Pariah

About this time, I began to screen my friends. One of them lived just a few blocks away but had a school-aged kid. Others dwelt far from our inland town, in the city; that urban resettlement camp we’d left years ago. Stacks of people lived there with animals, without memory of how they’d arrived.

These friends could visit our house, I decided, but remain outside the door as though they were just about to leave.

We can trust them, said my husband after a while, pointing at some faces on his phone. It wasn’t them I was thinking of, at first; it’s the transparent lines that connect one hand to another. The stranger you never kissed. One of you is surrounded by a ring of dirt, glowing. Could the screen trace auras: a good heart but an open-mouthed cough.

The doorbell chimed a burning piano. I looked through the pane at our neighbour, who’d placed a box of chocolates on the Welcome mat. She pointed at the box, nodding her head. I nodded, too—casting my head back and away, saying Ok, I’ve got it. She heard me like underwater.

I stood looking at the neighbour until she left. She had a mate’s car in her driveway. I noted the rego. It’s not really on, is it, I asked my husband. No, it’s not, I answered for him. I stayed at the window through the evening.

After sundown the neighbour’s driveway was clear. I wrote my letter beside the glass. Time took care of itself. I hung around beside me.

I carried on writing my letters inside. I didn’t receive any. And I didn’t read the ones I received.

As the neighbour had read mine, I’d watched her through the window and tingled. She’d read it slowly and folded it. Then she’d opened and read it again.

She’d come to the front door and mouthed Sorry through the pane. I hadn’t moved my head or hands. She’d held hers out, like two sheets of blank paper. I’d looked around for my husband. Those hands are aglow, I’d complained loudly, and it pinged about the room.

Commissioned and published by the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature’s Poet Laureates of Melbourne series, August 2020.

Thanks to the City of Literature team.

Image: Women wearing surgical masks during influenza epidemic, Brisbane 1919. Courtesy: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.