Redfern

We could have been followed, walking blind into circumstance. You're being punished for not listening to the ABC, he said. I had missed a story on some great liner coming in from a lap of the Pacific with hundreds, or was it dozens, of sick passengers. There were muffled secrets. They all stank as they squatted on holiday toilets. He could see them without being there. The gift was strong some days, his clairvoyance, moving beyond mere empathy. He could reach across the city and actually see them, clutching their stomachs as doctors arrived, the ambulances lined up along the dock, the freaked out pretending to be efficient management from the liner; the presence of the media making everything worse.

What do you mean punished? he asked. I've written beautifully about dead people for weeks. They all laughed. It had been true. That morning he had organised a freelancer to do a job in Whistler, in Canada, the most popular ski resort in North America, two million plus visitors each winter. There had been something like 700 Australians working at the resort, as always prized for their sunny disposition, good looks and hard work. Twenty three and twenty four. As if time itself had been descended, hushed, the brilliance of the snow, there with two lives snuffed out. For him, remote, working with a machine brilliance, a professional empath, he misted up in sequence as he spoke to the shocked relatives; this time ringing so close to the time they had themselves discovered from the news that, in shock, they actually answered his questions.

While the furore, and the sequence of the things they spoke about, the length of private occupations, the time passed, and amazingly, he didn't care about that either, appealing, through their emotional distress, to the parent's desire to get things right. I'm sorry to ring you at a time like this. He was a lovely bloke, the father sobs as he slams down the phone. Fuck off, vultures, is the more common response, the cries disappearing flat into the suburban night.