Solo Read Online Free

bark draped around their roots in strips and sheets.
    I picked the telegraph pole a little to the right. Videoshop boy’s disappointment was not in keeping with the spirit of the exercise, I thought. He doesn’t know how many hours I’ve spent wearing eyeshades.
    On the second day we made a human machine. Bethany and I started because we were hungry, and no one else was going to do it. We stood face-to-face and put our palms together and pushed them back and forth. The boy they call Rumpelstiltskin joined in by bending at the waist and lifting Bethany’s ankle in time with our pushing. The Vermox girl then did air punches over his head, and so on until everyone made a part in the machine.
    I can imagine that if we were all wearing silver costumes and there was some funky industrial music playing and strobe lighting it would look really cool.
    Callum was last. He stood at the edge and tilted his head from side to side, which I thought was a bit passive, and he’d only done it for a few seconds when Wendy said we could stop.
    On the third day we did the Trust Fall with Simon. We were told to stand on one of the tables in the mess room and fall off it backwards into the arms of the others.
    Callum was excused. He sat out in the sun reading a magazine and sweating.
    It made me cross. Trust was hard for all of us. But more than that, I knew that I would do an exercise that made me feel uncomfortable just to be close to him.
    When you pike out, I feel invisible.

8

W ORKSHOPPING IT
    On the morning before my Solo we had another affirmation-dressed-up-as-creative-writing task to do. Bethany had gone on her Solo, so when I was deciding where to sit I sauntered towards Callum as though I was picking a spot at random.
    Callum was wearing what looked like suit pants cut off at the knees, a singlet, boots and a bowler hat. He also had a string of carved wooden beads around his neck.
    He smiled one of those brief closed-mouth smiles that you give to people when you are reaching across in front of them in a lift to press the button for your floor, or picking up the magazine they just put down in a doctor’s waiting room.
    Simon said we had to choose an object from our childhood and talk about it with our neighbour. He gave us a piece of paper so that we could ‘workshop our ideas’.
    I sighed. I’ve been workshopped before. Simon wasn’t going to fool me into some kind of personal revelation.
    I picked up my pen and scribbled the first thing that came into my head.
    When I was about seven, a friend of the family gave me a pair of eyeshades – the ones you wear on a plane to shut the light out.
    I would wear them around the house and pretend I was blind, trying to sense objects without seeing them. I wanted to learn how to use sonar like dolphins.
    Sometimes you can feel things, for example, wind across your skin, or your hair lifting off your face when you are near a door or a window. If you listen, you can tell the shape or vastness of a space by the quality of the sound. I experimented by talking into one of the kitchen cupboards and then in the lounge room – the biggest room in that house.
    Other times I would lie on the floor on my back and let the eyeshades take me places. I saw the most extraordinary things. I’d open my eyes in the blackness and feel my eyelashes flutter against the silky material.
    There is an old man with tiny strands of hair on his head, as though he’s walked through a spider web. He’s shuffling along the street wearing nothing but baggy green underwear. I can see his sloping shoulders and his potbelly. His nipples sag. He has wispy white hair rolling across his chest like a cumulus cloud.
    I wonder if I’m simulating dreams when I’m wearing the eyeshades, or maybe I am actually dreaming, or maybe somewhere in the world there is an old man shuffling down the street in green underwear.
    Callum and I swapped sheets. Callum had written:
    A long time ago some kid threw a rock over a bridge and it