She sells her body to save her mother's life. If they made her the star of a reality show, that would be the tagline. The series would end with the mother's funeral; or else with a wedding: the heroine marries a perfect man, and the mother is magically restored to health. She breathes in and out, holding her smile, as she struts along the catwalk which is not really a catwalk - just a zone indicated with masking tape on the hardwood floor of a loft in a warehouse in north-east Beijing.

For all of his eight years Neo has been trying to grow wings. He's mastered the egg, caterpillar, and pupal stages, but the emerging from chrysalis is suspended.

Behind the houses the river slides away all night. Buttery and resinous, the air hangs heavy with the river murk, the wet stink of the mudbank. Across the water, the railway sidings with their abandoned boxcars lie quiet, generations of graffiti hiding whatever colour they may have been. Beyond, the ibises stalk the salt flats, reeking brackish plains filled with seawater gone soupy, which the sea breeze blows across, filling the town with smell of rotting kelp. And then, last, the sea itself, tin-grey and wallowing, thick and cold like old blood. Between the flats and the water the smooth sand stretches a kilometre or more, and here the ships lie, the metal of their broken hulls slowly being eaten by the salt air. The sky above is the colour of ocean, the horizon gone. A flock of cormorants punctuates the grey, oily wings stretched black, hanging themselves in the wind to dry. All around the rusting hulks sit silent, unmoving.

The first girl is taken on the second weekend of the school holidays. Her name is Julie-Anne Marks; she is nineteen, she is beautiful, and she is gone. Everywhere we look Julie-Anne Marks is looking back at us. Just the one photo at first – the one her parents gave the police the night she didn’t come home. Julie-Anne Marks is stuffed into our letterboxes, pinned to every bulletin board, taped to every telephone pole. She takes up the whole front page of The Messenger – a full page in colour, block-capital headline. WHERE IS OUR JULIE-ANNE?

I’m scrubbing the word SCUM off the front door of our house. I wipe so hard that my wrists start to ache, but the red letters remain bold and bright, their edges dripping as if they’re bleeding.

I can’t remember when the man who is now my husband first told me he loved me. Was it when we drank cocktails at that windowless bar with the old train seats you could turn to face in either direction? We tried to go back once, but it had been replaced with a hardware store; we priced a set of outdoor furniture and bought some new wire for the clothesline to stop the super-king sheets from dragging on the lawn. Or did he tell me he loved me when I came to stay at his flat for the first time, when he was still living in Gore, within walking distance of the giant fibreglass trout and two doors down from his mother? She could see when he opened his bedroom curtains in the morning; sometimes she waved and held up her overweight dachshund, or shook a jar of Nescafé and mimed sipping from a cup. She still did Christopher’s washing for him, but only because there was no machine in his flat and it just made more sense than taking it to the laundromat, where anybody’s lint and hair and dead skin could end up on your tea towels. A push-up bra of mine found its way into the basket once, and she returned it washed and folded with the hooks done up. It lay on top of the pressed shirts and jeans, a pair of Christopher’s socks tucked into each cup. Was that when he said it? One morning in Gore, when we lay in his chilly bedroom beneath the poster of Abbie Cornish in Candy? I used to stare at Abbie Cornish when I couldn’t sleep. I knew I could never be her, with her collarbone and her upper lip. Even when I closed my eyes, she was still there.

Meadow-Wisp was conceived on the Cerne Abbas Giant. Her Dorset hippie parents, who believed in unfiltered communication, recounted every detail: hiking up the hill through dense fog, their torches reflecting chalk outlines (foot, calf, ribs, elbow), grass slick beneath them, concentrating on an energy focal point. In the final weeks of pregnancy, her mother cross-stitched a representation of the event. A constant through Meadow-Wisp’s childhood, it hung over her bed until she abandoned it for college.

[after the painting of the same name by Daniela Bradley, 2012]

Contributory Negligence n. 1 occurring in circumstances of negligent conduct on the plaintiff’s behalf that has contributed to the harm they’ve suffered.

That winter it was bad and he often woke a little before midnight with his teeth aching and he would dress quickly and walk through the snow for an hour or so and later, when he came home, he saw the lights burning softly at her window. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Sometimes he stopped in the hallway and listened at her door but there was little to hear. Once he heard the squeak of a cork but there weren’t any voices and he liked the thought of her having a late night drink, alone, while the building slept.

You are meeting with your PhD supervisor. You’re in his office – there’s a desk, books, framed degrees, and a wife, also framed. And there’s you and your supervisor seated on opposite sides of his desk. You’ve just completed the first confirmation for your PhD. Confirmation had once made you think of young girls in white tulle dresses, of people who have faith. At university, confirmation is when the school deems whether or not your research is viable to continue. It may not be if your theory isn’t new enough, or your proposal is too ambitious or it’s half-cooked, or maybe you’ve not been working hard enough, or maybe you’re a stupid girl. There are a number of reasons why the university may not have faith in you.

 Ray was stuck in traffic, an unusual feeling in a town the size of his, inching forward through a detour round the railway crossing. He watched the orange text changing on the roadside electronic billboard in the kind of trance he had recently found himself lapsing into more and more. TRACK UPGRADE he read absently. DELAYS EXPECTED. DETOUR AHEAD.

He’d forgotten – they all had. Barrelled up to the intersection into town as usual to find the contractors had been hard at it from 6 a.m. just as they’d promised, a squadron of shining earthmovers and excavators hacking away already. Thousands of dollars being spent every minute by whatever construction company had won the tender. Not anyone local, that’s for sure. Ray might have had some contract work himself, then.

Up ahead, a guy in reflector sunnies, fluoro vest, and hard hat was propped next to a ‘stop/slow’ sign.

‘That’s gotta be the easiest money in the world,’ Ray’s girlfriend Sharon had said to him once in the car as they waited at some roadworks. Ex-girlfriend. Having a dig at him, Ray had thought, because he’d done a stint himself on a road crew the summer before.

‘Not always,’ he’d answered, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, but weighing in anyway. ‘Some motorists, they just get out of the car and king-hit you, because they’re sick of waiting. Two blokes have been run over deliberately, just holding signs like that.’

She’d given him a look. ‘That’d be why you get the extra loading, is it? Danger money?’

‘Go ahead and laugh,’ Ray had said with a shrug, releasing the clutch. They’d been on their way to his sister’s for a barbecue, he remembered, and looking at her he’d suddenly felt the same deep dragging inertia he felt now. The sight of her there, holding a cling-wrapped pavlova in the passenger seat, mouth a sour twist, her pink blusher sparkling in a shaft of sunlight. Something creeping over him like a slow anaesthetic.

‘I’ve tried,’ she said a few months later when she told him they were splitting up, ‘but it’s all going downhill.’

‘I thought we were going good,’ Ray had answered, hearing the whine in his voice, hating it, ‘and now you’re telling me you’re moving out.’

She’d rolled her eyes like he was the thickest kid in the class. ‘Not me, Ray,’ she’d said. ‘You. You’re the one moving out.’

SLOW, the sign said. And then the flashing arrow for the detour, down past the boarded-up hotel and the old saleyards. Ray yawned. He’d be late, but everyone would be late today, and the manager was never out the back anyway, at the warehouse where Ray worked three days a week, lucky to have that. So what if he was late? How many nested imitation terracotta pots could the public want in one morning? He idled, watching the traffic, exhaust shimmering in the dust raised by the labouring machines on the line, their battered metal teeth jerking and tugging at the railway tracks, trashing them.

Slow. Slow. Stop. Then flip, his turn.

The roadworker turned his mirrored and shadowed gaze to Ray as he drove past and gave a wave that had been reduced to its bare minimum – a single slow-motion finger lifted in acknowledgment that here was one man passing another man who was pretending to be doing a job of work, bored shitless and leaning on a one-word sign. Ray raised a finger off the wheel in response, glancing at the expressionless face and looking away again. Didn’t know him.

Up ahead he heard a splintering crack, like ice, as an excavator levered up one of the railway sleepers, the big engine surging to get purchase on the gravel.

By late afternoon, when Ray was at the pub, there was already talk of the sleepers.

‘They’re pushing them into piles,’ Frank was saying. ‘Sorting them from shit to good. So they’ve got to be selling them on.’

‘See, if that contractor was a local,’ said Vince, ‘anyone could go and help themselves to some of them for firewood. Anyone at all.’

‘Not these bastards. They’ll be selling them on to some other sub-contractor, any money. That’s why they’ve got that barrier round them. They tender for these jobs and they screw the last cent out of ‘em. That’s the way they do business,’ said Frank decisively. Frank, who hadn’t worked for fourteen months.

Afterwards when Ray drove Vince home down past the intersection he saw the old sleepers piled high – big dark timbers, rooted up now and useless. A string of flapping orange flags had been erected around them.

‘If that’s the barrier,’ Ray said, ‘it looks fairly token.’

‘Thing is,’ said Vince, pointing, ‘people’ll be after those for landscaping. You wait. And they’ll go to the other spot they’re working on, that old crossing out of town.’

‘They’re pulling all that up too?’

‘Mate, they’re pulling up five k’s of line – there’s gunna be millions of the things. Tons of ‘em. This company’ll never notice a few disappearing. You wait.’

Ray nodded. He’d seen gardens himself, of course, edged with old redgum sleepers. It was just the kind of thing Sharon had always been on his back to do, landscaping the garden.

‘Why do it,’ he’d argued, ‘when we’re just renting?’

‘Ray,’ she’d said, exhaling a breath of resigned frustration. He’d waited for an answer, but she’d only repeated it as she’d turned away. ‘Ray, Ray, Ray.’ Almost tenderly. And him standing there, stranded, never knowing what she was going to want next.

‘Redgum,’ Vince was saying now. ‘Beautiful. Burns like bloody briquettes. You watch this town – winter coming on and a pile of scrap wood like that. A little string of orange flags isn’t gunna stop anyone.’

The sleepers – those perfectly good redgum sleepers and a sudden professed desire to landscape – it was all Ray seemed to hear about over the next two weeks. Bernie at the warehouse told Ray, with a kind of defiant righteousness, that he’d grabbed a ute-load late at night to finish off his pool area. Someone at the pub achieved fame by liberating thirty sleepers in broad daylight with two mates, avoiding suspicion by donning fluorescent vests to do the job.

‘And that’s fair enough,’ Bernie said, slapping price stickers onto a shipment of outdoor furniture. ‘You can tell by the way those piles are graded that whoever’s got the tender is just going to put a match to the crap ones.’

‘I guess,’ said Ray. Inside the opaque layers of shrink-wrapped plastic on the pallet, he could see stacked ornamental Buddha statues. It was like gazing in to a submerged shipwreck, crammed full of calmly waiting monks.

‘I reckon get in now, and get what you need,’ said Bernie. ‘Just do it discreetly, and don’t take the new replacement stacks. Don’t get greedy.’

Ray lifted his knife and sliced through plastic, breathing in, as he tugged it off, the chemical, sealed breath of some factory floor in China. He thought of waking up that morning with an empty plate from last night still sitting on his chest, gently rising and falling, his hand keeping it steady, in exactly the same position he was when he’d fallen asleep. A white plate, round and innocuous as a moon.

At Steve’s barbecue that night, he walked up and down the brand new paved barbecue area bordered by lines of sleepers. Set at intervals in the newly-shovelled topsoil were small clumps of perennials, which reminded Ray somehow of a hair transplant.

‘It looks great,’ he called, feeling Steve’s eyes on him. There must have been something wrong with him, some bug he had – how else to explain this bottomed-out energy, the sapped, exhausted feeling as he watched Steve turning steaks on the grill? He’d go and have a check-up. A blood test.

‘A rustic border,’ Steve was saying. Full of focus and purpose, pressing here and there on the meat with the tongs. ‘That’s going to grow in no time.’

Ray swatted a mosquito in the dusk, racking his brain for something to respond with. Nothing.

‘We’ll have a pool in here next,’ Steve added. ‘Get rid of the lawn altogether. Just an outdoor entertainment area. You right there Ray?’

‘Yeah, good.’

‘You wanna grab yourself some coleslaw?’

‘Thanks.’ He levered himself up from the chair, putting down his warm beer. Another thing – these last couple of months, he’d felt this heavy squeezing under his sternum, slowing him down. Shouldn’t have worn shorts. Should cut down on the beer. He walked over to the trestle feeling the eyes of women on him; Steve’s wife Sue smiling over, other wives and girlfriends raising their heads to glance at him, going back to their wine. The only single man there, he realised, feeling something speculative in their glances, something indulgent.

He’d driven past Sharon’s house tonight and seen a car in the drive he didn’t recognise. He couldn’t stop thinking about it; his brain was like a dog jerking on the end of its chain over and over, returning to it. So that’d be the thing to do – get chatting to someone else, let word get back to Sharon that he was out there, available, a catch, on his feet. But even though he could feel those eyes on him (car in her drive, that convulsive jerk on his throat as he circled it again), he sat back down with his laden plate on one of the sleepers instead, because the thought of trying to get a conversation going with any of them felt like heavy lifting. And they knew all about him anyway; a thirty-five-year-old man who lived in a colorbond shed at a mate’s place, not exactly unemployed but a part-time storeman. A liability, not a catch.

Just temporary, he’d said when he first moved in to the shed, just till I find a place of my own. Back then he couldn’t imagine spending winter in it, holed up there with just the shed heater, the cold coming up through the cement floor. And how gradually it had happened, putting a piece of carpet down, buying the lounge suite at Vinnies that time, putting up the television aerial. Telling himself he was saving money. Finding his feet. Waiting for things to go from shit to good.

‘Hey, Ray,’ a voice was calling him. Steve’s teenage son. Scott. Sam. Something.

‘Come and check this out,’ the boy said, beckoning Ray over to a big black telescope on a tripod, pointed straight up into the night sky.

‘Not quite dark enough yet, Sean,’ Steve called from the grill, scooping meat and sausages up onto a platter. ‘Wait till it’s dark and I’ll show you how to adjust it properly.’

Ray stooped and looked carefully through the lens.

‘I think it’s Mars,’ said Sean. The smell of him – grass and sunscreen, sweat and energy, all of it barely contained – registered in Ray’s head with a sudden painful bloom. This shortness of breath, the pressure on his chest – he thought of his old man’s heart attack, the way he’d staggered crabwise across the lounge-room, his arm out, wordless. Take him five weeks to get a doctor’s appointment, anyway. He’d ring tomorrow.

‘Is that focused now?’

‘Yeah, that’s good,’ answered Ray. He could make out a blur, a jittery nebula like a reflected car headlight, but blinked and saw something else there in the lens, something dilating, sweeping closed and open again. His own huge eye reflected there; the lid creased, a maze of lines spreading like rivulets.

‘Is it Mars?’ Sean said doubtfully. He’d taken the boy out fishing one time, he remembered, with Steve; clowned around pretending to fight a carp he’d landed on the bank. Casting all day, that day, into snags. Ray blinked again, saw the pouched skin around his eye wrinkle like crumpled old paper, his own iris staring at him black as space. If he had a son now, he thought, he’d be fifty when the boy was fifteen. So probably all for the best, then. He let out a breath that hurt like a stitch.

‘Yep, that’s Mars,’ he said.

Turning the keys in the ignition in his car, he fought the impulse to go home via the house again, check if the car was still there. Up his old street, the same streetlight broken, up to the driveway that he used to pull into every night, taking that normalcy for granted. His ute bumping up over the curb and the sensor light snapping on as Ray got out of the car in his loser shorts, running to flab, any fool could see that. Then Sharon’s silhouette in the ridged glass of the front door, her and whoever was there with her. He saw her put both her hands up to the glass to peer through the distorting ripples of glass at him.

Don’t worry, he heard her saying, her voice muffled, it’s just Ray, seeing him for exactly what he was; he could hear that in her tone. Her right arm lifted and snapped off the sensor light impatiently, leaving him there in the dark, and the shapes of the two of them rippled and shifted as they stepped back from the door, Ray thinking he would never forget this one moment as their shadows swam together out of the light.

He opened his eyes and saw he was still sitting in his ute outside Steve’s place, his hands slack on the steering wheel. He tried to tally up the beers he’d had. Tried to send a message down to the deep-sunk part of him, skudding along somewhere, to kick-start itself again.

He had an idea – a half-arsed idea, he berated himself, a crap idea – to head down to the crossing and put down the tailgate and load in a few sleepers. Twelve, maybe. Enough to take around tomorrow to Sharon’s place. His mind swerved over this bit – the dropping them unannounced onto her front lawn – and went straight to the moment when he’d be levering them squarely and surely into place between some solidly-hammered pickets. And her surprised gratified smile, lost for words for once, as he went away and came back with a load of topsoil from Jenner’s and spaded it in. Her instant landscaped garden, ready for some seedlings.

He could manage loading them up himself, he was sure, if he raised one end first then pushed them onto the tray. Or get a mate. Get Vince to help him. He checked his watch – 12.40. Vince would be snoring in front of Rage by now, three bongs down.

It was when Ray got down to the track and saw the motionless machinery there, the dark mountains of sleepers silhouetted, that he felt his original plan begin to melt and solidify into something else. Why should he do a damn thing for Sharon? Hanging round her place like a whipped dog. Why shouldn’t he score some for himself? Take them home, cut them up with the chainsaw, make a decent firewood stack. He imagined, briefly, the shed heater ticking with cosy warmth, stoked with redgum, glowing all night. Or – and this was better – why shouldn’t he keep some whole, do some landscaping for himself, build up a couple of beds and plant some veggies out at the shed?

Ray realised he was at the crossing, sitting motionless again in the cabin, staring at the flattened earth where the railway track into town used to be. All of it scraped as bare as something strip-mined now. A plan dropped onto the town from above, not a single local employed. You could understand the ire, this harmless, face-saving looting of stuff pushed into unwanted piles. And he was so tired of this, the way he kept finding himself hunched over, eyes closed like he was hibernating, the way he had to rouse himself to move.

Ray stretched as he stood, his spine cracking. In the back he found himself a pair of gloves, let down the tailgate, and here came the moon, sailing out from behind a cloud, ready to help him. Sean, if he was still up, would be able to see every crater on that surface, it was so clear. Ray ducked under the orange flags and tugged at a sleeper, pushed and pulled it free, dragged it over to the ute and heaved it in with a grunt. Easy. Another one. Another. He’d only need ten. Some people he knew had taken dozens of the things. It felt good, even though it was the middle of the night, to be working up a sweat. Cold oxygen in his lungs prickling like stars, clearing his fogged head finally.

What could you grow in winter? Potatoes, maybe. Beans.

Ray was considering the pile absently, wondering which piece to haul free next, when bright blue lights rolled across it. A lazy roll, rhythmic and silent.

He’d been humming; hadn’t heard the cop car pull up.

And as he turned, squinting in their sudden high beam, his chest squeezing, all that traitorous warmth descending into his boots, he knew that they wouldn’t bother with their siren, because they could see that it was just him. Just Ray. They knew he’d turn just like this, and take what was coming to him. Because they need an example, he thought wearily as he peeled off his gloves, the realisation flaring like a little chunk of burning rock, a tiny meteor.

What was the word? An escape-goat? Nowhere to put the gloves, so Ray threw them onto the ute tray, and missed. The cops’ headlights casting big crooked shadows.

He waited there for them, next to the sleepers, lowering his bare hand for comfort onto weathered, solid old redgum, hauled up and discarded but with so much life in it, still, it just broke your heart to see it go to waste.

Cate Kennedy is the author of the award-winning story collection Dark Roots (Scribe, 2006) and the novel The World Beneath (Scribe, 2009), both of which were shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is currently at work on a new book and a collection of new and selected poetry, The Taste of River Water, both due for release in 2011. She lives on a farm in North-East Victoria with her family.

The roofing gives a little under his weight but Oskar’s not afraid of heights when he’s on his skateboard. He can see his friends below. Gav has his camera ready and Amadi gives him the thumbs up.

‘Mate, it’s no higher than a ten-set,’ Amadi calls.

When the urge unearthed itself, Joan Mercer was at the sink washing dishes, her husband’s egg cup and her children’s cereal bowls. She flicked the soapsuds from her hands and crossed the kitchen, going out through the sliding doors and onto the wooden deck. There, she contemplated the garden. In the corner of the backyard, jonquils were blooming. But it wasn’t these that drew her over the lawn. It was the jacaranda tree. It was calling to her.

The Hair

Tom wasn’t supposed to bring the wig home; it was peeled from his scalp like a banana skin every night. Then it was arranged on a faceless polystyrene head that sat in front of his dressing room mirror.

Certain days: it is easy to imagine this small, once-prosperous river town (barely distinct from many other small, once prosperous river towns) as if you are only passing through it, shunpiking the thruways in favour of the scenic rural two-lanes on a road trip in your better, your best life. The life in which your formidable boxer-turned-human-rights-lawyer wife has simply pointed to this town on a much misfolded map and declared: Here, lunch. Possibly because of the town’s suggestive name, possibly because she is exactly twenty-eight miles from ravenous. You promise that after this town, from this town on, you will take over your share of the driving. Neither of you slept well last night, in a three-star last-minute in the town of Lake Whoever, but you’ve racked up several hours of passenger-side napping while your wife listened to the final chapters of Springsteen reading Springsteen, somehow keeping the rental car out of the loosestrife.

Neither of you will have hoped for much from this town – sandwich, tank of fuel, leg stretch in view of water – so it is quick to outstrip expectation, quick to disarm you with sleek geometric shop-window typography and skeins of wild geese overhead (the geese, too, only passing through), with the ratios of porch swings to porches and tire swings to maples. The egalitarian yacht club with its yard of bright vessels (none of them yachts) wintered tight under blue-and-white ship wrap. The wood across the river a gentle riot of autumn leaves, the tree line a long, fire-feathered serpent outstretched along the bank, light breeze riffling its plumage.

When I walk by the security-office door on my break and it’s open, I snatch a look. The supermarket guards keep the door open when it’s hot, over forty. Right now, mid-February, that’s most of the time.

‘You must get boiling with that headscarf on,’ my friend Skye says, almost whispering. We’ve been friends for weeks before she says this. I’ve seen the other girls wear strappy tops under their brown supermarket overalls.

It’s only us in the staff tearoom, me and Skye in the plastic chairs, Mo standing against the wall in his silver trainers, drinking Nescafé. Mo glances up, he doesn’t miss a thing.

I look at him, I look at Skye.

‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ I say. ‘The air conditioning helps. I never get cold.’

‘That’s what my mother says,’ Mo murmurs.

Columns of black-and-white CCTV screens cover the walls. There are no windows, the same as in the staff tearoom.

What can the security guards see on their screens? What can’t they see? This is what I want to find out. This is why I peek. Usually I don’t get more than a few seconds. The screens all look the same, the aisles all look the same. The security guards sit with their feet up on the desks, drinking cold Pepsi.

Plus right now they have giant red cardboard Valentine’s Day hearts hanging in the aisles, blocking the view of the cameras.

Defeats their purpose, you might say.

Gives ideas, my mother might say.

More ways than one, I think to myself.

Already I know the place I’m looking for won’t be the frozen-goods aisle, its corridor of smooth fridge doors. Nowhere to hide there, and freezing cold, too.

It also won’t be the open-plan sweets area with the help-yourself display units, the imported Valentine’s Day chocolates in stacks of red and pink. Everything in the sweets area is waist high. The supermarket expects sweets and chocolates to go, also grapes, cherries, cherry tomatoes – anything that’s finger food. Mo says so. Some days we set out sample trays of cherry tomatoes. They all go in twenty.

Everyone does it, Mo says. He’s worked here for longer than us girls have. He’s been in this country for longer, too. Stuff just walks into people’s mouths, he says – Smarties, plain old marshmallows, Jelly Babies, – everyone thinks they can sample one or two without anyone noticing. Maybe no one does. The security guards wait for bigger prey.

My heart jumps. It jumps the minute he says, You won’t believe how much just walks. Mo, I see, is also taking looks at the screens. Mo is also wondering about places out of sight.

But then, who wouldn’t want to find a hidden place somewhere to break up their day? Who wouldn’t take a moment to skate, slide, twirl a trolley? Skye once turned a somersault. It was quiet, close to closing. She did it in a second, flick flack, just like that.

Mo knows more, though. He has the lowdown. The shoppers picking their noses in empty aisles, plucking at their underwear, squeezing the fresh bread till it’s nearly flat – Mo knows their secrets, he has it all cased out. When he tells me about something he has spotted, I blush. I let my headscarf fall lower over my cheeks to hide my blushes. But I come back to him.

‘By the bleach, I think,’ I tell Mo. ‘That’s the best place.’

See if he agrees. From what I can tell, people don’t pause and browse in the cleaning-products aisle. Any security guard with knowhow won’t waste time watching those screens. Shoppers go straight to the item they need on the shelf. They don’t linger, they don’t steal bleach. Unless.

‘Uh-huh, Farhana, so now we know. Bleach section. We know where to find you when next you have something to hide.’

And he winks at me. My heart jolts.

The first time we spoke my heart did the same jolt, a skip out of time. It was in the staffroom. The fan was on, another hot day. He caught my eye and without pausing said salaam alaikum in proper Australian from behind his Pepsi can.

‘Salaam alaikum,’ I said, straight away dropping my eyes, but not before my heart turned around and I returned his look, may God forgive me. And then added, ‘Hello.’

We’ve kept it to Hello ever since, but my heart still jolts.

It’s all crazy. It should be stopped.

❧

Dear Veronica, I’d write, if I had the courage. Dear Veronica or Pamela or Monica – these names that no women I meet ever have.

I love him. He is … he is … When I hear his voice in the next aisle my breathing goes insane.

Dear Monica, Dear Pamela, I’m on the verge of writing. Can’t talk to my mum, can’t talk to my aunt, though she’s younger with highlights under her headscarf. Can’t talk to anyone at school. They’d want to go huh, is that for real? Hide their real feelings with a cough. Like Skye. ‘You serious?’ she says. ‘You feel bad just looking a boy in the eye?’

So all I can think of is an agony auntie like you, Dear Veronica, from Mum’s Woman magazine. There are rows and rows of magazines like yours here in the shop by the checkouts. I restack them every day.

The best way of getting to know this country, Mum says. What the men think is on TV. What the women think is in these magazines.

But what she reads in the magazines worries her, the agony columns especially. Reading the columns, she heaves low, grieving sighs and calls my aunt. They talk about the nice Afghan boy up in Brisbane, our cousin five or twenty-five times removed. They talk about nice Afghan boys in other cities around the world. This country is too full of temptation and false allure, my mother tells my aunt, not in English. We need to move fast to get her settled.

Dear Veronica, Dear Pamela, I’d like to write if I could, if I had courage, if I didn’t think Mum would read the letter and find me out in a flash.

I work with him and can’t stop thinking about him, I want to write. Whenever we’re stacking shelves I want to reach across, I want to hold his hand. I think it will be a warm, dry hand. I want to be his girlfriend but I have no idea. Can I say girlfriend? I don’t know what girlfriend means. I wouldn’t know how to begin.

Would they even understand? Everything dear Monica, Pamela, Veronica say is about promise and possibility, grabbing promise, widening possibility, having it all. Isn’t this the land of big flat horizons and big possibilities? Isn’t this the twenty-first century? Isn’t this the place and the time where you take your opportunities in both hands?

But that’s why I’m writing, I’d say. But wouldn’t say, can’t say. Take my opportunities, what does that mean? What is that my? What is that take?

See, the place where I’m from, that place – you can hardly say the word, because people look at you, the name of the landlocked country with deep caves and valleys up in the clouds where outsiders get killed and insiders get killed, the place that was once the hub of the world, everything trading in every direction east to west, south to north from the time of Alexander, walnuts, silks, carpets, upholstered chairs, mulberry saplings, silverware, glass goblets, masked goshawks, falcons … There, in that place, what your family wants goes. Families depend on a girl not choosing for herself.

Opposite of home, this new country, Mum often says. You walk to any edge of this country and you fall into the sea. You don’t walk on.

Why walk to the edge at all? says my aunt, when millions of people are walking to the edges of their countries trying to get to this one. Drowning in small boats.

Only reason we got here, Mum says, your father’s a damn good doctor, and we’re a good family, and you and your sister are good girls, good as gold. That bit she says in English. Good as gold.

Dear Veronica, I want to write, Dear Pamela, I think I know Mo likes me because when we’re stacking together he tells me about himself. He tells me about growing up in Victor Harbor, the only Lebanese family in town, the only Muslim family, his father the caretaker of the caravan park. He tells me they had a butcher shop once, but the town wasn’t big enough for a halaal butchery. He tells me his mother stays at home. She stays at home all the time. Mo’s father walked him to school.

Dear Monica, I want to write, I think I know Mo likes me because he tells me private things about himself. He tells me about the Airfix planes he used to build as a kid. American Airforce planes mainly – Mustangs, Harrier jets. To this day his mother has them dangling from the ceiling in their living room. He’s embarrassed saying this, but he shouldn’t be. I like that he built Airfix planes. I like to know everything about him.

He tells me his first job was in a tablet-repairs shop that also sold XL and XXL clothes on the side. The shop for the guys who get fat playing games all day on their tablets, Mo said, and made me laugh. Who am I to talk, though? he went on. Spend about four hours every day on the Xbox.

When instead we could be walking up and down the Parade together chatting, I silently say to him. When we could be sitting together in the shade of the bandstand on Memorial Square drinking smoothies.

Dear Veronica, I want to write, I think I know Mo likes me because he tells me about stuff he reads on the internet. Did you know trees are sociable? he tells me. I mean, within their different species? Their roots reach out to each other. That’s why the giant sequoias never grow tall away from the big forests of America. They grow tallest together, reaching out.

I think, reaching out, what is he telling me? And I say, it’s different for us then. We leave our countries to grow tall elsewhere, over the sea.

In reply he just looks at me. And I remember Victor Harbor. I remember the halaal butchery and the caravan park. I remember he has lived here ages, unlike me.

Dear Pamela, I want to write, I think I know he likes me because when I’m working on an aisle refilling shelves, he makes sure to place the boxes of new products on the top shelf by jutting them out, so that even a short person like me can reach them. So that I can stretch up, wiggle them out and then pull them down.

Dear Monica, I also want to write, I think I know for sure he likes me because today, the day before Valentine’s Day, he asked me to help him stack in the cleaning-products area. He remembered what I’d told him and he made a date, almost.

He leaned right over and said smiling, ‘At least with the headscarf the camera won’t see you blush.’

And I said, don’t know where the words came from, I said, ‘It won’t show anyway, the screens are black and white.’

So today, Veronica, we have a game plan of sorts. Am I saying we? I don’t know what we means, I do know what we means. Well, we, he and I, for the first time we have a plan.

Of course we’ve walked our way towards each other down all kinds of aisles, crossing paths between the washing-powder towers, the jams and chutneys and just add milk pale-pink instant puddings. But then I tell him about safety in bleach and he asks me for help.

We move down the cleaning-products aisle from opposite directions just like normal, except today all this is planned. We are sidestepping like dancers, even our stacking hands are moving in sync. My heart goes mad.

I see his silver trainers out of the corner of my eye. I see the red cardboard love hearts hanging from the ceiling, even here in cleaning products. I see the red, foil-wrapped, chocolate mini-heart he is holding in his hand. At this time of year there are mini-hearts piled in plastic bowls at the checkout for $1 each. I refill the bowls every few hours so they always look full.

He puts the chocolate in my hand. It is soft from lying in his palm. We reach the opposite ends of the aisle and change direction. We cross paths a second time. He tucks a second chocolate into my hand. He moves off, thinks better of it, does a funny moonwalk turn, and pulls a third chocolate out of his pocket. I laugh. This chocolate is even warmer to touch. It is going squishy inside its foil. He offers to peel it for me. I shake my head. I can’t bear to close my hand over the softening chocolate, the three squishy chocolate hearts.

What do the cameras see? What do the screens in the security office show? A boy shelf-packer and a girl shelf-packer working together, just that, though, wait a minute, their crossing point is always closer to his end of the aisle, may God forgive her. That means she sidles faster, she wants to go quicker. She is ahead of him, ahead of herself.

On the day before Valentine’s Day, I collect three chocolates from Mo’s hand in cleaning products.

The next day, Valentine’s Day itself, we play our sidestepping game again and I collect four.

I put my hearts in a paper bag and hang it on my hook in the staffroom. Then I worry about the chocolate melting and I go to store the bag in the fridge where we keep the milk for our coffee.

And then, Dear Veronica, I see Skye has also received a chocolate heart. She has left her heart on a shelf in the fridge marked with her name on a Post-it. Skye’s chocolate heart is not the mini kind. It is one of the $7.95 hearts that we sell in sweets, the type that guys in suits rushed in to buy today at lunchtime along with bunches of cellophane-wrapped red and pink carnations, hoping to make up later for what they forgot to give this morning. My job today is to spritz the flowers on the hour with cool water to keep them sprightly in the heat.

Dear Pamela, I want to write, I don’t want to write, I think I don’t know anything, I think I do know something. I think Mo has given Skye this $7.95 chocolate heart.

I remember how in these last few days of hot weather Mo has gone outside during our breaks to stand in the shade by the back exit and chat to the shelf-packers who smoke. Skye is a smoker.

‘It’s the sociability,’ he says passing me on his way out. ‘Humans like sociability like trees do,’ I think I hear him say.

The smokers stand in the shade of the Queensland box by the exit and kick the fallen tree fruit and exhale their smoke up into the branches. I see them through the crack in the fire doors. Skye stands against the box trunk with her overall poppers open to show her strappy top underneath and squints into the smoke rising from her cigarette.

Skye knows what girlfriend means. Of course she does. She knows what girlfriends do. They squint through their lashes and blow smoke into boys’ faces. What Lebanese boy from Victor Harbor wouldn’t want to stand with a girl like Skye in the cool shade and give her chocolate hearts on Valentine’s Day and see her screw up her eyes at him?

At the end of the day Skye has six chocolate hearts in the fridge, two big, four small.

Dear Monica, I want to write, all I know is, Mo couldn’t have given her all of those chocolates.

❧

It is over forty-five degrees today, even hotter than it was on Valentine’s Day. First thing this morning we took down the red cardboard hearts hanging in the aisles. The boxes of chocolates are two for the price of one and probably melting and turning white underneath their foil. The door of the CCTV room is wide open. The security guards have got used to me standing in the doorway. They don’t look round when I pause to take a look.

Mo is visible to me all around the supermarket. His bright silver trainers show up white on the screens. Since Valentine’s Day I try not to go where he goes. I avoid his plans.

The fact is I’ve been punished. The eye of God sees everything and I went too fast. I was giddy. Sidling sideways down the aisles to meet with a boy I hardly know and receive warm chocolates from his warm hand, it meant too much.

Skye and Mo meantime pretend nothing is going on. He joins her and the other smokers under the box tree. They take plastic cups of Nescafé from the machine in the staffroom. I see him hand out cigarettes. He carries a box in his pocket even though he doesn’t smoke, or not that I can see. I see him offer to light her cigarette with one of the orange plastic lighters we sell at the checkout. I see her flick her hair and giggle into his face.

At the end of the break, he offers her gum and she takes it. Freshen her smoky breath. Back in the staffroom he offers me gum too, smiling as though nothing is wrong. I say no, really quick.

I find a new favourite place to stack, at the shelves of hair products. This spot is directly under the eye of one of the cameras. I know this from my CCTV peeking. I like how smoothly the tall bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hair serum stack. I like how they shine like candy – green, pink, raspberry, orange – and I like how they smell of almonds and honey. I go back often to neaten the rows. I like to think no customer could ever guess how many times the display has been touched, lined up, straightened. I want them to think they are the very first today to reach out their hand and select just this shiny shampoo.

And then he is suddenly stacking here beside me. Salaam alaikum, he says, same as that first time.

Dear Monica, I’d write if I was still thinking of writing, Dear Pamela, his hands are moving in rhythm with mine.

Dear Veronica, I won’t let myself think but still I think it, he has sought me out.

I slow my stacking hands and he goes slower, to my tempo. I look up at the CCTV to remind him it’s there, our supermarket eye. He looks up too, then back at me. That loose shrugging of his shoulders under his shirt. I start to blush.

Dear Veronica, I see our hands playing in harmony over the full and luscious fortifying serums, and the pure shine conditioners and gels, and though my headscarf shields my cheek I know he can see my blush without even looking, and I know that he knows what I am thinking.

This is what I am thinking, what I am trying not to think. I think that by leaning in his direction just a fraction I can let the weight of my hair under my headscarf brush against his arm. So he can feel the touch of what only the eye of God and my mother and the mirror at night can see.

Dear Pamela, I want to write, this boy at work, the one I liked, I don’t know what to do about him. He follows me around, he watches the cameras just like I do, he always knows where to find me. I no longer trust him. I mean, I don’t trust myself around him.

When I’m around him I lose my senses. Even when I see him on screen I lose my bearings. When I see him light Skye’s cigarette or straighten her collar after she’s refastened her poppers or, once, curl her hair back around her ear, and then when he comes over to stack shelves with me as though nothing was the matter, I can’t help myself. I think warm chocolate hearts. I think finger food, cherries, cherry tomatoes, orange plastic cigarette lighters.

I also think of hairgrips with pearly tips, the kind I use to fasten my headscarf. He offered me a new packet today when we finished stacking and straightening the shampoos.

It won’t help, Dear Monica, to advise me to get his number and invite him to a movie like you do with everyone else. It’s gone beyond that point.

I go to stand in the doorway of the CCTV room till the two security guys notice me. I don’t have to say anything, I only point. I point to Mo in his bright trainers moving across the screens. I point to his quick Airfixing fingers flying here and there, all over the place. See his fingers reaching for stuff, I say, just small stuff, true, chewing gum, cigarettes, lighters, matches, hand creams, hairgrips with pearly tips, coloured elastic bands, stuff that girls like. But doesn’t it just stack up and fill up his pockets?

‘We’ll observe things for a while and then take steps,’ the head security guard says. ‘The manager will be grateful. You’ve been very quick to see this.’

‘I always did stack quicker than him,’ I say, and close my fingers round the unopened packet of pearly hairgrips in my overalls pocket.

‘Supermarket Love’ was commended in the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.