I honestly don’t know where the frig to start, guys. All I want to do is tell you about this one day last September when I snapped like a twig – my twenty-first birthday actually – but the problem is that that makes me think of something that happened before, and that reminds me of something else, and the next thing you know I’ll be giving you a minute-by-minute account of me as a fetus. Maud the fetus. That’d be great. Just the diary of this tiny, beautiful fetus wondering what the world’s going to be like and getting excited for the big day. I wonder if fetuses do get excited. I wouldn’t put it past them. You think they’re putting their feet up in there but they actually don’t stop. You’re probably never busier in your whole life than when you’re a fetus. That’s a medical fact. You can trust me, I’m basically a doctor.
I don’t know if you really want to hear about all this stuff that happened to me, but if you don’t then all you have to do is put it down. Like, no one’s got a gun to your head. Unless they make it mandatory reading in schools. I’d love that. Millions of kids being forced to read to this garbage. And it’s not going to be an action-packed thriller either, by the way, with spies and explosions and all that. I don’t think anything explodes. Unless you count me. I explode. I’m not kidding. I’m still finding bits of me all over the neighbourhood. But all I’m saying is that if you’re just into explosions, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I don’t know how writers come up with such interesting stuff. I have this scarily bad imagination. When I try to imagine something – say a dog – all I see is blackness. I’m jealous if someone can just picture a dog.
I was sick all September. I was on about my sixth flu for the year and I was getting over a UTI and I had three mouth ulcers. Basically one leg already in the grave. And that’s how I turned twenty-one. You’ll get a kick hearing how I spent my twenty-first birthday. I was hiding out in the laundromat on Bannister Street in Fremantle by myself. Not really how I saw my twenty-first, to be honest. I didn’t even have clothes to wash or anything. I went there to get away from everyone and to write a letter to my brother. I needed a place free of distractions so I could get the letter over with once and for all, say everything I wanted to, and move on with my life. And I couldn’t go home and do it there because I’d promised my housemate, Winnie, that we’d have birthday drinks, and she’d be waiting for me. I could’ve done without the drinks. Her heart’s in the right place, don’t get me wrong, but she corners you into stuff. You know those people? They let you know how much they’re looking forward to it and they go overboard preparing for it so then you feel like you have to do it. She’s like that. So you set a date to have a relaxing drink, but it feels more like a crushing black cloud hanging over your head all week.
A laundromat has got to be one of my favourite smells. It makes you feel so clean and pure. It’s like hitting the reset button on life a bit. Plus you can sit there for hours on a cold night without anyone getting on your case. All you have to do is look annoyed – as if you’ve got better things to do but you have to wait for the stupid cycle to finish. It started raining as soon as I stepped foot inside. Hammering down.
Coming in from the freezing cold night, I felt this solid wall of hot, humid air from the tumble dryers smack me in the face at the door. My face flushed and my nose was instantly running like a tap. There were three rows of radioactive-green hard plastic chairs and a long silver bench in the middle where a man in a blue waterproof poncho was delicately folding his washing in a way that made me wish I was the linen being folded neatly and placed in a bag to be taken home and put lovingly in a drawer. He stopped to look at me and then went back to his dainty folding. The windows were steamed up on the inside and some car headlights passed blurrily by. Apart from the man in the poncho, two others were waiting for their clothes. I sat down with my back to the window across from a squirrely guy who was going for the cowboy look. He stopped biting his thumbnail and wiped the thumb on his flannelette shirt. I pulled my uni notebook and a pen out of my bag, opened to a blank page and hunched in. Ready for the letter to come flowing out. But nothing happened. I just got itchy.
I didn’t have a coat or a rain jacket either. I’d gone out in just my purple turtleneck and it was already driving me up the wall. I only had my bra on underneath and the alpaca wool was so prickly that I knew from the second I sat down I was going to spend the whole night scratching. I was furious. I was close to ripping the turtleneck off and sitting there in my bra – except I’d never actually do that in a million years. You could tell people were thinking I had fleas and I’d come to wash the fleas out of my clothes. No one wanted a bar of me. It was lucky I was in my black culottes because at least they’re halfway comfortable. I’m quite small, quite petite, and I wouldn’t’ve thought I could pull off wide-leg culottes. I had it in my head that they’d make me look like this absolute tree-stump, but they so don’t. I love them. And I’m pretty much swimming in all that extra room I have. I could fit a watermelon in my pocket if I had to. I know that these days everyone’s walking around in cropped, ankle-length culottes but I don’t care. I still love them. My ankles pop out the bottom like these exquisite, slender twigs.
Between the spinning dryers and the sound of buttons clinking against the glass doors of the washing machines you could hear the downpour outside. All in all, it was a pretty good place to do what I came to do, which was to write that stupid letter to my brother. So I turned the page in the notebook even though I hadn’t touched the one I was looking at and I told myself that no matter what, I’d finish the frigging letter before I left. Just get it over with. Pop the old heart on the sleeve and move on with my life.
The whole thing was my cousin Max’s idea. She’s the Max Gladstone. You’ve probably heard of her. She used to be a tennis player but after whupping Serena Williams at Wimbledon last year that was the end of her playing career. She got too popular and now she’s always doing TV ads for anti-fungal socks and chewing gum. I swear, every time I turn on the TV she’s telling me that those anti-fungal socks are ‘ace’. I think she manages to fit in a couple of games a year. I don’t get that. Don’t they give her enough millions playing tennis? I would love to call her up and be like ‘hey, I saw you selling socks on TV. Do you need some money? I mean, I’m a med student and I can barely afford one piece of sushi a day but I’m sure I could spare something’. How good would that be?
Anyway, she called out of the blue from Sydney when she heard about Lloyd, and told me I ‘just had to’ write him a letter. And I should stick in all the stuff I wanted to say to him. Really ‘let loose’. They’re her words. ‘Let loose’. As if I hated his guts or something. As if I was seething. But the idea was that you write like he was alive and could write back. She even said to mail it. I must have rocks in my head to have listened to her. Everyone’s suddenly full of advice when someone dies. People start chucking books at you. Anything with ‘death’ in the title.
I’m not kidding about that, by the way. The woman who’s lived next door to my mum and dad forever popped by to give me a book by Ernest Hemingway called Death in the Afternoon. I swear to God it was just about bullfighting. Start to finish bulls. It was just bulls, bulls, bulls. I read it to take my mind off the whole thing. Suddenly I was this bullfighting expert. O and they send you quotes. That’s the worst. The take-each-day-at-a-time and the they’re-with-you-in-your-heart quotes. Anyway, Max had barely got on the phone when she had to go again – she must have had another anti-fungal sock ad to shoot – but after a day or two I realised how much time I spent sitting around talking to Lloyd when I was by myself. Hours. I couldn’t stop. So I thought it wouldn’t kill me to give it a try. That’s what I was doing at the laundromat anyway.
I sat on that chair staring at an empty page in my notebook for a whole hour. If you’ve ever sat in one of those hard plastic laundromat chairs five minutes you can imagine what a whole hour can do. My ass was asleep all the way down to my knees. I thought I might be in a wheelchair with stumps the rest of my life. People would be like ‘O, were you in a horrible car accident?’ or ‘did you fall out of a sixth-floor hotel room?’ and I’d be like ‘nope, I sat in a laundromat chair for an hour’. I’ve never had a case of pins and needles that bad in my life. Anyway, at the end of the hour the page was still blank so I hopped up to get the blood circulating and looked out the window as a blue neon West End Medical sign turned off for the night.
There were still three of us in the laundromat. A lady in blue flannel pyjamas and a mangy canary-yellow bathrobe with her hair in curlers was reading a pulp-fiction book. She even had a few overnight pimple patches on her chin and an ugg boot up on the chair. She couldn’t have been more relaxed if she was on her bed with the door shut. People like that amaze me. I can’t be that relaxed when I’m literally in my bedroom. With a padlock on the door.
Then there was the cowboy guy sitting across from me in a tucked-in flannelette shirt, leather jacket and some pointy leather boots. He was one of those spindly types who look like they’ve never picked up a dumbbell in their life. He had patchy facial hair and an old cold sore on his upper lip and he must have liked the way he looked rolling his cigarette because he spent half an hour rolling one and then stuck it behind his ear.
He kept looking at me and then down at the floor and shaking his head. For some reason there were all these feathers scattered around me on the blue-and-white tiled floor. A heap of them. I asked the cowboy the time because my phone was dead. He sighed like I was asking him to change all the tyres on my car. Really slowly, he pushed his sleeve up a whole centimetre and told me it was ten-thirty.
After what felt like another hour had gone by, I asked him the time again. It was only ten minutes later. He looked like he wanted to knock my teeth out for that one.
The reason I was asking was because Frankie, my oldest brother, was coming home from California that night. His plane got in at eleven and I wanted to know if he was here yet. Frankie had called me up a couple nights before and we got into a big argument. I hung up on him and everything. He kept calling me ‘Our Lady of the Suds’ because I was in the bath. He kept asking if I was with Francis of Assisi and how Francis of Assisi was doing and whether Francis of Assisi was enjoying his time in the suds too. When I hung up he tried to call back but I was done with him.
I opened the notebook back up like I meant business. It was Heart-on-Sleeve time. No fooling around. I got this wind in my sails and wrote Dear Lloyd. Then I stiffened up. I sat there on Dear Lloyd for another ten minutes staring at the page. Then I wrote:
This is Max’s idea. I’m pretty sure reading mail is on the list of Things You Can’t Do Once You’re Dead. I’ll have to check my first-year textbooks but I’m pretty sure that’s there. I think the medical definition of death is: ‘Irreversible cessation of brain stem function and inability to read mail’. Before they had EEGs to check if someone was dead, they’d stick some mail in the dead guy’s hands and wait to see if he started trying to write a response.
Total garbage, I know. You don’t have to tell me. But bear in mind that I was rusty at the whole letter-writing thing.
What really punched me in the breadbasket was that Lloyd was the one person in the world I should’ve been able to say something to. I could barely talk since it happened. I suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say to anyone. And when other people talked it hurt my ears. I was considering going around in earmuffs. The only stuff I could really talk about was stuff that had nothing to do with anything – like medical facts.
I think that’s what that dumb fight on the phone with Frankie was all about, to be honest. I’d been this gigantic idiot for thinking I might be able to have a halfway honest conversation with him. We hadn’t talked properly in years and Frankie’s got this annoying thing where you’re still the same age you last were when you talked on the phone. He won’t update his idea of you. Absolutely refuses. In his head, no time has passed on your end since the last conversation. So for him I’m about twelve years old and still doing Irish dancing. And it kind of broke my heart talking to him because he’s this genius – like, he’s inventing all these things with his company in California to use wind power and thermal power to counteract global warming – so when he called, I had this feeling of relief. Like maybe here was someone I could actually, you know, talk to. And in the end I just found him annoying with all that Lady of the Suds and the Francis of Assisi crap so I hung up.
I flipped the page and started the letter again:
Dear Lloyd
You always used to say you were looking for the village idiot to talk to. I never got it before but I think you meant you were looking for someone who doesn’t always know better or who isn’t trying to show off how many books they’ve read and all that. But just some guy who sits around on a crappy step all day with a ball of string and nods when you talk but not exactly in time with what you’re saying and who looks around as you pour your heart out like maybe he understands or maybe he hasn’t heard a word. And when you’re all done he doesn’t say anything – yes!!! – but, instead, just shyly gives you some, like, small black beetle he’s keeping in his sweaty palm. His pet beetle. And that’s it. All you’ve got is a beetle to show for this beautiful transaction. Is that what you meant?
I realised tonight in a laundromat that you were my village idiot. When I could get you, that is. Which wasn’t a lot lately. You were this idiot sitting on a dirty step with a beetle in your hand. I miss that. God, what I’d do for that beetle right now
I didn’t get any further because a fourth person showed up to get out of the rain. She was on the large side. Biggish. Hell, she was a hippopotamus, guys. But a beautiful hippopotamus. She came huffing and puffing inside, dragging this lime-green grandma trolley behind her that was overflowing with plastic bags and coathangers and other useless crap. She gave it a good yank up the step. She was in this dark purple cape and a squished straw hat with faded pink plastic flowers, and her two spotty hippopotamus legs went down into these incredibly dainty peach-coloured ballet slippers. One look at her and I knew I might as well kiss writing the letter goodbye.
One of her ballet slippers had a piece of duct tape stuck to it and she suddenly became aware of it a step or two inside the door and tried to get it off by stepping on the tape with the other foot, but then it just stuck to the second shoe. My heart was in my mouth for this woman. It was a nightmare. She kept transferring it from one foot to the other until she realised that it wasn’t going to work. That’s when she started to bend down. I felt sick. She knew she wasn’t getting down there. Everyone knew.
I couldn’t watch it anymore. I knelt beside her whopping leg and tugged at the tape, but she was standing on it with all her weight. She wouldn’t lift the heel.
‘Maybe if you lift your foot …’ I suggested.
‘I am!’
She absolutely wasn’t. She refused to lift her heel at all. I think all the attention was making her self-conscious. Somehow she was pressing down on the tape extra hard.
‘It’ll come off in its own time,’ she snapped. She just wanted everyone to stop looking. She didn’t want this girl kneeling down yanking rubbish off her. But when I looked up and she saw my face she jumped in surprise.
‘O, for the love of Mike.’
‘What?’
‘You look like an angel,’ she said, with the whisper of an Irish accent. Her mouth dropped open and she grabbed this incredibly large breast of hers. They were absolute basketballs. ‘But you’ve got the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.’
She pushed her lips out and, from that angle, the light caught her moustache. As I stood up and went back to my seat I shrugged at the tape like I was saying it was just one of those things you can’t really do anything about – even though all she had to do was lift her foot a millimetre.
I want to quickly tell you something. I once read a story about this Japanese monk who came to a house dressed in rags begging for a bowl of rice and everyone kicked him out and made fun of him and then the next day he showed up again in his monk robes and they thought he was somebody else and took him in and praised him and told him he could stay as long as he liked. It would be their honour, yada yada yada. But the monk was so disgusted he just walked out on them because that’s all they could see. Clothes. That’s all they cared about. So I make sure I don’t treat people differently or ignore them because they’re not exactly like everybody else or because they have this strange purple cape on and a straw hat that looks like it was pulled out of a rubbish heap that afternoon.
The cape woman sat down on the same row of seats as me. She took up two whole seats. Then she budged closer and shot me a shy grin. I liked her even if she was breaking my heart bit by bit. I even liked her moustache. When I smiled back at her she put her knees together daintily and half-turned them towards me and started to say something and then stopped. To be honest, I thought she was going to say how beautiful I was again and I don’t get compliments that much, so I was all ears. Instead, though, she looked sheepish and told me the ghost of Marilyn Monroe visited her. The cowboy across from us sniggered his big nose off at that one.
‘Like to know what she told me?’ she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘She said: “show ’em all your stars, pet”. ’
I thought that was quite nice. ‘Show them all your stars’. I kind of believed Marilyn Monroe really had said that to her. She would’ve said ‘pet’ in that sexy, wispy voice of hers. And I felt like I knew exactly what Marilyn meant too. I had all these stars I didn’t show anyone – I had a whole bagful that I kept under lock and key. And I’d been around for twenty-one years and I hadn’t shown them to anyone. See, I would’ve liked to write that to Lloyd. That’s the sort of thing he’d get.
The cowboy was still shaking his head as if he was listening to a couple of morons. I basically had to make conversation with the lady just to show him it’s not the end of the world if you’re a bit friendly, you know? I mean, no one’s saying you have to saw your arm off for every Tom, Dick or Harry but would it kill you to smile? We could’ve really shown him by having a great conversation too. But she blew it. She started telling me about all these ghosts who would come and have sex with her, and some who had even raped her. And not just any ghosts either, but the ghosts of all these kings and Knights of the Round Table and Napoleon. She was off her rocker. I remembered for the first time in a while that it was my birthday. I suddenly felt so depressed I had to leave. The night was a total loss. My letter was still hanging there on some sentence about a frigging beetle. I could’ve written a hundred letters with what I had in me, but it was all stuck somewhere. I just couldn’t get at it. And, on top of everything else, I’d stood Winnie up. I pictured her drinking chai tea in total silence except for the sound of her turning the Woolworths catalogue as she circled the two-for-the-price-of-one tunas and discounted foot-fungus creams.
I stood in the doorway looking out at the rain. You could smell the dark seaweedy smell of the port. And the pine trees. I was about to step out into the downpour when the cowboy came up behind me and lit his cigarette.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked like he was king of the laundromat.
I told him I was going home.
‘But,’ he pushed smoke out the side of his mouth like a real cool guy. A cool guy with a big cold sore. ‘Whaddabout your clothes?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here,’ the cape lady piped up.
He budged past me and stood with the toes of his pointy cowboy boots outside.
‘Men,’ she huffed. ‘Big bunch of nobodies.’
The cowboy looked me up and down. ‘You’re not walking in that, are you? You got an umbrella at least?’
‘O yeah, I’ve got this nice one with a dog’s head on the handle.’
‘Well, where is it?’ He looked at my hands.
‘At home.’
‘So you don’t have an umbrella.’ A long rumble of thunder shook the doorframe I was leaning against. ‘Jesus, lemme give you a ride when my clothes finish.’
‘That’s alright,’ I shrugged, but it was tempting actually because it was a twenty-minute walk home in the rain across the bridge into North Fremantle and I had this funny feeling about bridges at the moment. Nothing really. Just a dumb superstition. Like at the last second I was going to throw myself off.
‘All you girls trying to do without men these days,’ he shook his head. ‘Okay, okay, you don’t need me but I’ll give you a goddamn lift anyway. I’m just a big humanitarian.’
‘Hey!’ the crazy lady shouted at the cowboy. She was getting shrill. ‘Did you hear me, sir?’
‘Lady, what do you want me to do? Drown? You’re not even using the washing machines.’ He pointed with the two fingers holding the cigarette. ‘See the sign?’
YOU ARE TRESPASSING
AND WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE
IF NOT USING THE FACILITIES
MANAGEMENT
‘How joo like me to call that number on you?’
She didn’t say anything. Just pushed that moustache of hers out proudly like she was some queen who wouldn’t be spoken to like that. But she still had that string of brown duct tape sticking to her slipper. She was breaking my heart.
‘Why do they let her wander around, that’s what I’d like to know?’ He shook his head. ‘She should be in a mental hospital. Heavily goddamn medicated. I’ve seen her wandering the city for years. Sitting around train stations like she’s waiting for someone …’
He looked absently at the cigarette he’d smoked down the way the cool guy does in movies. Usually they don’t have herpes though. I wanted him to shut up so much. To just close his mouth. I couldn’t bear the idea of the long walk in the rain over the bridge home.
‘She doesn’t even have anything being washed. How joo like that? Just nothing goddamn better to do on a Thursday night.’
Suddenly I was halfway up the footpath to South Terrace with that guy calling out behind me and the rain hitting me smack-bang in the face. In my rags. Just like that Japanese monk.
Shortlisted for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award 2024, This is Where We Say Goodbye can be purchased here.
An interview with Howard McKenzie-Murray.
Howard McKenzie-Murray is a fiction writer and playwright from Western Australia. He is a regular contributor of fiction to The Saturday Paper and his most recent stories have appeared in Island, Berkeley Fiction Review and The Hooghly Review. His debut novel, This is Where We Say Goodbye (Fremantle Press), is out April 2026.
IG: @_howardmckenziemurray_
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