The object she most remembered from her childhood was a large silver ball. It was where they kept the pills that the whole family house unit (FaHU for short) would be given each day. The pills were transported there twice a day via the dispatch system. Once to be there for the wake up time and once for before bed.

Bryony’s FaHU was made up of her, (she had been existed for around 16 years now), Miles who had been existed for about 14 years, and the adultunits Jane and John who were in charge of food distribution, keeping the place clean and monitoring the silver ball. Jane or less frequently John would stand by the ball at the appointed hour and Bryony would often watch. She always marvelled at how the little door would seem to appear from nowhere and Jane, or less frequently John, would open it to find the allotted doses inside. Some days Bryony ‘s dose cup would have several pills that she would chew with delight and other days only one. But she never understood why the door never seemed visible except when the doses came through.

She remembered the ball clearly. It had always been there and she thought of her life as punctuated by the regular visits to it and the relief of each serve of pills. She had a much vaguer memory of Jane and John. Had they always been there in this form? or did she remember a different Jane and John? Bryony was not sure. How could she be sure now?

The unit itself was purpose built and contained a bedpod for each member. Bryony’s bedpod contained a window that overlooked an image of green rolling hills. She often wondered where this picture had been taken and how long ago. She knew, of course that green rolling hills were no longer accessible to individuals of her level. You had to be a wealthy to be able to access the areas of any natural. It had been explained to her that she was much better off this way and she used to believe it. She knew that soil and grass and natural water contained bacteria and things that could be dangerous. She had always been grateful for the well cleaned environment and toxin free life they could lead. She had learnt to be grateful and couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be less fortunate. She understood that their FaHU was of a much better standard than many. The cleanpod where any inadvertent dust or microparticles could be washed away before entering the main wing of the FaHU was large and warm. She had heard from others at her education level acquisition facility (ELAF) that some cleanpods were cold and the smell of the cleaning products was so strong your nose would itch for maybe an hour afterwards. She had always felt fortunate and smug in her own space until yesterday.

Yesterday she had seen the book.

She knew nothing could be the same now.

Bryony had been sitting after ELAF, unusually she had not much to do and was chatting to Miles. One of them, she couldn’t even remember who, had been laughing about how when they were little they used to try to feel the silver ball all over, looking for a way to get in, in between doses. Bryony stood up and acted out what they were laughing about; running her hands all around the ball and pretending to be looking for a way in. But as her hand reached to the back of the alcove the ball was set into she felt a click and something give behind it in the wall. Before she could think Bryony’s hand was pushing through a softening gap in the wall and her hand felt something unfamiliar. She grabbed it and pulled but had to negotiate several angles before she could pull it into the bright artificial light of the room. It fell open in her hands. It was a book.

Bryony had heard of books and seen them in the online museums, she and Miles both knew what it was but couldn’t believe such an item could suddenly be in their foodpod behind the ball. Miles was so stunned he asked
‘What is it?’ even though he obviously could see it. Bryony didn’t answer but instead gingerly tried to lift one page from another in the way she had seen pages turned on the museum videos. When she looked at Miles he was close to tears. The complete surprise of it all had overwhelmed him and Bryony realised she was shaking. She quickly closed the book and its colourful cover stared at her with the words.

Children’s Atlas of the World.

This changed everything. By blind instinct they knew not to tell Jane and John and managed with supreme effort to negotiate a ‘normal’ evening. That night, long after they were supposed to be asleep, Miles and Bryony poured over the book they had discovered. It seemed the places they had been told were stories actually existed. They looked at pictures from space of familiar shapes of land and instead of the regular pattern of citylands they had learnt at ELAF there was a messy, dirty, colourful world of strange ‘countries’. Bryony could only remember once before that she and Miles had gone against their normal routine and that was when they were very small. Back then she hadn’t felt the billowing fear that was surrounding her now. Sometime between now and then she had absorbed the consequences of transgression. But now that she had transgressed she felt she may as well pursue it more. She would need to find out what was being kept from her. What was truth and what was a lie.

She knew nothing could be the same now.

I hate my crazy neighbor.  She really scares me.  She is mean and ridiculous. I am not a hating person.  I like people.  At least I really try to.  Because I am a nice girl.  A good girl.  It’s my thing.  Anyway, the first time I met crazy neighbor was on the first day we moved into our house.  She came over to welcome us, to introduce herself, and to meet us.  I introduced her to our brand new puppy.  We had just got him that day.  I had a week off to move into our house and I also wanted that week to settle our puppy in, to be there for him.  It was all planned out, the right thing to do.  See, good girl. She seemed nice.  She told me about the park at the end of the road with the ducks that I already knew about, and because I am a nice girl I smiled and nodded politely and thanked her for the info.  She seemed nice for about 5 hours.  At 10.30 when we went to bed and put our brand new puppy to bed in the laundry, he cried for his mum like brand new puppies do.  She came over after 10 minutes to complain that she couldn’t sleep.  10 minutes! I mean how crazy! How mean and ridiculous.  So being the nice person that I am, the polite, good girl that I am, I apologised, and nodded and went to the laundry to try and quiet down my puppy.  My husband came in.  “Sarah, we don’t have to do this, our plan was to let him cry it out until he got used to this.  If you keep going into him that is what he will expect every night”  “I know, I know…but the neighbor….” “Fuck her” he said (he being not so worried about niceties as I am).  I can’t remember the details of what we did for the rest of the night.  I think I may have ended up going in every 20 minutes or so until he went to sleep, but over the course of a week of settling in our new puppy into our new house, our neighbor continued to complain about his tiny whimpers.  I mean moving house is a pretty stressful thing as it is.  She made it hell.  She complained rudely to us, the council sent letters, the council called us, the police came.  The police came to our door at the end of our first week in our new house.  They were confused because they had been called about a loud barking dog, led to believe that we had made the complaint.  But when we opened our door, all was silent; our puppy was asleep as his crying at bedtime routine was now down to 5 minutes.  When we explained about crazy neighbor and her complaints a light bulb went off in one of their heads… “Ahhh yes, your neighbor, of course” and then they left leaving us standing stunned in the doorway.  It was then that we realised exactly the extent of the craziness that we had moved in next to.  The police seemed to know her, and were used to her.

What bothered me the most was that she made me feel like I was doing something wrong; she took away my self assigned ‘good girl’ status.  I traipsed up and down our street knocking on the doors of the neighbors’ houses apologising for my puppy.  They all looked at me blankly, until I mentioned crazy neighbor, and then they too had their light bulb moments and started sharing their own crazy neighbor stories.  The good bit was that I got to meet all my other nice, lovely neighbors early on, so far the only good thing about crazy neighbor.  Over the last ten years there have been numerous incidents where she has tried to make our lives extremely difficult, and, like the fool that I am, the good girl that can’t stand the idea of anyone disapproving of me, she has got to me each time.  I have let her get to me with her always absurd complaints.  She wouldn’t know it though.  On the outside I am polite, perfect calm, me.  Smiling, friendly, approachable.  On the inside I am a wreck. Even when she is not giving us hell and goes quiet for a while, she still gives me anxious butterflies in my tummy when I see her and an instant fear that she is about to ‘get us’ for some unknown offence.  But as my husband says, what could she possibly get us for? I am, as I say, a nice girl, a good girl, it’s my thing.

Mick leans back into the front door and feels it shudder closed. The relief that used to come with finishing a day at work barely registers these days. Leaving the factory to come home to three rowdy kids and a moody wife is almost worse. It just feels like another job. He knows he shouldn’t feel like this. His kids adore him, and he them, but they’re still bloody hard work.

He sighs, throws his keys in the bowl and stoops to pull off his work boots, waiting for the cascade of feet down the hallway and the familiar shrill of his children’s voices. Instead, the house stays quiet, and he’s greeted only by the faint drone of the fish tank gurgling from the living room.

“Eli? Kids?”

Nothing.

He shrugs and heads upstairs for a shower.

“Thank God.”

After the day he’s just had, a few quiet minutes to himself are exactly what he needs. He’s been dealing with problems all day. The morons on the airport job that lost all their cabling, Joffa fucking up the Latrobe quote, and now Marty had gone AWOL. How the hell would he find 25 grand and three new blokes by Monday? He was so sick of having to fix everyone else’s fuck ups.

He peeled off his work clothes and stepped in front of the bathroom mirror, glancing at his rippled torso and flexing hard. A few days earlier he’d caught up with old classmates at his twenty year school reunion, and every single one of them had turned to fat. Let themselves go. Not him. He was still fit and hard. Probably better now than two decades ago, to be honest. He was pleased to still look this good.

Stepping in under the water and closing his eyes, Mick felt the heat glance off his chest. It was the only place he had left to himself. Everything else belonged to others.

From under the shower he suddenly heard his phone ringing in the bedroom.

“No fucking way. What now?”

He tried to ignore it, but the ringing persisted. No doubt some other fuck up he’d have to sort out urgently. Sometimes he wished the whole world would fuck off and leave him be. Everyone. Eli, the kids, work. Everyone. Or perhaps he would one day.

When he’d towelled himself off, he picked up his phone.

Six missed calls. No Caller ID. Fuck off.

Just as he tossed it back onto the bed, it rang again.

No Caller ID.

Mick picked it up to delete the call, but something made him reconsider and he swiped right instead, and put the phone up to his ear.

“Mick!” Elise’s frantic voice gasped at him. “Thank God.”

“Eli? That you? What?”

It was a bad line, crackling over her voice and echoing his own, but through the distortion he distinctly caught the word ‘hospital’.

“Eli? What? I can’t fucking hear you! Where are you?”
More scratching and again, small fragments of her voice punctuated through.

“Come…em…see…”

She was crying too, making it even harder to understand her.

“Eli,” He yelled. “Slow the hell down! I can’t…”

He could no longer hear her.

“FUCK!”

He was frantic now. He pulled his phone from his ear and tried calling his wife’s number, but it diverted straight to her voicemail.

“Shit. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK.”

He started to check his own messages to see if Eli had left anything for him, when suddenly, he heard their front door close and footsteps in the hallway. He sprinted downstairs.

“ELI? Thank God. What’s going on – ” But instead of running into his wife on the landing, he caught Mary, the cleaning lady’s bewildered face.

Fear shot through him once again.

“Oh shit, Mary. I thought you were Eli.”

Just then, his phone lit up in his hand again. This time, it was a number he didn’t recognise.

“Hello?”

“Michael? It’s Carol. From three doors’ down? Do you want me to feed the kids?”

“What?”

“Immy and Jack…”

“I’m sorry…you have Immy and Jack at your place?”

“Yes. Eli went with Ben in the ambulance. I…”

“Huh? What? Why?” Panic rose in his chest.

“You don’t know? Eli didn’t ring?”

“NO! Nothing.”

She fell silent for a second. Mick could sense her panic.

“Oh god, Michael,” she whispered. “I thought you knew.” She gulped and then continued, even softer than before, as if she couldn’t bring herself to say the words too loudly.

“They’re at the Children’s. Ben…he fell out of a tree.”

Mick swayed and wanted to vomit.

“Christ.”

“The other two are here with me. They’re totally fine, Michael. I’ll keep them here as long as you want.”

Her voice continued talking, but the phone was no longer at Mick’s ear. He had to get to the hospital.

* * * * *

Elise can’t sit still. She paces the waiting room, feeling her chest heave with each breath, waiting anxiously for someone to tell her Benny is ok. She needs to see him, but has no idea where he is.

All around her, the hospital buzzes with activity. Nurses in identical scrubs and bandanas scurry in all directions, patients wander about. When she’d arrived, the paramedics had wheeled Ben away immediately and an orderly with had taken her to the waiting area, and made her a cup of tea, but Elise hadn’t been able to even take a sip without feeling violently ill, so the polystyrene cup remained cold and full on a table nearby. They had told her to wait and the doctors would talk to her soon.

She walked over to the nurse’s station and tried to get Mick on the phone again. Again, it rang out and diverted to his gruff voicemail voice.

“Mick…God, please answer! Where are you? Benny…we’re in emergency at The Children’s. I need you to get here.” She hung up the phone for the eighth time, and walked slowly back to the windows. Someone had made an effort to hang tinsel across the glass panes, and Christmas carols played cheerfully through the hospital’s PA system. The cheeriness of the familiar jingles grated on her. Who wants to hear fucking Christmas Carols.

“Mrs. Farrell?” A woman’s voice spoke. Elise wheeled around to see someone in hospital gowns calling her name from the desk.

“Yes. I’m her.” She hurried over to where the woman was standing.

“Mrs. Farrell…can you come with me, please.” She said gently.

Gulping slowly, Elise followed the woman through some swinging doors to the right, and into a cubicle. The woman drew the curtains around them and asked her to sit down.

“Mrs. Farrell. I’m afraid I don’t have good news. I’m so sorry…Benjamin. He’s… well we’re not sure he’s going to pull through.”

The room swam and the woman’s voice began to echo in Elise’s ears, so softly she couldn’t make it out properly. It was like a thick barrier had descended over her dulling her senses. “What? I can’t hear you!” she yelled, “I can’t hear.” She was frantic now, pleading, “Benny…where’s Benny?”

“I’ll take you to him, Mrs. Farrell. He’s in ICU.”

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get wat you’ve always got.”

So I’m just going to put some ideas down and leave them here. It can’t do any harm.

I was having a bit of a laugh about my tallest brother’s quirky ways. Spencer P. Jones wants to teach him how to play guitar. He’s never played a guitar in his life, so the expectation would be that they start from the very beginning. My goofy brother however has confided that he’s planning to have secret ‘other’ lessons with someone he doesn’t know or care about so he won’t be embarrassed about not knowing how to play the guitar when it comes to the ‘real’ lessons.

Is this kind of behaviour genetic? That exact thing hasn’t happened to me, but I know what he means and have avoided the ‘real’ lesson so many times for the same reason.

Genetics interests me because I’m adopted. I feel perfectly qualified to discuss the tired old nature vs. nurture discussion. I’m not tired of it. We all know biology is genetic, but is behaviour? I reckon it is.

I didn’t grow up with this particular brother and there’s also another older brother and sister. We’re all so very similar though. Our use of words, our sense of humour (humour?), the stupidity of the everyday, our addictions- not all at once and not all the same, and Jesus is an addiction- I’m declaring it.

We have a 90 year old aunt. She says every day at about 4pm she suddenly panics because food has to be prepared for dinner and she’s got no idea what to do. I do that, except I sort of worry about it most of the day before the deadline hits. It’s only been recently recognised we’re all crap at food.

The nurture side has had an impact of course. I have two brothers from that family and a mum and a dad (up until 2011 for dear darling Jingo, loved to bits by all).

We learned that you should make everything from nothing, the original up-cyclers (TV in the cupboard and don’t tell the visitors). Grow your own food, eat the animals. We learned that money was something we didn’t need. We’re all now so totally embarrassed by money and somehow we morphed this philosophy into not deserving anything. If money comes our way, we freak out and waste it, give it away or hang onto it never to be spent ever ever just in case.

If I make a cake (don’t do it much -nature) and it’s not from scratch with the eggs from our own chooks (nurture) I feel like a cheat, same with all food, except I’m pretty lazy with food as we now know (nature) and we have to eat so packaging wins.

The other thing about all these brothers is that, being the youngest and a girl, I felt the need to prove I could do whatever it is those bigger boys were doing and that whatever girls were like was not my bag. No one really mentioned it was a thing, I just made it a thing and wouldn’t do ‘girly’ from a very small age. That’s caused some internal struggle in my later years because somehow it made me a reverse sexist. Like girls are less than.

I did a welding course in my 20’s and made some furniture (1 x chair, 1 x table, 1 x lamp), then while I was working at a bar in Richmond with all the old blokes (I loved them, so many favourites with the best stories), I got a ‘scaffolding appreciation’ (appreciation?) certificate, then onto bob cats, front end loaders and I wound up being a ‘forky’ at the exhibition centre for 5 years. I loved it. I was on a team of women and we got lots of attention for ‘giving it a go’, (and actually we were very good, we had our heads in the paper with a giant article even) and the blokes thought we were all a bit mad but cute. It made us separate from them but not like ‘other girls’. Those girls, whoever they were, were always a bit piss weak in my view.

I’ve been working in a feminist women’s health organisation for a number of years now, nearly 6, and boy (girl?) have I learned some things.

It’s always those that you’re not like that teach you the best lessons eh. Twenty or so women over these years, young and less young, educated, fervent, friendly and fun. And so it is, women can be however they like (which I’ve always thought), not realising they can do it while they wear the highest heels they want or the flattest, having babies, not having babies, painting those nails, having them extended even or get the dirt under them, wear make-up if you want, glitter, glam, bare face, boob jobs, pants, skirts, beige business suits…. go for it.

Anyway, which ever family I was going to grow up in, I would’ve been free to be however I liked in that regard, that’s just how I decided I was going to do it. Trying to be different to fit in.

I do need to add a little political commentary about how women are actually underrated in our very own ‘lucky country’ and there is a lot of work to be done to achieve equality. The deaths, the violence, the sexism, the stereotyping, the bullshit. The total lack of regard.

My point was really about myself and judging books by covers and not being my own self in entirety.

A woman today was talking about female friendships and investigating them more in her own work. That interests me because I really feel like I’m missing something in my own world there. I’ve got some favourites for sure, but as a blanket rule I mean. I’ve been having the ‘other’ class to avoid the real one for a while.