I get up, I get dressed, and I clean. Armageddon or not, I don’t think I can stand living in the middle of my own refuse for another second.
I pull down the Cinnamon Girl scraps from my walls and bookshelf, and I carefully bundle them together in a spare archive box. I lay my sketchpads on top; all but my first one, filled with the rough, hopeful plans for the beginning of her story. I think I might be able to salvage some bits from this one. It may be premature to consider a revised origin or post-
Crisis
story for her, but jeez – it’s not like I’m gonna be panned for messing with her mythology just yet.
Beneath my piles of shoes and clothes, last year’s school stuff is still scattered. I’d chucked a few things into the bonfire my class had up on the hill after exams, and yet year-twelve debris remain strewn across my room. I gather up the books, and my school diary that’s covered in more photos of my friends and me than any actual school business. On the cover is a pic of me, Caroline and Tia; Tia’s face peeking up in the background, behind a close-up of my cheek and lips, and Caroline mugging with chocolate brownie mashed in her front teeth. I rip off the cover and balance it on my bookshelf. And then I archive the rest.
The morning sky is streaked the colour of whiskey when I eventually emerge outside. I drag my banana lounge beneath Dad’s plum trees, with my pencils scattered around me. I open a clean pad of Bristol board, but instead of drawing straight away, I just hang out, and I watch for a while.
I can’t describe the mood as the farm wakes; the best I can capture it on my page is a layered mess of human beings, a bit like
Moses
, this Frida Kahlo painting in one of Mum’s art books.
I draw as the sun struggles above the blanket of white. At some point Angie wanders out with a plate of cheese muffins, and she sits beside me in silence as we contemplate my pages. I’m not entirely sure of the storyboard that’s emerging. I suppose I just have to trust that my subconscious knows something the rest of my brain is still catching up on. I kinda like this new version of Cinnamon Girl though; her lines are simpler, sort of naïve in style, but somehow I think she might be okay with that.
I fall onto my green couch that night and pass out before my head hits the cushions. When I jump up the next morning, I install myself at the edge of my plastic garden and I keep working.
In between, when I feel like a change of perspective, I wander through the secret gate and out into the Palmers’ field. I don’t head anywhere in particular, just kind of soak up the atmosphere as I meander alone. A non-denominational prayer circle has sprung from the T-shirt rubble of the Thunderdome; as it turns out, not everyone has shown up here just to get tanked. The people who have taken over this spot are quiet, and introspective. I sit under a tree and chat to a couple of Buddhist women who tell me all about impermanence and interconnectedness and stuff. And then someone on stage announces that naked Battleship is about to begin beneath the water tanks, and they take off with cheery waves.
Strangely, as I mosey through the farm, I bump into a bunch of people I know. New faces who have become regulars at the bakery, and a few arsebags I recognise from Merindale, and a handful of friends from school who are still hanging around the Valley, all of whom are embracing the End Times with varying levels of enthusiasm.
I fly a kite. I toss a frisbee. I graciously decline to participate in a nudie dance-off. Once, as I’m weaving through the caravans and cars, I stumble upon an orange-and-blue VW Kombi with fraying purple curtains, and my feet come to a stop.
Thumbing through a magazine in the doorway is dreadlocked bikini girl, one of the visitors who’s become a fixture at Albany’s. Her name, it turns out, is Lizzy Warren, and she is a second-year graphic-design student in the city. Lizzy lets me sit in the shade of her doorway, happy, she tells me, just to talk to someone who’s showered in the past week. We yammer about Marjane Satrapi and Georgia O’Keeffe, and Julie Doucet, who we have, like, irreconcilable opinions on. Apart from Mum, there isn’t anyone in the Valley who really gets the stuff that I love. It’s kind of nice, if a bit incongruous. I leave with Lizzy’s number, and a promise to look her up if I ever do make it to the city. Neither of us points out that this is contingent on the city still existing come midnight tomorrow.
In between, my friends drift in and out of Albany’s. Caroline and Tia drag me away from my pencils to hang out at Anzac Park with some random surfer chicks from Perth that they have made friends with. Petey drops by with a parcel of greasy chips and classic TV episodes of
Wonder Woman
loaded on his laptop. He makes himself at home on my bedroom floor while I work up colour-palette options on my Wacom. Even Eddie manages to find an hour free in between chores. He hunkers in my backyard, falling asleep on my banana lounge with an Akubra on his face and a mumbled promise to ‘deck the feck-stick’ who sprayed one of his cows blue.
No-one discusses the end of the world, or the missing member of our group, leaving my imagination to construct scenarios involving him being abducted by a red-headed siren who looks like a mash-up of Mary Janes from different
Spider-man
s. But there is an uneasiness to my friends as the clock ticks, a nerviness that, if I were to draw it, would look something like lengthening shadows moving in over their frames.
•
I wake up late on the final day of the year to the whirl of helicopters hovering overhead and music already playing. The sounds of the Valley are way different this morning. A buzziness filters into my bedroom as I open my eyes, my head filled with that last-day-of-school feeling of excitement and melancholy.
I swipe at the drool puddle that has formed beneath my cheek. I seem to have fallen asleep facedown at my desk. I remember waking up at two in the morning with this crazy urgency that made me leap out of bed and hurry to my bookshelf. I may have been dreaming, but I remembered this sequence of frames in one of my dad’s
Gods and Mortals
Wonder Woman books that I just had to find.
I push my chair away from my desk. Around me are the teetering stacks of Dad’s and my comics; some of his so thumbed that the pages are barely attached. I never did find the art I was looking for. I got distracted when I stumbled on Dad’s copy of
Batman: Year One,
bookmarked a third of the way through with a receipt from the Wasileskis’ service station. Dad was always obsessed with this book. I don’t know how many times we’d swapped it between us, Dad grilling me about my opinion on the art style and Miller’s take on Catwoman and stuff. I hadn’t read his copy in ages though, not since I bought my own hardcover a few years back. I always wondered what Dad would have said about the reworked colouring in my edition.
I glance at the clock on my desk. The pink numbers seem to crackle with an intensity way more insistent than normal. I grab a dress from my wardrobe, and I hurry into the shower.
•
I’m towelling my hair as I slip back into my room, and my elbows are blocking my face, so for all of three seconds I fail to process that Grady is sitting on the armrest of my couch.
He leaps to his feet when he sees me, but then he sort of hovers, like he’s not sure what to do next.
I freeze, and I drink in his presence in my room; dishevelled curls and rumpled
Cutty’s Boxing Gym
T-shirt and old jeans, and dirty hands, which I know means he’s in the middle of work. His face is shadowy with stubble. He looks exhausted.
‘Grady. What are you doing here?’
He runs a hand madly through his hair. ‘I don’t know. I was dropping off some boxes but then … I found myself here. I was going to leave. And then I didn’t.’ He falls into my desk chair and buries his face in his hands. ‘Alba. What’s going on with us?’
I toss my towel onto the floor, fizzy frustration sending my voice stratospheric. ‘What’s going on? I dunno, Domenic. You are the one who was all, like, nice knowing you, have a great life and whatnot. And, you know,
you
are the one hankering after the first chick you meet with a city address who gives you the side eye –’ I suck in a giant, shaky breath. ‘Now you’re asking
me
that question?’
Grady’s face flushes. ‘Alba, Jesus, it’s not like … I don’t know what I’m doing! I was right, I think, about me needing to work through my own stuff, and you were right when you said that you needed to figure things out, but –’
‘But what? What, Grady?’ I snap.
‘But why do we have to do that apart?’ he yells.
I fall onto my bed and hug a pillow to my chest. Outside, a shouty song is blasting from the band. Inside, the silence hangs, full of finality. Cold water trickles from my hair and down my back. Part of my brain is yelling at me to speak; the other part knows it’s just not ready to say the things it needs to say.
Grady’s tired eyes fall onto my desk. I’d tossed Daniel’s presents there, and then forgotten about them; right now, his hardcover book is sitting on top of a pile of comics like a cheerful, flab-free trophy.
‘What’s this?’ Grady says. He picks up the book and flips it over, and then he looks up at me blankly. ‘Alba? Why are you reading a diet book?’ he says quietly.
‘Um, I’m not. It’s not mine. Well, it’s mine, but not really. Ah … Daniel gave it to me. I think it’s supposed to be inspirational,’ I say with a really crap attempt at lightness. ‘Hey, if Indigo’s pecs are anything to go by, I’d say it’s, like, the Green Lantern Power Ring of diet books.’
I swallow, my hands suddenly tingly in a way that has nothing to do with the ominous grandfather-clock sound effect chiming through the PA, and everything to do with the fact that Grady’s face has morphed into this expression I’ve only seen once before, when Anthony backed Cleo’s car over the science project Grady had spent months working on. His pupils are so big they’re almost blacking out the brown of his eyes.
‘Daniel. Did. What?’ he says. His voice is scarily expressionless, like Dr Manhattan in
Watchmen
, just before he vaporises Rorschach.
‘Look, Grady, it’s just a book,’ I say hurriedly. ‘And we were talking about us –’
‘Yeah, except there is no
us
, is there, Alba.’
He storms out of my room, slamming the verandah door so hard behind him that the frame of my house shudders.
I consider running behind him. But my feet don’t want to move in that direction. My eyes linger on Dad’s comics, and the panel of Cinnamon Girl on my screen. She’s standing on the steps of Albany’s, staring down Main Street at an invisible point on the horizon. I’ve roughed out the buildings and the sinister penny-farthing in her distance; I realise that though my character is changing with every incarnation, I can draw my town flawlessly without ever needing to leave my room.
I toss aside the pillow and hurry off my bed.
•
My house smells like fresh laundry and cinnamon sugar. I dig out Mum’s photo albums from the top of her wardrobe and carry them into the lounge, sweeping aside our Santas so I can place the albums on the coffee table. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I sit on the floor and flip open the first book. It’s one of Mum’s junky ones; a few pages are artfully arranged, until she lost interest and just jammed the rest in alongside receipts and takeaway menus.
Mostly, they’re pics of Angie in her last bit of high school and her first bit of uni. Mum beams in her school uniform, a gaggle of girls crammed around her with matching high ponytails and cheesy smiles. I see the same faces in a dozen photos; but I know Mum struggles to remember all their names now. My favourite part of this album is the second half: the scattered shots of Mum at uni, when her hair becomes blue, and her lip becomes pierced, and the face alongside hers becomes Cleo’s. Sticky-taped inside are concert tickets and flyers to art shows, and in between Mum and Cleo and their bizarro friends, the face of my dad as he drifts into their story.
I reach for a leather-bound green book in the middle of the pile. I haven’t looked at this one in ages. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of the pics; there’s a scattering of photos of me and Grady, sometimes as awkward prepubescents, sometimes as gappy-toothed little kids. There’s an assortment of Eden Valley events, like that one time the Alberts organised a cook-off in Anzac Park, and ended up burning down the gazebo.
And in between, everywhere, like the
Where’s Wally?
of Eden Valley, is my dad. A sneaky photo of him sleeping in front of the telly in his green chair with baby me in his arms, and mowing the lawn of the bungalow where we lived when I was a kid, and smooching Mum in front of the new neon sign he’d hung above Albany’s trellising. Photos of him and Mr Everson installing the bench in front of the fruit-and-veg, and of him fixing the farm fencing at Cleo’s yellow house, and covered in soot and cinders as he helps the Ridleys rebuild their goat shed. There are pages of him with Grady at Merindale basketball courts, and Grady with our family in the
Fantastic Four
costumes Dad insisted we wear for Halloween that one year. And there is that single photo of him atop his stupid ginormous Kawasaki Vulcan, the motorbike blindingly shiny, probably cos it’d been subjected to its bazillionth polish that day.
I drag my eyes up. Dad’s favourite green armchair, saggy and faded, still has pride of place in our living room. His law books are still scattered through our shelves. The Cecily Brown print he bought for Mum still hangs over the water stain on the wall, and his face beams down from everywhere, his photos and stuff and
spirit
as ever-present as if he had never gone anywhere.
My dad, tall and broad and solid, his hair the exact same shade as mine, his dark eyes almost the same shape as mine. Always smiley, and goofy and way too loud.
I close the photo album and place it carefully on top of the pile. If my dad were watching me now, I reckon he’d be rolling his eyes at my mushy mawkishness. He’d swat me over the backside with whichever random comic he had in his hand. If he knew the mess that was in my head, he’d probably give me one of his giant, smothery bear hugs, and his favourite piece of faux-dad advice: