Fiction

Burn⁸

An old ex of mine would grumble that the work they did, their day job, was beneath them. They were an artist in their not day job, their real job, and not at all untalented, working at huge scale and hyper-fine detail in pencil, portraits so large and close that the face within the frame would show a forehead or a chin, but never both; a nose and one ear, but never both. The works were beautiful but unsettling. Stunning on the gallery walls, but not something, I’d always try to console, that many people would be keen to hang on their living room wall. Especially not the subjects themselves: it is frightening to get that close to your own skin.

So on the side they worked for three hours on weekday mornings, two hours in the afternoons at a before- and after-school care centre, setting up art activities in between feeding the kids Cruskits spread with Vegemite or cottage cheese. It must have been noisy, messy, chaotic: all the things that children are and do best. It was most likely exhausting. It is beneath me, my ex would say, not often, but often enough that I came to expect it, that I remember it still, all these years later.

I never answered. I always wanted to say that to consider any work beneath you means you think the people who do that work are too.

I’m thinking about this while I stare at a new set of photos on my computer screen, all fish-eye lens to make the rooms look bigger and amped-up light to make them brighter. Sparse furniture, plush rugs. Spacious Family Home, I know I’m supposed to write. Modern Urban Oasis. Beautifully proportioned, open-space layout, sun-drenched courtyard etc etc. It’s not that the work is beneath me, but the phrase recurs because, I think, it is work I could do in my sleep.

And then, as always when I despair like this, I remind myself of a friend who has it worse. The copy she writes is for appliances (“there’s only so many ways you can describe whitegoods”) and, more often than not, includes vibrators within its remit (“there are only so many synonyms for sensual, and most you’re not allowed to use”).

And yet it is a special kind of soul-destroying work to pay your ever-increasing rent by helping to sell homes for ever-wilder prices to the very people who get to set the rents that mean the chances of you ever buying a home yourself move further and further away. Great Investment Opportunity. Guaranteed Returns. Developer’s Dream.

The agents know I’m not one of them. It’s in my clothes, maybe: no matching skirt and jacket, sensible, scuffed shoes. It’s in my hair, which defies any and all attempts at ruliness, my use of words like “ruliness”, my inability to hide my horror at the sales figures they throw around offhandedly. The agents aren’t unkind, but it’s clear I am an unknown entity to them; some strange alien child who’s somehow sitting in a corner of their office. I never meet the clients.

The agents get commissions and speak about their own investments in other, outer suburbs. They complain about their tenants and their demands for urgent repairs. They gift buyers French champagne when they sign contracts. I write descriptionless descriptions of shiny, shiny kitchens and bathrooms with smooth stone tubs. Contemporary Style. Modern Fittings. Luxuriously Appointed.

The Macquarie Dictionary word of the year, for 2023, was cozzie livs: noun, Colloquial, cost of living [humorous play on COST OF LIVING].

Dual-Level Architectural Brilliance. Contemporary Living.

Also on the longlist, boreout: noun, Colloquial, a state of demotivation or dissatisfaction in one’s job, brought about by a lack of interesting work. [BORE² + (BURN)OUT, modelled on BURNOUT].

See also, I add, BURN⁸: to feel strong passion: she was burning with anger.

An ex of mine came from a moneyed family, though this was a fact she kept quiet – something I have since learnt is common in people of her background who work within the arts. It isn’t cool, I guess, or it’s somehow slightly embarrassing, so they pretend to be as excited about the fancy finger food at festival launches as the rest of us and complain about cozzie livs in chorus too. The penny didn’t drop for me until I met her family, drove to her parents’ Spacious Family Home in a Leafy Street, backing onto a park and Offering Harbour Views, albeit in slivers. It was her brother’s 30th, and there were caterers, there were waiters in white shirts and bow ties keeping everyone’s glasses full, there was an eight-layered cake from a celebrity pâtissier and two lanky Afghan hounds looking on longingly from the balcony, their hair sleeker and far better groomed than my own. I complimented my ex’s mother on a painting near the kitchen door, an interior with a balcony view over water, curved lines, cerulean blue. I told her it reminded me of Brett Whiteley. It is a Whiteley, she replied.

I hate all of this, my ex had said as we drove away, hours later. This is why I moved away.

I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I still can’t.

The agents make strings of phone calls after 5pm, because it’s a good time to catch people after work. I don’t stay back, and this too is a signal of my strangeness. I walk home most days, rather than face the crowds and chaos of the peak-hour trains, passing through three Highly Desirable suburbs and into mine, much less so. It’s late summer, the heat still radiating off the footpaths, and my sensible shoes move swiftly along the ground. There are flowerbeds of leggy geraniums, of sago palms and fernery, there are cats perched like imperious statuary on front fences, pittosporum and frangipani in full and falling bloom. You should just take an Uber, one of the agents suggested one day. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what to say.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 11, 2025 as "Burn8".

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