When he was alive, Jacob had a saying and that saying was: fuck those fucking sons of bitches. Actually, it was all one word: sonsabitches, as Jacob didn’t care about “that fucking shit like correct grammar and stuff”. He said it now, conversationally, over his cornflakes, while I complained about Rita-the-Receptionist, bitch extraordinaire at my office.

“Fuck those fucking sonsabitches.”

“Yeah thanks,” I said. The greatest thing is that the way he said it seemed joyful, even said casually, even over cornflakes. Everything he did was joyful, in a way—he smoked joyfully, his anger was joyful, his insults, everything. All the words that came out of his mouth were said with an innate rightness, of possibility and pure emotion. It must have been a relief to just let such pure emotion run you. Sometimes I can feel the weight of all my stupid things left unsaid, in my stomach lining or my chest, and it makes everything I do or say feel tainted with the same weight. I’d have bet anything Jacob didn’t feel that heaviness.

This was the last day before everything changed, and it was one of those days where the frost was beginning to bite your toes in the morning and you realise: hey, winter, having the benefit of being not summer, also corresponds with coldness. Also that day, Hurlock’s Law said This Triangle Has Four Sides—Shanice had made up this one—and she’d scrawled it in her loopy strange handwriting on the whiteboard over Jacob’s head. Under the words she’d drawn a picture of… a triangle. Three sides.

“What the fucking fuck?” Jacob had said incredulously.

“The fourth side is time,” Shanice had said. Serenely. A philosophy major. She smiled at Jacob, smiled at the scrawled crazy loops of her Hurlock’s Law, smiled at the ceiling. Shanice and her triangle, with Time Added.

I went to work and Jacob ate his cornflakes and then I guess something else must have happened. I don’t know what, or I’ve forgotten.

↓

Hurlock’s Law also said—unwritten, but vocalised by Jacob and myself—that Hurlock’s Law Shall Be Ever-Changing and Flexible as Dictated by the Extremely Good-Looking and Sexy Owners of Hurlock’s Distinguished House (myself, and Jacob—Hurlock had been his uncle). Once Toddy pointed out that if Hurlock’s Law was so ‘ever-changing and flexible’, it was hardly a law at all, was it?

Toddy studied engineering (“like a fag,” Jacob said, grinning) and was concerned about: “whether some laws were really laws or not. I mean, laws as defined as something scientists would agree is ever-present and always acting, which I would argue that Hurlock’s Law is not if it keeps changing.” He spoke, as always, slightly harried, too-fast, the sort of guy who has to spit out his argument because other people lost interest in what he was saying. That night, Hurlock’s Law had changed to “TODDY IS A GIANT WANKER” and I’d written it with dramatic relish. All caps. Toddy kept coming over to our place all the time, even though I guess we didn’t treat him too well. He must have liked it anyway, because he always showed up, and it was kind of nice having him around really, another person to pass the time with—razzing and talking shit.

He must have especially liked Jacob, because he stopped coming round.

Facts about Jacob:
• wore the same jeans every day,
• was a joyful smoker,
• favourite movie: Pulp Fiction (he loved the scene with the adrenalin shot to the heart),
• favourite song: Ace of Base; The Sign, and
• he worked at a funeral home.

Once, someone said it was ironic that Jakey had worked at a funeral home, considering, and isn’t it strange how life turns out. I don’t remember who it was, but I do remember Toddy. He broke and lunged at whoever it was, this callous speaker. Toddy was a weak kid. He could have been pulverised.

Toddy and me stopped talking really. Everyone else disappeared, but I kept seeing Toddy around, all over the place. I saw him and he never mentioned it. Wasn’t it killing him as well? He knew it as well as I did—he knew, he knew and he knew, a million times he knew. Instead of bringing up Jacob, he was insulting. Manipulative. Intentionally obtuse. Maybe he hated me the same way I hated him; the same hate which was both a form of I need you here and please just leave me.

Or maybe he just plain hated me.

↓

When I go to work, everyone’s eyes slide past mine and conversations seem to fade as I approach. I see Rita-the-Receptionist clutching an armload of files and trying to look busier than she really is, so I stare at her as she scuttles past, little and tubby and rodent-like. I feel powerful and detached, I feel vindictive, I feel drunk. Fuck those fucking sonsabitches.

I sing under my breath. Hurlock’s Law says: you exist. Hurlock’s Law says you exist. You exist. You exist. Hurlock’s Law says, he says.

I lean across my desk, towards where Michael is already typing away. I can’t concentrate on the screen for long enough to tell what he is writing. Maybe it’s poetry. Maybe Michael is a poet, in his starched white shirt and balding head.

“You’re very late,” he says.

“Never give up on your poetry, Michael,” I say. He snorts, quietly, so nobody else hears.

“You know they’re going to fire you,” he says. A poet man. Still typing, and he looks at me.

“Yes.”

“Probably today.”

I stand up from my cube. Everything is beige and beige, and it’s been beige forever. Something hurts and I don’t know what. “I’m going to leave now then,” I tell him, in what I think could be a sober and dignified voice. He nods like he thinks it’s a good idea.

“That’s probably a good idea,” he says.

↓

Outside, on the street, nothing feels like a good idea.

The problem is, everywhere you go you’ve been before, and everywhere you go has memories attached. That’s just too much to bear sometimes. I fell in love for the first time when I was sixteen, and then I fell painfully out of love when I was seventeen, and having to live with the memories of that love felt like it was going to kill me. It would be fine if only it weren’t for the memories. Clustered at street corners, curled around traffic lights. Certain shops I couldn’t enter any more. I remember how every song used to be about me and when they started being about other people.

I don’t know where to go, so I go home to my mother’s house. I don’t have my key, so I break a window and sleep on my childhood bed.

↓

I’ve always walked a lot.

I walk past the casino. Nothing there, don’t slow down. Towards the river. It’s very still. Like everything is waiting. Cross the road. No cars, except in the distance, traffic lights red and green on your skin. Cross the road. The strangeness of wandering the city streets when no one is around. Like the end of the world. Nonsense. There is only the dark here; people sleep at night, that’s what people do.

The sidewalk. The bridge. You exist, you exist.

Walk along the bridge, with South Bank in the distance. Buildings on both sides, water in the middle. The bridge. The sides. The metal bars. The water. A roaring in my ears. Jacob over cornflakes. Jacob in the morning. Joyful swearing.

I put my hands on the metal bars. It is cold, it is cold, it is cold. The freezing metal feels like relief. You exist, you exist.

On bad days, when everything seemed stale and no rain even fell to ease the feeling of waiting, Hurlock’s Law said simply do not be afraid. On dark nights. The river of ink. The river of forgetting. The metal under your hands.

Janika Dobbie is an eighteen-year-old Brisbane girl studying physics and english literature at the University of Queensland. She’s into comics about dinosaurs, and also, sometimes she writes things. This is her first thing published.