Wildlife by Fiona Wood Page A

participating, but it is thanks to her—to her older sisters, anyway—that we have the know-how.
    Holly positions the three-step ladder we have borrowed from the drying room directly under the kitchen-area ceiling fan. She climbs up. I hand her the flour, which we’ve managed to stockpile during our week on Slushy, stealing a couple of handfuls a day in small freezer bags. She carefully spoons heaps of flour along the length of each fan blade and climbs down.
    Ten minutes’ work on our part—surely at least two hours’ cleaning up required, if things go according to plan.
    We have to wait until after classes this afternoon for our payoff. Fortunately the day has been warm, and shortly after they troop inside, someone switches on the fan.
    We can’t see them, but we know they’ve done it from the screaming that ensues.
    We should possibly play it cooler, but it is hard to resist the temptation to document what’s happening.
    Holly and I sit outside, counting down their exit. Five from the first shriek.
    Four.
    Three.
    Two.
    One.
    “Smile!” Holly says, as she takes photos of them bursting out of their front door, sneezy, shouting, flour-coated. Very angry. Which makes for some pretty good photos.
    They do not smile.

26
    thursday 18 october
    When I see the girl still looking at the handsome boy with such buried longing…
    When I read
Othello
…
    Thinking how few of Shakespeare’s plays you got to know, and how much you loved the ones you’d studied and read and seen performed, is just one of the things that makes me bite the inside of my cheek hard. The little pain to stop the big pain. Doesn’t work. At least we got to see that fantastic production of
Hamlet
together, remember? (Duh, of course you don’t. You are no longer in a fit stateof consciousness to remember things. Sane me reminds myself that this is a one-way conversation.)
    But if you could just see these jackanapes, Fred, the cream-faced loons that
Othello
is wasted on. I don’t even love this play. Things do not end well for Desdemona. And she has done nothing wrong. Nothing to deserve it. Nothing to motivate it. Nothing to precipitate it. Another pointless death. So I do relate to that extent. But she does not die at the hands of a soon-to-be-shattered truck driver. She dies at the hands of an irrationally jealous husband.
    I mean, hats off to Shakespeare, he certainly lays it on the line, talk about life lessons in the odd, unhappy ending. It felt so theoretical with
Romeo and Juliet
, though, didn’t it? And a bit silly. Kind of avoidable. Too coincidental. So much swings on shitty timing.
    But, silly us, so much does swing on shitty timing.
    If you’d left a bit earlier.
    If you’d left a bit later.
    Stop it. Bite down. Stop biting.
    They are not all stupid.
    Sibylla, for instance, is smart, but she is being pulled right out of shape up here. It’s because of the billboard.
    Holly put a big photo of the “old” Sibylla up in our house bathroom. On the mirror. It is very unflattering. In it, Sibylla is pimply, and her skin is dry and red, perhaps symptoms of the pimple treatment, and she looks to have her mouth full. It’s nasty. Sibylla laughed, of course. It’simportant to be a good sport, not to show if your feelings are hurt. What is the alternative? Especially if it’s your best friend having the laugh.
    So just before class today some of the hoonish, boorish boys… shall we call them jocks? That is what they are, I suppose. Anyway, these boys started singing the theme song to
Australia’s Next Top Model
to, or “at,” Sibylla. At first she didn’t notice. But when she did, she looked, I thought, in appeal to Ben, the brand-new going-out person, as if to say, your jock friends, can you get them to shut up? But Ben is Mr. Easygoing, Mr. Hailfellowwellmet, Mr. Friendofthewholeworld, so he seemed not to notice, or maybe he chose carelessly, or coldly, not to notice. The teacher had not yet arrived and the boys got louder and