WesterlyMagazine

‘Street Fight’ by Franchesca Walker

This short story by Franchesca Walker was published in Westerly 69.1, and we’re thrilled to make it freely available for everyone to read here on the Editor’s Desk.

Franchesca Walker is a Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand and European) writer and storyteller who grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and is gradually learning to call Australia home. She has been published on both sides of the Tasman Sea, most recently in SBS Voices, Journal and Headland.

Street Fight

It was eleven o’clock in the morning and already forty degrees outside. We’d kept the blinds closed and set ourselves up in front of the fan but sweat still pooled beneath my thighs. Alex lay next to me on the couch, dressed only in his undies and watching Friends reruns on TV. I scrolled through my phone, counting down the hours until sunset.

A post from James (No. 15) on our street’s social media page caught my eye. Just in case anyone ever needs an ambo or firey, he’d written and attached an article describing how an ambulance heading to an emergency had been forced to do a U-turn and find another route because the cars parked along our street made it too narrow to get through.

Carol (No. 121) had commented underneath, blaming the weeping peppermint trees on the verge. The council should get rid of them and build car bays instead. I’m sick of our mirrors being clipped by people speeding down the street.

I read it to Alex, who scoffed. ‘Her cars are getting clipped because they’re hanging out in the middle of the bloody road.’

Carol drove an SUV, her husband Sarvesh had a ute. They were both massive—their bonnets came up to my shoulder—and incredibly shiny, courtesy of the hours Sarvesh spent washing them every weekend. He’d back them onto the verge until their boots were in line with the footpath, their headlights hanging out over the road. Then he’d drag the hose from his front yard and spend a good hour circling one, then the other, watering, soaping, watering again. Alex and I glared as we walked past, raising our voices about how disrespectful it was, taking up so much public space, wasting so much water on cars. We only did this if no one was outside, though—when Sarvesh was there, we’d wave and smile and yell a cheery hello, waiting until we were past the next house before muttering how rude he was.

Other people on our street liked Carol’s comment—first one, then three, then twenty-seven.

Agreed, Allan (No. 65) replied. Accident waiting to happen. I saw a car come from the Sefton end the other day and only just miss a car coming from the other direction. Not enough visibility.

His comment got a bunch of likes too, the number of blue thumbs climbing faster than an Oxbridge old boy up the corporate ladder. Carol evidently saw this as an endorsement of her proposal because a couple of weeks after James’ original post, she wrote her own: In light of Sandon Street’s widespread support for the creation of car bays, I have made an e-petition requesting the City remove the trees from the verge and replace them with parking.

She attached a link to the e-petition and asked everyone to sign.

I was down by the river when I read what she’d written. It was my Saturday ritual—I’d spend an hour or two watching swans waddle across the park while screaming kids tried to catch them, checking social media when that got boring.

‘What the hell?’ I exclaimed, startling a man walking past with his dog. I hadn’t cared when Carol’s carparks were hypothetical but now she’d gone too far. I pictured the eighty-year-old trees wrapped in guide ropes, heard the buzz of chainsaws as they were brought down one-by-one.

Clicking on the comment box beneath Carol’s post, I typed, I don’t agree trees should be sacrificed for carparks. They lower the temperature and, considering the summer we’ve had, I would’ve thought everyone would be in favour of that. Our city has the lowest tree canopy of all the capital cities in Australia. According to the ABC, less than twenty per cent of the city is covered.

I attached the article that I’d quickly googled to add weight to my argument. I wanted to add, Maybe limit your family to one goddamn car and buy smaller vehicles, Carol, but decided against it. Based on how the administrator (Antonio (No. 18)) had dealt with past controversies on the page, I knew he’d claim it breached community standards and ban me. Although I liked the idea of scrolling social media without being assaulted by posts about dodgy-looking people testing car doors late at night or asbestos at a nearby worksite, I also didn’t want to miss the offers of free lemons or free furniture that popped up between the bouts of neighbourly paranoia.

Jeanine (No. 45) messaged me that evening while I was in our courtyard watering the silverbeet, the only vegetable that had made it through summer. Switching the hose to my left hand, I pulled my phone from my pocket and read what she’d written.

Saw your comment under Carol’s post and 100 per cent agree. I’ve begun an e-petition to counter hers. It’ll be considered by the Council at its next meeting. Maybe you wanna come?

Across the street, the garage door at No. 10 slowly opened and our neighbour Rosa emerged like a cuckoo from some bizarre suburban cuckoo clock—yoga pants and sandals, hair pulled back in a ponytail, leaf blower in one hand. She worked down one side of her driveway and up the other in a drunken zig-zag pattern, the leaf blower’s erratic whine piercing the air. Every day was the same: the annoying noise, the obsessive maintenance of order. It drove me insane.

I bet Rosa would jump at the chance of getting rid of the trees, I thought.

I messaged Jeanine back: Yup. I’m in.

The public gallery was already packed when I arrived at the council chambers, although most of the seats were empty. People huddled in small groups along the walls, shooting glances at one another across the room. Like me, they held one of the pamphlets that had been laid out next to the door, explaining the process the meeting would follow.

Carol held court down the front, next to a low wall dividing the gallery from where the councillors sat. Surrounded by her supporters, she preened, greeting each new arrival with a royal incline of her head. Jeanine was on the far side of the room, locked in an intense conversation with a man with a weathered face and shoulder-length grey hair. An Akubra in hand, the man made short, jabbing motions to emphasise each of his sentences while Jeanine nodded vigorously, her thick-rimmed glasses slipping a little further down her nose with each nod. Making my way over to them, I introduced myself to the man, who wrapped my hand in a tight grip and barked out a sharp ‘Greg,’ and made small talk until the meeting began.

 ‘Item eight, petitions.’

The mayor’s voice jolted me out of the stupor I had fallen into. For over an hour, the council had waded through the minutiae of local government. Adopting the previous meeting’s minutes, councillors’ leaves of absence, declarations of interest—each item was so boring that I’d been lulled into a sort of a bureaucratic coma. Hearing the word ‘petition’, I perked up and leaned forward in my seat; others around me did the same.

The mayor continued. ‘Do any councillors have petitions to table?’

 A small, bird-like woman raised her hand. ‘I have a petition from Carol Kaul to remove the trees from the verge of Sandon Street and replace them with car bays.’

Next to me, I felt Greg tense. He began bouncing his leg up and down, the Akubra he’d rested over his knee like a cowboy on a bucking bull.

‘Reasons for the request include the narrowness of the street,’ the councillor read from a sheet of paper, ‘and resulting issues caused by street parking and the damage caused by tree roots and leaves to residents’ properties’.

This was obviously too much for Greg. ‘Dendrophobes!’ he yelled.

The entire chamber turned to look at him. The councillor, who’d taken a breath before reading the next part of the summary, sat with her mouth open like a hooked fish slowly dying on a pier.

‘Dendrophobes!’ Greg yelled again, just in case anyone hadn’t heard him the first time. ‘They’re afraid of trees, that’s all it is. Terrified of leaves and bark and, and—’ he stuttered, struggling to find another part of the tree to list, ‘—and NATURE.’

Carol, twisting in her seat, glared at Greg. ‘Would you shut up?’

Ripping his Akubra from his knee, he waved it in her direction as if trying to erase her words from the air. ‘This is a public proceeding. I have a right to be here and have my views heard.’

Rosa, sitting next to Greg with only a single empty seat separating them, took up Carol’s cause. ‘Yes, but you don’t have a right to interrupt proceedings.’

I bloody knew she’d do anything to get rid of those leaves, I thought, looking around Greg’s substantial body mass and catching her eye. I pursed my lips and slowly shook my head. This obviously enraged Rosa, because she proceeded to roll up her procedures pamphlet until it formed a mini bat and reach across no man’s land to smack Greg on the arm. Greg, who had, until then, been focusing his attention on Carol, leapt at the minor assault, causing his Akubra to fly from his hand and across the gallery and catch a small boy in the face.

Then it was all on. Like a crowd enraged at a bad umpiring call, we leapt to our feet as one. Greg seemed to have become possessed with the spirit of a car dealership’s waving inflatable tube man, flailing his hands while making groans usually reserved for cartoon ghosts and calling, ‘I’m a big scary tree!’

On my other side, Jeanine was stomping her feet and screaming so loudly I temporarily lost hearing in one ear. Someone—I didn’t see who—tore up their procedures pamphlet and began flinging tiny bits across the room. Flecks of spit hit my forehead and I briefly wondered whether it belonged to me or someone else, before realising I didn’t care. At the end of the row, a girl, aged about seven, dropped to the ground and covered her head with her arms. Swear words—the kinds I never thought neighbours would’ve known—were flung from one side of the room the other like a perverse game of table tennis.

Down the front, Carol banged the dividing wall and yelled, ‘Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.’

On the other side of the divide, a staff member hustled councillors out a side door. I caught a glimpse of a councillor’s face as she left; she looked shocked and disgusted but also strangely enthralled. Her expression reminded me of how I’d felt, years ago, when I’d seen a cockroach dragging a cigarette down the footpath.

This is definitely going to be in the news tomorrow, a small part of my brain thought as I leapt on my seat and started making leaf blower noise in Rosa’s direction.

It rained the night before the meeting, thick heavy drops pummelling the street and pooling in the gutters. That morning, Alex and I walked down to the river and stared at the water. Full of sediment, it churned downstream in one seemingly undividable mass, ignoring the traditional boundary between river and land, making it impossible to say where one ended and the other started. I heard a dull thump upstream and, turning, saw a log ricochet off the bridge.

More rain was predicted. Some meteorologists said it was an atmospheric river where water vapour was sucked from the ocean and dumped on the land, but others said we’d never experienced something like that before and doubted we’d start now. No-one on Sandon Street suggested the meeting should be called off. Caught in the middle of a staring competition, neither side wanted to blink first.

We met halfway down the street, outside numbers 70 and 71. Neutral territory, Jeanine and Carol had decreed, after their owners had told both of them to piss off when they’d knocked on their doors seeking support for their petitions. Someone had placed orange traffic cones across the street to stop cars from driving through and stuck a sign on each one: Sandon Street Conference. Please Find Another Route.

Alex and I each carried a dining chair as per the directions on the street’s page. We wore waterproof jackets and woollen hats. Ready to ride out the storm, both environmental and street-wise, I joked.

A middle-aged man, who I recognised from the page as Allan (No. 65), came out his front gate as we neared the meeting point, carrying a collapsible table. For some reason, he’d decided to erect it before leaving the house and so hunched over, his arms stretched to grasp either side. His not-inconsiderable belly sat on the tabletop like an uncooked pudding.

‘Need a hand?’ Alex asked, giving his chair to me and reaching for one end of Allan’s table.

Allan reared back as if Alex was about to punch him. ‘What side are you on?’ he spat. ‘Parking bays or trees?’ His eyes flicked from Alex to me, trying to align our faces with our profile pictures and any views we’d posted on the page.

Alex took a step back. ‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t want a tree-loving hippie touching my table,’ Allan replied and, finding his answer in our shocked expressions, continued into the street where he lowered his table with a thump.

Directly opposite, Jeanine sat behind a massive jarrah table with Greg and a handful of other people I’d met in the council foyer after the now-infamous meeting. We placed our chairs behind them and silently watched our neighbours gather around Allan’s table, the men greeting each other with a firm handshake or slap on the back, the women waving, heavy bangles jangling on their wrists. They did their best to ignore us, but every so often one of them looked our way as if to check we weren’t advancing on them.

The rain arrived before the meeting could begin. There wasn’t much warning, just a clap of thunder so loud it shook our table. Torrents—sitting in the middle of Sandon Street, I finally realised what the word meant. Water fell from the sky as if each raindrop was trying to set an individual speed record, the gutters filled then quickly overflowed, the street was soon covered in an inch of water.

Yet if you’d stumbled across us at that precise moment, you would have thought it was a beautiful summer’s day. Our faces were scoured red by the rain, our waterlogged clothes hung from our limbs like Spanish moss, and it became difficult to see each other through the watery veil descending from the sky, but none of us moved. We all remained on our respective ends of the street, glaring in the increasingly low light, daring each other to break first so we could claim the moral victory.

Couldn’t even handle a bit of rain, we’d crow at their retreating backs. Obviously not that committed to the cause if they run at the first sign of bad weather.

Our impasse was broken by the river bursting its banks. The roar reached us first, then the cracking of toppling powerlines and screaming house alarms set off by the power outage. The world suddenly seemed upside down and the wrong way round; I could no longer tell what order things were happening in and I couldn’t say with any certainty where the earth ended and the sky began. It simply seemed as if we had been engulfed in a world of water. It came from all directions—beneath our feet, above our heads.

Jeanine yelled at me, but I failed to catch her words. Seeing my confusion, she pointed at the nearest peppermint tree, turned, and waded towards it. Alex grabbed my hand and followed, yelling at others to head for the trees. Some did, using the nearest branch to hoist themselves into the canopy, but others began making their way home. Maybe they thought it was safer there.

Jeanine and Alex climbed the tree and reached down to pull me up. They straddled a branch each, while I stood in a fork and clung to the trunk. We had to move twice, climbing higher as the water rose. Jeanine threw off her glasses—with so much water covering them, she couldn’t see anything anyway. Through the leaves, I glimpsed people being knocked down by logs barrelling down the street or losing their footing and being swept away. There were torn bits of colourful paper being tossed about in the water.

 At one point, Carol’s SUV floated past with Carol—who must’ve made her way home when the water started rising—spreadeagled on the roof. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her eyeliner, usually so impeccable, was running down her face. I reached out instinctively, yelling at her to grab my hand, while Alex held the back of my jacket and anchored me to the tree. She turned towards my voice and, after flicking the water from her eyes, spotted me. I thought she lifted her hand as if she was about to take mine, and I leaned further out, causing Alex to grunt with effort. But I must have been wrong because her fingers never touched mine and the last thing I remember was her lying with her cheek against the roof of her SUV like a lover as they were both carried down the street.

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