The Room on the Other Side

A quarter-acre of uneven ground near the centre of the Bixbus settlement is marked with stakes and cord. Adrian Pafistis arrives before anyone else on the first day and walks the perimeter, assessing the ground composition and the gradient that will need correcting along the eastern edge. Kain Jeffries brings the settlement's only compact front-end loader across from the supply staging area shortly after dawn. Jerome Smith and Marco Ferraro appear with a rake and a borrowed shovel. Paul Smith passes through the site twice. Nobody has the luxury of spending an entire day on a single task, and by late afternoon roughly half the site has been levelled. The ground is flat where it had not been that morning, and level ground is the precondition for everything that will follow.

Two days later, a twenty-foot shipping container is lowered onto the eastern end of the cleared ground with a deep, percussive thud that carries across the quiet settlement. That same morning, Jenny Triffett walks inside it for the first time and marks in chalk where the windows should go — two openings on the northern wall for consistent light, a smaller one on the eastern end for cross-ventilation, a side entrance on the southern wall so children can enter from the planned courtyard. She is not assessing the container as a structure. She is assessing it as a classroom. By late afternoon the chalk lines have become rough openings, the steel cut back through the corrugation with an angle grinder and a spray of orange sparks.

Over the four days that follow, the container is made safe to touch, battened, panelled, fitted with a door that closes and perspex windows that admit rectangles of afternoon light, and painted white twice. By the evening of the sixth day, Jenny is dragging furniture across bare ground toward a room whose walls are still tacky with the second coat.