The Shape of What Remains

Chapter One

AMOS, MONDAY AUGUST 23, 1999

He wakes on Monday morning with a slab of concrete on his chest. He calculates: if it were six hundred by six hundred, three hundred thick, it would have to weigh about 270 kilos. It’s an exaggeration—he wouldn’t be able to breathe under that load; he’d be dead. But when he sees the newspaper still spread out on the table from the night before, he knows it’s not an exaggeration. The secret is that heavy, and if he doesn’t get it off his chest it will kill him.

The secret. The word sounds like a kid’s story. Information he’s keeping to himself fits, but that’s cumbersome, so The Secret is how Amos Frank refers to what he keeps in his mind. But keeping it there—no matter how he refers to it—is worse than a slab of concrete on his chest. It’s a growth in his consciousness. A growth taking over, spreading into almost every thought.

He shakes his head as if to dislodge it, to focus instead on the day ahead, and, drawing back the corner of the tartan picnic rug he’d hitched across the window, sees the early‑morning Sydney cityscape, tinted gold. Going to be a fine day. Good. He doesn’t enjoy biking to work in the wet. Focus on what’s real, he tells himself, and what is real to him is the living body—its muscles, tendons, veins, arteries, organs and bones. His own living body and the living, breathing bodies of others—that’s his safe ground, and his carefully curated knowledge of the parts of the human body, the layout, the patterns, the interconnections of systems with gait, posture and movement patterns, stays with him always. But so does the secret.

His bike jolts over the scarred surface of the road passing a construction site, the shopping mall that his boss hopes will bring more patients through the door. The reek of wet cement in the air; a concrete truck just pulled in; the slow, slurry rhythm of concrete mixing—the sound that lived in his ears for two years, even in his sleep. The driver—high‑vis vest and concrete‑caked boots—climbs down. That’s where real work happens, he thinks, functional and unglamorous. He sees a tradie wipe his brow with a dust‑smeared forearm, pausing between lifting lengths of steel reinforcing. The workers’ physicality, the quiet damage carried in their ligaments and joints, is real. He doesn’t miss that work—he respects it, those years at the Coremix Concrete plant in Yennora—but he misses the raw honesty, the pain with no name, no theoretical knowledge—the opposite to later years he’d spent at university. He sees that worker lifting using his back, thinks if he keeps doing that L5 is going to curse him by noon—the lower vertebrae would want to slide forward while the tissues attempted to haul it back and voilà—acute lumbar facet lock. The explanation behind that pain kept secret by physiotherapists. But that’s not his secret.

He stops at 278 Burwood Road: an old Federation‑style house, its tired charm blushing beneath the ignominy of having to wear the sign PHYSIO FITS on its forehead— above the centrally-placed front door. He wheels his bike through the side path, gravel crunching. The lock clicks into place against the narrow trellis on which a bougainvillea vine climbs. Every day he warns himself to watch for its thorns. One of these days lack of focus might cause him to forget.

The front door opens into a waiting room, newly laid faux‑timber flooring and a slight smell of liniment. This was once a sitting room where a family clustered around a radio in the evenings, listening to Australia’s Amateur Hour or Dad and Dave. In the small kitchen, he flicks the switch on the electric jug, stretching his arms while he waits for it to boil, noticing a dull ache in his shoulders, from his muscles’ memory of concrete‑yard labour possibly or more likely from carrying the secret.

Mug of instant coffee in his hand, he returns to the waiting room to the receptionist’s desk, glances down the names in the appointment book under the column headed Amos. After eight months in the job, some are familiar: Anne Thompson with her stiff neck. Is it her left levator scapulae? He’d worked that muscle; she’d left seeming free of pain, yet it must have seized again. It has to be something less anatomical, more to do with her emotional situation. His one semester of basic psychology comes back—and his study of neuroscience—when he finds himself at the intersection of body and mind. Patients often expose fragments on his treatment bed—stories, confessions, worries. But he can’t expose his inner world to anyone. The secret lives beneath his ribs, down his spine, dragging at the edge of every thought.

Amos Frank loves being a physiotherapist. At twenty‑five he knows the two years at the concrete plant and the four years of study have got him where he is now, earning money, even saving to help his mother keep on top of her bills. It has all been worth it—the work, the study, the learning. He makes people feel better. They leave smiling, relieved of their pain and discomfort. Mostly. Nearly always. But today his mind threatens to shift away from his patients. He finds himself thinking about his options. Impossible, all of them except perhaps the first—to do nothing, stay silent, keep the secret to himself. Is it the best thing to do, though—he doesn’t know. He only knows he must not allow it to interfere with his work.

He copies the names of today’s patients onto a new page in a cheap exercise book and transfers next to them any notes he’d made for those he’d seen on previous appointments, to keep all the information methodically in one place in front of him:

Denise Carmichael, 61. Frozen shoulder. Add—cautious; note does not like stretching past discomfort.

Leo Zhang, 34. Tension headaches. Add—check neck posture corrections working? Has ergonomic support at work arrived?

Simon Daley, 47. Lower back pain. Add—possible disc involvement (awaiting MRI). Still nervous about bending?

Eddie Ng, 70. Elbow pain. Add—query: poor scapular control/inhibited rotator cuff/biceps tendon involvement? Add—shoulder requires palpation. Acute pain likely.

June Bremer, 68. Stroke rehab. Add—fragile gains, fluctuating fatigue. Check for dizziness before standing exercises.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

“Morning, Amos. Good weekend?” Sebastian’s voice, crisp, upbeat, breezes in from the passage outside Amos’s treatment room.

“Yeah. Nothing exciting,” Amos replies, thinking his discovery could be described as neither good nor exciting. Just life‑changing. He folds back the cover of his exercise book to make it lie flat on his table. “You make it out to the beach house?” he asks. Sebastian has paused in the doorway.

“We sure did. Twins were in the surf before breakfast—bloody freezing, but they don’t care.”

Five years between him and Sebastian, but it may as well be decades. His boss, the young owner of Physio Fits, moves with the confidence of never having missed a step. Sydney Grammar School, Bachelor of Science in physiotherapy, an extra honours year; parents buying the house on Burwood Road and paying for its conversion into a clinic leaving their son free to collect trophies: a sleek townhouse, a beach place up the coast, a wife who packed hand‑cut fruit into biodegradable containers in the twins’ lunch boxes. The path that brought Amos here: solo mother requiring parenting, Fairfield High School, two years of shifts six days a week at the concrete plant to save enough to pay for a degree. He thought Sebastian had seen in him a hard worker who wouldn’t expect a high salary; an employee who would help him keep his car upgraded every year. Provided Amos sticks to seeing his patients in the allotted times.

He scans the list of patients again. He’ll try harder to run on time. But the secret is already colouring everything, like a drop of dye in a glass of water.

Eddie Ng shuffles in, clutching his elbow. After six patients, Amos feels he’s seeing him through smeared glass.

“The pain came back when I was gardening,” Eddie says. “Pruning roses.” Roses—thorns—gardens—secrets. Amos rubs his left temple, pulsing with pain for the last hour.

“You want to lie down or stay seated?” Eddie points to the treatment table. Amos’s hand pauses on his shoulder. Normally, that space—touch but not pressure—is where he might read the story: why there is pain in the elbow. Today, nothing. He skips palpation, goes straight to applying the ice pack. Eddie flinches.

“Sorry,” Amos says. From where he’s standing he can glimpse over to the open notebook on his table, read the note from the previous session: acute pain likely; needs palpation. Stay present, he warns himself.

Finally, the tenth patient, June, recovering from a stroke, her left side still weak, her speech clipped and slow. Amos blinks hard, the pain behind his temple now pounding. His afternoon coffee on the windowsill, cold. June sits down, appears hesitant, but he doesn’t notice.

“Are we doing the same as last time?” she asks, doubt and fragility in her voice. But Amos doesn’t hear it, or if he does, it doesn’t register. He’s skipped checking his notes altogether.

“Yes, the standing balance exercises.”

“Actually…” she starts.

But he’s saying, “Just give me a minute while I set out the cones.”

She stands up then, prepares to walk and her knees buckle under her. The fall is sudden. He turns, too late.

She’s shaken and frightened; he’s worse. He crouches beside her, assessing any injury, apologising, his mind shocked out of autopilot into full control. Why hadn’t he listened to what she was trying to say.

When she’s seated and calmer, he looks at his notebook. “Check for dizziness before standing exercises” glares off the page at him.

***

After Sebastian has walked whistling out the door the place is silent. Amos sits writing the incident report, not out of obligation, (Sebastian sees them as a waste of earning time), but as his penance. He should have picked up on June’s hesitation, her fear, but the secret has been bleeding into his judgment. He’s haunted not just by guilt over her fall, but by guilt for holding onto information and by the knowledge that it will upend lives if he reveals it. Yet keeping it to himself could compromise his integrity even further. Today it has damaged his ability to do the work he loves.

And he still doesn’t know what to do about it.

Chapter 2

ANGEL

Amos’s mother called herself Angel. Angelic she could be, Amos thought, on her good days. She was young to be his mother—just over forty—though he wasn’t sure exactly about that. Nor did he know anything about her life prior to having him. She must’ve been around seventeen. He only knew she’d been born and lived in New Zealand. Nothing about any family of hers. Any time he asked her, she’d say something like, You don’t want to dig into that past, kiddo.

Angel was into yoga. She was also into crystals, auras and past lives. When Amos had told her seven years earlier that he had decided to become an accountant, she dropped her favourite incense burner.

“An accountant? You want to spend your life dredging through peoples’ garbage—because that’s what it is—their old receipts and invoices, finding evidence of how they spent their money? Oh God, Amos,” she’d said, “when there are so many meaningful occupations. And you’re a healer, you know it’s in your name.” She’d told him this many times; that she had named him soma spelt backwards, and what a wonderful, mystical thing soma is, according to the Eastern thought she followed.

But Amos had become tired of living on nothing. They had survived, just, on her unemployment benefit and what she made from her card readings and yoga lessons, which tended to be spasmodic. He had decided to be an accountant because he knew they made good money: he even imagined saving enough to buy them a house. Other people had automatic payments set up so they never went, like he did, to the Post Office to pay the gas and electricity bills, or the phone bill, in crumpled notes and loose coins on the last day before the service was due to be cut off.

He had worked out how much it was going to cost to do a Bachelor of Commerce degree. Angel shrieked when he told her. “And how do you propose to make money like that? You’re seventeen. You did get very high marks in science—thanks to the home schooling I gave you when you were young—but love, you’ve got no skills, no experience. It will take you years and years to get that much, that’s assuming you’re even lucky enough to find a job. This is 1992. Have you got any idea how many shopping trolleys you’d have to push at Woolworths or how many cars you’d have to wash before you saved anywhere near that much?”

That’s when he’d told her about Coremix, the concrete plant in Yennora, three kilometres northeast of Fairfield. He had walked straight into the manager’s office with his shoulders back, held his eyes resolutely ahead until he reached the man behind the dust‑covered, paper‑strewn desk.

“I got offered a job there,” he told his mother. “The work’s hard but the pay’s good. If I do the long shifts, I’ve worked out I could save what I need in two years.”

Turned out his saving hadn’t been quite as good as what he’d calculated. Either he’d underestimated the amount he could put away each week or the university fees were higher than he’d estimated. But after two years of working at Coremix, even though he still didn’t have quite enough he knew he could not do another year there. Still, he worked right up until the week classes started. Only then had he stopped pulling on his cement‑stiffened work shirt and shorts, pushing his feet into baked‑grey boots.

And then he found himself on Monday 6 March 1995, being jostled by the hundred‑odd new students as he walked into lecture room 157 of the Carslaw Building off Eastern Avenue at the University of Sydney. His new career had begun. Only the first step towards it—but a step he’d earned. He noticed the mix of expressions on his mother’s face as she watched him leaving home that morning—her continuing disgust at his choice of study, but he thought he also saw pride. Perhaps because she had raised, single‑handedly, a son who meant what he had said, who had followed through.

In those first weeks Amos found he was comparing himself unfavourably to the mostly laughing, loud‑voiced first years. They wore their family‑inherited entitlement like they wore their casual but label‑branded clothes, coming from glossy private schools with curated futures waiting for them. His world—the small rental with his mother, the two years at the concrete plant—made him feel not only older, but of a different species. Sometimes he imagined the cement dust had changed the colour of his skin: had seeped in creating a greyness that exposed his humble origins.

One lunch break, he walked away from those first year students clustered in groups in the sunshine on the grass, and beneath the fabled sandstone arches he found a bench built close against the wall. It was shaded, quiet and cool there. He unwrapped the canned‑tuna sandwiches he’d made early that morning before catching the train from Fairfield to Redfern, not noticing at first, in the shadow, a young female student. From his first furtive glances he had the feeling that her trunk and limbs looked too small. He saw then her steel‑rimmed round glasses and how her hair was cut very short, close‑cropped to her scalp and bleached white, that contrasted oddly against her darkish olive skin. She had positioned herself at the very far end of the bench, her left shoulder pressing against the wall. Her hands, too, were tiny, like a young child’s hands, and with her right hand she was using chopsticks, carefully eating rice from a plastic container—carefully, he thought, because she was at the same time scanning, through her glasses, pages of a thick hardcover book propped open on the bench next to her. He peered over just enough to make out the title: ACCOUNTING REPORTS AND ANALYSIS.

“Do you understand that stuff?” It had taken him several minutes to find the courage to ask the question, and once he spoke he regretted that his voice sounded too loud; the cavernous arch above them had amplified his words.

She looked up at him, and for an instant he had a vision of a fawn, wide‑eyed and still, as unmoving as a statue, deciding whether danger was near; whether she should leap away to safety into some bushy glade. He imagined this—he had never seen a baby deer, but he once watched, with his mother, the film of Disney’s Bambi. The girl looked like that dainty little cartoon figure—fragile, uncertain and distrustful.

“Yes,” she said, very quietly, after a long pause.

“I don’t,” he said then, relieved she had answered. “I can’t get my head around it, any of it. I think my mother might be right, that I’m not cut out to be an accountant.”

For several moments she said nothing, and he thought he had shared too much information and alarmed her. But then the soft voice again: “My father says I must be an accountant.”

“And you go along with that?”

“Yes,” she said, the word muttered almost too quietly for him to hear.

“You always do what he says?” That sounded rude, he thought, hoping he hadn’t caused offence—his question had escaped without pre‑thought. She sat, silent—she seemed sad—for several moments, and then replied, “I would be a bad person if I didn’t.”

He noticed then her slender neck, so slender that when she bent forward to pick her bag up from the concrete, he saw the points of her spinal bones under her smooth skin. When she stood up he saw how petite she was, and when she walked away, jerkily, he glimpsed between her sage‑coloured cotton trousers and her shoe that her left foot was not skin and bone. It was wood or plastic.

Amos looked out for her on following days and found her always in the same spot, sitting close to the wall like a small animal sheltering beside a cliff. Slowly, over a few weeks, after he had spoken to her again—always with gentleness and respect, and always waiting patiently for her slow, quietly spoken answers—they became acquainted, in a fashion: names—hers was Rosiane (French, she explained), the suburbs they lived in, their subjects at school, and that led to him asking her questions about parts of the course he was struggling to understand. She explained the concepts in ways that made sense to him.