In his costume’s case, however, the middle star was missing. Jack had no idea why this was so. Skewed memory?
Whoever’d been the artist of that original sketch of Southern Cross — the superhero — had obviously been clutching at straws for a symbol of Australianism. To be honest, he might just as well have used the Vegemite logo.
When Jack had once bothered to investigate further, the MADE SIMPLE Self-Teaching Encyclopedia told him the Eureka Stockade was a failed rebellion that lasted just one day. Then again, it ended up inspiring male suffrage and was identified with the birth of democracy in Australia — something everyone had since been deprived of.
Jack returned to the face of this hero, which now annoyed him.
If he looked too long at the flawless mug in the mirror, he felt there was every possibility he’d go blind. He pulled on the mask, and that was somewhat better. It covered everything bar the eyes.
“Done with the preening?”
Jack lifted his gaze in the mirror’s reflection and found Pretty Amazonia standing in the doorway to the bathroom.
She wore her bows and ribbons, leaning against whitewashed wood with her arms crossed, and Jack noted the woman nearly reached the top of the doorframe. Her expression was blank, aside from a vaguely upturned mouth.
“How long’ve you been there?” he asked, without turning.
“Long enough. You all right?”
“Sure.”
“Any aches or pains?”
“Only the ones in my head you warned me about. What’s up?”
“We have a group meeting, another humdrum affair organized by our fearless leader. Lose the mask — we don’t need to follow formalities indoors. But let’s grab coffee this time, so the bugger’s jokes don’t fall flat. Otherwise, it’s downright depressing.”
THE 0R1G1N 0F
S0UTHERN CR0SS
#110
Back in Melbourne, the environmentally lashed, overpopulated last city on earth, Jacob Curtiss lived it up at Hikari Mansion.
Even so, let’s not fiddle round misleading you but leap straight to the point — Hikari Mansion, near the corner of Hope and Elizabeth Streets in the northern suburb of Preston, was a Housing Commission dump.
Likely it’d been named, with perverted jocularity, in homage to the Japanese concept of a ‘mansion’: myriad apartments thrown together in the single building, with each separate flat containing one tiny room and a more compact bathroom. Jacob Curtiss therefore really resided in a box and this box was about twenty square metres.
He’d shared the place with his mother and father, before they were taken away. “Sedition,” the uniforms had said as they shuffled off his parents, with their wrists and ankles shackled, black plastic bags over their heads.
That was when he was thirteen. He’d lived alone in the box for two years.
Jacob had no TV, no electricity — it was cut off when the bills weren’t paid long before — and he stopped going to school on his fourteenth birthday. Figured nobody would notice, or weep, and he’d been proven right.
There were twenty-three other boxes the same size on this floor, twenty-four apiece on the other fifteen storeys of the Housing Commission block. They were shoved full of families and couples and kids and elderly types too afraid to communicate with one another.
Sometimes, when he needed a sense of space, Jacob would trek to an abandoned locomotive graveyard half an hour’s trudge from Hikari Mansion, close by the ruins of Batman Station. There was a gutted carriage there, stripped of anything valuable, parked on uneven gravel since the iron tracks had also been plundered. Usually Jacob sheltered beneath the car with a large sheet of plastic, listening to the rain on top, watching it spatter and torment the mud and eternal puddles.
Most of his time, however, the boy was home.
In his particular 202 cubicle, Jacob hoarded things, mainly books. A number of these had been left behind by his parents, like the dog- eared, constantly underlined and asterisked Penguin Classics paperback of Thomas More’s Utopia, which belonged to Jacob’s father. The others he collected from derelict houses, junk piles and rubbish bins, many of the books water-damaged — yet legible regardless.
There was a black-bound hardback of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, published by ImPress Mysteries, New York, with an old price sticker on the back in Indian rupees (175 Rs).
He had eighteen of the full set of twenty-five volumes of the MADE SIMPLE Self-Teaching Encyclopedia, published far back in 1964, yet still in relatively good nick despite the mould.
One of Jacob’s favourite tomes was a hefty hardcover from 1970, titled This is Australia, by M. Sasek: a simple picture book with vivid red binding that had a painting of a girl holding a koala. She was dressed in a check one-piece with a boater on her head.