The manual for egress – by Franklin Barker
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYFROM THE UTAS ‘LOVED STORIES’ PROJECT
2026’s UTAS third-year creative writing students were challenged not to ‘write what you know’ but to ‘write what you love’. What they produced were stories that range from the most personal memoirs to the most outlandish fantasies.. We’ve featured excerpts from five stories on Island Online - read all the excerpts from 2026 and 2025 here - and one full story will appear in Island 179
By day, they communicated by secret signs: a cough into each wrist, a precise twitching of the left eyelid, a sudden dilation of the nostrils. At night they gathered to drink skinny glasses of absinthe in restaurants and clubs with women’s names or watch banned films in the grimy cinema on the Plaza of Desultory Light. They were all men. At work they played the roles of physician, boilerman, clerk; in their hearts they were practitioners of an ancient and essential magic, and by way of their insular, convoluted mythology, had driven themselves quite insane.
The newest of them was a narrow little neurotic named Rambert. He lived in a garret that had been merely dismal when he moved in, but now the moths had eaten everything: rugs, curtains, bed-linen. He stored his clothes – dark and stained by a dozen different substances – in an iron box at the base of his cupboard to keep the moths out. His twin habits were capturing what moths he could in a glass jar to release them one by one to burn themselves up in the flame of a cheap candle, and wasting away the small hours at his desk, gaslit fog pressing insistently on the windowpane, pen quivering above the page. Once, before the war and newly equipped with a worthless education, he had been at least been a poetaster. Now all he could bring himself to do was copy from memory passages out of The manual.
The manual for egress was their bible, written some hundred years before by Dr Osram – the worst of the magicians and a man they worshipped. After long nights at the Bistro Eileen or the Club Marguerite they would drunkenly quote at one another in unlit parks occupied only by tramps:
In London which is Vienna which is Jerusalem there is no such thing as night or day but only the theophanic hour of dawn. The City Above is bounded by level fields of purest green beyond which the sun, gentler than our own despite its appalling radiance, is only ever a single heartbeat from rising. Simultaneously, the sun has always just risen. In the face of that daybreak every blade of grass is limned by brilliance and each man is master of his own shadow. Though the City is too large to map, one is never more than a moment from stumbling across these fields …
Later, when one of them clings to a broken lamp post and vomits over his boots, or kneels with his bloodied head in his hands after a fight with one of the tramps, his companion might recite his favourite passage:
In Paris you are a child again.
On one such occasion, the kneeling man was Rambert; by that time rarely seen apart from the balding, middle-aged man beside him. The handwritten business cards in this man’s jacket pocket, shabby and stained with something that might have been oil, would have told you his name was Croy.
They had met some time before, following the death of Rambert’s mother. Rambert was returning from a perambulation that had taken him between the factories that churned out cheap cigarettes and plastic raincoats, above which rose the smokestacks – once the elegant spires of the old nobility, now hollowed out, summits swallowed by a firmament of pollution. Rambert entered his mother’s house to find it filled with flies. They grew thicker as he approached her bedroom.
He found her lying with the blanket up to her chin, exhaling flies through her mouth like smoke; a common affliction for women of her generation. He shut the door and went upstairs, where he lay awake all night in his room watching a moth on the ceiling mockingly wave its sickly smelling wings.
He was roused at dawn by knocking from downstairs. The first thing Rambert noticed, on opening the door, was Croy’s hair: in those days, he had enough to slick back and make its greasiness appear almost intentional. He explained that, for reasons of bureaucracy that were inscrutable to Rambert, he had come to repossess the house and its contents on behalf of the government.
‘I’m just a contractor,’ he said, grinning apologetically through yellow, worn-down teeth. Later he exclaimed over and over as he stuffed cutlery and old letters into a sack, ‘How it stinks in here!’
He found a volume of Rambert’s poetry while looting the young man’s bedroom. ‘Is this yours?’ he asked excitedly. ‘I fished a copy out of the gutter years ago. My friends and I thought it excellent.’ He stained the pages as he leafed through it with dirty fingers. ‘A man’s success in life is directly proportional to the fullness – which has nothing at all to do with happiness – of his childhood. Memories of youth are the only parts of us that matter. Yet how fleetingly it passes; how much time is spent watching the outside from high windows … That’s it, isn’t it?’
Rambert had never met an appreciator of his work before; he felt awed and uncomfortable. ‘I thought I would change something with those poems,’ he said. Croy laughed shrilly, like a bird, and threw the book into his sack so that the spine bent backwards and ripped.
‘Not in this world,’ he said. ‘You are one of life’s secret thinkers. Is there anything I can do for you?’
Rambert looked round at the bare room. Rectangular shadows hung like afterimages where his visitor had stripped the pictures from the walls. Already he had begun to forget what they looked like. ‘Can you give me a job?’
Croy took Rambert to a harbourside cafe. They sat at a metal table on the street outside, drank cheap coffee, and watched a rusted battleship roll in off the putrid sea to squat in the dock like the ruins of a steel cathedral. The procession of figures that emerged from it, indistinct in the smog, had aged thirty years in the five months they’d spent away. No one greeted them. Still the broadsheet on the men’s table reported that the war was being won and the value of money was going up, though they changed their mind one week to the next on who the enemy was, or which currency exactly was theirs.
By way of an interview, Croy asked Rambert, ‘Do you believe the world has conspired against you specifically? Have you always felt there must be more to life than this? Can you start today?’
Yes, yes, and yes. ▼
Image: JR Korpa - Unsplash
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