The detail of the sandals

My friend told us all how she had been attacked by this woman in a supermarket car park. Because of the whiplash from the time, less than a fortnight before, when a car had rammed into the back of her – because she still had the whiplash, she said, she’d had to wind down the window of the car she’d borrowed from the garage, leaning out of the unfamiliar car as she backed into the space, and so that was how she heard the slam of the door – a slam so loud in itself that she pulled in her head and wound up the window. It was just as well that she did this, she said, as the woman would have gone for her, hitting her, scratching, but instead had only slapped at the glass, bent the mirrors in, wrenched the wipers back and forth on the windscreen, and all the time this woman had been swearing at her, screaming at her, for taking so long to park – taking your bloody time, you fucking cow. If she’d had a weapon she would have used it, my friend said, she was that much out of control.

When my friend pulled out her phone to call the police the woman had then left in high dudgeon, but my friend had been able to describe the woman to the police. She’d had the rego of the car and could name the make, but to her surprise and satisfaction she’d been better able to describe the woman. She had hated the sight of that woman and had never wanted to remember her, but she knew that she had been dressed in a crushed faded teal linen suit with a grey voile top that might have been a singlet, and that there had been spangles on the straps of her sandals.

Pandemic II

A matter of days after she told her kids about the so called Swine Flu and explained what a pandemic was and could be, my colleague told me that she had noticed her kids had already found an online game called Pandemic II, which her kids were now playing instead of their usual preferences for Sims or Call of Duty.

Free at last to transform her life

When I asked him how business had been in the last several months, my physiotherapist said that, since the economic down turn, he had been seeing a predominance of two kinds of clients: the first the worker who knows she is in danger of losing her job, who puts hours and hours in at the office, working long into the night and into weekends at the computer so that she might not be fired, and the second, the one who has already been fired who, free at last to transform her life and so finally to become that fit, slim, healthy person she has always dreamed of being, begins to develop the sort of injuries that hitherto he has only seen in the professional athlete who, keen to win at all costs, trains too hard and for far too long.

Window of porn

All the time the teacher was talking to her as she sat at the computer in the class there was a video going of a full on sex scene close up, he told us afterwards in the canteen. You couldn’t see the faces, only the genitals, he said. The man was black and the woman white – or should he say the male bits of body were black and the woman bits white. Anyone would have been able to see it as the student was talking to the teacher, he said, only nobody else was looking for some reason. The teacher, who had pulled up a chair to sit alongside the student, kept talking to the student and the whole time behind the shoulder of this student, unbeknownst to either of them (or so it seemed), the genitals were going.

It was strange that this student could get porn when so many sites had been blocked at the college, he then said. If he wanted to go on YouTube he couldn’t. Even his hotmail was blocked on some days, and once or twice Google. In the end the teacher had got up and walked away without saying a thing and the student had then turned to the screen and closed the window of porn before opening up Word to make a start on the acquisitions report, he had to assume, that they’d been told they had to finish by the end of the week.

Ant on the moon

She told me that she had always wanted to write to someone in Australia. Even when she was only ten years old and of course still in Russia she had been entranced by the image of Australia on the map, by this large, pink country all by itself at the bottom of the world with water all around it (and for this she made scooping motions with her hands). Europe was many coloured, but Australia was pink. All the children in the class had been invited to write to a child in another country and her teacher had asked her who she would like to write to, but when she had said a child in Australia the teacher had laughed. She might as well have asked to write to an ant on the moon – or so I thought she said as she swayed on her heels in her long pink dress.

Offered free to all

It was carefully planned, she told me. The local church that had members handing out flyers at the nearby stations knew that the only way that the flyers would not get dumped within two minutes of being received was by including two sudoku puzzles next to the message that said ‘God’s forgiveness is offered free to all’: one to do on the journey to work and one for the journey back later on.

Not long after he would have got out of school

I wondered whether it was because he was one of those large, soft-faced kids with blond hair, glasses and a voice still a child’s that when I overheard him say, ‘so he followed them, he led them away’, I knew without a doubt that the boy was retelling the story of a film, a game or a book, and not his observations about the Bank of Queensland robbery that had occurred only metres from where he was now walking but on the previous day, not long after he would have got out of school.