Cooper.

The alarm goes off at four fifty, and it's the worst part of the day. Cooper knows it every morning the way you know a steep hill. His body begs to keep sleeping the way it begs for air. He sits on the edge of the bed for three minutes, feet cold on the vinyl, staring at nothing, while Dazza grumbles and rolls over. He's a low-metabolism koala-Kin, the kind that sleeps through the morning. "I'm not lazy," he protests before anyone can say it, "I'm low-consumption — there's a difference."

Then the coffee brings him back to life and he heads out in the dark. The town at five in the morning belongs to him: low fog over the Hastings River, the cockatoos still quiet, the valley smelling stronger than at any other hour — cold eucalyptus, water, a hint of manure from the paddocks. He lifts two fingers off the wheel to greet the other three cars that exist at that hour: the baker, a nurse coming off shift, the milkman. Twenty minutes a day, he's the king of an empty kingdom.

Wauchope, the Hastings Valley, the mid north coast of New South Wales. He's never lived anywhere else. Zero moves in an entire life.

The station lives in the old croquet club, on the corner of Bain and Cameron, the lawn out front still marked with the old court lines. A volunteer hand-painted the 2WAY sign, and the W came out a little crooked. The screen door gives a sharp bang when it shuts — that's the sound his day starts with.

Before anything else, the first cup. Coffee from the place on Bago Road, ground that same morning, black and nearly boiling, in a brown stoneware mug with the glaze chipped right where his lip rests. It was his Nan's — his grandmother's. He holds it with both hands, as if it weighed more than it does. Five minutes that belong to him, in the dark, with the town still asleep, before he switches on the mic.

He walks in whispering — "morning" — and out of that small, round body in a Hawaiian shirt comes a diesel-engine roar that doesn't match his face at all. Anyone who knows him only from the radio pictures someone twice his size. Breakfast announcer on 2WAY, six to nine, a volunteer, not a cent to his name for it. In the afternoons he delivers hardware to cover the rent, and he likes that double life: nobody at the counter would guess the voice on the radio is his until he speaks.

There's another Cooper, and he comes out on Saturdays at the bowls club. His voice stays soft, but a clean coldness sets in: he stops joking, reads the end in silence, and calls the curve of the bowl three shots ahead. "I'll leave you this one nice and easy. Take your time — I've got all day." He delivers a perfect shot, steals the end, and drops a "sorry, mate" with zero remorse. The softest man in town is the deadliest on the green, and nobody sees it coming from him.

It's the koala's territoriality finding its way out wherever it can: his chair with the duct tape on the armrest, his mug, his stretch of the counter, the songs he refuses to play. Underneath the plush toy exterior is someone who knows exactly who's behaved well and who hasn't across thirty years in the district. He files it away. He keeps smiling regardless.

The one thing that really pulls him out of his good mood is gratuitous cruelty. The bloke from Sydney who bought the Whitlocks' old house, ran the family out, cut down the gum tree in the garden for the view, and now calls the station to complain about the noise. Cooper doesn't argue with him. "Right then. Let's play another song."

As a kid he was the loud one in a big litter. In a house full of koala-Kin siblings napping around the clock, somebody had to make noise for anything to happen in the day, and that fell to him: he narrated dinner, narrated the match over the top of the TV commentator.

His grandmother would take him up to the bush behind the house and tell him the names of the trees. This one's tallowwood. This one, grey gum. This one here, swamp mahogany — the old-timers used to talk about that one like it was a delicacy. It was her way of teaching him to count the named things of the valley, one by one, like someone taking roll. The same tally, long before there was a notebook for it.

When she died, old, in her own bed — which in this town already counts as a luxury — she left him the mug. Cooper swears his on-air voice, the one that booms, "is Nan's, just louder." He doesn't carry it like a wound, but like an absence that keeps him warm: every name he reads well on air, he says the way she taught him to say goodbye. The conversation keeps going — it's just that he's the one carrying it now.

He started hanging around the 2WAY studio as a teenager, not out of some dream of being an announcer, but for something more physical: inside, there were people talking into a microphone, and talking came as naturally to him as breathing. He fetched tea, coiled cables, learned not to cough near an open mic, and learned to read the wall clock, which rules over everything. They let him stay because his big voice made the old volunteers laugh.

One day, a bloke who was retiring handed him the headphones without ceremony. "Here, kid, see what you can do with this." And he left him the graveyard shift, the one nobody wanted. At sixteen, seventeen, he was doing three, four, five in the morning, spinning records for truckers and for nobody at all.

That's where he learned something that's never left him: talking to people you can't see, who don't answer you, who might not even be listening, isn't the same as being alone. It's being accompanied in the dark. He still uses those same headphones, the cracked headband wrapped in electrical tape — the kind that's always on hand in a delivery town with a handyman husband. He puts them on and the voice settles into place on its own.

About twelve years ago they gave him the brekkie slot, six to nine, the one the whole town listens to. It was his one real promotion, and the warmth of it nearly frightened him. Between songs he reads the weather, the birthdays, the parish notices, and at the end, quietly, the district's births and obituaries.

The tally started out of embarrassment, not out of any cause. One morning he read two obituaries back to back without knowing they were mother and son from the same litter. The widow called him afterward, hurt but kind, with a patience that stung more than a shout would have. That night he wrote both names in a notebook so he'd never mix them up again. The notebook stuck around.

Without meaning to, he started noting the births too, in the other column. And one year, flipping through the pages, he realized the obituaries were pulling ahead. Not by much — a handful a year — but ahead, and steadily so. His grandmother had already given him the breeding numbers, though he didn't understand it then: "there were so many of us you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a cousin." He's probably the only one in the district who knows it by name, because he's the only one who reads both lists out loud every week. He never says so.

He reads an obituary the way he'd read a birthday, with the same warmth, slowly, so his voice doesn't shake. "Slow down, the surname deserves to be said properly. Rest easy, mate. You did well." That's the whole discipline: feel it on the inside, hand it over warm on the outside, never change the tone, not even when the name weighs on him.

The day his grandmother died, he wrote her down with her full name, unabbreviated. It's the only thing he's written out in full in years of tick-mark columns. The next morning he read her obituary the same as any other, and nobody in Wauchope knew it was hers. He went home and Dazza had left a fresh gum leaf on his side of the bed.

It's an old Hastings custom: when someone dies, the neighbours leave a gum leaf on the family's porch, without knocking, without going in. Cooper reading the obituaries at seven in the morning is that same leaf, laid down by everyone at once. And the reverse holds too: if he's out on his delivery run and spots a new strip of eucalyptus ribbon on a letterbox — a baby born — he gets out of the van just to note it down in the good column that night, before the clinic even announces it.

It sits in the bedside drawer of the granny flat, under the charger cables. A spiral notebook, red cover, the Spirax kind they sell at the servo — he takes it from his day job and uses it only for this. Two columns in biro: on the left, the ones being born; on the right, the ones passing on. He never adds a total. He refuses to sum it up on purpose, and he only knows how it's tracking by which of the two pens runs out first. Knowing only half of it, as a kind of mercy toward himself.

Dazza knows the notebook exists and has never opened it. It's the one serious pact of ten years of marriage, and it's never been said out loud.

He doesn't talk about it, because talking about it would turn him into the sad koala of a town in decline, and he wants to be the bloke on the radio who makes your breakfast a bit brighter. The tally stays private precisely so his cheerfulness on air stays real and doesn't turn into a performance. When someone at the pub gets maudlin — "this town's dying out" — Cooper cuts in with a grin: "Yeah, yeah, Macca, terribly sad, all of it. You gonna throw, or do I have to do it and beat you again? I've already got a funeral booked for Sunday."

Dazza. Darren to his mother, Daz at home, Dazza when he names him on air. Also koala-Kin, which in a shrinking town is no small thing: he found one of his own. A carpentry teacher at TAFE in Port Macquarie, he built the deck and the shelves for the breakfast slot, and the two of them needle each other for sport, koala versus wombat: "at least I don't dig holes in the garden." They rent a fibro-and-tin granny flat that Cooper calls the luxury shed. "Poor in the wallet, stinking rich in life," he says without a trace of irony.

In summer his voice changes. It comes out a touch deeper when he says good morning, the meter needles swing into the red, and one volunteer learned to turn down his gain in January without ever knowing why. He gets more territorial about his chair, clingier at home. He puts it down to the heat: "Must be the heat, mate. That'll be it." He never links it to anything else, and not-knowing is part of who he is. Dazza is the only one who notices — "your voice gets deeper in January, did you know that?" — he went blank, laughed, and changed the subject. Those weeks, Dazza rests a hand on the back of his neck a little more and doesn't ask.

He closes every morning with the same line, tossed off like any ordinary see-you-tomorrow: look after each other, because we're the ones who are left. Nobody in Wauchope knows he means it. He wouldn't admit it either. Then he switches off the lights, walks out drained at nine, and goes to sleep off the morning. The last image of his day is usually the bedside drawer, the one he doesn't open. Coffee, and back at it.

> **Canonical quote:** He never adds up the total — he tracks it by the thickness of the pages, and the next morning he says good morning just as warm as ever.