Page 4 of People Skills

Colin turns on his torch. Everything down there is covered in thick dust and spiderwebs. The smell is a lot stronger now.

‘Definitely a dead animal. My money’s on a possum, but it could be a rat. Even a whole family of rats.’ He looks at me, raising his bushy eyebrows as if that’s an exciting possibility. ‘Sometimes when the mothers are stressed, they start eating their own young. Let’s take a squiz then,’ he says, turning and beginning to shuffle very slowly backwards into the hole. His left hand has a tremor. He is holding his right leg stiffly, at an angle. He has, I know from previous conversations, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

I can’t watch him break a hip.

‘I’ll go,’ I say. There’s my cheerful problem-solver voice again.

‘No love, I’ll go,’ he says, still inching backwards.

‘No, you stay here and direct from above,’ I say. ‘The most experienced person should stay at ground level.’ An entirely made-up statement but it sounds true.

‘You’re really okay to go down there?’ he says doubtfully.

‘Yes. It’ll be an adventure,’ I say. Hot as an oven, dark as a cave, filled with dead things and a stench so strong I might pass out. Just the adventure I feel like undertaking today.

Colin is looking at me with concern.

‘It’s not really a place for a young…’ He trails off, as if he’s remembering that he’s not allowed to end that sentence with the word lady anymore. ‘Untrained staff member,’ he says, after a long pause.

‘I’m trained,’ I say. If once crawling under my rented sharehouse to try to find a phone that had slid through an unacceptably large gap in the floorboards and seeing a spider and screaming and thrashing and backing out and buying a new phone rather than going down there again counts as ‘trained’.

‘You’re in open-toe shoes,’ he says, looking even more doubtful.

‘They’re sturdy,’ I say. ‘Very sturdy. Like a boot in sandal form.’

They have no grip at all, so I’m probably going to be the one to break a hip, but I push that thought from my mind.

‘Okay,’ he relents. ‘You’ll need these.’ He hands me a shovel, gloves and a garbage bag. ‘For the body.’

‘The body. For touching the dead body. Okay. I can do this.’ I repeat the mantra as I descend into darkness, bag and torch tucked into the waistband of my pants. I can do this. I can do this. Handling dead animals does not fall into the scope of my job, technically, other than in the sense that the scope of my job is wide enough to cover almost anything. I’m Hillary’s personal assistant but everything is personal to her, and the wider my job is the more bad stuff I have to do, yes, but the more good stuff too. I’m doing a lot of work on the festival; she’s giving me the opportunity to weigh in on programming, sit in on meetings, to have a voice. To feel like I matter again. I can put up with a few side quests into the depths of hell if I also get to help put together a panel on the topic of complicated female friendship in fiction. Or maybe my bar is now so low I’ll do anything for employment that feels meaningful.

‘What do you see?’ Colin calls down the hole.

I move the torchlight around. Something scurries. Spiderwebs glint.

‘I can’t see anything dead.’

‘Go further in, it’ll be hidden behind something.’

I walk further in, use my gloved hands to push aside spiderwebs, the only thing stopping me from screaming is that I’m sure Colin will try to hurry down the ladder if I do, but the oppressive heat and the smell and the dust and the cobwebs and creatures scurrying and other creatures smelling are all pushing me to my limit.

‘Follow the smell of death,’ Colin calls down helpfully.

I close my eyes and breathe in quickly, trying to focus only on the smell. Go that way, I tell myself, like I am some kind of smelling oracle. I’m right because behind a few cardboard boxes, which I move with a deep full-body shudder at what might appear, there is the body of a large, dead possum.

I gag and swallow down a scream of revulsion.

Right. I have gloves on and I just need to shovel it up and put it in the bag. Its dead eyes are staring at me. I will probably see them in my mind before I go to sleep for the rest of my life.

One quick motion and it’s over, I tell myself.

I hold my breath and bend down and scoop up the possum and shove it in the bag and twist the bag shut. My heart is pounding. I feel like I’ve just performed open-heart surgery.

‘You okay?’ Colin calls.

‘Yes. Got it. I’m coming up.’

‘Well done, very well done,’ he says. He sounds genuinely impressed. ‘You’re a natural.’