Prologue

– The letter that started it all -


4:00pm Friday

The letter was opened and smoothed flat on a denim clad leg. The owner of the leg and reader of the letter creased her forehead in concentration.


Dear Penny
Woe is me! I have really done it this time. I’m in a spot of trouble. No… not a spot; a big-sticky-hard-to-remove-stain.
My heart has been broken, my soul is lost and I’ve had enough!
Don’t want to burden you with all the details but I want you to know I’ll be un-contactable for an indefinite time. I will be of “no fixed address”.
In a nut shell I’m running away from my problems, I shall head north. I will sort myself out in sunnier climes.
See you somewhere, sometime
Love Lotus.


Lotus scrutinized the letter with a critical eye; too many clichés, doesn’t give the reader enough information, incomplete sentences and very gloomy. At least she had learnt how to criticize a piece of writing at University, if nothing else. It was too late to re-write now, it would have to do. Lotus hoped Penny would pick up on the thread of humor and not take it too seriously and come looking for her. Humor was the only thing left holding Lotus’s life together. If she lost that she’d really be up shit creek.
She re-folded the piece of paper, pushed it into the envelope and wrote Penny’s address on the front. Then she flipped it over and because she would have no address for return mail, she absent mindedly drew a smiley-faced picture on the back.
Lotus stood before the red post box. She switched her weight from foot to foot. Suddenly she was over come with uncertainty. She felt like the fool in the Tarot Deck. Was she about to jump off a precipice? And was she an idiot for doing so or was she taking a leap of faith? An elbow nudged her aside and the arm attached to the elbow put a letter into the slot. It was that easy, Lotus observed but still she stood switching her weight from side to side, her body physically balancing up the consequences.

*****


The turn of the hour from three to four o’clock seemed to have heralded a bizarre magic for all over the country strange things where afoot. In far north Queensland the owner of the Laura Pub was leaving his bungalow. He was on his way to the bar to clean up before Friday afternoon happy hour. He pulled his door closed behind him and walked towards the Pub. The veranda boards creaked in the same place as usual and his hand swatted flies away from his face of its own accord.
As he came to the end room in the row of bungalows he glanced in the open door. He took another half step forward before his feet stopped and his mouth fell open. The new barmaid was glowing. Not in the way a healthy pregnant woman is said to glow, but literally glowing. A foggy white light appeared to be emanating from her body and now that he paid attention he could hear a gentle humming coming from the room. But the barmaid did not seem to be moving her lips.
Pete had seen the girl meditating before, sitting on the end of the bed in that strange hat, and staring into her bowl of water like she was trying to see the future in a crystal ball. Pete had seen a lot of weird things in his time but he had never seen anything like this. He started to dwell on the phenomenon but then shook his head. He didn’t want to rack his brains trying to find an explanation. He had enough on his mind.
Pete turned back towards the Pub and continued along the veranda. He began to hum. Perhaps his head was foggy from his lunch time pint.


*****

On a busy street in Adelaide a juggler entertained the homeward bound commuters. Many were in too much of a hurry to get home and take off their week-day-worker masks, to notice the way he expertly juggled or to ponder how the juggler managed to maintain such a peaceful countenance in the midst of all the traffic and noise. A little grey man managed a weak smile and a nod to acknowledge the poor juggler, whom he pitied because he didn’t have a real, important job like the grey man. A bouncy woman rattled her pockets to show that she had no money and contorted her face into a grimace that was meant to say ‘but believe me, if I had money I’d happily chuck a handful into your hat.’ A couple with their arms around each other and a chasm full of silence between them stopped briefly to watch. The woman noticed the fluid graceful movements of the performer’s dance and smiled sadly remembering how she used to like to dance.
The juggler juggled on until inexplicably he dropped an orange. He caught the other two oranges and the three knives and a small frown flashed briefly in his eyes. He rarely made mistakes, but they weren’t unknown. The Universe was trying to tell him something. He crouched on one knee on the pavement so he could watch the orange bounce down the gutter and into the traffic. Nothing happens without a reason the juggler was fond of saying. There is a lesson in every detail, a message in every action.
The run-away orange seemed to defy the laws of physics the way it bounced out of the path of peak hour cars and buses. It seemed destined to the fate of premature-juicing. But the juggler saw the orange reach the other side of the street.
Having interpreted the message of the fruity fugitive the performer stood and smiled. He packed away his knives and transferred the few coins from his hat to his pocket. He picked up his bag of tricks and with a knowing smile began to peel one of the remaining oranges. Juice ran down his chin as he bit into the fruit and he laughed at the absurdity of it all and walked away down the street.
*****
Rocket Boy was sitting very still. He was contemplating the Butterfly Effect, a theory that suggests that the Universe is an interconnected swirling mass of energy. The theory says that life is a series of cause and affects events. Rocket Boy was blown away by the story of the butterfly. The innocent insect flapping its wings on one continent could set in motion a chain of events that ultimately caused a cyclone in a distant part of the world.
Rocket Boys eyes were beginning to water because he held his eyelids rigid. He was trying not to blink. He didn’t want to be responsible for a Tsunami in Asia. But, he reasoned, he couldn’t be responsible if he didn’t mean to cause it could he? Did good intentions count here? He really felt too tired for this sort of meditation. Instead of expanding, his fatigued mind just seemed to be going in circles. Carefully let his eyes close and let out a sigh… just a small one…

*****

…and as Rocket Boy sighed, a cool wind made Lotus shiver. She stopped procrastinating and pushed the letter into the slot of the red post box. The envelope tumbled down and in darkness landed on a stack of other correspondence. There it waited patiently for the five o’clock Post man.

Chapter 1

‘Where ever you go there you are.’-Anon

‘The fun is not here on the side of the road.’ Lotus observed as she watched a car approach from the south. It appeared to be slowing down as it came closer but it was hard to be sure, might just be wishful thinking. The vehicle was a new model red Ute with mags and spoiler; just right for a young man and his big ego. Lotus kept her eyes on the car and willed it to stop. She reminded herself to smile.

What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion. The passenger window wound down, the hand holding the can of Red Bull, the arm drawing back to line up a good shot and then the can flying towards her.

Lotus leapt back and the can hit the gravel where she had been standing. It burst on impact, spraying her with its sticky contents and then ricocheted off a rock and into her right leg. She felt the skin of her shin split open and drew in a sharp breath.
‘Snot sucking sodomite!’ she yelled after the receding vehicle.
Lotus was hopping mad─ literally. She lifted the leg with the split shin and jumped up and down. She waved her fist, middle finger extended, angrily at the car but it was now out of sight. So she turned her attention skyward, towards the whole Universe. She yelled out the question that was screaming through her brain.
‘How the fuck did I end up here?’

It was at this moment, while she was hopping and swearing, when things seemed to be the very worst that they could get, that Lotus had a strange out of body experience. Suddenly her mind seemed to loosen its connection to her body and it drifted off a couple of metres to one side.

From this astral vantage point she calmly watched her physical self continue to rant and rave and the thought that she looked ridiculous stomping around in the dirt drifted across her mind. She didn’t dwell on it however; it floated across her mind-screen like a cloud. It was closely followed by another cumulus nimbus of thought that spoke to her in a whispery, disinterested voice ‘wasting a lot of energy expressing negative emotions’. Then a stratus of thought blew in wondering how she was doing this; how was her mind seemingly in two places at once?
Instantly her mind zapped back to her body, as if it had been stretched out to one side on a rubber band and now someone had let go. Ping, it was back where it should be. She stopped jumping and lowered her sore leg to the ground. The cut wasn’t too bad, just stung a little. The cloud thoughts were on her mind. Where had they come from? Lotus didn’t know a lot about altered states of consciousness but believed that either she had just experienced some sort of ‘moment’ or she was going mad. And though she was a bit upset she believed she still had a firm enough grasp on reality. So what was ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was, trying to tell her? That she was wasting time being negative. That was the second time today. She should try to be more positive? But how did one become an optimist? Were you born with a propensity to behave one way or the other or was it external events that determined how you reacted. Maybe she could chose to see the sunny side. A wave of nausea hit her and she ran to the long grass back from the edge of the road and retched. She coughed and her stomach clenched into a knot. Her throat constricted but nothing came up. She was glad she had missed breakfast but other than that she couldn’t think of much to be happy about right at this moment.

Lotus straightened up, took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. She forced the sick feeling back down into her guts and brushed some of the dust from her jeans. She bent down and retrieved her hitch-hiking sign from the ground.

She had scrawled the words on the flap of an empty beer carton this morning before she had left Brisbane. Looking at it now she realized how angry and black the letters appeared. Everyone would be able to tell that she was running away. She tore the sign in half, sat wearily on the part which said ‘But Here’ and rested the ‘Anywhere’ part against her knees. That was slightly less desperate sounding.

Lotus sat on the side of the highway and waited. The sun beat down on her. It sautéed her cerebellum and broiled her sweat-marinated body. She loathed this intense heat but she was good at waiting. It wasn’t something that she particularly enjoyed but she had done it a lot. Her whole life she had been waiting for some ‘thing’ to happen; some as yet undefined event that would change her life. One day ‘it’ would happen and it would be so magnificent that it would transform her from dull to exciting, from mundane to spectacular. It would give her a reason to wake up in the morning.

Morning…A thought was tip-toeing from the bedroom of Lotus’ brain to the front door. Maybe it was in the morning; in that fleeting moment between being asleep and awake that you made the choice─ optimist or pessimist. There seemed to be a split second interval where things could go either way. You could feel wonder rising, a shiver slowly tingling up the length of the spine before it spreads out to the fingers and toes. Expectation about what the day will bring causes a small smile to creep from consciousness into this semi-awake state. The corners of the mouth curl sleepily upwards. She hadn’t felt that way since she was a kid. Or it can go the other way. And in this moment between dream and reality a thick mist descends. This mist is made from droplets of foreboding and despair. It is heavy and it clings all day. This morning when Lotus awoke she lay shrouded in mist.

This morning she had opened her eyes and scanned her bedroom. The walls were bare except for lumps of crusty blue tac that had once held posters in position. In the half light the blue tac looked like pustulant growths erupting from the walls; a sure sign that the house was terminally ill. The black mould that splotched the ceiling was another symptom. She pulled the blanket up over her face and wondered where all the fun had gone.
It seemed that barely a minute ago she had been a teenager full of unquenchable ambition, ready to leap frog joyously, if a little foolishly into adulthood. And then in the blink of a blood-shot eye she had found herself here; lying alone under a moth-eaten blanket, staring at the mould on a sagging ceiling.
She tried to answer her question, where had the fun gone… but she couldn’t come up with anything, blank, black-hole-mind. Thinking about it made her head ache. Perhaps she should start with something easier like trying to work out when had the fun gone? If she could pin point that she might be able to work out where her life had gone wrong. She removed the blanket from her face, rubbed her eyes and stared into the gloom attempting to tease an answer out of the ether. The fun had left a long time ago but she could not remember when exactly, but she had only just admitted it recently. It was a parabolic reaction, she thought. She pictured it thus in her mind:-

A quiet scritching sound caught Lotus’ attention. The graph faded from mind. Anyhow, it was useless trying to represent these things in a two dimensional scientific form; life was way too complicated. She propped herself up on one elbow and turned to the door. The morning battalion of cockroaches had arrived. She didn’t move. Fighting wasn’t an option. You just learnt to live with them. And they weren’t so bad; sometimes she felt she had more in common with the roaches than any of her human flat-mates. The cockies scuttled across the floor and out of sight behind a pile of dog-eared magazines. A smog scented breeze shifted the sarong that hung over the broken glass in the window. Lotus caught a glimpse of the sky beyond. It was grey. It was still early. Maybe she would try to go back to sleep. All this existential pondering was making her tired.

But then she remembered. Ping, light bulb on. Today is the day after she said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’ Therefore today is the day she has to leave. You don’t say something like that unless you really mean it. She would have to get up right now, before anyone else woke up and tried to stop her from leaving. They would try to talk her out of going . It’s not really important to Lotus’ house mates what she does. She is not really very important to them; they are just a bunch of misfits who have all ended up here together. But they would feel as if Lotus was rejecting their way of life. It would piss them off that she thought she deserved something better. Perhaps they would cajole her into staying; convince her that if she just waits long enough some ‘thing’ will eventually happen. In her emotionally tender state she wasn’t up to arguing.

A groan, followed by the murmur of sleep-talking penetrated the thin wall that separated Lotus from the neighbouring room. The sound propelled her into action. Most mornings she was slow to rise; the weight of sleep, threads of dream honey held her to the bed; but this morning she was toast popping.

Today was the day she was going to find out where the fun had gone.