Route 19: Shivaun Plozza
Route 19: The Giants of Albion by Shivaun Plozza
This episode mentions sexual assault — if you or someone you know needs assistance, please contact: Lifeline (13 11 14) or 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732).
Two sisters are side by side on the street. They wear school uniforms, pale blue check and royal blue blazer. One has a ribbon in her hair; she fidgets, looks at her older sister, then down at scuffed shoes. Both girls should be in school, behind the concrete wall they lean against. Instead, they are side by side at the tram stop, waiting.
The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 19 tram, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Credits
Written by Shivaun Plozza
Read by Sarah Vincent
Commissioned by David Ryding
Edited by Elizabeth Flux
Recorded at the State Library of Victoria
Produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton
With music by Steve Hearne
Tramlines is a podcast created by Broadwave in partnership with the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
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Image by Connor O’Brien
The Giants of Albion - Route 19 by Shivaun Plozza
[SFX A tram travels towards the listener. Rumbles along the tracks. People board.]
Intro (various voices): Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines (laughs), Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines, um T-R-A-M-L-I-N-E-S, Tramlines.
[SFX Tram doors open]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: This is Tramlines: part audiobook, part spoken word and part locative literature. These are stories written to be listened to on a tram.
[SFX Tram dings and journeys on. Theme music fades out. Episode theme opens]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Today’s journey is a new fiction work by Shivaun Plozza: The Giants of Albion, read by Sarah Vincent. The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 19 tram, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Sarah Vincent VO: Two sisters are side by side on the street. They wear school uniforms, pale blue check and royal blue blazer. One has a ribbon in her hair; she fidgets, looks at her older sister, then down at scuffed shoes. Both girls should be in school, behind the concrete wall they lean against. Instead, they are side by side at the tram stop, waiting.
“How long?” asks the youngest. She looks over her shoulder.
Her sister does not answer.
When the tram comes—a sleek pill—it hums like something from another world and the eldest sister finds that thought satisfying. She likes the idea of being elsewhere, somewhere impossible.
They board the tram. Three steps. Broken air-con.
It is almost but not quite empty inside—there is an old woman with a shopping trolley, a man humming to himself as he taps out of time against the window, a young woman frowning at her phone, the driver behind glass. The sisters choose four seats at the back and sit diagonally across from each other, their bags resting on the seats beside them.
The eldest sister turns to look over her shoulder through a window stained with sticky child-sized finger prints. There is a funeral parlour across the road that has caught her eye. The carpark is empty but she imagines it full of mourners, swathed in black and weeping. She imagines herself amongst them. Or perhaps it is her in the back of the hearse, caged in wood and satin.
She has always loved to pretend.
Her sister kicks her shin and leaves a streak of dirt. The sister is younger, 14. Her name is Lindsay. There was a great aunt with money, a spinster. They named the sister after her but when the great aunt died the money did not come. What a waste, the mother said.
Lindsay sits with her legs apart despite memories of her mother’s scolding. She hates her name.
“Did something happen?” she asks.
The seat fabric is rough against her bare thighs and her school dress rides up to show the line where she stopped shaving her legs, the golden hairs that catch the late morning sun and sparkle like spun straw. The hem of her dress has a ring of pin-prick holes, stitch marks from when it used to belong to her sister but needed to be let down. The dress has more than one ring of phantom stitches, like the age rings in a tree. This is how old I am, she thinks. I am three stitch rings on the hem of my sister’s school dress.
She kicks again.
“What?” says her sister. She snaps her words like a rubber band. “What do you want?” The eldest sister’s name is Sian. There was no great aunt, this time. It was a little girl. The daughter of the butcher and she had black ringlets and Irish skin. She would buy jelly beans from the mother, who was 17 and just out of school, working in the IGA. When I have a daughter I’ll name her Sian, said the mother.
The little girl grew up to be a waitress and, later, third place in the Miss Victoria pageant and, even later, a woman with a blurred face recounting the details of her assault on the national news. She was such a pretty girl, said the mother.
“Nothing,” says Lindsay.
She notices how the blue of her sister’s dress looks against the swirling green seat pattern. Blue and green should never be seen, her mother says. Her mother says a lot of things.
The tram rattles away. I am excellence, says a sign on the concrete wall of the sisters’ school. I am compassion, says another. I am blue and green, thinks Lindsay. The school fades from view.
When the tram stops again, a woman and two kids climb the steps—a boy and a girl. The boy runs to the middle and stands on the join, the part that swivels when the tram turns a corner. If you stand just right, your body twists, your feet turn in opposite directions, your stomach drops.
The girl grabs her mother’s arm with both hands and drags her toward the front of the tram. When Sian was little she would drag her mother to the front, too. She wanted to sit where she could see the reflection of the driver’s face in the window and pretend she was steering the tram.
The little girl tugs and tugs but the mother slumps in the nearest seat and tells her daughter to sit still and be quiet.
Lindsay looks out the window, at a warehouse covered in posters and graffiti. A woman walks her dogs. On a street corner is a sign for the Big Four Holiday Park. They stayed there once, when Lindsay was nine and the school dress hung in her sister’s wardrobe, pristine and waiting to be worn for the first time. She remembers the blisters of sunburn on her father’s shoulders and making friends with a girl whose name she had already forgotten by the following day and she remembers the envy of seeing her sister in a two-piece bathing suit for the first time. Her mother said Lindsay was too young.
Being too young hadn’t stopped the boy who grasped at the flat planes where her breasts hadn’t grown yet while her nameless friend held her under water until her lungs burnt. She’d thought she was going to die. She sometimes wonders if she did.
She remembers the boy’s name. Ben. He was staying in the caravan next to theirs. He waved at her the next day; smile at the nice boy, her mother said.
Lindsay turns away from the sign. The tram moves on.
“Do you think they’ve noticed?” says Lindsay.
Sian rubs her thumb across the blacked-out screen of her phone. The skin catches in the cracks. She presses her forehead to the window—the action makes her think of that woman she once saw on a different tram who licked the poles when she thought no one was watching. But she wants to get close—as close as possible—as they pass the other school. Because she might see him, the boy who used to send her texts. She read his words like poetry but he was just a boy and the words were just words. And he doesn’t send her texts anymore.
You didn’t know I was a witch, she thinks as the tram passes his school and she curses him. He will cough up his heart—it will land on his maths homework—and the other boys will point at the bleeding lump and laugh. Sian presses her forehead hard against the glass, presses and presses until she feels the ache of it.
Lindsay kicks her shin again. “I said, do you think they’ve noticed?”
“I heard what you said.”
“And you didn’t answer.”
“Because I don’t care.”
Lindsay cares. She has a science test. And she has a best friend who got her first period three months ago and now she says you don’t understand, Lindsay. Because you haven’t got yours yet and if Lindsay isn’t right there in front of her, she’ll be forgotten. Lindsay doesn’t want to be a ghost.
The tram stops outside a bluestone building. A man gets on; Lindsay notices his dead-eye stare and his hands curled into fists and she wonders if he can remember when the building behind him was a prison, when the people who lived there hadn’t paid more money than sense for the honour of a Pentridge address. Perhaps he used to be one of them. An alumnus of the College of Knowledge. Perhaps he saw Squizzy Taylor’s ghost once.
He sits two seats up from Lindsay and Sian, and they can smell the smoke on him. Stale and cloying. Sian sees the hotel across the road and thinks: that’s where you’ve been. On the pokies. You lost three thousand dollars but I am magic—look behind your ear, in this top hat, in your pocket. Is that your card? The Ace of three thousand dollars.
The tram keeps moving. Always in a straight line. They pass tin fences and warehouses and churches and scrub and vacant lots and more churches—bluestone like the prison. Stop and start. Both girls know when to look away so they don’t see the medical centre on the corner where a man in sweat-stained beige once pointed to a tiny black spot on their father’s shoulder and said, “I don’t like the look of that”. Lindsay remembers that summer in the caravan park. She’d thought the worst thing was the boy who had grabbed her and ruined something she hadn’t yet become. She only remembers the blisters on her father’s shoulders because she was the one who had rubbed aloe vera into the redness while they watched tennis on the flickering tv. It used to be a good memory. Until the man in sweat-stained beige ruined everything.
When the tram crosses the intersection there are no more vacant lots filled with scrub and concrete and graffiti; there are shops now: falafel and banks and Fat Harry’s Clearance shop. The woman with the trolley stands unsteady and presses the stop request button twice.
She gets off at Coles and more people than Lindsay can count get on. A baby screams for attention in her mother’s arms and an old man gives the bags on the seats next to the sisters an unfriendly look. He sits across the aisle from them and stares. Lindsay closes her legs.
“They’ll call mum,” she says. She leans forward and taps the round of her sister’s knee. “They’ll call mum.”
“I know,” says her sister. “You didn’t have to come.”
But she did. She wears her sister’s dress and inside her textbooks is her sister’s name crossed out with her own name scrawled underneath. She is always a step behind, always chasing, always coming second. She longs to catch up to all the places her sister has been before her and claim them as her own.
Sian presses her forehead against the window again. The large maroon Coburg Plaza sign looks like it used to be the future. It is clean and round; the a’s are triangles. It was someone’s idea of the future once and Sian wants to be closer to that feeling.
People get off and on at the market. The tram buzzes now; conversation, music from a phone, next stop requested, laughter. The man still glares at the school bags. His body tilts toward the aisle, toward the sisters, his fingers twitching in his lap. Lindsay imagines him reaching out and grabbing her bare knee—perhaps he can see the golden hairs on her thighs and he’s wondering what they’d feel like under his work-rough fingertips. He would shake her leg and shout in her face, spitting with every word: Look how much space you’re taking up! Too much! It’s not yours to take.
The tram stops. Italian cake shop on the corner, supermarket on the other. More people on, more people off. Hardly any seats. The bags stay where they are. The sisters know how much space they take up—Sian doesn’t think it’s enough. Her father used to read her a fairytale. Jack and the Beanstalk. She wanted to be the giant. Fee-fi-fo-fum! She wanted the giant to eat Jack. I am a giant and I eat Jack and I eat trams and bags and Italian cake shops. I eat space.
Lindsay presses her legs together and watches her sister: phone in her hand, thumb tracing the web of cracks. Her face tilts upwards, the point of her chin angled high.
It seems strange to Lindsay, that something as infinite as her sister could fit inside a bag of paper-thin skin. Sometimes she doesn’t fit. She bursts at the seams. Lindsay thinks that’s the problem and she knows it’s why she followed her sister today.
She saw that look—that infinity-bursting-through-skin look as her sister marched toward the school exit—and she knew.
And she followed.
The tram pulls through the intersection. The shops are sparse now—hidden between pubs and industry. There are posters and graffiti and warehouses again. Chinese medicine, rental cars, real estate. The conversation is dull. Sian watches the little girl sitting on the edge of her seat beside her mother. She is trying to peek between the throng of passengers, trying to see all the way up the front. Sian smiles—no teeth, just a twist of the mouth—as she thinks about the little girl driving the tram. With her hands on the controls, the tram leaps the tracks. It diverts down side streets, over the petrol station, into the air. They would fly elsewhere, somewhere impossible.
Sian smiles again. I recognize another witch when I see one, she thinks.
The tram stops. Rainbow Bubble Coin Launderette. The sign is faded blue, the same pale blue as the sisters’ school dress.
People get on and off—Lindsay has lost track. She tries to pay attention in case one day this will become a bad memory. Maybe she’ll be a blurred face on national TV. She’ll need to know height and hair colour and age.
A woman stands next to Lindsay’s seat and hugs the pole. She is wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and red lipstick. Lindsay watches the woman run her tongue along her teeth and check her smile in her phone’s reflection. Lindsay licks her teeth, too. She wishes she had red lipstick; she wishes she were brave enough to wear it.
When the tram stops at Moreland road there is a rush on and off. The tram is crowded now. A woman looks at the school bags and mutters. She is too short to reach the overhead bar. She speaks louder now: No manners. No manners, she repeats. Lindsay shifts in her seat, eyeing her bag.
Sian doesn’t hear the woman. She is looking at the hairdressers’ on the corner thinking about shaving her head. Her mother loves her hair. She plays with the ends while they sit next to each other on the couch watching Home and Away, rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger and sighing. I wish I had your hair, her mother always says. Well you can have it, thinks Sian. I’ll shave it all off, Mamma, just for you.
Lindsay rest her forearm across her bag, it sinks until she reaches the hard shell of her lunchbox. She hasn’t asked her sister where they’re going.
The tram pauses at the depot. Both Sian and the little girl lean forward in their seats and watch the driver gather his things. He leaves and for a moment the driver’s seat is empty. Sian tries to send a telepathic message to the girl, from one witch to another: Run. Now is your chance. Run.
But the little girl stays where she is and a new driver stomps up the steps—he has to adjust the seat and the mirror. The tram takes off again.
Sian slumps in her seat, knee touching her sister’s, and pretends she is a giant. She has climbed down from her beanstalk with Jack’s blood staining her fingertips, his bones between her teeth. She is in the middle of Sydney Road, the asphalt buckles under the weight of her. She plucks the tram with her giant hands and tips it up and down, sending the passengers tumbling from one end to the other. Like a snow globe. Pretty, she thinks, watching the passengers float like fake snow. She tips it up the other way. Pretty.
She swallows the tram whole.
The woman mutters: no manners. Sian snaps her teeth and the woman hurries away.
At the next stop Sian watches a man gets on wearing a faded brown suit. It hangs loose on the shoulders and the cuffs are worn. He sits in a vacated seat before the muttering woman can. He shifts until his back is to the window and sets his jaw. Sian likes the hunger in his eyes. She looks at him until he notices her too. She wonders if he can see how hungry she is. So hungry. She has eaten a tram full of people and she still aches with hunger. There is so much space inside of her and it never gets full.
He looks away.
They cross Albion street. Lindsay remembers her father reading a bedtime story. Jack and the Beanstalk. It scared her; don’t climb the beanstalk again, Jack. Don’t be greedy. But her dad said it was okay. Where he grew up there used to be giants. In England? Yes, honey, when daddy was a boy in England. His mother told him bedtime stories. The Giants of Albion. So that’s where Lindsay thought the giants lived. On Albion Street, Brunswick. She would grab her father’s hand and hold tight whenever the tram crossed that street. Now, she presses her knee against her sister’s. “Do you remember—”
“No.”
I don’t remember anything, thinks Sian. I was born five minutes ago. I am brand new.
“Is this seat taken?” A man asks the question, blue t-shirt, cargo shorts, thongs. He points at their bags.
“Yes,” says Sian.
He stares at her a long time. “Bitch.”
Sian smiles with all her teeth. “I sure hope so.”
He shakes his head and walks away.
Lindsay catalogues his every feature. Six foot, brown hair, thirties.
Sian clutches the hem of her school dress in her fist and squeezes. The centre of her back is sticky with sweat, between her thighs too, her temples, the back of her neck hidden under too much hair. I’ll shave it off when I’m a giant, she thinks. They pass a vacant lot, the walls surrounding it covered with graffiti. Lindsay likes the way the words overlap as if the artists are shouting over the top of one another. She has a sudden desire to stand up and shout something. But she has nothing to say.
They pass stores filled with white wedding dresses. Sian wonders what the collective noun is for bridal shops. A disappointment of bridal shops. Last year she tried on their mother’s wedding dress and paraded up and down the living room. Look how thin I was, said her mother with a hand over her mouth as she laughed and laughed and then cried and cried. She cried for hours. Lindsay locked herself in her room and Sian danced to the songs in her head until she ripped the hem on the heel of her shoe and tore a hole in the armpit. She hid the dress in the bottom of her mother’s closet.
Lindsay’s knees jiggle. She doesn’t know how much longer this tram ride will take because she doesn’t know where they are going. She is just following. She is just making sure she isn’t forgotten, that she doesn’t become her sister’s ghost. They pass another church. They pass Savers. The girls at school talk about Savers, the girls who are one of a kind. Lindsay’s mum won’t let her go. I won’t have you dressed up in dead people clothes, she says.
At the next stop, the doors open and music filters in from the pub. Two girls with bags full of dead-people clothes get on. Lindsay watches them—two bags each, so full their fingers are turning red, squished through the handles. Lindsay looks at her own fingers: pale, blue veins. An older couple get on—she holds his elbow and helps him up the steps. They eye the sisters’ school bags but say nothing. Lindsay looks to Sian but cannot catch her sister’s eye. She crosses her legs, pulls her shoulders down. Someone stands up and the old man and woman sit down with glowing thanks, thank you, thank you so much.
Sian is watching the blue angels blow trumpets and strum lutes. They are painted on the wall outside her window and she thinks their music would be beautiful. Perhaps it would be sad. Funeral music to make widows in swathes of black and grey weep. The saddest thing about being dead, thinks Sian, is that you don’t get to see how many people cry for you. She didn’t cry at their father’s funeral. Lindsay did. She left red crescent marks on Sian’s thigh, just above the knee, where she gripped tight as the mourners sang. It was as if she was afraid of her sister leaving too.
But Lindsay hadn’t been afraid of that. She’d been afraid because it was the first time she’d felt her edges blurring. She’d kept checking her reflection in the stained-glass windows to make sure she wasn’t see-through. She’d held onto her sister so she wouldn’t lose herself.
There is an exodus at Barkley Square. More climb on. Two boys shove each other and laugh—hoodies, jeans, caps, sparse prickles on their chins and upper lips that would grate against your skin. Lindsay tucks the details away carefully. For later.
Another woman with a shopping trolley gets on. A family who shouts to be heard over one another. Men in suits. Lindsay thinks about texting her best friend—am I missing anything? she would say but she’d mean, are you missing me? She checks her reflection in the window.
The tram waits to cross Brunswick Street. There’s a 7Eleven on the other side, tucked in from the road. A man died in the car park. Sian remembers it. She closes her eyes: she is a giant and she plucks the blue angels from the wall and places them outside the 7Eleven where they play their beautiful-sad music.
Not long now, thinks Sian. She pushes out her chest and breathes deeply.
The tram crosses. On the other side, the trees cast mottled shadows. Sian likes them because they’re like clouds and if she squints she can see shapes in them. A howling dog. An angel blowing a trumpet. A giant eating a tram.
These trees, thinks Sian, are from a fairytale. Their cracked skin and thousand arms and small green leaves. She presses her nose to the window, squeezing it flat, and licks the glass.
Joggers circle the park. Pretty Park, the sisters’ mother calls it. Where are you all running to? thinks Lindsay. A woman, hands on hips as she catches her breath, looks up and watches the tram rattle past and Lindsay wonders if she’s asking the same thing: Where are you going? Speeding by on your tram. Lindsay hates to think of herself as a fleeting thought in a stranger’s mind so she looks away. She looks at her sister. Where are we going?
Sian licks the window again and grins.
The tram stops and a child tugs on his father’s arm and points to the sign for the zoo. Not today, says the father but the child does not stop tugging. The tram doesn’t go that way, says the father. It does if you have the right driver, thinks Sian.
Sian got lost at the zoo when she was seven. The teacher had told them to hold hands. So you don’t get lost, she said. Her partner was a girl with Bali braids and a Vegemite stain on the hem of her t-shirt and every time Sian reached for her hand she would snap it out of reach. She ran away from Sian in the butterfly enclosure. Sian remembers a woman looking down at her saying, are you lost, love? Sian said no because she wanted to be locked in the zoo overnight, to see if the animals would come out to play. When her teacher found her, Sian was scolded for not holding tight to her partner’s hand. I hope you get eaten by lions, she’d said. Her mother had been called.
Sian wants to laugh. She can hardly keep it inside of her. It feels like having a secret. The juiciest, rarest secret and it aches not to share it but it’s a good ache. It’s a tongue pressed against a sore tooth kind of ache.
Lindsay checks her phone but the screen is blank.
“How much longer?” she asks. She stretches, arms entwined above her head, fingers reaching, body long, back arched. Three different men watch her; she sees them noticing her. Of course she does. She shrinks, body no longer arched, no longer reaching. She longs to get off this tram—there are too many details she has to remember.
Sian chews on the corner of her thumb, catching a tag of dead skin between her teeth and ripping. “Soon.” Sian feels her seams stretching. How can she be so hungry and still bursting at the seams? Perhaps this is metamorphosis. Her skin will shed and underneath she is a giant. Or a werewolf. Or a bear. Something that eats hearts, she thinks. She will leave her skin behind and leap from the tram, blood staining her fur and her belly full—finally full—of hearts. She will disappear into Royal Park and become a legend.
She angles her face to the sun and smiles at the warmth. Soon.
The tram stays crowded. No one gets on or off. The man who called Sian a bitch is glaring at her, legs spread wide to firm his stance against the jerking tram or maybe to take up as much room as possible.
He is a small man, thinks Sian and spreads herself, too: legs wide, arm draped across her bag. She blows air across the aisle at him. She fills all the space she can.
The tram stops at the corner. Lindsay knows that road leads to the cemetery. Her ancestors are buried there; bone dust in the dirt. They went once, as a family, when she was a child. She saw two men digging a grave and Sian said, They’re digging it for you. In bed that night, Lindsay pinched the taut skin of her arm over and over but it didn’t work. The shadows came for her that night.
As the tram takes off again, Sian reaches across the seat, feeling blind until her fingers brush the button on the pole. She presses it twice. People around them eye their seats in anticipation.
“Is this it?” says Lindsay.
“If you’re going to follow to me it is,” says Sian.
She stands, shoulders rolled back, chest puffed out, legs wide. Her seams will burst, thinks Lindsay. Right in the middle of this tram.
Lindsay gathers her bag and stands too. The tram is still moving as they make their way to the doors in the middle—neither look back to see who has taken their seats. The sisters lurch side to side as they walk. It reminds Lindsay of being at the beach, standing in the shallows while the undertow tries to drag her out. She remembers burnt shoulders then, too. Her own.
Lindsay’s bag crashes into the muttering woman.
“Sorry,” says Lindsay.
“You’re standing in our way,” says Sian.
When the tram stops, there are people waiting to get on. They don’t move so Sian pushes through. Lindsay follows.
On the street corner, they wait for the tram to move and for the lights to change so they can cross. Sian can see Royal Park from here, a sliver of pale golden scrub and she thinks: I could be lost in there and no one would find me. I would be a legend. A fairy tale. A bed time story for little girls who dream of driving trams into the sky and far, far away. Lindsay can see the park too, but it’s not golden scrub she sees—her eyes are drawn to the shadows. They aren’t like clouds to her; they are like dipping your foot into a lake when you can’t see the bottom.
The lights change.
Sian crosses the road.
Her sister follows, a step behind.
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Tramlines is an initiative of the Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature Office with the podcast created by Broadwave.
Route 19: The Giants of Albion was written by Shivaun Plozza and read by Sarah Vincent, commissioned by David Ryding, edited by Elizabeth Flux, recorded at the State Library of Victoria, produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton, with music by Steve Hearne.