Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh Page B

hovels the city has recently listed on a special register to address the housing crisis. If you earn under $40,000 per year, you qualify to rent one of these holes for a subsidised rate of $750 a week. The initiative was inspired by the Japanese capsule-hotel concept except that the holes aren’t capsules, just concrete tubes with open ends.
    â€˜It comes with a postbox,’ I tell her.
    â€˜Dear girl,’ says Mrs Tracey, ‘you must start making more money.’
    As Mrs Tracey drives off, I make diving hands and launch myself into the hole.
    I light a match and hold it up to the fire sprinkler to set it off so I can wash my face.
    All refreshed for a night in, I lie in my horizontal hole eating a deluxe muesli bar from ALDI and fall asleep pondering the mechanics of G’s rapid ascent through the frozen-food ranks.
    The next morning, Mrs Tracey unexpectedly shows up again in her white HiAce.
    From the back window of G’s van, I spot her in the distance trailing us. When the van stops, she stops.
    G knocks out a few Cream Reapers in the morning and, each time, the very second that the hand with the smartphone flops out on the pavement, Mrs Tracey is there to pick up the body and load it into her van.
    It’s a slick operation.
    She carries the bodies all by herself, slinging them over her shoulder and dumping them on the stretchers. She has a strange level of upper body strength, especially for someone built like an English rose.
    I follow G out to see her. I warn Mrs Tracey that she shouldn’t get involved.
    â€˜You suggested it, my dear.’
    G laughs. ‘Looks as if Mrs Tracey has a better business mind than you.’
    â€˜It’s undeniably a growth industry,’ says Mrs Tracey. ‘You can smell the desperation out there. But you can’t cart all your customers off to hospital. It’d be better for you if these people just go missing, and I can help with that.’
    G invites her into his van for a private conversation.
    Mrs Tracey and her HiAce are hired on a permanent basis, with key performance targets based on numbers of bodies transported. In fact, G hires all of the lady drivers comprising the Tracey’s Transportables workforce. He shouts the team to a lavish toffee-offal brunch and woos them with the promise that he will buy them a brand spanking new fleet of white Toyota HiAces and have each vehicle fitted out with a stunning four-bed interior.
    With Mrs Tracey’s team on board, G decides it’s time to expand the Cream Reaper fleet. Nine more black vans set out across Sydney, each trailed at a respectable distance by a HiAce complete with lady driver. The rest of Mrs Tracey’s ladies are assigned to backup vans, on call to take over body collection duties when the designated HiAces are at capacity. The cost of running the transfer vans is incorporated into the price of the Cream Reaper ice-cream packages.
    I am curious about where Mrs Tracey intends to take the increasing number of bodies.
    â€˜I’m a woman with connections. I know people who can disappear people, in return for a cut of my fee. I’m an expert in unpublicity.’
    Lee is sceptical that anyone can be disappeared.
    â€˜If you think things can’t be hidden in Sydney,’ Mrs Tracey tells him, ‘you’re reading the wrong news.’
    Mrs Tracey decides to embark on a more active role in the operation. She takes to stepping out of her HiAce to ‘stretch her legs’, hovering around our van and keeping an eye out for potential customers.
    â€˜I have a performance target, after all,’ she says.
    In Double Bay, she goes for a short walk and returns steering a middle-aged woman by the elbow. The woman is wearing head-to-toe beige and has just had a facial. With no make-up on, she squints out at us from behind dark glasses.
    â€˜It’s over,’ says the woman. ‘It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.’ She