest of the world is “end-of-history poisoned”, and you’re both obsessed with recreating these east-west cold war narratives: then what’s poisoning you two?’ When Alice had cleaned everything, she put on her headphones and crawled under the blankets and sheets, falling asleep quickly with her back to the door.

‘WHAT’S WRONG?’ SUNNY ASKED A PALE-FACED HELEN, who entered their shed with a bucket of KFC at midday. ‘I went into the church,’ she said, looking overawed, ‘there were nuns.’ When Sunny started howling in laughter, Helen snapped, saying that it was ‘too fucking cold’ and she needed some reprieve from the winter. Too fried after her all-nighter on Beth’s acid to get any further than the corner of the street, her blankets damp to the touch, shivering through the house, hoping there might be some kind of warm snack inside the church to tide her over until the KFC opened. ‘One of the nuns talked to me, ’ she said conspiratorially, starting work on her bucket, ‘she knew about our house. She told me to take a seat. It was really weird. ’ Sunny took a piece of chicken and tried to find a deeper psychological reason for Helen’s decision to walk into a church for the first time in her life, but Helen grew impatient, took her chicken away from them and said that no, she wasn’t in need of help from a higher power, because she was ‘beyond redemption anyway’.

We Want Something

Helen looked out her window to where their neighbour was clearing the street gutters again. He moved as though he were doing them all a favour, shovelling in long, sweeping motions and staring around for approval like a martyr. She wanted to yell out to him, ‘no one cares!’ But she closed the blinds instead, feeling trapped in the house to avoid him, not up to venturing out to brave the cold either. She leaned on her desk and looked back at her room, at the crates of records she’d left stacked in the corners. She sat down in front of them and started sifting through the rows of LPs, deciding to finally arrange them in a logical order. Beginning alphabetically, she quickly changed her mind and opted for a method she’d always joked about: organising them on a spectrum of relative mood, from ‘sad’ to ‘angry’. But faced with two ‘sad’ records, she ran into the issue of what kind of sadness made something sadder than the other. When all the hardcore records got pushed to the right, she felt unable to tell the difference between the different types of anger contained therein, failing when trying to determine what kind of musical anger was real or performative. Not only did the novelty of the task wear off, but as she arranged these albums, she was faced with the memories that came with them. She still had a dozen copies of her first band’s LP, and set them aside to give away, trade with someone, or maybe slip into an op shop records section like Walt used to do. She had copies of records by bands she’d supported over the years, purchased purely out of pity. Then she groaned when she arrived at the two FEAR LPs she had a history with, records from her teenage edgelord years that had managed to be a ridiculous source of contention in her relationship with Suze.

Three years ago, Suze had come home early in the night and walked in on Helen just as she started re-listening to More Beer, singing along drunk and guiltless to ‘The Mouth Don’t Stop (The Trouble With Women Is)’. An argument followed: Helen made the case that FEAR were more or less a parody of the misogynistic rock attitudes of the eighties, and Suze cauterised that thought by asking if she had to look up the band’s politics to confirm this idea. (Helen admitted that Suze was probably right.) After that, Helen offloaded the FEAR records to Walt, and had later inherited them back into her collection, slipping the albums into a box in the closet without ever telling Suze. And here they were again.

Feeling defiant, Helen left her bedroom with FEAR’s The Record. She’d been thinking about it anyway, the endless war coverage and discussion sending Lee Ving’s shouting vocal swirling around her head for weeks: ‘Let’s have a war / jack up the Dow Jones.’ Helen arrived in the living room, staring at the record cover, and from the corner of her eye, noticed Beth and Rocco shift quickly away from each other on the couch. She pretended not to see them, placed the record on the turntable and left for the kitchen. She called back into the living room to see if they were thirsty, and came back with three beers as ‘Let’s Have a War’ reached its mid-point, the two now sitting at opposite ends of the three-seater. She sat down in the corner armchair, and threw her feet up on the coffee table.

‘This is probably funny to you,’ she said to Beth, ‘but this song was the first I’d heard of the military industrial complex.’

‘Yeah?’ she replied, listening to the song for answers, finding none as the album shifted to ‘Beef Bologna’. Beth raised an eyebrow.

‘I mean, I didn’t get all my politics from FEAR, but you get my point.’

‘I can vouch for FEAR – The Record as an educational tool,’ Rocco said, with Helen reminding him that he probably shouldn’t.

Sunny came into the house from the shed with phone in hand, sensing the others’ presence. ‘Did you see Žižek’s getting cancelled?’

‘Nathan was going on about that months ago,’ Helen murmured.

Sunny thought for a second. ‘No, no, that was Chomsky.’

‘Right.’

‘Chomsky was calling for Ukraine to negotiate a settlement, so he got cancelled by liberals for being a pacifist,’ Sunny explained, ‘but now Žižek is talking about powering up NATO to rip through Russia, so he’s being cancelled from the left for being a war hawk.’

‘Sunny,’ sighed Rocco, tired and battered after being beaten by thirty-eight points in Kellyville. ‘No one cares.’

‘I mean I don’t care either, but you have to appreciate the drama,’ they replied, sitting between Beth and Rocco and taking stock of ‘New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones’. ‘Man, someone needs to bring the diss track back to contemporary punk.’

‘Yes!’ Helen cheered. ‘Nothing happens at shows anymore. They need band feuds.’

‘What do you mean nothing happens?’ Rocco asked, remembering only his personal mosh highlights through the year, peaking at the fight he won in the bowling club car park.

‘Things used to happen,’ she insisted. ‘Like that festival? Years ago, those were memorable. Like once, a guy threw a brick into the crowd which sent someone to hospital, which caused a Facebook meltdown for weeks, then everyone forgot about it. Or that time someone threw a chair in the crowd that hit this guy in the head, but he was so high on acid he didn’t even flinch, just picked the chair up and returned it to the guy who threw it.’

‘That sounds horrible,’ Beth said, repulsed.

‘It was,’ she admitted, ‘but that was the point.’

‘At least some good things are happening again,’ Rocco said, flicking through one of Sunny’s zines dumped by the couch. ‘Maybe it’s not our kind of good thing, but it’s close.’

Nathan and Alice burst through the front door, energised by a day on the picket line. A new round of university strikes for increased wages and job security in the wake of the financial crisis was especially promising to them. They were excited about the solidarity between departments and the potential they felt was rising among professors, staff, casuals and students. But their energy shifted when turning on those who crossed their picket, the scabs who said that while they ‘support the strike’ they ‘needed to get to work’.

Beth seemed to bristle at their attitude. ‘Don’t pretend you and Alice aren’t coming straight home from the strike to work on all the papers you didn’t get to touch while getting your photo taken in front of an NTEU banner.’

‘What?’ Alice stammered.

‘We’ll be listening to your fucking keyboards going till three a.m. –’

‘– sending emails in the morning,’ Sunny interrupted, ‘saying: “Sorry this is late, had to do a solidarity!”’

‘Can you please not put that back on?’ Alice said when Helen broke the silence by flipping the record, disrupting what was becoming a terse conversation.

‘Just let it play out,’ Helen said, dropping the needle on ‘We Destroy the Family.’

‘Please turn it off,’ she added, ‘it’s disgusting.’

‘See this is what I’ve always said about punk music,’ Sunny argued with a mock serious squint, ‘this kind of music, played in this way, maybe it’s our form of protest.’

‘This is not a form of protest!’ Alice shrieked, shocking everyone to silence.

‘Agree to disagree I guess,’ Sunny shrugged. Alice shook with rage as ‘I Love Livin’ in the City’ played, then Nathan snapped: ‘How are you all on Beth’s side for this? We have every right to strike.’

‘Nathan!’ Beth yelled over the record. ‘It’s because we know how much you get paid!’

Nathan paused. ‘It’s not about how much I get paid...it’s about the conditions my colleagues and I endure.’

‘Endure?’ Beth scoffed. ‘I spend all night shovelling cocktails into the mouths of landlords for $23 an hour, tell me more about what you endure. Tell it to Helen, who gets half a week’s work to vacuum popcorn, or Sunny who has six months left on the NEIS scheme before they’ll be working for the dole at half of minimum wage, or to Rocco who literally hasn’t stopped working from the moment we met him and is still living paycheck to paycheck.’

‘All those struggles are related, Beth,’ Nathan tried to remind her.

‘No, your struggle is being middle class and striving for more,’ Beth insisted, ‘our struggle is that we’re working class and headed for less. But we hear more about your bullshit than anything to do with what we’re going through. Why aren’t you out front of my bar telling my manager to stop shaving fifteen minutes off either side of my shift?’

‘Let’s just chill,’ Rocco interrupted. ‘How much does Nathan get paid? He’s not living like a king.’

Nathan looked at him sheepishly.

‘Like thirty an hour?’

No one replied.

‘More?’

‘Fifty-three,’ Nathan said.

‘Shit, okay,’ Rocco said, standing up and hobbling out of the room.

‘But the workload!’ Nathan called out.

This division sent Nathan back on the attack, focusing on the fact that the others were sitting on the couch drinking beer and listening to problematic punk records, which could hardly be said to be leading to any tangible outcomes. He said that people like Helen and Sunny were too focused on their social scene, force- fitting a notion of the political onto an empty art form. As the record ran to a close, Alice claimed that Sunny and Helen’s methods couldn’t build a broader political project, but Sunny resisted. They argued that the complex political frameworks Nathan and Alice took for granted were built off the backs of members who came to it through things like music (‘This record is how Helen first heard of the military industrial complex!’ Beth exclaimed, half- sarcastically). Alice scowled and said that this ‘punk and hardcore’ music had zero revolutionary potential since it excluded too many people on aesthetics alone, while Nathan said he was not interested in Sunny’s doomed cultural revolution, and was more interested in platforms built on ‘material needs’. And while Beth quietly agreed with the couple, she’d formed an alliance with the others. She stood up and started the record over from the start just to raise the tensions. She left the room to fetch three more beers, and sat back down in time for Alice and Nathan to leave.

‘Ahhh,’ Sunny moaned. ‘The sweet sounds of protest.’

Nathan tried to squeeze a full day’s work into the morning before the rally for Palestine. Tired and sore at his desk from marking a dozen student essays in the middle of the night, he struggled to write up his reflections on the picket line. He quickly spiralled into a tangent on the unsettling outcomes that came with the casualisation of the academic workforce, writing that universities were heading towards a paradigm where each role was stripped down to an AirTasker scenario, where teaching, marking, research, paper authorship and conference presentation would all be bid upon as micro-tenders. He heard Beth’s voice in his head, saying: ‘I fucking hope you have to feel what the rest of the rest of us are feeling.’ He shook it off and tried to write about the rising rate of strike days, and then about the Sydney-wide train strikes, beginning to repurpose an old essay about Uber’s step into ridesharing alongside the proposed privatisation of the city bus routes. He argued that the driverless train network and Tesla’s experiments with driverless cars were a threat to the workforce, but his thoughts had no flow. He closed the documents and went back to the manuscript he wanted to develop about the housing crisis, since The Centre’s work on anti-communism was lagging. He felt short of inspiration. He’d just started to think of where he could look to frame his arguments as Alice pulled him away, wanting to ensure they got to Town Hall in time for the opening address.

Nathan and Alice read separately on the train, and didn’t speak until they arrived at the station. They tapped off at the turnstiles and predicted a modest but passionate turnout of people for the rally. They speculated on which groups wouldn’t show, and who would arrive to stand alongside Palestine after it had suffered yet another brutal Israeli airstrike, killing over fifty civilians, a quarter of whom were children. As they ascended the stairwell, they saw their housemates sitting on the Town Hall steps. Nathan nodded in their direction, and under his breath repeated something he had often said to Alice, that while they were dedicated comrades (ensuring their appearance on every picket line and rally they could locate), their housemates were ones of many who hung at the edges of movements, picking and choosing their causes as though from a menu. As they approached, Nathan smiled knowingly on hearing Helen regale Sunny and Beth with stories from her years as a teen goth who travelled into the city to trade CD-Rs for punk zines.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ Nathan said as he approached them. ‘I didn’t think this was your scene.’

‘Should we go home then?’ Beth asked, head tilted to the side with hands clasped in front of her. ‘Maybe we can come back when we’re protesting for your pay packet?’

‘That’s a bit of a false equivalence don’t you think?’

Nathan put an arm around Alice’s shoulder and walked her towards the trestle tables where their comrades sold stickers, pins and magazines, greeting them politely and catching up on their progress. Beth scowled at them from the steps, and turned to Helen to tell her that these groups had been asked multiple times not to leaflet vigils or protests of mourning, but refused to acknowledge the request or the criticism. She said that Nathan and Alice were among a group of socialists who were infamous for charging anyone who brought this up with accusations of red-baiting, suggesting that anyone who threatened the building of cross-issue discussions of a progressive nature were not just anti-communist, but playing into the hands of the right. So week after week, year after year, they would be there: trying to move copies of a magazine about solidarity just out of earshot of stories of oppression.

Helen had nothing to say to Beth; she had never felt qualified to have an opinion on protest etiquette. She watched a small group of older women shuffling some placards they had made for the occasion, their message written on an A4 piece of paper in landscape, laminated at home, and attached to garden stakes bought fresh in a Bunnings combo pack. When they tried to force one into Helen’s hands, she stared at it bewildered: ‘HANDS OFF ASSANGE, DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER.’ She had no words for this sloganeering that came on an afternoon that Julian Assange lived another day (not shot by an Israeli missile): a day when they gathered to mourn more Palestinians lost to another ‘pre-emptive’ strike. The organisers spoke of those complicit in Israel’s attacks, and encouraged those who resisted them. They made no mention of the irrelevant flyers and placards, and touched only briefly on the heavy-handed police presence. After everyone had spoken, they broke their arrangement with the police and marched regardless, all together, circling Town Hall once.

The mass of a couple hundred dissipated into their friendship groups, splintering away from the action down their disparate train lines and bus routes. They were all gone within the hour. The organisers remained to tidy up what was left, with a sea of cops watching over the scene with handguns holstered on their hips. With Nathan and Alice helping with the pack up and Beth needing to head back across town to get to work on time, Sunny and Helen were left alone. They walked to George Street, and continued to Railway Square, ignoring the trams and trains, in wordless agreement to follow old habits to bus lines that brought them through suburbs they could no longer afford to live in. They talked about their younger selves and their efforts to contribute to something, Sunny telling stories about what they used to get up to with Walt: charged with a political spark when he ran a splinter group named the Contemporary Communists of Punk in 2019. Sunny had been one of the first members of Walt’s shortlived collective, and at first, helped him leaflet gigs that had the involvement of hospitality conglomerates. Thinking this was falling short of the CCP’s potential as a group, they convinced Walt to expand the project to more serious targets than punk shows. Together they had written and printed hundreds of proforma resignation letters which they handed to police at Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Deaths in Custody marches. And while Sunny had been threatened and intimidated by police, Walt was left untouched. Sunny described how Walt was later criticised in their circles for inflaming the cops during a time of heightened police violence, but Helen didn’t want to hear it. She had simply wanted to arrive at the protest to show her opposition to Israel’s apartheid against Palestine, and go home to catch up on the sleep she had missed from back-to-back night shifts.

Sunny was lost in thought on the bus ride home, saying suddenly to Helen at a set of lights in Enmore: ‘You were right when you said that things don’t happen anymore.’

‘When did I say that?’ she hummed, tired, her head rested up against the window to feel the vibration course through her skull, the sensation numbing her thoughts.

‘The other week, about the mosh drama,’ Sunny reminded her, watching her head jostle against the glass. ‘What you said about the guy throwing bricks into the crowd.’

‘Yeah, well, I was being pretty stupid,’ she said slowly, leaning forward to stretch her back. ‘It’s better now. It’s a good thing if shows are safe, if no one’s worried about receiving a brick in the head on a Friday night. I think I was just tired, you know?’

Sunny looked down the aisle of the bus, feeling defeated. ‘It’s all over, isn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’ Helen asked bored.

‘If Helen fucken Coleman is saying that things are better when no one’s provoked? That means it’s all over.’

‘You tell me,’ Helen said, irritated at that assessment, her voice shaking with the idling of the bus, ‘you’re the one with the finger on the pulse.’

‘I QUIT, YOU DIPSHIT!’ Rocco and Sunny applauded as Beth practised her resignation speech, coming in and out of her room to try different outfits for their effect. ‘You want it to be more threatening, less sexy,’ Sunny suggested as she went back for the black vest that made her ‘look like a pro wrestler’. The dress rehearsal had the three of them worked up, so Beth told them to come to the real thing, to sit around the bar and wait for the moment. She’d do it right as the rush started, when it couldn’t be any more inconvenient for her manager, who had bullied and harassed her all year: who asked her to set him up with any friends of hers who came in the bar; almost fired her after she criticised him for pouring all the Russian vodka stock into the sink for an Instagram story; who took all her tips, crying poor about the cost of his ‘finasteride’ prescription (which took the staff six months to realise was a hair loss treatment). ‘Let me take over the playlist,’ Sunny said as they walked up New Canterbury Road together, ‘then when the time is right, give me a sign.’ Rocco nodded enthusiastically: ‘Then play Stone Cold’s entrance theme,’ he said, ‘when you hear the smashing of the glass, you say the line, flip him off.’Later, they sat around the bar and mocked her manager, going through the script, trying the new natural wine he ordered (‘god, this tastes horrible,’ ‘you get used it,’ ‘what kind of reasoning is that?’), trying his new specialty cocktail (‘the flavours are imbalanced,’ ‘we’re trying something different, ’ ‘maybe don’t try so hard ’) and then the moment hit. On the stereo, the glass smashed and Beth yelled to a bar full of confused cocktail drinkers: ‘I QUIT, YOU DIPSHIT.’ She threw her towel on the ground and led the others to the pub.

Ghosts

Helen fidgeted in the waiting room of an Ashfield doctor’s office. She was there because it still bulk-billed, but she felt suspicious of the place, its walls postered with options for non-surgical face lifts and wrinkle-reduction methods, AfterPay logos stickered into the vacant space where a price tag should be. It made her nostalgic for lay-by; the logic of getting something only after you’d paid it off made more sense to her than paying for a de-aging procedure in instalments after the fact. She figured this was a generational issue.

‘Coleman? Helen?’ a woman called down the hallway. She followed the voice into another fluorescent-lit office.

‘What can I do for you today?’ the doctor asked, clicking through a form on her computer.

‘My neck hurts,’ she said simply. ‘It hurts all the time.’

As the doctor typed this into her form with two opposing fingers, Helen was reminded of her last doctor’s appointment. She’d gotten into an argument with Suze’s GP about a mental health plan. Helen asked him how her score for stress, anxiety and depression could be so high when she felt like ‘the least fucked up person’ of anyone she knew, claiming that if there was a rise in anxiety with all that was going on in the world, surely the baseline needed to be shifted to compensate. This had confused the doctor, who responded: ‘I’m not sure that’s a healthy way for you to be thinking right now,’ before referring her to a grief counsellor she never went to see.

‘What do you do for work?’ the doctor asked.

‘I work at a cinema. I stand up, I sit down, I sweep and vacuum.’ she twitched and rubbed her shoulder. ‘It’s not posture if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I don’t think it is either,’ the doctor replied emptily, glancing with tired eyes over her glasses. ‘Does the pain make you irritable?’

‘Yes it does,’ she sighed. ‘Look, I realised that my neck pain isn’t normal, because it’s there all the time. I injure really easily. A few months ago, all I did was fall over and the pain has been horrible. I’ve tried all the self-prescribed Google things, but nothing helps. Like, I know that something’s wrong.’

‘You wouldn’t be here if something wasn’t wrong,’ the doctor smiled. ‘Let me take a look first.’

The doctor poked and prodded, identifying a slight deformity through her cervical spine, but nothing that should be causing that level of pain. She sat back at her computer, printed Helen a prescription for high-dose ibuprofen and muscle relaxants, and ordered her bloods be taken for autoimmune markers. She printed a referral to a rheumatologist to explore the potential for arthritis, and a referral for an MRI, which might be able to spot something that she couldn’t.

The rheumatologist was offensive, telling her as he went through the tests – ‘grip my fingers, push back against my hands...harder’ – how women of her generation were all ‘looking for a diagnosis’.

‘Every day, I treat someone who wants me to tell them they’re sick,’ he continued with contempt. ‘They waste my time. That’s the problem with public health in this country...if they had to pay more for it, maybe they wouldn’t just come along for something to do.’ He whacked her various joints with a reflex hammer and sat smugly back at his desk, and as though aligning her with his so- called problem patients, said: ‘There’s nothing obviously wrong with you. Your bloods are fine, your examination is normal, but go get your scans done and we can have a look when you get back.’

She walked out furious, then grew angrier that the specialist had gotten inside her head. She was booked in for an MRI, and felt like she was dissociating inside the tube, the beeps and whines and thuds of the machine all speaking to her, as though in code. Though she knew the noises were a kind of code, something to do with waves and frequencies that she thought to ask Alice about when she got home. The scanner took its images, and when she later read the radiologist’s report, found that they gave a picture to a litany of notable spinal features. She brought it back to the rheumatologist against her better judgement, and he read the report verbatim, confirming that Helen had a swan-neck deformity, with bone spurs and protruding discs pushing into her nerve canals, stopping right at her spinal cord. It at least gave a picture to her agony.

‘So how do I fix this?’

‘Structurally speaking,’ he said, leaning back in his chair with his legs apart, ‘you have a bad neck. You don’t just “fix” that. You’ve probably inherited that down the line or had an injury at some point. You usually see this in contact sports, or car accidents…’

In an instant, a hundred memories rushed through her head: of playing rugby league as a kid, of leaping and charging through mosh pits into bodies, walls and floors, the face of Suze’s friend who let her fall to the ground the last flash in her mind’s eye.

‘A problem like this is hard to treat,’ he continued. ‘I can send you to a surgeon, but if they’re any good they won’t operate on you at your age. We can send you to a physio, which can help, but you would have to commit to the process.’ He looked down his nose at her. ‘And there are chronic-pain specialists, alternative medicines.’ he trailed off. ‘Unfortunately, it’s a long road ahead and it won’t be simple, but your GP will help you get the care you need.’

‘My GP?’

‘Yes,’ he replied impatiently, already swivelled to his computer monitor to write this advice up as a letter, ‘the doctor who referred you here.’

‘I don’t even know her name.’

‘Well,’ he said, smiling smugly, ‘now might be a good time to learn it.’

Helen walked up Missenden Road, heading away from the hospital to the King Street bus routes she was drawn to out of habit. The rain started up again, charging the air with new smells and sounds, the water on the roads and footpaths reflecting the colours of changing traffic lights. She walked past a gaggle of British nationals running through traffic. Crowds of youths lined up to get into the bars she used to get kicked out of at sunrise. She remembered joking with her friends about how being sequentially kicked out from venue to venue along King Street was like the hospitality industry panning for gold. But she could no longer remember who those friends were, what year they’d discussed it, or why exactly they had found it so funny. Her pace quickened, trying to shed the skin of an early life that she felt was clinging to her, but when she passed the open windows of the Newtown Hotel, someone called her name. She stopped suddenly when she saw him, shocked, knowing that the past only comes for you when you invite it through the door.

‘Helen!’ the man yelled, sitting alone in a tight-fitting polyester work shirt, muscular arms and a protruding stomach that pressed against the stretch fabric. She examined his aging features, noticing how different he had looked at Walt’s funeral. How on that night, he looked like he had aged ten years in five, and how a year later, he looked to have aged another five again.

‘Duncan,’ she said, reeling.

‘I just finished a meeting at the uni,’ he explained, leaning out the window. ‘Come in, sit down. My shout.’

She went inside and slid into the booth, expressionless, taking his next comment (that he barely recognised her) as an insult. Helen stared at Duncan. He had been a childhood friend, the best friend of her brother’s for a time, a man who had for a few short periods been a key part of her life: as a close friend, then a brief love interest that was never acted upon, and now this.

‘I’m not surprised you still live in Newtown,’ he said, arriving back at the booth with two schooners.

‘I’m in Hurlstone Park now,’ she replied after clinking glasses, ‘but I had an appointment at RPA. Spine problems.’

They compared notes on their differing spinal complaints (his, lumbar; hers, cervical). ‘Do you have a good physio?’

‘Not yet. The specialist wasn’t really clear about what I should do from here.’

‘Physiotherapy will help.’

‘Yeah and what do you do for work again?’ she asked, nodding at the breast pocket print on his polo.

Duncan laughed. ‘I can take a look if you need, is all I’m saying. It wouldn’t take us long.’

‘Thanks Duncan,’ she said, sipping her drink, ‘but I’ve been handled enough today.’

‘Independent Helen, I get it. You can call me if you need to. You still have my number?’

‘Has it changed?’

‘I don’t change anything I don’t have to,’ Duncan smiled.

Helen cringed, knowing it was true. When he went to the toilet, she looked through his Facebook profile to see what she had missed, having muted his accounts to avoid the feeling now coming over her. She caught up on his life as quickly as she could, noticing what looked like a house, shared with the long-term girlfriend he brought to the funeral, and work updates on his personal accounts. It all indicated that he had done what he was designed to do: disappear into middle-class anonymity.

‘You seem different,’ Duncan said when he returned.

‘Well it has been a while.’

‘No, you’re a different person,’ he insisted. ‘You’re relaxed. Zen-like.’

Helen didn’t feel ‘zen’, she felt depressed. She tried to think of what kind of person she was when they’d last spoken at any length. She couldn’t remember. But then she thought of the life she’d been leading through the year and discovered that she had friends who understood her on some level: housemates and companions who she didn’t need to hide from or explain herself to. That she was noticeably calm now was hard to hear; it hurt to think that it took her so long to feel understood by those she spent the most time with.

‘How are things with your girlfriend?’ Helen asked to change the subject.

‘Fine,’ he said, looking hurt by the question, then looking out the window in thought. ‘Or mostly fine.’

‘Why, what’s happening?’

‘We’re both sleeping around.’

‘You’re in an open thing?’

‘No, no,’ he said, taking a deep sip of his beer, ‘just straight up cheating.’

Helen wasn’t that far removed from her own similarly themed relationship but felt shocked to the point of becoming puritanical. ‘And how’s that working?’

‘It’s not,’ he admitted, ‘but we get by. We have to. It’s not like either of us will walk away...not now anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘She’s having a baby?!’

‘Yeah,’ he said, filling his glass again. ‘It’ll put things into perspective once the baby’s here.’

‘Jesus, Duncan, will it?’

‘Maybe not, but that’s what they say, isn’t it? Having a baby gives you some perspective. Sounds like a crock of shit to me, but who am I to argue?’

She laughed for lack of knowing how better to respond. ‘How far in is she?’

‘You know what?’ Duncan said, drinking quickly. ‘I actually don’t know. Four months? Seventeen weeks? Who speaks in these time frames? A guy at work, he told me the other week that his kid just turned eighteen months, as though that means something. I understand human physiology, I understand trimesters, but I don’t know when she’s due. Maybe she’s due tonight! Maybe I’m supposed to drive her to the hospital! Or maybe it’s in three weeks, or just before Christmas, I can’t remember. It’s all.’ he trailed off and gestured in the air. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

Helen felt a sense of foreboding, thinking that it wasn’t really as though Duncan hadn’t changed, so much as he’d devolved.

‘I should get going,’ she said gently. ‘You’re heading home?’

‘I was thinking of hanging around Newtown for a while to see what happens,’ he paused. ‘You want me to take you back to yours?’

‘No, I’ll be okay, the bus stop’s right there.’

‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift,’ he said looking at her eagerly – hungrily, she thought. ‘I feel like we haven’t caught up properly.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said coldly. ‘You have a good night, okay?’

He smiled forcefully, still sitting. ‘It was good to see you!’

‘Likewise, Duncan,’ she said, and when she felt him back off, said more warmly: ‘I hope you’ve been okay.’

‘I’ve been all right,’ he mumbled, lingering in his seat until Helen stopped motioning to leave. ‘I’m sorry to bring this up, and it’s not really for me, more for my parents. But would you be able to tell me what happened?’

Helen’s heart sank. ‘What happened to Walt you mean?’

‘No one ever told us,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘I don’t know if I want to talk about it, Duncan.’

‘I understand. It’s just that my parents still seem fucked up about it.’

‘And you?’

‘It’s the saddest thing that ever happened to me,’ he said seriously, adjusting when he saw the look on Helen’s face. ‘But I know he didn’t like me that much by the end.’

Helen saw the depth of his wrinkles, the grey in his sideburns that he still cut too long down his cheeks. ‘He went missing,’ she explained at first, ‘and then someone found him.’

‘Someone found him how?’

‘I don’t think Walt would want us to focus on the details,’ she said quickly. ‘He’d want us to think about the bigger picture.’

Duncan seemed to understand that was the best he was going to get. They left out the front together and hugged goodbye briefly, Duncan trying one more time to offer her a lift. She declined and watched him cross the street. He walked past a group of wasted eighteen-year-olds and past a newly vacated shop. She saw Duncan now as a broken man, doomed to live out the consequences of a lifetime of short-sighted actions. But as she started to feel bad for him, he turned to check for traffic. She saw him smiling to himself, perfectly content.

Helen got on the bus and wanted to retell this story, but was reminded that the only person she could have debriefed to was dead. Even though the conversation might have gone: ‘I saw Duncan, I think he hit on me,’ and Walt would have said something like, ‘Who cares,’ it would have been exactly what she needed, exactly what she was missing. The 428X got her home so quickly she almost missed her stop, running back from the church through the rain, down her street and up under the front awning. She fumbled with her keys at the door and noticed a late-model Commodore parked out front with the windows cracked open. She went into her bedroom and peered through the curtains, squinting at the car. Paranoid, she adjusted the curtain to cover the window. Then the Commodore drove off aggressively, dropping a burnout on its way as a quick wind blew the screen door shut. Her bedside lamp flickered. Then it flickered again. Then it flashed in long dashes. Then in quick succession. Her heart quickened as she turned to face it, and by instinct rushed for her notepad and started writing down the frequency and length of the flashes, suddenly reminded of a primary school Morse code tutorial, translating the light:

Dot dot dash dot.

Dot dot dash.

Dash dash dash.

Dot dot...dot.

Her hands shook as she scribbled down the interludes, seeing them as though they made a sound, as though she were back in the beige plastic tube of the MRI machine, its codes and signals rushing through her. Then a rumble of thunder shook the house, and the light shone steady. She opened her laptop and searched for a Morse code translator, cross-checking her best guess at a reading.

..-. / ..- / --- / .. / .

‘F.U.O.I.E,’ she said to herself, squinting at her notepad in the lamplight: ‘FUOIE.’

When she saw it was meaningless, she gave in and cried, deep and loud.

‘Helen, what’s wrong?’ Alice called, the howls bringing her to the door.

‘Nothing,’ she said, trying to quieten herself down.

‘What happened?’ Alice closed the door behind her and sat next to Helen on the bed.

‘I thought he was trying to talk to me,’ Helen stammered, looking to the closed door.

‘It’s okay,’ Alice said, confused, ‘it’s nothing a warm bath can’t fix. Can I run one for you?’

Helen nodded to get her to go away. She listened to the water running down the hall, and joined Alice, who was cleaning off discarded pieces of floss and wiping away the muck and grime left on the edges of the bath. Her warmth in Helen’s room turned to a revulsion in the bathroom; she was reminded that it was only Helen and Rocco who were brave enough to get in that tub. Helen thanked her and sat down slowly in the hot water, examining the spectra of colour that surrounded her: pinks, blacks, greens and browns on the walls and ceiling, the grout between the tiles darkening (tiles that would fall off the wall if you scrubbed at them). She reflected on her longstanding opinion that moulds and biofilms couldn’t be as hazardous as they were said to be, remembering this was something her dad had once said about asbestos. She lay back in the bath, contorting herself to get her head under the water, climbing up the wall with her feet to stare up at the black mould that splintered across the cornices. Her neck spasmed and the muscle relaxants she’d taken made her feel sick. She checked the forecast, saw the storms predicted for the next ten days, and fell into an acute depression, realising that a week of sun had trapped her into thinking that it was all on the improve. Everyone she knew, however hopeless, seemed to have a thought in the back of their head that things would work themselves out, that they would find a way to become better – richer, easier, comfier – when all they had experienced was a steady decline. She closed her eyes, and what felt like moments later, woke in a panic in the now-cold water. She shivered, got out and dried off to the howls of the water rushing down the plughole. Then she hurried back to her room to dive underneath her damp blankets, trying to sleep, staring at the ceiling, hoping she’d feel like living again in the morning.

‘NEVER SEEN IT HAPPEN EITHER,’ Sio said, sitting by the fire in the yard and agreeing with Rocco, who was having a hard time convincing Sunny that they’d never had a teammate come out to them. Rocco had been frustrated by a few months of blow over that followed a rugby league scandal, the Manly Sea Eagles pride jersey being scuppered by players standing down on religious grounds, sending his teammates and work colleagues repeating veiled homophobic talking points about how ‘politics should be kept out of footy’. Sio stood up off the esky and threw the others another couple of beers, explaining in tandem with Rocco what it was like on worksites and the rugby league field. ‘My last coach, you’d swear he thought gays were a myth. ’ Rocco nodded knowingly. ‘Not one player with a profile has come out for thirty years; you don’t talk about it. The whole playing group, coaching staff, support staff, it’s stuck in 1992.’ Sio explained that he spent his whole playing life running around with no one the wiser, that once when he was seventeen, he hooked up with a teammate after training, who’d gone back the next day and pretended it never happened. Then stopped passing him the ball on game day. ‘The repression man, it’s so intense.’ Rocco said he’d had a similar experience, sharing a heated moment with a teammate who insisted on pumping the balls before training because he was particular about ‘ball pressure’. When Sunny said it was heartbreaking to hear a story of long-lost love, Sio just shrugged, and said: ‘can’t always get what you want.’

Rent the World

Sunny got off the tram at Haymarket and moved through a rush of pedestrians. Ducking and weaving between them, Sunny tried to identify what was wrong with the latest HDPE recordings that blasted through their headphones. They felt short on time. Alice had told Sunny about Helen’s odd behaviour at the house, which worried them immensely. So they arranged to see Helen on her lunch break, pretending to already be in the city for an errand. Helen took all her breaks in city pubs, constantly testing how far she could venture from work to visit new locations, and on this occasion decided to hold one at the Palace Hotel by Capitol Square for, she told Sunny, ‘nostalgic reasons’. But when they arrived, walking through the front bar, into the empty bistro and sparsely populated pokies room out back, Helen wasn’t there. They called her, and then found her: smoking around the corner, trying to peer through the dusty windows and into the basement venue she spent half of 2013 in, a venue once called the Square.

‘Did you ever come here for shows?’ Helen asked when Sunny approached, looking through the glass between her two hands, a cigarette still smouldering between her fingers.

‘Only right at the end when it was closing down. I never understood why it closed.’

‘The owner wanted to run a gin bar,’ Helen said, her face still pressed to the glass. ‘Something to do with the small bar licenses they brought in to civilise this city. At least there was some justice,’ she said, turning to Sunny and leading them around to the pub. ‘They had a perfectly functional business as the best shitty venue in town, then went bust trying to cater to a better class of people.’

‘Very dumb,’ Sunny agreed, accepting Helen’s offer of a drink, which she ordered and paid for with the natural movements of a regular. ‘Business owners shouldn’t have the freedom to do shit like that. There needs to be a body that is like “no, that’s enough small bars now” or like “sorry Dulwich Hill, the seventh café on this fifty-metre stretch was the last one”.’

‘Yeah, you can only drink one coffee at a time.’

The two sat outside and watched the trams sidle along Hay Street, talking about how it never made sense for the franchised Harry’s Café de Wheels location to be considered a tourist destination, and that the hut’s renaming to the Sydney Pie Cafe felt somehow more logical. Through these discussions, Sunny tried to ask how Helen was going, but she deflected subconsciously: complaining about work, complaining about Nathan talking too loud on his conference calls at night, complaining about the quality of singles on the apps Beth convinced her to download again. And then, influenced by the location, ruminating on her life ten years prior.

‘I look back at that time when I was just playing in bands and seeing music every night there was a show, getting really high and wasted...sleeping with all these strangers,’ she said, wistfully at first, and then with a sense of dread. ‘And I guess I do remember some of it because I can talk about it now and see the images in my head, but really: I don’t remember much. And if I think about it and compare it to now? It’s like, “Wow: I had a drug problem.” Now these days I’m lucid, and have all these crystal-clear memories... but of what? Nothing has happened for at least five years that was worth remembering. It’s like I got it all backwards.’

‘You didn’t have a drug problem,’ Sunny replied, about to go into bat for the benefits of a social life supplemented by drug use as a means of experience, before Helen interrupted sharply.

‘Well it’s all relative isn’t it? You tell any normie on the street what they thought of my lifestyle then and they’d be mortified.’

‘But Hel, that’s the point of living that way: you don’t exist relative to “normies” anymore, you become your own thing when you find your people.’

‘Sure, but then you have to go work or date in the real world, and you don’t get much sympathy by saying, “Look, I’m on my own thing”.’

Helen finished her beer, needing to rush back to work, and Sunny watched her go, knowing they’d touched on something Helen needed to get away from.

As Sunny finished their drink, they dwelled on the parts of the city within their sightlines, thinking about Helen’s claim that she spent her 2013 venturing to that venue each and every weekend. To Sunny at least, that was an era marked by a flurry of activity among the scenes they were a part of as a spectator. Contrasted with the recent years of uninspiring cultural attempts, Sunny knew that the mid-2010s benefited from a place to arrive at that felt like their own. A way to gather momentum, to exchange details and build something together. When they left the Palace and walked past the new tramlines towards Railway Square, they looked for such a space that could host what now felt like a pipedream. Everywhere they looked, there were vacancies. For lease on street level was the last gun shop in the city, and above the rows of restaurants and hock shops, the last peep show in Haymarket was boarded up. All these shopfronts for lease, abandoned and unused. Further down the road, Chinatown was deathly quiet. A new artisanal food quarter had been constructed around the corner under the guise of revitalising city life, but its effect was to choke out the first- generation institutions in the centre of the city. They imagined that developers were frustrated at not being able to weasel into the Dixon Street Chinese restaurants to take a cut, so collaborated to kill it with competition. It had become such a blatant model: the same way they turned over Kings Cross by overselling a problem with alcohol-fuelled violence, limiting trading hours to constrain income, and then creating a legislative framework that could slowly pound struggling establishments into the ground with fines and security fees. Then the developers arrived with a handshake. Sunny changed their mind about starting a new space, and thought instead about joining up with these struggling restaurants. Maybe they could help feed into the ecosystem that had been built: of restaurants and importer-exporters that preceded the City of Sydney’s interests in injecting higher-density everything. They thought of historical examples from early punk history – of the Dead Kennedys, Flipper and Black Flag at the Mabuhay Gardens restaurant in San Francisco; of X and The Germs and Black Randy at the Hong Kong Cafe in LA – but Sunny lost steam, thinking the contemporary punk community lacked the dedication to commit to such a project. They felt that the scope of the inner city was beyond them, and figured that whatever their next big step was going to be, it would have to be close to home, it would have to be done quickly, and it would have to leave a mark.

On the way home, Sunny convinced the house group chat to catch up at the Gladstone Hotel in Dulwich Hill, chosen because they were on the 426, and the bus had just terminated out front. The pub sat at the crest of the hills where Marrickville Road butted into New Canterbury Road. Sunny had never been inside, but had admired the top-floor balcony that was unused but for the hotel’s cleaners airing out linen. When Sunny walked towards the pub on their travels, they would stare up at the balcony in awe: sun-washed in the afternoon, replete with hard plastic umbrellas extending out of their accompanying tables, powder-coated pastel purples and yellows and reds, all evenly faded.

Sunny drank schooners by the window until the others arrived. Helen walked briskly ahead of Nathan and Alice who bickered behind her. She made eyes at Sunny and went straight to the bar to order a jug, then felt guilty and turned to offer to get the others a drink, but the couple were distracted by someone who had accosted them with an overzealous greeting. Under the lurid lights of a low- budget renovation, the couple talked to a man who was strangely put together: dressed smartly, but unkempt, washed, but unbrushed, confident in his greetings, but anxious all the same. A woman hovered next to him, silent and cornered out of the conversation.

‘What brings you two here?’ Nathan asked, introducing the man as Clive and the woman as Sara when Helen returned with a jug of Reschs.

Clive said, smiling: ‘We were at the brewery for Dale’s birthday.’

Helen and Sunny stiffened at the mention of his name.

‘Of course,’ Nathan said unflinching. ‘We wanted to come down, but we were at the rally.’

‘How is he?’ Alice interrupted with a sense of urgency.

‘He’s not great,’ Clive admitted, ‘but we spent the morning with him, organised the birthday drinks, so he’s feeling better.’

‘He’ll be okay,’ Nathan said firmly, responding to Alice’s anxious aura.

Helen found the situation odd, and weirdly threatening. She stood with Sunny and watched the other four move to their crowded table. As she looked for an excuse to avoid sitting with them, Rocco came through the door, having driven straight to the pub after seeing Sunny’s invitation.

‘That was quick,’ Sunny exclaimed, asking the bartender for another glass and suggesting they leave for the beer garden. ‘You didn’t stay with the team?’

‘They were still drinking in the sheds,’ he said, ‘but I needed to get back for work tomorrow.’

‘And now you’re here.’

‘And now I’m here.’

The three of them left the others in the front bar and went round back via the bistro, Helen grappling with the swinging glass door and spilling the top part of their jug trying to navigate.

‘You’re okay with Reschs?’ Helen asked, shuffling to the middle of a bench to let Rocco’s legs swing in under the table.

‘I said that I’d give up drinking when I got within a few months of the World Cup,’ he replied slowly.

‘Yeah, and who’d you say that to?’

‘I only ever thought about it,’ Rocco said, playing with his lips. She slid a glass towards him. The pub’s manager did the rounds of the beer garden to empty the ashtrays. She spotted Rocco in his black-and-yellow sports coat and lingered at their table.

‘You work for Mounties?’ the manager asked, nodding at Rocco’s club jacket and introducing herself as Linda.

‘I play for them,’ Rocco replied, an inversion, Sunny noticed, of Rocco’s general attitude towards rugby league as work.

‘It’s good to see some footy players come through here,’ she continued. ‘We put some sponsorship money towards the Glebe Dirty Reds this year, but they don’t even come here for a drink. Only their trainers do.’

‘Right, right...we play against them sometimes. How much do you put in for a sponsorship? You should throw some our way next year.’

‘You cunts don’t need any more money,’ she stirred. ‘I can’t remember how much, it’s a weird figure. It’s all done through this fucken thing we got signed up to by the higher-ups,’ she said this pointing at the ceiling. ‘Some company scans all the tills and machines, gives us points, which this company turns into money, that we have to give out to some community effort for their benefit.’

‘Is that what this membership thing is about?’ Sunny asked, taking a pamphlet for a loyalty card out of their bag that they’d slipped out of a stack at the bar, its cover reading: together we can make a difference.

Linda nodded. ‘I dunno how it works. One of the kids I got on the front bar reckons it’s data mining, analysing everything we do. But I wouldn’t know to what end. Couldn’t just run a pub and pour cold beer into clean glasses, could you? That’d be too easy.’

Sunny took her complaint as an invitation and began to probe for information about events and promotional strategies, how much flexibility there was around the pub’s spaces and nightly events, from meat raffles and trivia to open mic nights. Then they broached the topic of what the balcony space was used for, asking if it wasn’t under-utilised.

‘Some of the blokes who live upstairs go out there for a coffee or a smoke,’ she admitted, ‘but yeah, not very well used to be honest. But there’s no money in setting up and staffing a new bar just for a view is there?’

‘What if you set up a stage, did music?’

‘Too loud. It’d keep the whole neighbourhood up. We got a complaints record the size of my arm just from people yelling past the new units.’

‘What about bands in the sports bar?’

She looked at Sunny with suspicion. ‘We do a cover band every now and then. You’re in a band, are you?’

Sunny nodded.

‘What kind of music?’

‘Rock music,’ Sunny said.

‘The owners might not be too happy,’ she said, stubbing her cigarette out and sweeping their ashtray into the bag that hung by her side, ‘but they’ve been shitting me. Come back and talk to me during the week when we’re less busy, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Less busy?’ Rocco whispered after Linda had moped inside via the swinging door. ‘There’s ten people in this fucken place.’

‘Pokies room is probably packed,’ Sunny said, distracted. ‘Earning their points for the community.’ Sunny analysed the space before continuing. ‘We could do shows here. Maybe we can set up a fake community organisation, like a dummy club to get sponsored through their points thing. If you partner with these people, get some of that COVID recovery cash, all that stimulus money...’

‘You can’t think like that,’ Rocco argued, picturing the squats and venues he’d played in across Europe in his band I Pentiti, donating the playing fees back to the space, cleaning up afterwards. He explained how autonomy was a politics of refusal, not one of compromise. ‘They make it look easier, with the council money and the unused space dangled in front of you, but then you have to meet their KPIs, and by the time you’ve ticked all their boxes, you just end up recreating the thing you’re trying to avoid. Plus, once government knows that your hopes, dreams and aspirations aren’t to become another profitable arm of the events sector – they find a way to get rid of you.’

‘Yeah, but we’re starting from the beginning. If we can find a way in, to get just the barest of permissions to do some of these things, maybe we wouldn’t have to bite and scratch for everything.’

‘Sunny, if you’re looking for autonomy, you won’t find it through the permission of a council. Autonomy means not having to make all the shitty little alliances, autonomy means you set your own terms, make your own rules. You don’t get that by writing the right letter, or applying to the right grants committee. You don’t get given autonomy, like anything that’s worth a shit in life: if you want it, you have to reach out and take it. Problem is that no one in this city is bold enough to do that.’

‘What do you suggest then?’

Rocco smacked his lips and looked around the beer garden, towards the upstairs floor that Sunny was talking about, the wasted space of the balcony they had such dreams for.

‘Occupy the pub,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Sunny said sarcastically, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

‘You walked in here and started thinking big. You asked to do a show on your big dream balcony and then you settled for the sports bar in the corner? You’re ending up with the opposite of what you wanted. What you want is right there,’ Rocco said, pointing over Sunny’s shoulder. ‘Reach out and take it.’

‘Alright coach,’ Sunny said, mocking him. Helen’s attention returned to the table, having drifted away at the familiarity of the conversation’s tone.

‘What do you reckon, Helen?’ Sunny enthused.

‘I wasn’t listening.’

‘Sunny’s gonna occupy the pub,’ Rocco said.

‘When? After last call?’

‘No,’ Sunny replied, eyes lighting up when the date materialised in front of them, ‘on grand final day.’

Rocco nodded proudly: ‘That’s it, Sunny!’

‘Just have a grand final barbecue at ours and put a show on beforehand,’ Helen said sadly, remembering the grand final day gigs Walt was so obsessed with getting to work, tired of Sunny’s insistence on playing out her brother’s fantasies.

‘I have it figured out,’ Sunny said hurriedly. ‘First, we get them to agree to a band night, which that manager was already keen on. But then we leave our gear behind, see where they lock up. Then we do another show the night before the grand final, same deal, but practised. Maybe we get an out-of-town act, some party boys…’

‘...what, as patsies?’ Rocco asked.

‘Maybe, yeah, some real cunts we don’t like to take the fall. Or someone we do like; it doesn’t really matter. And we book them two nights in the accommodation upstairs. Now we have the keys, and we know how the overnight doors work…’

‘None of this will work,’ Helen said, ‘you both know that right?’

‘We know the manager now,’ Sunny said.

‘And she hates her job,’ Rocco added, Sunny nodding furiously: ‘Yeah, she hates her job.’

‘Everyone hates their job,’ Helen told them.

‘Yeah, but you can tell that she really hates it,’ Sunny added. ‘If we could get her on side, maybe even to choose her staff if she can, people willing to look the other way...’

‘And then what?’

‘When the pub closes, we bring all the gear up to the balcony, lock the doors, set up and play. And then we record it: Live at the Occupation, 2022.’

Helen bit her tongue about Sunny’s obsession for a live album that would capture the essence of the year, which seemed not to have been satisfactorily marked by ‘Live in the Alley’, ‘Live at the Bowlo’ or any of their ‘Live at Paradise Estate’ attempts.

‘How long is this thing supposed to last?’ Helen asked.

‘Forever,’ Rocco said. ‘It’s an occupation.’

‘Just as long as it takes to get it on tape,’ Sunny thought out loud. ‘Nathan can get someone at The Centre to figure out how much we can get away with without being charged for anything. What have we got to lose?’

‘Our chains,’ Helen said flatly. ‘I don’t see any way that you, or the manager, or anyone else involved doesn’t end up in prison.’

‘No, they only throw you in gaol now if it’s a protest,’ Rocco replied. ‘This isn’t a protest, it’s “live music”.’

‘It’s larrikinism,’ Sunny added, ‘radical larrikinism.’

‘But why here? Ask yourself: is it just because this is the pub we’re sitting in, and you’ve had ten beers?’

They both fell silent for a moment.

‘No, the location is good,’ Sunny decided. ‘With that balcony... every time I walk up that road, it’s all I can see: a band playing into the street, sending a message down the hill to all of New Canterbury Road, bands ripping off into the sunset...’

‘It’s not a good idea, Sunny.’

‘What a surprise,’ they hummed, pouring a glass from the jug which frothed over onto the table, ‘Helen doesn’t think something is a good idea.’

‘Let me revise that: it’s a shithouse idea,’ she said with finality, hoping to put it to bed.

Sunny began to put the pieces of their plan in place with the help of Linda. In the first weeks after their discussion, they began by organising a handful of shows on Wednesday nights, which were overwhelmingly successful. They were not only well attended, but had been useful in providing the information Sunny needed. They had quickly learned the details of the pub’s processes, the location of storerooms and cameras, the flaws in the design of the stairwell and the upstairs accommodation. Their shows ran for four consecutive weeks without incident. Then one of the hardcore bands Pat suggested drew an overzealous crowd that smashed up a TAB terminal with some bar stools. The pub owners charged Sunny for the damages despite Linda’s protests.

‘They don’t know what they’ve got,’ she slurred to Sunny when they went down the road to the Huntsbury Hotel to discuss the issue. ‘The damage was a couple hundred bucks tops, but these shows have tripled what we usually take over this bar. But because the pokies money dwarfs what we can do in the sports bar, they don’t care what actually happens inside the venue.’

‘Why even have a sports bar then?’

‘Community service,’ she said seriously, ‘or stupidity; take your pick.’

Sunny agreed to pay the bill for the TAB terminal in any case, with the bands from the past few weeks donating a share of their playing fee to the total. Linda, who talked tough, was appreciative of the trouble Sunny went to, which was when Sunny worked on pivoting her angst about her superiors towards their greater mission. First Linda agreed to set up a show on the afternoon of the grand final to make it ‘feel like an event’, which she confirmed the next day. Then Sunny began to let her in on their pipe dream, minimising the idea of an occupation to a stunt: they simply wanted to record a live album on the roof of the Gladstone Hotel. Linda felt her accumulated frustrations boil over into enthusiasm for Sunny’s scheme, helped along by being plied with beer and weed. She began to brainstorm ideas for how to circumvent the systems and protocols that would permit their getting a band upstairs undetected. In the unlit beer garden of the Huntsbury, with a poker machine feature their soundtrack, Sunny and Linda came to an understanding.

‘COME ON,’ BETH CALLED TO ALICE, feeling high and cheeky, dancing in the kitchen with Sunny after another of their house shows, trying to get her to stop cleaning, to get her to ‘loosen up’. Beth turned up the stereo and started making Alice a Rob Roy with Nathan’s scotch, and after she gave in and accepted (even being convinced to take a line off the mirror on the kitchen bench to meet the moment), the others realised it was a mistake. Alice had restrained herself from booze and drugs since the housewarming, and now really did let loose. She finished the cocktail quickly, then demanded another one, then transferred Beth a hundred bucks and asked for more coke, then went around the house asking rude questions about their pasts. Asking Helen how Walt died. Asking Sunny about their childhood. Asking Beth if she needed help getting a ‘real’ job. And then she became highly emotional, and told them that Nathan had kept in touch with Dale after being kicked out, sneaking around behind her back. She said she accused them of sleeping together (which they weren’t) and was disappointed when Nathan revealed to her that he kept seeing Dale because he needed to make sure he was safe. She cried, and said she’d been hoping that Nathan and Dale were plotting something big, something useful, like ‘an assassination attempt’, that it was ‘so sad’ that it was just ‘more addiction’. They tried to give her water, but she got angry at the offer, smashed the glass, then cried again. Then walked around the yard in the dark and returned to the kitchen to go back around the loop: asking Helen how Walt died, asking Sunny about their childhood, asking Beth if she’d ever get a ‘real’ job.

The Radical Centre

Nathan wheeled his bike through the side gate and hung it next to the others under the car port by Rocco’s gym. He put his helmet under his arm, brushed his fringe to the side and went around to the back door. He jumped in fright when he saw Rocco standing statue-like by the veggie patch in the twilight. He seemed to be talking to himself, but as Nathan neared him, he discovered that Rocco was staring at the cat, mumbling to it as it dug through Alice’s garden.

‘Everything okay?’ Nathan asked, still uncomfortable talking to Rocco, who seemed to see right through him.

Rocco turned around slowly to face him. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, noticing Nathan breathing heavily from the ride. ‘What have you been up to?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Nathan said cryptically, still catching his breath.

Rocco sat on the couch to block Nathan’s path, testing him. ‘I’ve got time.’

Nathan faltered, but knew he was overdue to bring someone new to The Centre. He told Rocco that he’d just given up on a research thread they’d opened up back in July upon learning that Shinzo Abe had been shot dead with a homemade weapon. Nathan explained that they’d been struck by the unusual circumstances behind the killing, and were looking for the possibility of it being a left-wing terrorist attack. The red herring, Nathan said, was that Abe’s killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, had shot Abe out of a personal vendetta owing to his mother’s bankruptcy on the one hand, and Abe’s tangential relationship to the Unification Church on the other. The church was a sect born from anti-communist programs in US-occupied South Korea before being exported to Japan, where Abe placated its followers to form an electoral bloc. Nathan said he and Clive (who was a self-described ‘Japanophile,’ a moniker that Rocco found creepy) wanted to work this incident into The Centre’s manuscript on anti-communism, the book taking on more of an internationalist flavour. But they were disappointed to find that Abe’s engagement with the Unification Church wasn’t much more than cynical electoralism, there being no real connection to their existing work at all. Nathan said that their most recent meeting had ended the side-project, with Omar and Sara telling Clive that they just didn’t know enough about Japan’s spiritual and political intricacies to publish anything authoritative on the topic.

‘That’s all really interesting,’ Rocco lied, and had stopped listening about halfway through.

Nathan felt nervous. ‘Would you ever want to be involved with what we do? Sunny told me you had some experience with Italian Marxism.’

Rocco examined Nathan wearily, and admitted that he did have some frustrations about not being a part of a political project in Sydney. ‘I used to help at some of the occupied social centres in Turin and Milan, I don’t know if that qualifies as “experience”. But yes, it does bug me that I don’t know who the anarchists are around here. It’s weird for me to see all these posters on the walls without having a connection to anything on the ground.’

Nathan didn’t admit to his neighbourhood postering sprees. ‘I’d say you should come to The Centre tomorrow, but you’d be working right?’

‘Actually, I have a day off,’ Rocco replied, Nathan’s expression falling for a second.

‘You should come then. Around mid-morning if that worked for you?’

Rocco nodded politely, unsure of himself but feeling as though he owed his housemate this visit, thinking that it could at least be the distraction he needed from the mysterious angst he’d been feeling.

In the morning, Nathan loaned Rocco the tallest bike he had, and navigated the ride awkwardly. They overtook each other, ceding ground as they snaked down the backstreets over train lines, along the Cooks River, down towards Tempe, on the way to Rockdale. On the busy streets, Nathan hugged tight to the gutter, but Rocco continually flared his arms and moved into the road when faced with parked cars or obstacles.

‘Rocco, slide over!’ Nathan called to him, surprised to be out cycled. ‘Stay out of the main lanes!’

‘You gotta claim the road or they’ll run you down!’ Rocco yelled over his shoulder. He was blasted by the horn of a Land Rover, which overtook him and jetted off to a traffic light. Nathan felt vindicated, until Rocco screamed into the air, stood up on his pedals and took off in pursuit, his teeth bared in an absurd grimace. The car drew to a stop at a red traffic light, and Rocco skidded around the front of it, beating on the hood with an open hand.

‘Hey dickhead, was it worth it?’ he shouted at the driver. ‘Was almost running me the fuck down worth it?’

‘Hey, fuck you,’ the driver spat through a crack in the window. ‘Don’t touch my car.’

‘Fuck me?’ Rocco screamed in reply. ‘Fuck you!’

The lights turned, and the man sped away, flipping Rocco off as he flew down the Princes Highway. Nathan caught up, breathless, guiding Rocco to the footpath.

‘These giant cars are pedestrian killers!’

‘Rocco, Jesus...you’ve got to be more careful...’

‘Careful! Careful of what? Fuck, I forgot how afraid this country is of emotions!’ He yelled, gripping an imagined object in front of him, his eyes rolling back in his head, his muscles rippling at his forearms.

Nathan kept his nerves below the surface when they arrived at The Centre. He walked Rocco around the back of the Adult Superstore, up the stairs and into what had once been an open-plan office. The room was darkened by rows of makeshift curtains hanging around the windows, all reinforced with strips of thin timber that filtered the sunlight. The walls were plastered with news sheets taken from a local newsagent over the past two years, Telegraph and Herald headlines from early 2020 reading, ‘COMRADE ALBO,’ and the many mentions of ‘THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’ on the front pages that accompanied the wave of sinophobia that followed the start of the pandemic. These posters gave weight to The Centre’s narrative around a renewed anti-communist push. Rocco sensed that this group thought of themselves as above the other groups of the radical left in the city, reminded of a time when Nathan said The Centre was ‘unaffiliated’.

Rocco was introduced to the four people in the office: Omar nodded while talking quietly on the phone; Clive seemed to be practising a power stance from the centre of the room; Sara sat at a desk sealing envelopes, shielding their contents from Rocco’s gaze with one arm; and then Xoe, a newcomer who was the only person at The Centre who made an overt attempt to greet him.

‘Is Beth coming?’ Clive asked after Rocco had been introduced, getting up to move them all to the round table to begin their meeting.

‘No, Beth isn’t coming,’ Nathan replied tiredly, gesturing to Rocco to take a seat as Sara set up her laptop and a handheld Olympus voice recorder to take the minutes. Rocco squeezed into the foot of the rickety timber table that had been left behind by a previous tenant, wondering why he was there. The others went through their formalities as Rocco sat wordless, trying to get a feel for the organisation of five, embarrassed at his ever having imagined the kind of bustling social centre he was accustomed to in Italy, full of people with ideas and strategies. He felt his size in the room, which made him claustrophobic, sensing Clive stealing glances at him, knowing that he was perceived as a threat.

Nathan reported on the work of the Australian Unemployed Workers Union around the new Centrelink requirements, and how they’d raised the profile of the absurdity of the updated Jobseeker program. He added that they’d identified some issues with a Work for the Dole employer, a private street-cleaning service whose major client included councils and developers. They’d recorded record profits by combining council tenders with cheap labour, which they sent to the streets to remove unauthorised posters from suburban walls. The posters, Clive added, had been pasted up by The Centre and its associates. Nathan turned his laptop around and showed the photos he’d taken before the posters had been removed, identifying that a right-wing group had taken to defacing them. Someone had taken a large texta and written GENOCIDE over the top of the word MARXISM on the posters left over from March’s conference. Another design that alluded to environmental chaos in its graphics read ‘CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM’ altered to read ‘PEOPLE IS THE PROBLEM’. The deeper meaning of the latter was taken to a round table where it was decided that it was ideologically based, Omar summarising that ‘instead of seeing capitalism as a system as the issue, making “people” the problem deflects the energy to birth rates, population growth, and for the post-fascists and neo-Nazis of course, immigration’.

Everyone at the table was in earnest agreement with each other, Sara keeping the minutes in a typist’s flurry. Nathan and Clive opened discussions with known conclusions, building upon their past statements with viewpoints that should have been cliché to an organisation like this. Rocco felt his time being wasted. When they had rounded out their thesis on the pipeline from eco-fascism to traditional fascism, and designated the report writing to Omar, Rocco’s irritation was showing.

‘Who do these reports go to?’ he asked after the plan had been agreed upon.

Clive looked at him suspiciously. ‘Our comrades.’

‘Yes, but who? Where are they? What do they do?’

‘Well, we have many avenues for discussion,’ he began warily, ‘but I don’t know enough about you to –’

‘– it’s okay,’ Rocco said, cutting him off and getting up to excuse himself. ‘Keep your sources safe.’

Nathan was troubled by another of his housemates leaving after his invitation, concerned about what the others at The Centre would think since he’d told them that his ‘rented commune’ project was going to plan. In the weeks to come, he worried that his reputation was suffering, so he began to raise fewer issues in his discussions, and soon began to make excuses to miss the readings and meetings until he had something groundbreaking to deliver. After months of reading Sara’s minutes sent through their Slack chat, he began to feel mournful about his lack of involvement, and found the chance to come out of his self-imposed exile when the Queen died in September.

Nathan called an emergency meeting the moment he heard the news, knowing it would have some ramifications for their upcoming submissions. He had just finished a grocery shop in Summer Hill, and noticed the flags in the square flying at halfmast: the Australian flag in its imperial blue, red and white, and the black, red and yellow of the Aboriginal flag next to it, both dragged up and down at the whim of the council flag bearer. At first, he thought nothing of it, and then he considered the audacity of lowering the Aboriginal flag to honour the expiration of the world’s most prominent coloniser. He wondered if there wasn’t an essay in that. He went straight to The Centre expecting to be the first arrival, no one having replied to his email. But when he arrived, he found Clive, Omar, Sara and Xoe already talking and writing. They’d been holding a meeting without him.

They continued unabated. Clive and Omar had dozens of conversation points readied, pull quotes of some of the infuriating commentary about the Queen’s death, ranging from the commentators fawning over her ‘legacy’ to the members of the Australian Republic Movement speaking gushingly about the Queen’s decades of service and, Omar read incredulously, complimenting the Queen’s ‘imprint’ on the globe.

‘What’s our position on the death of the Queen?’ Clive asked them.

‘We’re against the monarchy,’ Nathan said glibly.

‘We’re against any capitalist state,’ Omar reminded him.

‘So we’d be against a republic too?’ Xoe asked. They ignored her.

Nathan brought up the flags in the Summer Hill square and told them not to be distracted by the monarch, that they were missing the point. ‘Omar, I know the last time you brought this up I said we didn’t have time to talk about it...’

‘The Indigenous Voice to Parliament?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s our position on that?’ Clive asked, his hands clasped in front of him.

The others were silent, nervous and uncertain.

‘Any Indigenous comrades we know are pushing to oppose it,’ Omar explained patiently. ‘The push is for a treaty before a symbolic position. But of course, just like the marriage equality plebiscite, it’s a very powerful symbol for fascists if the referendum doesn’t pass.’

‘Yes,’ Clive said, looking thoughtful, ‘but what do we think.’

Omar looked at Clive blankly. ‘We listen to our Indigenous comrades.’

‘We would be advocating to vote with the far right,’ Nathan interjected them.

‘Not with them,’ Omar said. ‘The vote might be the same on paper, but the reasons are very different. I think that we could abstain from having a position, and say instead what is true: that non-Indigenous Australia shouldn’t be able to have a say on the matter at all. The issue of whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have this specific type of “voice” should only be up to them to decide. No one in this room should be able to vote on that.’

Sara transcribed his comments with fierce concentration as Nathan dwelled on this for a moment, ignoring Omar and Clive, who continued the debate. Nathan thought of a line he’d liked for some time, and even used on occasion, though no one had ever picked it up nor quoted it as he’d hoped. He had run it over in his head so many times, adamant that it was a balanced slogan, one that covered all bases. As Omar and Clive debated over the table, he moved to the whiteboard, and wrote it out in all caps:

WHAT GOOD IS A VOICE WITHOUT A SAY?

The others stopped.

‘What’s that?’ Clive asked.

‘It could be the heading of a press release,’ Nathan admitted, pretending to be brainstorming rather than delivering a final position. ‘Maybe it’s our banner for the next Invasion Day march. Maybe that’s our position.’

‘A question isn’t a position,’ Omar said.

‘Should I start to write the release then?’ Clive asked dutifully.

‘No, we wait, it’s just a thought for now.’

‘Yes,’ Omar said, ‘but what are we waiting for?’

Nathan didn’t have an answer. When he packed up later and started descending the stairwell, he overheard Omar saying: ‘It’s fine, but the more you read it, the less it makes sense,’ and he wondered if he’d ever go back.

When Nathan arrived home, he sat at the head of the kitchen table and started on the soup Alice had served him. Rocco came through the door, shopping bags bunched in one hand, and a carton of beer hoisted over his other shoulder. He charged inside and dumped everything on the kitchen bench. Sunny, with the sixth sense of being able to detect the arrival of booze, floated in through the back door.

‘You hear the Queen died?’ Sunny asked on entry, motioning for Rocco to pass them a beer.

‘It’d be pretty hard news to avoid,’ Nathan replied, trying to cool down the soup with short, sharp blows of air, irritated at Alice for overheating it.

‘What do you mean the Queen?’ Rocco asked, tearing the carton open with his good hand. ‘Like the queen Queen?’

‘Yeah,’ Sunny said with phone in hand, ‘died of being an old hag.’

Beth came out of her room still in her pressed work uniform after an early finish. She undid a shirt button and reached past Rocco to take a beer from the box.

‘Did you hear the news?’ she asked them.

‘Yeah, Queen dead,’ said Sunny, motioning again for a drink, which Rocco handed them eventually, after pretending twice to drop it.

‘So the old world really is dying,’ Beth said, half-joking.

‘Sure is!’ Sunny acknowledged, twisting the top off a stubby. ‘But the new world is stillborn.’

QUITTING THE SMALL BAR to take up work at the Canterbury League Club had its advantages (better conditions, more hours, more co-workers to complain to, management who actually fixed problems) but it messed with Beth’s body clock. She couldn’t switch off after the overstimulation of the club, with all its bright poker- machine lights and sounds, the tunes of jackpots and features singing through her head in endless loops while trying to sleep. She turned to sleep aids: first-generation antihistamines bought over the counter, the muscle relaxants Helen had given her after they made her sick, and her favoured ketamine, enjoying treating it with medical intent. Between those, she could sleep, or at least shut her eyes and lose part of the day: out like a light. This worked fine until the day she woke up to a cloud of sickly sweet mist coming under her locked door, her eyes blinking awake and itching as the whooshing sound of a half dozen flea bombs in an airtight house brought her to life. She’d slept through the knocking of the others, through the texts and calls, and to the doxylamine, ketamine and orphenadrine in her system, added a lungful of permethrin.

Other Animals

It was like an echo from May when the rain fell again for consecutive weeks. The house was horrified to discover the ceilings covered with grey dots that spread and darkened, all emanating from the corners of the room and across to the centre of the ceiling rose. Rocco’s efforts to clear the mould on first moving in hadn’t lasted six months, which distressed everyone, and when it came to allocating resources for the clean, they reached an impasse. Rocco had injured his elbow and was told by the club physio to keep it straight for a week, while Helen had been told specifically not to ‘look up’ by her specialist, suspecting that the movement pushed bone spurs into her nerve canal. This left Alice, Beth and Sunny to deal with the problem after Nathan cited crunch time for The Centre’s research efforts. They were hesitant to get started, even though they noticed it was presumably the mould that was making them all itchy, as the spores spread through the air and settled on their skin. Sunny procrastinated by staring up at the ceiling and saying: ‘It gets mouldy up top first because water falls from the sky,’ which no one found funny. Alice snapped and called the real estate again, who asked her to log the complaint by email so they could inform the landlord, then informing her that mould removal ‘remains the responsibility of the tenant’. To prevent mould growth, their agent said, they should keep the windows open, and when Alice reminded her that it was winter, she repeated the advice, emphasising that this was especially the case when the days were short. The stalemate broke when Sunny kept asking Rocco how to reach the ceiling, and he furiously walked them to the laundry to hand them a broom (which he wrapped with an old towel), a bucket (which he filled with a solution of vinegar and salt), and then told them to lay down some tarps and use their brain.

Sunny did as instructed, making the house smell sour and acrid, and after collapsing in the kitchen from doing the bulk of the mould cleaning, found themself uncomfortable, exhausted and irritable.

‘Is anyone else still itchy?’ Sunny asked from the table.

‘For what?’ Beth asked.

‘No, not like emotionally...physically.’

‘I’ve been itchy all week. Maybe it got worse when the mould was disturbed,’ Helen said, sitting at the kitchen table and immediately moved to scratch her ankles. ‘Or it’s the vinegar?’

‘Gosh, now I’m itchy again,’ Alice admitted, standing on one leg and using her free foot to rub the back of her calf.

‘It’s psychosomatic,’ Helen said, saying ‘mould spores’ out loud to test her theory. They all scratched in response.

Dale the cat sauntered inside to eat the food it had splayed across the tiles. Alice studied him as he picked at his food, eating strangely as he always did, taking each biscuit in his mouth individually before chewing hesitantly. Then he curled up on the tiles and started to scratch himself violently.

Alice frowned. ‘When was the last time someone de-flead Dale?’

‘I mean, I just pretend the thing doesn’t exist,’ Helen admitted.

Rocco overheard the exchange from the living room and yelled into the hallway. ‘The cat gave us fleas, didn’t it?’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Alice started.

‘No, it’s the cat,’ Rocco grunted, bending over to look through his leg hairs.

‘If it is fleas, it could be the myna birds,’ Sunny suggested. ‘Birds carry fleas. Could be a mouse?’

‘Could be the crust punks from the last house show...come on, Sunny,’ he added, seizing an opportunity, ‘it’s the cat. It’s time we finally talked about getting rid of it.’

‘No,’ Alice said tersely, ‘we have to get rid of the fleas.’

‘What are you, the Minister for Energy? You have to get rid of the source.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ Alice glared.

Rocco motioned to slit his throat with his thumb.

‘Animal,’ she spat. She left the house, saying she was going to purchase a flea, tick and worm treatment for Dale.

Rocco wore the insult, and retreated to his gym where he tried to come up with a workout that didn’t strain his elbow, but he couldn’t find the right movements. He stared across the lawn, Sunny’s shed lit up by its harsh fluorescent light, shining bright under the afternoon storm clouds. He examined Alice’s fledgling veggie patch, the shrubbery and trees, and dwelled on the cat’s influence in the house. He watched it walk into the garden and return satisfied a few moments later. The horrific squawks of a cuckoo rang out through the air, which sent a chill through him, thinking about how the cuckoo thrives by laying its eggs in the nests of other birds to raise them second-hand. He thought it was a sign. He became conscious of his foot tapping rapidly beneath him and remembered bitterly that he needed to be awake at five a.m. to set up a new scaffold for a cladding job in Rydalmere. He texted in sick. Helen came outside with the music of Pussy Galore playing through her phone, and on hearing the shrill and tinny sounds, Rocco joined her on the couch. They both faced the yard and scratched their flea bites.

‘You doing okay?’ Helen asked, brushing cat hair off her work pants, agitated after being called in to cover another shift.

‘You ever think we’re too old to be sharehousing?’ Rocco asked.

‘Are you kidding me?’ she laughed, distracting herself from scratching by rolling a smoke. ‘Every time I wake up in this decrepit little shithole...I wonder how I got to thirty-seven and have this to show for it.’

They sensed movement from one of the neighbour’s balconies, and looked up to see a man staring down at them in the waning light, sitting in a dressing gown, observing, his bald head backlit by his stovetop extractor fan.

‘You try to live your life, but someone’s always watching,’ she continued nodding up at the man, ‘watching from outside the house, listening from inside the house –’

‘– running their diseased cats around the kitchen to piss on the floor and shed fleas all over the house.’

‘You know there’d be people up there who have gone through all of 2022 and never had to deal with fleas? People who didn’t find a hive of maggots on their floor, don’t know what black mould even looks like, weren’t kept awake all night by rain flooding out of broken gutters.’

Rocco was distracted by the cat, which sat on the cold grass, its fur slicked by uneven damp patches. ‘What do you think we should do about that thing?’

‘Just do what I do,’ Helen suggested, staring into the moonlit clouds. ‘Try not to think about it.’

Rocco let out a sad sigh for Helen, unsure of how to advise her to take some control of her life without offending her, endeavouring to do as he did on the football field: to lead by example.

Alice returned from the shops with flea bombs and a treatment for Dale, who scurried into the back alley by instinct. Asking if it was a good night to bomb the house, they agreed reticently, unable to hear word from Beth, whose door was closed, presumably working a day shift at her new job at the leagues club. Rocco was the only one irritated by this imposition on his plans, but Sunny soothed it over as they rushed out front to meet Sio who was taking them to band practice in Tempe.

‘Come with us and wait at the pub,’ they said, seeing the agitation in Rocco’s mannerisms. And when he reacted poorly, continued: ‘I’ll meet you up there when we’re done, we only have to play the set once or twice.’

Rocco followed Sunny and squeezed into the back seat of Sio’s Honda Civic. He calmed down in the car, asking which pub he could watch the Thursday Night Footy in while he waited for the rehearsal to finish. Sio suggested two options near their practice space.

‘There’s the titty bar near the creek,’ Sio started, taking off at the lights and yelling over his shoulder, ‘but I dunno if it has a TV. Otherwise there’s the old man pub near the bus depot, but it’s right near the Australia First office so I’m kinda suss on it.’

Rocco didn’t think for long, asking to be dropped off across at the latter, claiming he didn’t need ‘that kind of distraction’. Inside the Tempe Hotel, Rocco settled at a bench with a beer and a good view of the TV screen. He sat alone next to three other solo drinkers that he nodded at politely: one greyed and wrinkled in the makeshift TAB section, another trying to chat up the bartender, and one more around his age, also preparing to watch the game, but drunk enough to be falling over himself at his stool. Rocco got swept up in the opening hits of the game between Newcastle and the Roosters. He studied both teams, the way they constructed their attacking sets, their body language in defence, the way Newcastle seemed relieved every time the Roosters got a kick away, as though the job was done. He was pleased at the Roosters’ attitude, taking the opportunities when they were provided, ‘pulling the trigger’ on their opportunities as his coach at Mounties would have said. He had no pity for Newcastle when the Roosters started to put them away convincingly. Occasionally he talked to the younger man next to him, only to comment on the laborious captain’s challenge process, or the blowout scorelines that had plagued the 2022 season. The guy was drunk and anxious and rubbed his shaved head constantly, complaining that the competition wasn’t ‘fair’ anymore, because of the referees and all their ‘biased judgements’. Rocco argued that a ‘fair’ match allowed a significantly better team to win by as much as they deserved, so that what the guy really wanted was an ‘even’ contest that gave a bad team a leg up here and there where they needed it. But the guy was too wasted to consider Rocco’s point and just sat there stupefied, crinkling up a TAB slip when Daniel Tupou scored on the other side of halftime.

Sunny came through the main door in an oversized coat that wouldn’t zip closed. Cold and on the verge of shivering, they looked bewildered into the room. The man next to Rocco tripped over himself trying to leave at noticing Sunny, the stool crashing to the ground while he hurried towards the back door. Rocco was startled by all the commotion, and saw that the guy had left his bag on the floor in the rush.

‘Hey mate!’ Rocco called, holding out the backpack as Sunny stood in place at the other end of the pub.

The man turned around, ready for a fight at Rocco’s calls, but saw what was happening and returned sheepishly, taking the bag with one hand and keeping his gaze lowered, mumbling a thank you and then leaving by way of the bottle shop.

‘You know him?’ Sunny asked on approach, lit up with energy.

‘That guy?’ Rocco asked, turning to watch him slink away. ‘No, we were just watching the game.’

‘That was the guy whose room you took,’ Sunny yelled with jaw dropped. ‘That was Dale!’

‘Really?’ Rocco asked, peering over the bar to see a flash of him walking onto the street. He was unsettled by Sunny’s charged energy. ‘What was his deal anyway?’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ Sunny said, about to tell the stories of Dale’s behaviour in the early months of 2022, beginning to laugh at their own joke before they told it. ‘He was a bit of a wanker.’

The publican came around the room to announce last drinks before the game had even finished, and Rocco responded by ordering another jug to the bartender’s annoyance. They moved to the lounges by the fireplace which the publican immediately extinguished.

‘Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask if you’d be interested in doing an interview,’ Sunny said to interrupt the silence.

‘What about?’ Rocco asked, swirling his swiftly emptying glass. ‘About a few different things, but I’ve been reading about the band you were in, I Pentiti? I want to know more about it, maybe explore why you felt comfortable singing in a band in Italy, but had never tried here, what that says about us…’

Rocco sat stoic in his seat. ‘You’re putting together another project I see.’

‘I want to do some interviews to expand the range of my work a bit, maybe talk about things that are a bit less personal.’

‘Sunny, have you ever considered just taking a break? Doing nothing?’

‘I do nothing all the time,’ they argued.

‘No, I mean: not starting a fucking interview series. Not playing music, not organising endless house shows, not writing, not even reading. Like actually doing nothing.’

‘Just because you don’t see me doing nothing doesn’t mean I don’t like...fuck, and get high alone, and watch shit on my phone like everyone else...’

‘All of those things are doing something, Sunny! I mean whole days at a time with nothing to do and nothing on the mind. We’ve lived together all this time and I know more about your projects than about you as a person.’

‘Maybe I am my projects,’ Sunny said defensively.

‘You came out of the womb holding a glue stick and a pair of scissors?’

‘Well, you can’t prove that I didn’t.’

Neither reacted when the bartender turned up the lights.

‘Fine,’ Rocco laughed, ‘let’s do the interview then. Ask me some questions.’

Sunny barely let the sentence finish before propping their phone on the table to record. Nervously and all at once, Sunny asked Rocco to explain how he had come to join his Italian band in the pre-pandemic years, what that meant to him, and where that band fit into the broader Italian, European and international underground music scenes. Rocco tried to unpack the question into its individual parts. He explained the logistical difficulties of the band, of his living in Turin while training and playing for Saluzzo out at the city limits, the others all based in Milan writing songs for him. He explained how he’d met them all when he visited their city, loitering after a show before spending the weekend with them on a bender fuelled by ‘Milano coffee’, all finding his broken Italian to be a source of great comedy. Then they themed a concept band around him, posing Rocco as a malevolent outsider sent by the EU to destroy Italian punk and hardcore.

‘But we didn’t get much traction,’ he continued, playing with his glass and trying to think of a better story. ‘It was hard because I lived in Turin, not that it’s that far...but the scene in Turin was really insular, we couldn’t get shows there. We probably had to tour more, but I had to play footy on weekends...you can guess the rest. We recorded this really good LP one weekend, it was a concept album demanding that the British punks forgive our ‘cultural debt’ to the EU; but this was just before Brexit, and our bassist Antonio was adamant that the message didn’t make sense after that happened. Not that it’s important, but he was an academic, you know? Everything had to be consistent for him. We argued so much about it, because to me, you could easily just reinterpret it as an analogy for broader cultural stuff. Me and our drummer Silvia said we were just sending up the punks of the anglosphere, who were getting very, “This band is sick, they sing in another language!” We thought it was adaptable, especially because the people we were targeting couldn’t understand Italian anyway...but he didn’t go for it. It was a real shitfight.’

‘Do you think you’ll ever release the album?’

‘None of us really talk anymore,’ Rocco said mournfully, Sunny sensing in his tone that they shouldn’t pursue the reasons why. ‘But I feel like now’s the perfect time for that kind of record, like we should put it out now. Because Italy’s having a cultural moment again. You know, fucking Stanley Tucci and his negroni 101 recipe that scored him a million-dollar TV program where he ‘searches for Italy’ by laughing it up in hotels. Every second TV show with money pumped into it by a streaming service gets set in Italy now. It’s propaganda, putting a smiling face on Italian culture when the place is taking this insane lurch to the far right. There’s an election coming, and the people who are going to win it are all proud descendants of Mussolini, running on all this racist dog-whistle shit...’

‘You feel like that’s all connected?’

‘I just think it’s concerning that the anglosphere is back to the Italian worship right now, with all that considered.’

‘You don’t think these cultural things just come in waves?’

‘Yeah, but at the end of the day, what’s Italy’s most famous invention?’

Sunny blinked, surprised by Rocco’s unexpected flourishes, that felt rehearsed.

‘Non è pizza,’ he continued, leaning into Sunny’s phone: ‘è fascismo!’

The publican, who had been trying to close for an hour, switched off the music and asked them to leave.

Rocco and Sunny left out the door and started up the Princes Highway, taking the first steps of a long walk before Rocco stopped suddenly at a blue office building with its windows barred and caged. Its two display cabinets in the shopfront were empty but for a piece of driftwood, a disturbing-looking portrait of an unnamed bearded white man, a Ned Kelly figurine, and two faded film posters advertising an ‘Australia Day’ screening of a film that ‘ASIO doesn’t want you to see’. A tattered Eureka flag hung limp in the dead air from the corner of the awning. Rocco recognised it as the office of Australia First, the fringe white supremacist party who, while never being elected to a seat outside of local government, had haunted the landscape with a politics of hate since its birth during the John Howard years. Rocco gripped onto the steel lattice and tested its strength with a shake, spurred on by telling stories of his past as an antagonistic hardcore frontperson.

‘How has no one torched this place?’ he whispered, squinting through the gaps in the curtains, examining vents and cracks, eyeballing the fences and gates which were all locked up and secured.

‘Come on, Rocco,’ Sunny said, trying to drag him away from his imagined drunken attack, ‘they have security cameras.’

‘Fuck their surveillance,’ he said, biting his thumb at the CCTV.

‘Let’s go,’ Sunny insisted, but Rocco shrugged them off and stumbled drunk down the building’s side alley. He inspected the strips of barbed wire bolted into the brick, the paranoid attempts at fortification.

‘I can’t believe it’s still here,’ he said, standing up on the tiles to get a better look into the back. ‘An office for fascists just sitting here, and no one’s bombed the joint.’

‘It might be closed down,’ Sunny added timidly, trying to get Rocco to leave it behind, but he acted as though he could sniff the air, claiming that someone lived there just as a spotlight clicked on in the alleyway.

‘Sensor light,’ Rocco observed dismissively, now noticing Sunny’s panic.

‘Yeah, a sensor light,’ they replied, walking backwards to look for a taxi heading towards Newtown, flagging one down and getting inside before the driver tried to turn them away for the short fare.

At home, Rocco gave the cabbie a twenty, and the two stumbled through the side gate. Sunny slurred their goodnights and hurried through the rain to their shed. Rocco watched them go and, feeling his night wasn’t done, went inside to take his bottle of limoncello from the freezer. He returned to the outdoor couch and sat back heavily, pouring the thick liquid into a shot glass. He took a sip and felt homesick for his other home abroad, then a wave of exhaustion washed over him, and he wondered if he couldn’t fall asleep outside for a change. He watched the light in the shed extinguish as Sunny settled in for the night. He breathed heavily, his thighs spread wide, his head rested on the back of the couch between sips. He had almost drifted to sleep when the words ‘caloric deficit’ ran through his head. He tried to wake up, thinking he should eat again, but when forcing his eyes open, he made eye contact with the cat and shuddered awake. It sat still in the rain, sodden and non-responsive, staring into Rocco’s eyes.

‘You scared me, you little shit,’ he said, the cat unmoving, taunting him, Rocco thought. He called out to the animal, which took a step towards him, then sat just out of Rocco’s range, beginning to scratch itself ferociously again, breathing strangely, a string of saliva hanging off its exposed layer of bottom teeth.

‘You’re sick and lonely,’ Rocco told the cat. ‘You’re dying and flea-ridden. And no one takes care of you.’

The cat ignored him and walked back into the sprinkling rain, staring towards Sunny’s shed. Rocco got up unsteadily and tiptoed back into the house. He walked through the unlit kitchen, through the empty living room lit up by the TV home screen, and went into his room. He tripped as he went down on his knees to reach under his bed, grabbing blindly at boxes and tools until he found the hard plastic case. He dragged it out, manoeuvring it around the other objects, the smell of mildew trapped in the mottled plastic. He forced the rusted latches open and clenched a hand around the cold, polished timber. He snuck back through the house, past the sounds of his housemates watching movies on their laptops, humming through their closed doors. He heard a door open behind him, and moved quickly into the yard. He listened to his housemate move through the hallway, waiting for the sound of the exhaust fan to prove they were making a visit to the bathroom. When the rattling whirr of the fan rang out, he slumped into the couch out back, the cat still standing in the rain, turned slightly now to stare into the garden. Rocco rubbed the timber of the air rifle rested on his thighs. It was a weak weapon that he’d inherited from his mum, who had inherited it from his nonno, an heirloom with a history of sitting in cupboards and linen closets and garage shelving. It went unused except for the occasional family target practice, games that he won by the time he was twelve. Bleary eyed, he played with the barrel until he remembered how to cock the neck back. Then he dropped a pellet inside it. He hoisted the rifle to his shoulder, remembering how to line up the sights. The cat turned to look at him. Then Rocco heard a gasp over his shoulder, and he shook at the surprise, pulling the trigger, the sound of a thwip driving the pellet into the yard. He turned to see Alice shrieking in the doorway, then back to where the cat’s body was splayed on the ground.

‘What have you done?’ Alice shrieked again, clutching at her pyjamas.

‘Ah,’ he drawled, a light switching on from a balcony above them. ‘You weren’t supposed to see that.’

‘No no no no no,’ she panted.

‘Is everything okay out there?’ Helen yelled from her room.

Alice screamed back: ‘Rocco killed Dale!’

Rocco placed the rifle down next to him and listened to the opening of doors from inside. Beth came rushing out of her room, as much for the alarm of the statement as for the prospect of drama, and Helen followed a few steps behind, stoned and tired, but already chuckling in surprise.

‘He did what?’ Beth hollered, shoving Alice out of the way to see the cat laying limp at the foot of the yard. ‘Oh my god, you’re a fucking psycho!’

Helen came outside and gathered with the others. ‘Why do you have a gun?’

‘It’s an heirloom,’ he explained.

‘Okay Texas Pete,’ Beth said.

‘No one was going to put that thing out of its misery,’ he tried by way of explanation, doubling down when he received no response: ‘None of you do anything to solve your problems!’

‘You can’t do that, Rocco,’ Alice said, trembling, yelling again: ‘You can’t do that!’

‘Do what? That thing was the walking dead! It lived its life crawling around in its own shit and piss. We’ve all got fleas, our kitchen floor is covered in its food...it could barely even breathe.’ ‘You murdered an animal, Rocco!’

‘It’s not murder,’ he argued. ‘I’ll dig a big hole for the thing and you can plant a tree in it.’

Alice was confounded by the silence around her. ‘You all had Dale kicked out for what? For masturbating? And now Rocco has killed a pet in our home, and you just stand there?’

They all looked at Rocco who tried to compose himself.

‘Firstly,’ Helen interrupted tersely, annoyed by Alice’s tone, ‘Dale wasn’t kicked out for masturbating, he was kicked out for making Beth uncomfortable.’ Beth nodded as Helen continued. ‘Second of all, let’s be pragmatic for once.’

‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Alice trembled.

‘The cat was sick,’ Helen continued, ‘and none of us were going to take it to a vet any time soon. And if we did, they’d probably say we needed to put it down anyway, and none of us would pay for that. So...’

‘You’re all so heartless,’ Alice said, beginning to cry. ‘You have such cold hearts.’

‘Come on, Alice,’ Rocco argued. ‘You didn’t spend a moment with that cat. You just dumped some food in a bowl every few days and complained about the shit in the garden, no one should be happier about that cat being dead than you.’

‘Maybe don’t be so flippant about this one, Rocco,’ Helen interrupted sternly. He opened his mouth and closed it again. It was only when Alice went back to her room, distraught and mortified, that Nathan came outside to see what had happened.

‘You killed the cat?’ he asked Rocco.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry.’

Nathan stared at the scene in the yard, and for once, had nothing to say. He went back to his room to console Alice, and the others followed, Beth telling Rocco that while it was an unbelievably fucked up thing to do, they could deal with it in the morning. Rocco waited for the house to fall silent again, feeling the grip of regret in his stomach. He fetched the shovel and found a place along the fence line where he thought Alice might like to plant a tree. There, he dug a hole for Dale.

IN THE STOCK POT, Rocco showed Sunny just how low a heat you needed to work with, even just to caramelise the onions in the lard. He poured them both full glasses of cheap chianti from a carton of six he’d bought for the occasion, making his friend Silvia’s ragu recipe as a way to apologise for what he called ‘the incident’. He placed large hunks of osso bucco in the pot, cuts of meat that bled through the bone, then thick pork sausages in the spaces between, all browning in the pool of fat he’d formed in the pot. ‘It’s a pretty graphic meal, Rocco,’ Sunny said, smacking their lips after a long sip of wine. ‘You sure this was the best choice of apology dish?’ Rocco pushed the meat around the pool of lard, ignoring Sunny’s comment while shaking his head. An hour later, after he’d stirred in the tomatoes, Sunny, drunk, asked the same question again. ‘This culture,’ Rocco said to himself, waiting for the oil to rise to the surface of the tomatoes in orangey streaks, ‘this culture is too sensitive.’

HOW_TO_RENT_A_COMMUNE.docx

Nathan made a show of flipping the lamb chops on the barbecue, the raw meat hissing on the flames. As he cooked, Alice watched him talk to the woman from Adelaide, in town for a conference, conveniently ‘finding out’ about the reading Nathan was hosting. Alice watched their movements carefully from across the yard. They were engrossed in each other, seeming to forget they were in public, forgetting that Alice was standing right there. She knew they’d fucked in 2017, at that year’s Marxism conference, but Nathan didn’t know that Alice knew. He didn’t know he had friends who went behind his back to tell her, who stopped talking to her when she did nothing about it. In fact, Alice thought that of all the things Nathan took for granted, the big one was that she knew everything about him yet had never betrayed him. As she watched the woman from Adelaide nod intently as he spoke, she relaxed, realising that rather than being powerless in this situation, it was through her good graces that Nathan retained his social status. But then he left with her. Out the back gate with a handful of others from the reading, neglecting to say goodbye or to even invite Alice along. She was surprised to find that it didn’t even hurt anymore.

Nathan’s departure triggered a memory from the 2007 Woodford Folk Festival, in camp, a woman staring at him as he peeled an orange with a knife. She told him she was impressed, noting that he ‘must have done that before’. And Alice had seen how easily moved he was by a compliment, later watching him walk off into the bush with her. Then his lying when he returned, freshly showered, explaining that it was so hot and muddy that he needed to clean himself off before coming to bed. She thought about his lies and misrepresentations. In Newcastle, at the 2008 Camp for Climate Action protest, Nathan sought to impress the senior members of Solidarity Magazine who he’d just started writing for. She watched him berate cops and charge the coal trains running from terminal to port. He followed the more zealous among the protestors as they cut their way through the cyclone fence to latch themselves to a carriage, only to be dragged away by a cop who looked down at him in disgust when Nathan collapsed in a pool of tears. That night, camped in Wickham Oval with the other members of the movement, Nathan cried himself to sleep in his tent, Alice attempting to soothe him as he explained his handling back at the station, first about being ‘a victim of police brutality’, and then about his court summons, which meant he was likely to end up with a criminal record. He wiped his tears away and stammered about his future, and weeks later, seemed disappointed when he was let off with a warning. She thought about 2009 when they were travelling New Zealand as volunteer organic farmers, and how she’d suffered his peacocking all trip about being an ethical omnivore, constantly discussing the health of livestock, only to catch the look in his eyes as their hosts slaughtered a hen. He froze and then flinched as the farmer dropped the chicken upside down into a homemade tin funnel, its head peering curiously out the bottom, blinking and clucking before being knifed clean through the neck. Nathan stood pale with shock as its wings had twitched and flapped.

Alice tossed in her bed, reflecting on fifteen years of fooling herself into thinking Nathan was the man he claimed to be. It weighed on her all through the night, until she heard the front door open, and heard him tiptoe through the house, sniffing intermittently. Then she heard the water hammer of the shower’s pipes shake the house awake. She pretended to sleep, sensing him come to the room to sit at his desk, oblivious to her wakeful presence. She rolled towards him to keep one eye on his oversized monitor, and watched from under the blanket. He sniffed, and then sniffed again, Alice upset that he partied harder when he left her behind. She watched him go about his work: scrolling Twitter, inspecting the stats in the back end of the various websites he helped edit, scribbling notes in his pad, filling out his spreadsheets. She watched him open the magazine’s submissions portal. He rejected ten submissions without reading them, which seemed to please him, as though she could see the flow of dopamine in the room. She remembered other things he had admitted to her, like hoping to be known as a pre-eminent Marxist scholar; that his joke about wanting to be introduced on podcasts as ‘the author of many books’ was, in truth, an aspiration. She wondered if she had always known he was like this, and when she saw his phone light up, and that half-grin of his spread across his face, she knew it was that woman again. It made her feel small, and then she felt vengeful.

Alice woke to the sound of their printer a few hours later, opening her eyes to find Nathan in the exact same position she’d last seen him in: bolted upright at his desk with a glass of whiskey at his side. She tried to sleep through the noise, but could feel him move around the room, readying to leave. When he saw that she was awake, he leaned over to her, reeking of scotch, telling her he was going for a coffee with the woman from Adelaide before her flight. She didn’t react, watching him pick through the printed paper and assemble a copy of a document he was printing in duplicate. He disappeared quickly through the door, leaving her there, the printer relentless in its noise. When she got up to see what exactly was worthy of disrupting her sleep (a draft of the manuscript he made her promise to keep secret from the house), she finally cracked. This man who didn’t show people his drafts (after a columnist once ‘stole’ his IP) now seemed very happy to hand-deliver it to this woman he kept rushing off to see. Thinking it was high time for him to feel the embarrassment he seemed impervious to, she collected the pages of his personal copy, and took them straight to the living room to dump the manuscript face up on the coffee table for the others to find.

Beth had sensed something off about Nathan at some point in the winter, but couldn’t place just when. Over time, he seemed less talkative for a man who never shut up, and whenever she spoke at length, he listened with a quiet intensity, as though analysing her every word. She’d grown used to a dynamic with him where she would finish a sentence and expect him to discredit its content, but now he would just sit there, thinking. She suspected something, so started to bait him to try to draw an impassioned response.

‘Hey Nathan, essay idea for you,’ she said when he had sat down in the living room armchair, cradling his whiskey and annotating papers on his tablet. ‘Does Gorbachev’s death mark the end of the end of history?’ she asked, making a face.

‘I don’t know if there’s anything in that, Beth,’ he mumbled, not looking up.

‘Okay,’ Beth said, now fumbling with Google Translate. ‘Try: do svidaniya Gorbachev, privet history!’ He didn’t reply. ‘You can make it into a pin, sell it at your little meetings.’

‘I’m sorry, Beth,’ he said, finally putting his tablet down, ‘I don’t have time for this. If you want my opinion, I think you’re pushing too hard to find connections between contemporary events and a theory that’s been reduced to a catchphrase.’

He left to work in his room and Beth flopped on the couch in annoyance, muttering ‘God, says you’ to herself. She laid back to google him. She searched through the websites he’d contributed to, reading through their archives, looking for something she could make fun of. She’d forgotten that she had muted his accounts and hadn’t seen any of his new work, then felt an uncanny sensation when coming across a familiar headline, discussing The Atlantic’s use of an illustration of Alex Jones in a feature piece, the photo credited to an artificial intelligence. She skimmed Nathan’s thoughts on it, and followed a trail through some related articles, and then noticed that his writing felt disturbingly familiar. She kept reading, parsing Nathan’s arguments, and went straight out to Sunny’s shed to run it by them.

Sunny dismissed Beth’s concerns. They knew about Nathan’s tendency to rip off his talking points from his friends, but had never been perturbed by it. It was useless anyway, they said, telling her they knew someone who sent in anonymous complaints to Nathan’s many editorial boards that had never been acted upon. Sunny said that when it comes to the kind of writers who crawl all over each other for the first and best opinion piece each week, that ‘they all do it’, and chose to dismiss Nathan’s essays as another form of careerist journalism, regardless of their niche publication in the unpaid socialist mags. Sunny said its best to constrain your reading and writing elsewhere, which is why they stuck to the zine networks, where, Sunny said, ‘writers didn’t clutch their pearls so hard’. Still frustrated, Beth returned to her room to prepare for a scheduled show.

Sunny dawdled inside for a midday shower, and after cleaning off the grime of the prior night’s gig, went back through the house with a towel around their torso and their clothes rolled up under their arm. They stopped suddenly at seeing a stack of A4 pages placed on the coffee table. Tilting their head to read its title -

HOW TO RENT A COMMUNE: A FIRST STEP TO LANDLORD ABOLITION

Half-naked, they sat on the edge of the couch and started to flick through it, reading the preamble presumably directed to a publisher, listing related titles that included How to Blow Up a Pipeline, The End of Policing and Abolish the Family. Then pages and pages of outlines and sample chapters with headings like ‘from co-op to commune’ and ‘on community visibility’. It was dense but incomplete, errant passages filled with highlighted dot-points like ‘can we construct an ethical gentrification project’ burning holes in Sunny’s thoughts. They stood up quickly, caught their falling towel and knocked gently at Beth’s door, who ignored them. They thumped louder again until she appeared through a crack in the door, wrapped hastily in a gown.

‘Sunny, I’m busy,’ she whispered, her stream’s notifications pinging from over her shoulder.

‘You have to see this,’ they insisted, smiling as they raised the document to her face.

Beth’s eyes widened at seeing the title. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

Sunny walked slowly back to their shed to get changed, reading the work in progress as they went. On each page sat Nathan’s attempts to justify his own place in the world with lofty theoretical discussion. He discussed the role of rented space through the evolution of Marrickville warehouses once connected to DIY art and punk communities, now converted to craft breweries. This was a topic that Helen and Sunny had bitched about at length, only Nathan had reached a different conclusion. Where they had only identified the irony of breweries taking over the venues shut down by noise complaints and unlicensed drinking, Nathan claimed this change was a process of ‘reindustrialisation’. He wrote that ‘stagnant urban development’ could follow a trail from reclaimed spaces (DIY spots and squats in the shadow of old industry) to new small businesses (in the form of breweries and artisanal goods manufacturers) in order to ‘disrupt major industry from below’. Sunny sat on the edge of the couch and read bewildered as the topics for discussion were laid out in front of them – ‘on conflict resolution’, ‘music as communication’, ‘communal protest’, ‘sharing space in a pandemic’. They saw that Nathan had been taking from them to build the career-defining manuscript he’d always craved.

‘This is so fucking funny,’ Beth said eventually, joining Sunny on the couch after finishing her session, a grin of shock and awe spread across her face.

‘It’s like he wrote a bad review of our lives,’ Sunny laughed.

‘Yeah and it’s a hatchet job,’ she said, still reading, finding parts of herself in the conflict-resolution chapter where he’d used everyone else’s behaviour except his own as a guide to communal living. ‘This is a joke, right?’

‘I guess he never thought we’d find out,’ Sunny said, hushing when they heard the door open down the hall.

Nathan came through the corridor, staring absent-mindedly at his phone as he passed through the living room, filling a glass of water and heading back towards his room until noticing the stares that shot across to him.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, before Beth flung the pages at him. They blew apart in the air and fluttered to the ground. Confused, Nathan reached down and brushed them off, registered what was happening, then stood calm and still.

‘What’s it like to have never had an original thought in your life?’ Beth asked.

Nathan stood in place, seeming to take stock of his options, frozen like an overworked computer. ‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked eventually, examining the pages.

‘Maybe that you’ve been using our lives as fodder for a Verso submission?’

Nathan stopped himself from saying that he thought it better suited to Pluto Press, and explained that it was a work in progress, that he planned to bring it to them for discussion when the draft was complete. But Beth goaded him, calling him a liar, and when Nathan suggested he introduce an oral history component to make the document collaborative, Beth reminded him that everything he’d written was already collaborative, since his thoughts were stolen from his housemates. Nathan didn’t respond. He knew from experience that his role in a situation like this wasn’t to fight the critique, but to look as though he were taking on feedback.

‘How many people know about this?’ Sunny asked, trying to keep a straight face while watching Nathan panic.

‘Nobody,’ he lied. ‘Maybe one or two people, but I can fix this.’

‘It’s too late, isn’t it?’ Beth interrupted, picking up on Sunny’s play. ‘We’ve seen it, we know it exists, we know you’ve been tracking everything we’ve said and done all year. It’s a really disturbing breach of privacy, Nathan. You get that, right?’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ he lied again, ‘but I need you to tell me what I can do.’

‘I don’t think you’re in a position to make requests,’ Beth said firmly. ‘The question I have now is whether this stays between us three, or whether we tell everyone.’

‘The work had to take things from other places,’ Nathan started to explain, trembling. ‘It’s written through a collective lens. But we can fix this if we all work on it together. Maybe we can publish it as a collective. Which is what I wanted to do, but you all make fun of me so much that I didn’t think you’d be interested –’

‘It’s never really a “collective” with you though, is it Nathan? It’s always, “the collective formed by Nathan Golubev” or it’s “published by The Centre”. You can’t be involved in anything that doesn’t make it entirely about you.’

Despite his best attempts to take the criticism cleanly, Nathan could only repeat himself and try to downplay the situation, which drove Beth’s antagonisms; Sunny grew less interested in mediating, instead enjoying the melodrama that was laid out before them. And in time, Nathan slunk away and went into his room to talk to Alice about what had happened. She pretended successfully that she hadn’t planted the document in the first place, claiming she’d let Beth use the printer, who must have found the draft in the paper tray. She pretended to be sorry about the ‘slip-up’. As Nathan shook with nerves, he paced around their room brainstorming a wording to the house group chat. Alice helped him with this and relished in his suffering. He went to send his message, but on flipping through his other apps as he went, saw that Beth had already tweeted a photo of the manuscript, thrust up to the light with the caption: more like how to be a dumb cunt.

Nathan rushed back to the living room, leaving Alice midsentence.

‘Take it down,’ he said, shaking.

‘Take what down?’ Beth smiled.

‘This is not a game,’ he hissed at her.

‘I’m sorry, is your reputation at stake?’

‘Beth, you may think I’m an idiot, but a post like that isn’t good for me; the manuscript isn’t ready yet, I don’t even know if I’ll do anything with it now.’

When she laughed at him, he explained how his comrades had been doxed in the past, how because of her holding the cover page up to the window in the photo, any enemy could pick the vintage of the building across the street, could examine the cornices and the ceiling rose, and that when combined with the details hidden in Beth’s account (and directing with unexpected venom, the line: ‘everything you’ve put on the internet’) they could gather a location, find him, and presumably harm him. Alice tiptoed to the living room and listened to her boyfriend’s manipulations.

‘Nathan, stop,’ she interrupted. ‘You put your home address on everything you mail out, the only person who is going to give away your whereabouts is you.’

Nathan ignored her. ‘Delete the tweet, Beth.’

‘I’ll delete it when you’ve deleted your manuscript,’ she smiled stubbornly.

Nathan stared her down. ‘Be serious.’

‘Oh I’m dead serious,’ she said, now steeled.

Nathan fetched his laptop, and showed Beth as he deleted the file from his local and shared drives, explaining that the only copies left were the one in her hands (she promptly tore it up) and a second hard copy that he’d given to ‘a friend’ that morning to read on her flight. Alice watched the two together, how they sat in the lounge awkwardly now that the overblown situation was resolved. Beth went back to her room, glancing almost pityingly at Alice on her way out, and Alice stood there, confused, ashamed and somehow heartbroken; stuck for answers about what to do next.

ROCCO WALKED THROUGH THE BACKSTREETS of Hurlstone Park towards the shops, ravenously hungry, irritable, and slipping on the tiled footpaths after the rain sprinkled the surfaces. More than ten minutes on foot to a grocery store was ridiculous for a city, he thought, almost unjust: all that walking to find something as simple as a sandwich, having passed the beat-down facades of former hamburger joints and corner shops, mixed businesses and ex-tobacconists all gone. There was nothing left in this suburb but a McDonalds at the crest of an intersection, an RSL and a service station, then nothing until Dulwich Hill. He walked past an architect’s office in the guts of a former bakery, it’s blinds open to display their meeting room, as though to offer their services to turn more neighbourhood small businesses into open-plan offices. He stepped in a puddle and felt world-weary and attacked, like he had to face the trials of fucking Hercules just to get a panini. ‘I’m done with this shit,’ he mumbled.

Departure Lounge

Rocco adjusted the lamp on his bedside table, trying to get the lighting right while waiting for Silvia to return his video call from Milan. He suddenly regretted his decision to start growing a beard and considered rushing to the bathroom to present a clean-shaven face to his friend, but she called the moment he sat up out of his bed. Flustered, he checked himself in the phone camera before answering. She appeared on his phone, cheeks flushed and her hair pushed up under her cap, taking a quick break from a working bee at the Leoncavallo social centre. She grinned on seeing her old friend dial in, but Rocco saw a hint of worry beneath her smile. And when he asked her how she was going, her expression fell.

Silvia filled him in on what was happening in Milan leading into the Italian election. The reality had dawned on them that the new government was certain to be sworn in on the back of a right-wing electoral bloc headed by the Fratelli d’Italia, a nationalist party who had been accepted as ‘post-fascist’. Rocco had been unmoved when he first heard of the electoral shift, but was unsettled to see Silvia relay a genuine concern on the ground. She told him about the downturn in work prospects, street rallies against the after-school program that forced kids to work for free in factories, and the job-site deaths that had occurred due to their inexperience. The global sanctions on Russia had sent energy bills into impossible realms. The trattoria they used to eat in after I Pentiti practice had closed when they couldn’t pay the gas bill, and across Italy, masses assembled to conduct bill-burning ceremonies in protest. Georgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia and the likely new Prime Minister, began to speak of a loss of traditional values, an Italy ‘diluted’ by immigration and the ‘woke left’. Meloni declared, with no sense of subtlety, a need for a return to Italy’s ‘glory days’, which was giving the far right a confidence in public that Silvia said she’d rarely seen before. And while she tried to deflect, and claim to find it all pathetic and embarrassing, Rocco was affected by something in her tone. She looked off camera for a moment and then smiled meekly, telling him she had to get back to Antonio and the others. And then she was gone. The sunlit greenery of the vacant block behind Leoncavallo disappeared, and he was left alone in his damp room in Hurlstone Park. He laid back in his bed, stared at the ceiling, and finally made the decision.

Rocco requested a house meeting, and spent the next morning waiting for it anxiously. To kill time, he tried to push through his injuries to make one last attempt at the lawns, but he’d left it too long, the grass grown too high to run a mower through. Then, standing in the yard thinking of borrowing a whipper snipper, it rained for the first time in weeks. He felt the swift descent of a depression come down on him, the rain picking up and soaking him through as he gazed expressionless into the sky. In that moment, he was hit by the wave of defeat that comes only for the stubbornly self-sufficient at their most expended: knowing he’d given everything he had, and that no one planned to give anything back.

As much as he had enjoyed parts of his new life in Sydney this time around, his connections felt shallow and intangible, maybe even tangential to whatever his purpose in life was supposed to be. Realising how close he was to retirement, he asked himself, ‘if not this, then what?’ These intrusive thoughts came to him as a voice in his head that would ask mockingly late at night when everyone in the house was busy: ‘Where are your friends?’ He’d collapse in bed after work and training and scroll through photos and videos that his old friends posted from Italy, watching like a voyeur, staring at all the people who used to be in his life. Then that voice would ask, ‘Who are your friends?’ And though on some level he loved Sunny and Helen and Beth (and had even grown fond of Alice although she still held the cat incident against him) he felt like little more than a caricature to them. It made him homesick for his second home, confused by feeling like an import in the city he’d grown up in. With the football season almost over, his arm struggling to recover, and a sense of angst in the house after the arguments and incidents that piled atop each other in recent months, Rocco told the others he was moving out.

Gathered around the kitchen table, there wasn’t much anyone could say about his departure in the end. He over-explained his reasons for leaving, describing the predicament of the squats in Milan where his friends lived, and his concern about a new Italian government and its lackeys that were likely to come out of the woodwork after a Meloni victory. He said he felt a connection to their struggle that he didn’t feel towards Sydney, no matter how hard he tried, thinking that he wasn’t able to help the people here (who he claimed didn’t want to be helped) like he could overseas. He said that, with his rugby league career coming to an end, and with nothing on the horizon for 2023, it was the right time to go back.

‘Rocco, it just sounds like you’re depressed,’ Helen said, worried.

‘I am depressed,’ he replied, locking eyes with her. ‘This is me doing something about it.’

‘Sure, but you don’t have to go straight to fleeing the fucken country.’

‘I can see how it looks like that,’ he said, measured and polite, ‘but I’ll be in England for the World Cup in a month anyway. So either I come back, or I stay in Europe. I had to make a call one way or the other.’

‘Do you think that maybe you’re just running?’ Sunny asked tentatively.

‘Maybe, but it’s not like I’m running away from anything,’ he insisted, ‘I’m running towards something. To where I think I need to be.’

Helen bit her tongue when she felt moved to state the obvious – that he was running from himself – but she knew a made-up mind when she saw one. In the coming weeks, she fretted about Rocco, watching him take on a dismissive energy as his departure grew nearer. He stayed up late and went out partying with Beth. He extended his one-beer bath to whole bottles of wine that he left piled up in the corner of the bathroom. He overate, coming home at night with a bagged whole chicken for himself, and in the morning, Helen would see him taking a bag full of kebab wrappers and delivery service paper bags to the bins. He seemed unafraid of all consequences, and Helen wanted to remind him that he could fuck everything up if he wasn’t careful; that it was all well and good to jam in the shed with Sunny for the improvised psych-hardcore recording project they’d devised, but that taking shrooms every night after training and claiming it was okay because ‘psilocybin doesn’t show up on a drug test’ wasn’t going to bode well when he ran out on the field for Italy. She saw the way he let Beth lie across him in the living room, which soon extended to her cuddling up to him for warmth every single night, and then overtly making out on the couch. And in these moments, Helen saw a different version of him appear from deep within, his id coming to the surface for all to see: a recklessness from his past that he had talked about earlier in the year as something he had moved on from. She didn’t know what to say to him.

Rocco tried to focus on game day. He was named to start in the front row for the final trial match for Italy, but was forewarned by his coach that he’d have to play well to ensure a place in the World Cup squad. The pressure made him swoon. And as he packed his things for the match, he found himself dissociating for the first time in years. First he realised he was already on the road without remembering ever leaving. Then he forgot where he was going, or who he was playing against, then he was at the back gates to Lidcombe Oval, waiting for the gatekeeper to let him and some of the Maltese players in through the locked gates. Then he was in his full kit, and soon warming up on the field. Then he was lined up arm-in-arm as the Italian anthem started, though the scorekeeper had accidentally played a version from YouTube without vocals. The players stood awkward and close-mouthed, unable to mime the instrumental calls to Italian nationalism, or to stand with mouth shut as Rocco had planned. In a flash, he experienced a crisis of confidence, that voice asking him why he agreed to wear this jersey, emblazoned with that flag, less than a week after Italy voted in its post-fascist future. Then the ref’s whistle blew and Rocco felt present again, lumbering in line to defend the first Maltese hit up, then diving at the ankles of the opposition centre who scooted formulaically from dummy half. He struggled to his feet, trying to avoid using his bad arm for leverage. After twenty minutes he was taken off the field by the trainer, who gave him a radioed-in update from over the fence.

‘He wants you to put on a stink when you go back on the field,’ his trainer said, adjusting the strapping on his elbow.

‘I don’t think so,’ Rocco said, looking to the cameras set up for a live stream.

‘Coach said he needs you to show some aggression.’

‘I’m not putting a fucking stink on if it means I’ll get suspended.’ ‘No one’s getting suspended in a trial like this,’ the trainer said dismissively, finishing Rocco’s strapping and walking him over to the bench. ‘I’m not gonna tell you what to do.’

‘…but?’

‘…but you know what you have to do.’

Rocco refused to start the requested fight when he was sent back on the field in the second half, thinking the instruction might be a test about self-control, but within minutes he began to panic and overplay his hand. Even though Italy was comfortably ahead, he took it on himself to move the ball: attempting audacious offloads that didn’t hit the mark; dropping a ball trying to bat it on to a half playing out the back; dropping another ball after he mistimed a crash play on the line; and finally, trying and failing to chip kick for himself as the final buzzer blew. He lumbered slowly to the sheds without any of his prospective teammates saying a word to him.

‘You should have told me your arm was that fucked,’ his coach said from inside, standing over Rocco and offering him a bag of ice for his swollen joints.

‘I needed to prove that I can play,’ he replied.

‘Yeah, and how do you think you went?’

‘Could have been better.’

‘I want to say that it was one of the worst front rower performances I’ve seen,’ he said, standing over him, ‘but I like you too much.’

Rocco stared at the floor between them, a position he was accustomed to as a player; stood over by a coach who wanted to teach him a lesson that was too late to learn. ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Rocco said tentatively. ‘I was sloppy, but everyone was off today.’

‘Doesn’t matter, mate. Everyone is going to watch that video. How am I supposed to go to the selection committee and tell them you need to be in the squad when I can’t even pick out a highlight?’

‘Show them something from Cup then...that game when I was man of the match.’

‘When you’re in an Italian jersey they’ll take notice. When you’re in a Mounties jersey they don’t care, you know that.’ Rocco began to stifle a panic that rose in his chest. ‘Fuck Rocco, if you had at least put a stink on I could show them you had some mongrel!’

His coach moved on to the next player, and instead of showering, Rocco threw off his ice packs and tried to demonstrate his commitment to the cause. He went out to the field and hoisted chairs over his shoulders to bring to the storeroom. He took in tables and helped pack down a marquee. He helped a volunteer lock up the second change room, and then went across the ground to bring in the goalpost pads and corner posts. He worked until there was nothing left to do but close the screen for the scoreboard. Standing outside the mid-century brick gates, another volunteer held down the button at the control panel to close the rolling shutters. He watched his coach march out the front gate, ignoring Rocco as he passed. He went to call out, but he couldn’t speak, then he heard a flapping noise among the groans of the chains and steel.

‘Hey mate,’ he called out to the volunteer, seeing a pigeon caught up in the gears of the roller door. The volunteer looked into the distance.

‘Hey! Aspetta!’ he called louder, the pigeon panicking, its one free wing flapping desperately as it was drawn into the chains. ‘Basta! Basta!’ Rocco called, but the man just stared back at him dumbly.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Fuck man, let go of the button!’

The roller door drew shut with a clank and the pigeon went still. Rocco looked to the bird hopefully, but it dipped to the side and then fell. Its body thumped on the concrete, motionless, feathers taken into the wind.

‘Fuck,’ Rocco moaned, collapsing to his knees.

‘Jesus, it’s just a pigeon,’ the volunteer said, closing the storeroom and the gates, snapping shut the padlocks, all oblivious to Rocco’s traumatised state, who kneeled there mouth agape and heart pounding.

‘That doesn’t feel like a bad omen to you?’ Rocco asked desperately.

‘At least it wasn’t a dove.’

Rocco drove home with the windows of his ute dropped, hoping the rush of air would keep him awake. Speeding eastbound down Parramatta Road and squinting through the reflection of the sunset in the rear-view mirror, he struggled to breathe through the tension. He looked forward to being at home, despite having less than a day before he left it for good. He parked on the street and handed the keys to Helen, who had agreed to arrange the handover of the ute to one of Rocco’s workmates, who’d already bought it off him cash in hand. She reached up to give him a warm embrace before running off to work. He had one final ice bath in the tub. He dried off and changed into the loose clothing he planned to wear for the next day’s flight. His bags were already packed, and he made one last look around the room to make sure he hadn’t left anything weird behind. He shook hands with Nathan, who was on his way out the door with Alice, who hugged Rocco, telling him she would try to forgive him for killing Dale, thanking him for supporting her through the year, ‘despite all of that’. Sunny was at the Gladstone Hotel making last preparations for their occupation scheme, and promised to rush home to spend the last of the night together by the fire. This left Rocco to pace around the house again, listless, feeling savagely alone, and then startled when Beth came charging through the door.

‘I found someone to take the rest of my shift,’ she panted in the hallway, looking as stunned and dishevelled as he did. Rocco panicked, and felt a surge of stress and relief hit him from opposing sides. He saw by the look on his friend’s face what he had done. He’d been attaching a string to Sydney on his way out again, even though he was desperate to cut and run.

Rocco woke up terrified by the first of his alarms, seeing a message from Sunny that read, Have fun in there, but you better wake me up before you go. He raced to the shower and came back to his room to find that Beth had gone back to her bed, closing the door, unresponsive to his knocks.

‘Sunny!’ he called into the yard. ‘I have to leave!’

He saw their head appear through the shed window, their rebleached hair lit up by the flickering fluorescent lights. They came out the door and into the early morning wearing an oversized Mounties puffer jacket.

‘Nice jacket,’ he said.

‘Yeah, a friend of mine gave it to me,’ Sunny smiled weakly, pushing their head into his sternum by way of a hug. Helen came to the back door and ran out barefoot to join the embrace, until it was just the three of them holding each other lopsided among the knee-high grasses and weeds.

‘We’ll miss you,’ she hummed while squeezing him around the rib cage, tender from the trial match he’d blown. She added, excited: ‘Good luck at the World Cup!’

Rocco smiled awkwardly at her assumption, and thanked her for her support.

‘I can’t believe you’re missing the grand final,’ Sunny said, annoyed that Rocco took a cheap one-way flight on that day of all days, ‘and the occupation.’

Before he could apologise, he looked down to see that his Uber was on the approach. He ran back into the house, yelling over his shoulder to come visit, then yelled ‘Go Parra’ for Sunny’s benefit. He collected his bags and stopped to knock again at Beth’s door.

‘Just go, Rocco,’ she called back to him, her voice muffled as she added: ‘You’re being clingy.’

In his guilt, he went to ask her to visit sometime, but backed away from the door instead. He gripped his bags and jogged down the front steps, past Alice’s Astra in the driveway, and into the car that was waiting for him.

No one had been able to find a replacement for Rocco, so Helen was pressured into requesting a temporary rent reduction from real estate. She caved to alleviate Beth and Sunny’s financial stress, and would have been relieved herself if she didn’t already know that it was a fool’s errand. That Nathan and Alice had also asked her to push for a drop in the rent infuriated her; she knew they had the money to cover the extra room, at least temporarily. But she went along with it, called the real estate office, and on raising the prospect of lowering the rent for a month, the agent seemed to seethe down the phone line.

‘The market has been growing all year,’ she explained, ‘you’d be more likely looking at an increase rather than whatever it is you’re suggesting.’

‘We’re not able to pay an increase,’ Helen said, asserting herself. ‘We won’t do it.’

‘We can talk about that when we discuss the renewal of your lease.’

‘Well, we’re not going anywhere.’

‘You know the owners have every reason to sell,’ the agent said, annoyed at Helen’s stubborn response. ‘It’s a very desirable plot of land.’

‘Our landlord loves this house,’ she reminded her, ‘he would never let it go.’

There was silence down the line, before the agent informed her that the man who had come to prune the lemon tree had passed away, that the house was now in the hands of his children who weren’t so sentimental about the premises. ‘I would only say that the amount of money on offer to the new owners would be very convincing. So if you like it there...my advice to you would be to be the best tenants you can, and do whatever is asked of you.’

‘Like I said,’ Helen replied sternly, ‘we’re not going anywhere.’

The agent collected herself over the phone line. ‘I understand. I’ll let the owners know your feelings. There’s a month until your notice period in any case. Perhaps we should discuss it then.’

ROCCO’S FAMILY USED TO TELL HIM that he was uncannily similar to the uncle he had never met: the uncle he was named after, the only family member from Turin who could speak enough English to talk to him as a kid. His mum used to prop him up on the phone seat late at night and hand him the receiver (that he remembered now being the size of his head), holding it in two hands as this apparition crackled long distance down the phone line. Speaking in strange idioms like ‘always listen to your heart’, from a place that sounded so far away that he imagined it to be the moon. Some nights it sounded like the man was already dead, calling from elsewhere and training him for his future. Rocco’s family told him it was his superstitions that made him so like his uncle, his obsessions with things that didn’t seem to matter: electrical tape wrapped exactly two-and-a-half times around his football boot, outside to inside, from the moment he could do it himself. So Rocco blamed everything that happened on failing to see the signs. He was convinced that he should have listened to such symbols: the birds he’d seen killed in the street, the sound of the cuckoos spending time in their yard, that he should have been treading carefully instead of flying loose. How could he have watched a pigeon die in front of him and just hope that everything would be okay?

Grand Final Day

Sio crammed his drum kit behind the amps stacked in the back of his hatchback, then continued goading Sunny about Parramatta’s chances in the grand final. In his brown cotton Penrith jersey, Sio outlined the many weaknesses that had been exposed in the Eels through the finals series, laughing and pounding the dashboard each time.

‘Just an absolutely piss-weak back five when it comes to yardage,’ he cackled, drum stands clunking in the back as he whipped the Civic off the Princes Highway and towards Sydenham. ‘Like what’s the plan? Give the ball to Paulo and RCG twice a set while everyone else waits for their time to shine? I’m embarrassed for you already!’

In the passenger seat, Sunny tried to remain stoically indifferent to Sio’s needling, texting the others with details for the plan they’d concocted as they double parked in the bus zone out front of the Gladstone Hotel. Sio switched the hazard lights on and insulted Sunny’s jersey while hoisting drum pieces and amps onto the footpath to the incessant bleating of horns behind them. Then he raced the car around the corner and into the pub car park. They met the others in the sports bar, where Sio got to setting up the kit on the mezzanine floor which had been doubling as a stage for Sunny’s weekly punk shows. Linda flirted with Pat as he laid out cables and leads along the bar in preparation for doing sound. A group of regulars interrupted her to ask for an explanation, which she provided wearily, assuring them the band wouldn’t affect the screening of the main game. Pat then handed them a copy of Sunny’s flyer, and the men made grunts of relief, glad to see that the day’s set times included the kick-off for the NRL grand final.

The plan to get the gear locked behind the Gladdy’s doors had started with setting up a two-band bill to play after the men’s game. Sunny had given up on their idea to bring a patsy in the form of a band they didn’t like. Instead, they assembled two bands who were sympathetic to the cause, people they could trust to go through the next steps, which required: a few members to get absurdly drunk in view of the main bar’s CCTV camera to the point of being ‘kicked out’ after they played (this justified their leaving gear behind); for someone to bring a large painted bed sheet as a banner for their band (this was to be draped behind the stage to block the cameras in the band room); and for everyone else to bring as many people as possible (ensuring the day would look sufficiently chaotic to explain away how Linda failed to set the alarms).

Helen arrived in the sports bar as the NRLW grand final kicked off, a handful of old men looking up at her in concert. She walked past them (their heads dropping in unison as she neared) and found Sunny with the members of the bands. They drank nervously with half an eye on the game, and soon split into groups: one to the beer garden to smoke, the other to the big screen to watch the second half. Newcastle put the Eels away comfortably while the first band soundchecked the room. They were a new group called The Left Hemisphere, comprising the embittered members of the alleyway synth-punk band who quit when their singer insisted on licensing their music to a beer ad campaign. Sunny and Pat were all too happy to embrace them into the fold. The band finished the soundcheck by ending mid-song and shrugging, just as Jimmy Barnes and his daughter went through the pre-match entertainment on mute on the screens of the sports bar. A crowd assembled, and Linda turned the volume up on the TVs around the venue, the commentary team recapping a week of news ahead of the much-hyped ‘all Western Sydney grand final’. With the nerves of the game spreading through the pub, Sio started up at Sunny again, Parramatta already looking likely to cave under the pressure when the whistle blew.

‘Got a name for a grindcore band,’ Sio said as Nathan Cleary launched a kick into the sky, careening down on Parramatta’s right winger, notorious for his issues with the high ball: ‘Waqa Blake Bomb Defusal.’ But Blake caught it comfortably. Then Penrith scored. Then they scored again, Sunny rubbing the back of their neck in frustration, Sio riding his stool and slapping the table with glee. After an hour, down by eighteen at half-time, Sio suggested a name for a party rock band: ‘How about King Gutho & The Botched Dropouts?’

Sunny walked away from their torment, and came back sullen for the second half, the Eels held scoreless until the final five minutes. Only when it was too late did they cross the line: twice in quick succession, losing by fourteen points. ‘How about Consolation Try,’ Sunny said, dispirited, as one of the only Parramatta supporters who hadn’t left the pub early. ‘Post-dolewave band, industry- approved for the festival circuit.’

The roar of a handful of Penrith fans in the beer garden wafted in through the back door as The Left Hemisphere set up. Linda dropped the Channel 9 audio and faded across to the PA for the thudding of the kick drum. Maria, who had been talking at Helen through the entire game, ran to the stage to watch The Left Hemisphere play a brisk and forgettable ten-minute set. The room clapped politely when it was over, waiting for Sunny, Sio and Maria to change their gear over. When they arrived on stage, they played fast and focused, with Sunny preserving their voice for the occupation. They tried to hand the mic over to members in the crowd to sing for them, but no one had ever cared enough about the band to learn their lyrics, Sunny yelling: ‘just make it up, it’s your band now!’ The people gathered in the pub were confused by the activity, but swarmed around nonetheless, reaching over each other at the bar to where Linda and her two bartenders rushed back and forth from fridges, to taps, to tills, to terminals. When HDPE finished their set, they packed up lazily, everyone involved with the plan looking at each other from across the room: Pat, Sunny, Linda, Sio, Helen, Maria, each waiting to be told what to do.

Linda closed the pub early, citing the next morning’s public holiday as reason for the midnight close. Those in the gaming section left bitterly, one making a comment about the ‘lingerers’ in the sports bar on his way out, until Linda told him impatiently, ‘They’re staff,’ and the old man in the Eels jersey responded, ‘They don’t look it!’ When the last of her bartenders clocked off for the night, she locked the plotters inside. In small groups, they followed the route Linda had devised, rushing upstairs to a room she’d set aside for them. The few who lived upstairs had been forewarned, nodding at those who arrived in their residence, unperturbed by the parts of the plan she had filled them all in on. They squeezed into the corners of the hotel room, fitting in around the amps and drums stacked high. Linda went downstairs to turn out all the lights, adding her own locks to the inside of the doors, and joined the others where they split a case of beer and lay in wait.

Beth coasted through the early morning roads in the back of an Uber, staring out the window at the Canterbury construction sites, listening to the driver mumbling on the phone. She texted Sunny again as they crossed the Cooks River. Still no updates from their planned occupation. Beth got out of the cab and struggled with the door, finding only Nathan and Alice watching a student documentary in the living room. She shivered as she walked past them on her way to the kitchen. They’d kept to themselves since the discovery of Nathan’s manuscript; Nathan had gone into his shell, acting meek and ashamed in order to garner pity. Beth looked to the liquor shelf and poured herself a glass of his scotch, and returned swiftly past the couple, who pretended she wasn’t there. She veered right instead of left at the hallway, sitting on the floor of Rocco’s half-emptied room. She leaned against the wall, sipped at her drink and thought of him, his smells of grass, sweat and steel still lingering in the air. She thought of the distance that he’d kept from her, how it was breached in brief moments of intense personal connection. The way he cared for her in secret, switching to a platonic state so swiftly when out in the world. She was unsure of whether she’d fallen for him, or wanted him dead, deciding it was probably a bit of both just as the screams of an overpowered car engine cut through the air from the street. Her thoughts were interrupted by the screech of tyres slipping on tarmac. Then the tyre smoke collected at the front of the house. Furious at the interruption, she jumped at the sound of someone bashing at the screen door. Beth leapt to her feet and peered out through the hall. On seeing the shadows of two more men rising behind the figure banging on the screen, she sprinted through the corridor and slammed the door shut, the deadlock slipping closed as they continued to bash with their fists.

‘Where’s Nathan?’ the man yelled.

Alice and Nathan approached the hallway timidly.

‘Who the fuck are they?’ Beth hissed.

‘I don’t know!’ Nathan whispered, frozen in a panic.

‘Tell him to get the fuck out here!’ the man yelled again.

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about!’ Beth yelled back at him.

‘We know he lives here,’ he sneered.

‘He’s not home!’ yelled Alice desperately, receiving a shot glance from Beth.

‘So you do know who he is,’ the man replied.

‘I told you he’s not home!’ Alice said again, turning to look for him. He was gone.

Beth ran crouched through the house, seeing shadows of the figures outside through the glass of the front door. She flew into each room to check the windows were locked, arriving in the kitchen to find Nathan huddled on the ground. She looked at him in contempt, locking the kitchen door and running back into the lounge room to find Alice holding her phone in two hands, shaking as she struggled to dial Triple-O.

‘No cops!’ Beth hissed, taking the phone off her and stalking around the house. Going back into Rocco’s room and looking among the boxes he’d left behind. ‘Where did he leave his gun?’

‘His gun?’ Alice hissed. ‘Rocco’s gone! He wouldn’t leave a gun in the house...’

‘Yeah, Alice, he just popped a rifle in carry-on before jetting off to the UK. Of course he left it here.’

‘Jesus, Beth, what are we going to do with a rifle? We need to call the cops.’

‘They probably are cops, you idiot,’ she spat, staring crazed into Alice’s timid gaze.

The man continued to yell for Nathan from outside, reaching through the broken shards of the flimsy screen door to knock firmly on the glass.

‘Fuck off!’ Beth screeched back at him, crawling into Helen’s room and looking out the corner of a window to see three cars out the front. When she crawled back into the hallway, Alice snatched her phone back and called the police, determined, and no longer shaking.

‘He’s not home and he’s not coming home!’ Alice yelled finally. ‘I’m on the phone to the police right now!’

‘That’s not very smart,’ the man said, one of the others saying something to him that changed his tone. ‘Tell Nathan we’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that...and the day after that. Until he faces us.’

They heard the cars tear off up the street, the smoke hanging in the air as the engine noise whipped up and out into the distance.

‘Yes, hello,’ Alice was saying into the phone, suddenly composed as Nathan reappeared from the kitchen, ‘I need to report an attempted break-in.’ She placed her hand over the phone and said to Nathan: ‘We can’t sleep here.’ He nodded in agreement, silent and ashamed.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Beth said, eyes narrowed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly, thinking. ‘But Alice is right; we can’t be here. You should come with us, we can put you up at Alice’s dad’s house.’ Alice shot him a look.

‘You two do what you want,’ Beth replied. ‘I’m going the fuck to bed. I don’t have time for this shit.’

She ignored Nathan’s protests and listened to Alice talk to the police in calm, respectful tones. She went back to Rocco’s room and looked through his things, digging deep into his emptied wardrobe and around the furniture he left behind. She leafed through the bags and boxes that she’d agreed to drop into a clothes bin, realising with finality that he hadn’t left anything behind for her. She retreated to her room, closed her door and sat back against the wall. Just like Rocco, the rifle was gone.

Beth listened through the door when the police arrived a half hour later. She heard them come into the hallway, telling Alice and Nathan to be calm, saying they’ll make sure a patrol comes back through the night, and then the sounds of the officer handing over a card and telling them to call if they have any insights on the identities of the would-be attackers. Beth lay back on the floor and fell asleep for a moment, shuddering back awake at a noise, and went to the hall to see Alice and Nathan slip out the front door and drive off into the night.

‘Fucking cowards,’ she spat at them, and went through the house checking everyone’s windows again. She checked the house group chat which confirmed that the others had successfully locked themselves inside the Gladstone and were waiting for the right moment to set up on the balcony. Beth didn’t want to alarm them, imagining the heights of their trespasser’s stress, so sent through a garbled string of emojis: peace fingers, devil face, guitar, angel, fire. Her heart turned over when a burst of wind howled outside, and she began to panic. Her leg ached from all the crouching and rushing, so she took an Endone that she’d managed to save for the right occasion. Then she paused and took a Valium, to calm herself. She checked the lock on the front door again, and let herself into Helen’s room to take her pouch of tobacco, which she brought to the backyard. She nestled in her spot on the outdoor couch, rolled a cigarette and lit it, dangling a hand over an overflowing ashtray. She slumped back against the warped masonite tacked into the exposed timber frames of the laundry. Brushing cobwebs off her shoulder, she spread out and pulled Helen’s ridiculous blanket over herself, facing out across the shed, to where the long grass stood tall, still unmowed. She checked the time again, only a few hours from sunrise, and let herself fall asleep, hoping that waking up to the morning light would set her straight.

Linda opened the door to the corridor. She ventured out quietly, reminding the only wakeful resident of their plan; he in turn negotiated his continued silence in exchange for an afternoon of free drinks. She agreed with a sigh, then propped open the doors to the balcony, returning to the room to take an armful of cymbal stands before ushering the others out in turns: Sio with the kick drum, Sunny with the bass amp, and Pat with mics and leads resting on top of the guitar amp. Maria and Helen sat awkwardly in the corner, cross-legged on the floor, touching gently at the knee.

‘I should help them set up,’ Maria said, blushing, getting up to peek through the door. ‘I’ll see you out there,’ she added, hoisting Sio’s cymbal bag over her shoulder, tucking the snare under her arm like a football.

‘Okay,’ Helen breathed, dumbstruck until the door clicked shut. She sat there, breathing through a sense of dread and then snapped out of it, suddenly frightened, feeling haunted while alone in the musty hotel room.

On the balcony, the group set up in a rush. The neighbourhood bird songs rose in volume, mynas flitting over the skyline, cockatoos on the branches of a blue gum screeching in a pack.

‘Will that be in the recording?’ Sunny asked Pat in a panic.

‘Probably,’ Pat admitted, clipping a microphone to the kick drum.

‘We’ll keep it in yeah?’ Sunny breathed. ‘In between tracks?’

Pat stood up slowly, his body tender from the all-nighter, and gripped Sunny by both shoulders.

‘Do not worry about the sound of fucking cockatoos appearing in the dead space of your recording,’ he said. ‘Focus on your performance. We won’t get another crack at this.’

Sunny nodded, duly motivated, and stepped nervously around the balcony. Sio sat himself behind the drum kit. Maria tuned her bass first, then saw Sunny warming up their voice, and so tuned their guitar too, leaning it face-first against the amp when she was done. Sunny took a breath to compose themself, hoisted their Squire Strat over a shoulder and smiled wide on seeing Helen hurry onto the balcony, arrested by the glare of the light.

The sun came over the horizon to bathe them in pink and orange hues. When Sio rolled around the drum kit at a signal from Pat, Sunny tried to get back into character, stifling a surge of pride as Maria started a long, slow bass intro. Sunny jacked the volume on their amp to meet the moment, and the screeches and howls of their live set was underway. They played their standard intro, moved on to one of their few well-known songs, and then played their cover of No Trend’s ‘For the Fun of It All’. Fearful about being cut off at any moment by someone charging up the stairs, they played their best new song, then an old song, then improvised with some feedback as planned in case the recording was cut off prematurely. Nothing happened. Lights came on in the apartments opposite, but Pat mimed at the band to keep going, so Sio yelled out a song title, and the others played to it. Then another old song. They played their warm-up jam to finish, which kept going and going, still waiting to be cut off by some external force. Maria and Sunny hit the final note for an outro to their now twenty-minute set, ringing out and working the neck of the guitar, kicking the bass over to keep the feedback running in wait for Sunny to draw it to a close with a lyrical turn. But Sunny just breathed heavily into the microphone, searching for a final line that would never come.

With the recording still running, the feedback screeching into the mics, Pat ended up unwittingly providing the record’s coda, saying at the sound desk to Helen: ‘If there’s one eternal truth for this city, it’s that it takes a shitload of planning to get to something as underwhelming as this.’

They cut the amps. Pat saved the recording project, and backed it up to a USB stick he hung off the key ring on his belt loop, preparing for his laptop to be confiscated by whoever came to shut them down. All six of them were baffled that nothing was happening. Linda went inside and returned with two bottles of prosecco she’d stowed in the hotel room, fired the corks into the street and passed them around, but everyone loitered in a hushed silence. Pat sat at one of the plastic tables, Sio looked over the wall to try to get a view of what was happening below, and Maria joined Helen on the floor. They awaited the punishment for their transgression, but no riot squad sprinted up the central stairwell. No tactical team rappelled down on them from a police chopper. No local news crew filmed them from street level. The few lights that had switched on in the apartment blocks were now switched off. The first 426 of the day completed its route and pulled into its stop at the end of the line. They watched the bus driver walk into the public toilet and close the door to a cubicle. Without a word, Linda started bringing the gear back down to the sports bar.

‘Well,’ Sunny said finally, ‘I guess we got away with it.’

‘Shit, don’t sound so happy,’ Sio laughed.

Sunny wondered what Rocco would have said about the ‘occupation’ turning into a one-off event, devolving from the seizure of private property to the sending of a message, to a slightly unusual recording location. Sunny helped Linda with the gear, and when back on the rooftop, they lined up along the balcony edge and looked out over New Canterbury Road, the sunrise throwing ever more spectacular colours across them. Helen saw a black Commodore and two Hyundai Sonatas fly towards them, whipping around the corner and turning sharply onto Marrickville Road.

‘Hoons, at this hour,’ she joked, shaking her head.

‘Nah, they’re undercover cops,’ Sio said.

‘Cops don’t drive Hyundais,’ Maria replied.

‘What hoon have you ever seen in a Hyundai?’ he argued.

‘What cop have you ever seen in a Hyundai?’ she replied tersely.

‘All the new cops drive Hyundais,’ Sio insisted.

‘Bullshit, they’re all try-hard patriots driving their little Holdens around.’

‘No, it’s true,’ Sunny interrupted. ‘They won the government tender around the time Holden went broke,’ they trailed off and thought about Nathan. ‘My housemate wrote an essay about it.’

They kept waiting and passed around the bottles, Linda flinging them onto the pub roof when they were finished. They all went back to staring into the rising sun.

‘You see that?’ Sio asked, pointing towards the church spire.

‘The smoke?’

‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘Probably back-burning.’

‘There’s nothing to back burn through there,’ Linda said. ‘It’s all old shops and apartment blocks.’

‘... and our house,’ Helen added, the words hanging in the air until a fire engine whipped past below them, heading towards the rising plumes.

ALICE CRIED IN THE CAR, mortified at what had transpired. Driven away from the house in the middle of the night, hastily packed bags in the back seat, Nathan already justifying their next steps saying, ‘In some ways there’s an imperative to cease distributing money to the landlord class. Buying a home, regardless of whether the money comes from your dad or not, isn’t something to be ashamed of. ’ She closed her eyes, feeling hopeless, carted away by her boyfriend the plagiarist, away from her housemates that included an animal killer, a hoarder, a self-described spinster, and a wannabe concubine. What a disgraceful year to have lived, she thought, blaming Nathan for it all, thinking that if she could just get to Christmas and finish their family events, then get through the holiday period, and then his birthday in January, then she could finally leave. The same promise she’d made going into 2022.

Missed Connections

Rocco suspected he hadn’t made the Italian rugby league squad by the time he was boarding the plane to London. Three weeks before the first game kicked off, and he still hadn’t gotten word. He felt an unspeakable barrier in front of him when he thought to reach out and ask, knowing that if he did, and found out it was a no, the whole journey would be over. He crammed into an aisle seat next to two passengers who would be afraid to ask him to move, and kept the dream alive. As the plane took off, he began a routine of alternating codeine and Valium, swallowing them with tiny bottles of gin that the steward handed to him in generous handfuls with a wink, sympathising with the discomfort that came with Rocco’s size. He slept the whole way to Singapore.

At the connection in Changi, Rocco trudged through the airport and kept his phone switched off, worried that if he opened the line back to Sydney, he would get nothing but bad news. So he continued in denial and managed to eat four meals over the five- hour stopover. He shuffled onto the fourteen-hour leg to London, and was sat next to another large man who described himself and Rocco as caged animals. Rocco didn’t feel caged necessarily, but it did seem like he was in captivity: depressed, futile, trapped and subservient. The in-flight entertainment featured an Italian cinema package, which he thought was typical of the country’s returning cultural moment, and fell asleep to Rome, Open City, waking up in a shock four hours later. Pleased about his time jump, he requested more tiny bottles of booze and expected to cruise through the rest of the flight, but then he started to think about what waited for him on the other side, and didn’t sleep for the remainder. When he landed at Heathrow, he turned his phone on for the first time in over a day, and saw the messages and missed WhatsApp calls flood his screen, ignoring them all, flicking through them to find the Italian coach’s voice message. It told him they had no room for front rowers this tournament, and that he wouldn’t be in the World Cup squad after all. Rocco now had to admit that he had no idea why he was in London, or what he had expected to happen. He hadn’t booked accommodation. He had figured that he’d travel to the north of England for the first Italian game, thinking that even if he wasn’t selected, if he arrived in the right place he might luck into a spot by injury (force majeure, as he had once read in a playing contract). That plan felt ridiculous to him now. He dragged himself through the gates and scanners and inspections, and when he came to the checkpoint, he knew immediately from the border guard’s eyebrow that he was in trouble.

‘Is there any reason for there to be an alert on your file?’ she asked him.

‘There shouldn’t be,’ he replied, trying to appear confident, and then panicking: ‘I’m here to play in the Rugby League World Cup.’ He showed her some supporting documentation composed of printed-out team lists with his player profile photo displayed, sheets of nonsensical documents that he’d brought in case something went awry.

‘All right,’ the guard replied and typed at the computer in front of her. ‘Says the World Cup was in 2021.’

Rocco tried to appear calm. ‘It was postponed to this year, but they kept the year in the name.’

‘What, like the Olympics?’

‘Yes, like the Olympics.’

‘Don’t get testy with me,’ she instructed, continuing to inspect her monitor until she confirmed the fixtures commencing in October. ‘So why would I have an alert on your file?’

Rocco thought of the possible reasons over the years: I Pentiti’s illegal border crossing to the US to tour in 2018, a few dubious trips to London for hardcore festivals over the years, some minor charges in Italy that he wouldn’t think would be on the watch of a UK border guard. He decided she was bluffing.

‘I didn’t realise I had a file,’ Rocco began, ‘but there’s no reason for me to be denied entry. Maybe because I have two passports?’ She ignored his Italian passport, and reminded him of Brexit, a line which he had learned UK border guards were fond of delivering. She asked him to detail his itinerary, so Rocco explained that he hadn’t planned it all out yet, but was planning to move back to Italy after the World Cup. He hadn’t booked those flights, he said, since he didn’t know if they would make it past the pool stage. He added that it was a complicated story, with many moving parts and boardroom politics, but that it shouldn’t be a problem.

‘People get into this country with simple stories,’ she explained, ‘and I’m being told that you don’t have a simple story. Do you have a work visa?’

‘I’m not here to work.’

‘Are you or are you not playing in a World Cup?’

‘Yes, I am,’ he said impatiently, ‘but I’m not at that kind of level.’ ‘Let me try again: are you getting paid to play sport in the United Kingdom?’

‘No,’ he stammered.

‘You’re aware that on both of these passports, you are not able to work if you cross the border?’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to regain his confidence. ‘The thing is, they only just announced a squad without me in it.’

‘Which would mean?’

‘That I’m not entering the country to work.’

‘And yet, you’re here to play in the Rugby World Cup.’

He thought better of correcting her.

‘I can put you through to my coach. He could explain.’

‘Fine,’ she said, examining him suspiciously, ‘phone him.’

Rocco ignored the time difference and after being screened a couple of times, eventually got through to his coach.

‘Rocco,’ he demanded. ‘You don’t answer for two days and now you’re calling me at this fucking hour?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m in London.’

After a long and weighty pause, his coach said that he wasn’t even due to fly out for a few more days, that he didn’t know what to make of this situation, and finally, through his teeth: ‘I have a lot of people asking for favours right now.’

‘I’m not asking for a favour,’ Rocco insisted. ‘I’m at border security at Heathrow. They need proof that I’m here for the World Cup, but that I’m not being paid to play in the World Cup.’

Rocco listened to his coach breathe heavily down the line.

‘Why couldn’t you just wait? I told you that I couldn’t promise anything, I told you –’

‘Shit...don’t worry about it then.’

‘What the fuck are you doing in England, Rocco?!’

Rocco turned away from the guard. ‘I wanted to be in the country in case something happened,’ he explained.

‘Mate, you’re not in the squad. I’m sorry. Maybe if you can find your way to a game to watch...I can see if I can get you a ticket.’ Rocco looked at the border guard who softened when reading between the lines. ‘I’m sorry, Rocco,’ his coach continued. ‘If I don’t see you over there, we’ll get a coffee back in Sydney, all right?’

‘Okay,’ Rocco stuttered. ‘Grazie.’

‘Bye mate.’

‘Ciao.’

The border guard looked up at Rocco patiently. ‘You didn’t think to put me on?’

‘There was nothing for him to say,’ he said softly. ‘I won’t be playing.’

She looked through the hall to see the influx of another arrival begin to fill the zigs and zags of the queue leading to her. ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said, folding up his Australian passport. ‘And I don’t understand the predicament you’re in right now, but nothing you are saying to me adds up. Now, I don’t know if you’re lying –’

‘I’m not lying.’

‘– or if you’re just a strange lad. But it looks to me like you’re here for a holiday, yeah?’

Rocco nodded.

‘So go have a holiday in London,’ she said stamping his passport. ‘Book a flight out of England within the month and don’t work. I assure you that today, you were lucky. One of my colleagues over there would have sent you back to Australia, do you understand?’ Rocco nodded again.

‘You’re one mistake away from a travel ban, and two passports won’t do much for you if you’re turned back at the border.’

Rocco felt a relief wash over him, not because his interrogation was over, but because with his career finished, he had nothing left to fight for. Rocco collected his bags and hauled them to the train station. He came up into the morning sun when the train neared Paddington on the Heathrow Express, and changed to the Overground, which he took to Liverpool Street to get to the only place he knew in the city: The Commercial Tavern in Shoreditch. On arrival, he went into an alley, unzipped his checked luggage, and in great big scoops, took out his football boots, his mouth guard, his training gear, and his strapping tape, and dumped it all in a trash can. Then he went into the pub, a place he only went to because he’d once ended up there when I Pentiti had toured the UK years prior. He had met a guy on that tour who worked in a tattoo parlour nearby, but didn’t know whether to contact him or not. He’d be more than happy to host Rocco if he asked, but by the time he had his phone in hand to send the message, he couldn’t find the courage to call in the favour. He felt the inertia of trying to switch from rugby league mode with his coach, to ex-punk mode with his acquaintance. So instead of messaging the tattooist, he called his former coach from Saluzzo instead, who still lived on the outskirts of Turin. Unlike the tattooist he met back in 2016, whose friendship status could never be certain, Enzo would always be his coach. Rocco arranged to fly to Turin that night, where Enzo promised to pick him up and put him up until he found his feet. He finished his pint of Guinness and retraced his steps back to the airport. He was desperate to feel at home again, to feel stable, and, looking back at the shit he had spun over the past year, began to worry that he’d become a person with very little integrity.

Through the plane window, Rocco watched the sun strike the Alps, his knees pressed up against the seat in front of him, his half-emptied bottle of water popping as the pressure changed for the descent. It was a view he couldn’t remember ever taking notice of, only ever flying back from London hungover and asleep. As Torino appeared beneath him, he thought of his former bandmates, his former teammates, his former workmates, his former housemates. There were so many people who knew these isolated parts of him, yet he felt that no one knew him in his entirety, and he thought, no one ever would. He didn’t know which parts of himself he would reveal on this next chapter, didn’t know where he was supposed to go, where he wanted to live, or what he wanted to do.

Rocco sailed through the checkpoints of Torino airport, arriving outside to find Enzo waiting for him. He fell into the embrace of his former coach, on the brink of collapsing as they ported a piece of luggage each to Enzo’s work truck. He had left it double parked and with the windows open by the taxi rank, which was covered in banners that made a case against the encroachment of Uber and the interventions of Brussels reading: TORINO vs BRUXELLES, BRUXELLES PRO UBER? He paused briefly to try to place this politically, but was too tired, taking only an internal note to parody this in the event that he ever reformed I Pentiti.

‘Allora,’ Enzo drawled, thrusting the truck into gear. ‘How was Sydney?’

Rocco tried to think back at the years that had passed. ‘Exhausting.’

‘And you’ll stay here this time?’

‘I think so. There’s nothing for me back there.’

‘Which means of course, there’s something for you here?’

He stared out the window as Enzo took them along the motorways circling the city limits, catching glimpses of the sprawling city blocks. ‘I hope so,’ he said, falling silent as they entered the countryside. He fell asleep against the window.

Enzo made him work for his stay that week. He took Rocco to the edge of the city to a home extension he was working on, an extra two rooms to be tacked onto the back of a farmhouse, the slab poured and lying in wait for Enzo to rope someone in to help with the framing. This was how Enzo had always operated: never getting around to hiring someone ongoing, doing everything himself until an opportunity came up to slip someone a handful of cash to help with some lifting and carrying. Enzo yelled out lengths and Rocco measured and cut the timber with his coach’s ancient drop saw, coming together to assemble a wall when they were done with its parts. By the end of the first day, the framing was complete and they sat back and marvelled at their handiwork.

‘See, this is satisfying,’ Rocco explained, already feeling better. ‘When I was in scaffolding, I’d do a day like this for someone, and then come back weeks later to pack it all down again.’ Enzo appeared baffled by the observation as he handed Rocco a beer.

Each day went the same way, moving on to extending the roof, the gutters, the exterior bricks, laid shoddily because Enzo refused to bring in a bricklayer, insisting on doing them himself. Rocco left his phone at home each day, and let himself feel disconnected and displaced for just long enough for the device’s addiction to slip away from him. He felt almost at home. They worked all morning and then drove back to split a litre of wine, eat piles of food, and fall asleep in the lounge chairs, before driving back to the job and working until the sun went down. Then, they came back to Enzo’s house and stumbled inside to drink and eat all over again with his wife and her mother and three kids who bickered constantly about things Rocco didn’t understand. The weekend came, and then the World Cup began, and Enzo forced him to sit down in the family room to watch Italy take on Scotland in the first pool round. Enzo beamed with pride that he had contributed to Italian Rugby League somewhere down the line, but Rocco tried to hide his shame at watching on TV what he should have been participating in.

‘I’m happy for Gioele,’ Rocco admitted, watching the Italian-based player who’d moved to Queensland to learn the game before the 2017 World Cup. ‘He made a lot of sacrifices. It’s a good send-off for him.’

‘You all sacrificed something,’ Enzo said, sagely.

Italy won comfortably and were ecstatic in celebration. Rocco sat on the couch drinking everything that was handed to him, ending his night by finishing a bottle of homemade grappa that Enzo had left for him before going to bed.

Rocco woke up on the couch, a tray by his side with peach juice and a croissant rested on it, a note to remind him to make himself a coffee. The juice was warm, and the pastry was cold. The kitchen stove and the moka pot were blocked off to him by the yelling of children. He fell back asleep. When he woke the second time, Rocco turned on his phone and swiped through dozens of notifications he couldn’t bear to deal with, eventually getting to a message from someone he’d played with once in Torino. She was going on tour with her thrash band through North America, and had heard via Silvia that he was looking for a place. She offered up her apartment for a month, but it came with the condition that he look after her cat. He froze momentarily, realised there was no possible way the word could have spread, and then agreed. Enzo was disappointed when Rocco told him he was leaving, but said he understood that Rocco needed to ‘make something of himself’.

The apartment was on the same block as the Askatasuna squat, a short walk from a public swimming pool he used to swim laps in, which he discovered on arrival was already closed for the season. He hauled his bags up the stairs and collected a key from the neighbour as instructed. He read through the notes she had left for the plants and the cat and then sat back in the couch, falling asleep. He woke hours later, dripping in sweat from the humidity trapped behind the closed windows. He ignored more texts, more DMs, and more calls. He ignored everyone and left his phone behind to go for a walk, testing his memory of the city by marching to each and every squat he could get to by foot or tram.

His memories of these Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestitiowere foggy by virtue of his only ever going inside to satirise them as front man of I Pentiti. Though it had taken him a few years, his experiences at the house Sunny nicknamed the Paradise Estate had changed his heart on the CSOA, and he felt ashamed to walk up to their gates with an earnest set of eyes. He used to see these idealistic crust punks and their exclusions and single-mindedness as banal and idiotic. Thinking that by shutting themselves off from the world and defending their closed circle, they allowed the rest of the world to get away with whatever it wanted. Rocco used to think that if you ever got behind those gates, as I Pentiti had on occasion, you heard only lip service to their forebears, but now Rocco was reflecting. He realised, after these few years away, that he had never given them credit for the burden that came with not just maintaining the squats, but all that came with continuing what they inherited. How could you keep the dreams that arose out of the Years of Lead, and drag them uphill into the twenty- first century? How could you possibly do justice to the actions and thoughts and theories of autonomia? It was the responsibility of the people in the CSOA to maintain their history, and Rocco had added nothing to the conversation outside of mockery and contempt. He saw the potential of punk again as an expression of these traditions. He saw that his previous attempts to grow rugby league in the north of Italy (his way of dovetailing Italy’s worker’s movements and theories of operaismo with the game’s history as a labour movement) was as confused as it was ineffective.

Over the next few days, he travelled to every spot he could remember going to when he first arrived in Torino. He went to every squat he’d played in (sometimes going inside for a rave, a hardcore gig, or to his chagrin, a folk punk performance). He went to every bar and café he remembered drinking in, he went to every trattoria he’d enjoyed eating in, and inspected every house he’d worked on for any length of time. He took the train to Lingotto, where he made a beeline to reassess the FIAT factory that he had idolised before his first arrival, the birth of what he knew of Italy’s years of protest. When he went there the first time, he’d hoped to see an incidental monument to the factory workers of Torino in the same way that his tour stop in Detroit years prior had made sense of the American auto industry. On his revisit, he remembered the crushing feeling that came over him when he saw that, rather than setting workers’ struggle in stone, it had been converted into a shopping centre. All its history had been glossed over with LED signage and rows of mobile phone suppliers, teenagers packing the tables of a McDonald’s: a complete ideology cleanse of a neighbourhood. He accepted Lingotto as a lost cause, then considered himself one. He resolved for a moment not to repeat that mistake, but the freedom of not having (as Beth once described it) ‘a thing’ was unsettling in its own way. He felt desperate to be in a band again.

He returned to the apartment and ignored a sea of messages to text Silvia, telling her that he was going to stay in Italy, but hadn’t figured out where to live yet.

You fucking idiot you hate Torino! she wrote. Come to Milano.

If you think that would be ok, I will, Rocco replied, pausing and then adding: but we have to get I Pentiti back together.

Certo! We’ll come back from the dead!

When should I come?

You dumb motherfucker, why are you asking me? Come whenever you want.

Do you know anyone with a room? One of the squats maybe?

Sleep on our couch, find a place later.

Would that be ok?

Relax Rocco, she wrote, taking longer to compose the final say. This time, we’ll be sure to make you a home.

‘I HOPE THIS DOESN’T SOUND like I’m treating you as Walt’s replacement, but I think I’d really like to reform one of our old traditions,’ Helen wrote to Sunny in her break. ‘Even though it’s shit there now, maybe we can just do it one more time: have a few drinks in Camperdown Park, wait for the new year to start. Like that time you came along with him, when it was you, me, Walt and Suze. Only it won’t be a fucken train wreck this time. I probably can’t stay for long cos I need to work, but if you’re interested and aren’t doing anything in the afternoon, it’d be nice to do. All good if not though, we can just hang at Pat’s before I go to work. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he could come too if he wanted. I’ll chat to you tonight anyway, just wanted to let you know I was thinking about new year’s and there’s no one else I really want to see. That’s all!’ Sunny wrote back with an in-joke: ‘YOU’RE asking ME what I resolve to do... IN THE NEW YEAR?!’

Fertilise the Future

‘When was the last time you saw the house?’ Helen asked Sunny over the phone.

‘Hold on,’ they replied, voice muffled as they finished chewing on a mouthful of something. ‘What house?’

‘Really?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m at the soon-to-be demolished site of Paradise Estate,’ Helen said, finally giving in to Sunny’s nicknaming, standing on the footpath and staring at the signage that adorned the front yard, metres wide like a mini-billboard, solar panels spread across the top to power the lights for the notice that read:

D.A. APPROVED THIRTY-TWO (32) APARTMENTS POSITIONED ON QUIET STREET IN HURLSTONE PARK.

A photo of the property manager who had shown them the house almost a year earlier sat at the bottom, smiling, seemingly happy at her promotion to the sales department.

‘I haven’t seen it since we were kicked out,’ Sunny admitted. ‘Why?’

‘They’re turning it into apartments.’

‘Figures,’ Sunny said, chewing again, ‘it’s Sydney.’

‘No, but it’s D.A. approved.’

‘So?’

‘So that takes ages to get through council. It was their plan from the start. How did we never think to check?’

‘Who had the time?’ they said, suddenly irritated. ‘The fuck are you doing there anyway?’

‘I was going past on the bus and wanted to see what it looked like.’

‘Yeah, but why?

‘You reflect on New Year’s Eve don’t you? That’s what people do?’

‘No, Helen, you think about the next year on new year’s. You’re supposed to forget the bullshit of the year that just finished and start pretending that the next one isn’t going to be bullshit too. You take lots of drugs to distract yourself from the fact that everyone’s looking for a better party, and then when you’re high enough, you do something really dumb, and you wake up hating yourself, and then you start all over again.’

‘My mistake,’ Helen mumbled, starting to walk back to New Canterbury Road to meet Sunny in Camperdown Park, where they had agreed to recreate the tradition she and Walt had set years earlier. She walked past one of the neighbours who didn’t recognise her enough to say hello, went past the church where a nun she’d once spoken to nodded at her politely, and crossed the road to wait for the next 428, trying to shake the impossible sense that she could still smell smoke in the air.

Sunny and Helen had guessed what happened to the house the moment they left the Gladdy. They had embraced everyone on the balcony when they wrapped up, laughed about the sense of occasion they’d all failed to construct, and gone their separate ways before the cleaners were due to arrive at the pub. But as the two plodded down the road, they lost their giddiness, knowing they were walking to the site of a fire. They turned the corner at the church and saw a collection of neighbours crowding around the front of their house as a firefighter brought a hose back to the yard from around the side gate. The fire was still smouldering. An ambulance beeped a horn to clear the spectators, turned on its lights and blasted the sirens as it took off towards the hospital. Sunny and Helen pushed through those who gathered, tired and wasted and high and dishevelled, unsure of how to look, what to do, or what to say on approaching the front door. A cop with a blond buzzcut went to push Helen and Sunny away, but saw from their expressions that they weren’t just curious onlookers. They stood on the front lawn and waited to be told what to do.

A firefighter told them it was safe to go in the house, describing how the fire had started in the shed, which released a deep groan from Sunny. It had burned through the yard and garden, but had been extinguished just in time to prevent it from moving through the house. He said it stopped at the laundry and back porch, where they had found Beth right at the edge of the flames, somehow sleeping through it.

‘She was very lucky,’ he said, explaining that the timing of their arrival was fortunate, a neighbour from one of the apartments having called in the fire just as it had gotten going, and adding finally: ‘Your friend chose a bad night to sleep under the stars.’

They gave their reports to the police, lying about being out partying after the grand final, and when all were satisfied, they went back through the house to inspect the damage. There was little evidence of any fire until the back door, where black marks from the flames ran up the open windows, the flyscreens destroyed. Ash and dust were blown into the corners of the kitchen, and when they went outside, they found the grass blackened by flames. The outdoor couch was blackened too, the burn marks cartoonishly broken by the silhouette of the blanket Beth had been lying under. The garden was razed, pockmarked with spindly burnt-out stems, and then the shed: the roof partly collapsed, the weight on the door jamb preventing Sunny from getting inside. They opened the back gate and together, they managed to jam open the roller door until it caught where the tracks warped. Down on all fours, they shone their phone’s torch inside to examine the charred evidence of their archive, peering through the wreckage of warped vinyl, melted tape cases, paper turned to ash. Sunny sighed heavily, laid down and rolled over onto their back, staring emptily into the clouds.

‘You okay?’ Helen asked, looking down at them with concern.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ they lied, thinking about how little it seemed they’d be able to rescue from the wreckage, recalling all the tapes they never got around to digitising, wondering if the hard drives would have survived, now regretting having ignored the constant prompts to pay for extra cloud storage. They closed their eyes, held their breath, then looked back to Helen. ‘I hated archiving anyway.’

Helen led Sunny inside and to her bed, where they both lay down clothed, falling into a deep sleep. They woke hours later to the noise of thumps and crashing through the house. Helen elbowed Sunny awake, both of them rising to see if Nathan and Alice had come home. They saw instead three strangers moving in and out of their room. Helen clenched her fists by instinct, steadied her body and stepped firmly into the corridor.

‘Who the fuck are you!’ she yelled, before Sunny placed a hand on her shoulder.

‘Nathan asked us to collect his things,’ Omar explained, gesturing to the front yard where a van was reversed crooked in the driveway.

‘He said Alice wasn’t comfortable coming back to the house,’ Clive added. ‘I hope that’s all right. I assumed he would have told you.’

‘It’s no problem,’ Sunny said. ‘I suppose it’s good to hear they’re okay.’

‘If there’s anything we can do for you...’ Omar started. ‘A fundraiser maybe, or some help with cleaning?’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Helen said, cutting him off.

He nodded. ‘Also, we have something for you.’ Sara went out to the van and returned with a stack of used archive boxes, folded down and ready for reuse. ‘Nathan said you might be able to use them.’

Sunny examined the boxes, dispirited. ‘Tell him I said thanks for all the support.’

‘I will,’ Clive smiled, the members of The Centre packing up Nathan and Alice’s room with a swift efficiency and leaving without a word.

Sunny tried folding one of the archive boxes together, but gave up, exasperated.

‘Is this a prank? They just gave me boxes to collect the ashes of my projects in.’

Beth laughed only once when Helen and Sunny came to visit her in the hospital. After sitting defiantly mute through their pleasantries, she finally broke when Helen told her that the blanket she’d been dragging from sharehouse to sharehouse gave her a rash not because of her allergies, but because it had been a fire blanket the whole time. That she’d relegated it to the outdoor couch was one of the most bizarre strokes of luck Helen had ever experienced.

‘Yes, “luck”,’ Beth had replied when she was done laughing, gesturing to her bandages. ‘A real picture of luck right here.’

‘It could always be worse,’ Helen tried, but Beth stared right through her.

‘Do they know what started the fire?’ she asked.

‘They said someone lit it,’ Sunny interrupted.

‘Who?’

‘The cops were like, “Do you have any enemies?” and I was like, “How much ink’s in your pen?” Try: the neighbour I spent all year feuding with, the real estate, the new landlords who want to cash in on this shithole, fucken Dale who’s probably been stewing all year, that guy Rocco beat up after the festival, or some neo-Nazi groupuscule that Nathan pissed off somehow...’

‘What did they say?’

‘They looked at me like I was an idiot.’

‘What about Rocco?’

‘Nothing,’ Sunny replied. ‘No reply.’

‘Well at least it’s not just me.’ Beth looked away from them to stare through the TV, which was showing an episode of Cheers. She turned up the volume on Ted Danson and Shelley Long, who acted through a violent argument broken up by a laugh track.

‘It’s Nathan’s fault,’ Beth spat from her hospital bed, angry at his swift departure after the fire. ‘None of this would have happened if it weren’t for him.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Helen reminded her.

‘Sure we don’t. Notice how he hasn’t published a single essay or sent off a single moralistic tweet since it happened?’ Beth rested her phone on the back of one bandaged hand and scrolled through it with her least damaged finger. ‘He’s been completely silent. Has he checked in on you?’ The others shook their heads. ‘Me neither. The guy ran non-stop until now, but there’s a prison riot in Tehran, mass protests in China, the threat of nuclear war is as high as it’s ever been...they interviewed a robot in the House of Lords! They installed an AI in some android that they dressed up in a floral dress and overalls, made it look like a work in progress with “incomplete” little mechanical arms, and then asked her questions about painting. And he’s just...silent.’

Sunny and Helen looked at each other speechless. They handed her the snacks and magazines they brought her which she mocked them for, saying: ‘Wow, very 1995.’ The two stood back, unsure of what to say that wouldn’t rile her back up again.

‘I gotta sleep,’ she said breathing shallow. ‘Thanks for letting my brothers get my stuff. Even though they’re acting like they predicted all this would happen. They’re actually smug about me almost dying. Fucking men.’

‘You’re gonna be fine, Beth,’ Helen said timidly.

‘Yeah sure, I’m gonna be great,’ she said, closing her eyes, wincing as she shifted position, pretending to sleep until they left.

It was left to Sunny and Helen to receive the eviction notice. They didn’t mind the burden, agreeing that being forced to do the leg work of setting up and packing down the house had a nice kind of symmetry. They dealt with the insurance company, who deemed the house unsafe to live in despite the opinions of the firefighters, and as a result, were returned their bond in full. They were glad not to have to contend with Nathan and Alice, and Beth had good reason to stay away. But they worried about Rocco’s non-reply. He hadn’t even looked at any messages they sent through. Helen suggested he might have deactivated all his accounts to get through the border crossing, while Sunny guessed that he’d be busy training and partying with the Italian Rugby League squad. Then, sleeping on the floor of Pat’s living room, they got up together at five a.m. to watch Italy’s opening match against Scotland and had their questions answered. Once excited about being able to watch Rocco achieve his lifelong dream of retiring after a World Cup appearance, they saw that his name wasn’t on the team sheet, that he wasn’t on camera, and when they searched online, realised he wasn’t in the squad at all.

‘What does that mean?’ Sunny asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Helen said concerned, trying to think of how to get through to him.

‘Was Rocco full of shit too?’

Sunny speculated about whether, if Nathan was there, he would claim that Rocco was planted to sabotage all their projects for a year, but Helen tried to quieten Sunny down, telling them to just go ahead and ask. Sunny emailed Rocco, and texted her old number, and sent messages to his Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with the words: ROCCO WERE YOU FULL OF SHIT ALL ALONG? There was no reply. It was only when Sunny opened a collaborative Google Doc with the file name ROCCOWEREYOUFULLOFSHITALLALONG that they got a response.

Within the document, Rocco wrote a long and sprawling explainer that outlined what had happened with the Italian team, and his shame around his not wanting to own up to the fact that he’d failed at manifesting his position. He told them about his move to Milano, where he was crashing with the former members of I Pentiti, and volunteering across the CSOA networks in the city, preparing for the potential of Georgia Meloni’s bans on unlicensed raves coming for the squats. When Sunny replied to give detail about the fire, they found they were typing live into the document at the same time, and only then did Rocco cave to a video call.

‘Beth’s fine, but she seems really worked up about everything,’ Sunny summarised clumsily. ‘Not the house, but other stuff: more of her AI freak-out, but also the war, all the protests and revolt around the world. She’s pissed about all the inaction here, but you know how Beth is. She’s always projecting.’

‘She’s right though,’ Rocco said, looking just out of frame of his camera, ‘there’s revolt everywhere except Australia.’

‘Everyone’s just prepping for Christmas here,’ Sunny said. ‘Like, I feel like I’m the only person in the country who’s afraid of the bomb.’

‘It’s funny how they tried coining the Quiet Australians moniker for the placid private school racists...because all white Australians are quiet. It is the most vacant, uncaring place in the world. That island makes people feel like they’re so safe, so apart from everything, so complacent.’

‘Maybe it’s good you left,’ Sunny said gently.

‘Maybe. I mean it’s ten times more fucked here, but at least people say it out loud. It makes me feel like I’m involved in a fight worth fighting. Maybe you should come visit. You and Helen.’

‘And Beth?’ Sunny interrupted, suddenly defensive of their friend.

Rocco paused, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say to Beth.’

‘Maybe you should call her,’ Sunny had insisted. Rocco smiled weakly, then claimed to have a sauce on the stove that needed attending to. He hung up abruptly.

None of the other managers at the cinema were hard-up enough to agree to the New Year’s Eve shift, so it was left to Helen to run the worst night of the year. Walking into Camperdown Park to meet Sunny before her shift, she thought she could at least claim a victory by showing up to work drunk and stoned. She saw them sitting nervously in the afternoon sun with their back to the open grass, facing the Newtown cemetery and drinking in deep contemplation. When Helen sat next to them, they passed her a beer, and made a toast to their year of drama, and then to Walt, who should have been there. Sunny reached into their tote bag and took out a thick booklet with a black cover, spiral bound with white plastic.

‘This is it?’ Helen asked, taking the booklet and flicking through the first few pages.

‘It’s everything of Walt’s that I’d already scanned, or what I could cobble together from what was already published. The rest was whatever I dumped into that filing cabinet we found in the alley, which, lucky me: I guess was fireproof. Everything I’d picked out as important though, in those piles on my desk? Gone.’

‘Maybe it’s a good thing,’ Helen said, lighting a joint. ‘Maybe you never would have finished this until half his shit got torched.’ ‘Maybe,’ Sunny said thoughtfully. ‘Instead of the Best Of, you get the B-Sides and Rarities.’

Sunny had been forced to give up on their initial idea of stitching together Walt’s notebooks to form a cohesive volume, leaving them to pull together the errant pieces left over after the wreckage. They let each passage settle where it felt most at home, and it was only in presenting Walt’s work as scraps that Sunny finally understood Walt’s ongoing project. It hadn’t been about leaving a comprehensive statement behind, but about writing it all down before it was over. Sunny felt honoured to bring that to completion, compiling what was left of Walt’s notes, essays, short stories, and song lyrics into one long tome they named Curated by Fire: Walt Coleman’s Unpublishable Works of (Non)Fiction. They waited anxiously for Helen’s response, watching her read through it, waiting for approval for a broader release.

‘Thanks for doing this, Sunny,’ Helen said, eventually. ‘I know I gave you shit for this, but seeing this is a good feeling.’

‘You’re okay with it?’ they asked desperately, and Helen nodded approvingly.

‘Fuck, Sunny,’ she groaned, collapsing back onto the grass. ‘I don’t want to go to work.’

‘Your job sucks, Helen.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Just quit,’ they shrugged. A pug ran across the park and knocked over their drinks. Helen stared at the animal in disgust.

‘Yeah, in this economy I can quit my job,’ she said, recalling how she’d snapped at Sunny while grocery shopping that week after they kept pointing at overpriced items on the shelves to say, ‘Hey look, cost-of-living crisis.’

She checked the time and groaned again at the dread of returning to work as Sunny rambled about the evolution of the ‘great resignation’ to ‘quiet quitting’, demanding Helen resign before she received a ‘quiet firing’. She left Sunny behind, headed up the camber of the hill, past the cemetery and onto King Street, where she waited for a bus to take her to the cinema. There, all the usual annoyances of a holiday shift hit her in a drawn-out sequence. Packs of impossibly loud children screeched around the lobby; couples bickered in hushed whispers in the line for tickets; pensioners asked for plot details about every movie that was showing; and then, hours into her shift, one of the junior staff called in sick, saying that he ‘forgot December 31st was New Year’s Eve’. She told her co-worker that she was taking an early break to blow off some steam.

Helen walked through Ultimo and into Chinatown, where she ascended the spiralling internal staircase of the Market City Tavern, past the TAB at the entry and the pokies section on the middle floor. She figured she could get a cheap view of the sunset on the hidden upstairs rooftop, some perspective to steady herself before heading back to the job. She sat on a stool by the railing, staring at the office towers around her, packs of seagulls catching the light as they flew overhead. She rummaged through her tote bag and returned to Sunny’s booklet, beginning Curated by Fire in earnest. And though the quality was poor, she enjoyed seeing her brother’s writing on display like this. She’d forgotten that the only writing she consumed anymore came via the movies screened in the cinema. Each film seemed forced to reckon with its own existence in increasingly blatant ways. Hollywood grappled with itself to feel relevant: a new Matrix movie needed to spend its runtime dwelling on the fact that it was a movie; another Spider-Man sequel had to admit that there had been other Spider-Man movies by spending millions on needless cameos featuring previous spider men. And always with the sequels, and spin-offs and prequels and origin stories, all littered with knowing winks to the viewer. ‘Culture death,’ she thought, which is the same thing she thought at the start of the year when The Wiggles won the Hottest 100 with a cover song. She wondered how much longer this could go on.

She turned back to the booklet, each page-turn interrupted by a drag from her cigarette or a sip from her beer, or one time an English cricket fan leering at her table to ask her where he could get ‘good fish and chips in this part of town’, to which she sent him down Dixon Street to expand his horizons. She kept reading and then found that Walt had at some point grappled with the same thing: obsessing over historical trends of metafictional and intertextual breaks in books, film and TV, trying to locate these alongside crisis years, but failing in his research project. He wrote that in times of existential threats, cultural artefacts would tend towards an all-knowing admission of its purpose in its closing stanzas. He explained that this was a way of submitting to the work’s futility: that in such times, nothing in production could get through to a final product unless the curtain falls: only then could it prove conclusively that it had been created, instead of imagined. His thoughts were garbled, unfocused, and inaccurate, but Helen read desperately ahead, wanting him to be right about something.

Helen balanced her smoke at the edge of an ashtray, looked down at the missed call notifications from work, and saw that she’d been gone an hour. She ignored them. She went inside the sliding doors to buy another beer, then sat on the Market City balcony until the book was done. It ended with a whimper. She placed it face up in front of her as the sun waned over this small section of the city, the sky glowing, the bats soaring across the skyline in search of their night-time activities. She stubbed out her cigarette and took a crumpled receipt out of her pocket, wrote ‘PLEASE TAKE’ on the back and tucked it into the cover page, the way things used to be done before street libraries centralised these small personal acts into impersonal neighbourhood collections.

A message came in from Sunny, saying they were going with Pat to a house party in Enmore, and in that moment, Helen realised she had already quit her job. She told Sunny she’d be there in half an hour, and Sunny responded ecstatically, declaring that Helen was taking back control of her life a day early. She left down the spiralling staircase and out onto the street, thinking about how life progresses in weird cycles, dawdling towards Central for a train to Newtown. She walked further down Enmore Road and recalled decades of memories as she passed the locations that hosted them, trying to shake off the dread of each memory as a new year dawned. She passed the first sharehouse she’d ever lived in, the building repainted to disguise the faults within. She found the party when hearing Sunny cackle with laughter from down the street. Entering through the front gate, the light coming around the side of the house, she tried to prepare something as an answer for the question she would inevitably be asked. She remembered one of Walt’s annual bits, saying repeatedly with varied emphasis: ‘You’re asking me what I resolve to do in the new year?!’ And by the time she was asked for her resolution that night, she had an answer: all she wanted from 2023 was to go to bed each night with a life worth waking up to. No hills to die on, no hole to die in.

About the author

Max Easton is a writer from Sydney. He is the creator of Barely Human, a zine and podcast series exploring underground music’s ties to counterculture and subculture. His first book, The Magpie Wing, was longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Paradise Estate is his second novel.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

How to Start Again

Enter Round Back

Archive Memory

The Great Resets

Praxis After Hours

Luddites for Progress

The Interloper

How to Rent a Commune

Rising Tide

A Game Played by Thugs

Live in the Alley

Keep Off the Grass

Fulcrum

Vectors

We Want Something

Ghosts

Rent the World

The Radical Centre

Other Animals

How_to_Rent_a_Commune.docx

Departure Lounge

Grand Final Day

Missed Connections

Fertilise the Future

About the author