There is always rubbish at the South Point landfill. I’ve pushed it around for months now but it never goes anywhere. My boss simply says, ‘make sure the rubbish is gone by next week’. But the next week he doesn’t show up and the rubbish is still there.

For the past two hours the dope has been wearing off and your mother has been wearing you down. She offers you and Lucy a lift home. Even though the thought of catching a crowded tram makes you want to throw up – you can barely stand the touch of your own clothes on your skin – you turn her offer down.

The feet were the first to break away. I put on weight quickly in the months following the fires and so my feet spread out for balance. They reverted to feet from some human prehistory, all stiff hair and hide, the toes blackening. Whose feet are these? I looked on dumbfounded as they tried to stuff themselves back into the shoes at the end of the bed. Stamping around the hotel with that Neolithic gait, the unfamiliar, cavewoman pelvis – and whose feet had I dragged out of the aftermath?

There’s a joke at the resort and on the whale-watching boats. Tourists who are leaving the island pass it on. New arrivals splurt laughter, clap hands to mouths in embarrassment, cast sidelong glances at the skipper of the Moby Dick, then furtively retell and embellish. The whispering buffets Rufus – his hearing is painfully acute – though he knows no malice is intended.

Hannah replied to my Facebook request for friendship by email. Hey Keira, she’d said in the email, what’s it been, one year, two? She was no longer with Thomas, she’d moved interstate and she’d prefer – she wrote – not to use Facebook to maintain contact.

Artists are neither a ‘proletariat’ nor a ‘vanguard’, and they do not make successful ‘revolutionaries’. If they have been, it has only been for a moment before the firing squad or the gulag or the concentration camp has seen to their ignoble demise. Some of the more fortunate are taken up as a permanent class of bohemian émigrés by whatever cities happen to be the cultural centres of their moment.

Devon was at home with his father when it happened, his father’s heart attack. They were having breakfast and then Roland’s eyes blinked and blinked as his mouth opened wide. He tumbled as he tried to find a hold on the kitchen bench. He hit the ground but he still looked as if he were falling on down through the floor.

My brother tends to a nest of prehistoric computer games under his hospital bed. He plays them to access old memories the way some couples use sex toys to create new ones. He once said memories are limited like game cartridges: write-once. Your brain can’t look back and see new details your child eyes missed. Maybe. When I replay the picnic my brother and I had on a roundabout once, my brain is seven again.

The RSL hall stinks of boiled meat, and Reece and Dooley are running late. I’ve got some footage on the mobile from the game this afternoon. At least it’s a distraction, something to help me avoid the small-town desperation milling around. All those slavering mums and dads waiting for their chance to corner me and dump a load of shit about their shitty adolescents.

I’m puzzled by your decision to deny availability to Axcel’s film and photographic archive. Since the technologies being investigated are now, effectively, public domain, you should expect the public to be cynical about appeals to commercial confidentiality. Though it’s our wish to remain open-minded with regard to the efficacy and conduct of your researches, obstructive behaviour will, inevitably, have implications when forming a narrative viewpoint.