Boundaries (prologue and chapter 1)

 

“Prologue”

2022

Ethel Newbury moves like she’s on a mission -- it’s because she’s on a mission.

She steps off the paved path (lined with metal railings for her fellow retirees, those with less confidence in their step) and makes a beeline for the duplexes. The duplexes are where villagers like Ethel live, those that are independent, not demented; their bones lacking the brittleness which makes showering a risk of Homeric proportions, but she isn’t going home just yet. Home is in the Howard wing, and she’s cutting through the newer Gillard complex. No. Ethel knows exactly who she is looking for.

“Nice day, aint it?”, Graham St. George, resident of the Fraser wing, asks as she passes by him. Graham leans over a spartan garden bed, tending to a rather arrogant yellow tulip. Graham’s graying tendrils of hair cling to him in sweat from the midday’s heat, revealing a sun-spotted scalp.

“Drink my melted shit, Graham,” Ethel shoots back, not breaking stride. Graham doesn’t look up. He knows not to engage bullies. And Ethel really knows how to bully.

Ethel’s getting closer. Barbara’s duplex. Decorated with knick-knacks on the outside (“Home is where the grandkids escape to”, “Live long enough to be a problem to your kids”, and other bullshitery that makes Ethel’s stomach churn) as if this were a real home -- and not some open-air tomb for the burdensome Ethel Newburys, Barbara Chans, and Graham St. Georges of the world.

Ethel pounds on Barbara’s door. Barbara’s neighbour in the adjoining duplex peers through the window, hearing the commotion, but she knows not to get involved.

“I know you’re home, Barbara. We have nowhere else to be until they serve lunch,” Ethel says.

There’s movement inside. Timid sounds. Maybe Barbara’s planning her next move.

“My grandson’s visiting the nursing home tomorrow, Ethel. He’ll have your money,”

“Oh, is he? Is he, now? Just like last time?”. Ethel makes her way past the duplex’s front façade, towards a window. She feels around in the base of a succulent that Barbara has made the effort to maintain, revealing a satisfying garden rock. Ethel looks up at Barbara’s side window. She can see Barbara inside, cowering. Ethel’s bones creak -- she’s eighty-five, after all; spritely, but still eighty-five -- as she bends down to nab the spare key hidden under the rock.

The key fits in the door with ease. Ethel had half-expected time and weather to have warped the lock, making the key stick, but perhaps the recent renovation on Gillard Unit had something to do with it. Barbara shrieks in primal fear as Ethel gains entry.

“Don’t play cards if you can’t make your fucking calls, Barbara,” Ethel commands.

#

Graham St. Cloud stood up to admire the tulip. It was only one. But it made his day. Even Ethel’s vulgarity couldn’t take away his sense of achievement, he thinks, as he heads back early for lunch. And she’s been like that with everyone recently. He’d be a fool to take it personal.

The automated sprinklers come to life, bathing the tulip. Graham briefly worries about over-watering (he’d complained to the nurses about it last Spring) but then finds himself entranced by the arc of the water, the rhythmic tchk-tchk-tchk of the machine, and the ensuing curve of a rainbow cast in the air before him. He can’t stop himself from smiling.

He steps away, towards the dining hall, still admiring the rainbow.

Graham’s still smiling when hears Barbara’s anguished screams, and her deafening, pleas for someone to stop, please stop coming from the Gillard duplexes.

Graham calculates whether it would be more directionally efficient to continue on-course to lunch, and to ask for help there - or to turn back.

He sits, for a moment, with the knowledge that they’re serving chicken cacciatore today.

 

 

 

“One (Olive)”

2022

Olive Newbury tries her best to delicately adjust her underwear. She’s standing near the center of NKALCorp’s fourth-floor cubicle farm, and, like every day, she had been pushing that unwieldy cleaner’s trolley around when she felt it suddenly very urgent that she remove her underwear from deep inside her nethers. She’d doubted anyone was looking at her: she could hear the commotion of the office and felt no eyes upon her. But if even one employee saw her do this, she’d certainly have no choice but to swim into the Brisbane river.

Distracting herself, she empties the contents of a wastebin under an unused cubicle into the black garbage bag she lugs. She bends over to return the basket to its original location when she hears the slightest titter of a laugh. With deer-like reflexes, she stands and looks around. There are no obvious suspects. No grinners to see.

This cubicle farm, where NKALCorp houses its entry-level nepotism-hires and unpaid interns, is filled with many clones of the very same little white boy.  Early twenties, slicked back Patrick Batman hair, wireless headphones, and strap-over-the-shoulder messenger bags. The clones without the headphones listen to Joe Rogan at their desks and don’t care who is forced to partake.

Olive often thinks these tracts of the same little boy. All of them thirty years Olive’s junior, stretched all the way from the executive offices to the windows.

Olive looks down at her behind: her underwear has ridden up above her slacks, as she suspected, causing both the earlier discomfort and the anonymous giggling. She stands in the space between her cart and a filing cabinet to readjust and continues her rounds, emptying wastepaper baskets full of empty fast-food detritus and study-pill bottles, the incident neither particularly distressing nor entirely routine. Just another piece of evidence that Olive filed away unconsciously, like a detective building a case about herself:  the woman for whom  minorly unfortunate things continued to happen.

#

Hannigan, one of the fourth-floor executives, is about fifty-two years old. Olive thinks she saw his date of birth once but can’t be sure how. Olive knows he likes when she comes to empty his wastepaper basket. She also knows he likes it because of the things Olive lets him do to her.

When Olive arrives, he’s already shut the blinds, so the building’s unsatisfactory natural lighting contributes to a dimmed Chinese Restaurant aura. Olive can tell Hannigan’s looking at porn, because even though she can’t see his computer screen, the colours and shades reflected on his glasses – vibrant purple and pink, flashing – are of the obnoxious pop-up ads you get on free porn sites. Hannigan looks at free porn, Olive pondered.

“Anything in the trash for me, today, Dominic -- Mr. Hannigan?”. Hannigan shakes his head, eyes still on the screen. The bright colours of creamy skin covered in cum are now reflected on his frames, moving rhythmically. Olive looks at him. He’s handsome. He’s basically her age, younger by only a handful of years. But still, something felt dirty. Maybe it felt dirty on account of how dirty it all was.

Hannigan finally looks up, his eyes lit with an idea.

“Could you please wear something for me today, Olive?”.

#

Olive bends over the bookshelf in Hannigan’s office, pretending to use the feather duster he had brought (a highlight from her view of the shelf – The Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro). The outfit – a skimpy black and white Halloween store maid’s costume that made Olive feel self-conscious about her legs, crisscrossed with varicose veins – was a size too small. Hannigan sits behind his desk touching himself.

“You have to do a good job, or I’ll report you to immigration,” he says, eeking a moan. Olive guesses this means she’s supposed to be Latina today.

“Of course, Mr. Hannigans, I do good job.” The accent she attempts comes out wrong, sounding like an Irish brogue, or perhaps that of a deaf person.

Hannigan gestures Olive to approach him behind the desk. She obeys, putting the duster down. His fly is down, and his penis is out, but he’s otherwise fully dressed. He further gestures towards the offending organ, as if Olive would be at all confused about what he wants her to do. She kneels by his desk chair and finishes him off with her non-dominant hand. He grabs yesterday’s paper memo from his desk and comes into it. Olive is thankful for one less thing to clean up.

Immediately, Hannigan returns to business. He seems filled with clarity. He shoots a at Olive in costume almost with confusion, or disgust, as if she is a dog wearing clothes.

“Olive, can you make sure you clean up the rec-room today? Dipshit interns leave it like a frat party.”

Olive changes back into her blouse.

“No problem. I’ll see you next week.” She’s not sure she will.

Hannigan, nodding, minimizes the porn and starts typing an email. Olive grabs her cart and heads towards the door. She doesn’t know what to do with this weekly experience. She never does. Sometimes, at night, she tries to touch herself thinking about it, but that just leaves her feeling worse, physically, almost like she has a flu.

“Mr. Hannigan?”

“Hm?”. He doesn’t look up.

“Why do you this? I mean, with me, specifically. Why not another cleaner, or literally any other woman…below…you?”.

Olive catches her reflection in a metallic feature wall on the left.  Bloated. Pasty-skinned.

Hannigan stops typing when she asks this. He looks at Olive, considering her, the way one tries to consider early conceptual art.

“I guess it’s more about me. Going back to childhood. I always liked women who were achievable. Easy. If you’ll forgive me…women below me. My wife – I have a wife, I don’t know if I told you – she’s independently wealthy, a CFO at Optus, and I love her, but she doesn’t scratch that itch like you.”

“Oh.”

“But you. You’re like a blank canvas. For my fantasies. No internal life, at least not in any way relevant to me. I can’t – and don’t want to – imagine you having any kind of life outside this room.” He turns back to the computer and sends the email he was composing. “Does that answer your question, Olive?”

Olive nods. She knows he said it without malice (in fact, it seems he made a genuine effort to say that in the nicest way possible, a charity she doesn’t even deserve), but she feels a gaping wound. It’s as if he had performed surgery on her, only to pull aside the incision and find nothing inside. No organs. No tumour. Just blood pumping pointlessly.

Olive doesn’t say goodbye, too afraid she’ll burst into tears, and opens Hannigan’s door to leave.

“Olive – don’t forget. Clean the rec room.”

#

Olive hadn’t known how easy it was to resign. It was as simple as going to NKCAL Corps’s old campus across the industrial park, finding the directory to the human resources wing (eight stories up), speaking to an intern, meeting one of the hiring executives, and then chatting to an administrative assistant who helped her complete the forms.

After waiting two hours, a woman named Ponie did her exit interview. Ponie smelled like rosewater.