TA RA RA

Moths! In everything. She turned out her pockets on the way to work, full, as she’d suspected, of grit, their horrible sandy eggs, strange all-coloured lint from the house entire. Romy loved her work for providing a break from the moths, or more precisely for providing a break from her own inner life, the moths being, more than a pestilence, a kind of metaphysical rash she could not correct. She had recently taken a job as a policy analyst at the Lou McEnright Foundation, a non-partisan, for-profit think tank; a policy, she had learned, was something Lou McEnright wrote down. The Foundation worked towards a sustainable future by empowering young people and accountants, and key to this mission was the funding of creative enterprise. More often than not, this funding was internally allocated to staff members who showed personal promise to Lou McEnright. This was the basis of the job’s appeal.

Romy believed she was a great candidate for personal promise. In the past, she had been subject to horrible sexual abuse, which gave her a fractious quality that was disturbing to others and made her unstable upon waking and at certain hours of the night. She was lying to several different people for money. She didn’t ‘not come’ from money; her mother had some money and since her mother was dead Romy had some money. She was twenty-nine. ‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said. Not everybody had to be a revolutionary. If she were rich she would be good at it. She would take a trip to Marseille and not post about it. She would buy cast iron cookware. She would fund the revolutionary activity of others while living comfortably, but in order to do this she had to mine her memory of the horrible sexual abuse, and to do this, to best advantage, she had to find herself in a certain position, with the right connections, which meant, for the time being, playing the part of counterrevolutionary. There was much to fund. Smoke got into the carpet. People could not afford to live in their houses. Animals were dying, and so on. At some point, the usual horrors had started fading out, losing their distinction; she worried that, were she not to capitalise soon, the horrible sexual abuse would lose its power, over her, over its public.

Simon didn’t think this was a problem. ‘Most people don’t live in the world,’ Simon said.

‘I’m not as perceptive as you are,’ Romy said. ‘It’s very powerful, to notice so much. I’d find it tiring. Always running to keep up with yourself.’

‘It’s a light jog,’ Simon said.

Romy believed that, with Lou McEnright’s support, she could go places. She knew that Lou McEnright saw something in her. Every day she would stop at Romy’s desk and say, ‘I see something in you, Romy.’ For some weeks, awaiting the moment of her election, Romy had sunk into a depression; her mind turned mercilessly to the moths, and she was unable to work at all. Groping about now in her pockets, Romy almost missed the trill of Lou McEnright, from her office, calling her in.

‘Something horrible has happened to you,’ said Lou McEnright. ‘You have an artistic temperament.’

‘I have a private and painful past,’ Romy said.

Lou McEnright looked at her dully, like a snake. ‘What do you want from the future, Romy?’

Romy considered this. ‘I want to derive wealth and success from my private pain.’

‘Why haven’t you done that already?’

Romy nodded thoughtfully. ‘I have tried, but I haven’t been able to write about what happened to me. Every time I try, it gets worse. I’m afraid, if I keep trying, I will lose the knowledge of what actually happened. I’ll end up stuck with a feeling, and nothing to attach it to.’

Lou nodded back at her. The flesh of her arms was soft; miniature drapes like strudel pastry looped between her shirt and her armpit.

‘The artistic process is arduous,’ Lou said. ‘It involves letting go of something.’

‘Ok,’ Romy said.

‘When I see something in someone,’ Lou said, lightly shuffling a stack of papers, ‘that means they have something very special to share. But to share, they need time. They need nourishment, and resources.’

‘I do need nourishment and resources,’ Romy said.

‘You do,’ Lou said. ‘And I can’t rest knowing that you’re out there, withering at a desk, wasting your talent. Wasting time.’

‘It’s not a waste of my time,’ Romy said.

‘It’s a waste of mine,’ said Lou.

On a picturesque country trip before the last fires, Romy bought a sheepskin rug at a roadside market and took it home, to make her living room feel less judgemental. She lived alone with a cat named Fingers; he was black and white and could only fall asleep on the keypad of a laptop. The sheepskin had been infested with moths, and now the house was too. Simon said that she could have anticipated this, based on her previous experience with mites, small rodents and so forth, her knowledge of the country. Though this was correct, it was so unhelpful it was basically wrong, and she’d been annoyed with him for a time, had even considered not replying to his texts, until he got moths himself, a different species, and became completely pathetic, clawing at his silks, brocades, animal hides. Simon liked beautiful things. His apartment was cluttered and difficult to navigate, filled with paintings and stainless-steel devices. She found it soothing there; time seemed to roll more gently. There was always a child screaming outside, which Simon claimed not to mind; he said it would grow up soon and forget how to do that. She bought him yellow flowers from the supermarket, not fresh but luscious still, big as fists and tightly furled, threatening to burst.

A storm curled above her as she scuttled to his door. Her shoes, she noticed, were too shiny, too studied. A melody came from inside, familiar to her as a smell. Simon always insisted on music; he didn’t believe that she preferred silence, and she had come to like the music because it was his. The songs she played later to recall her time there were different songs, which belonged to her memory of the thing rather than the thing itself, so as to avoid meddling too directly in what she knew to have occurred, what had certainly happened but could never again be approached directly, a practice of love so subtle it may as well have been a purely mental event.

The Lou McEnright Foundation paid Romy’s registration, flights, and accommodation to attend a global seminar for future-thinkers held in a remote European village. It was difficult to determine the source of funding from looking at the website. The first time she saw Simon he was eating a complementary pastry, standing up, with a plastic fork. She was fascinated by his manners, his wrist deftly stabilising the pressure of the tines as he, one-handed, cleft his pastry in two. Simon was part of the para-academic contingent, he explained, which meant somebody had paid a university to send him there. ‘Things are very suspect,’ he said brightly, ‘when you need a graduate student to launder the vibe.’ The theme was ‘Narrative Strategies’, what Simon, later, spitting card-flavoured canapé on the carpet, called a theme of a theme. She attended his presentation, ‘The imperial gothic: cross-dressing in colonial adventure narratives’, of which she retained little but the itching sensation of the world expanding. The next day, late to her panel, her hangover drawn in a curtain around her, she crept into the empty seat next to him. A tiny girl with a trembling voice and a face like a French tip stepped out from the lectern, revealing a huge, distended belly, one of those pregnancies worn like a practical joke. Romy gasped audibly. Simon looked at her. ‘I wasn’t expecting it,’ she said.

Romy delivered her presentation on therapy through storytelling as a policy instrument. When, during question time, Simon asked her what a policy was, she burst into tears with a glowing red vitality. Chastened, he took her by the elbow and marched her to the hotel bar, where they both became unbelievably drunk. There was some kind of white dust all over her hands, Romy noticed, paracetamol, or powdered sugar. Simon explained his theory of the imperial gothic. He kept raising a cigarette to his mouth and then flinging his hand away, somewhere between a tick and a flourish; she was transfixed by the movement and forgot to listen to what he was saying. She tried to angle her face so that it might be natural for him to kiss her.

‘You should get a doctorate,’ he said. ‘They’ll give anyone a doctorate. Get this licentious benefactor of yours to fund it. Then you can tour around the world forever, conference to conference. Of course, the food is revolting. But you’ll lose weight.’

He departed for bed with a delicate lurch. Romy, scabrously unkissed, stayed at the bar, making conversation with a sweet-featured war orphan the hotel staff had been trying to expel. Without prompting, the orphan told her his horrors: that he had once lain prostrate under a tree, clutching an assault rifle, pissing himself with fear as he hid from enemy soldiers, while a snake gave birth on top of him. Googling on her phone, one eye shut, Romy verified that certain snakes do give birth to live young. In the spirit of exchange, she shared her feelings.

‘We just have this connection,’ she said, gesturing at Simon’s empty chair.

‘Hje is hjomo?’ the war orphan said.

‘No,’ Romy replied, tearfully. ‘It’s much more complicated than that.’

They met by arrangement outside a museum of regional history. Romy pictured her own face the previous night, its stupid, moon-struck expression, and conveyed her mortification by fidgeting with her sleeve. She stared at Simon when he was looking in the other direction. The museum was closed. They wandered through the streets of the town, telling the stories of their lives, these stories becoming deeper, more private, until it was revealed that they were both sexually dysfunctional, oppressed as they were by private terrors. Romy, she explained, experienced a kind of clenching disorder. Simon, he explained, experienced impotence, accompanied by panic attacks. It was the middle of summer. The night was sultry, but the air between them was dry, crackling and bodiless. As dusk came down they found themselves on a ruined path, winding its way to a chapel, forest scalloping up around it.

‘I don’t know if it’s chill to just wander onto God’s property,’ Romy said. Simon laughed.

As they walked, the path receded into a deeper quiet, the insect noise whittling down to a pointy tone; then, a glitch of a sound – wrenched deep from her ancestral mind the word pig resounded – a muted, sly grunting – and they turned on their heels and ran, squealing, back up the path, their arms and legs studded with brambles. The sun ahead sunk into cream, peach, and dissolved. Two small dogs howled at their backs as they flew past pumpkins, a lattice grate of corn heads, tomato vines.

They ate dinner outside a konoba, at a little table on the street. Simon explained that he didn’t date. ‘My arrow of lead,’ he said, gesturing at his dick. ‘It basically never works. I’ve tried everything. I had a Viagra dealer for a while. Humiliating. He felt so bad for me even he stopped replying to my texts.’

‘How do you know he felt bad for you?’ Romy said.

‘It’s difficult to describe, physiologically, but even with the drug it was always drooping. Or craning, somehow. Like it was being conscripted against its better judgment.’

Romy laughed and began choking on her pasta. She looked at the thin red line that ran from the middle of his cheek to his jawline. He’d told her he didn’t remember how he’d got it; some accident, he said, when he was a child.

‘Are we bonding?’ she asked. Her voice sounded too loud. She felt afraid. She spat out a small piece of pasta and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

‘Too late for that,’ he said. ‘You’re my favourite person.’

Romy was relieved, despite or perhaps because of the intensity of their meeting, to think that they would never see each other again.

The next day, scrunched into the cheap seat of her return flight, she watched him stroll down the aisle and take the seat next to her. He didn’t even seem surprised by the coincidence. The knowledge fell upon her, a deep calm knowledge like the precursor to grief, that Simon was a fact she would have to deal with for the rest of her life.

Having failed to write convincingly about horrible sexual abuse, Romy took to historical fiction. She had enjoyed bodice-rippers as a young person, or she had a clear memory of fingering herself over water-damaged paperbacks in the public library; the branding of bottoms with hot irons, the imprisonments, rotting teeth, the endless letters; the past was a landscape of decadence, organised by pain, much more satisfying than the frictionless present, which was all about having too much of the wrong thing. She sat on her front porch, safe from the moths, her shoes wrapped in a plastic bag of pesticides beside her, watching the flame tree riffing in the hot air. Birds screamed. An itch crawled up her thighs. The birds in Australia always screamed, like they objected. She wrote. Ljubi, in the clean light of an olive grove, rolled the ball between her palms. It was sticky, amber coloured, the size of her eye. It came with a letter from an unknown man. FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, BE MY WIFE. It was important to recognise opportunity when it came. She sold the amber ball for passage; first, a little steamer, then a ship with sails. On the boat she was sick every morning, alone with the stars, until one early-rising sailor, short, with butcher’s arms and a thin moustache, quite sexy, started keeping her company. He made jokes about the hard pouch of fat on her belly, an affliction since birth. Her mother thought it was a hernia but then her mother died and nobody had noticed it since. Your husband will be pleased with his fecund new bride! said the sailor. Ha ha ha, she said, and thought, fecund? One day after her morning vomit she lurched at the moustache, bile dripping from her chin, and kissed him full on the mouth. He retched, recoiled, hurled her away. Ha ha ha!! she said, and he left her alone after that, though he kept watching her, they all did, dancing and drinking, the gluey hot meals making her ass fat and her cheeks red, bouncing around like a rubber ball, she had to keep letting her dresses out or the men pinched her, even after the vomit story had been passed around, like they couldn’t help it, ha ha ha, oh, it was heaven. Romy drank a bottle of white wine, and instead of continuing she watched the flame tree until it moved. She fell asleep on the porch, and when she woke up the tree was different.

Her sister texted her almost every day. when will you hang out with me??? she wrote. our mother is DEAD. Their mother had been dead for years. Romy texted back a picture of her rug, masticated into a complex pattern. She began to store her t-shirts in the freezer. She spent all her money. She took people she barely knew out for five-hundred-dollar dinners. She bought handmade dresses made of intricate knots that she didn’t understand how to wear. She hung the dresses in her closet and let them fill with holes. This made her feel purposeful but it did not make her feel better. The only thing that made her feel better was Simon. They’d fallen into a habit of weekly dinners, followed by heavy drinking, which they politely pretended, every week, would be moderate drinking. She lived for those suspended hours at his table, where she was no longer herself but an angel, appointed to the high seat of human interest, listening to him talk, watching him make small, fussy movements in the kitchen, all his energies concentrated in his long red fingers, brows drawn down, feminine and then masculine, his steely precision like a nurse or a machinist.

This time, Simon was already drunk when she arrived. He was distressed. Dinner was marinara, which Romy took to mean that he was really losing it, a bland red sauce with big, tasteless shrimp, curled up like bloated fingers. His work was not progressing. He was smearing all his fricatives, glassy-eyed, gripping his tumbler too tightly.

‘It’s so difficult here,’ he explained, the s’s going everywhere. When he was upset, his handsomeness came undone, slid off his face, all his features making their way to a border. ‘It’s so culturally empty. Difficult.’

‘Difficult how?’ Romy said.

Simon dashed his hand against his forehead. ‘Like trying to make a loop out of a straight line. No, that’s stupid. Trying to knit every accident of human activity into a whole so you can go, aha! I’ve fixed it! It all makes sense if you just hold it at the right angle!’

Romy blinked. ‘You said you wrote about gay guys shooting kangaroos to impress each other.’

‘And even then I have to say, it’s much more complicated than that. Look at this complex patchwork. Look at the connection between historical event and this recondite garbage I just made up while high on prescription speed. In return for my insight I demand a bunch of fucking money.’

Romy cooed, hesitantly.

‘It’s probably less difficult where you’re from,’ he said.

‘New Zealand?’

‘Somewhere Slavic?’

‘Way back. I don’t know anything about it,’ she said. He looked annoyed. She imagined reaching for him, from behind, and gripping his hip bones. ‘I live here now,’ she said.

‘You should look into it. You could write about that instead. Postcolonial, diaspora, ethnic white person literatures, whatever. Give yourself a break from all the molestation stuff.’

‘Oh no,’ Romy said. ‘If I start writing anything else I’ll never get back to myself. And if I can’t make use of it, then what was it for?’

‘You’re right,’ Simon said. ‘It’s best when rape is useful.’

‘If I could just figure out what the moths meant, that would really help,’ she said. ‘They have to mean something.’ Romy’s outfit was dappled with holes, softly crumbling on her person.

‘Maybe at some point you need to consider the possibility that you are the infestation,’ Simon said. ‘Not that you are carrying moth eggs in you, or on you, but in a broader, “humans are the problem” kind of way.’

‘I’m obviously the problem.’

‘And so you contain the solution. At worst, you are the vehicle chosen to convey the problem.’

‘You sound very fatherly.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘No more daddy stuff.’

‘Don’t apologise. You’re great at it. You’d be a great dad.’

‘Sounds like something someone with a bad dad would say.’

‘Do you want children?’ Romy asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’m wonderful. I should advance the gene pool.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t be surprised,’ Simon said. ‘I’m a family man.’

‘But you don’t like children.’

‘I like helping people. And children are so helpless.’

‘Why won’t you help me?’ she asked. In her head, this had been a perfect relay, steely, controlled. It came out as a plea.

Simon gleamed. ‘Nobody can help you if you won’t help yourself.’

‘You can help me,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I need new clothes. Some that aren’t full of holes.’

‘Are you asking me how I’d style you? As my ideal woman?’

‘Go on,’ she said. She twirled slowly. ‘Make me over.’

‘There are a few things I’d do,’ he said.

The next week they met in the park equidistant to their houses. It was raining, the evening setting in. The greens were more lucid than usual, preindustrial; he was strangely dressed, in pinks and purples and browns; his umbrella was purple, too, and he held it low, so their cigarette smoke pooled in a dome around their heads, and their eyes stung. They walked slowly, their legs damp from the long grass. She spoke, without reserve, as if compelled, about Lou McEnright, her doomed charge, hitting the same marks, how hard it was to write about the horrible sexual abuse without writing about either the world or herself, the former requiring opinions, the latter requiring knowledge, of course she had neither, and she could feel herself boring him but she had no control over this, like her personality was a dog she was running to catch up with.

‘Just get it down on paper, sell it to that stupid woman to turn into a webinar or a social media campaign, and then move on with your life,’ Simon said. ‘Think of it as an exorcism. Or, I don’t know, own it. Take back your power. Pick a figure of speech.’

‘I don’t know if that will make me feel better.’

‘You shouldn’t expect to feel better,’ said Simon. ‘But maybe you’ll realise you don’t have to feel good.’

‘I don’t know if that’s true for everyone,’ said Romy.

‘It might not be true for anyone,’ said Simon. ‘I made it up.’ He gasped. ‘A fox,’ he said. She caught its shining eye as it trotted into the scrub.

‘They brought them here to hunt,’ Simon said. ‘Horses and hounds! But they don’t move very fast, do they.’

‘I didn’t know they lived so close to the city,’ Romy said.

‘Oh yeah,’ Simon said. ‘They’re everywhere. Who knows what they eat. Scraps, I guess.’

‘They’re surplus killers,’ Romy said.

‘I thought they were scavengers,’ Simon said.

‘They are,’ Romy said. ‘But when they kill, they kill more than they eat.’

‘So they kill for sport,’ Simon said.

‘Sometimes. I think they just like to eat their favourite parts.’

‘I’m tired of all this nature. Let us walk through this beautiful suburban tunnel. Perhaps we’ll find a needle.’

The rain grew heavier. They drew together.

‘Do you ever feel like,’ she said, ‘everything is a metaphor. You know. For the horrible things that happened to us.’

He smiled with measured, artificial sadness. She felt irritation rise like a song.

‘Sure. It seems like one pattern over and over, the horror of your life. Everything just confirms that you were destined to be miserable.’ He smoked his little cigarette. ‘But most things have nothing to do with you.’

She looked at him directly. He’d tucked the hood of his raincoat behind his ears. It made him look like a bat.

‘Almost everything has nothing to do with me,’ Romy said. ‘But everything seems to have something to do with us.’

‘Don’t do philosophy to me,’ he said. ‘I hate philosophy.’

**

Her new husband was tall. He spoke with his hands. He took her to a town, then a swamp. He told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. All he had to compare her to were wild cattle, she said. He threw a boot at her head and missed.

The best gum came from the marrow of rotten trees. The expert diggers could tell where to find it from the shape of the ground, her husband said, but the expert diggers had fucked off. Now they had to burn off the scrub and topsoil. Then they would dig, for hours, days. It was tricky, her husband said. Burn-offs could parch the good earth, leaving nothing but barren dirt. But that was the magic of it, he said. Digging was cultivation in reverse. They degraded the land, sold the gum, then bought the plots they’d ruined for cheap. They planted grapes, olives, whatever would grow, wringing the dead soil for profit, like a chicken’s neck, her husband said. He patted her on her hard, fat belly. They would buy up the land and prosper. She was too bored to object. This scheme only confirmed what she knew, that the world in which she lived was the wrong one.

**

There had been no childhood home. They moved from city to city; then their mother died, and they were sent to the farm. Romy remembered less, having been younger. There was a tabby cat that clawed her face. A large copper cauldron she liked to hide in. Her sister had always been fatter, prettier, easier company. i will do ANYTHING to hang out. i will hang out with you and your new gay boyfriend if that is what it TAKES, she texted.

Romy had not been entirely truthful about her clenching disorder, or she had overstated it. Actually she found it easy to have sex so long as the men were ugly and, ideally, indifferent to her, making sex an essentially virtual or abstract activity. Her real complaint was that her sister had, more than once, purloined these ugly men, which was somehow much worse than being forsaken by an appropriate love object. The whole shape of this situation had been too humiliating to share with Simon.

Eventually Romy succumbed to their meeting. Simon was not ugly, she figured, was in fact very beautiful, and on a more superstitious level since they weren’t sleeping together the conditions were not in place for any weird sororal fuck magic. She tried to induce vomiting before their date, thinking this might be restorative, but she raised nothing but bile and gave herself a bruised throat, showed up to the bar foreboded with a sense of sexual use.

The three of them drank neon blue drinks. Her sister dripped neon blue down the front of her dress. Romy scanned it nervously, looking for holes. Her sister talked about her most recent termination. She explained her idea for a t-shirt that said GET THAT ABORTION! Simon made thoughtful faces as she spoke. He made soothing remarks that were also jokes. The embarrassment Romy felt about her sister quietened. Romy thought she might be ready to have a sister again after all. Simon asked questions about their family. Romy never talked about her family, he said.

‘Of course this isn’t a picture of the actual gum he sent her, but it all looks the same,’ her sister said, holding her phone up against Simon’s face. ‘The story, this is the story as it was told to me, if you want the story. Basically our grandmother is obsessed with our family history, she got locked on when mum died, really it’s a form of gossip, she thinks it’s a conspiracy anyone ever lived at all. She lives in this scabby part of the island where they all immigrated a hundred years ago, now they just grow wine and olives and kill their cousins drink-driving, she tells this story to anyone who’ll listen. So basically, our great-great-grandmother gave birth to twelve children on a pressed earth floor, different floor every time, because they moved site every few months, her and her husband, moving up this seedy part of the country bit by bit. After every baby, she’d say, I Want To Go Home!’ her sister laughed. Her back teeth were blue. ‘You make some money and take yourself home!, he’d say, and she’d say, I don’t have any money! and he’d say, Well neither do I! So she had all her children like that, until the last one. When she had the last one it was on a feather bed in a farmhouse, and she found out that’s where the money went, from digging gum, on a farmhouse and a bed. And that last baby, the bed-baby, had children, and those children had children, and then there’s us. Ball of gum, dirt floor, sheep. Ta ra ra!’ She pointed her finger in the air and flicked it with each syllable, ‘Ta ra ra! Then you.’ Her quick-bitten finger trembled in Romy’s face. Romy wanted to bite it. Her sister’s voice was faraway and theatrical, like an old Hollywood star with the vowels pitched down, the poles flipped parodically in her doctor’s scrawl of an accent, Tararar, Tururur, the sounds never quite making it all the way out of her mouth. ‘That’s what they called us, apparently,’ she said. ‘Tarara! That’s what they thought we sounded like.’

‘You don’t speak the language,’ Romy said. ‘Mum didn’t speak it.’ 

‘Why would we? What for?’ her sister looked at Romy with a loose, sweet expression, and Romy almost liked her. ‘What for?’ she stage-whispered. ‘We prospered.’

‘A good language is a dead language,’ Simon said, and winked. He was drunk. Her sister and Simon giggled, their heads together. How nice, Romy thought, clenching, they’re getting along. She ordered another drink. They were exchanging numbers, ha ha ha, they were going to the film festival. She thought of them toasting to her, best friends, at her wedding; yes, in some ways they were very similar people; after all, her sister was her sister, and Romy and Simon were the same. Although her sister was being embarrassing again, her grin ridiculous, widening like a tomcat, egging herself on, no, Romy felt softly towards her, wanted to stroke the silky skin on the backs of her hands. She looked beautiful. Romy was proud. Romy watched Simon’s eyes pass over her. Romy marvelled at the shape of her own jealousy, that something so ugly could spring inside her, where nothing much lived.

**

Simon was a counterrevolutionary, or at least he was living a bad life; if by bad Romy meant unserious, though she wasn’t sure she did. She wanted to be like this too, or maybe she already was; or she didn’t care about badness or goodness so long as Simon was there to make her feel important, beautiful, vital. Romy didn’t need to be serious because she was self-aware. This time, she brought him wafers and a jar of pesto.

‘I associate pesto with the cafeteria at art galleries,’ Simon said.

‘You could associate it with something else,’ Romy said, desperately. ‘It’s never too late to form new associations.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But the problem with that is, and I run into this often, why would I suffer, even for a single moment? Why retrain myself to love what I hate? If there’s any other option?’

‘My philosophy is more shame-based,’ Romy said. ‘Rubbing my nose in my own mess, that kind of thing.’

‘And you wonder what your problem is. All this grief about pleasure,’ he said.

‘That’s a little transcendental for me,’ Romy said. He didn’t reply. She felt glum, then morose. The evening had been spoiled, she had failed to understand his philosophy, she had overestimated her own authority and made herself ridiculous. She drank a glass of vodka and watched his back as he chopped tomatoes. His phone, face-up on the countertop, buzzed frantically.

‘You’re texting my sister,’ said Romy.

‘Your sister is worried about you,’ said Simon. ‘She says you’re having a psychotic break.’

‘I’m not having a psychotic break,’ said Romy, nastily. ‘I have moths. I have a very demanding job.’

‘Would you tell me if you were having a psychotic break?’ asked Simon, turning to face her, with an expression of such perfect concern it looked fake.

‘Don’t you think you’d be able to tell?’

‘Maybe,’ Simon said. ‘If you’d been having one this whole time I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.’

‘If I’ve been having one this whole time then it’s just my personality,’ Romy said. ‘Which makes no sense. Mental illness can’t be your personality.’

Simon considered her. ‘It can be,’ he said. ‘If you’re a psycho.’

‘Why are you texting my sister?’ Romy snapped.

‘She is texting me. I am chopping tomatoes.’

‘Are you attracted to her?’

Simon wiped his hands on a tea towel. ‘I think I’m gay,’ he said.

‘That’s fine,’ Romy said, quickly. ‘I thought so. I mean, it had occurred to me.’

Simon looked at her with something like pain. ‘I really do think I’m gay.’

‘My mother is dead,’ Romy said, to say something.

‘Well, families are always in crisis,’ Simon said, his hands dancing around his head, the light catching his eyeballs. ‘You know I love you. That’s the thing.’

Romy paused. ‘I love you too,’ she said. She had expected this, she realised, but she hadn’t known it. Her voice was rough and small.

‘And the other thing is, Romy, I don’t think I’ll have sex with a woman again. I don’t think I’ll want to.’

Romy nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘And if I had sex with you,’ he said, ‘Then I would just be putting that off. I’d be putting off not having sex with you. So you see.’

‘I see,’ said Romy.

They were quiet.

‘What do you think it would be like?’ Romy asked. For a while, she thought he wouldn’t answer.

‘It would be like turning on the lights in a room,’ he said.

‘You’re not going to tell anyone,’ Romy said. ‘About the horrible things that happened to me.’

‘What? No,’ said Simon. He looked annoyed. ‘No. I keep that deep inside me. In the part of me that is also you.’

‘Which part is that?’ Romy said. She sat herself on the kitchen bench and lit a cigarette. Simon laughed, an unlikely sound, like an emergency siren. She felt afraid.

‘It’s my favourite part,’ he said.

Anger came to her like a friend. It warmed her from below, as if she had been dipped in it, like a candle wick. When she opened her mouth to speak, she thought her voice would sound different; but it was her voice, the same as always.

**

It was important to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Ljubi’s strengths: recognising opportunity. Ljubi’s weaknesses: scraping the rust-coloured shit off lumps of gum; sewing sacks together; making walls out of sod and rags; balancing a tin pot on a shovel; avoiding sinkholes when she went to piss in the night; stacking boxes; stacking tins; cleaning; sorting; waiting; persuading the evil Clydesdale to swim across the river; diplomacy with the pock-faced men who ran the storehouse and pinched her shrinking ass; effacing her own preferences; oh, Ljubi hated everything; the ground so trampled it looked like choppy water; tinned butter; tinned fish. It repulsed her, all of it, everything covered with a fine patina of clay. She rubbed her skin with cloth, spit, flax, water, but it wouldn’t come off, and it itched. Every day, one bitter display of weakness and hatred after another, until the sky got dark and she started on the fire with sheer purple rage, so when the men returned in their sodden shirts it was heaving and blowing like a pair of lungs. She tried to think of precious things — suckling pig, brick hearths, church bells — but it was no good. When she closed her eyes, she saw gum, that foul yellow, its sickly interior light, spotted with dark clots, like ink in water, like something taken from inside a body.

**

Romy lay in bed. Fingers kept her awake with his rapid pacing, like a guard dog. Her sister was calling. She was probably in love, or pregnant; her sister got pregnant every time she had sex, slipped in and out of love like a pair of shoes. Romy was grieving because the moths were deeply entrenched in the home environment, and everything that wasn’t a hole was covered in little disintegrated bits of everything else. She wasn’t grieving her mother or the things she had said to Simon or the horrible sexual abuse because there wasn’t anything she could do about any of that. Some days she woke up and nothing was wrong. You made rules for the moths, she thought, but the moths did not observe them. Her texts to Simon were sent but not received.

She walked grimly through the annals of her teenage history. Here she had put a glass of wine in the sink and puked into it; here she had broken her knee; here she had eaten hot chips and the grease had stained her school skirt through the paper. She had listened to music that told her she was a bitch and also hot. She had fantasised about being herself, exactly as she was, but desired. Looping, looping, the events of her life like junk in a knapsack, like socks in a dryer, roadside crap laid out on a blanket, sheep shit horse shit then you. She fell into a sleep so deep the cat stopped pacing, fell into an olive grove, lit up by the moon. There was the shearing shed; there was a door, but it was locked. Just as she had as a little girl, she got down on all fours and crawled, groping and zig-zagging on her hands and knees in the putrid dark until she emerged on the other side of the door, into the pen; she let herself out of the gate with a practiced, elegant movement. She pulled a cigarette from her pocket and flicked a sticky lighter over and over, the smell on her hands rich and vile. A pile of wool was stacked high, like a snowbank. She flopped down. The sour tang of sheep grease filled her head. She puffed on the cigarette; it was dry and loose. Ash collected like flies at its end.

She woke in the night, her arm floppy and numb, she lifted it and it dropped right down, her feet buzzing and her hands buzzing, like something was perched between her eyes with its mouth open. She knew, all at once, how to restore her life. Simon had been sent to her, and if he didn’t want to do it that way then maybe he would do it the other way. Perhaps the problem was not one of preference, of a rigidity, but an intimacy that must find expression in certain acts, yes, suddenly she was certain that this was the case. They would overcome, they would heal each other, and she would be able to write about the horrible sexual abuse, cleanly and easily, waving at it from the opposite shore. Weeping hysterically, she tore apart the room looking for her scarf, found it gaping in ten places like a honeycomb.

Coconut oil, said Romy to the man in the shop. But the man didn’t have any coconut oil. This is a pharmacy, he said. She was wild-eyed, determined. It could be done, she knew, she could pull it off, if only she could engineer each of its parts. There was a straight, narrow path that led directly to the things she wanted. There was nothing that could not, in the last, be redeemed.

**

When she had the baby, the walls of the shack shivered. Her screams rang across the gumfields, cursing her husband, God, gum, the clay, marriage, the earth, pleading for it to burn, pleading for them, whoever, for all of them to crawl into their own ballsacks and die. After the birth she never slept. Nights came and went with no reprieve. Blood still clotting between her legs, she smothered them, both of them, the crying and the snoring, done. She walked in the dark though the bog until she reached a plane of outer scrub where the ground was untouched. She struck a match, watched her work as dawn arrived: thick orange clouds, hanging close, light catching in the drizzle, the air stinging. The faster it burned, the further it took her, away, on a ship made of money.

**

When she arrived at Simon’s, her sister was sitting on the bench by the front door, smoking, like a cat in the sun. She looked beautiful, her thick hair like rope, her pale brown eyes surrounded by very many fine lines; tired, like she hadn’t been home. ‘It’s good you’re here,’ she said. ‘I have so much to tell you.’

‘Tell me everything,’ said Romy. She watched her own hand lift a cigarette to her mouth. Her lips were dry.

‘We met up,’ she said, ‘before the film festival. To talk about how psycho you’ve been lately. Sorry, I shouldn’t say psycho. To talk about how you’re being a bitch. He told me what happened. How you got drunk and cried and called him a faggot and he told you never to come back. Though I notice you have come back. He told me the horrible things that happened to him. And I thought of you, Romy. I thought of all the horrible things that happened to you. And it made me feel so tender, it made my heart open. Like a pair of legs, Romy. Do you understand? Like a pair of legs.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Romy said. A weight lifted from her, like water evaporating.