Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh Page A

container to another for no practical reason. I wonder out loud what other embedded journalists do in these situations. Do they get involved?
    I make a decision.
    I tell G I’m curious to see where this goes, even if it gets me in trouble. In fact, I know someone who may be able to help out. The stepmother of a primary school friend of mine drives a transfer van that collects dead bodies from hospitals and homes, and takes them to funeral parlours.
    â€˜Sounds good,’ says G.
    But where should she take the body?
    â€˜The morgue or something?’
    I tell him he’ll get arrested.
    G comes out of the van. He looks at the body, then at me.
    â€˜Look,’ he says, ‘so I didn’t give much thought to corpse disposal. But I’ve had some quiet discussions with various councils and they’re happy for my permits to incorporate a small population cull. The whole city’s overpopulated, so it’s good from a public health perspective. Plus it’s a more palatable death experience. If they did it with garbage trucks, it wouldn’t be as good, would it? And if you’re stupid enough to buy a Reaper, then you deserve to die. It’s natural selection. It’s a self-selecting cull.’
    I find it difficult to believe this permit arrangement exists.
    â€˜I put a little grease in the wheels of government,’ G says, ‘and they turned for me. And the police are always happy to close one eye in return for free product. It’s a cut-throat industry. People call me the bad boy of Sydney ice-cream, but I don’t think they know what bad boy really means. It’s a fucking war out there, lady. And I intend to win it with ice-cream.’
    Mrs Tracey arrives in her white Toyota HiAce.
    She is dressed to match her van, in a loose tux-style white shirt with the sleeves pushed up just past her wrists. She is wearing tailored white pants, white flats and pearl earrings.
    â€˜I just came from a fantastically good lunch with some of the mothers from my grandson’s playgroup,’ she says. ‘You know that new place everyone’s raving about that does the toffee offal?’
    G shakes her hand. He explains what has transpired and asks if she can take the body to a hospital and tell them she found the blogger lying in the street, on the verge of death.
    As they talk, I reminisce. In primary school, Mrs Tracey was always one of those nice mothers who brought Tupperware containers full of sliced oranges to our netball games for the half-time break. She was one of those women who was so positive and wide-eyed about everything that you might have thought she’d been slammed in the head by a wayward crane.
    Even now, as she talks to G, she nods understandingly, giving him those wide eyes. It’s from her training in the death-care industry. She smiles with that big red-lipsticked overbite in such an empty way that it seems she might not even realise the gravity of the situation. If you sliced off the top of her head and looked in, it’d probably be full of mist and red carnations and rectangular wholesale wake cakes in chocolate and orange poppyseed, and a pasty organist playing ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’.
    We all stare at the former Elena1995.
    â€˜I picked up three bodies this morning on the way to lunch,’ says Mrs Tracey. ‘So I have one more bed for your girl. Serendipity.’
    She straps Elena1995 into a stretcher and loads her into the back of the van.
    â€˜Would you mind very much if we take a photo together?’ Mrs Tracey asks G. ‘I’m just so thrilled to meet such a famous artisan ice-cream maker.’
    â€˜An odd time for a photo,’ says Lee, as we cluster together.
    â€˜Say cheese,’ says Mrs Tracey.
    Mrs Tracey drops me home before she drops off the bodies.
    â€˜What is this?’ she says. ‘A hole in the wall?’
    It literally is. It’s one of the thousands of new horizontal