PART ONE
-
SUFFERING

Chapter One

Leah surveyed the refuse. The stink of trash and metal entwined in a wet rusty tang.  Her hands were encased in blue latex gloves torn at the wrists. The thumb of her right glove was lacerated down its length and hung open but it did not stop the sweat from filling the fingers that remained intact. From amongst the bottles and cans she plucked plastic bags, soiled diapers, half-full jars of peanut butter, and children’s toys. She tossed them into the trash cans behind her, leaving the recyclables to continue on their journey. A black fly landed near the corner of her left eye. Her expression never changed. 
The radio played over the high-pitched whine of conveyor belts and the beep of forklifts in the loading bays below. Every day the same songs and every day the voices of the presenters maintained an artificial cheerfulness. At four o’clock the belts stopped, and the workers cleaned up their stations, their eyes strained from watching and sorting. Leah took off her fluorescent vest and tossed it into her locker. They stood in a line and clocked out. Everyone else filed outside to their cars but Leah entered the yard through the back door.
It was the season for fires. The vineyards, orchards, and estates of the Adelaide Hills were being transformed into ash. There, on the sweltering and desolate plain where Leah stood, the ash fell. Gum trees bent away from the wind, their slender leaves making the sound of rain. The sun seemed artificial, hung in the sky, a heavy orange ball lighting the world aslant with a dim and dreamy light. 
The yard was littered with scraps of plastic that had broken away from the bales of sorted bottles. The bales lined the yard forming a barricade between the trash and the world that created it. On the other side of the bales was a chain wire fence. Beyond the fence there was a four lane highway and cars choked the straight, flat expanse. The cars crawled to the city or away from it into the sprawl of suburbs and out into the vastness of the country. Inside the cars there were people living out their lives, and beyond that, Leah did not know.  Leah took a cigarette from the chest pocket of her inky blue canvas coveralls. She lit the cigarette and the smoke dissolved into the opaque air. A bead of sweat dripped over the edge of her upper lip. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and licked at the salt.
The wheels on the gate squealed as they slid to a close and the chain clinked as it was pulled through the gap. Leah rose and sucked the heat of the cigarette to the butt, dropped the cigarette to the ground and pushed the burning tip into the cement slab with the ball of her foot.  

‘I thought you had gone’ Duc said. 

Duc unlocked the gate. She climbed into the tip truck and shut the door, locking herself into the indelible stench of smoke, diesel, and motor oil. She lowered the window and wiped the grease from the crank onto the leg of her coveralls. Duc threw a book onto the dash, and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola into her lap. He climbed in, pulled the door shut, opened his own bottle and drained half of it in one steady long gulp. She lit a cigarette and passed it to him and lit another for herself. 
Duc talked. This was his habit when he was with her. To fill the spaces of silence as though he was worried what may come to life in them. Next to the materials recovery facility where they worked there was a dump where people brought their unwanted things: furniture, books, and clothes, and the dump sold them on to the public. Duc and Leah shopped there for free. He read exclusively from that collection. Most recently he had found a book on Greek mythology. He told Leah how her grey almond eyes were like Athena’s, knowing that her father was Greek. He said these things with no conscious inclination toward romanticism, rather he had been imbued with a tendency toward it at birth. 

‘It’s weird that she sprang from his forehead and not a mother,’ Leah said.

‘I have been thinking about that too,’ Duc said, then bit the corner of his bottom lip and waited. 

‘I reckon they thought a woman like that could only come from a man’s imagination.’

Duc released his lip and smiled. 

‘I thought you would say something like that.’

They avoided the main roads until the suburbs broke into wide open fields of low yellow deadness. There was no street sign where they turned. It was barely a road. Just a track of fine pink dust that puffed into the smoky evening sky. The dryness of the air made them cough. 
Tractors dug a deep grave in a continuous drone, their beepers disabled so no one could know whether they drove forward or backward. Duc quit the engine, but the absence of its sound could hardly be noticed. He yelled down from the open window at a woman with a clipboard. He took an envelope from inside the book and passed it down to her. She waved him on. They drove to a precipice of that man made cliff where the stench of waste rose with its bitter metallic tang. Leah jumped from the truck and waited beside it. She looked into the abyss. Duc tipped the tray up and the bales of sorted plastic tumbled out of the truck and fell into the pit. When the truck had become horizontal again, she checked it to make sure all had fallen and returned to the cab where she lit another cigarette. 

‘I come into that shitty place five days a week and pull bottles of piss and snotty tissues from the belt just so it can all end up in the ground with everything else. It’s all so pointless,’ Leah said. 

‘Do you believe in God?’Duc asked.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I don’t think anyone believes anything is sacred anymore because life is so full of shit, you want something you buy the thing, you don’t want it anymore you throw it out. We dig up the ground and bury it or send it to some other country where it just sits in a pile. I think that’s why there were so many gods in ancient Greece, everything was hard to come by.’ 

‘I pray sometimes, but only when I think I might be pregnant’ Leah said.

‘Jesus Leah.’

He drove her home in his station wagon that smelled just like the truck but was otherwise spotless.  Streetlamps poured a warm orange light into the hot dark night and the moths set about dying beneath them. Front yards were decorated with Christmas lights and plastic effigies of Santa Claus yet Christmas had passed and the new year had already begun.
Leah and Duc had celebrated together at the pub near her house where they served her pitchers of beer despite knowing she was only seventeen. Duc had taken her home in a taxi and walked her to her door, but he had not gone in. He never went in, so she slept alone in the empty house without a whisper of resolution for the new year. The fake snow, the tinsel, the faded effigies, broken cars amongst the decorations. Dead grass grew up to their doors.
Leah flicked her cigarette butt through the window and it danced down the road. Duc shifted the gears down and stopped at the curb in front of Leah’s house. The car idled a smooth and steady rhythm.

‘When’s Douggie fixing your ute?’ Duc asked.

‘Soon,’ Leah replied.

‘You can still come with me in the evenings if you like, if you want to still.’

Leah opened the door but paused with one foot in and one foot out. The transmission towers that ran beside her house buzzed. 

‘Do you want to come in? I have a present for you. For Christmas, I only just finished it.’

‘I better get home.’

Leah’s feet remained. Duc’s eyes fixed on the triangle of white the headlights made on the black road. Sweat dripped from his dark hair cropped at the nape. It fell down the gully along his spine and pooled in a patch like an exit wound. He quit the engine and took his foot from the clutch. Leah turned her key in the lock. 
She returned from the shower with her long black hair loose and wet around her shoulders. Duc was looking at the walls so Leah looked too. Both of them wore only black, black jeans and black t-shirts, together they stood like mismatched exclamation points against the egg-shell white of the walls, Duc held a cigarette near his face and with his left hand he traced the faces of the people in the frames, the spaces between things like grout between tiles. Though in those suburbs the dust always had a way of getting inside, every frame shined clean. 
Leah was ten-years-old when Grace began disappearing for long periods of time. Her older sister, Rose, was thirteen, and already spent as much time as she could at her best friend’s house. Rachel’s parents owned a deli and by the standards of the area, were rich, and Rose was drawn to the idea of wealth, the food, the swimming pool, and the free marijuana Rachel’s dad gave them too. 
The first time, after a whole week had passed with no sign of Rose or Grace, Leah began cleaning. She scrubbed the deep fryer fat yellow from the walls of their government funded tract home. She threw out years old expired packaged food Grace had collected from the Salvation Army food bank, washed the carpets with a bucket of soapy water and a rag, and cleaned the hard water stains from the toilet bowl. 
By the time Leah was thirteen the house was more hers than her mother’s. Leah craved a home, where Grace craved something else, something she could never quite name. At eighteen Grace had been so desperate to escape the coldness of her English parents that she married the first man who had the courage to put his arm around her slender waist. She thought a child would fill the space in her, she thought a second one would too. But nothing ever seemed to be exciting enough. Nothing in the world made Grace feel at home.
Leah had been alone for three weeks when Grace returned to a clean house almost completely empty of food. To combat hunger, Leah had lifted donuts and finger buns from the school canteen. 

‘Did you tell anyone I was gone?’ Grace asked. 

‘No,’ Leah said, 

‘Good girl.’ Grace said. 

Seeing the resourcefulness of her youngest daughter Grace left more frequently, leaving money for food until Leah was old enough to earn money herself. As soon as she turned fourteen Leah got a part-time job at McDonald’s. At 15 she quit school altogether. She began frequenting the dump on her bicycle route home to collect framed photos of other people’s family members that got tossed out when some nameless grandmother passed away. She had met Duc then, in her McDonald’s grey slacks and green pinstriped shirt. The black nail polish flaking off her bit-up fingernails. Her index and middle fingers were stained from chain smoking.
It hurt Duc, it always hurt, the way Leah was an island in the wasteland of the world. Duc had opened the windows and the hot breeze lifted the scent of her mother’s perfume around the room. He had never asked her why she collected them. He did not need to. She collected them for the same reason the men at the dump could not bear to demolish the piano. It was beautiful, and in tune too, but no one in the entire northern suburbs had any use for something so beautiful. It had been purchased in 1946 by a ten-pound-pom who did not know how to play the piano but associated it with the wealth she sought, the dream she had of escaping the poverty of England. 
The enduring beauty of this object no longer determined its worth. Leah and Duc had been rummaging on a cold winter day when they overheard the workers arguing about who was going to do it and Duc intervened. Duc approached the task with the graciousness of a mortician receiving a corpse. He used his own lean body and an axe. The workers stood and watched with their beanies and caps in hand as though witnessing an execution. When the piano had been reduced to smaller parts, Duc put down his weapon and ordered the men to separate the metal from the wood and to burn the remains in a small smokeless fire.
Duc swept his hand around the dining room where artifacts were placed with the intention of a homemaker who may receive guests at any moment. 

‘You’re a curator of garbage. There is something from every decade in here’ 

In the lounge room Leah reached above the television set and brought down from the cabinet a bottle of gin and two crystal glasses. She lifted three ice cubes from the ice bucket with a pair of metal tongues and half filled the glasses with gin. With the gold gilded soda bottle she topped the glasses off. There was no lime. Duc was silenced by the drink and by the lump in his throat. She lifted the arm of the record player and sat the vinyl disk on the spindle. She lowered the arm, and the needle traced the valleys and peaks of Billie Holiday’s low sultry voice. She lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Duc. They smoked.  A macramé lightshade obscured the bright light of the bulb and cast a shadow that moved about the room in the breeze. She took a drag of the cigarette and exhaled. The needle of the record player found the quiet ridges in the center of the disk and returned automatically to its resting place. Duc’s silence filled the room. 
Leah’s room was bare in comparison to the rest of the house. The walls empty except for a large cloth print of Katsushika Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ that hung next to the double bed. There was the cloth, the bed, a wardrobe, and a bookshelf. Duc stood in the doorway. Leah went to the wardrobe and opened the door. From a drawer she took a small parcel wrapped in glossy white paper with mistletoe print. She pointed to the bed and told him to sit and he went as if on his way to the guillotine. She handed him the parcel and he unwrapped it slowly without tearing the paper. Inside was a hat crocheted with a blue-black yarn. He put it on his head. 

‘You won’t need it for a while, but I thought you would like it,’ she said.  

He smiled and the space left by a pulled tooth showed. His hands and face were crazed like the inside of a ceramic cup and stained darker than the rest of him, stained and roughened by the sun and dirt. Blackness worked into the cracks of hairless fingers. His brown slender neck glistened with sweat and the pulse of his blood kicked against his skin.
He removed the hat and set it on his knee and stroked at the soft stitches with the palm of his rough hand. The smell of his clean shirt and dirty skin rose like the smell of hot cement after a summer rain. His thick lips parted and closed. Words did not come. Leah went to him and stood between his knees. Duc lifted his hands and put them on her hip bones and pushed her backward. He rose in the space he had created between them. She put her palm on his chest. 

‘Won’t your mum be home?’

‘She hasn’t been home in months.’

‘I shouldn’t have stayed.’ 

Leah fell onto the bed.

‘Come on. You let me follow you around like a shadow.’

 Duc sat beside her. She ran her fingers along a strand of her thick dark hair and placed the end of it in her mouth. 

‘I’m trying to do right by you.’

Leah sat up and took his cigarette pack from his pocket and lit one and threw the pack on the floor. 

‘It’s like ten years difference.’

‘That’s a lot.’

‘In ten years, I’ll be right here doing the same thing.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be. You smoke like a train.’

Duc stood and opened the broad tall sliding window and kicked off his shoes. He lay beside her and took her cigarette, drew it down, and passed it back to her. Her fingers played at the fringes of his cotton t-shirt and the passage of time could be measured by the inching of her hand toward his chest where it came to rest on his breastbone. His palm covered it, and his fingers threaded between hers. 

‘The ute isn’t really busted, is it?’

Leah buried her face into his shoulder to muffle her laughter. 

The room was lit by the harsh white light of a bare flickering bulb and the air was perfumed by the dead grass in the backyard. A moth the size of a saucer flew through the screenless window and danced around the room, and they fell asleep to the sound of it tapping against the bulb, her body clutched at his like somebody drowning at sea.

Her eyes fluttered open. It was light outside. Duc was gone. The bulb in her room was flashing on and off, on and off. Shane filled the doorway, his filthy fingers flicking the switch.

‘Who the fuck was that bloke?’

‘Where’s Mum?,’ Leah replied.