The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

Chloe into a darker section of the building, where my eyes are slow to adjust. I lose track of my own feet as we shuffle further into the gloom. Chloe pops a door, a big metal thing with rubber seals that suck and pull apart. She flicks a switch and fluorescent lights blink into existence. I look inside with her. It smells unusual.

‘Here?’

‘Yep. Amazing that the power’s still on, isn’t it?’

We step through and the heavy door clunks shut behind us, only making me jump about a kilometre high. There are tiles on the walls and a concrete floor and the dot-dot-dash of the fluoro lights glare above.

‘What is this?’

‘A meat locker.’

‘A whatsy?’ A chill races through me, above and beyond the chill already in the air.

‘You know, a really big fridge. They could have kept meat here, or maybe it was cheese or veggies. Who knows.’

Chloe’s voice echoes slightly. She lays down the bags she’s been carrying.

Rows and rows of ghostly pig corpses fill my mind, sides of cow, dead flesh laid out and waiting to be eaten. It’s airless in here, cloying. Something rises up inside me.

‘Are you alright? You don’t get claustrophobic, do you?’ Chloe looks concerned.

‘No, I’m fine.’ I pull on the door handle with the least amount of urgency possible, but I do a bad job of it. Eventually I figure out I have to pull the lever towards me. Air whooshes into the box, the locker, whatever. I stick my head into the gap, breathe in.

‘You and Jeremy aren’t Australia’s first daddy-daughter serial killing team, are you?’

I try to joke but she sees straight through me.

‘We’ll try and be in here as little as possible. Let me show you where to get dressed.’ She herds me out, using the same voice you would on a doddery old person or a cat cowering under a car. ‘It’s going to take me a while to set up.’

A crow caws somewhere nearby as I let myself back into the meat locker. Now that my eyes can cope I see that it’s just a freestanding metal box in a bigger warehouse space, nothing more sinister than that.

We’d discussed how I was supposed to look in the shot, but I’d kind of run with my ideas a bit. I tried to keep my mind on Chloe’s folio and all the visual references she’d collected, I really thought carefully about it.

Chloe stops what she’s doing to look, a set of leads in her hands, gaffer tape bangles around her wrists. I stand, one bare numb foot on top of the other, horribly, unfamiliarly awkward.

‘It’s good,’ she says after a few seconds.

‘Really?’

A cold draft blows up the see-through white dress I pinched from Mum’s wardrobe. I’ve got my floral bathers on underneath, and I’ve blanked out my face with white powder, blending blue eye shadow here and there for that half-dead look. Most of my effort has gone into my hair, which I’d started at home, tangling and plaiting bits of it up, pinning it into place. On top is the crown that took me a week to make. It’s a crown fit for a travelling Opal warrior queen, made from twigs and feathers and plastic magical stones from my secret suitcase. A relic from Wingdonia, a re-creation of the fantasy.

No one but me needs to know what it means, not even Chloe.

‘Nah, it’s better than good, you look great. I’m nearly done.’

Chloe seems different here, out of school. More grown up, more herself. She finishes taping the cords down and checks all the connections.

One corner of the room has been turned into a set. There are two of those umbrella flash things, a crumpled sheet on the ground, fairy lights taped up, battery packs and cords hidden away to the side. The lights bring out the mottled patterns and stains on the concrete. I can see the ideas from her folio coming together.

‘How do you know so much about this?’

‘I don’t really. I read a lot of Wikihows.’ Her long black hair hangs over her shoulder as she checks the spidery tripod and camera for stability. ‘All of this belongs to school. If we break anything, we’re screwed.’

She straightens. ‘Right. Can you lie here? I put a little cross on the spot, see that masking tape?’

I lie down slowly, arranging my nightie around me. The cold of the concrete floor shocks my skin.

You wanted dark, Natalia, I tell myself, you wanted real, so lie down already.

Chloe takes some test pics, murmuring to herself. She rearranges my feet and arms and holds a little white-balance meter near my face.

‘I have no idea if I’m doing this right,’ she says.

With my eyes closed, the clicking of the SLR sounds like insects chirping.

‘I don’t know what the hell you’ve got on your head,’ says Click-Click-Chloe, ‘but it works.’

Damp seeps into my muscles and joints and I let it. I wanted everyone to stop lying to themselves and each other and look at what’s really happening, to all of us.

I’m dead, I tell myself. My heart has stopped, my blood is sludge, the electricity in my brain is gone.

When you’re dead everything stops, the activity in your cells creaks to a halt. Your brain powers down, the sparks that leap from neuron to neuron cease, all your thoughts and memories and what you think of as your personality is gone because your brain machine has stopped. You don’t have a soul, because what you thought of as your soul was just electricity in your brain. You only exist while the machine thinks you do.

Afterwards, where do you go? What happens to all these thoughts?

I start to shiver, the smallest possible tremors all over.

‘Are you cold? Can you handle a few more minutes?’

Chloe speaks to me from a thousand kilometres away. I manage to lift my head.

‘How does it look?’ My mouth barely moves.

‘It’s hard to tell on the display, it’s so small. I want to try one more thing, if you