Lachlan Plain Drafts

Protagonist:
· Sixty-seven-year old fisherman.
· Carried out a small-scale trawling operation off the south coast of Australia until the fuel crisis of 2007.
· Lived off government benefits with his wife and disabled son until the Acquiescent Labour Bill - passed by the upper house and implemented by Centrelink in 2010 – when both he and his son were forced to leave their wife/mother in their coastal home and work in the Ranger uranium mine, South Australia.
· The Bill was introduced by the Liberal Party Inc in the face of the spiralling fuel price and a constituency – the majority of whom were still gainfully employed – crying for the abolition of the Welfare State.
· More cheap labour was required at the mine, as it was in most industry, as what was once a mechanical process was partially manual since the fuel crisis.
· They only remained underground for several months where his son was ostracised. The last straw was when he was beaten unconscious in the lavatory by a Warden and several of the welfare ‘Recipients’.
· On returning home they scrounged up enough fabric from a disused canvas factory to rig a sail to their trawler that was still sitting in a state of disrepair in a cove near their coastal home.
· When they returned to the waters they once fished they discovered nothing left to catch. The fish species surviving overfishing had been wiped out by a South American parasite.
· They had to move their operation into deeper, more dangerous waters to make a basic living.

His son:
· Disabled from birth by the accumulative effects – through generations – of dioxins in the fish population since the 1960s.
· Big brute of a man.
· Speaks little, except to his father when they’re away at sea for long periods.

The scenario
· Approached by a stranger in a pub with an offer he can’t refuse…if he drops this hessian bundle in the ocean as far south as possible, then he will be paid a large sum.
· Whilst at sea curiosity gets the better of him and he looks inside the bundle to discover six defrosted brains.
· Remembers the raid of a government scientific facility by a resistance group reported on the evening news.
· Dreams about the brains in bodies. His son is strangely silent so he begins talking to the brains. They are a group of Indigenous Landrights Activists. One of their main causes was the returning of Aboriginal skulls from England for a traditional burial.
· His son is killed in a raid by a pirate resistance group for alcohol. The unruly group is led by a Captain Kurtz like character and is more pirate than resistance…a thin veil of political ideology to justify looting and pillaging. They celebrate when they find the brains – fetch a lot on the black market. The captain has a computer and the necessary connections to hook them up. They put a series of foot heaters on them and boot them up. The fisherman’s dreams were accurate. These brains were the brains of an Indigenous group.
· The pirate ship is raided by the coastguard and all the pirates are slaughtered in the battle.
· Whilst he is being held in a small cabin the guard explains to him that it was all orchestrated by an American PR company employed by the Liberals Inc…right down to the pirate raid. It was all staged to show the state triumphing over the resistance. The fisherman refuses to believe, he quite liked the pirate captain – for some streange reason - despite killing his only son.
· The fisherman is taken back to land and paraded in front of the media as the mastermind of a devilish resistance plot. His brain is put on ice.
· His wife spearheads a class action and is shot by a mysterious gunman at the foot of her hillshoist whilst hanging out the washing

I wasn't necessarily thinking of Liberal Inc as a political party within an independent nation state. Perhaps more of a privatised wing of TNC, TNCs' 'deputy sherif' in the South Pacific, an insignificant wing of a bigger conglomoration, a remnant of a twentieth century federated nation state.

So what state is democracy in in 2025? Is there still the hyperbole of democracy and freedom? The rhetoric? Do governements still stand for ellection? Even if quasi/staged elections. Is there still a facade of nationalism/democracy/etc?

And the question, "How does the fisherman know about his wife's death?"...

How does one sense the world through Senseless? Does one sense? I suspose, judging by its name, one doesn't. But perhaps one has a kind of ineffectial omnisience, like a disembodied consciousness suspended over the world in a solid glass bubble...or perhaps the murder of his wife is something that comes to him in a dream, one of those really lucid dreams, so there is still not certainty as to whether it is something he's actually picking up from the world psychosymantically (is that the right word?) or just a projection of his subconscious...

Pinning down the sense of Senseles is integral to finding a voice for the monologue:

The experience of being suspended in a bodyless limbo. Thoughts without the concreteness of the physical world to challenge them with. A dreamy aquatic suspension.

The fisherman is someone who's very existence - leading up to being trapped in Senseless - is entirely rooted in the physical...in the everyday struggle with the elements to make a living, to scrape together the bare essentials, food in belly, roof over head, family...he has a certain peace that comes with age and sitting out at sea for days on end with no-one but a mute son...then he is dragged into an insubstantial, esoteric limbo by chance and those that power the power.

The Enviroment

Lachlans first post in the Drafts section of his forum is an interesting series of point form notes on the sad life of a fisherman who is caught up in the spirit of the times and ends up within the senseless archive.

I really enjoy the unashamedly left wing politic explicitly bound in his draft. Enviromental issues of aboriginal land rights, energy management and the role of the media are themes around which a corrupt Australia are responsible.

I really like how the big enviromental themes are treated at grass root levels, that is how they affect this poor fisherman and his sad life. I am interested about how the fuel crisis, pirates and South American parasite affected him. There is a sense of global events that have marked this persons small, sad life. This leaves open many opportunities for other writers and Lachlan to cross-over plot lines.
Comment Submitted by Alex Gibson on 9 May, 2006 - 10:57.
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Points to Consider...

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Firstly, I want to reiterate what Alex has written. "Here Here", as they say in 'Question Time'.

Secondly, I just want to raise a few small points to consider:

The idea of the Liberals Inc. is an interesting idea for us to develop, especially in relation to the TNA. I wonder how much power Australia's government yeilds, or whether they are subservient to the TNA. In which case, the set-up involving the fisherman is a command passed down from a higher source of control?? Or, does the TNA have it's own Left and Right that spans accross all nations? We should think about this...(I'll definately keep it in mind for the Glossary).

Also, I was wondering how you imagined that the Fisherman discovered about the murder of his wife? Especially if his connection to the outside world ends when he becomes 'senseless', or does it?
Comment Submitted by Olivia Crang on 10 May, 2006 - 22:37.
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More Thoughts...

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Great! I think the more monologues that access this idea that Senseless is not death of self is ideal! I find it truely believable that the death of his wife would come to him in a dream. That concept actually heightens the believability of Mitnick's position, who has been able to remotely access her own body and create 'Senseless'.

I also love the concept that the fisherman has used his body for work his whole life, and that when this set-up happens and he is stripped of it and has to find other ways of surviving/communicating/being. These are all great concepts to work with, for everyone!!

Also, in relation to the government, I am as yet undecided, but I think your idea that there are branches of the TNA is a good one. I'll kep thinking and keep you posted...

I was also thinking about the Right or Liberals Inc. and wondering whether the Left or Labour Party still exists in 2025?? It also relates to your thoughts on democracy...Again I'm not so sure...but thanks for provoking the thoughts : )
Comment Submitted by Olivia Crang on 11 May, 2006 - 14:02.

This is not the way I understood cold. Not the biting morning frost, glasses steamed up, fingers fumbling from numbness and sharp shocks of sensation from the heat of the coffee cup, the mist and early morning sun, seagulls scream and the gentle clunk of the boats nudging their moorings, a hallow of cigarette smoke around where we work, untangling nets, raising sails or refuelling the outboard on those days when Joe’s managed to procure some fuel on the black market and his wife puts a black dot sticker in the bottom right hand corner of their shop window, so that everyone in-the-know knows. This is not that kind of cold. It’s not that fresh early morning cold shared in silence with the boy, the boy who throughout the day looks on the world with fearful eyes, but throughout those early morning rituals, and also for the rest of the morning, bobbing on that benevolent ocean, all the way through til the afternoon when we find ourselves confronted by the landlocked world of man, that fear leaves his eyes, and all that’s there then, in those eyes, in the cold and as the sun thaws the world, is a peacefulness, a contentedness, and when his gaze falls upon his fathers’ face, trust.

But this cold is different. It’s empty. Impervious. It’s not a cold that one feels on the tip of ones’ nose. It’s everywhere, equally, at once. All throughout this space…space? What other word is there for it? This vast, senseless, subaquatic limbo. This mindlessness. These thoughts, these words, drifting by like jetsam. These things I never thought before. I only ever owned one book. I owned some magazines when I was younger. The paper doesn’t interest me and I’ve never understood the internet. But not all these thoughts are mine and I don’t think all these words are either. These thoughts that nudge up against me, some latching on like barnacles, others drifting right through me, and others sit there, alien thoughts quickly assimilated. And the faces. There’s a constant flow of memory here, parents, school, friends, wife, son, and others, one man I only ever saw once on a bus on the way to visit my dying mother, snot through his beard and sucking on a tinny, and all those blackened faces of other miners, those sour, spiteful faces, but not just as I remember them, weathered, beaten, but also as young men, in school uniform, in nappies, and the faces of their mothers and the nipples they suckled on. And faces with no memory attached as an explanation, as justification for their existence, alien faces, foreign faces, races of people I never knew existed, gung-ho young soldiers and bearded guerrillas, charred corpses, men and buffalo in rice paddies, women at looms, fat men and fat cigars, screens with numbers scrolling across them, graphs, pie charts, babies disfigured by fist and machete, by scalpel, by nuclear fission and tidal wave, brothels and women raped against a backdrop of burning villages…these aren’t my memories, these aren’t my thoughts, my thoughts were simple, I remember my thoughts, they were gentle, like rain, I want my thoughts, I want my body, I want to die like people always have, like the boy did when they put a bullet through his head, I want my memories back, my dreams and nightmares, I want to tell my story, I want a witness.

In two thousand and ten, or eleven, I’m not sure, the boy was about three or four, a massive tanker capsized in the bay spilling oil and killing all the fish. It got everyone down, it wasn’t just the economic hardship, fish were our life, our livelihood, everything. Then, to make things worse, the fish, no, all aquatic life, even kelp, in an ever-increasing radius, were found bobbing to the surface, dead, pustulant and real smelly. An environmental department report identified the culprit, the Aristotle Beetle, a South American stowaway in the ballasts of the tanker that sank, and the same report claimed nothing could be done about it, there’d been infestations all across the globe, it had no natural predator and no disease killed it. Well, some of the boys and their wives got some city lawyers onboard and launched a class action, which of course the government crushed immediately, no explanation, no compensation, nothing, silence, denial, just that we were ungrateful, living off welfare whilst others died for their country, then the introduction of the Acquiescent Labour Bill just to make sure we didn’t get too comfortable on government hand-outs, and four big blokes in suits banging on the door at five in the morning, wrenching the coffee cup from my hands and cigarette from my lips, pinning the boy and shoving Mary, my wife, when she came to his defence, no guns, not even batons, just force, but not even that much force, me and the boy acquiesced easily, walked to the waiting van without fuss. It was a rattly old refrigerated van with milk crates on either side. There were eight men in there already, some sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the crates, others hunched or squatted on the floor, a couple of them were smoking and the space was heavy with smoke, I felt like choking. They read us our rights when we stopped for morning tea, there wouldn’t be any guards with us when we stopped for meals or toilet breaks or even when we got to the mines, we hadn’t done anything wrong, we weren’t prisoners, we could come and go as we liked, but we had to work for our bread…and if we didn’t work for our bread, if we ran from one of those truck stops into the desert, they wouldn’t have chased us, they wouldn’t exert themselves, they’d simply wait until they arrived back to the comfort of their city offices, they’d sit in their ergonomic chair in front of an ergonomic screen, and terminate our payments, our vouchers, but not only our food vouchers, our wives’ and children’s, our mothers’ and fathers, brothers’ and sisters’ and all of their families. And underlying all this, between the lines, sat twelve years service, no jury, no right to response, no right to remain silent, it only got one mentioned at that morning tea, ‘the law’, no-one knew much about the law then, not that we do now, that malleable beast of a law, but we’re a little more familiar with it, with the Censored and the rest of the Sedition Legislation…

You see I’ve got to capture this chronologically, pin it down, tack it down, it’s like when you scramble across the deck struggling against a wicked wind to pull down the sails before they’re torn off and snatched away. I’ve got to collect these thoughts, these memories, and grasp them close, grasp them tight, order them, categorise them, define them, define my self again, always mindful of those other thoughts, those parasitic thoughts, I think all these thoughts are mine.

We worked hard. Well the work was hard, not like fishing, fishing’s a pleasure. I worked nights and the boy worked days, not that it made much difference underground. I awoke every evening to the boy sitting sullenly at the foot of my bed. I’d beat the stiffness out of my trousers, pull them on, put the water on to boil, open the door of the cabin and tip the silt out of my boots, make two cups of tea, sit on the chair opposite the boy sipping the tea and watching him let his go cold. Every evening there was another wound, or black eye, or missing tooth. I’ll be the first to admit that the kid’s a bit slow. Always has been. Didn’t speak a word til he was ten, and only then when he was out at sea, then he’d talk his little heart out, and he still does, or did until they took us away, but only to me, and only on the boat, mostly just questions, what it was like for me as a boy and to tell the story of how Dave rescued me from the storm again, he did talk about himself too, such a sensitive soul, a vulnerable little thing, he’s always been picked on…I’d pat him on the head, sling the pick over my shoulder and join the solemn procession of miners out the camp gates, down the hill, past the equipment gathering dust since the Fuel Crisis of two thousand and nine, and into the mouth of the mine.
I found him by the creek, the creek that runs black from the mine. There was blood pumping from a gash across his face. He lay there, too shamed to scramble the six hundred metres up to his father’s cabin. Silent as ever. I dabbed at the wound with the whisky from my flask and tore a length from my shirt to bind his head. I dragged him into the scrub and waited for them to begin the search. They never did. We must have had some benevolent bureaucrat smiling down upon us that day. The next day we left. In full daylight and no-one stopped us. We walked until we were faint from thirst. We sat arm-in-arm in the dust, amongst the saltbush, two wedge-tails circling above us. We hadn’t seen a soul for as long as we’d been walking. I’m not sure how long we sat there before we did, both slipping in and out of consciousness, punching each other to keep us awake. A battered old truck pulled past with a couple of forlorn, ragged donkeys in the caged tray. The vehicle sputtered to a stop. There was silence for some time. A wiry old fellow stepped out, so weathered he might have been made from clay. He spoke all the way back to Adelaide, but I didn’t listen much.

When we walked in Mary didn’t speak, but she was pleased to see us. Before we were married we spoke a lot, late into the night, about everything, fish, the mortgage, the television news. When the boy was born she spoke to him all the time even though he never said a word in return, just smiled. But no one speaks much now. I noticed that her garden was thriving. Everyone in town’s garden was looking great. I suppose the women just had more time for things like that.

I’m not like the others in here. I’ve never been political. I had a family to feed. We’d only taken the boat out a couple of times when he approached us. The boat had fallen into disrepair and it took a couple of weeks to fix, the only materials we had were those we scrounged from the beach or, yes it’s true, other ships. The boy stopped making eye contact and took to muttering under his breath. Me and Mary started fighting, she said to leave the boy be, but I needed his help, I’m not as young as I used to be, and we needed that boat, we needed a livelihood, our diet needed more than just the lettuce from her garden. I was sitting at the end of the pier, we’d had an argument and I was swigging on a bottle of whisky when he emerged from the shadows. He was a young fellow, stooped and lanky, dressed in black. He was carrying something in a potato sack. Apparently he had a thousand dollars for me if I took this sack, and its contents, to a certain latitude where an unlit trawler would be waiting for me, five hundred now, five hundred when I returned. Normally I would have laughed, the boat wasn’t designed for that kind of depth, but I’d been taking it almost as deep in search of fish. so when he produced the five hundred I nodded my agreement. He didn’t want to know my name. He told me to tell no-one. I told my wife when I got home and she just looked at me from the bed with slitted eyes, but didn’t disagree. Me and the boy left at five the next morning. It wasn’t a refreshing cold that morning, it was heavy and suffocating, I could hardly move my limbs.

A day out from land I opened the sack. The man said never open the sack and I wish I never had. At first I couldn’t make out what they were. Five pinkish shapes fell from the bag and bounced on the floor. I bent to pick one up but pulled back. It was a brain. They were all brains. Human brains. I didn’t know for certain at that point. I talked, I don’t know what I said, I’m not sure if I was talking to them at that stage or just to myself, but the silence had to be broken. It was some time before I was aware of his presence. I turned and the boy was standing silently in the doorway. I pushed passed him and went up to the deck to light a cigarette. He was down there for ages, I’m not sure what he was doing, I never asked him. We ate our beans as if nothing had happened. We went to bed without saying a word. When I woke up his bed was empty. He was down there again with the brains, just standing with them at his feet. I put my arm around him but he pulled away. I’m not sure why, but I grabbed him by the elbow, dragged him from the cabin and locked the door. I think it was the look in his eyes, an obsession I’d never seen before. He snatched at the keys but I wouldn’t give them to him. He took me by the shoulders and began pounding me against the wall, he’s a big young boy and I’m just a little old man. He let me go and I fell to my knees. He lurched above me as if to kick me but pulled away, pounding the locked door a couple of times before slumping against it, sobbing. I stood up and dusted myself off. I wanted to comfort him, but I was afraid of him, of the thing that had taken hold of him. I just went up on to the deck and lit a cigarette.

My dreams were incredibly lucid over the next few nights. Some were of the boy, he was a baby again but he was bigger than me and playing with me like he used to play with his teddy, sometimes cuddling me and at others bashing my head against a rock. But I also dreamt of the brains down there in the hold. In these dreams I’d wake suddenly and lie there, staring at the ceiling. Then I’d slip from the bunk and tip toe to the door, careful not to wake the boy. I’d unlock the door and stand there in the darkness. Sometimes I’d pick one up, hold it to my cheek, to my lips. In those dreams I knew who these people were, I greeted them by name. But I’ve forgotten now. All I see is silhouettes…no, they’re black, their skin is black, at least one of them is, he’s well spoken, he’s drunk in a pub talking with his mate of landrights, he’s standing at a podium in an English Museum calling for the return of his ancestors skulls, he’s running with his uncles through the scrub and they’re being shot at, not with bullets but tranquilliser darts.

The radar didn’t pick up the pirate ship, it appeared out of the mist a few hundred metres from starboard and they clambered up wielding rifles and machetes and hoisting their mangy dogs aboard. The boy appeared from the hold carrying a bucket that, on seeing the pirates, he dropped at his feet spilling soapy water across the deck. He turned and ran back into the hold. One of the pirates gave a whoop then gave chase and the rest followed, I beat off the one that was holding me and ran after them, but I was too late, there was a shot as I rounded the corner and the boy was lying there in a pool of blood and one of the men was using the butt of his rifle to beat down the door. I was thrown to the floor and pinned there. I could only see a little of what was going on. They’d found the brains. They were playing soccer with one of them, two of them jostling as the brain bounced off their boots, then a victorious whoop and a shot at goal and the goalie blocking with his machete, I’m sure I heard the thing scream as he sliced it in two. And one bloke strutting about with the brain balanced on his head and another couple of guys chasing after him trying to trip him up and everyone laughing uproariously. And still laughing one bloke pointed to the dog who was eating the halved brain, the truly bipolar brain, which inspired a new game, feed it to the old bloke lying in the corner. They had the good manners to cut it into bight-sized chunks before forcing it down my oesophagus as four other guys held me down.

Then a horn and the coastguard calling for us to identify ourselves on a megaphone and suddenly I’m alone, lying amidst pieces of brain, spattered in blood, listening to the laughter, gunfire and screams up on deck. Then silence. Just footsteps. I sit up shakily. I gather the brains in my lap talking all the while, baby talk, comforting talk, I can’t remember what I said but I was still talking when the coastguard entered. Look at this sick bugger, he called to his mates who weren’t far behind, Too right, he’s a fucking degenerate, Let’s blast his brains, see how he likes it. Then an older man entered, pushing the younger men aside and approaching me, he patted me on the head before injecting me, he had gentle yellow eyes, he whispered something in my ear before I passed out, something that made me like him. My only memories from that point on are random, a woman’s voice speaking French, a figure in white, bright lights, an airflight, an a aquarium, a shark, an octopus, a beaker and a vile on the bench at head level, a momentary pain, short and sharp, then an infinite, senseless plateau stretching out before me.

One thing I do remember though is a visit, in a cabin painted white, the floor still rocking so we were still at sea. A visit alone by the one who’d injected me. He was pouring sugary water into my mouth when I sputtered into consciousness. He said something about dolphins, or else I misheard him. He placed a hand on my forehead and smiled. You know you’re just a prawn. I smiled too. The robbery of the brains from the Institute was all staged, when the nightly news camera sees you wheeled into maximum security it will see a broken, battered smuggler and a triumphant government, the question will no longer be whether or not the preservation of living brains is ethical, it will be about security. But I was thinking about the Mary cooking prawns. About her curled up in bed like a prawn. About the baby boy curled up like a prawn. I smiled and he smiled too.

So, we know it’s a long one and that has to change….Unfortunately I don’t have too many suggestions for that. The language is very descriptive which I like, so I wouldn’t suggested cutting lines out randomly. Possibly it’s that a few of the beginning paragraphs need to go? I’m not so sure though, see what you can come up with…

I do have a few points just in relation to integration.

1) What are the ‘black dot stickers’ on the windows? If they mean something profound to you then let us know more and we can try and integrate the idea into the other pieces. If they are not vital, maybe that description is one which can go…?
2) I think you’re point about ‘capturing this chronologically’ is in fact spot on. But I’m just a tad confused with your own chronological order... I think it possible goes back too far in time? Are we talking 2010ish + the 12 years of time, which were his sentence? If so, maybe bring it forward 5 years, to just before the TNA was started. This would integrate more with the ideas in the glossary, general timeline and would lead us up to now, 2027. If that were the case, it would also be as though his ‘censorship’ just happened to him, and would justify the fact that he is in a state of emergency himself. That he is finding it too hard to grapple with his ‘Senseless’ situation! (Something which really comes out in your story!)
3) Also, the fuel crisis in that case can probably be brought forward to about 2013 or something…? I think going much past that date is going a bit too far into the past…See what you can do.
4) Finally, in talking about the way you were captured, I think you need to re-read Joseph’s script. You incorporated the idea of needles (or maybe he took it from you??), but I feel if you could successfully link his science-fiction tone into your rugged environment it would make for an interesting integration.

And other than that I think the ending and the revelations that occur throughout are strong. Keep in mind that they are the core of what you want to say, so work with making those points the clearest and you should be able to shorten it, and still affect the audience, like you do.

All the best,
Liv

It is an incredible piece of writing and the themes tackled are wonderfully dealt with. However, I can't work out whether it is too literary...not just long, which strictly speaking - in terms of long term goals should be too much of a problem - but it reads like a well scripted novel to me at the moment as oppossed to a performance piece. I hope you think that's fair. I would have to really study it to make any theatrical suggestions at this point and I would like to throw the ball in your court as the author of this piece to make the necessary adjustments. Livs suggested timleines don't worry me so much, I think at this point keep imagining your own mode of capture and treatment (rather tha it being particularly systematic (more random - more dangerous, I believe). I did understand the black dot thing, unlike Liv, and thought it was quite a nice touch - it's those details - the small markers we ritualistically look out for that we remember.
Look forward to reading more

This is not the way I understood cold. Not the biting morning frost, glasses steamed up, fingers fumbling from numbness and sharp shocks of sensation from the heat of the coffee cup, the mist and early morning sun, seagulls scream and the gentle clunk of boats nudging their moorings, a halo of cigarette smoke around where we work, untangling nets, raising sails or refuelling the outboard on those days when Joe’s managed to procure some fuel on the black market.
This is not that kind of cold. It’s not that fresh early morning cold shared in silence with the boy, the boy who throughout the day looks on the world with fearful eyes, but throughout those early morning rituals that fear leaves his eyes, and all that’s there then, in those eyes, in the cold and as the sun thaws the world, is a peacefulness, a contentedness.
This cold is different. It’s empty. Impervious. It’s not a cold that one feels on the tip of ones’ nose. It’s everywhere at once. All throughout this senseless, subaquatic limbo, this mindlessness. These thoughts, these words, drifting by like jetsam. These things I never thought before. These thoughts nudge up against me, some latching on, others drifting by, and others sit there, alien thoughts quickly assimilated.
And the faces. Parents, school, friends, wife, son, the other fisherman, weathered, beaten, but also as young men, in school uniform, in nappies, and the faces of their mothers and the nipples they suckled on. And others, one man I only ever saw once on a bus on the way to visit my dying mother, snot through his beard and sucking on a tinny. And faces with no memory attached, alien faces, foreign faces, races of people I never knew existed, gung-ho young soldiers and bearded guerrillas, charred corpses, men and buffalo in rice paddies, women at looms, fat men and fat cigars, screens with numbers scrolling across them, graphs, pie charts, babies disfigured by fist and machete, by scalpel, by nuclear fission and tidal wave, brothels and women raped against a backdrop of burning villages…
…these aren’t my memories, these aren’t my thoughts, I remember my thoughts, they were gentle, like rain, I want my thoughts, I want my body, I want to die like people always have, like the boy did when they put a bullet through his head. I’ve got to capture these memories, pin them down, like when you scramble across the deck struggling against a wicked wind to pull down the sails before they’re torn off and snatched away…

…after the spill, some of the boys and their wives got some city lawyers onboard and launched a class action, which the TNA crushed immediately, of course, no explanation, no compensation, nothing, silence, denial, just garden vegetables shrivelled from the refinery next door, a sour, sullen wife and a broken boy who buried his face in his mother’s apron like a baby…

...I’m not like the others here…I had a family to feed…

…sitting on the pier after a fight with the wife. Approached by a man carrying a potato sack. A thousand dollars to take this sack to a certain latitude. An unlit trawler waiting for me. Five hundred now, five hundred on my return. The boat’s in disrepair, and it wasn’t designed for that kind of depth anyway. But I nod. No questions.
Tell no-one. I told my wife and she just looked at me from the bed with slitted eyes, but didn’t disagree…

…it’s not a refreshing cold. It’s five am, me and the boy are preparing the boat. It’s a heavy, suffocating cold…

…Five days out from land and I open the sack. Five pink objects fall to the floor. And the boys there over my shoulder. A silent hulk. Starring at the brains too…

…Nine days out from land. Three fitful nights. The hull locked. The key fingered sweatily in my pocket. And those things lying on their own in the dark…

…silence. Just footsteps. I try to sit up…

Look at this sick bugger.
Too right, a fucking degenerate.

He had gentle yellow eyes. He patted me on the head before injecting me. I’d heard of censoring before.

…a woman speaking French, a figure in white, bright lights, an airflight, an a aquarium, a shark, an octopus, a beaker and a vile on the bench at head level, a thousand pinpricks of pain, then an infinite, senseless plateau.

…a visit in a cabin painted white. He was pouring sugary water into my mouth when I sputtered into consciousness. He said something about dolphins, or else I misheard him. He placed a hand on my forehead and smiled. You know you’re just a prawn. I smiled too. But I was thinking about my wife cooking prawns. About her curled up in bed like a prawn. About the baby boy curled up like a prawn. I smiled and he smiled too.

When Olivia said that you'd made a lot of changes, Rochelle, I was a bit concerned. But that was fine. I have made some more. I think the story becomes the memories he's talking about in the first half. I've also put the bit about the forieng faces back in. Hope it's not too long now.

Cheers.
Lachlan.

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