That was the moment when things changed again for Benny, when his mild brain damage became something more severe. He lay in a coma in Canberra Hospital for three months. The swelling on his brain would certainly have killed him if not for the quick actions of a visiting specialist, a South African surgeon who was an expert in head trauma. He excised a four-inch section from the front of the patient’s skull then sewed the flap of skin back over his forehead. His brain expanded to fill the gap where the bone had been. When the swelling went down, Benny woke up and the doctors patched his skull with a special metal plate.

I had seen what happened at the pool. I saw Moses jerk backwards. Adam McDonagh visibly shrivelled, losing his bantam chest. Their movements brought other movements, which came in quick succession. Two bigger boys running up and lifting Benny from the water. Mr Sedden rushing over, dropping the apple he’d been eating. And then the man who ran the pool sprinting over too, to start the CPR he had once shown us on a dummy.

Shortly afterwards Mr Sedden, as the first adult on the scene, asked me to write down what I had witnessed. He was distracted as he gave me a pen and paper, too distracted in that moment to distrust what I would write. My statement was to be given to a policeman, who had already been called and was driving down from Cooma. But before I could write anything, I saw Mr Noffey through the wire fence. He had just pulled into the car park and was doing that thing he did, taking a breath and drawing himself up. He didn’t know anything yet, he was oblivious. Then I turned to see Moses, who had so far gone unnoticed. He was standing in the shade of the liquidambar trees, close to the gathering knot of people and yet apart from them.

It was an accident, I thought. It could happen to anyone. Then I looked at the page and wrote what I had to say.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

Claire Conrad and everyone at Janklow & Nesbit, Ben Ball, Siobhán Cantrill and the Simon & Schuster team, Nicholas Jose, Brian Castro and the writing community at the University of Adelaide, the Norman Mailer Centre in Provincetown, the Residencia Internacional de Arte Can Serrat, Varuna the Writers’ House in Katoomba, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Luke Carr, Geraldine Hakewill, Kyra Henley, Tessa Khan, Jonathan Pearlman, Nadia Rosenman, Laura Scrivano and Andrew Nolan.

Earlier versions of the story ‘How is your great life?’ appeared in Meanjin and Black Inc’s Best Australian Stories 2015.

The landscapes and skyscapes of the Mars-like planet in ‘Day Zero’ were informed by Sean McMahon’s writings, especially the essay, ‘The aesthetic objection to terraforming Mars,’ which appeared in James SJ Schwartz and Tony Milligan (eds), The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, Switzerland, 2016), pp. 209–218. All errors and liberties are my own.