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Authors: Paddy O'Reilly

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BOOK: Peripheral Vision
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‘I never said yes, fucker. I was struggling,' Emma said.

‘Show me your face,' I ordered the man.

He turned away. ‘No. Why?'

I called Suze on my phone. ‘We've got one.'

Lu bent down and thrust her phone toward the man's face. There was a flash. ‘Got it. I'm sending now,' Lu said, pressing the button.

Suze's voice was a whisper. ‘Did he say it?'

‘No, but he mightn't have had time. Lu's sent you a pic.' I could hear the beep as the man's photo arrived on Suze's phone. Things were shifting inside me, again.

‘It's not him,' Suze said.

I'll never get it out of my head, what I saw when I found Suze that morning. Two other people, the ones who found the two girls before her, probably have nightmares like me. Three months later, I saw Suze in another way I can never forget, her grey broken face in the hospital after they had pumped her stomach.

He's around here somewhere. This is his patch.

Shannon tsked. ‘Oh well, never mind. We seem to have found ourselves a right arsehole though. Baseball, anyone?' She's always had a wicked sense of humour. She swung the bat twice, hard, and it whished through the cold night air like a blade. The kneeling man bowed his head. He was probably praying.

‘Do you like baseball?' Shannon asked. As she poked him hard in the back with the bat we all moved in a little closer, our moonshadows stretching and reshaping around us.

‘It was a misunderstanding,' he muttered.

She pressed the bat into his shoulder and gave a swift push so that he toppled sideways, flailing his arms.

We looked to Emma, who shrugged.

‘Next time,' she said.

The man leaped up and ran off toward the trees.

The breath from our mouths was turning to frost but I wasn't cold anymore. I bent and ran my finger through the blood on my foot then used it to draw a cross on the pillar.

‘Next time,' I repeated.

To my surprise Emma laughed, which made me and the others start to laugh. Soon we were laughing so hard that the park filled up with sound, and the whole of the night belonged to us.

Fireworks Night

On the night of the fireworks he rests his hand on the back of my neck as we walk. His hand is heavy and tanned brown. I can picture it lying dark against my neck, the fingers stretched enough to curl around my neck where it meets my shoulder, to cup the rosy hot skin burned by the sun of the summer festival.

We are part of a crowd walking slowly down to the riverbank to watch the fireworks. People smile at me as they pass. They smile because I am not one of them, but I have come to watch anyway. I can appreciate this part of their culture, even though I am a foreigner. I can be a part of this event. We will all be a part of this event, it is for sharing, and we will come away happy and tired and then I will go home. Home to my own country. Tomorrow I will board a plane and go home and one day soon I will share this pleasure with my own people by showing them photographs and telling them about my adventures, and we will all understand each other better. That, I think, is what they believe.

The weight of the brown hand resting on the back of my neck lifts, and Hiroshi points to a stall by the side of the road selling dinner boxes packed with noodles and dumplings and other small delicacies with rice. The stall is lit up by bare bulbs. Plastic flags in red and white stripes hang in an arc from the poles at each corner. The flags flutter in the evening breeze. The breeze and the moving flags make it seem like it should be cool, but it is still hot, the air is dank with humidity, and Hiroshi's warm hand has left a moist print on the back of my neck. He reaches around my waist and guides me toward the stall, where the stallholder is shouting a welcome and waving his tongs over the range of his merchandise. I am wearing a black rayon dress that hangs from two thin straps at my shoulders. Hiroshi's hand is hot through the rayon of my black dress as though we were skin to skin.

‘
Irasshai
!
' the stallholder shouts. ‘Welcome, hallo! Hallo Miss America!'

He has a row of golden teeth along the bottom of his jaw that gleam in the light of the bare bulbs. At the stall next door, a man is selling goldfish to children. His stall is a series of plastic blue and white pools teeming with fish. The children have to scoop up a fish in a tiny net, then they are given their catch in a plastic bag filled with water. The fish man waves a scooping net at me, ‘Hallo, fish here, hallo.' The golden-toothed stallholder makes a joke in a low voice to the fish man and they both laugh before turning away from me and Hiroshi.

‘What did they say?' I ask Hiroshi, and he looks at me. I can see his lips moving as he tries to form the translation in his mouth, but his mouth is all slow and sticky from the heat and he cannot make the English from the Japanese.

‘About fish,' Hiroshi says, and shrugs. Translating is too much trouble – it is too hot.

A small child wearing a Japanese happi coat and tiny wooden sandals clatters past and touches my sleeve on the way.

‘Hallo, hallo, sensei,' she calls before her mother puts a hand on the small of her back and pushes her forward.

I know this child, although I can't remember her name.

‘Hallo,' I call back. ‘Goodbye.'

She came to my class a few times, my class of toddlers and young children who repeated English words after me so accurately that I could hear my own Australian accent in their voices.
To die is choose die.
What will we do to die?
The mother looks back over her shoulder and nods her head slightly as she smiles to me.

Further along the road, a few stalls selling grilled chicken skewers have set up. The fat from the chicken drips and sizzles on the coals and the aroma wafts along the street past us. Two businessmen, their ties loosened and their sleeves rolled up, sit on low stools in front of the closest stall, drinking from big mugs of beer.

We pass the local supermarket with its bargain bins of socks and cabbages, then the futon shop. Fluffy futons are stacked five high on pallets out the front while the old man who owns the shop sits drinking tea on tatami matting inside the window. He stares at me and Hiroshi as we stroll by, as if he thinks the window makes him invisible. Further along the road the pottery shop owner pulls down her shutter, locks it, then joins the crowd moving toward the river. Watching her brush streaks of clay dust from her shirt as she walks, I realise that the sights on this walk are souvenirs I should be collecting.

Hiroshi is swinging the plastic bag with our dinner boxes back and forth in time with our steps. He leans over and takes my hand in his, then lifts it to his mouth and blows cool air into my palm.

‘Hot night,' he says, then laughs. ‘Hot August night.'

At home, August is the month when we have lost patience with the cold and the dark. We long for nights like this.

As we round a corner on the road we see the riverbank laid out before us like a woodblock print. Many hundreds of people are gathered to watch the fireworks. They sit in groups, their brightly coloured cotton kimonos glowing in the dusk light. Each group has its own patchwork of groundsheets and blankets, and pairs of shoes and sandals are lined up neatly at the edge of each group's territory. Paper lanterns sway on the decks of flat-bottomed boats cruising up and down the river, and down by the dock a man with a megaphone tries to organise a group of unruly elderly citizens.

I feel a rush of panic for what I am about to lose. I stop for a moment and breathe in deeply, trying to capture and hold the complicated scent that is Tokyo on a hot summer night.

We pick our way among the parties on the riverbank and find a small spot to spread our plastic sheet. I slip off my sandals and step onto the plastic. Hiroshi passes me the dinner boxes and I hold them while he unlaces his shoes and pulls off his socks, then steps onto the sheet beside me. As I look down I glimpse where my dress strap has slipped. The white skin where I was protected by the dress stands out in stark contrast to my pink shoulders and arms, as though this day, this festival, this country has burned its impression onto my body. I will never belong here and yet this place has become a part of me. A part that for the rest of my life will ache when I least expect it.

Just as we have opened our boxes and lifted salty pickled plums to our mouths, the first firework explodes above us. Then another and another and for half an hour we all stare upward at the brilliant light of the sky, and at the climax the whole sky burns bright until suddenly there is only darkness and the smell of the burned powder and empty bottles and dinner boxes and children asleep on their parents' shoulders and it is over.

Acknowledgments

To my Kanzaman friends, Jane Watson, Mary Manning, Penny Gibson, Pam Baker and Janey Runci, thank you for your helpful comments on story drafts and your excellent company. To all the literary magazines, thank you for being the engines of the short story world. And to Madonna Duffy, thank you for having me on your wonderful list.

Publication details

‘The Salesman',
Griffith REVIEW 29: Prosper or Perish
, 2010; and
The
Best Australian Stories
2010
,
ed. Cate Kennedy, Black Inc., 2010.

‘Procession',
Going Down Swinging
, Issue 30, 2010.

‘The City Circle',
Griffith REVIEW 45: The Way We Work
, 2014.

‘Stingers',
Review of Australian Fiction
,
Volume 10, Issue 6, 2014.

‘After the Goths',
Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books
, eds Jason Cotter and Michael Williams, Hardie Grant, 2009.

‘Family Reunion', published as ‘The Good Son',
Australian Book Review
, June 2009.

‘The Word',
Southerly
, Volume 68, Number 2, 2008.

‘One Good Thing',
Brothers and Sisters
, ed. Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2009.

‘Breaking Up',
Overland
, Issue 192, 2008; and
New Australian Stories
, ed. Aviva Tuffield, Scribe, 2009.

‘Serenity Prayer', published as ‘Reality TV',
The Great Unknown
, ed. Angela Meyer, Spineless Wonders, 2013.

‘Territory', published as ‘Friday Nights',
Review of Australian Fiction
,
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2012.

‘Fireworks Night',
Eureka Street
, 12 March 2008.

Also by Paddy O'Reilly

THE END OF THE WORLD

A sparkling collection of award-winning stories.

Stylistically varied and enlivened by a wry, dark humour, the stories in this collection span a broad range of experience – an alien visitor who communicates in the language of romance, a woman waiting for her death, a case of confused identity, and the sour taste of relationships lost or abandoned.

O'Reilly's characters are at once defiant and accepting, curious and bewildered. From Japan to suburban Australia, and onto a place where larger, odder things are possible,
The End of the World
plays with our perceptions of reality.

‘Fresh on every page, adventurous, enlightening, nicely restrained yet vivid and often moving.'
Australian

ISBN 978 0 7022 3594 8

First published 2015 by University of Queensland Press

PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.com.au

[email protected]

© Paddy O'Reilly 2015

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,

criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior

written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Cover design by Design by Committee

Typeset in 11/16 pt Bembo Std by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 0 7022 53607 (pbk)

ISBN 978 0 7022 55182 (ePDF)

ISBN 978 0 7022 55199 (ePub)

ISBN 978 0 7022 55205 (Kindle)

University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

BOOK: Peripheral Vision
10.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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