Chapter One:

It was the last century. The final one. And it was all her fault.

She, coruscant in gilt earrings, basked beneath a crabshell-red globe, the sun through a grimy window. Fuégo de ladrónes. The fire of labour.
Not that she was working. Susan and work were like a triffid and seawater. She had never had “recent, relevant, demonstrated work experience” nor been a liar or an entrepreneur (‘undertaker’ in French, work or starve she supposed). From her roost, she gazed over an invented city like a muezzin with vertigo. A vast siphon of silver beads, climbing to, then falling from, an unseen hand. The railcars, the houses, the five hills of life… Half-memories, wry as a moue, sieved fountains, green-lit plane trees, shy shadowed encounters, the longings and shortings out of a tear-streaked utopia. Within everything, though, the great hum, nada Brahma. This afternoon, the sky was as blue as a mouldy orange …

She, on the womby bus. Back to reality, grasping the ephemeral seat in front with stumpy fingers — she barely came up to the top of it — as the driver up ahead frittered away her surplus-value. No chewy in the ancient gouges. Kids guffawing rebelliously down the back, none reading Capital in the capital of capital. (She knew what the secret police knew, they spied on the likes of her.) She neither on ice nor laudanum. She who fingered the gold moon at four as it sat on the hill’s horizon like an O of surprise.
Nasusanasusana. Dark-eyed Susan. Nausea. The world a doll’s house of many yet-to-be-forgotten rooms. She danced above a sunshower-lit patch of it like a palmful of midges in midwinter. Pretending to be alive. She existed in a constant state of velleity. That was why she always perched over the wheel, like a roc on a precipice. August crows croaked overhead. An elegant messiness pervaded her coruscating mind. She travelled, as always, on her threatened concession card, tumbling into the teens of the 21st century.
Well, it would be her fault if she didn’t find the green girl from outer space. Iliana, who could be anyone, even a boy. She (like Susan) pined for the myrtle-lined bends of the slow river Hazzen sussurating. Squinting in the piquant wind. They had taken her there once. The soft summer Jeannie-with-the-light-brown heartland of Iliantyn, where they hadn’t abolished money yet but they’d made it very small.
Trams clanked by, daffodil-yellow, new as incanubula, petrol being costly as wine. Each bore tasteful picture of the Unity P.M. A man straddling two empires with a foot in each grave.
Fiddle dee dee. All about as inviting as removing your pubic hair with glasspaper. In the Land of Whoopsy Diddly Dandy Dee / where nobody is paid, and everything is free … Thank God she was a Nullipara woman. And twenty-five already.
An abacus of power lines flicked past.
Her denim hem scratched her knees, her dyed blonde hair was lank and tired and short, like herself, her heart was a spring uncoiling.
And down there a girl, blonde and (she fancied) Congolese-British in purple tights and green smock daubed with African colour-writing, beckoning her. Was that … but she was gone. The world with her.
Hogarth would have satirised her lack of perspective. She’d seen his self-portrait: the man was good too. She smiled to herself. Her thoughts were emaciated but agile, like raindrops bouncing off hot asphalt. Unperturbed by the dyslexic rattling of the vehicle and of the capitalist plot against the proletariat (most of us), a fawn baby gazed about from its mother’s thin arms, smiling genially. He engaged the looks of others, the smile fading, then brightening again. Getting to know the new world. A cherub, yet sharp as an obsidian sliver. Susan’s head rang like the Maria Dolens.
The baby only grinned more palmily. They tattooed newborns in Auschwitz.
News of Iraq or something on the bus radio. Rogue capitalists ruled yet, while opposition was building as never before. They way they threw money into that quagmire you’d think it was a wishing-well, someone said. The earth a common treasury. She, thinking sedition in our classless wonderplex, on the bus, a bum on a seat, her rattling mind trailed off to be replaced by a perfect kaleidoscopic flux …
Oh, sUSAnna.
And P.M. Peach everywhere, that semi-elected murdoch of an alien land, the personable racist with the twinkling hair.
There had been a revolution in China.
Adult n-cycles splashed by in a fleeting shower. A dirigible sailed overhead. But for their assistive zinc-air motors it was 1911. In Asia it was tomorrow. The ice was melting. Moneybags was mobile.
The bourgeois has no history, only tradition.
Grumpily, grumping silently, Susan peered inside her capacious fawn dilly-bag, not made in ‘Timor-Leste’. Inside hid her screwed-up knitting, her fine-toothed nit comb that she cleaned with shoplifted dental floss, her folding field lens for itinerant amateur geologising / botanising, her homemade tampons, and her Notebook of Inventions and Metaphors. (Why not straighten the Leaning Tower of Pizza — as she called it — by re-aligning the ground?) A topologist’s nightmare, like the seven bridges of Königsberg.
Her bee-sting breasts itched.
No cancer there. She scratched them and picked her aquiline nose.
If she had a bomb she could blow the bus and all the propaganda-poster trams to bits. But she caught the baby’s eye (not once the anti-terrorist slogans above him) and felt ashamed. She stared into the well of the rear steps, where bits of coloured foil were dancing in the eddies like children round a maypole.
Shivering, radical without a stonebreaking root to grasp, she wrapped her own thin arms about herself. Timber in the round is stronger. Time to get off.

Chapter Two:

She perched squirming on a metal seat of white-flecked blue with her recycled school Notebook and chewed pencil, on the eastern side of Garema Place near the Florina Building and a bin. Garema Place was a place for Susan. Low buildings in a country town where some sad-eyed young girl had sat thousands of years before while pondering future identity politics. Magpies on the shade tree bough above, itself drippingly green under the tall blue sky.
The tenses of labour, as Marx said in the Grundrisse. (Zit-popping scions of the Aspirational Class swaggered by.) Postmodernists repudiated such object permanency and tossed out babies with the bathwater when they couldn’t swim; she didn’t.

Tall glass of fitfully blue sky. The sky’s high and wide, I can’t get there on a smile …
so blue, honey, blue I am, don’t tell me I’m sweet as blackberry jam …

Her unperformed guitar piece. (To be a rhapsode, a Greek busker ….) She was thirsty, hungry, sadder than a vapour trail in the crook of the unseen horizon. A trembling in her empty tummy.
Policeless bicycles rolled by in English (hawk, spit). On one of them — no, that couldn’t be Iliana. She scribbled in her notebook in English (hawk, spit).
Better get to the flat. The blueness was draining from the sky. The wind was rising.

In her temporary home, she, dog-tired, tossed down her Notebook on the camphory, dog-legged, hall table. She turned off the mock-1930s mock-bakelite radio. The place was a Housing unit, sublet illegally from an enterprising friend. (Better than being ‘trailer trash’, or freezing on Mt Ainslie, or raped in a back alley.)
The kitchen was cold, the round-shouldered bestickered fridge warm. Feeling a total numpty, Susan banged out a five paragraph essay on her Dad’s well-oiled Remington collectible, which she’d predictably dubbed the ‘Helen Keller’. On Iliana. No one would believe it. Most folks these days were what the Dutch called zo fijn als gemalen poppenstront — as fine as ground doll shit. So had they been crafted by the powers that be.
Susan felt like an old-time mini-skirted secretary with a filing cabinet full of fingernail parings, though guzzling a ‘Michael Jackson’, a tipple of sweating soy milk and grass jelly, and pondered learning The Guide for Disgruntled Secretaries, (Sleight Of Shorthand Press, 1927), by Miss Jo Stalin.
Tofu-brain. It wasn’t time to publish yet, supposing that were possible (except over the net). She glanced out the window, at road signs that might have been designed by Athanasius Kircher (had he been at the Sorbonne in 1968). Unity! Individualism! Unity! Silk-screened propaganda everywhere. The town’s main employment, it seemed. It beat graffiti, they claimed. The flat was set in a picturesque parklet like a fleck of blood in a thimble. A vacuum cleaner quavered in the distance. She felt safe for now. The Emoh Ruo (Heimat) department, called by her The Impeccable Order, would not find her here. Ho ho. She went into the lounge and sat inelegantly in her largest wicker chair.
We’re gettin’ sick of it sick of it sick of it — We’re gettin’ sick of it, we’re gettin’ sick of it — We’re gettin’ sick of it sick of it sick of it — We’re gettin’ sick of it, We’re gettin’ sick of it! We’re gettin’ sick of it sick of it sick of it sick of it — We’re gettin’ sick of it we’re gettin’ sick of it! We’re gettin’ — rattled like a three-wheeler puffing billy train through the railyards of her mind, with due apologies to a dusty Springfield.
She parsed then tore up the sheet she’d typed. Ickety-pickety. A parsing phase, perhaps. Writing was a waste of time, or a waist of thyme, or a woman of flowers, until she found the green girl. Then she would know where the lines were …
Susan masturbated, then went out to the shop. (Must try it the other way round.) She was dying for a cup of homey Ecco.


Susan’s fantasy

She continued to fantasise autistically all through the vegie and dairy aisles. At least they had more than blockaded lands like Zimbabwe. But Iliana would change all that. More than all those who rabbited on vacuously about ‘cultchah studies’.
She stocked up on overpriced vegetarian food, making silent jokes to herself about vegans. (Freytag’s Triangle be damned. This was not a story.) She thought of giving Chisenbop (finger-abacus) lessons for money. Susan was always practical. She had a strong feeling she was about to meet someone important.
If only there were somewhere to sit in a supermarket. Even the check-out chicks thought so. Archimedes would never have written The Sand Reckoner in one. He’d barely have totted up his grocery bill.
Her dilly-bag was not full of stuff she didn’t need. She had learned something over the years.
Then she saw the one she’d been looking for. But no, it’s never that simple.
She trudged homeward, fantasising about a shopping trolley or even a bicycle, as rare veteran SUVs sputtered by.

She sat in the park, aimlessly examining her bits of shopping. Several people waked past. She sucked on a tic-tac. Stared vacantly down the path at the ’shops’ she’d left. No lines there. God, who was this hippie rag-bag coming along with a stroller full of worldly belongings?
“Have you got the time?”
She had not expected a line like that, but.
“’bout five.” she muttered, intent on reading the lies on a packet of fake mince.
The thin-armed woman with the fat baby, the latter now buried in commodities.
“I’m Vida.” said the mother. “I saw you on the bus.”
“Was I that obvious?” Susan laughed. The woman, pinched and ‘white’ and around thirty-five, looked a bit puzzled. Probably didn’t get it at her age. Susan wasn’t sure she got it either.
“Susan.” she explained. So, this wasn’t Iliana. But how could she be sure? How did she know anyway? Wasn’t it all a fantasy — about the lines, the strings, how they linked it all together.
“I’m looking for this Iliana.” said Vida, and Susan’s heart jumped. But no, she’d said “I saw you buy the bananas.”
“They should grow fruit here.” Susan mouthed with a glance at the gum trees about them. For a moment she felt seasick. She knew that the antipodes of where they sat lay in the Atlantic between Gibraltar and Washington.
“Sorry?’ The woman sat next to her. “I’m new to Canberra. Haven’t got a bloody car or a bloody job. Just me and Paul.” She meant the baby. He smiled, laughed in fact, face covered in smears of plum, and tiny candy cane in hand. A happy child. An honest consumer.
“Don’t you know anybody here?” said Susan.
“No. Maybe you can introduce me around?”
“I spend most of my time at the National Library. Or any library that’s warm. Um, but yes, I do have a few friends. Um, there’s Rachel, Joe, um …”
“Is Joe your — boyfriend?”
“No, I’m a dyke.” Susan dredged up from her bag a ‘bunch’ of two bananas. She hated the things, they were for Rache. Maybe Vida was after a husband.
“They’re still too expensive for me.” said Vida. “But Paul likes them.” She smiled back at him.
And plums. Paul had been trying to grab one. It fell to the floor. The passing manager picked it up chivalrously. Susan flared a nostril. He definitely fancied her too. When he’d gone, Vida had slipped it in her pocket. She now wrinkled her nose:
“I’ll pay. The landlord gets what the shopkeeper doesn’t.”
“I lift stuff too, when I’m desperate.” Susan went.
“You’ve got to. The rent’s shocking. I’m looking for a better place to live.”
“You can stay at my place — no strings attached.” Susan offered. Or lines.
“How many bedrooms?”
“Two.”
“Lucky.”
“It’s a sublet guvvie. So I won’t charge you. I —”
“I’ll buy all the food then.”
This woman was too organised. Might even be forty. Mum’s age.
“Sounds good. Do you have a cot for him?”
“Sure.” said Vida. “I’m organised.” It still had bits of packing in it.
Susan felt a bit breathless.
She had seen Vida at the opposite checkout. Ari, the manager, was trying to serve both of them, all grins and gold teeth in two directions. Susan had got her tofu, nutmeat, el cheapo breadcrumbs, rice milk, TVP fake mince, bananas, and an oil-wasting plastic pack of orange tic-tacs.
You’re a vegie, said Vida’s sole glance. Ari gave Paul (at that point invisible) a tiny candy-cane, gratis.
“Come again — ladies.”
No, that was Susan’s fantasy too. Well, some of it.
Presently, cold wind off the Brindabella range moaned about their Nikéd feet. Susan had her faded bottle-green track pants on under her skirt. Vida was carefully but tattily dressed for winter.
“Is it very far?” she asked.
“Ten minutes walk. I haven’t got a car either. Where are you living at present?”
“O’Connor. I’ll move my stuff tomorrow if that’s o.k. I really don’t get on with my neighbours. Drug-dealers.”
“Mine are old ladies, mostly. It’s an ‘Aged Person’s Unit’.”
Vida widened her watery eyes.
“Oh, my landlord is over fifty! It was his, see.”
“Right. Oh well, I guess it’ll be o.k. I’m thirty-four. Ah, this is a nice little park.”
“It’s full of drunks at night. I’m just over that way.” gestured Susan.
“I like Canberra. I’m from Sydney.”
“So am I, originally. Enmore, Redfern, Surry Hills.”
“I was born in New Zealand.” Vida breezed on. “In Timaru, South Island.”
“We should hev got some fush and chups.” Susan giggled.
“Thet’ll do!” Vida laughed. Paul laughed along with them, happily sticky. “Anyway, you don’t eat — fush.”
“True. Do you?”
“Only when I’ve got my period.”
“I get periods of madness too.” said Susan, wondering if this was going to be anything like the momentous meeting of Marx and Engels.
“I’m a shrink actually.” winked Vida.
“Hey, he winked too!”
They’d reached the other side of the little park. The house was another two blocks. At the next intersection, a bus raced by. There were no tramlines around here, nor cars.
“I’ll have to get a bike,” said Vida, “one with a kiddy-trailer.”
“It’s flat as Beijing here — from what I’ve heard.”

Paul tossed the remains of his candy-cane and spluttered with mirth again. Then he looked upward in wonder. Overhead floated a red-lit airship bearing the P.M.’s airbrushed picture. Susan shuddered as the shadow passed over the trees. They were three privileged helots of the declining ‘west’ surrounded by a world ocean of impoverished billions.
She thought they’d better get home.

Chapter Three:

There had been no machine-gunnings for many years. The media denied them anyway. The Internet was mostly under control, they half-lied. Freeze Peach, she thought.
But the green girl was afoot, somewhere, Susan could feel it. People got poorer every year. Someone had to help. The rich had yet to have their gold poured down their throats , unless it was in the form of Goldwasser. They grew, it seemed, physically as the people shrank individually, yet burgeoned in numbers.
Inside her head it was safe. Stone walls do not a prison make and all that. She upended her dilly-bag and the screwed-up knitting, the fine-toothed nit comb, the folding field lens, her homemade tampons, her Notebook of Inventions and Metaphors (N.I.M.), and her few bits of shopping fell out on the rickety hall table. She had the first new tic-tac and shoved half of them back in again.
Her bee-sting breasts itched again but she did not scratch them.
“Who’s Iliana?” asked Vida as she came in. Vida wanted to go out job-hunting for something part-time. Susan had agreed to look after Paul for a small fee.
“Banana?”
“No — sorry, I was just looking at this thing you’d typed. Sorry, is it private?”
Susan felt her face go hot.
“Just a character. Inspired by — um, a dream, I guess. Like Surrealism. I’m calling it Gilt music for a perfumed corpse in an early stage of decomposition.”
“The music or the corpse?”
“That’s the beauty of it.”
“Were you stoned or something? She sounds pretty wild.”
“She — she is green, or in green, anyway.”
“Like Robin Hood!”
“Uh — how did William Tell?”
“Eh? I really am a shrink.”
They both sipped their green tea. Susan had forgotten to sieve as she’d poured. She tried to strain the tealeaves through her crooked teeth.
Vida had kicked her shoes off. Her hippie skirt glittered like a long-faded decade. “What are the lines?” she asked.
Susan shrugged. “You know, ‘Ley-lines’. Perfect spaces. Feng shui. Dowsing. Memory palaces. Sound and shape. Just a bit of fantasy. It’s not very good.” She went to grab back the sheet, but Vida leant back in the other wicker armchair at the same time.
“It’s fine. I mean, I’m no writer, but it’s interesting. So Iliana is a kind of rallying-point for a movement …”
Susan went cold. What if this woman were a police spy?
“I guess so — I haven’t really written anything yet — in fact, I might not bother to finish it. Never get it published anyway!”
“You never know. We could do with a rallying-point against — Peach Blossom!”
Susan choked on her tea. ‘Peach Bottom’, she’d thought.
Vida rose and clapped her on the back gently.
“It’s — never that simple …” said Susan, red-faced, recovering.
“No, we need to unite the workers globally before anything will really happen. But maybe someone could do that.”
“We can’t find — Iliana.” said Susan, feeling silly that her private fantasies seemed to be coming true, or at least coming out.
Vida leaned forward again and looked at her penetratingly.
“No? We’ll see. But maybe you could be Iliana, so to speak.”

There was a thump or two, like a secret knock, at the door. Joe. He would restore insanity around here.
Before they could stir, he entered with his latest bakelite radio cradled in his arms. It was playing, tuned into some surviving short-wave pirate station.
Susan introduced them. “He sells ’em in the market.”
“Free enterprise.” said Joe, a lanky fellow of 30 with greasy lopped hair.
“He’s an anarchist.” she explained. “And a ‘botanical terrorist’ — ”
“ — ‘guerilla gardener’ — ”
“ — he’s been planting fruit trees and things on nature strips.”
“In dead of night.”
“6 pm!”
“Cold work at this time of year.” He grabbed some of Susan’s mashed tofu-bread crumb ‘pie’ from the fridge and began munching on it.
“Well, why nick my cold food, then? I’ve got a nutmeat roll in the oven.”
“Congratulations! Who’s the father?”
“Fuckbrain.”
Joe wiped crumbs from his droopy moustache.
“I am the epitome of resistance. Johnny Appleseed of the 21st Century. I will bury the city beneath my herbage. The roots and leaves are with me. They will strangle the bourgeois from the neck down — no point in going in the other direction. Mmm, this is nice stuff. More in the oven, eh …”
“Leave it, you zygotic Zerzanist. That is my Personal Prahvate Property. And in case you haven’t noticed, we have a Guest.”
Vida was laughing. She’d been up to check on Paul, but he was still fasto.
Joe sat on the wicker sofa nearby, belching.
“Isn’t he disgusting?” went Susan.
“Not as much as someone who has an all-wicker suite in whisker-grey from the Smith Family. All you need is a print of Whistler’s Mammy on the wall. My name’s Joe Maggiore, by the way. The local Italian Stallion, if she’s to be believed. Pity I’m half-Lebbo.”
“Maggot! Phony Phoenician! What the hell would I know?”
“Precisely, Susan liebling, but that doesn’t stop you making up stories.”
“I’ve just been reading one.” Vida said, unperturbed it seemed by this adolescent badinage, holding up the sheet. “It’s not bad.”
“Oh, all that Iliana crap. Nice idea, but you know Susan’s as mad as a cut snake.”
“And you’re named after a fucking lake!”
Susan had poured herself a glass of Jameson Irish whiskey and downed it in one go. She didn’t offer the bottle around but snuck it back in the kitchenette cupboard, hoping no one had noticed. Her heart was thudding as they talked about her fantasies (at least they didn’t know the sexual ones).
“Maggiore means Major. As in eldest son. Not that I am.” Joe stretched his long legs out, and picked at a fuzzy hole in his grubby jeans.
He lit a cigarette.
“Go outside to smoke that, Giovanni.” said Susan, red-faced.
“Come on, it’s the last century, Susan. You said so yourself.”
“I speak in paradoxes.” said Susan, looking at him sphinx-like.
“You should have been a mystic like Hildegard and Julian. No wonder the E.H. have left you alone.” He coughed.
“Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?” Vida interjected.
“A dog on a bender.” quipped Susan like a flash.
“Close.” They all laughed. She had another dram of whiskey, this time offering it around.

Then the real rapping began.