Graveyard Shift
fiction by Claire Cao
We had many names for our line of work.
“Bro, we’re like those dudes from The Conjuring,” Ravi said when we took a ciggie break out in the winter dark, wet leaves suctioned to the soles of our Blundstones.
“Yep, the numba-one exorcist crew in Sydney,” Trinh shot back, shoulders quaking with laughter. “Clear your home of ghosts for a bargain price.”
Nostrils wafting smoke, I moved slightly closer to Ravi’s arm, a spooked myna chick seeking its mother’s wing. It was hard to cough up a chuckle. Nothing in the company’s welcome package had prepared me for this sudden intimacy with death.
Our jobs in the past months had all been from the bereaved: sons selling the homes of cancerous mothers, cousins prepping the furniture of unloved grandparents, widows emptying rooms that brimmed with too-fresh memories.
Everything we handled was smeared with spectral echoes. Couches of all shapes and sizes, stamped with butt prints. Collections of grimy records, boasting everything from Diana Ross to Guy Sebastian, marked with Crayola and burger oil. Sticky, rat-chewed things were our trade, destined to be expertly packaged for permanent storage or for sale, scattered across the full breadth of dero suburban garages.
Last week, at a job in Camden, we spent the day moving the Garfield merchandise of Ricardo E. Diaz, a newly deceased maths teacher who clearly had an obese-cat fetish. In the stead of children or real pets, he’d amassed collector-edition Jim Davis strips, a Garfield telephone set and a fridge magnet that proclaimed, “TO EAT IS HUMAN, TO OVEREAT IS DIVINE,” in Comic Sans under two fleshy paws.
“Not to freak you out, Viv, but we didn’t have that many morgue jobs ’til you came along,” Ravi said as we attempted to move a tangerine love seat decorated with Garfield’s trademark drooping lids. They seemed to blink coquettishly whenever we shifted too far left. “It was mostly people upscaling or moving overseas,” Ravi continued as we edged the seat out onto the verandah. “You must be cursed as.”
At that very moment, the open box housing the Garfield phone began quivering spasmodically, a deep static voice gurgling: FEED ME. Startled, I felt my grip slacken completely, right as Ravi lurched backwards, the chair looming over him with its hulking orange belly.
It wasn’t until Ravi’s fifth invocation of Christ that I realised I’d dropped the weight directly on his foot.
He deserved it.
✷
On Tuesday, I screwed up. The job was in Parramatta, at the flat of a local writer named Adrian Russo who’d died of a stroke a few months ago. It was a lonely little capsule—tea-stained floral couches and russet kitchen tiles belonging to a pre-millennium era that had been preserved with freakish dedication. Duckling-yellow paint peeled from the walls as we weaved rolled-up rugs in a maze of crumbling paperbacks. When the light struck at just right the angle, I saw a golden flash of embossed names: Kushner, Pushkin, Yamauchi.
Russo himself sat on the mantel next to his square telly, in a blue ceramic jar with handles shaped like curling tides.
“Move him closer to the middle, will ya?” Ravi asked, leaning back into a wicker rocking chair. He flipped through Russo’s copy of Rebecca, looking infuriatingly chill. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Why don’t you get off your pancake ass and fucken help, then?” Trinh said.
Ravi pointed at his sore foot, triggering an eye-roll from both Trinh and me.
The head of the moving company, Li Hong, stood in the foyer, flirting with the poncho-wearing Mrs Russo. Intermittently, his pick-up lines boomed around the snug space, phrases like curves like Mariah Carey punctuated by honking laughter. We all groaned. At noon, Mrs Russo came in with a tray of Coke cans. We sat cross-legged in the cleared sections of the living room floor, glugging away, sweat drying in the furrows of our armpits.
‘What’s a young girl like you doing in this job?’ Mrs Russo asked between prim sips.
I was in the middle of selecting a polite way of telling her to shove it up her flaccid bum when Ravi said, “Viv’s a genius. She was at uni studying—uhhhhhh, smart people shit—for years. But then she decided to stick it to the man and fondle dead people’s stuff.”
“Shut your mouth,” Li Hong said, roughly shoving Ravi, who immediately began whimpering about his foot. “She take university break after her father leave. Very good for us—little Vivi knows the value of hard work!”
I silently finished my Coke, then stomped back towards the moving van, Ravi and Trinh whispering ooooooh, someone’s pissed before I slammed the door shut.
The guys were fine enough to work with, if you didn’t mind that your business automatically became everyone’s business.
Not wanting to dwell on Ba, I shunted rug after rug into the van, and thought of this instead: lecture halls, the kettlebell weight of my secondhand textbooks. The stale, heady air, generated by the building’s infamous lack of ventilation; the smell of lumpy sandwich mayo and spaghetti sauces couched in styrofoam. Wankers who wore suits to class, spread out over the lecture seats, sweat blooming on their upper lips and around their pits. Rustling. Pages and pages of dead trees in choral chaos as students cram-read and gossiped and slurped their morning coffees.
Then an ambo rushed past, releasing a deafening, guttural wail. I remembered where I was. It was five, and the sun was beginning its slow dive beneath the skyline, casting the block in spindly shadows and amber hues.
I dusted the lint and peanut ash off my hands.
✷
Finally, it was time to sieve through the dense boroughs of books. We metamorphosed into our gentler selves, passing around pages that were time-softened and hanging limply to their binding. On a whim, I opened a copy of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and found an inscription, scribbled out in sloping, chicken-scratch letters:
Brother,
All objects have a shade. When I saw this in Borders yesterday, I thought of the first time I read it—happy in your basement, on my tenth KB. A play so full of anger, so inevitable, can contain the shade of that moment. Happy birthday.
Peace and love,
Tomas
I shut the book. My gaze skittered around the room. There were no photos around. No signs of Tomas, and days spent lazing in a basement. I twisted my body in every direction, scrabbling to find a small token indicating this ghost had been cared for, missed.
“Vivian, watch out—”
The warning came too late—I had already lost my balance. My elbow connected with a swirling handle, sending the urn flying. The shell splintered, spraying bits of Adrian Russo into open mouths, loose with horror.
✷
“Ma, I’m not fired. Li Hong told me to take some time off.”
Ma stood in the doorway, holding a plate of sliced oranges. In response, I whimpered. Rolling closer to the wall, I continued to pick at the soggy bits of pepperoni that lay lifelessly in a Tupperware container.
“Aiyoh, be considerate of your poor mummy,” she said. “All day at work you clean, but here you can’t even put socks in laundry.”
“I don’t clean at work, Ma. I’m a removalist. Can’t I feel sorry for myself?”
“If you are lawyer, you can do whatever you want. You can even shit in my bed.”
I rolled back around to glare at her, but saw that she was grinning, crow’s feet crinkling. Ma shuffled over in her Hello Kitty slippers and knelt down. My sad container was replaced with the fruit. Her callused hand brushed against the plane of my cheek, fleeting.
After munching through the last orange piece, the rind snug against my teeth, I finally got up to take the plate to the kitchen. I stopped at a framed photo of Ba, perched on the creaky Roland piano where he always played ‘You Raise Me Up’ to annoy me. He’s wearing his bootleg Dodgers cap. Instead of ‘L.A.’ the logo read ‘I.A.’
I wondered what he might have been doing right at that moment—I knew that he had returned to his birthplace, Taishan. Maybe he had a new wife and a new daughter. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he now ran a street-side stall selling his own bootleg Dodgers caps.
Casting my gaze around, I wondered how I’d remove the organs of this room, stripping it out until it was skeleton-bare. The first thing to go would be the flat screen, then the bookcase where Ma displayed my chintzy athletics trophies, then the piano.
Then the little things that neither of us dared to touch—tartan UGG boots, reading glasses, the towering masses of Australian Chinese Daily newspapers. The bottles of red wine that he stored beneath our retired VCR, and the expired tubes of macadamia cream that he used to massage into his scalded hands, wounds amassed from years as a bricklayer. The detritus of a life.
✷
The following week, I was back at work.
✷
I knew the next place well. The Huynhs lived a six-minute drive from mine—in a ’70s red-brick townhouse on Bareena Street, where I spent my childhood terrorising their son and pretending to be a mermaid in their bathtub. When Mrs Huynh opened the door, her plump arms began pinwheeling with joy. Nothing had changed. I was six again, on her doorstep with a plastic strainer full of cherries from Ba.
“Nice to see you, Auntie,” I said, flushed, as she led us onto the carpeted floors I’d thundered across thousands of times. I spotted a Tasmania-shaped bloodstain near the staircase that had dripped, fully formed, from my finger back when Andy and I thought it was a sick idea to have a stapler swordfight.
On the couch, a broad-shouldered guy in a black CDG jumper was lounging on his stomach. When he saw me, he popped up like toast, rushed over and yanked me into a hug. “Viv!” he yelled, jubilant. “Can’t believe you’re here! And that you’re still a midget.”
Ravi and Trinh exchanged amused glances as I leant back a little, eyes skimming over the wonky line of his nose. It looked like someone had smashed it in half and the bone had healed all wrong. That was new—Andy being pummelled by someone other than a tiny girl in an Ariel costume. Other things were different, too: he was taller, more tank, with a swooping black fringe and an uneven undercut.
“Careful,” I said. “Bet I could still take you.”
When Andy showed us all the landmarks, opening doors to broom closets and bedrooms that I used to hide in, I thought about what Tomas had written. That all objects contained a shade. My fingers traced the smooth curve of a bannister and the twisting fault lines webbed into the plaster. Slowly, it sank in that the Huynhs were moving away for good.
Our job was to strip this space back to its most primitive form. We were going to excavate settees I’d lounged in, Totoro plushies I’d pushed around in prams and tables where I’d sat, slingshotting baked beans and macaroni pieces into Andy’s face. And then Andy and his mother would be exorcised, too, lost to the temporal flux of memory.
✷
A portrait of Mr Huynh was mounted on the wall adjacent to the kitchen table. He was wearing his wedding suit, a camellia blooming over his heart in oily swabs of yellow and vermilion.
I remembered Andy’s Instagram post about his dad passing: a sepia-filtered picture of a young Mr Huynh cradling his toddler son, both faces ruddy with health. By then, we were in different high schools, and hadn’t spoken in years.
I’d felt sorry for Andy, sure, but after giving the photo an obligatory like, the app was closed and abandoned. At the time, I had been too busy getting sloshed with Ba, both of us laughing at compilation videos on Weibo of Americans trying to speak Cantonese. Andy sidled up beside me. “Dad actually had frosted tips at his wedding but Ma told the painter to do this instead. Not very legit, ey?”
I turned to him, dimples drilled into my cheeks.
✷
We finished removal the next day.
I had mostly forgiven Trinh and Ravi for being dickheads the previous week. We slung our arms around one another, buoyant with a job well done, taking in the stretches of splotchy carpet matted like the coat of a stray mongrel. Every cockroach-dwelling corner was exposed to the diluted morning light.
There was something viciously satisfying about stripping away every marker of identity from a house, of seeing it disrobed and raw. It reminded me of when Andy and I gobbled our Red Lea chips too quickly and the heat melted flesh from the walls of our mouths. Though it hurt, we kept peeling and peeling the flakes, holding up white, pencil-shaving-shaped swirls to marvel at their integrity. We poked our tongues into our own wounds, feeling pink and new.
When we loaded the last chair into the van, Mrs Huynh began to emit squeaky hiccups that rattled the frame of her bony shoulders. I put a hesitant hand on her back. “It’s going to be odd at first,” I told her. But, eventually, anything’s bearable.
✷
“Wah, you’re cleaning,” Ma said, tattooed eyebrows disappearing into the fringe of her perm. “Did something horrible happen?”
Without replying, I strong-armed piles and piles of Ba’s old newspapers into bin bags, before shooting tubes of expired hand cream after them like missiles. Eventually, Ma grew quiet and planted herself on the stool near me.
I tied up the bags and dragged them out front. Tomorrow morning, the garbage truck would come and collect them, trundling towards the muddy slopes of landfill where they’d nuzzle against empty milk cartons and scavenging gulls. When I returned to the house, Ma was drinking one of Ba’s bottles of merlot, a lattice of deep red netting over her lips.
She held out a glass to me. It fit into my palm like it would fit into a polystyrene-lined box.
✷✷✷
Claire Cao is a writer and editor from Western Sydney. She is a screenwriter on the feature film Here Out West.
