Priory Road

you can't say anything anymore

There were many little things that Brayden liked to say. No such word exists as gaslight. Anya Taylor-Joy is attractive because she looks like a prey animal. Sushi is a kind of pie and that’s why I have it with sauce. Somewhere in the history of every person is a diverged road, where what they like to say withers more often than it fruits, so they shelve their childish things and learn to speak as grown-ups. Brayden took the other path.

It was therefore a matter of time until his new manager invited him for a chat. This was dispiriting. The job had been a clean break from labouring on building sites, and spiking rubbish after carnival events, and trading unanswered job applications for his employment agency’s sign-off on another fortnight of Jobseeker payments. Now he had a payroll department and a food court next door. He was, in theory, expected to leverage his off-kilter gregariousness to create sales outcomes. It was an alchemical formula that pleased his case worker, who had built a career trying unsuccessfully to transmute liabilities into assets.

In earlier times Brayden might have benefited from a Carnegie course, or being sexed in by Rotarians. Instead, in an algorithmic synchronicity event conjured by the sudden incentive to lean into his strengths, he was found by a podcast. It had not occurred to him before that comedians were friends with each other. Jokes, he discovered, were formed in the cold fusion of relaxed conversation, and the thing said mattered less than the personality saying it.

The personality he liked best was a corpulent Greek in flashy clothes and gold chains, who was able to bend every topic into a cool observation about different types of pussy. The word was delightful in his accent, and Brayden practised it into his voice notes. He found a crisp Hawaiian shirt to pair with his grandfather’s Akubra, and introduced himself to his new workplace as Braid.

Nobody remarked on his style. Even Ollie, whom he already knew, behaved as if they all wore uniforms and Brayden’s was as regular as his own. They were friends in primary school and made a flash animation together called Mortal Wombat. They had spent every weekend at each other's houses, and spent their weeknights talking on the phone, and they parted ways when sex hormones abruptly reterritorialised their birth cohort. He contributed to Brayden’s redesignation as Skizza, owing to the latter’s habit of ostentatiously twitching one eye to express discomfort, which became so reflexive that Brayden privately lost track of how deliberate it was.

Ollie pretended not to remember any of this. He treated the new Brayden with wary tolerance, and memed about Braid in his private chats.

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The manager was a friendly woman who wore bright triangular blazers, which Brayden told her that he liked. Instead of returning the compliment she offered two friendly pieces of feedback. The first related to the audio recordings of his sales calls, which he had been intending to request copies of, thinking of them as episodes of a gonzo one-man podcast. It was great, she said, that he had such commanding rapport with customers and could sustain a cold-call for so long that the recording software timed out, but at the end of the day his job was to upsell premium energy plans, and so far his approach had failed to contribute a single dollar of measurable value to the company.

The second piece of feedback regarded an anonymous coworker who had expressed discomfort with a comment Brayden reportedly made in the kitchenette. He was encouraged to exercise better judgement in respect of fostering a safe work environment for everybody.

It was hard to isolate the comment she was talking about. He remembered scrubbing coffee rings from the bench when Bree walked in, mock-aghast at how clean he had made it. You could eat pussy off that, he replied. Or there was the time he stood on the periphery of Ollie’s group, hearing him recount his catty response to a belligerent service complaint, and pointed out that he could catch more flies with pussy. Due to its recency, as well as self-reproach over the joke’s quality, he decided that the offending incident probably occurred last week when Bree dropped her takeaway cup and he said it was no use crying over breast milk.

Sometimes, as a meditation, Brayden recalled the six weeks he had spent on a certain construction site, where the other men sent him on a new errand every day while they emptied his lunchbox and filled it with empty Cadbury wrappers. When he brought this to the attention of the site boss he was unable to keep his voice from breaking. The boss rubbed his shoulders and told him not to worry. The next day he found his work bag sticky with Fanta and stuffed with sandwich crusts and animal shit.

After he passed through its stages (gritted teeth, tremors, subdued growling, despair), the mediation reminded him that it was a gift—the opportunity to fix his own mistakes. He started orbiting Ollie’s crew more closely, biting down on his jokes unless something perfectly innocuous occurred to him (I'm on the sea cow diet; the sea star diet; the seesaw diet; the C-section diet; the season diet). His chance came when Bree mentioned that her lease was ending. Like a cobra Brayden explained that he owned a van from when he used to operate a removals business. This precise configuration of detail convinced Bree not to press her objection that Ollie was already helping her move.

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He borrowed the van from his brother, who did operate a removals business, but had not worked since his last drink driving offence. It had to be jump-started and seemed to hydroplane on dry surfaces. Brayden stalled it at every intersection before entering the golden countryside. When the street signs disappeared he started to wonder if Bree gave him a false address, but soon Ollie’s SUV glimmered to mark his destination, freshly washed and visible from space.

601a Priory Road was divided from the surrounding paddock by electric fencing. Sheep grazed in the northern field, and to the south a handful of chestnut horses payed dead in the heat. Ollie stood in the driveway, craning to adjust the bungee straps that fixed an upturned dining table to the roof of Bree’s sedan. Whitegoods were piled up at the roadside, giving Brayden a clever place to choose to park.

They looked surprised to see him. Everything was stripped from the house already, save for a chest freezer and a heavy wooden bedframe. He started removing slats, but Bree told him the bed belonged to the landlord and would be staying behind. They moved onto the freezer, with Ollie guiding while Brayden lifted it backwards to the van. He had it loaded onto his brother’s trolley before Bree explained that her new place was already furnished with appliances, and someone from the internet would arrive that afternoon to collect her old ones. She and Ollie started sliding boxes into his hatchback, which was a job for two people. Brayden looked around for something to talk about.

A yearling with a blonde mane had started to wonder what they were doing and bounded to greet Brayden when he strolled near the southern fence. Horses lost their infant playfulness more acutely than other creatures, he guessed. He only knew the big, taciturn monsters from his grandfather’s farm. They watched through opaque eyes with a weird intelligence that could not be trusted to make sense. The yearling did not yet have this abyssal quality. It followed him up and down the fence line like a puppy, mirroring him in energy and speed, yanking a stalk of grass from his hand when he tested for current in the wire. He ripped a tuft from Bree’s lawn and fed it from his hand.

Bree approached carefully and asked if Brayden liked horses, sounding like a gallerist discovering secret masterpieces in the home of a moron. He told her he used to be an endurance rider. He had stories: there was the time a bumblebee spooked his filly and she bolted deep into the bush, trapping his leg when she eventually collapsed and not releasing him until next morning. There was the gelding that snatched sparrows from the air and crushed their bodies underhoof. With real humour Bree confessed that she never learned to ride, though she had always wanted to.

‘You can eat a horse’s pussy, but you can’t make it come,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You can lead a horse to pussy, but you can’t make it...’

Come left his mouth like a guilty plea. Bree emitted a curt vowel meant to resemble laughter, glancing everywhere that did not contain a human face.

Ollie, eavesdropping from ten paces, said they should get moving if they wanted to unpack before the buyer arrived. He asked Brayden to stay behind in case they came early, and so he could spend more time with his new friend.

When both cars were gone Brayden found an unread message from Bree. She thanked him for his offer but said it was now unnecessary for him to drive all this way, since she was not moving very much furniture after all, so she and Ollie would be fine on their own.

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He took up a regular seat at National Joe’s, draining $40 a day on flat whites and remarking on the newspaper to anyone who sat nearby. When the cafe closed he went to the nearby bar. On the first night he told the bartender how much nicer it was than the other place, where tradies from the building site used to stir snot into his vodka lime sodas. Her wide-eyed response was a point of likeness. He too knew what it was to be struck dumb by the exhortation to speak. She told him she liked his outfit, and Brayden talked and drank until he ran to the bathroom cupping his mouth.

People called from Australis Energy and Hike Employment. They texted and sent emails. He was not so blasé as to ignore them; every second of ringing was absorbed in a discrete, considered decision not to react. They rang the battery dead, and his phone became an unsouled ornament protecting a small section of his bedside table from gathering dust. He kept up his routine without it, waking at seven, shaving and aftershaving, ironing his Hawaiian shirt and brushing his Akubra. But instead of walking to the Australis office, he drove his brother’s van to 601a Priory Road and watched the horses.

The adults kept their distance, casting eyes that might have been suspicious, or might have meant something ancient and unfathomable, but the yearling always ran to greet him. He brought bags of apples and rolled oats. For the first week it was easy to get close, since cars could be heard from miles away on Priory, and he could jog onto public land before anyone accused him of malfeasance. When the new tenants moved in he had to be more circumspect. They were a family of four, with a lifetime of belongings and an expensive lupine dog. He watched them too. The mother and kids rarely emerged from the house, while the father seemed to spend every spare minute mowing grass, or tidying the hedge, or building a sandpit to entice his children off the couch. Brayden wondered if he enjoyed this, and whether the family preferred him to stay outside or in. He wondered what sort of Asians they were, and whether they were used to a different life than this. He wondered if they were liked by the people who knew them.

It was on a weekday, when the father should have been at work, that the yearling reached for a patch of unmowed grass and became stuck in the fence. It thrashed and whinnied, and Brayden launched himself from the van to free it. The father had seen the same thing and rushed outside on the same impulse. They almost collided on the front lawn.

Brayden explained that he was the owner of the horses and the paddock they lived on, and that he liked to keep an eye on them in case this sort of thing happened, because they were an expensive investment. The father said he had seen Brayden in his van and thought he was a child abductor. Brayden thought this was a risky joke and rewarded it with the first laugh he had given in weeks.

The father introduced himself as Hugo Tang. He had owned restaurants in Melbourne before the writing on the wall convinced him to sell up and downsize, and to spend more time with his family, though he was not sure how happy they were about that.

Brayden sympathised. He used to own a whole fleet of horses of all different grades. He supplied horses to the police, to the movies, and—speaking of Melbourne—to those people who used to drive tourists up and down the street in buggies. But he too had grown sick of the bullshit, and he sold everything off except for his top-tier racing horses, of which the blonde-maned yearling was his favourite. Hugo asked what its name was. Pussy, he said, and Hugo took his turn to laugh.

Hugo asked why he did not alter the fencing to make it harder for Pussy to get stuck. Brayden told him getting stuck was mental exercise for the horses, making them easier to train because they learned problem-solving from needing to twist their heads out of wire so frequently. Hugo laughed again. He said that the horse was just like his son, who had learned no problem-solving and could not plan far enough ahead to realise that if he ate all the snacks at once there would be no snacks left, and this was why he was getting so fat.

Brayden watched his yearling join the other horses, grazing together on the brittle grass, each trapped in its abyss but all of them trapped together. He asked Hugo how he knew that his son wasn’t just hungry.