Maya Crombie is a zinester and fiction writer studying Creative Writing and German at The University of Melbourne, and currently a fiction editor for Voiceworks.
CLIFFS
I’m staring into the sanitiser at work. Water’s dripping from the top and I’m imagining it as a water feature in a garden or a grotto or like one of those plexiglass windows at the museum with the cross-section of dirt and moss and water and a frog. I pile in some dishes and then close it.
When I open it, it vents me with hot pungent air and I zone back in.
Somehow another half hour lapses after returning from the toilet where I tapped around on my phone. I stand in the walk-in fridge. I like the sour smell in there: some combination of golden cheese slabs, burger sauce, butter, slaw, pickles, tomato discs, vats of mayonnaise, bagged liquid cheese, etcetera. Everything is dated with a label sticker, and the vegetables are sealed in single-use plastic tubs.
I draw things on the receipt paper. I serve five customers and try to avoid the managers. I imagine them being angry at me. Anyway. On the bus, then, at home.
At home I turn on my laptop. Earlier I’d been itching to get on Google Maps in order to find places I went while on holiday as a kid. I was trying to think of restaurant names through the shadowy outlines of meals and interiors. There’s a restaurant I always picture with a big tree inside it, but I know that can’t be right. That becomes kind of exhausting until I’m flying down these country roads in Google Earth. I’m passing stretched cars and cows suspended in mid-air like smudges, while holding my hand to my laptop and feeling the vibrations of the trip-hop song I’m listening to. The other day I spilled candle wax all over the carpet by trying to light an already-fucked candle by holding it upside down. The wick had disappeared under a valley of wax. There are droplets caked into the carpet across my room. I pick at a little speck. It pleases me how it feels like nothing when hot wax falls onto my finger; it never hurts.
*
I’m under the blankets reading fanfic for a book series I’ve been reading fanfic of for years. The scratchy russet blanket that smells old and I usually keep under the bed is draped over my sheets. I’m disrupted by an email notification but it’s just from Everyday Rewards. My nose feels blocked and irritated and I can’t soothe it. When my left eye starts stinging from tiredness and I rest my finger over it to hold it closed, the words on the laptop screen look far away.
I switch to reading reviews for work to see if I’m named, even if it’s in a bad review. Lately I’ve also been playing Papa’s Freezeria. It sometimes makes me feel angry and inadequate, but I want to keep playing in case there’s an end I can reach.
*
I ride the train to see Xavier with all the commuters on their way to work. I sit turned against the window and scroll a bit on my phone and listen to Massive Attack’s album Protection.
X texts me every few days and I procrastinate on responding even when I read the texts as they come in. We go to the movies or get a drink, and I feel like at any moment he might see right through me and walk away. I don’t know. I’m waiting for him to drop me.
X and I would typically start our days at the library near his house. (Rain was coming down in sheets today for instance; characteristic for late November.) We’d listen to music together, synced up by pressing play at the same time and putting our own separate headphones on. We were often alone; sometimes there’d be a reading for parents and toddlers, and their shrieking would mellow underneath the voice of whatever minimal downtempo ambient we’d picked.
Then from the library—since the rain would have probably paused by then—we would walk over to the Rotary op shop and look at $1 doilies and used glassware and worthless DVDs. X was set on finding some scarves to hang on his wall. The ones we found were often tattered or the wrong colour. Then we’d go to the station to head into the city and get coffee, which was never a good idea for me because it tended to make me anxious (which I typically first noticed on the train home), but I kept drinking it because it made me feel like talking. And I liked talking to X.
*
I was at work thinking about seeing X tomorrow, then somehow, I was back at work again thinking about how fast the time with X had passed. I could time travel—I said to myself—by creating these little blips that I would pile on top of each other and then replay all at once. I still remember walking to school one July morning in Year 9 and the way the houses looked squared and crisp in the frost and thinking, ‘I’ll always remember this when I remember how fast everything happens.
Recently instead of filling a cup of water up for myself, I’ve been getting sneaky and I fill up lemonade instead, or I’ll do half-lemonade and half-water to dilute the bubbles. It still tastes strong enough. Today I fill up what is essentially two-parts lemonade and one-part water. Maybe they’ll notice me doing it on the cameras.
*
I’ve been getting really good at Papa’s Freezeria. Or maybe I just feel that way because I’ve been playing more. I get a good rhythm going, as I’m listening to the ceiling fan flutter and rain drumming outside. I put on Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I remember the customers, start recognising their orders and notice when they change. Think about what X might be doing.
*
When his shift at the ice cream store finishes in the early afternoon, X buys some of those 250ml apple and blackcurrant juice boxes that we both like, and we sit out on the curb at the edge of the carpark and drink three each in long gulps.
I chew thoughtfully on the last straw and then I toss it limply onto the steaming bitumen. Fragrant rain appears in spots on the concrete around us. We walk over to the train station.
X and I go to the park with heavy oak trees, where the houses look kind of magical and I see a particular one that reminds me of Mulholland Drive. Pre-Summer in the city always feels like trees rustling, the rattling and dinging sound of the trams, the free Bible course people, everyone walking somewhere, dampened heat beating down and sunburn.
*
I start feeling guilty for being mad at old friends in my dreams. They have been so horrible lately, but I can’t bring myself to call them nightmares. Yesterday I dreamt that my little sister died, and I felt bad that I was so affected by it because when I woke up, I knew she was asleep down the hallway and not dead like so many other people’s little sisters. ‘In my dream, last night, you died,’ I tell her over dinner, because I didn’t see her for breakfast since she got up and left for school before I could bring myself to get out of bed.
‘What,’ she replies, like me mentioning that made her uncomfortable or it felt weird and, somehow, to say it made it real.
*
X and I go watch another movie together. He texts me asking if I want to go; it’s a horror movie we’ve spoken about together and they’re showing it at a cinema near his house. He meets me outside the station. The streetlights turn on at some point as we walk past restaurants at half-capacity; metal curves protruding over the bruised clouds. We sneak in.
*
At work I print the exact right number of labels for the frozen chips I portioned. I fill two boxes. In Papa’s Freezeria there is always a queue of fuming customers, but here at work I shuffle around to look for menial cleaning jobs and whatever might need restocking. I’m always wiping over little crumbs on the stainless steel. I can still kind of taste lozenges on the roof of my mouth.
After work I am listless as ever. The tab I was playing Papa’s Freezeria on crashed and I lost my progress. I think I might have been close to some kind of end, if there was one. I was at rank 45, if I remembered correctly. I go downstairs and make a tea, and it doesn’t taste like anything specific, just herbal. I take Nurofen and watch TV on mute. Some channel they play in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.
Rain crescendos outside into a storm. Pellets of water pound at the iron garden furniture outside. It gushes down so thickly that it becomes impossible to see through the layers of it. The backdoor is open and (the flyscreen is shut) and the sweet smell of rain-dampened eucalyptus wafts in.
*
This week I don’t remember any of my dreams, even though I have to assume that I’m still having them. Maybe I’ll start playing Papa’s Burgeria or else another game we used to scramble to during wet day timetables. How many times did I probably make a new Poptropica account on the school desktops?
Anyway, X says he’ll visit me at work today and afterwards we’ll maybe sneak into another movie. I wait behind the front counter, click around on the POS and point the scanner at things and try to guess when he’ll come out from the screen of rain, cross the road, shake his hair under the awning and enter through the front door.