Congratulations to our Prize Winners and to all who entered.
1st Prize: Michelle Jardim – The Body For It »
2nd Prize: Maya Linden – Hope »
3rd Prize: William Stanforth – The God of Punching On »
1st Prize
The Body For It
By Michelle Jardim
Your smile doesn’t waver, a symbol of hope, even as your bicep begins to ache from holding your mobile so steady. The photo of Sinead O’Connor forces the barber to squint, tilt his head and purse his lips, as if sucking creative inspiration from the chemical-laced ether. To embolden yourself, you recall the other screenshots occupying your digital storage space: the eclectic Pinterest album of Lt. Jordan from G.I. Jane, Furiosa from Mad Max, Okoye from Black Panther, and Eleven from Stranger Things.
The barber’s pause is pregnant, familiar, and so you brace yourself for the insults framed as good-faith protest, the age-old: ‘It’s bold. Are you sure you can pull it off?’ ‘I mean, sure,’ the barber says instead, straightening. ‘I can do it. But, you know you won’t look like that?’
He scratches the back of his head, entrancing you with the sound of nails against an unburdened scalp—incidental ASMR that makes you shiver with anticipation. ‘Yes,’ you laugh, because it’s funny. Funny that the barber feels compelled to remind you that you are not the stunning Irish singer with her petite frame, dimpled cheeks and arresting doe eyes.
‘If you’re sure,’ he tells you, rolling out the salon stool.
You jump onto the leather with all the sureness of someone who—were it not for the fear of bald spots—would have done it yourself with your brother’s electric razor. In the reflection, you spot the brother in question, Taner, who enabled this decision by introducing you to his tried-and-tested locals.
Like one would a cadaver, the barber cloaks your body in a plastic sheet. Shit, you think, now painfully aware of just how unlike Sinead you are. You see washed-out, blemished skin. Chubby cheeks. Dark eyes that resemble those of a siren scorned.
Before you know it, the razor is passing over your skin, leaving crop-like patterns in your scalp. The thought of accessing all that flaky crust and lathering your exposed follicles in shampoo leaves you pre-orgasmic. Oh, the mere minutes it will take to rinse and dry, you think—sublime!
That night, Taner sends a video to the family group chat. It reveals a physically and existentially lighter you, as you shed the hair-dusted cloak and proclaim to the world, ‘I look so good.’
#
Predictably. That’s how your Year 11 students respond to your buzz cut. All it takes is for Seth, the product of gentle ‘he-didn’t-do-it’ parenting, to bury his mouth into his shoulder and cough, ‘Okay, Britney Spears,’ for the classroom to erupt into giggles. The tastelessness of the comment does little to rile you. Your disappointment stems from it being retro and unoriginal.
You cross your arms and share your unimpressed glare with each cackling student until they press their lips together and avert their gaze. The corner of your mouth lifts, so you spin to the whiteboard before the students can catch and exploit your moment of triumph. ‘Miss Evans?’
‘What?’
‘Are you sick or something?’
You swivel back to reprimand Seth, only to register the visceral reaction of the girl at his side. A prodded anemone, Emily shrinks in her seat. Heart pinched, you try not to hyper-fixate on the eyelashes she attaches with glue, the eyebrows she inks on and the blonde wig she is exempted from tying back.
Collecting a marker, you scribble an essay prompt on the whiteboard, something about the semiotics of hair with a tenuous reference to the curriculum and Raymond Antrobus’s poetry anthology. Then you turn to face your students and demand: ‘Women with hair like me. What do we think?’
‘Miss,’ Seth asks. ‘Are you having a mental breakdown?’
Smiling in the face of smugness, you slap your marker against the whiteboard. It squeaks as you sanitise Seth’s implication: Mental illness. Seth tries again, calling you a ‘they/them’. Gender non-conformity. Queerness.
Reassured that their responses won’t get them in trouble, the class becomes invested and vocal. The responses roll in, and the whiteboard loses its whiteness. Asceticism. Counter-culture. Protest.
In a stroke of pedagogic genius, you’ve segued from personal attacks back to the curriculum. Your students can now draw on Antrobus’s poem Ode to My Hair to discuss the intersecting themes of race, identity and masculinity. Ha, you think, triumphant.
You’re blissfully unaware that Seth’s mother, Mrs Clarkson, will soon demand a meeting with you and the principal, where she will argue that you should be educating her son about Judeo-Christian values and Leni Riefenstahl (even though Seth doesn’t take your Studies of Religion or Modern History classes). She will run her eyes over your body and tonsured head as if you’re a witch or femme tondue, searching for devil marks (cough!—moles—cough!) or hickies left by German soldiers (cough!—strangulation bruises—cough!). Pearls clutched and eyes ablaze, she will exclaim that you are not to radicalise her son with third-wave feminist ideology—certainly not anything about these so-called ‘El-Gee-Bee-Tee-El-Em-En-Oh-Pees’.
#
That night, you agree to join your colleagues at a karaoke bar, desperate to drown out Mrs Clarkson’s diatribe with vodka lemonade and tone-deafness. With more curiosity than judgement, the new school nurse notices that you haven’t touched the chorizo bites.
‘Are you a Buddhist?’ she asks.
Giggling, you explain that you don’t really eat pork. Before she can reply, the chemistry teacher, Simon, leans into her body and whispers something into her ear. You watch his lips drunkenly formulate the sentence: ‘It’s not halal.’
This annoys you. You know your reality to be more nuanced than that, your identity more hyphenated.
‘Gotcha,’ replies the nurse. ‘I’m Samantha.’
‘Aylin.’
‘I got you a margarita,’ Simon interjects, slurring the words into Samantha’s neck. She flinches, mincing a ‘thank you’ through gritted teeth, forcing a smile that falls short of her eyes. It’s gratitude under duress, so you lift your eyebrows to interrogate her reaction—a female Morse Code for ‘do you need rescuing?’
Suddenly, Samantha yelps and points to the stage where your principal is belting The Horses by Daryl Braithwaite. She grabs your hand, but before she can tug you deep into the bowels of the dance floor, you skull the contents of the glass you mistake as your own. Tequila, not vodka, singes your throat. Foul, you think, scrunching up your face.
#
Vision warping, you stumble into the cubicle. You try to drag your undies down your thighs, but your forehead is too heavy. It collapses onto your knees like a cartoonishly heavy anvil. Thunk! Your body follows your head, crumpling onto the tiles. You’re halfway onto your back before the cubicle door is kicked open and the nurse—what’s her name?—enters. You don’t trust your eyes, mainly because the image before them is too debauched, too psychedelic. Like a voyeuristic director’s shot, your gaze pans over her gartered legs, her novelty nurse costume and devilish grin.
Samantha—that’s her name!—straddles you, sinking her body over your hips. You want to protest, but instead, find yourself gripping her waist. Wh—wh—what, you think. Why are you guiding her pelvis back and forth over your own partially bared mound? Why are you letting this happen on the public bathroom floor? Why is arousal flooding your body, and why are her sighs and giggles sending you deeper into decadent delirium?
There’s smugness in the mouth that hovers over your own, forming a perfect ‘Oh’.
‘Wait,’ you gasp, but Samantha’s palms travel past your stomach to cup your breasts, squeezing slightly as if to create more cleavage. ‘I’m not—’
‘Like this?’ she finishes for you.
You shake your head. ‘This isn’t—’
‘Like you?’
‘The time!’ you exclaim. How to explain to the nurse astride you that you’re not sure that she even exists—that you’re questioning what’s real, what’s revelation, and what’s Rohypnol. How to explain that the priority is to call Taner with whatever dexterity remains in your thumbs, not to rub the nipples straining against her costume.
With a sad smile, Samantha begins to dematerialise, but not before she kisses you. It’s warm, wonderful and entirely not real. Because you are alone in the cubicle, and you always were, a shivering, pretzelled body that you can’t untangle, much like the feelings that linger between your ears and your legs as the world begins to darken.
#
When you come to, you find yourself in a hospital room that smells medicinal, somewhat like the tequila you heaved up earlier. When you turn your aching neck to the right and see your therapist, you turn it the other way. To your left, you’re aghast to find nothing and no one. Not Taner, or your dad or your stepmum. No IV drip, plastic stools or side tables for visitors to toss their newspapers. With a groan, you flop your head back to the right. Your therapist is still there, but a notepad has materialised in her lap and a pen between her fingers.
‘Hello, Aylin,’ she says, closing her eyes and nodding, affirming words you haven’t yet verbalised. ‘You know why I’m here.’
You blink hard, hoping it can teleport you to a different hallucination, one inhabited by different ghosts of your long-haired past. Anything other than the wraith that haunts the palliative care ward, the one that resembles you, but with waxy skin, baldness and bruising around her eye sockets.
‘We should discuss your mother, yes?’ your therapist asks, scribbling nonsense onto her notepad. ‘Sorry, did I say mother? I meant your haircut.’
Tapping her pen against the words, your therapist purses her lips as if she’s completing a multiple-choice quiz.
‘It grows back,’ you whisper, but she doesn’t hear you.
‘You seem angrier than usual,’ she notes. ‘Defensive.’
Rage works its way up your throat, proving her point.
‘I mean,’ she muses, gesturing vaguely at your forehead. The tip of her pen draws figurative scribbles into the air as if restoring your natural frizz.
You squeeze tears through your eyelids, thinking that if you cry hard enough, you can leech out the toxins that are tripping you out. But when you open your eyes, your therapist’s face begins to transfigure. One by one, her features are sucked into her skull, first her eyes, then her nose, and finally her mouth, consumed by the prominent and masculine features of your uncle.
‘Get out,’ you croak, your hands beginning to twitch.
‘I like your haircut,’ he tells you, running a callused thumb over your ear as if to tuck a strand behind it. ‘It’s bold, sure, but you have the body for it.’
You follow that lazy, bloodshot gaze down your torso, which is hardly the petite frame associated with being able to ‘pull off’ a short haircut. With horror, you realise that it’s not your body at all—it’s too skinny, too developing, too hairless to belong to any twenty-eight-year-old woman. This is the body you had when you were eleven, only it’s not, not really, because in that ossifying cranium, there’s an adult brain with adult anger; there’s a well-honed fight response that bangs against the walls of your central nervous system, screaming don’t freeze, don’t fawn, don’t flee. So you listen, so you scream—for your mum, your stepmum, your dad and Taner, until those adult lungs in that breastless chest feel just about ready to split.
#
When you were 13, you asked your dad over dinner: ‘Would you still love me if I shaved my head?’
For reasons abstract to you at the time, this question seemed a reasonable way of testing whether a man’s love for you was unconditional. Your dad stopped chewing, his eyes darting to your mum, who reacted even worse to this innocent provocation. Buckling into a fit of sobs, she mumbled an apology and rushed for the bathroom, leaving you and Taner in stunned silence.
Later, Taner would drape an arm around your shoulder. ‘You know she’ll lose her hair, right?’
In time, your dad would answer your question, if not with words. In your mum’s final months, he would act no less enamoured because dead matter refused to grow from her follicles. Despite this, you would repeat your question years later, this time to a university boyfriend. It would make even less sense in this context—you weren’t convinced that this one loved you at all, even with your hair flowing past your shoulders.
‘I mean, if you had cancer or something, I guess,’ he would reply with a shrug. ‘Not if you did it for no reason.’
You would take no satisfaction in the fact that this man would recede in the decades to follow, eventually pilgrimaging to the home of your ancestors for a hair transplant.
#
An air of humiliation, not humility, follows you into the classroom. You feel defeated, no longer able to relate to the short-haired heroines you have screenshotted and Pinterested to death. A week has passed since the karaoke bar incident, and you worry that your absence has shown the class weakness. Worse, you fear that the timing of your convalescence has confirmed their assumptions. A shaved head followed by a week off work? Woman, you reek of a nervous breakdown.
Your students are silent upon your entrance. Uh-oh, you think, as you await the punchline. You imagine the substitute teacher reinforcing ‘Respectful Schools’ messaging, using what almost happened to you as a case study. So you stand before the class, equally as mute, anticipating a slew of jokes.
That’s when you notice the collection of notes and letters scattered across your desk. Welcome back, they say. We missed you, they imply. There’s even a packet of fancy herbal teas and a flower arrangement, both redolent with spring and healing. You open the note attached to the ribboned natives, your heart leaping at the name signed on it.
Unfortunately, you wouldn’t remember how Samantha followed you into the cubicle, so nobody else could. You wouldn’t remember her dropping to her knees to pull up your half-mast underwear. You wouldn’t remember how she turned you onto your side, ensconcing you in her jacket. You wouldn’t remember how she kept your brother on the line while she dialled the ambulance with her own phone. You wouldn’t remember how she screamed at the bar staff and later, the police, that, no, you hadn’t drunk too much, that Simon had obviously spiked the tequila. You would, however, remember her visiting you in the hospital, confirming with the staff who delivered your meals, ‘Hey, no pork, right?’
Back in the classroom, you make a joke to break the silence. ‘Substitute teacher that bad, huh?’
That’s when your gaze catches something in the front row, resulting in a sustained and awkward pause. You squint and fight against the glare streaming through the window. Without eyelashes to accentuate hooded lids and eyebrows to sharpen an otherwise delicately featured face, it takes a moment for you to recognise Emily and her perfectly bald head.
2nd Prize
Hope
By Maya Linden
Reef’s drying wetsuit hangs from the tree like a lynching. Dark human shape. Headless. Empty limbs swaying gently. The wind is rising, shivering bare branches. His car is not in the driveway. Hope is not sure what she’d wanted—to see it there or not.
Hope can be a strange thing sometimes. The girl herself, and the emotion. She hopes sometimes for more pain just to feel something. So, she supposes she hopes that things might end differently tonight—that by dark Reef will be home beside her, under the fleecy grey blanket, his body heavy around hers, cloaking out the ocean chill. Slick and slippery between her legs—against her will. His fingers kneading her nipples until they stand out harder than the cold of 5am last winter. Last winter, she’d run naked but for a white singlet and cotton knickers to the foam of the sea, frothing broken lace at her feet, the sun rising purple and burnt orange over the cliffs; bluff puncturing the sky, dirt red and jagged in the distance.
What had she been hoping for then? Escape? Death? Rebirth? To be some kind of Aphrodite phoenix rising from the waves—returning to him once more as the funny, soft, kind, carefree girl he’d first met? But instead, her hands had turned a pallid yellow, all the blood drained from them—not prettily, but like something dead for a long time—and she’d staggered on numb heels back to her car and turned on the heating while saltwater pooled on the car seat and streamed down her cheeks.
Dusk now and she’s sitting in the driveway. The car radio switched itself off some time ago, but she can’t move. It’s September, but cold is still thinning the air, burning her lips. She’s noticed small pink breaks in her skin opening up in places, scoring her mouth as drought-cracked earth. The tree is a silver birch, and its white trunk shimmers, uncomfortably out of place in this coastal town of towering gums and dense salt bush. She wonders how it got here. How she did. He’d once punched that tree. ‘Couldn’t find anything to box,’ he’d explained, his knuckles bleeding, white trunk streaked with red. She’d crept inside the house and lain down on the queen bed they shared. A steaming summer afternoon then, the blinds drawn down, her nostrils flaring in the humid room. Then they’d fought, and she’d smelled the acrid blast of hops on his breath. Perhaps that was the first night he left. Going, she is never sure where. Leaving her alone in the house, which seems to heave around her, feeling so open on those nights, so exposed. The shattered fencing, the dark uncut lawn, lush and whispering. The shadow of the tree looming too large in the dark—its punched bark hanging, its torn flesh under the porch lights buzzing with mosquitos. She shivered in the heat, unable to sleep, her teeth rattling, dinner uneaten in the sink.
After that she began to imagine car crashes—the thud and crush of metal against her body. It was comforting, the nothingness she imagined came afterwards. When she was little, she had kept snails as pets, gathered from damp garden beds, their shells carefully marked X with nail polish so she could find them again each time it rained. I didn’t understand love then—and maybe he doesn’t now, she thinks. She didn’t see the shell that held them, how thin it was, how fragile. Instead, she would cup them and hug them tight between her palms, squeezing with her fingers until she felt the soft crack, the wetness of their bodies slipping into her hands.
She finally finds enough energy to leave the car and walks past the tree to the front door, entering the house. Perhaps I still haven’t learned not to hold on too tightly to things, she thinks. But it’s me now who breaks. A year ago, when she was living over 100 kilometres away and would only visit on weekends, he would listen at the window for the soft rumble and sigh of her tyres reaching the curb of his street, and run out to meet her, opening her car door and taking her bags. Throwing his arms wide and letting her fall against his warm bare chest—the tattoo there of the lion, jaws gaping, crowning her skull. She longs most for the feeling of those arrivals now, the homecoming of his chest in the warm evenings, her ear pressed to it as she used to listen for the ocean in shells—the roar of his blood, thud of his heart, the internal workings of him that only she could know. Inside, music, soft acoustic tunes, a cheese platter set out, gold glow and sweet citrus scent of a candle. Night falling over the yuccas and courtyard, nothing more wanted.
It’s a different house now, one they’ve taken together since she moved here to be with him. The kitchen is dark and smells of burnt oil and onion, an archipelago of toast crumbs and coffee grounds end at the sink, which is scattered with unwashed dishes. He used to leave notes for her on the kitchen bench if he couldn’t be home when she arrived. Carefully curated treasure hunts of love hearts and ‘babes’ and smiley faces, leading to a box of chocolates or a soft pouch from which shimmering jewellery slid out into her hands. Her eyes stretched wide in wonder, corners of her lips upturned so far it almost hurt.
The benches are empty apart from the crumbs. She opens the fridge—also empty. The tropical couch cushions and throw rug she’d brought from her apartment back home are sprawled in a tangle of pink, orange and grey. Her parents say they called her Hope because they’d hoped so long for her to come to them. Yet for most of her childhood it seemed to her that they had hoped she would just disappear. Eventually she did, skipping to a different city—the foggy windows of an overnight bus cold against her cheek in the morning, polluted sunrise a bruise in the sky. It felt so easy to leave then. So exciting to start her life all over again. Now that prospect is a bone-deep dread. She pads into the bedroom, imagining him there sleeping, and how she would whorl in beside him, coiled against the shape of his limbs, her buttocks pressed to his hips feeling the heat of his body, barely breathing.
Her heart drops at the unmade bed, the vacant space where his pillow should be—the sight of t-shirts and underwear spilled to the floor from a hurried tipping of a dresser drawer into his overnight bag. Something on the bedside table—she reaches to pick up the note, but finds the damp crumple of a used tissue between her fingers. She drops it to the floor and draws the blinds, beginning to shake. Before—before she came, when they could only see each other once a week—he used to leave a cologne-drenched jumper of his with her each time he left, and she’d slept in it, imagining his arms around her. She opens the bottom drawer of the dresser and finds it crushed there, a dark stain on one cuff, moth holes tracing a hungry trail across the pockets now. It smells damp, faintly of sweat. In the bathroom, she searches through his drawer, noticing the items also missing there—deodorant, a razor, hair wax. Her toothbrush alone in the white streaked cup.
At the back of his drawer, she finds the old bottle of cologne. Its pump is broken and no longer releases any fragrance. She shakes it upside down over her palm, and a small drop spreads coolly there, smelling of their first six months, of nights with limbs tangled impossibly, dreaming of a time when he would always sleep beside her.
Tonight, she can’t eat. Her stomach tightens around his absence when he leaves her like this. She undresses and slips under the covers, all the lights out in the gaping house. She thinks of how she read a long time ago that some scientists once planted trees in a controlled environment, a glass bubble—and although they had nutritious soil, sunlight, an ideal temperature, once they reached a certain height, they all fell down. In the end, they discovered that the forces of the wind that whip saplings to and fro, scattering their leaves and shattering their branches, are in fact what gives them the strength to stand, spreading deep roots in resistance. She wonders why it doesn’t feel the same for her—why she is simply tired of having to be strong. All she wants is to curl up under the blanket, a soft thing that does not want to resist anything. That cannot.
Noises shudder from the garden. Wet slap of his wetsuit against the trunk of the tree. Hope wraps herself up in the doona and sheets, the one pillow left, cradling her head. Her brow is tight, eyes heavy. She closes them. Flashes of colour spar inside her lids. She won’t sleep tonight. She imagines Reef’s headlights approaching up the driveway. The slide and clunk of the lock, the front door opening. She imagines the waves taking her, finding the place where they don’t break, where she will. Letting the rip drag her out beyond the horizon, weed and water hollowing her mouth. She imagines car crashes without sound, the crunch of glass, the nothingness that comes after.
3rd Prize
The God of Punching On
By William Stanforth
Back in the Nokia 3310 days, Orhan and I used to fight grown men for fun. We were never cruel and never fought out of hatred or prejudice; we didn’t fight anyone not asking for it or incapable of defending themselves. We just didn’t back down—and back then, on Friday and Saturday nights on Hindley Street, there was no shortage of men looking to scrap.
In almost all cases, it was an unfair fight on paper, where the odds were stacked against us: often three to five young men against Orhan and me, teenagers straight out of high school. The contenders, as we called them, were usually angry, bored and insecure—the kind who’d knock the bag of Hungry Jack’s out of your hand for no reason or punch you in the back of the head because they didn’t like your tight jeans or long hair. Emotionally stunted, they came into the Adelaide CBD looking for violence. But so did we.
#
We got their attention by dressing like indie band boys—arty types. Boys who’d shop at vintage stores and hang out at Jive and listen to jangly guitar bands. Though what they, the contenders, didn’t know was that Orhan was the Roger Federer of punching on, essentially the GOAT depending on who’d seen him in his prime. Built like a Jack Russell, he could move like water, ducking and weaving through flailing punches. At the right time, he’d come in with a lightning-fast jab or an uppercut so heavy the contender would stop cold, and it was lights out.
Of course, I could hold my own, but Orhan was on another level. It was like an art form to him; he was spiritual about it, had a whole philosophy around it, like how much force to exert relative to the threat at hand. He was about finding balance in the chaos. Action and reaction, weight and counterweight. So if a guy had a knife and was swinging it around, Orhan and I would go to extra lengths to disarm him. We’d really rock his world, so he’d think twice about ever doing it again. On the other hand, if a contender was wasted drunk and starting something without even knowing it himself, then he probably didn’t deserve to get his teeth knocked out. In this case, we’d work his stomach and he’d fold, sick almost instantly. After, we’d make sure he and his mates didn’t pass out or choke, even giving them water bottles from the servo. Sometimes they’d thank us and shake our hands.
#
Almost all contenders were shocked by Orhan and me. We’d go down dim alleys with them as they squared up, pushing us, yelling threats. Occasionally they’d give each other that little smirk, and you just knew they thought this was their lucky day—that they’d found easy prey.
But we’d take them down. One by one.
Much bigger than Orhan, I’d usually end up with a few on me. I’d fend them off, blocking and jabbing until Orhan made his way through the group. I’d see each man drop to his knees, stumble into a gutter. Then came silence, followed by groans of pain.
Slowly, the contenders would come back to reality, almost reborn and muttering dreams in a daze. They’d struggle to remember their names or what year it was. Orhan and I would stick around to make sure things hadn’t gone too far.
If all was okay, we’d leave, never turning back, not fearing them chasing after us—because they’d be nursing their wounds or just standing there, wide-eyed, unsure of what had happened, but knowing on some ancient level they’d met their match. Because that’s the effect we had—or Orhan had, at least.
#
Now, in the iPhone 17 era, from my banal, corporate, LinkedIn daydream, only a handful of fights stick out. The first started, as many did, at The Kava Hut on a Friday night. Here, ageing hippies served the namesake beverage and played Bob Marley over the speakers. They didn’t care that we were underage or if we drank cask wine in the back room with its floor of sand and fake palm trees—so long as we were discreet and at least bought one bowl of kava.
This night, I was impatient, keen to get out there to find some contenders, drinking almost like they did.
Orhan told me to relax, to use the time to centre myself, to think about where we were and what we were doing. Why we were doing it.
‘We’re showing men who they are,’ he said. ‘It’ll happen, like it always does.’
‘It’s getting late.’ I checked the time on my phone. ‘It’s eleven-thirty.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘But why not right now?’
‘You’re drunk, excited,’ he said. ‘You’re missing the point.’
‘You dunno what you’re on about,’ I replied, somewhat obnoxiously on reflection. Because he was right: the likelihood of contenders on a Friday night in Adelaide was as sure as the sun rising in the morning.
Not long after, we were in Supermild, and it was after midnight but the crowds hadn’t yet arrived. Sure enough, we found some contenders in the beer garden. Three guys in their 30s wearing suits at a table with a girl who was slumped over, drunk, perhaps sick.
At first, the contenders took no notice of us, as Orhan and I sat at a corner table.
We knew they were up to something immediately: two men sat either side of the girl and the third across from her. You could’ve been mistaken for thinking they were friends, but the way they were talking to her and the way they were laughing—that braying, gleeful laughter—showed they were a special kind.
They were trying to get her to finish her drink, but she couldn’t lift her head. The one across from her said, jeering, ‘Hey—hey bro, uh, I think she wants a cig.’
Another said, ‘Yeah, yeah, she does.’
The third pulled out a pack of smokes and lifted her head by her hair to stick one in her mouth.
She struggled to spit it out and mumbled, ‘No … no … don’t.’
The third produced a lighter and tried to light the cigarette, waving the flame around her hair and in her face. The girl attempted to stand, but the man across from her leaned forward and pushed her down by her shoulders.
She protested, fighting to remain conscious as the laughing continued.
The man with the lighter then lit a lock of her hair. It burst into flames before the girl managed to extinguish it with her hand, yowling.
At this point, almost on instinct, Orhan and I stood and went to their table.
The men turned to us, and the girl freed herself, slipping out from between them and running into the empty bar, weeping, stumbling. I won’t relay the details of the fight, except to say I saw a side of Orhan I’d never seen before. No weight or counterweight. That night, Orhan was an unstoppable chain reaction. He went thermonuclear.
#
After the fight, we jumped the beer garden fence and bolted, parting ways at the northern edge of the CBD and both going to our respective parents’ homes. We were scared this time that we’d gone too far, and I spent the next week checking the news, waiting to see if the cops were looking for anyone after they found those three guys in the state they were in.
But nothing happened—the men must’ve recovered.
The wounds on my fists healed but the scars remained, and the next time I saw Orhan, he was solemn. We agreed that night was a mistake.
‘I broke my rule,’ he said.
I sipped cask wine at The Kava Hut and he sat there, nursing a glass of water.
‘Who knows what they would’ve done to that girl if we weren’t there?’ I said.
‘That’s the point. We don’t know.’
‘Forget about it,’ I told him, knowing he wouldn’t.
That night, for perhaps the first time, I sensed people on the street knew us somehow. That word was getting around.
And I wasn’t wrong; for the next month or so, we had an almost mythical status—mainly Orhan. The girl had told nearly everyone she knew that we’d saved her, that she’d been drugged by those men and she was convinced she was going to die.
So we wandered the streets in our skinny jeans and the contenders somehow knew it—or at least one in their group did and told the others. They’d run away at the sight of us, or if they did approach us it was to sheepishly talk to Orhan. To see him in the flesh.
The man behind the myth. The Adelaide apex predator.
The god of punching on.
#
I lost the last fight. I’d grown tired of everyone in Adelaide knowing Orhan and not me—because I’d never backed down. I’d been there every fight, every scrap. But it was Orhan who got the notoriety.
We started the night at The Kava Hut and I was drinking like I was trying to win a medal in an Olympic sport. Guzzling half coconut shells of wine. Orhan was looking at me in a way that only vaguely suggested he didn’t approve. A subtle look that aggravated me more because I wished he’d just say it: tell me I was behaving like a child, tell me to pull my head in. But he didn’t because he was above putting himself over me, and that made it worse.
As much as I try to rationalise it, years later, the truth is that I was angry, bored and insecure. Just like all the contenders, I was staring into the void of myself, my own fragile ego and precarious manhood. And I wanted to prove myself worthy to the void, let it stare back into me and see something. Anything.
‘Why don’t you just say what you’re thinking?’ I slurred.
‘You okay?’ Orhan said, with sympathy in his eyes.
‘Just say you think you’re better than me.’
‘I don’t think I’m better than anyone.’
‘You would say that, and feel even better about yourself for it.’
He paused, thinking, before saying, ‘I don’t feel that way.’
‘You do. You’re human like all of us.’ I swept my hand towards the west end of Hindley Street. ‘You’re not a god,’ I yelled.
‘I’m gonna go home,’ Orhan said, standing.
But I stood with him, on the sandy floor. He tried to pass me as he went for the exit, but I blocked him. Then he looked me in the eye as though urging me to let it go. To take a breath. Instead, I pushed him, and when he did nothing, only taking a step back to centre himself, I pushed him harder.
One more time he tried to pass me, and again, I didn’t let him.
When I hit him in the chest, he finally reacted, hitting me back the exact same way with the exact same force. This went on, us exchanging equal blows, for what felt like forever. I knew he’d only respond—never initiate. It was as though I was fighting myself in a mirror—some better, stronger version, not weak from booze, undistorted by ego.
Of course, he won.
The last time I ever saw Orhan was as I lay on that sandy floor, my eyes blurred with tears. I never saw him again—not out, not online. That night, Orhan exited The Kava Hut, onto the street, and he did not look back, as I knew he wouldn’t.
