She did not think about it much when she decided to buy a phone charger from that place up north with the mall and the subdivision and the motorway, but she left work early to get there on the bus because the bus had its own special lane all the way north and this wasn't even that far really. The bus went fast and it stopped where she could see the mall up on the hill, and the man yelled something, and she got out and the bus was gone.
A belt of macrocarpa stood behind the bus stop sign, rambling left and right as far as she could see, hacked back so that the exposed branches pointed at her face like accusatory fingers. She turned around and, keeping the mall in her sights, crossed the highway. Step by step the mall was eclipsed by the blanketed hills of the subdivision, which were in turn swallowed up by a row of Monterey pine a few kilometers nearer. The mall looked close from the bus, but it was now apparent that in order to get to it she would have to traverse a field of weeds and gorse, a small pine glade, and a hilly planned community. What the fuck have I done, she thought, They offered free delivery, and pressed on.
The field looked sad and flat but the weeds were taller than she, and on the left was a path of clay and rocks that lead to a muddy lake in the centre. A corrugated iron shack stood next to it, and a cute stumpy pier. The insects droned like a chainsaw. Diggers and bulldozers were off to the right, away from the clay path, and had gone to seed, with rats nesting comfortably in the foam seats, and obese furry creatures snoring with open yellow eyes on the roofs cracked and peeling in the hot sun. Some of the weeds, she thought, looked kind of like her mother, if not in appearance then in demeanour. Scratching the cuts from the gorse until they puckered up and stopped bleeding, and plucking from her socks the prickles and cords of the wild vegetation, she stumbled out of the field and into the relative shade of the Monterey pine border.
Like hideous faces the trees descended into a small black stream and up the other side, stopping at the edge of a sports field which yawned its way to a skatepark, netball court, and two storey rugby club. She got muck on her shoes from the stream, dodged seagulls at the skatepark, and smirked haughty past the rugby club, marching up the hill and past all the newly built beige houses. The road looked dusty although it was not. Each blade of grass on every berm was dewey and proudly individuated. The area looked like a nineteen fifties barbecue advertisement, and she could feel its humidity causing her skull to shrink, tightening on her brain and causing her sinuses to run with a thick transparent liquid that smelled strongly of ants. It was clear to her that this was an unwelcome development, a wasteland where the grass turns up mud like chocolate mousse and the birds, confused, look like they've been kidnapped from their homes and brought here against their will.
At the top of the hill she saw the mall and felt relieved. There were only a few more hills to go and each rolled gently from the last, never dropping to the level of the sports field in the other direction. Before she could resume her usual style of walking (a bizarre and officious technique that horrified onlookers with its long strides and warlike, jerky movements) however, a cat slunk out from the fence, and waited for her in the middle of the footpath. She stopped and stared at it for a bit, thinking intensely behind a blank expression, and then decided that she had better pat it. Unlike just about everybody else she knew, she took no pleasure from playing with cats and in fact found that their fine fur, so often either waxy or dusty and granular, left a film on her fingers that lightly repulsed her. If she ever did pat a cat she did so out of an imagined obligation to the cat's owner lest they see her walk past their prized beast with nonchalance and begin to worry about it being somehow less desirable than others. Because she had never made the effort to impress a cat, she did not know that they preferred a horizontal caress to a vertical clap, and so she raised her flattened hand and tapped the cat three times on the head, causing its ears to stick out sideways and its face to scrunch up like it was about to sneeze.
The cat, furious, turned around and walked up the driveway and to the yard, and the woman, satisfied, continued toward the mall. The cat rolled around in the dirt and then stopped abruptly as though it had been caught out. It began licking itself. Then it sneezed. The yard did not belong to the cat, nor did the house. A man lived there they called The Priest, not because he was involved in the church down the road, but because in a previous life he ran one out of a school gymnasium and performed baptisms at the adjacent Carol Jupiter Aquatic Centre (if not for proximity alone, the open barbecue area made it a better location for ceremony than any of its competitors). The Priest now more or less lived in the gigantic spa bath that came with the house, which he had de-installed and moved to the sunroom out front. He sometimes thought about his congregation out west, but was happy out here with his sunroom and spa bath.
Today The Priest had with him in the spa bath one of the large furry creatures with yellow eyes that inhabited the greenfield land on the outskirts of the subdivision. The creature looked nervous. Its bright yellow eyes darted around the sunroom so as to double and triple check that it knew where the exit was. The Priest stared the creature straight between the eyes and refused to blink, employing carefree body language to put the creature at ease. He focussed great physical and psychological energy on dangling his left arm over the side of the spa bath, more than the creature had ever exerted in its life. He sighed affectionately and then inhaled so forcefully that you could hear the oxygen rushing into his body, screaming to get away. The creature felt like it was about to pass out when The Priest rasped in its direction, his eyes bloodshot and watering, the veins in his neck bulging, his reclining body taut and purple.
The creatures weren't dangerous per se, but more and more of them were being spotted roaming the residential streets at night when people were fast asleep in bed. The Priest didn't know for certain why the people of the subdivision had elected him as a sort of unofficial sheriff in affairs such as this, but he accepted the position with great pride. He had volumes of Franz Mesmer on his bookshelf, as well as key texts by Abbé Faria. He had boxes full of Elizabeth Ichbald's satirical Animal Magnetism which he would use to start bonfires in the summer. He didn't mind the creatures, and if it weren't for their clay-like faces and demonic yellow eyes he might even find them cute. But as town sheriff, he had a job to do and he was determined to do it well.
That morning he had sent his neighbour down to the field equipped with some trade items (food, magazines, sunglasses), which, all going well, would be instrumental in establishing a relationship with these creatures. Having exchanged items and built trust, the neighbour would then suggest that the leader of the creatures come with him for a beer at The Priest's house at the top of the hill. In practice however the neighbour had inadvertently dropped his box of trade items in the stream by the Monterey pine, and the creature currently in The Priest's spa pool was only there because the neighbour had chased it down in his car and kidnapped it. The creature's family had all run out of the forest, screaming through their horrible faces after him. Of course he did not tell this to The Priest, who said that things like this require a great deal of trust and patience. For The Priest, a casual spa bath between friends seemed the perfect environment for a creature such as this to drop its guard, knock back a few beers, and divulge any and all information pertaining to the creatures' activities at night, their weird clay faces, and their intentions in general. The Priest's neighbour, the one who had gone down this morning, had a theory that they were collecting material with which to build a spaceship or maybe a tank.
The cat was greatly annoyed that The Priest was occupied, so went back to find the woman so abnormally lacking in feline empathy. She was a few blocks down by now, almost outside the cat's house, so it doubled its pace to catch her up. When it finally did, the cat swerved between the woman's legs, giving her a fright, and causing her to mutter Fucking thing. The cat's owner heard this from the front garden and reacted immediately. Why don't you like my cat?, the child asked, on the verge of tears, to which the woman responded I do like your cat, it's the prettiest cat in the whole world. Really I do love your cat. This made the child very happy, and he ran back into the house yelling Mum, mum! We've got the prettiest cat in the whole world! The lady outside said so! The lady outside continued walking like a marionette controlled by a deranged puppeteer on her way to buy the phone charger from the mall.
To her credit she did not panic when she arrived at the mall to find that Bond and Bond had been bought out by Noel Leeming, and that Noel Leeming were only selling micro USB chargers for smartphones. Nor did she panic when on her way to Kmart she passed a LogoLand and saw in the window what she still with great certainty believes to be a childhood portrait taken of her, printed on t-shirts, mugs, cutlery, and dinner plates. She did not panic when she used the bathroom next to the McDonald's and saw her name written twice on the cleaning roster stuck at the entrance, the only name there. She felt uplifted when she saw that the food court had a Chilando, not because Chilando made particularly good tasting food, but because a burrito bowl wouldn't contribute to her paunch the way a Big Mac most certainly would. She felt decent as she poured her own rubbish from the tray into the bin, saving the cleaner from having to do it.
Things were okay. Things were basically good for her. Sure, she felt sad as she thought about her mother, but then she felt relieved as she left the mall, remembering that the afternoon was still young, that she had some good movies to watch at home, and that the bus with its own special lane would have her back there in no time.
July 2018