Nostalgia is a poison

Pictured: Cannibal horses

‘Ashleigh, are you sure you want this trip? You’re going to use up all your funding at this rate.’

I’m not her interrogator. I just want to make sure she’s aware of what she’s actually doing. A 140 kilometre round trip from Sydney to the Blue Mountains. Multiple times a week. Every week. The money disappears the way termites eat a house: slowly enough that nobody notices until a wall collapses.

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ She’s on the verge of tears. ‘Do I need to remind you that you work for me?’

I feel like pointing out that, actually, she receives a government benefit. That doesn’t make her my employer. But arguing with a disabled woman doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Ashleigh likes touching buildings.

That’s not me being cruel. That’s literally what she does.

She’ll travel a hundred kilometres, get out of the vehicle, place her hand against a wall, usually a fish and chip shop, and then go home.

Most people hear that and laugh.

I don’t.

Years after leaving primary school, I climbed the fence and wandered the grounds drunk beneath the moonlight.

I tell myself these things are different.

I send an email to the office. Can we please stop pissing and shitting all over the differently abled toilets?

The reply arrives almost immediately.

‘I didn’t know we had differently abled toilets. Are they the same as the disabled toilets?’ comes a smart arse reply.

I try to spend my break alone, but somebody always finds me.

I see Maya tottering towards me across the car park and immediately feel exhausted.

‘Oh, there you are, Kirbs,’ she says. ‘Ashleigh is on the phone again. She wants to speak with you.’

‘I’m on my fucking break.’

Maya is perpetually cold. She wears layers upon layers of socks wrapped around her feet like bandages. She speaks Indian English — she’ll say bizarre phrases like:

What is your good name? Do the needful Please revert

It’s like an alien trying to imitate the English language but not quite getting it right.

Once upon a time, another colleague and I treated these phrases like a game. Every time Maya asked for someone’s good name, we’d exchange amused looks and struggle not to laugh.

That colleague, Samantha, is gone now. Most people leave eventually.

‘I don’t understand what this bitch’s problem is,’ Maya says. ‘What kind of idiot travels hundreds of kilometres just to touch buildings? Oh my God.’

She drags out the last phrase.

Oh my Gooooood.

A refrain. A ritual.

The trouble with rituals is that they only look irrational when they belong to somebody else.

I keep an empty bottle of gin on my bookshelf. Years ago I gave the same brand to Samantha as a farewell present. Later her sister drank it.

The bottle should have gone into the recycling years ago.

Instead it sits there gathering dust because throwing it away feels like losing something else.

The house I grew up in is still standing. Every now and then I drive past it.

The people are gone. The furniture is gone. The dog is dead. My grandparents are dead or vanished into that distant country where old people eventually disappear.

The house remains. Once I took a date there.

I pointed at it through the windscreen.

Look, I wanted to say. Evidence. Proof that I existed before this moment.

‘What should I tell Ashleigh, dear?’ Maya asks.

She asks me in the present, which is always becoming the past.

Tell her some people touch fish and chip shops. Some people keep empty gin bottles. Some people stand outside old houses. Some people break into schools.

It’s all the same thing. We all have talismans.

‘Tell her I’ll call her back.’

Maya shambles away.

For some reason she reminds me of Brumbies, feral horses, in the Blue Mountains and elsewhere. The ones people fight so hard to protect.

There was a story about them in Kosciuszko National Park. Horses reduced to skeletons, ribs showing through their hides. Somebody photographed one eating a carcass and claimed they were becoming cannibals.

No, the activists said. It was only eating the digested grass from the dead horse’s stomach. Get your facts straight.

I imagine Maya pecking at the corpses of her husband and adult son while explaining the misunderstanding.

A lioness feeding on a gazelle. She looks up from the bodies, her face streaked with blood, her eyes pale as spider eggs.

‘Just eating the lentils in their intestines, dear.’

The image makes me smile. It’s the little things that keep you going.

You can always visit the past, but no one will be waiting for you there.