Light hazard – by Sophie Overett
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
When he asks Miss Pris what it’s like, she tells him it’s strange. Like someone’s pulled the back of her head off and is messing about with her wiring, trying to fix a computer that was never broken in the first place. An itch turned a discomfort turned a sharp, relentless pain. A cable grabbed, yanked, and finally pulled loose – its casing peeled off to leave the tender thing inside exposed.
‘Gnarly,’ Matt replies, because it is. He dumps a bundle of weeds – nutgrass and lamb’s tongue – into one of the tubs Kevin had put out, and Miss Pris laughs. It makes the crow’s feet by her eyes stark, like corvid talons kneading in the softer flesh of her. She’s older than him, but not old – younger than his mum, he’s sure, but she’s still got to have at least a decade on him and the other community service kids. He forgets that sometimes, or, at least, he does until something reminds him – like when Luca had to show her how TikTok worked, or her blank look when Henok mentioned Fortnite.
Or until this, he thinks, seeing her pupil blown in her newly blind eye. It’s not cloudy like he thought it would be, like it looks in movies or on TV, but maybe that’s because it’s not forever. Optic neuritis is what she’d called it – an inflammation of the eye that’s left her temporarily blind. Three months to a year, she’d told them, and then she’ll be back to normal, and Matt had thought if it was a year, she wouldn’t see half of them with that eye again, and then he’d thought about the way his mum’s had looked that night and for the week of nights after it, swollen shut and purple.
Matt sniffs. The pollen’s thick in the air this time of year, and Luca had read the count off his latest phone because his sister has asthma, so reading the pollen count is just something his family’s always done, but Matt hadn’t thought it had mattered. The last few months, they’ve been working in the community garden just down past Collingwood, and it means there’s always something to get up your nose or stuck in your throat. White cypress and casuarina or a million types of grasses, and he’ll talk shit about it with the boys but, if he’s honest, it doesn’t really bother him.
Beside him, Miss Pris drags herself to her feet, groaning something about her knees as she wanders off to get another wheelbarrow of horse shit, and Matt looks past her to where Henok’s hitting on Sammy by the paperbarks, his body curved forwards and his smile wide, then to where Duy is at the edge of the edible garden, grass stains on his jeans as he plants out wiry chilli sprouts, Kevin overseeing, clipboard in hand and sweat dribbling down his temple. It makes Matt swipe at his own, smearing dirt across his forehead, and maybe that doesn’t bother him either.
Maybe it even feels sort of nice. The coarse grime of it.
And yeah, alright, maybe he’s just never had a garden before.
That’s all.
‘Hey, Matt, can you give me a hand?’
He jerks back, bats away an errant bee, his gaze darting up to where Miss Pris is heaving a sloping wheelbarrow towards him, and he gets to his feet, closing the distance between them. He nudges her aside, taking over fully when she lets him, her dud eye blinking rapidly like she’s got something in it. Matt looks ahead, feels the sun hot on the back of his neck and the pungent smell of the horse shit in his nose, and says ‘You alright?’ to the grass ahead of him.
Miss Pris makes a noise of affirmation, but her breaths are a little shorter, and Matt shoves ahead, back to their patch of the gardens, back to their kangaroo paws and their grevilleas, wild in the afternoon light.
(He knows the way breaths sound when someone’s hurt, remembers the sound of his mum’s through his bedroom wall. Thinks it’s a language he was raised on, those involuntary sounds a person makes when something in them aches.)
‘You sure you ’right?’ he asks again, dropping the wheelbarrow down to the grass, louder this time, and that seems to get Kevin’s attention.
‘You okay over there, Priscilla?’
‘Yeah, fine, Kev, thanks. Just heading towards ibuprofen hour, I think.’
‘Let me know if you need a time out.’
(Nothing ibuprofen won’t fix, his mum had said when Matt had seen her, her smile watery, her nose broken. Can you pick me some up? And take your brother and sister? Maybe go to Maccas too, yeah? You can grab a twenty from my purse. Please, Matty. Please.)
Matt always picks the native garden bed, which means he always ends up with Miss Pris.
She’d bugged him when he first started, but she grew on him like a fungus (‘Like lemon myrtle,’ she’d corrected sagely when he’d said it once, and at his questioning look she’d said, ‘If you’re talking about fast-growing plants in the native garden, you should be using a native plant for your metaphor’) and it’s not like they were friends or whatever – not like he was really friends with any of them – or like she’s one of his teachers at school either, but he’s used to her, and maybe sometimes looks forward to seeing her too.
She never asks him about shit at least, although sometimes it makes him wonder if she knows why they’re even here. If she knows Luca steals phones or that Henok got caught with a gun, or if she knows he’s here for putting his stepdad in the hospital. If she’d look at him different, treat him different, if she did.
‘You like sci-fi stuff, hey?’ Miss Pris asks, and Matt blinks, elbow deep in manure, looking over at where she’s mirroring him, her dark hair bundled up on her head, a wayward kangaroo paw leaning on her shoulder, a smear of fuzzy red.
Matt shrugs, fist around a turd, shoving it into the ground by the base of a grevillea.
‘You know HG Wells? War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man? He wrote all of those.’
‘Yeah, cool.’
There must be something to the way he says it because Miss Pris laughs, the look splitting her face in two, and Matt feels his cheeks heat, not really sure if he’s being made fun of, but whatever, Miss Pris leaves it. She leans back on her haunches, tugging off her soiled gardening gloves and reaching for the secateurs.
‘There’s a line in one of his books, The Passionate Friends. “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”’
She leaves it a minute, and Matt feigns mulling it over, digging in some more of the manure. He’s not even entirely sure he could spell some of those words let alone say what they mean, but he holds his tongue. His mum has a line she likes to say too after all – better shut up and let everyone think you’re a dumb-arse than open your mouth and prove it. Not that she says it exactly like that, but still. Matt huffs out a breath, feels sweat dampen the hair at the back of his neck.
‘When the doctor told me about my eye, about how long I might not be able to see through it … it was all I could think. Adapt or perish. Like a survival mechanism kicked in. Dumb, hey? I’m lucky it’s going to come back at all.’
Behind them, Matt can hear the rush of afternoon traffic. Can hear a magpie warble and Sammy laugh and the brrrt of a mobile phone in a backpack. He can hear Miss Pris’s breathing, but not as loudly as he can hear his own.
Which is stupid, like – fuck. Alright.
He wets his lips, shrugs something stiff, reaches for another handful of flaky horse shit. Feels it loosen in his grip.
‘But then I was thinking about the garden,’ she says, ‘about all the plants here who’ve learnt to adapt. All the non-native plants we tell to make do with this soil and this land and this sun, and all the native ones we tell to deal with all these feet and hooves, all these new predators, all these new plants cramping their style. They learnt how to adapt. I guess they learnt what they were capable of. And that’s weird too, don’t you think? Like something in you opens up and grows when a part of you gets cut back and trampled.’
Matt swallows thickly, and looks up at her, but she’s not looking at him like he expected. Her hands are making neat work pruning the bottlebrush tree, snipping back branches, dropping handfuls of leaves and bright yellow flowers to the ground, and he stares at his own hands, covered in dirt like they were covered in blood that night, and he thinks about reinvention with fists and the way this dumbfuck program maybe uncurled his hands for a minute, but then he thinks it’s not that simple, not that easy. He got old enough, big enough, to make a difference and he did, and they’re not the same, him and her, even if right now their hands are buried in the same shit.
He hears Henok’s voice and Luca cuss, and he thinks none of them are.
The thought makes him snort, makes him wrinkle his nose, makes him say: ‘You tryna have a moment with me, Miss Pris?’
And she does look back at him then, a small smile on her face and her eye on fire, like maybe she has her secrets too, like maybe she knows all of his.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Matty. You done with that? You want to help me get rid of some of this?’
And yeah, he thinks, he does. ▼
Image: Arthur Chapman - Flickr
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