Waiting for the Sun

The fryers at Barlow’s have three different beeps, and by February I could tell them apart without looking up. The long flat one is chips. The double chirp is tenders. The one that sounds like it’s apologising is bone-in, which takes eleven minutes and which nobody orders after ten, because even people who have never worked in a kitchen seem to know.

At twenty to eleven on a Friday, the apologising one went off.

“Who’s that?” Tevita said. He was at the sink with his sleeves shoved up, scraping crumb off the trays, and he didn’t turn around.

“Drive-through. Family box. I dropped it at half past.”

“Half past ten.” He said it the way other people say a swear word. “On a Friday. We close at eleven.”

“I know, Tev.”

He looked at me and I looked at him, and then we both looked at the clock above the pass, which Rhonda had set four minutes fast in 2019 so we’d feel behind. It had stopped working on everyone but her.

I lifted the basket, shook it twice over the oil and let it hang there, dripping, while the fryer settled. The chicken had come up the colour it was supposed to. I tipped it into the tray, salted it, and boxed it with the sides Mariam had already lined up on the pass without being asked, which is how I knew she’d been watching the clock too.

“Hilux,” she said through the headset gap, not looking at me.“One headlight.”

“Does he want sauce?”

“He wants it to be eleven o’clock.”

I took the box through to the window. The man in the Hilux didn’t say thank you, and he didn’t say anything else either, and I wished him a good night anyway, because Rhonda checks the drive-through recordings, or says she does, which comes to the same thing.

The door chime went at a quarter to eleven, when I was back at the pass tipping the last of the chips into the warmer. Mariam, still on the headset, gave me the look that meansfront counter, you’ve got it. I wiped my hands on my apron and went out.

It was the man from Coldline. Fridays, give or take a few minutes either side of ten forty-five, he came in wearing a hi-vis shirt gone soft with washing, smelling of the freezer: cardboard and cold metal and something under it like a coin. He drove a forklift, or something like one, at the cold-storage place on Quarry Road.

“Evening, love.”

“Hi. The usual?”

“If you’re offering.”

Six-piece, no coleslaw, two gravies, one Sprite, no ice. I knew the order the way you know a phone number you’ve stopped needing to look up. I knew that one of the gravies was for him and the other was for his wife, who’d had a hip done in October and could only manage food she could eat sitting up, and that he carried that second gravy home the way some men carry flowers. I knew all that because he’d told me, in pieces, across about fifteen Fridays. He’d never told me anything else, and he didn’t know my name. It was on my tag in capitals, DEL, but he had called me Dee, and Dell, and once, in December, Debbie. I answered to all of them. It saved everyone a moment.

“Keep the change for the jar,” he said, and slid a two-dollar coin across the counter toward the collection tin for the children’s hospital that sat by the register. He would have slid it toward whoever was standing there.

“Thanks. Hope your wife’s okay.”

“She’s a trooper.” He picked up the bag and held it for a second in both hands, checking the weight of it, and then he went out into the car park, where the last of the ibis had come in off the roundabout to work the bins. They stood around under the lights with their bald black heads and their sorry curved beaks, looking, as they always did, like men waiting for a bus that had been cancelled.

That was the last customer. Mariam locked the door at eleven exactly and flipped the sign, and the building seemed to let out a breath.

I know people think closing is the worst part of the job. It’s the part I like best, if I’m honest, because the shift has a shape to it, and the shape is that things get put away. The sauce guns come apart and go into their soaking tubs. The shake machine gets its nightly wash. The grill plates are scraped, the baskets lowered into the degreaser, the mats lifted and hosed and propped against the wall to drain. Each thing has a place, and a way of going there, and when it is done it stays done until morning.

I took the front of house. Chairs up on tables, mop bucket with the yellow wringer, the lemon-smelling stuff that smells like lemons only in the sense that a lemon would be offended by it. There are six fluorescent tubes over the dining area and at that time of night they are the only things in the building still fully awake. They have a flicker you can only see out of the corner of your eye, and the light they throw is the colour of skim milk. The third tube from the door is a different white from the others, a bluer one, because it was replaced in November by a contractor who used whatever he had on his truck. Nobody else has noticed. With the tables wiped and the chairs up, the whole room looked like the inside of a fridge, and that bluer tube sat in the middle of it like a mistake somebody had decided to live with.

I mopped toward the door, backing out of my own footprints the way you’re supposed to.

Rhonda’s office is a cupboard off the kitchen with a safe in it and a window onto nothing. She was in there counting the till with her reading glasses on, doing the thing where she moves her lips and pretends she isn’t. When I put my head in to say the floor was done she waved me off without looking up.

“You’re a good one, Del,” she said. “I put it on your review. Easiest staff member I’ve got.”

“Thanks, Rhonda.”

“I’m serious. Six-week review. Requires no management. I underlined requires.” She looked up then, over the glasses, pleased with herself. “You can tell the others I said it.”

“I will,” I said, and I took it, as I had the day she first showed me the form, for the compliment it was plainly meant to be.

The staff room at Barlow’s is a table, four plastic chairs and a fridge with a sign on it that says If it’s not yours, don’t touch it. This means you, Tev. My phone was where it always is on a shift, on the table, face-down, so the screen doesn’t light up the whole room every time it moves. I sat, took off one shoe, and flipped it over.

Eleven messages in the Marsh Madhouse chat since six o’clock.

Marnie named the group years ago, when it still had all of us in it, and then she left, and the name stayed. Six people in the chat now, and one of them is Dad, who has never sent anything in it but a thumbs-up, and that once by accident.

I read from the top, the way I always do, in order, so nothing could arrive out of sequence. Jayden wanted to know if anyone had the car on Saturday; nobody did, because Dad has the car, and Dad does not read the chat. Kayla wanted her charger back from whoever had taken it, and then, forty minutes later, said forget it, which, in the language of the Marsh Madhouse, means someone should ask me what’s wrong. Nobody had. A photo of a dog from a cousin I couldn’t place. At 8:14, from Mum: Is there milk.

Mum never uses question marks. I think of it as a kindness she does the family, in a way, because without one it isn’t a question for anyone in particular. It’s a question for the house. The house, in the case of the Marsh Madhouse, had gone on being the house. On my break at ten to ten I’d looked at the fridge in my head and answered: Half a bottle. I’ll grab another one on the way home. Nobody had replied to that, either. It sat at the bottom of the chat, in the small blue bubble that meant I was the last person who’d said anything, and it had the look of a coat left on a hook in a house where no one visits.

There was one missed call, from Kayla, at 10:12. No voicemail, no text after it. I rang back from the staff room and listened to it ring out, and I knew from the sound of it ringing, the way you know a house is empty from the way a knock sounds, that I wasn’t going to be told what it had been about.

I typed leaving now into the chat. I looked at it. Then I held down the delete key until it was gone, and put my shoe back on.

Barlow’s is on Dunmore Road, which runs between Raleigh Fields and the Dunmore Business Park, and between those two points there is nothing for nearly two kilometres but the road. No footpath past the Coldline turnoff. A gravel verge, a drainage ditch, a chain-link fence with plastic bags caught in it like something that has been trying to leave. It is the quickest way home and the worst way, and I’ve walked it so many nights that I could tell you the exact point where the streetlights stop being sodium orange and turn white, which is just past the bus shelter with the missing panel.

It was February and still twenty-nine degrees at midnight. The heat of the day had come up out of the bitumen and was sitting on the road like something that wasn’t going to get up. A northwesterly was pushing down off the ranges with a smell in it, dust and dry grass and, from somewhere far out, smoke, and the whole sky over the estate had that low brown glow that western Sydney gets on summer nights, when the cloud is just the city’s light bouncing back at it. In the trees along the creek the bats were making their noise, a high rusty complaint, like a lot of small gates.

A truck went past, close, and the draught of it lifted my hair off my neck and let it fall.

I never needed a map to know where I was. That’s the useful thing about the walk. At the far end of the business park, over the long roof of the old freight warehouse, there’s a bar of pale light that’s on every night, blue-white, thin as a ruler, with letters in it too small to read from the road. When it’s level with the roundabout I’m halfway. When it’s behind the second row of poplars I’ve got ten minutes. I’ve never looked at it for any other reason. It’s on the way, like the bus shelter is on the way, like the tyre-shop with the cracked inflatable gorilla. It’s just one of the things that tells you how far you’ve got.

The servo at the corner of Dunmore and Pell Street is open all night, under lights so bright it looks like the only place in the suburb that has been properly plugged in. I bought a two-litre bottle of milk for four dollars twenty. I paid with my own card, and the man behind the counter, who was watching a cricket highlights reel on his phone with the sound off, didn’t look up, and I said thank you to the top of his head, and the door chimed behind me as it let me go.

I was thinking about the Modern History source analysis that was due on Monday and sitting in my bag with a single paragraph written. I was thinking about whether the bats had come back to the same trees as last year or different ones. I was thinking, if I’m honest, about nothing in particular, which is the best thing the walk does for me. By the time I turned into Kestrel Street, my shirt was stuck to my back, and the bottle was sweating a thin line down the side of my leg, and the streetlight outside number nineteen was out, as it had been since Christmas.

Our porch light was off, too. That was nobody’s decision; the bulb had gone and the bulbs were in a drawer. The front window was lit blue instead, the colour of television, and through the glass I could hear the applause of a studio audience for something someone had said to them, a long warm wave of it, rolling out into the dark where nobody was listening.

I let myself in as quietly as I always do.

Mum was asleep on the couch with her feet tucked under her and the remote resting on her chest, rising and falling. A glass stood on the arm of the couch with an inch of something gold in the bottom. I took it out to the kitchen, rinsed it, and set it upside down on the rack, the way you’d put away a shoe that someone had stepped out of.

Then I opened the fridge.

There was already a bottle of milk in the door. Full, unopened, with the foil still on. Two litres, the same brand, the same blue cap.

I stood there with the cold coming out on my arms and looked at it for a while. Someone had gone out after all, then, between 8:14 and now. Dad, maybe, on the way back from his shift. Jayden, if he’d wanted something. Kayla, on her way to wherever the missed call had been going. I didn’t know who, and I didn’t check the chat to find out.

I put mine next to it.

Then I turned off the television, and lifted the remote off her chest, and left the throw from the back of the armchair over her shoulders, and stood in the sudden quiet of the house with my shoes in my hand, listening to the fridge hum, and the bats, and the faint tick of the roof giving the heat back to the dark.

Nobody had said goodnight. Nobody had asked me how it went. That wasn’t unkind, either. I was fine; it was well known that I was fine, and it was one of the things the house could count on, like the bulbs in the drawer.

I went down the hall, past the doors with the light under them and the doors without, and into my room, and I lay on top of the sheet in my uniform, and for a long time I didn’t sleep.