Dear Son’s Name

Kayla is playing with a plastic shovel and bucket in the yard, stabbing at the grass, humming as she assembles mounds of dirt. Amy, mum, is seated under the verandah. She is smoking Double Happiness, ashing next to her laptop, scrolling through Facebook, through Seek, through Indeed, through LinkedIn, through a docket her Dell-E Pin asks her to check in case it missed anything from her Groceries list. It assembles such lists based on a mix of the family’s consumption habits and the items they mention during household conversations. Theo, pet dog, doesn’t like the thing. He won’t sleep on the couch when she wears it, probably due to some discreet electrical hum. Or maybe, unlike the telly, the pin’s voice is too diegetic – confuses the poor boy.

The Dell-E projects its docket from Amy’s blouse – a dim, rectangle hologram which hovers two feet from her face. It’s mostly food and toiletries from Aldi, a couple of Woolies and Coles deals at the bottom. Amy glances to the price total – $194.21, including delivery – and says sure, Dell-E, looks good, go ahead. The pin confirms the transaction, says the groceries will arrive in the morning, and retracts its sun-stained hologram with a dull hiss: a process that gives Amy a synaesthetic twinge in her chest. She readjusts in her chair, rubs her eyes. Kayla, having heard Dell-E’s clerical South-England accent, asks if the pin remembered Theo’s dry food this time. Amy, without checking, says it did.

Facebook – on her laptop, the physical screen – is all slop. The job listings are too. Walls of text, vague job descriptions, opaque salaries ranging from minimum wage to ‘tell us what you expect to earn’. On LinkedIn, her local real estate agency seeks an AI Specialist. Prior experience in developing and deploying AI and GenAI models is required. She reads the job description and tries to imagine what would be involved in “integrating AI frameworks”. More than 100 people have clicked apply. How many of those were Centrelink fillers? She logs in to MyGov to check if her two demerits have expired, finds they haven’t. She remembers reading once, years ago, that Centrelink was going to stop penalising people for falling short of their points targets. Theo, resting listlessly under her chair, yawns. She pats him with her foot.

A notification appears on the corner of her screen, then dings on her phone, then is announced again by Dell-E: a video message from Meryl, her mother-in-law. She closes the laptop and gestures for Dell-E to play it. A photo-realistic animation of a sentient tea-cup, drifting lazily around the rim of a plate, eyes closed, smiling, dressed in glitter and psychedelic flowers. A white table-cloth, gluey and dense, shifts uncannily beneath the plate, similar to a curtain caught in a breeze. An elderly hand appears from out of frame, glides across the table to meet a lurid, youthful palm on the other end. As the hands connect words appear in cursive – violet and bedazzled – reading: “tea warms hearts and ties generations with quiet grace”.

Meryl routinely sends such clips since Kayla’s last birthday, when she made Kayla cry into her specially made burnt basque birthday cheesecake. Seated quiet in the corner, smiling, staring at the guests, Meryl had leaned over to Kayla and whispered something into her ear. Amy, watching, saw Kayla ask something in return. Meryl whispered in the girl’s ear again, then pulled away and screwed up her face in a sort of jovial, patronising way. Kayla soon after started sobbing – had to be carried off and consoled by her aunty in the other room. Later, when asked what happened, Kayla conceded that Meryl said the cake was yucky, that her mum’s cooking wasn’t very nice. She asked if nan loved mum and Amy replied: of course she does, sweety, she just didn’t like my cake.

The video repeats and Amy wonders where Meryl finds such garbage. That’s enough, she says, prompting Dell-E to close the message. She re-opens her laptop and resumes scrolling: Facebook, Seek, Indeed, LinkedIn.

More of this for minutes upon minutes, car after car gliding through the distant neighbourhood, squelching stones on nearby unpaved driveways, transmissions clicking to neutral, Amy’s plastic shovel scraping up dirt and thudding it to and from her bucket, Theo intermittently jerking up and jostling to the side gate to check if dad’s back from work until, eventually, he is. Upon hearing the car door Kayla declares his arrival: dad’s home! Amy says yes, he is, and gradually relents her focus from the screen to get up and brew a tea.

Before she’s at the back door she notices Kayla’s piles of dirt, nearly half the size of her persons, and says, Jesus, what’s all this? Kayla replies that she’s building a worm garden. That she’s going to pound all the dirt flat, like a square. That she learnt it from YouTube, from Jessie Jack’s toot-or-ee-uhls. She’s done some considerable damage to the yard – dug holes big enough to get a foot stuck in. Silence, then, again: mummy, dad’s home.

Inside the kettle is on. She’s getting the tea together, gesturing confirmations and denials at prompts from Dell-E’s routine calendar suggestions; yes to discounted group yoga, no to her cousin’s 34th birthday dinner, no to a webinar on AI prompt optimisation, yes to a casual shift at Carlita’s Bar & Dining. The kettle – purchased for $25.00 from K-mart back in 2018, still working – clicks ready. She pours boiling water into a pot packed with liquorice flavoured loose-leaf tea. As it brews she realises her husband hasn’t come inside despite arriving more than five minutes ago. She bends over to look out the front-facing window, sees the car is turned off and empty. Sees that he’s not on the porch or in the driveway, and mutters to herself: where is he? Dell-E responds that according to his work schedule and the traffic on his usual route, he should be home any moment. She holds the pin’s power button down until it declares that it’s entering temporary hibernation, then opens the curtain to get a clearer view of the front yard. She sees him standing past the gate at the letterbox. In his work gear, back turned, hair ruffled and oily from wearing his beanie all day, hunched over something he seems to be holding with both hands. Is he… checking the mail? Why would he bother checking the mail? Why doesn’t he bring it in here? Is something wrong? Is he putting off coming inside?

She bangs on the window and he fidgets around a bit, turns enough to reveal he is indeed holding a piece of paper attached to an envelope. His brow is furrowed. He’s mouthing the words. He’s flipping the paper over, and back again, and over again.

She again bangs on the glass and he looks over, nods recognition to her, smiles and takes a few steps up the driveway, only to slow and stop again, still reading the letter, still mouthing the words. She bangs again and shrugs at him, accusing: what is it? He looks up, briefly, but continues his slow, distracted shuffle. From the loungeroom Kayla yells, where’s daddy? Amy yells back for her to wait a minute, pulls shuts the curtain and heads for the front door.

From the porch she asks what he’s doing and he, without looking up, says he’s reading a letter. She asks who the letter’s from and he responds, with a mix of concern and confusion and irritation, that it’s from his dad. He holds the paper in his hand, shrugging, demonstrating its existence to her. She says: what? He replies: yeah, come have a look. So she walks to her husband, puts her arm around his waist and from the letter in his hands reads:

Dear [Son’s Name],

I know it’s been a long time since we spoke properly, and there’s a lot that’s gone unsaid. I want to start by saying I’m sorry — especially for going off to Warracknabeal a few years back without bringing you. I know that left a mark, and I can see now how it might’ve looked with everything that was going on at the time.

What happened between you, your missus, and the little one — I never meant to make that harder. Buying the house with your nan’s inheritance and all that probably added to the tension, and maybe it seemed like I was still messing around, still on the drugs. But I swear to you, I’m not into any of that anymore. These days, I just have a bit of a choof now and then with Morgan in Brim. Nothing heavy. That life’s behind me.

I miss you, son. And I’d really love to see you and your boy. I’ve got a good discount at the pub here, so if you feel like driving up sometime, I’d love to shout you a feed, catch up properly, and try to mend things. No pressure — just know the door’s open, and so is my heart.

I love you.

Dad

P.S. Stiill going STRONG with the liver not bad 8 years howz that knackers

She grabs the letter off him to read it again, asks: did he actually write that? He replies that he doesn’t know, and she, reading again, says what the fuck? And he replies: yeah. At the top-right corner of the letter is a logo for a company called Letter Me. It’s a minimalist depiction of an envelope with the brand name written across it, and underneath it the slogan “putting your words to paper”. Pointing to the logo he asks: what the fuck’s that about? She says she doesn’t know, that it’s maybe an NDIS thing to help people write letters, and he, taking the letter back, says that his mum never got the NDIS sorted.

The cold has arrived and she considers telling him to bring the letter inside but, watching him read, watching him mutter words from the piece of paper, his scraggly moustache overhanging his lip and contorting as he still, comically, sweetly, meanders in micro-steps to the front door, decides to give him a moment – after which he tuts and mumbles that the postscript, at least, was definitely his dad’s writing.

Theo, at the gate, getting impatient, whines, at which he pockets the letter and goes over to say hello. He pats Theo’s face through the gap between the gate and the ground – his usual routine of teasing excitement from the dog before slowly working his way to the yard. While patting Theo he asks where Kayla is, whether or not she’s with his mum. Amy tells him Kayla’s inside, to which he says: we better get started on dinner, then.

Later, after a serviceable fusion-cuisine meal he cooks off a recipe suggested by Dell-E, after they discuss job applications and Kayla’s worm garden and the weird clips from mum, and after they dock their Dell-E’s, put Kayla to bed, and lie down for a spare hour to rewatch a movie from the early 2000s – from when they were younger – he brings up the letter, half-hearted, flustered, eyes glazed, looking through or past the telly.

Wants to see me now, he says, after what he put you and Kayla through.

Mmh, she replies.

I didn’t even know he was in Warracknabeal.

Mhmm, she replies.

Mum must have bloody known then.

Mhm?

Yeah, his letter acted like I already knew he was there.

Sorry, where’s Warracknabeal?

You know it, babe, it’s the birthplace of Nick Cave.

Oh? That’s random.

It’s an hour North of Ararat – we drove through once with Kayla when mum was looking at that plot of land in Brim.

I don’t think I remember.

It’s not very memorable, to be fair. He used to take us there for holidays, just staying at some motel and going fishing.

Random.

He’d play ‘Into My Arms’ every bloody time we got into the car.

She laughs, says that sounds sort of nice, and he replies: it wasn’t.

Every so often he huffs another remark: he didn’t need to mention you two, he’s definitely using again, he only reached out because he’s lonely, living in the middle of nowhere. She just listens – it’s all past her, and she doesn’t mind his rambling. At a point his Dell-E misconstrues something he says about his mother and, from the other room, asks if he’d like to place a call to Meryl. No, he yells, for god’s sake, and turns the television louder. The movie rolls credits and, sunken into the couch, eyes forward, he says: I don’t mind that he didn’t love me, but it shits me that he probably thinks he does. She yawns, shuffles over to his side of the couch, then kisses him on the forehead, pats his leg and says, cheekily: well, I love you, son’s name.

Leonard Bernardone is a freelance tech journalist and creative writer based in Naarm. His works of fiction often derive from his personal experience and the perpetual strangeness of current affairs. Say hi at len@bernardone.com.au.