scene in which the narrator and Sarah watch TV

Probably, I could have summarised for my girlfriend Sarah, my sister Hilary wasn’t quite the cipher she used to be, but was still somebody who was living a life that was as bizarre as it was mundane and who, on top of it all, was – at least the last time I saw her – beautiful, so beautiful you might go months at a time without laying your eyes on a woman to compete with her, competition being the operative word. A goddess.

The sensor light on the porch came on, and my eyes came on with it. I’d been leaning forward in the seat and my head was squished not unpleasantly against the window. There were pins and needles in my left arm, buried under the weight of my body; the seatbelt was cinched tight around my stomach. I sat up and stretched. My cheek was cold and wet with condensation, its imprint and that of my hair still visible on the window but already starting to steam over. I looked at the sensor light; it flickered and it was full of dead moths, like a busted exhibit at the Natural Museum. Brakes squeaking, Sarah stopped the car inches from the gate and shut off the ignition, although as with most European-built cars the cooling fan continued to whir. A few rickety sounds escaped from the engine and the plastic on the dashboard seemed to creak. She took a deep breath, the breath of having completed a task, and on the exhale let out a cattish little sigh. From my pocket I took a cheap hair tie, made in China from defective condom rubber, and put it in my mouth as I opened the door to get out, taking care not to hit said door on the bins, which for some reason we always stored right where the passenger got out – in other words, where I got out. I shut the door and Sarah locked it. The smells of the food cooking in people’s kitchens I now found sickly and a little alienating. Then as she searched through her bag for the house keys I tied the hair on the top of my head into a fairly high bun, folding the hair tie over twice, cracked my fingers, and opened and shut the fuse box on the side of the wall a few times. When at last she pulled out a key and stuck it in the lock, the door didn’t open. It was the wrong key, of course it was the wrong fucking key, and we laughed about how new we still were to it all, upstarts in our own home.

Once inside, the first thing we did was turn on the TV, a full HD LED and DVD player combo, from Kogan, $199, made in China. There were commercials on every channel except Channel 31, on which there was a show about the latest video games. We chose the best commercial; I think it was for a bank or life insurance fund. Backed by a nice piece of Indie folk music, the commercial cut to a lot of different people, multiform, multicultural average Joes, doing nothing but exist in their designated environment – classrooms, foundries, gymnasiums, old folks’ homes – and stare down the lens of a camera moving slowly from left to right, as if each shot was a sort of miniature biopic of that person. Some of the people seemed close to tears. Others looked like Rodin sculptures. All reminded you of people you knew, and occasionally they were; I told Sarah, as the oaky male voiceover and product disclosure statement information began, that an old Greek guy who used to work with my dad had been approached by the RACV, because the RACV were looking for an ethnic man of his age and appearance, and that he’d been paid something like twenty grand to appear in a series of ads for home and contents insurance: did she remember the ads where the old wog guy lost everything in a flood or an earthquake or something? She thought she might’ve remembered. I think that’s the whole point, I told her: you can’t be sure whether it was the commercial or a family friend fitting that description who lost everything. Then after an ad for a new panel show about AFL, The Big Bang Theory came on. As it turned out, it was the start of a Big Bang Marathon, three episodes back-to-back. We watched all three; I don’t remember much except that at one stage the main guy was folding some of his clothes to uproarious laughter. When the last episode finished I scraped my front teeth along my tongue and swallowed. Then I went to brush my teeth, by way of the bedroom, where at Sarah’s asking I turned on our little electric heater, a made in China one called Monelli Turbo Ceramic. The air coming out of it smelt toxic, but kind of nice too, and the plastic on the casing bubbled in parts, the result of poor moulding.