The Standard

Best, she thought, were the bees.

She pulled up again, out of breath, resting on the black stone of the old fountain in Martin Place. There was no water in it, but people had packed the basin full of soil and grown up all sorts of things: tobacco flowers shot their purple and white stars around her head and further along, the arrow heads of purple joeys and fat, red bottlebrush. In amongst this were clumps of basil and parsley. There was no order, like someone had discarded a rug in the corner of a messy room, and the bees, drunk on pollen, meandered through it.

It was a place to sit and watch and remember now as she took in the people. The looks were different to that time before. It was the pre-infant bump probably, and many of those who paid her any attention were smiling when they looked north and caught her eye.

It was just about here twenty years ago when a fellow, pretty face glowing from the reflection of two thousand dollars of phone, nearly knocked her onto the road. She’d pulled herself up onto her bum and he was down there picking up his phone bits. That manicured face of his stared at her.

“Fuckin’ reffo.”

She knew what a reffo was even then, but was that her? She was born in Randwick, through Mum, via Hong Kong and London.

Was I part fuckin’ reffo? she thought now. Half -and- half fuckin’ reffo? 0.3… fuckin’ reffo?

Her aunties, Seh-Seh and Kat Yi-Yi, had pulled her to her feet, fucked off the fund manager and dried her eyes and elbow.

She smiled at the thought of them. Now the aunts are either insane or dead and the beach begins at Bondi Junction. She supposed that makes everyone a fucking reffo.

What she liked and envied now were the shoes. She sat, lost in dreams, and counted five pairs of colourful, beautiful trainers in various stages of disrepair. The weeks before the plastic ban, back in ’29, people panic-bought like tins of beans before a cyclone. Mae wished she’d been one of them as she compared her own dangling, ankle-length black bug stompers.

Even so, she had what was in the pack on her back.

That was enough to get her moving. Within a minute she was up over Castlereagh St and here it was on her left, The Bank of Australia.

The state didn’t do grandeur anymore, at least on the outside. Any signs of its past life had been chiselled off years ago and nobody was wasting water polishing a rock wall. Still, it had windows of actual glass, which said something these days. In the right one, taped over the busted stock exchange board, were the current rates. There was no official exchange, but people still had pretty stuff that other people wanted to buy from them. They needed a place to keep it and a price.

Inside was the original opulence. Marble pillars, relics of dead gods and empires, held the roof, and everything that was banned outside was conspicuous inside: mirrored marble benches, golden fittings, clean shaven and coiffed people.

No neckties, Mae thought as she approached the counter. There’s only so much you can get away with, even in here.

One of the elegant few approached the counter. “Can I help you, Miss?”

“Yes, I have an appointment. An exchange.”

She was led behind the counter into a glass-walled room from which she could witness other deals being negotiated in silence around her.

“Mae Allport? I’m Phillip.”

Phillip ushered her to a chair with an elaborate ringmaster’s confidence. He was the first of them she had had time to really look at, and what she saw was a smudged, cracked window into the past. Phillip’s fancy black pocket handkerchief had sweet purple-pink threads running through it like an old liquorice lolly, and some of these had come steadily undone. The suit itself was clean and hugged him in all the appropriate spots, but some of these spots were rubbed smooth from overuse. It was this, and having the treasure safely behind stone, that calmed her.

Phillip followed her eyes and pulled at one of the threads, giving up as soon as he’d made it worse.

“I understand you have something to sell… Do you mind if I take a look?”

Mae watched. Phillip’s hand had wandered back to the stray thread. He was young and fidgety. First big fish probably; a decent commission.

Mae smiled. “I had the feeling, talking to your boss on the phone, that I’d already sold it.”

He grunted. “Yes, sure. Of course, no, we’re happy to buy. It’s just a matter of price. If you’ve been following it, you’d notice that it’s gone off the boil a bit, so…”

Mae grabbed her sack. The thing Jane had told her was don’t mess about with them. Their magic, Jane called it their juju, was gone, it went the way of hedge funds and Ferraris. Bermuda was an atoll now.

“Look, I had a price agreed with Sharon. I had a slightly weaker one with your competitor half a block from here. And I’ve got this little one here- she patted her stomach. And my thighs are stuck together and my haemorrhoids don’t like your hard leather chair. So, I’m going to stand up and take this elsewhere.”

Phillip was out of his chair.

“No! No look, I’m sorry.” He held out his hand. “No. They tell us to do that. Sorry. It’s just that people sometimes say they’ve got something like this and then it turns out they don’t and we have to ditch the tire kickers. We have an agreement, yes? The price set to the Lego Standard on the 29th?” He leered at her pack. “Provided of course…”

In response, Mae pulled the drawstring on the pack and upended it. The clatter was loud enough to turn heads outside the glass walls as thousands of coloured bricks, a vomiting rainbow, washed out onto the desk and the floor.

Phillip had his commission alright; there hadn’t been a pile like this outside Denmark for at least twenty years. People had started to think a little mountain like this would never be seen again.

As the crackling died to an ebb, Mae thought about that sound again, on the hard-tiled floor of their house, as children. And Kit, dear, lovely Kit, locking the corner pieces into place for her tiny hands.

But there were other little hands to think of now. She looked at Phillip’s dumbstruck face and smiled again.

I can build a house out of this, she thought.

worm's-eye view photography of concrete building