Rytual

Prologue

Hers was the second dead body I’d ever seen, not counting my mother’s. My mother doesn’t count because when people died in nursing homes or hospital beds or a worn lounge chair they ‘passed away’. Dead was bright red blood – striking even in almost complete darkness. Hers was the second dead body I’d seen in as many months, and it was, if I’m honest, two too many for someone with my gag reflex.

‘What the fuck?’ I kept saying. Over and over, like a chant.

‘What the fuck?’

‘I can explain,’ Luna said, wiping the knife on the leg of her cargo pants, as if it were paint or chutney or nothing at all. ‘But first we need to move her body.’

She said it as though it was something I’d already agreed to – as if I’d known this was where we’d end up. And at first it made me mad. But I was tired. In my body, yes, but also in a grand, spiritual sense. And because I was tired, and I’d already sunk so much of myself into believing that this was the right place and the right time, I said, ‘Okay.’

One

The cycle studio was called Ride On! and the exclamation mark was compulsory. It was located in Richmond; a neighbourhood of Melbourne that most resembled a kind of Corporate Disneyland – everything in Richmond was designed to meet the needs of Ambitious Young Professionals. As I stabbed the studio key towards the lock, in the freezing dark of early morning, so hungover I was probably still drunk, I was reminded of the fact that I was neither ambitious nor professional, and even my youth felt questionable.

When the lock finally sprang open, I bolted up the stairs, the shadow of four consecutive negronis prodding at the back of my throat. When I made it to the landing, I ran my fingers over every light switch and snatched up the heating remote. The heater clicked on, then off, then on again, then it stalled. I stared it down, my right eye twitching in time with the machine’s little ticks, and eventually heat flooded the reception area. I leant over the desk to steady myself. I was not going to be sick. I checked the time: 5.41. Technically, I was supposed to open the door to clientsat 5.45, but anyone who arrived a full fifteen minutes early to a 6 am weekday cycle class was probably dangerous. The instructor and studio owner, Steffani, was also yet to arrive.

Ride On! was essentially a hallway with a collection of rooms that ran down the left-hand side. First, there was the Pilates studio. A woman called Freesia taught reformer Pilates four nights a week, and I often caught her staging elaborate photoshoots on the equipment before and after class. I say ‘caught’, but she rarely flinched when she met my gaze in the mirror. She was a micro-influencer as well as a fitness instructor, and also a floral designer. Anyone with under 100,000 followers apparently qualified for the title of micro-influencer, which seemed depressingly inclusive to me.

The second room was the cycle studio – the main event – which held thirty stationary bikes and an intricate lighting rig. The instructor’s bike was presented on a raised platform, which most of the instructors were fine with given they were also actors or failed actors. Classes took place in a lighting state you might describe as ‘in the club’ which tricked people into thinking that 45 minutes on a stationary bike was a fun and rebellious thing to do after populating spreadsheets all day. Behind the cycle studio were a small kitchen-cum-staffroom and two oversized changing rooms. The changing rooms were demarcated by gender, although the clientele at Ride On! were almost exclusively wealthy women.

When I started my role at Ride On! I thought that working there could fix me. But, just over a year later, Steffani was really on my case about signing up for the Ride On! teacher training, and I realised that any hope I had for transformation had vanished. I couldn’t stop making glib jokes about Ride On!, which meant that it really was all over. I had a habit of chasing belief with scepticism, but never scepticism with belief again. My pattern was: belief, scepticism, something new. I’d told Steffani I was considering the teacher training, but I was considering it about as much as I was considering moving to Norway. It was a year since my mother had died, and I was still bumping around in the dark, trying my best to make out the shapes of people and places. I wanted to keep this a secret, but the smell of grief was thick in my hair, like a bonfire or last night’s vomit.

After I’d prepared the cycle studio – powered up the club lights and selected a playlist titled ‘Empowering Weekday Wakeup’ – I did a sweep of each of the changing rooms to make sure no one had forgotten their sweaty underwear the night before. When I returned to the reception desk, I heard knocking. 5.52. I ran down the stairs and unlocked the door. A woman who came to class most days stared back at me, her skin bright with little flushes of pink. She had long, dark hair and an angular body, the kind of body the early-2000s tried to strongarm women into believing was the only possible body – that is to say, despite her sharp edges, her frame also carried a pair of enviable breasts. The pace at which these thoughts appeared to me was truly shocking.The call was definitely coming from inside the house.

‘Hi,’ she said, smiling expectantly. I smiled back. After amoment, she added, ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course! Sorry.’ I pulled the door towards me, which only left her with a small gap through which to enter the studio. She wore a fragrance I’d smelt before but couldn’t place. It was floral, but also somehow woody. Herbal, maybe. I followed her up the stairs.

‘I’m Rose,’ she said, when we made it to the landing. ‘Rose Liu.’

The computer screen was dark, but I fiddled with the mouse beside it anyway. ‘What size shoe?’

‘Eight.’

I handed her a pair of worn riding clogs. Steffani called them ‘clip-ins’, but the only way to describe them on an aesthetic level was a velcro clog. Rose smiled again and walked towards the changing rooms. She moved as if she’d never slept through an alarm, or perhaps never needed to set one in the first place. I flopped into the reception chair and swiped at the computer’s power button. As the screen lit up, I picked at the balls of fabric that lined the inner seam of my leggings.

‘Do we have tea, Marnie?’ Steffani said, bounding up the stairs. ‘Where’s the tea?’

She dropped her duffel bag on the floor beside me and slid a sweaty can of Red Bull from the side compartment. She stared at me as she chugged from the can.

‘I’ll make some now.’ I made a feeble attempt to stand up, but my heart wasn’t in it.

‘No! Don’t bother. The stampede will be here any minute.’

I nodded.

Steffani was six foot one, blanketed in lean muscle, and had a perpetually hoarse voice. Her hair was long, thick and bleached blonde, but she got her roots done so often I never discovered what her natural colour was.

Steffani lumbered towards the cycle studio, and I counted the seconds between 5.58 and 5.59. At 5.59, twelve women would clamber up the stairs and each profess that they ‘Couldn’t find a park!’ despite the fact that I knew where they lived, and where they lived was around no more than two corners. Like clockwork, three women trundled through the entrance, in varying volumes of goose down. A searing pain hit the centre of my skull, and I was reminded of the negronis. I checked their names off the list, threw them a pair of shoes each and waited for the second wave. Then the third. Until each checkbox was marked, all puffer jackets accounted for, and Steffani’s hoarse voice was booming over the speakers.

When I plucked my phone from the pocket of my Ride On! branded hoodie, a new message stared back at me.

You were right – were
practically neighbours!!
walk home was so quick lol. here
are my bank details:

BSB: 655-849
Account Number: 1066948
Account Name: Justin Langfield

I think it was $60 but just
transfer me 25 :-)

The number was unfamiliar, but Justin’s leathery cologne still clung to my skin. This was not the first time I’d arrived at Ride On! with a blistering hangover, which did make me feel as if my life were marked by a series of clichés. It was comforting, in a way – slipping into the persona of ‘geriatric party girl’. I was twenty-nine, but when I overheard groups of young women in line for the bathroom at a club I felt about one hundred and five.

It all started when I met Kahli, through a Facebook group called Popping Candy Real Estate. Kahli had advertised a room for rent in her Two-Bedroom Mid-Century Oasis, which should have been listed as a Cramped but Impeccably Renovated Two-Bedroom Thornbury-adjacent Apartment. There is a vein that runs through the city of Melbourne called the 86 tram, and it strings together the city’s most desirable neighbourhoods like beads on a necklace. Fitzroy. Collingwood. Fitzroy North. Clifton Hill. Northcote. Thornbury. Preston. As the 86 climbs north, the rent gets cheaper, although not as cheap as you’d expect. Kahli’s apartment was on the border of Thornbury and Preston, but the postcode was Preston. Preston is not at all close to Richmond. It was deeply inconvenient for me to live there, but I wore my commute like a badge of honour.

Kahli was two years older than me, but her life was worlds apart from mine. For one thing, she owned the apartment we lived in, but given how much money she spent on ketamine, I was starting to suspect that a hefty inheritance had been thrown at its asking price. Kahli was a consultant at a firm called Wallenheimer, and she was the kind of person who never arrived at a location with the objective of making friends. Our friendship was my favourite hobby.

I pocketed my phone and traipsed down the hall to the kitchen-cum-storage room. Even with a wall between us, Steffani’s voice was grating. While I prepared tea for the clients, I also downed the juice of three off-brand Nespresso pods and a GoProtein bar. I looked at my phone again. The message from Justin stared me down. We’d met at a bar called Education State. As I ran my coffee-coated tongue over my top teeth, memory bubbled to the surface.

‘Some people cave when they get keto breath, but that’s just your body going into ketosis,’ he said. ‘You just need to eat more protein.’

‘Keto breath?’

‘Yeah, your breath smells like faeces for a few weeks, but it’s actually not that bad.’

I stared at his bright gold watch, my brain soaked with gin and Campari.

‘Do you work at Wallenheimer?’ he asked.

‘No, no, I’m just here with my friend.’

I looked for Kahli, but everyone in the bar had merged into a uniform blob. I couldn’t tell if it was because they actually were all dressed the same, or if the gin and Campari had betrayed me.

‘Oh, sick. You work at Left Field, then?’

‘No. I work in a bar,’ I lied. ‘Not like this one. The people who do coke in my bar can’t afford it.’ He stared at me, blankly, which was a waste of a perfectly good joke. ‘I’m becoming a spin instructor,’ I added, for some pathetic reason.

‘Oh. Cool. I love cycling.’

I smiled, tense, and looked to his shoulders. They were solid, sensible. His body looked like a funnel. I was bold enough to reply, ‘You would.’

Five minutes later we slipped out of the bar, in search of an Uber and something to talk about.

The reason Justin had sent me his bank details was to pay him back for my share of the ride home. Apparently, it was surging. I couldn’t work out if I was supposed to feel empowered by this sense of hook-up parity, or furious – either way, when he’d suggested it all I could think to say was, ‘Okay.’ I gave the message a thumbs up and returned to the boiling kettle, but just as the switch moved from boiling to boiled, a figure appeared in the doorway. I jumped. It was Rose.

‘Do you have any spare towels?’ she said, catching her breath. ‘I forgot to bring one.’

I mumbled something between ‘Of course’ and ‘Sure’, and turned away from her towards the shelves stuffed full of RideOn! merchandise. As quickly as I handed her the towel, she was gone. I didn’t have time to tell her that it cost $49.

When I returned to the reception desk, I positioned the teapot beside the stack of small white cups that Steffani had artfully arranged the night before. The class had nineteen minutes left, and although I could have been completing the stocktake or cleaning the toilets or crafting passive-aggressive replies to client reviews, instead I typed Rose Liu Melbourne into the computer’s search engine. The first result, as always, was LinkedIn. Rose Liu – rytuał cosmetica. It was not unusual to discover that the women who attended Ride On! worked for aspirational startups, ad agencies that specialised in sneakers, or companies leading the charge when it came to new media. It meant the women were always wrapped in expensive, airtight lycra, and en masse they resembled a family of seals. My own worn, bobbly leggings made the divide between client and employee crystal clear. rytuał cosmetica was one such company, although they weren’t dealing in podcasts so much as lip gloss.

From the search results, I clicked the image tab and scrolled through row after row of press shots, event photos, product campaigns. The images often featured Rose and the brand’s founder and CEO, Luna Peters. I returned to LinkedIn. Her profile picture looked as if it belonged in a modelling portfolio. LinkedIn told me that if I wanted to keep perusing the employees of rytuał cosmetica, I would need to log in, and obviously I would have rather drunk toilet water through a straw than notified anyone of my sleuthing. Instead, I had the rare urge to peruse my own digital footprint. ‘Marnie Sellick’ returned a small collection of photos: two pictures from my personal social media profiles, a pixelated close-up linked to a local newspaper feature, and a group of five people smiling, herded together by a publicist, with the headline Most promising young screenwriters announced for Fifth Act film fellowship. My face was softer, as was the rest of mybody. But my hair was still honey-blonde, landing apathetically just below my shoulders. My eyes were grey-blue. I zoomed all the way in, waiting for some sense of recognition, but the girl in the photo stared straight through me. I edged the zoom over the man standing next to me. He was much older than the rest of us. I could only look for a moment before a wave of nausea clamped down on my stomach. I closed the browser window and stood, motionless, trying to decipher whether this was a false alarm or the Campari really was making a comeback. As quickly as the thought had formed it became very obviously the latter, and I ran down the corridor towards the men’s changing rooms. I barely had enough time to flip up the lid before hot, sour liquid flooded my mouth. I watched the red-tinted foam infect the pristine toilet water. Once I was sure it was over, I leant my chin on folded arms. Never again, I thought, but my conviction was slippery. From the cycle studio, I heard Steffani yell, ‘Only you can change your reality, riders. It’s time to level up.’