My coconut flour pancakes were a failure. Although I had followed the recipe in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gluten to the letter, somehow my mix would not blend. My mixing cup was half cloudy liquid on top, a thin strip of thickness in the middle, and sludge on the bottom. The experimental pucks in the pan (cooked in coconut oil) had turned to charred mush.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” gloated Father O’Riordan, who had wearied of my pontificating about the threat to the human body of drought-resistant wheat, soil depletion, pesticides, gut irritation, and similar depredations of industrial food production. “You’ll just have to have the old-fashioned ones.”
It was all right for him to talk; he wasn’t looking for a wife.
So I was grateful that the vicarage kitchen was such a bustle, with air-con at full blast. No one except Father really took notice. There were half a dozen other mixing bowls on the table, bags of flour, sugar, glistening waves of butter, a nearly empty bottle of maple syrup, three types of honey, a small plate of lemon zest, goat’s cheese. Despite the heat, the oven was on to char the palm leaflets for the next morning’s Mass. I had cut them that morning.
Father O’Riordan’s friend, Eleanor, who had just landed from England, expertly flipped pancakes and set them out browned to perfection in a stack at the centre of the table. She flipped the top two and heaped them with syrup and banana pucks, then set the plate down in front of Father. He had told me that she wanted to marry him thirty years earlier when he was in England. “But there was no chance of that,” he had said in his droll way. “But she’s very generous. Her husband died and left her stacks. You don’t know the half of what she funds around here.”
“Her husband, you mean the second choice after you?”
“We’re not going there.”
Donna, the parish treasurer, and her husband Paul poured cups of tea and glasses of wine for the seven or eight middle-aged parishioners squeezed into the kitchen. My conversations with them followed the same lines—surface concerns—job (between), car (yes, for now), study (on hiatus), but where else was there to go?
In Australia, Easter most often falls at the beginning of autumn. It’s all wrong. Symbolically, I mean. It can be anywhere from frosty to warm on Easter Day, but it almost always marks the beginning of the end of the hot weather and the descent into winter. Shrove Tuesday falls at the end of summer, when Melbourne is at its hottest.
In defeat, I placed my useless pan in the sink and went to answer the doorbell.
Jesse was at the door holding a bag of flour.
“Is this the fat day?” he said.
“Fat Tuesday, yes.”
Although I did not yet know him well, I was glad to see another face from my generation. Jesse was a type I knew we would be getting more of. I remembered how he looked like death warmed up at the first Sunday in the parish hall after Mass. I felt it was my unique purview in some sense to welcome these types. I was like them but more psychologically stable. He had just dropped out of a mathematics PhD and was driving the catering van for his father’s Italian restaurant.
“I’m just an absolute wretch,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “We should abolish numbers. It should be one, two, three, many, that’s it.”
I told him about a friend’s father I had just met, a physics professor who was calculating the weight of the universe. In fact, his team had just received a twenty-million-dollar grant from the government for this purpose. I had asked him what the use of the information would be, and he couldn’t say. Jesse laughed when I told him this.
After a few minutes of glancing at each other as the older folk caroused and ate their pancakes, I suggested we go for a walk, to which he hungrily agreed.
Although the clock said early evening, outside the sun was blazing. As we walked and our initial small talk concluded, he said, “I’m such a wretch. It’s that thing.”
“Which thing?”
“You know, that thing.”
“Yes, of course.”
“It’s the phone. If we didn’t have phones it wouldn’t be a problem. I just want to go to church, do my woodworking, pray. No internet, no technology.”
“I’ve convinced myself that Donna can see all the history. She handles all the vicarage bills.”
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“I’m actually at more than two hundred days.”
“I’m at, uh, eighty,”
“Fantastic, that’s great.”
“Uh, minutes.”
“Oh.”
“No one tells you it’s bad. My Mum would buy those magazines for my brother and I when we were, like, fourteen.”
“It’s so difficult, mate, it’s the hardest thing to give up.”
Unconsciously, I was walking towards the pocket park behind some basketball courts where I did my morning reading. A five-storey apartment building overlooked the park and on the wall behind the basketball goals was a mural of a wattle bird upside down lunging at a magenta bottle-brush. We sat down on the back of a bench, feet on the seat, under a gazebo with a public bbq.
“I’m at the point now where to find out what to think I ask my secular progressive friends and think the opposite,” Jesse said.
“I know what you mean. Not the best way to make decisions, though.”
“No of course not, but then how?”
“You have to just know, you have to discern.”
And then we saw it. There was a sign on the brick bbq saying “WARNING HOT SURFACE”. It was a wooden sign, a relic from a less technocratic age, and the lettering had been scored an inch deep into the wood in strong rounded capitals. The word WARNING had been left au naturel, as it were, but HOT SURFACE had been filled in with pale yellow paint. In between WARNING and HOT SURFACE were the words NO GOD written in black texta. WARNING NO GOD HOT SURFACE.
Jesse pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and with feverish strokes made the letters K and W on either side of the NO until the lettering matched the width of the texta lines.
“Nice.”
Here I should say that Jesse was average height, with short black hair and a deep Sicilian complexion and a lumbering way of moving, like a rock star on stage or like he was in a rocking chair.
“How’s life in the vicarage?” he asked.
“Good.”
“Is it good going to daily Mass?”
“Mate, it’s the best thing. I know I probably won’t do it forever, but it just focusses everything down, you know.”
“You mean up.”
“Yeah lol, obviously.”
“I don’t know how my friends do it, live, I mean. Where do they find meaning?”
I didn’t reply right away. I was drinking in the heat. I decided I could be earnest with him.
“It’s sort of a paradox, right? Meaning can only be made on earth in terms of life everlasting. If it’s oblivion at the end, then nothing we do matters. Yet eternity itself, if you really think about it, can’t be other than hellish. The prospect of eternity gives our actions meaning, but at the same time in eternity no action has any meaning. It’s like that Borges story, “The Immortals,” where these immortal men just lie around doing nothing. One of them falls down a canyon and they take hundreds of years to get around to rescuing him. That kind of thing. You could say, well, heaven is just completely beyond our comprehension, but I don’t like that answer. How can we strive for it unless we have some inkling of what it might be like?”
“So we’re just completely bitched then.”
“No, because that would make our creator evil.”
“It’s like those atheists who say a child with leukemia disproves God, or anyway a loving God, whereas it’s just as easy to say that only a loving God could make sense of something like that. It’s ultimately about your assumptions and what you most want. I think people largely get what they most want after death.”
“Kierkegaard says we’re always wrong before God.”
“Obviously.”
“Fuck it, then.”
“Yes.”
I was about to answer when we heard the bell ringing for evening prayer. Three, three, three, then nine. We entered the Lady Chapel just as they finished singing the Angelus.
The first time I went to evening prayer, I wasn’t expecting anything. It was a cold night, a Friday. I was completely overwhelmed. Father softly offering the petitions, placing the slips of paper on the chair beside him after each one—the cancers, the chronic illnesses, the degenerative diseases, the pleas for the conception of children, for family members to return to the Church, the welfare of imprisoned loved ones, the souls of the dead, the rare successes (“we give thanks for Seymour’s remission”)—all with names attached, names of people I knew a bit from around the church, people I knew to be useful and cheerful: people who had just enjoyed pancakes in the vicarage kitchen, revealed to be bearing intolerable burdens. If you think this is kitsch and sentimental, you’re right.
Tonight it was Madeleine with her infected hip socket. While mostly focussing on praying, I was watching Jesse out of the corner of my eye. He sat slumped over the entire time, head in his hairy hands, legs wide, elbows on his knees.
As we exited the relative cool of the Lady Chapel into the furnace of the night, Jesse asked “Beers? It’s Shrove Tuesday, so we’re morally obligated to get pissed.”
“Yeah, we’re doing no alcohol for Lent as a household, so probably a good idea. I’ll meet you at the park as soon as I get changed. I need to wear long sleeves and pants for the mosquitoes.”
“I’ll go to the shop and grab some.”
When I arrived at the gazebo Jesse handed me a bottle of Furphy.
“Not Furphy, bro.”
“It was on special.”
“I’m not drinking lies.”
He grabbed my bottle and turned both his and mine over, allowing the liquid to drain completely out on to the concrete.
“Good idea. We’ll get something else,” he said, dumping the remaining four full bottles from the six-pack in the recycling bin.
As I jumped down from the bench I saw it again. It was that same lettering in the same black texta. The Council was trying hard to fit in with the geist of the suburb by posting its rules and regs in graffiti stencil form, like teenagers used to do with their favourite bands. One of these had been sprayed on the broad pillar of the gazebo. “Keep your dog on a leash” below a stencil figure of a person with a dog. This had been modified to read “Keep your GOD on a leash.” Had it been there before? I was fairly certain it hadn’t.
“Now he’s just asking for it,” Jesse said.
“Let’s get some beers.”
“Who’s doing this?”
“Probably some high school boy, it’s good, shows they’re at least engaged.”
“I guess it’s more likely for someone like that to convert. Probably. Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
At the supermarket we got two six-packs of St. George’s Premium Lager, then returned to the scene of the crime. On a warm evening like this, of which plenty of light remained, the park would have been packed with little groups of friends on towels or blankets, drinking chilled wine or beer, kicking the footy or throwing tennis balls to their dogs, and even a few kids running around. But it was Tuesday, so we had the place to ourselves. I looked up at the apartment balconies behind us. It was a new build, a dogbox of glass and concrete. It would have been hell without air-conditioning on the top floors. I had lived in a similar building around the corner when I first came to the city. The lights were just starting to come on in those apartments, and I wondered if we were being watched, but I couldn’t make out any human shapes on the balconies or the windows. As the sun fell, mosquitoes began to bite my forehead and the back of my neck.
“Two hundred days, man what’s that like?”
“Good, mate. I feel so level-headed, very grounded. Obviously it’s not easy.”
“But Donna checks the history, remember.”
“I’ve really convinced myself she does.”
He began speaking without looking in my direction. We were still side by side on the back of the bench.
“No one tells you it’s bad, my Mum bought those magazines for me and my brother.”
“I know.”
“It’s all so backward. I remember when I was eight or so my Mum would bring her boyfriends back and my brother and I…went in to the living room and were asking, ‘are you okay, Mum?’”
I didn’t know what to say.
He continued, “It’s not inherently bad, the faculty itself. It’s just disordered, the way it is now, in a place like this.”
“Yeah.”
He put down his empty bottle and opened another.
“We should try to catch this no-God loser. Let’s get some food and stake out at the end of the wall.”
It was almost too late. We got to the food court just as it was closing. Only the fast Mex was still serving. I realised I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, except the two and a half beers—the half tucked away hidden in my left pocket, the mouth of the bottle under my shirt as I ordered a burrito bowl.
We ate as we walked.
“My girlfriends always break up with me when they realise I’m only looking for Mumma.”
“They always put too much lettuce on these, don’t you think?”
“We’re not rabbits.”
“You know how kids don’t like vegetables?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what if that’s because vegetables are bad for you and they know by intuition?”
“Perfect, definitely true.”
A few steps later we reached the corner where the basketball courts met the parking lot fence. There was a small landscaped area with juvenile Manna Gums surrounded by bushes. I slid down behind a bush against the wall, and Jess slid in beside me.
“How do you know he’ll come back?”
“Shhh, oh he’s an atheist, he’ll be back.”
“We’re just assuming it’s a he?”
“Lol.”
“What are we going to do when we catch him?”
“Burn him at the stake. I don’t know, mate. Dob him in for vandalism.”
“You think they would press charges? Probably give him a medal.”
I looked up again at the apartments. Only three now were lit up. The harshness of the lights in the parking lot intruded on my right and very drunk eye. The heat was still overbearing, with some slight breezes tickling the ends of leaves. Insect sensations and phantom insect sensations were running up my arms and my partially exposed lower back. My drooping posture was making leaning against the wall uncomfortable, so I moved into a crouch. That didn’t last long either and it was back and forth leaning and sitting up, trying to keep my muscles from betraying me. It had also crossed my mind that Jesse could have done the graffiti himself. If the “Please Keep Your God on a leash” hadn’t been there already…then it was most likely him.
“Just two dudes hanging out in the bushes,” Jesse said, “totally normal.”
“Shhh.”
And then I saw him. He was walking across the parking lot, seemingly unbothered by the light, walking slowly towards the entrance to the park—in other words, directly towards us. He was average height with a shaved head, somehow bulky without being either fat or toned, walking in a plodding, almost robotic way, while still seeming limber and keeping a good pace. He had on a black singlet, heavy black pants, black boots and—what made me freeze—what looked like a black surgical mask covering his mouth and nose. He continued lumbering right past our bush, just a few feet away, and to the gazebo.
“That’s him,” I whispered. “Has to be.”
We could see him slowly moving around the gazebo.
“Fuck it, I’m sick of this.”
Jesse stood up.
“Get down!” I whispered. “He’ll see you.”
Jesse brushed some wood chips off his pants and stepped around the bush into the glow of a streetlight.
“Hey! Are you the atheist?” he called out, hands cupped around his mouth to amplify the sound.
The figure took off running, away from us past the children’s playground.
“Hey come back!” Jesse called. “Wanna beer!”
At that moment he turned the corner of the apartment building and was lost to our view.
At the gazebo he had added UN to cancel out Jesse’s KN and make UNKNOW GOD. Not knowing how to add to this, Jesse just wrote I HEART GOD above it, in the same rapid strokes with his ballpoint pen.
“See you tomorrow for Ash Wednesday?” I said, “Eight AM.”
“Oh yeah, big time.”
Back at the vicarage Father O’Riordan and Eleanor were sitting across from each other drinking chilled white wine under the A/C outlet.
“What have you boys been up to?”
“Just preparing for Lent.”
“That’s good.”
I was up with the bells for Mass and kneeling down next to Jesse as Father O’Riordan thumbed the cold black sludge on my pounding forehead.
***
This is an extract from Spare Us Yet and Other Stories, by Lucas Smith.
In Spare Us Yet and Other Stories, Smith navigates the bewildering currents of modern life from Fiji to Utah to rural Australia. The monologue of a nineteenth-century washerwoman rescued from deadly peril strikes us as immediately and psychologically realistic as that of a twenty-first-century minor bureaucrat driven to madness by his uprooted anonymity. With psychological perceptiveness and uncompromising honesty, Smith carries heavy themes of faith and fear, conversion and doubt, freedom and death with such grace that the changes that come may at first appear, to the undiscerning eye, light. Like a skilled surgeon with a sharp scalpel, he works relentlessly to get to the marrow: no one is given an easy pass, nor dismissed as a lost cause.
Lucas Smith’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Quadrant, Dappled Things and The Rialto. His first book, Spare Us Yet & Other Stories was published in June 2025 by Wiseblood Books. He is the co-founder of Melbourne-based independent press Bonfire Books. He currently lives with his wife and three children in Gippsland, Victoria.