The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  This part has only come back to me recently, because it was a stage Alice passed through and eventually grew out of. I’d stopped thinking of her as a child with a death wish by the time she was four. As a girl she was lively and exasperating. Tom changed jobs and we took the opportunity to move up to the country. There I envisaged our daughter developing the kind of hardy resourcefulness and the love of nature that I recalled from my own childhood. I hoped that we’d all reset.

  What I can’t decide now is whether I was right in the beginning, or if it was what I did afterwards that made me right in the end.

  *

  All the food served in the Cirrus Club is made flat so that guests are not reminded of their altitude. We’re over two hundred metres up in the air here, floating above a chambered abyss. The menu is written in lower case. Today’s specials are mushrooms, steak carpaccio with capers, and a lemon tart as thin as cardboard.

  Eat enough, though, and you can still get fat on flat food.

  Paul has ordered an entrée but I stick to bread and butter. And the wine. He holds his glass at the top of the stem without drinking and asks how I’m finding the hotel. Surely, he suggests, I’m bored of eating the same meals day in, day out? He has mistaken my decision not to order for a lack of appetite. In fact I already ate two entrées before Paul arrived. I tell him that the specials change daily, about the in-room delivery service and the ordering-out guide. Although he’s right about one thing. Up here, nothing tastes very good.

  What I want to know about, but do not ask, is my garden. Paul isn’t the kind of man who’d be interested in plants – he’s a teacher, social studies and geography (an indoor subject now) – so I doubt he’d recognise which species have regenerated and which have died. I am wondering if Alice has thought to put in cuttings. The soil will be too alkaline for most things, but there’s an acacia I’m hoping has seeded. The risk is that the topsoil will blow off otherwise. Succulents would be best to start off with. False agave, houseleek, baby toes, pigface: felonious names. Sticks-of-fire and mother-in-law’s tongue; a bad joke. But the weeds will have pushed through before anything else. By now the weeds will be hip-deep.

  A waiter brings Paul’s entrée, a green soup, and lays our linen napkins in our laps. More bread is set out too, sourdough and grain. They are attentive here. They anticipate my endless craving for side dishes and carbonated drinks. If no one else is with me, I don’t even bother with the bread. I just eat the butter, square by square, listening to it evaporate into a greasy gas at the base of my tongue. There is a flickering around my tonsils.

  It’s a pea soup, with a sprig of mint, and it smells like turned earth.

  A vision rushes up at me from below then, of vegetables burned on their plots. Marrows like skulls. The past hot and sudden. Or am I confused? Is it possible they were skulls I thought were marrows? No. No, it’s a memory from before the fires, in the dry, of someone’s shrivelled gourds brought to the gardening centre for advice. People often stopped by with blighted leaves or fruit, because we were a kind of hospital, too, for plants.

  The misplacement of the image shakes me, though. Could that be the first connection burning through? Something tensile snapping open? What early warning is this?

  I pour from the bottle and concentrate on Paul’s rodent vowels. Something about people pulling together. He talks too fast. About people joining hands to rebuild a bowling club, a classroom and a swimming pool. But how does a swimming pool burn down?

  ‘Cheers,’ says Paul, who has raised his glass expectantly, ‘To?’

  ‘Oh. Marriage, naturally.’ This is the very smallest part of what he wants me to toast, to permit. ‘To union, then. To wedlock, to nuptials, to the happy day,’

  ‘To Alice,’ he drinks. ‘To love,’ and now he is going too far, ‘To family.’

  ‘Family.’ Yes. To goddamn family. To being in it, together.

  As he begins the soup I look down at my hand under the brim of the table. Whose thumb are you, there? I nudge it, but it stays fat and strange. When I push my fork in under the nail, it doesn’t hurt at all.

  *

  My girlhood was also spent in the country, but in the west. Until our early teens my family lived in Quairading, a wheatbelt town, although we had relocated to Perth by the time my sister and I reached high-school age. Those wheatbelt summers were vicious, I remember. Forty-degree heat waves that went on for weeks. Days stuck back to back with stupefying nights. The breathlessness. As if the air were laced with something granular. Split lips, mouthfuls of iron. Power lines that crepitated with the dust overhead. That kind of weather will taper you down, first to temper, then to superstition and deep paranoia.

  Midday is still vivid in my mind: so clean, dazzling and still. No wheat hissing in the fields, no stock bleating. You could hear every separate wing-beat of a crow as it flew low between the houses. It was as if an atomic bomb had rinsed through the sky and killed the wind. Which was entirely feasible back then – the end of the world could happen someplace else (the Pacific Ocean, a Soviet state) and arrive days before the radio announced it. My sister and I would sprawl, like victims of unseen radiation, on the cool linoleum in the kitchen. When our mother tired of stepping over our bodies and ordered us up, we left behind sweat-angels – the slithery calligraphy of fallen girls.

  The phrase pole-top fire rings out from that time, and yet I also remember that the blackouts meant we all slept with fire-starting items stored beside our beds. Boxes of Redheads, candles, kerosene for the lamp. Readied for electrical outages. Children didn’t play with matches then. Small domestic fires were ordinary, and even on the hottest summer night the Metters stove was stoked for cooking. There was no illicit appeal there. We didn’t play much of anything in that weather, anyhow. Listless, limp, limbo: in the summer, the speaking tongue unsticks from the roof of the mouth and drops into the lower jaw. We were too lethargic to use our imagination.

  In the year I turned ten, families in our street started receiving visits from two door-to-door preachers. Dusk gossip on the verandas called them ‘the Fire Evangelists.’ Fraudsters for God, wearing trade suits. One afternoon they appeared at our flyscreen – a well-dressed man, affable, carrying a briefcase and accompanied by his young son – offering a forty-point fire-safety check on the house. Courtesy, no cost. The man claimed to be tasked by the power company and, not knowing otherwise, my mother let him in. My sister and I learnt the boy’s name, Jacob, while his father inspected the ceiling insulation.

  ‘Can you stop, drop and roll?’ Jacob asked us, adding in hand gestures, in case we didn’t follow. ‘Stop. Dropp. Androll?

  We were sceptical, but on Jacob’s lead my sister was soon practising it down the front path as I kneeled on the steps.

  ‘Stop your sinning! Drop your idols! Roll to Jesus!’

  ‘STOP your sinning. DROP your idols. And ROLL to JESUS!’

  Crumbed in gravel, Jacob rolled up onto my sister, and then there was a moment that had very little to do with Jesus.

  Meanwhile, our mother’s voice had grown to a shout inside the house.

  Don’t give me brimstone, mister, I know brimstone. I’ll show you brimstone!

  The Fire Evangelist swung through the screen-door as if he’d been shoved, clutching his briefcase to his chest. He took up his son’s hand and marched him through the front gate, shouting over his shoulder.

  ‘Your home, missus! You have not built your home against the fires of Hell!’ He pointed at us, ‘You need to send your girls to church.’

  Because that’s what they did, these door-to-door preachers. In between pointing out the hazards of a heater sat near the curtains, and night-candles in the children’s rooms, they began to talk of the consuming fires underneath the house. That briefcase was heavy with bibles.

  When I was a girl, it was expected that the end of the world would happen in the Ch
ristian way. Yes, there would be fallout, and there would be brimstone – but then, someone would always be around to warn you. You would be given enough time to repent.

  *

  There are sirens in the streets below the hotel. I notice that sound more specifically, and even though it’s as faint as cutlery pulled down the glass, it still gets under my skin. Across the table Paul has ordered veal scaloppini with infant vegetables for main course, and I have squab paupiette, a pigeon chick killed before its maiden flight. Everything is wrong with the food here today.

  A week ago, I came across a bird trapped inside one of the highest hallways of the hotel. I don’t know how a bird ended up on the fortieth floor in a building where the windows are sealed by design. It flew from cornice to cornice, this ordinary small brown bird, hooking through the air. I watched it for nearly an hour, collecting carpet threads to furnish an eggless nest. For some reason, that bird made me want to cry.

  Clearly Alice has dressed Paul for our meeting. The tight, olive knit-shirt and the zippered jacket hung over the back of the chair; these are not the kind of clothes that a man Paul’s age feels comfortable in. A three-day beard the colour of wet salt blooms on his face and his hair is cropped short to offset baldness. It passes for grooming now – perhaps even for style – but if he keeps this up, in a few years it will be seen as vanity and, with a young wife, taken as a sign of insecurity. You don’t have to be a genius to imagine what they’re saying in the staff room. Tom never paid that much attention to his appearance in his life.

  Tom died five years ago now. He had been swimming in the lake, something he did every morning. It was a heart attack. He wasn’t exactly young for it, but his death still came as a shock. In fact, this is why Alice was taking the CPR course. In the years since her father’s death, she’s done all the refreshers and passed every level in first-aid certificates. One thing I regret is that she was there when they pulled him from the water. Alice has a fear of abandonment which I am sure can be tracked back to the moment she saw Tom lying dead on the mud.

  All the same, this relationship is something you don’t ever want for your daughter. To be other. Other woman, second wife. I’m OK with the so-called ‘modern family.’ I am not priggish. Those are hang-ups we could all do without. Some things, however, do not change, and one of those things is: men who have been married before are unsteady. Needless to say, Alice knows it.

  Paul has moved the conversation on to details of the wedding. He’s testing the perimeter of a demand, equivocating outside the point. At the moment, it’s the vows and the readings. Nothing biblical, naturally, but then what could they have? Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Not a single guest would believe it. Not now.

  ‘We’ve decided on bowl food,’ he says. ‘Instead of a buffet. Bowl food with a fusion theme.’

  Alice sent me the menu in the mail last week, but I pretend I haven’t seen it when he slides it across the tablecloth. She sends me other letters too, and I put them away in the drawer where the King James Bible hides. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those.

  ‘And there’ll be those sweet candy nuts’ Paul says. ‘In little bags to take home. It doesn’t say that there.’

  He is hoping for my approval, but bowls and bags? Will the guests play pin the tail on the donkey after the ceremony? It is a children’s party they have planned, not a wedding. Alice, the infanta in her white gown.

  ‘You know, Paul,’ I put the menu down. ‘If you’re getting cold feet on this, everyone would understand. I, for one, would understand.’

  ‘What?’ he whispers, and glances over his shoulder. ‘I know it’s soon but it’s devotion, completely. No question.’ He sits back. ‘The wedding’s going ahead, whether you’re there or not. I won’t call it off.’

  An image comes to me then, of Paul pumping on my daughter’s breastbone with his arms held straight. Breath, breath, pump, pump, breath, breath. Depress the solar plexus, that sun under the skin. Do it as punctual as a heartbeat.

  The kiss of life. That’s what it used to be called.

  ‘And your wife?’ I ask.

  ‘We’re divorced. I’m divorced.’

  I don’t need to remind him there are doubts.

  ‘Look,’ he raises his voice, shaky. ‘A lot got clarified recently. For everyone. We’re not the same as we were before.’ In my peripheral vision I see the maître d’ take a few steps towards us but I stop him with an open hand. Paul cuts a bite-sized carrot in two, eats it, and squeezes his fists on the table.

  ‘I know what I want.’ He takes a drink. ‘I’m committed to Alice. Any prevarication, that’s in the past. We’ve put it behind us. If it’s the age difference you’re worried about, that I can understand. You’re her mother, of course. Wanting what’s best.’

  ‘You are making a mistake, Paul,’ I say, without colour.

  ‘Have you asked Alice? Because actually, she doesn’t care what age I am. Perhaps what’s best for Alice, and I mean no disrespect, but perhaps what’s best for Alice is that she gets to make her own decisions. She’s old enough to know.’ His face is screwed into the centre of his head.

  But the mistake I was referring to has nothing to do with Paul’s age, or his habit in the past of returning to his wife. The mistake is to think that there is a before or an after the fires. Time is snagged on that day, and things are still burning down around it, here and elsewhere. Just because Paul can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

  Paul pushes his chair out and considers his plate, streaky with sauce. Perhaps he is going to leave. I pick at crusts in the breadbasket. After a minute he taps his thighs and shuffles back.

  ‘The green is coming back,’ he says. ‘Nature popping up again. Your place looks good.’

  ‘Not your wife’s place, though.’

  ‘My ex-wife’s house, for which she has insurance. You were lucky, though, I’m sure you know. There’s no reason you couldn’t move back in. Only the garden needs work, but the fires missed your house. Miraculous. Other people lost everything. Shit, other people lost everyone.’

  He means that the emptiness inside me has nothing to say to the unthinkable emptiness that other people have had grow outside of them. I knew those people, of course, and their wives and husbands, their families. Some of those people were regular customers at the gardening centre. One was a neighbour. I watched the memorials on television, but in the stark glow of it all it was difficult to connect their names to the idea of their bodies. Their bodies in gardens, bodies working hard to shovel and smooth, to turn soil and lop wood. Because for a while there weren’t any bodies – there were only ‘remains.’ Ash, in ash, in ash. Before the sifting and the identification, the dental records and DNA, the television kept referring to these ‘remains.’ For me, that snipped the strings between the names and the people.

  The maître d’ brings over a water jug, and I motion to the finished wine bottle for another. Paul’s glass is still full but this conversation needs more than that. The water is poured; the maître d’ says nothing out loud.

  ‘I can understand the funerals,’ Paul retracts, grasping for my hand but falling short on the table. ‘That must have been unthinkably hard. But this is a wedding. It’s a fresh start. And this right here is the day before the wedding. Can’t we find a way to be happy today? To put the past behind us?’

  But those are Alice’s words in his mouth. And the past Alice made up refuses to stay behind us.

  *

  The day before. The fires race backwards and ignite anything I have left inside that day. The fires race forwards to reduce the future to charcoal. What I remember now is edgeless and spreading. It’s like trying to stick those ashes together to make a new tree, trying to find a name in the remains. Come back with me, towards the disarray of memories around this ‘day before.’ See what things blow into it and bl
ow out of it. How the day falls apart under our touch.

  I woke up suddenly, falling through myself onto the mattress. Kiln heat. Past midnight. My tongue was skinny and dry. There was no dream in my head. After dark the temperature had continued to climb. From the garden came a noise like hot oil in a pan. Snap, snap, snap. My first thought was of a kangaroo caught in the fence. I got out of bed. Outside, the garden was lit by a low-wattage moon. The eucalypts were motionless, leaves glinting like scissors. I was afraid of what was out there. Momentarily, I felt the absence of Tom and put a hand out into the air where he might otherwise have been standing. Then I looked closer.

  Clouds of earth were puffing up from the bare flowerbeds. Bubbles bursting in the ground, spitting pf, pf, pf. I bent for a closer look. Was the soil literally boiling? Then it hit me: how it must be the bulbs, dormant at this time of year. Crocus and hyacinth, far down. They’d died, of course, in the heat – become desiccated and hollow. But it had got so hot that the bulbs were exploding underground. Like buried light globes. Pf, pf, pf. A minute, maybe longer, and then everything fell silent. I climbed back into bed, feet dirtying the sheets. But I could still feel the moon through the wall.

  Later. In the morning I was driving. A shallow vapour spooled out across the road like a fine sea-sand. I couldn’t see any smoke plumes or flames, although a gritty taste filtered in through the vents. A dust front, rolling over from where the fire was. The radio had been broadcasting the ‘stay or go’ message for the hour prior but the main blaze was kilometres away and I was prepared. I was returning from the gardening centre having set the sprinklers to a timer just in case, but at that point it didn’t look likely that the danger would push any nearer. Thinking I must bring in the load strung on the line, I put on one of Alice’s CDs – what she calls battle arias – and the music made me feel powerful and baroque, like a murderess in the air-conditioning. The sky turned from daisy to jaundice.

  But the CD was scratched, and I turned it off after a few tracks. Then I heard a terrible sound. At first I thought it was the engine, but I stopped the car and the noise continued, coming from outside. I opened the door, parked next to a paddock. A sound of ripping, like sheet metal being torn. The air was glowing and through the haze I made out the shapes of cattle. The cows were coming fast over a ridge, running under yellow curtains of smoke. I couldn’t tell it at first, standing there by the side of the road, but then I saw it. The legs of the cows were on fire. Their legs were on fire and they were making that noise, it came from their throats, that metal tearing. You wouldn’t know that cows could make that sound. But they can, they did. The cows came running, shrieking to me, and I could do nothing but watch.