About A Lovely and Terrible Thing
Around you the world is swirling. You pass through a submerged town, its steeples and trees barely visible through the thick water . . .
In the distance the wreck of the gunship HMS Elizabeth lolls on a sandbank. Oil slicks the canals of the capital and even now the old men still tell tales of mermen in the shallows . . .
A pool empty of water save for a brackish puddle and bones and hanks of fur on the floor - the remains of mice or possums that have tumbled in, lured perhaps by the moisture. Or perhaps by something else . . .
In bestselling author Chris Womersley’s first short fiction collection, twenty watery, macabre and deliciously enjoyable tales will keep you spellbound until their final, unexpected and unsettling twist.
PRAISE FOR CHRIS WOMERSLEY
‘By interweaving the trivial, the humorous and the grisliest of the grisly, Chris Womersley straps us in for a shivery ride.’ New York Times
‘Unrepentantly daring.’ The Age
‘Poetic and original.’ The Monthly
‘Brilliantly compelling.’ Australian Women’s Weekly
‘A master storyteller.’ Australian Book Review
CONTENTS
Headful of Bees
The House of Special Purpose
The Possibility of Water
The Very Edge of Things
Growing Pain
Petrichor
The Middle of Nowhere
The Other Side of Silence
The Mare’s Nest
The Age of Terror
Dark the Water, So Deep the Night
Where There’s Smoke
Season of Hope
A Lovely and Terrible Thing
Blood Brother
Crying Wolf
The Deep End
The Shed
Theories of Relativity
What the Darkness Said
Acknowledgements
Details of previous publication
For Freya
‘Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region . . . Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.’
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale
Headful of Bees
If, years later, you heard that little Adam Miller had joined a cult, you wouldn’t have been totally surprised: he had an unhinged sort of quality, that too-shiny light you see in the eyes of those Manson Family girls or Hare Krishna devotees handing out leaflets in the city. He was the kid in our street who found a pile of old Playboy magazines by the railway line, who would come to school with a dozen packets of bubblegum for his friends, who saw movies the rest of us weren’t allowed to see yet. I envied his family in the way you envy other families when you’re young. The other parents are always cooler or prettier than your own; they let you stay up later, do stuff your own parents would never allow. I thought he was lucky, although my opinion on that has, obviously, changed over time.
Adam had an unusual home situation and he and I became friends, or at least we hung out a lot after school – listening to his sister’s records, sometimes kicking a football around, eating Milo straight from the tin. His house was empty most afternoons from when we got home from school until dinnertime, sometimes even later. They were dim hours, full of strange magic, of things we would never again see or feel. We were young, on the brink of adulthood, those few years when almost everything in your life really happens.
Mr Miller was a scientist. He worked at the university – long hours and late nights, that sort of thing. Mrs Miller was a nurse but she’d been away for several months, staying with relatives out of town. She was a distant woman at the best of times, sick of her children, or so it had always seemed to me. I’d heard plenty of stories about her – we all had. One night the previous winter I was putting out the rubbish bins and encountered her on the footpath in the dusk light. She was leaning against the fence, smoking a cigarette, and seemed not to notice me straightaway, so absorbed was she in her meditations.
‘Hello, Mike,’ she said in a soft voice as I wrestled the heavy bin to the kerb. ‘And how are you this evening?’
I feigned surprise. ‘Oh, hi, Mrs Miller. I’m fine, thanks. How are you?’
‘Oh, you know. Taking in the night air.’
I nodded and looked around, although I was unsure what I might have been looking for exactly. The streetlights came on. My God, those suburban evenings, so full of hope and all its little victims. That smell of muddy grass, the clatter of spoon against a dog’s dinner bowl, a puddle of wine on the kitchen table.
Mrs Miller tapped her forehead with the packet of Marlboros, and the cigarettes rattled about inside, the sound of them like a battery of tiny coughs. Cough cough cough cough. It was an unsettling gesture, made more so by her accompanying low groan.
The previous week a dog, or maybe a possum, had tipped over our bin and rummaged through the contents, so I busied myself with jamming the metal lid on tight. When I had finished, Mrs Miller was staring at me intently.
Like some sort of Cold War femme fatale, she took a lengthy drag on her cigarette and exhaled the pale smoke into the air. ‘How old are you now?’
‘I’m almost fourteen.’
‘Nearly fourteen – wow. What an age. With everything in front of you. What are you going to do for a job when you’re older?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Miller. I quite like science. Maybe a biologist or something?’
She pondered this. ‘Why don’t you call me Vivian? You’re old enough now. We’re neighbours after all.’
I nodded.
‘Come on. Try it out.’
I stared up the length of the street, at the wet asphalt gleaming under the streetlights like the hide of a whale. A car cruised past. ‘Okay, Vivian,’ I said.
‘There you go.’ She pushed off the fence and tottered towards me on her high heels. Since the lights had come on and my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I saw that her skirt was askew and a leaf was lodged in her dark, tangled hair; she looked, in fact, like she had been climbing trees.
‘I have bees in my head,’ she hissed at last, in a conspiratorial tone that suggested such misfortune might have been the fault of someone nearby. ‘Waiting to . . . come out and take over.’
Caught off guard and with the image of her climbing a tree still uppermost in my mind, I shrank back, as if expecting to see a swarm of the insects wriggling about in her hair.
Perhaps detecting my alarm, she hurriedly corrected herself. ‘I feel like I have bees in my head, I’m supposed to say. I feel like I have a head full of bees, trying to crawl out. That’s all. I realise there’s nothing in there. I just . . . I don’t know.’ She flicked her cigarette butt expertly into the wide street. A sudden, unconvincing laugh. ‘Run along, Mike. Say hi to your mum for me.’
That was about a year earlier and I had hardly seen her since.
Adam had become obsessed with the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks and would play it over and over again on the turntable in his sister’s room. Sitting on the floor cross-legged, chin on his fists, weaving from side to side in time with the music. The record had been released the year he was born – 1968 – and this only added to its appeal. That, plus the indecipherable lyrics, its whiff of the mystical. I guess that’s what I meant about him being the sort of kid who might have joined a cult or otherwise been seduced by some extravagant promise. He had that searching quality, al
ways pointing out something in the music and asking what I thought old Van was wailing on about.
‘There,’ he’d say with a finger raised, peering at me through his grubby fringe. ‘What does he mean? Is he riding a bike or what? And where’s Ladbroke Grove, do you reckon? England, I guess.’
I shrugged. I was poking about in his sister’s stuff on the bureau. Sally was four or five years older than us. She was meant to be looking after Adam in their mother’s absence but we rarely saw her; she was always heading out with her plumber boyfriend, Gary, going to the drive-in, promising to take us to see Poltergeist even though, of course, she never did. There was a Led Zeppelin poster on her wall, pictures of David Bowie torn from magazines. In a metal dish were assorted hairclips, a collection of badges, and a bottle of pink nail polish. Clothes were strewn over the floor and the bed.
The side came to an end and I crouched down to sort through the other albums stacked against the wall. I was familiar with most of Sally’s records but enjoyed looking at the covers and reading the liner notes. She had the usual stuff – some Stones, Cheap Trick, Fleetwood Mac.
‘Hey,’ Adam said, tossing the Astral Weeks cover to one side, ‘guess what I found yesterday?’
He jumped up and began riffling through his sister’s drawers. After a few seconds he held up his trophy: a slim joint. He wafted it beneath his nose. ‘I think Gary gets hold of some pretty good stuff,’ he said, affecting the tone of an expert, even though I knew he had never been stoned himself.
I took it, rolled it between my fingers and sniffed. When I’d puffed on a joint in the bathroom at the school social the previous year, I hadn’t really felt anything, even though I had willed the tiles to transform, the fluorescent light to reveal something of the world’s great mysteries. Nothing, except a mild headache, probably from the tobacco.
Adam snatched the joint from me. He was excited. ‘What do you think? Should we smoke it?’
The very thought of it made me anxious. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Sally will kill us.’
‘What’s she going to do? Tell my dad?’
This was a good point. I made a show of checking my watch. ‘I’m not sure. It’s getting late. What about Gary?’
Adam rolled his eyes. ‘Who cares about Gary?’
‘Well, it might be his joint.’
‘If he says anything, I’ll tell my dad that Sally’s boyfriend is a drug dealer and he’ll call the cops straightaway. Come on. We’ll open the window and blow the smoke outside. It’ll be fine.’
I shrugged and turned back to the records, kind of hoping he would forget the idea. But he didn’t. He found Sally’s lighter, opened the window and perched on its ledge. Then he lit up, took a few tokes and passed it to me.
The following few hours are soggy in my memory. We watched a cat stalk a bird in the garden below. Rainwater dripped from a tree. Traffic, the distant hoot of a train, the soft glimmer of angels. There was a lot of heavy staring, of giggling at things I have long forgotten. Adam insisted on listening to the first side of Astral Weeks again, which suddenly sounded melancholy, riddled with portents.
I became incredibly thirsty and, leaving Adam lying on the floor, arranged my limbs to make my way through the gloomy house into the kitchen to hunt down something sweet and wet to drink. The hallway was cold. A dish on a sideboard rattled as I passed.
I was standing in the wedge of light from the open fridge door, cold juice bottle in one hand, when I noticed Mrs Miller sitting at the kitchen table. The shock of her. Like when I had seen her in the street the year before, she showed no sign of having spotted me, but it was impossible that she hadn’t. Sure enough, she turned to face me after a few seconds. A cigarette burned in a glass ashtray. All was quiet.
‘Hi there,’ she said at last.
I was terrified, paranoid, unable to speak. Eventually, I held up the bottle of juice and mumbled something about getting a drink. Surely, I thought, surely she would know instantly that I was stoned out of my mind. She would tell my mum, ring the police, throw me out of the house.
But she just waved a hand in the air. ‘Go right ahead.’
As naturally as I could, concentrating on every move, I lifted a glass from the cupboard and poured orange juice into it. Mrs Miller didn’t speak but I was horribly aware of her scrutinising me. I put away the juice, closed the fridge and was preparing to flee when she spoke.
‘No need to run off,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages. How’s your mother?’
I hesitated, stranded in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen door and the wooden table where she was sitting. ‘She’s fine,’ I managed to croak.
‘And your dad?’
‘He’s good, too.’
‘What are you boys up to? Listening to Sally’s records?’
I nodded.
‘And where’s she?’
‘Out with Gary somewhere, I think.’
She inspected me. ‘What did they tell you about me? What did Adam tell you?’
I shrugged. My mouth was claggy and dry. The bulge of fear in my chest was swelling right up into my throat. I wasn’t sure what she was asking me, whether I had even understood her.
‘Did they say I was with relatives all this time?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered, relieved to finally understand. ‘In Queensland.’
She found this inordinately funny, and giggled for a few seconds. ‘Yes. They taught me to meditate. To drink herbal tea. We wrote long lists of things we were grateful for. Children, houses, our health, of course.’
I was desperate for Adam to appear and rescue me but, with dismay, I detected the murmuring intro to the opening track on Astral Weeks’ second side. There was no way he would even hear us now.
‘Didn’t work, though,’ she said. She coughed several times and patted her chest. She undid a button or two of her dark blue blouse and pinched the fabric free from her chest, as if she were hot.
I began to back away, hoping to melt into the gloomy hallway without her noticing. And I was almost at the kitchen door when she composed herself and gestured for me to approach. My skin rippled with fresh fear.
‘Don’t be scared,’ she said. ‘Come here.’ Her tone was firm, but playful. I shuffled across and stood in front of her. I caught a thrilling glimpse down her blouse: the lacy edge of her black bra, the slope of breast beneath it. Its rapid rise and fall. A fine gold chain lounged across the ridge of her collarbone. She looked me up and down and smiled, but in a way that made her seem regretful. ‘I’ve known you almost all your life, you know. When we first met you were a boy in short pants. I remember thinking you would grow into a handsome man. And I was right. You’re almost there, aren’t you?’
Sometimes the world of adults is so strange. She held out her hand to me. The expression on her face was peculiar, indecipherable, and if I were older I might have understood it and taken flight, but that long-ago afternoon, aged fourteen, I knew no better. Unsure what else to do, unbearably excited, I placed my trembling hand in hers.
She coughed again, cleared her throat with a vile sound. ‘Can you hear it, Mike?’ Her voice was low and hoarse.
I listened. Nothing, not even the drift of music from the other room. I shook my head. Mrs Miller – Vivian – tugged my hand, drew me down towards her until our faces were almost touching. I smelled her shampoo, her elegant and womanly neck. She had a mole beneath her left ear.
‘Please don’t tell me you can’t hear it,’ she whispered.
And I listened again, harder this time. And it came to me, but gradually. There. A droning noise. I didn’t move. Mrs Miller coughed, coughed again. She seemed to have something caught in her throat. She hacked wetly a number of times, until she expelled onto her palm a small, damp thing coated in her own saliva.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I told you, didn’t I?’
And I stared, disbeliev
ingly, at what she had brought up. A bee struggling, with intermittent and querulous fizzing, to free itself from its foamy sac. Tiny cycling legs, sodden fur, wings plastered against its plump body. I tried to pull away, but Mrs Miller squeezed my hand ever tighter. She looked at me with a chilling expression of vindication and despair. And we stared at each other, my hand still clasped in hers, as more and more of the creatures clambered from her nostrils and ears. She opened her mouth and a dozen more made their way across her tongue and teeth. They lolled about in the strands of her hair like drunken mountaineers, picked their way over her cheeks, hundreds of them by now, a miniature army triumphant and overjoyed at the fresh lands they had conquered.
The House of Special Purpose
Warren was unfailingly polite to his parents-in-law, Marta and Leon, and cared deeply for their only daughter Amelia; still, they despised him, he knew. Amelia denied it, of course, and would become frustrated if he ever expressed his dismay. They were just mistrustful, she said. You would be too if you’d lived in Russia in those days. After all, friends of theirs had vanished in the night, were sent to labour camps, never heard from again. You’d be wary. You know, when my mother was pregnant with me, my father was jailed for two months for his religious beliefs. They thought they’d never see each other again. It’s a miracle they got out when they did. They don’t hate you. It’s their way, their manner. They’re different. It’s, you know, a cultural thing.
This sounded reasonable, certainly, but never seemed explanation enough for the way Marta offered up her powdered cheek for a kiss only to shrink back at the precise moment his lips might have brushed her skin, as if fearful of contamination. His father-in-law was friendlier, but not much. There would be a handshake, an offer of coffee, perhaps even an attempt to engage Warren in a discussion of the cricket (for which he had developed a curious passion) before the inevitable silence while Marta involved Amelia in some feminine business in another part of their gloomy suburban home. Once, not long after he and Amelia had started dating, Warren asked Leon about his time in prison and it was one of the few occasions he became animated. They were sitting side by side on the sofa in the lounge room. Leon leaned in close.
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