Lily is raking pine needles in the forest, along with twelve others. They have two more weeks before the next rotation. The government said everyone must work so here they are.
‘Lily?’ It’s the oldest guy in their group.
‘Yeah, Dan?’
‘You think the Minister is familiar with Sisyphus?’
She stares at the clump of pine needles at her feet. ‘Must be.’
They chuckle and it feels good. The government wouldn’t approve. Lily knows this and laughs harder. When the wind unsettles her pile of needles, she doesn’t mind. Keeps going. The outcome is not important. Her mother was a Tai Chi teacher, taught her a thing or two.
*
Joining the queue for the outdoor facilities, she looks around at the other grubby faces. At the sink, she splashes her face and neck, imagining it’s the sea.
‘Twenty minutes for lunch!’ Cassandra yells.
Just like that, the vision evaporates. Lily unwraps her sandwich and picks at the crusts. The weight is dropping from her bones.
‘Mind if I join you?’ Dan asks. Lily finds herself nodding at his kind grey eyes.
He asks her what she likes to do when she’s not here, and Lily is grateful for the question. Most people, even loafers like her, assume that this is her life.
‘I have two little girls,’ she smiles, ‘and I make papier-mâché sculptures. Conceptual art stuff. Not much time for either now.’ She flaps her hand at the picnic tables, the discarded tools on the grass.
Dan nods. ‘I grow veggies. This is actually from my garden.’ He offers her a sugar snap pea. It’s crunchy and sweet. The woods are full of people who look after kids or dad or grandma, people who cook or garden or paint. Loafers, in common parlance.
‘I need to get out,’ Dan suddenly sighs. ‘My partner isn’t well – lupus… I’ve been trying to plan an escape, of sorts.’
Lily lowers her voice. ‘You know, they’d just put you on another job, soon as they catch on. Worse gig, longer too.’
‘This one’s not exactly a walk in the park, is it?’
There’d been accidents. She wonders what happened to the smiley guy with the stretched ear lobes who’d helped remove a leech from her scalp once.
‘Good name though, huh?’ – a girl with dreads leans over – ‘New Horizons, makes it sound full of fucking promise.’
‘Are you new here?’ Lily asks.
‘Transfer.’
They startle as Cassandra blows the conch from the bulbous roots of a Moreton Bay Fig. They pick up their rakes and start to walk towards the woods.
‘At least she’s not sadistic,’ Lily says when they’re out of earshot.
‘Not yet anyway.’ The girl with dreads strides deeper into the woods. ‘See youse later!’
‘Hey wait, what was your last rotation?’ Dan calls after her.
‘Peaches.’ She doesn’t bother turning around. The backs of her legs are covered in welts.
*
On Lily’s last rotation, their task was to excavate a sump before filling it back up, over and over again. One woman had arthritis in her hands and had trouble holding the shovel. The supervisor made her squat in the dirt and use her bare hands. Lily felt sick in the guts for days.
A young couple ambles towards Lily and Dan. ‘Hey, mind if we join you?’ – a big guy grins at them – ‘I’m Kunal and this is Ruthie.’
‘We’re sick of each other’s company.’ Ruthie smiles with the right side of her face. Lily tries not to stare at the paralysed left half.
‘Free country,’ Dan says, laughing at his own joke.
Light filters through the thick canopy, creating an underwater effect of murky, mottled greens.
Lily grips her rake with calloused hands and scrapes it along the dirt. ‘How many shades of green can you see, do you reckon?’ Talking isn’t encouraged so she whispers. ‘How many could you name?’
They make a game out of it.
‘Emerald.’
Ruthie says, ‘Chartreuse.’
‘Dark green?’
‘Yeah alright.’
‘Um, lime.’
‘Peppermint?’
‘We’re just naming green foods now!’
They hear twigs snap.
‘Hey!’ Cassandra steps over a fallen branch towards them. ‘I don’t mind if you guys talk but keep your voices down, okay? Even with my bad ear, I could hear you from the bridge.’
‘Sorry,’ Dan says, speaking for all of them.
Cassandra glances at their pine needle clusters. ‘These are good. You can kick them over and start again.’
They nod.
‘Make sure you’re back at the yellow gazebo, half past four, okay.’
They watch her disappear down the trail, then resume talking.
*
On the morning bus ride, Lily is scrolling through the news on her phone. Jobs Galore for Job Seekers. She doesn’t bother reading the article. Instead, she clicks on a story about a skateboarding Macaw.
Their trail is marked with pink ribbons. Impossible to miss. Lily, Dan, Kunal and Ruthie veer away from it. The air is cool and damp. Frogs beep and croak. It’s almost beautiful.
‘What have you got there?’ Dan asks.
Lily holds up a canvas tote. ‘This?’ Although she tingled with the idea last night, it now seems a bit silly. She tries to explain. Lily’s mum taught her to weave baskets. They were sitting on the back verandah with rolls of raffia at their feet. Mum holding her hands and showing her how to coil, wrap and stitch.
‘It’s not silly.’ Ruthie bends down and offers her a handful of pine needles.
Lily wants to fill her baskets with pine needles. As a statement. But a statement of what? She isn’t sure. She pictures waves breaking, seashells glinting in the sun. Her mum sunbathing topless on the beach when they were kids. Her own kids.
They work slowly today. Kunal is the first to give up. He throws his rake across the clearing.
Dan says, ‘You better keep an ear out for Cassandra.’
‘Just me or are we missing a few people today?’ Ruthie asks.
‘It does seem kinda quiet.’
Everyone except Kunal – who’s taking selfies – continues to rake.
Ruthie glares at him. ‘I don’t want my pay docked ‘cos of you.’
‘I’ve got the ears of a bat, don’t worry.’
‘I didn’t know bats had selective hearing.’
Laughing, he rolls up his sleeves and takes another snap.
‘What’s that?’
‘Another busload.’
‘Where do they find these poor sods?’ Ruthie asks. Folks of all ages and background filter into the woods and they see the boilersuits. Ex-cons.
*
Time freezes as the next few hours pass. Lily tries to capture the muted light in words. Underwater, opaque. Diffused. She gives up. Her canvas tote is bursting with pine needles. Wandering further away from the others, she continues sweeping. Wonders how Verity’s doing at school; her eldest had a spelling bee today. They used to practice the words together, just the two of them. Verity’s letters were cramped and sometimes mixed up.
Daydreaming about the ocean, something shimmers in Lily’s periphery. Is someone behind her? That’s when she turns around and sees the girl hanging from the tree.
Lily screams.
Within moments, Dan is at her side. ‘Holy shit.’
‘Fuck.’
Ruthie takes Lily’s hand. More people arrive. Someone checks the girl’s pulse.
Cassandra pushes through the crowd. ‘What’s goi—’ she stops and looks up to see the girl with dreads. Her eyes are vacant.
‘Lizzie.’
Cassandra leans over and retches.
Eventually, another supervisor corrals them back into the clearing. Ruthie is still holding Lily’s hand. Someone makes a phone call and the ambos come to take the body away. It all happens very quickly. A man with white teeth hands out a phone number for a trauma counsellor. Everyone gets the afternoon off.
Lily gets on the bus without saying a word. On the back seat, she lays down and falls into a shallow sleep.
At home, when Verity and Sienna jump onto her lap, Lily shoos them away. She is thinking about her mother’s body. Later, she slumps on the back porch with a cup of tea. She doesn’t sleep.
*
When they arrive in the morning, Cassandra briefs them. It’s business as usual. No mention of Lizzie.
‘Make sure you can see your buddy at all times.’
Her skin is blotchy today.
‘If there’s trouble, blow this whistle.’ She demonstrates and passes around a bag of red plastic.
‘What, to startle someone about to jump?’ a bloke shouts from the back row.
Cassandra looks pained but ignores him. ‘Keep looking for your buddy, keep making noise, until you find them or someone comes to your aid, whichever happens first.’
Striding away from the pink ribbons, Ruthie points to some flat rocks by the stream. ‘What about here?’
Kunal pulls out four tinnies. It’s a quarter past nine.
‘To Lizzie,’ Dan says.
‘To Lizzie,’ they echo, clinking cans.
‘I overheard Cassandra talking to that other supervisor,’ Dan says, ‘what’s-his-name—’
‘Kosta.’
‘Yeah Kosta, he was saying it’s not the first time. They found another body last month.’
‘Why wasn’t there anything in the papers?’
‘There was nothing in the news this morning either,’ Lily says, unlacing her shoes. The creek, when she dips her toes in, is clear, icy. Tadpoles zip around her toes. She thinks about how easily a life comes to an ends. Ruthie peels off her clothes. They push off the rock into the water.
‘Of course, they’ll say mental illness caused it. That’s what they always say.’
‘I can’t imagine feeling so hopeless,’ Ruthie says.
‘Can’t you?’ Lily murmurs.
‘God, what can you even say about this?’ says Kunal. The group is quiet.
Lily puts her head underwater. When they were little, her mum would take them to rallies with handmade signs and bottles of lurid green cordial.
‘You know what my cousin’s workgroup does?’ Dan says as Lily hauls herself out of the water.
‘What?’
‘Paints eggs in the hatchery.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘No reason.’
A cassowary shuffles past. The creek sparkles like a diamond.
‘At least we’re outside, hey?’
Grabbing a fistful of pine needles from her bag, Lily twists and coils them into a spiral. The others watch as she adds more needles. She narrates each step like her mum used to. Inhales the sweet, green scent. She’s been in the woods for weeks and this is the first time she’s noticed it.
‘Take a handful,’ she says, passing the bag around.
*
On the last day of their rotation, the four of them arrive early. Lily unpacks the baskets while the others work together to clip them to the fence. Dan has printed out photos of Lizzie from Facebook. When it’s finished, the shrine is striking and eerie. It exudes the lemony scent of pine. The four lean against the fence and wait.
Cassandra is the first to pull up. They hear the screech of her shitbox from a block away. Now she stops at the fence, opens her mouth as if to ask a question, but sees the answer as her eyes brim. More people arrive for their shift. There are ten of them, then twenty. All huddling around the shrine. One of the supervisors reaches out to touch a basket. Another makes a phone call.
‘Enough,’ Cassandra says, turning towards the carpark. ‘Anyone need a lift somewhere? I’m going home.’
A few people raise their hands. Behind her, Kosta is shouting for people to get to work, but no one is moving. Lily hugs Dan, Kunal and Ruthie, and gets into Cassandra’s Subaru. As the car kicks up dust, her friends march towards the open road.
