THOSE RED DAYS

My mum was never a particularly superstitious woman, but in the days following the dust storm, I caught her ransacking our house, digging all of Jimmy Wang’s old clothes out of storage cupboards.

By then, the dust from the storm had mostly lifted and you could make out the outlines of buildings from a distance, even if you did have to squint through some lingering off-yellow fog. Just a few days before, you could hardly see ten metres in front of you. The Bureau of Meteorology called it the “worst dust storm seen by New South Wales in seventy years.” Dust storms were fairly common in the Outback; ever since the drought got bad—but I’d never heard of one this big making its way here, to the east coast, and so close to the city. Obviously, everyone freaked out. You would too, if you woke up one morning and everything was red. You’d think you’d gone insane. I know I did. I yelled for my parents, woke up my little brother Derek. None of us had seen anything like it. I still haven’t, in the years since then. An opaque, bloody mist had settled over the country overnight, bathing everything—the trees, our street, the old bicycle shackled to the pole outside, the newspaper stand that was somehow open 24/7—in an eerie scarlet glow. 

Trains got delayed. Planes grounded. People pulled their kids out of school. And that was before the news came out about the deaths. The authorities assumed it was a coincidence—we all did, at first—because why would the dust storm have anything to do with people dying? And dying in different ways as well. Looking back, the Wang family was one of the lucky ones. I saw on the news about a young family from Perth—since it was always whole families, not just a parent or child—on a hiking trip, baby and border collie in tow, whose bodies were found days later, scattered on the side of Mount Augustus. Heatstroke, said the Channel Seven morning news anchor, as a smiling family photo flashed up next to her on the screen. I wondered what their faces looked like on the trail, in the middle of the day, when the sun was high, when it dawned on them it was too late to turn back and too hot to continue.

I still don’t know the word that describes how I felt during that time. Like a vagal response, only stretched out for days. I’d never really had an issue with the sight of blood, until the other day, when I fainted getting blood drawn at the doctors. Right after I felt the pinch of the needle, and just before the world slid away, there was a strange, muted moment that reminded me of the days during and after the dust storm. I only recall the sensations that followed—the nausea, clamminess, how everything was quiet but unbearably loud at the same time, how my limbs melted into the chair—but it was the moment before, the split-second, blank buzz; the in-between moment, that really felt close to what I remember feeling all those years ago. 

Going to school again felt like a strange dream. I remember sitting in a circle with my friends at recess, talking fast and low, piecing things together like we were detectives. Why did Miss. Dalamaras keep coming to class with red-ringed eyes, as though she’d been crying? And there was a girl in the year above us, Spotty Sally, who didn’t come back at all. Bludgeoned to death in her sleep, it turned out, along with her parents and her grandmother. We soon realised most of us knew a family that didn’t make it. 

The Wangs, on the other hand, took the quicker route—on the M5 going home from the airport. I imagine their last moments were something like Princess Diana’s. I could see her, dishevelled and frantic in a beautiful, blonde way, wearing big, bright earrings that mirrored the photographers’ flash as they got her picture right before the car she was in crumpled against the tunnel wall with such force the paramedics couldn’t tell bone from metal. The Wangs weren’t royalty, and Jimmy cried too much and still sucked his thumb even though he was a year older than my brother, but they were nice enough and always slipped me a hongbao of twenty bucks during Chinese New Year. They weren’t the sort of people who died all at once like that, suddenly, like in a movie. 

And then it all just stopped. The deaths, I mean. No one could believe it at first, people were so scared. After that, they got furious. They demanded a federal investigation. When that turned up more questions than answers, people rioted. An independent National Anti-Corruption Commission was instated. Last I heard, it’s still ongoing. What’s even crazier is that, after a while, things mostly went back to normal. Visibility was still poor, but the air quality index had finally ticked out of the “hazardous” zone, and people were going about their normal little lives again. Even Mum seemed more relaxed, after she spent a whole afternoon combing out Jimmy’s clothes—warm socks, jumpers, shirts—sensible, versatile items that his family passed onto my family, for my little brother to wear as Jimmy grew out of them. 

When I questioned Mum about it, she insisted it had nothing to do with what happened—that our house was simply due for a spring clean, and Derek had already outgrown most of this stuff anyway. 

“Don’t be silly,” she snapped at me when I asked her if she was afraid of the ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Wang and little Jimmy Wang. My mum didn’t entertain fairytales. Though I suppose even she didn’t want her son running around in a dead boy’s hand-me-downs. 

These days, when I think of the Wangs—which isn’t often—I mostly think of Jimmy. The Jimmy I remember was tall for his age, with a fragile demeanour, or maybe that’s just how his parents treated him. My mum had once told me that when Mr. and Mrs. Wang travelled, they always booked flights on different planes—that way, if one of their planes crashed, the other parent could survive for Jimmy. I wonder what it would be like to be such a precious commodity. To be Jimmy, or his parents. Maybe it was a good thing they all went together. 

Sometimes I imagine us—Mum, Dad, Derek, and me—hanging from the ceiling beams in our house. Each of us strung up by a different coloured piece of silk, looped beneath the chin. The fibres stretch against the wooden beams and make a creaking noise when we sway at the start, and go silent when we go still.