Extract: The Temperature

Of course Fi was fired for a tweet. Summoned to a cavernous north-facing room she’d never been in, desk cramped with paper­ work, placards mounted on the walls of such overwhelming greenness that her hair, for once, camouflaged. Stop Adani! Rescue the Reef! Save the Koalas! Fight For Climate Action Now! Posters done pro-bono by artists whose work would cost Fi more than a month’s salary—not that she held it against them. Artists after all, should be paid, good luck to them, it was just a small sour spot with Fi that she did not possess some raw creative talent. That hadn’t stopped her taking a quick, excitable selfie in front of one of the prints when it had first arrived. It was by an up-and-coming with exponentially mounting Instagram fame, and just being in its presence, Fi had felt her cultural capital if not growing, then, like a rock passed by a comet, glowing from the heat. This was a few weeks after Fi had started the job she was about to be fired from, before the print had been framed and mounted behind the tired face of Lexi Bostik—brown skin, hair rippling down her back—who was now looking at Fi as if she did not know why she was there.

The poster depicted a similarly brown woman with rippling hair, their waves twinned. Indeed, most people in the office assumed the girl in the poster was in fact Lexi, rendered younger, the grey strips in her crown erased. The woman was also a metaphorical represen­tation: gigantic, naked, non-existent areolas, earnestly hugging the fauna and flora of Australia—a wombat cuddled to her hip, wattle wafting through the scene, banksias up the wazoo. Lexi Bostick: protector of Australia’s natural bounty, lover of all species great and small, sentient and photosynthesising.

Of course Fi was fired for a tweet.

In the throes of being fired, it didn’t occur to Fi that the likeness might have been deliberate on the artist’s part, only that Lexi had seen herself in the painting and bought it for that reason. Charit­able feelings down a dark, distant tunnel, Fi thought: Latent narcissism. Quietly, Fi suspected that while the browned skin of the girl in the poster was meant to be hereditary, Lexi—who had never claimed, as far as Fi was aware, to be a POC—had brown skin as result of years of sun exposure only. Lexi had grown up in the days before Slip Slop Slap. Fake tan, perhaps? No, she couldn’t prove that. Yet still Fi found herself fixating on Lexi’s skin, what seemed to her a deliberate obscuring of whiteness, however achieved.

‘Ah, Fiona, is it?’

‘Fi.’

‘Fi, right. You know why you’re in here, then?’

Fi shrugged, said, in a shrinking voice, ‘I put my Twitter on private.’

‘Even so, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.’

Fi nodded, surprised at the tears welling in her eyes, although she’d known going in there what to expect, had told herself she would not cry. She resolved once more to stand her ground, not to crack, although her fingers trembled.

Lexi was leant over the desk, her posture indicating she’d just been inspecting the documents held between her fingers, and this, firing someone, was a secondary task. ‘Please understand that this is not about your personal work ethic. I know you’ve done good work with the publicity side of things, which I’m sure you’re aware we need help with. But we do not condone violence.’

If Fi did, at some point here, feel guilt or shame (the two are not yet, at twenty-one, distinct), these feelings were quickly obscured by thoughts of how she would represent this interaction once she had left the room, in this year 2016, 140 characters at a time.

Fi had expected Lexi to say something else, an assurance that she agreed with the tweet, some indication that this was public pressure, that she was being let go with a wink and a promise of future references. But no.

In fact, when Fi closed the door to a new life of unemploy­ment, her neon green hair back to being offensively at odds with the environment, she was left with the impression she’d been given a lecture on what it meant to conduct yourself as a decent human being in the world. Lexi lecturing her.

Fi closed the door to a new life of unemploy­ment, her neon green hair back to being offensively at odds with the environment.