The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  A familiar-looking mother walks past, glances at my daughter and then at me.

  ‘Gosh, she’s grown,’ the woman says. ‘It goes so fast, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It does.’

  ‘Best make the most of it,’ she tells me.

  ‘OK,’ I say, fighting the urge to salute. ‘I will.’

  I don’t say anything else and the woman walks off. My daughter has come to sit in the chair beside me. She has collected a pile of books and is making a show of reading one. We read together for a little while in silence. She lifts one sandalled foot onto the chair cushion and hums softly as she pushes it back and forth in a dreamy way. I note this from the corner of my eye and then turn to look at her more directly. She is pushing something with that foot, and when I look at it closely, I realise that it is shit. It’s vital stuff, shit, a sure sign of life, as compelling as any book. I pick her up and put her on the floor.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  The shit is all over the chair. I glance from this to her legs and see streaks of it along her thighs, a clump hanging like a pendulum on the inside of her shorts. It is all over the floor, too. She’s just been to the toilet. Where did this all come from? I feel like I have just woken up, like I’m still groggy, trying to disentangle myself from my own thoughts.

  ‘Don’t you dare move!’

  I take out a wipe and run it across the chair. I succeed in spreading the shit over the cushion, turning it into the kind of economical but expressive flourish you might see in a Japanese symbol. I back away, feel myself flush with despair, pick up several clumps from the carpet, fold them in a wipe, drop them into my pocket, and look towards the service desk, where a young woman runs a stack of books under the scanner.

  ‘Look, Daddy,’ my daughter exclaims behind me in a voice that rings through the quiet. ‘More poo, there on the carpet! And there!’

  I have some on my fingers. Everyone will turn around soon to see me and my poo-stained hands standing guiltily in the middle of all this. My daughter will be happy to point out the sights. She is giggling with delight. I grab her hand and pull her small, light body along.

  As we pass the woman at the service desk I almost yell at her, ‘We don’t have any books!’ I imagine myself smuggling drugs through customs.

  In the toilet, I clean my daughter up the best I can. I am infuriated at her betrayal. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why?’

  I throw her pants in a plastic bag, put another bag against her bare arse – it sticks there without a problem and waves sadly as I put her in the pram. She’s finally realised how upset I am and doesn’t even attempt to sing. We begin walking home at a brisk pace. She quietly asks for her wrap. She likes to put the corner in her mouth and suck on it for comfort.

  ‘No,’ I snarl at her. ‘Not your wrap. You’re not getting your damn wrap! Don’t you dare even ask for it again!’

  There’s shit everywhere, in the pram, on her belly, on the plastic bag flapping up between her legs, tar-like and sticky. I don’t want it getting into her mouth, but I can’t deny it; I also want to make her suffer a little. It’s not as bad as I think, I tell myself. I suppose that there are other libraries I can go to around the city. Maybe there’s a witness protection program for people who leave shit in chairs for other people to sit in.

  My daughter begins sobbing.

  ‘Not a sound out of you!’ I snarl loud enough for people across the road to look at me. This makes me more ashamed and angry at May all at once. I know that I’m being an arsehole, but I know it only from a distance. ‘All you have to do is tell me when you need to do a poo, or afterwards. You don’t sit in it and play with it! Not at the library! Daddy’s not happy at all. When we get home, you’re getting a bath and going to bed. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.’

  We walk on in silence. My daughter chokes back her tears. When we get home, I put her under the shower. I wash her without any tenderness and even stick her head under the water, which makes her finally break into sobs. Then I put her pyjamas on and put her into her bed. Finally I stop moving and I look down at her. My daughter has put her wrap in her mouth. She feeds the corner between her lips and works it with a slight, repetitive motion of her jaw. Her sad blue eyes are turned up at me.

  ‘All you have to do is tell me,’ I say softly but I feel the conviction, the rage, draining out of me.

  She nods. I stand over her and think suddenly of how small she is – her nose the size of my thumbnail – and how tall I must seem, the fury written on my face, my hands hanging by my sides. My hands are very different from how I remember my stepfather’s, but suddenly they feel just as heavy. I walk out of the room and stand in the middle of the living room, staring out the window at the cliffs overlooking the ocean in the distance.

  *

  When I return to her bedroom, my daughter doesn’t notice at first, or pretends not to. She lies on her side, staring at the ceiling, her small jaw still working away. Then her gaze slides towards me.

  I stare down at her. ‘You want a hug?’

  She nods and I pick her up, hold her body against mine, and I shudder with love and self-loathing. My daughter frees an arm from my embrace and points down at the floor.

  ‘No poo,’ she declares with a solemn sweep of her arm. ‘No poo anywhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ I concede softly. ‘Wonderful. You want some lunch?’

  My daughter wants rice bubbles and eats two bowls that I feed her, although she knows very well how to do it herself. After that she goes to sleep without a sound. I lie on my bed and doze and snap out of it when the door to the apartment opens and shuts. I walk into the living room and my wife throws me a smile. We are always throwing each other smiles and expressions. They are barely caught, as if we are keeping something up in the air that is doomed to give in to gravity sooner or later.

  ‘How was your morning?’

  I tell her that it was OK. I look away. I get my stuff together, kiss her on the cheek, and leave the house. I tell her that I’ll be back soon, but as I close the front door, I imagine myself leaving her for good.

  *

  When my brother and I get together for a drink, he talks sometimes about the past and the way he used to beat me. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know why he did it; he feels like it wasn’t him.

  Who was it, then?

  I tell him that it’s OK, that I understand. He still doesn’t know where his anger comes from, when he gets drunk for example and something happens and it boils up. Then his pleasant manner evaporates and he acts in ways that are hazy in his memory, though the fragments he recalls are enough to fill him with a shame that takes a little longer to dispel.

  You could say that my brother is an old soul.

  *

  ‘Do you know what your father did with our money?’ my mother asked me one day. ‘He spent it on boys, when we were living in London. Prostitutes. That’s where your father spent his nights. That’s where he was when you were born. That’s why we were so poor.’

  I wish that this were the most unpleasant thing that I knew of him.

  *

  And my stepfather – who emigrated to Australia with us, and brought with him his language of heavy curses – has become no more than stories and memories too; the sort that unwrap inside your head even when you don’t want them to. I have an image of him tamping his pipe, lifting it to his mouth hidden in the dense mass of his beard, bringing the lighter close with his other hand and making the knot of tobacco at the centre flare into life. That sense I have of his heavy calmness and how quickly it could change.

  I have never hit my own daughter. I never would. But when you have such a past, there is an awareness of the possibilities, a question that stays with you, that aches whenever you stray near.

  *

  After my divorce, which
came soon enough and then felt as if it had been there forever, when I was alone and my daughter spent the nights with me, she slept more soundly. I would stand sometimes at the doorway of her room, and think of the men that stood at the threshold of mine, that stand there still, and what they had left in me.

  No further than this, I warn them. No further. I watch her sleeping, the peacefulness of her expression, and feel better about the world. She sleeps through the night, although sometimes she still wakes when she is sick or restless. I don’t make her go back to sleep but let her sit beside me on the couch while I read a book. She is happy to be there, to eat a sandwich, to watch a cartoon and glance over occasionally with a knowing smile, like we are both visiting someone else.

  Matter

  Miriam Sved

  On the morning of the first fitness test, Ranga saw a bloke on a bike get hit by a car.

  They’d only just moved to the neighbourhood – moving in the wrong direction, from a suburb with trees and private schools into this inner-city place, a warehouse Lisa called funky, the streets a blur of colour and sound. Ranga heard the cyclist go down before he saw anything. A flat-bodied thud. On a footy field you get to know the sound of bodies colliding and before long you can predict how serious from the noise they make – not in medical but in seasonal terms. A three-week injury, a six-week one. Ranga heard the cyclist go down and thought, season ender.

  It was on the main road near their new place, a road with tram tracks. There’d been a tram going by just before it happened – probably had something to do with it, the hulking metal caterpillar blocking everyone’s vision. Ranga heard the thud and when he looked up the bike was still in motion, skidding towards the curb a good ten metres from the man on the ground, the front wheel bent at a ridiculous angle. The man wasn’t wearing a helmet. He had brown corduroys, one leg rolled above the knee.

  Ranga was too close. Even though there were other people around – the guy in the car already out, creeping towards the cyclist with a weird bent-back posture, pedestrians half-running from further down the road and people coming out of the post office, mobile phones ready – even though they didn’t need him there, he couldn’t risk walking away. He wasn’t a top-echelon player, but he’d been playing for eleven years so it was inevitable he got recognised, especially with the hair. It wouldn’t look good – Ranga McPhee, he was right there when it happened, never even stopped to help – so he hovered through the fractured bursts of movement (the guy who’d been in the car was running now, then skidding down on his knees by the cyclist; other people running from the shops; a frantic little glut on the arterial road). Ranga hovered, buggered if he knew what to do. There’d been a St John Ambulance course a few years ago where they’d been taught CPR and the recovery position and all that, but what was the point when the doc was on hand at every game and training session, and all you had to know for yourself were the overnight signs of concussion. Ranga doubted whether the guy on the ground wanted to know the signs of concussion. But even though there was nothing to be done and the bloke from the car was already there doing it, down on all fours beside the man (Hello? Mate? Can you hear me? Didn’t see you, you all right, mate?), Ranga found he couldn’t move if he’d wanted to. He stared at the cyclist’s body, which wasn’t quite still anymore. One of the legs, the one with the pants rolled up, twitched on the slick concrete; the head made little juddering movements. Weak and meaningless like the last protests of a grounded fish. Ranga watched it and the kit bag over his shoulder felt heavy.

  The ambulance came and he forced himself to move off.

  *

  It was January. The worst of the sting of last season’s last game had dulled and the necessity and leeway to party were fading. They’d all had to sign off-season contracts, committing to what Cob called the bare minimum – basically that they wouldn’t kill themselves or anyone else or turn into fat bastards. That was a month ago, and a contract could only stand up so well against the drawn-out summer days, massage sessions that left you wilting in a tingling new skin, the euphoria of that first dehydrated pull of beer.

  In the old leafy suburb, Ranga and Lisa were just down the road from Kev, the team’s warhorse ruckman, famous on the field for the length of his reach and the stretches he could go without speaking, and off it for the amount he could drink without falling over. The four of them – Ranga, Lisa, Kev and his wife Linda – sitting out after Linda put Rochelle to bed, sweating it up on the patio, summer all around them like a warm bath making it easy to forget about the last game and the pre-season to come. Kev chugged down one beer after another, Ranga tried to look like he wasn’t trying to keep up, and Linda brought fruity alcoholic concoctions from the blender for Lisa and herself. Ranga remembers his first summer as a player. The smug feeling of time on the clock – two months that were basically your own, bankrolled by the club, sprinkled with a few media appearances. It was fun. The whole game, the whole thing was fun, but summer was like the childhood dream of grown-up freedom.

  Now Ranga gets to the grounds with ten minutes to spare and heads to the walloping room – a little antechamber tacked onto the massive gym – where almost all the boys are already sitting in neat primary-school formation. They’re waiting for Cob to arrive. Kev’s already there, with his freakishly long arms crossed at his chest. He gives a twitch of his head towards the seat beside him – Ranga’s seat, the one he’s sat in for pre- and post-session wallopings the last nine years, and for a moment Ranga thinks the whole day – the cyclist, the heavy gym bag and the betrayal of summer – the whole thing is just an upsetting dream, one of those dreams where your past and present selves become confused. The kid sitting in Ranga’s seat is skinny and ginger and can’t be more than eighteen, the same age as Ranga when he started with the club. Then someone up the back of the room laughs and Ranga notices how quiet it is. They’ve all been waiting for him to get here and find the ginger mutt in his seat.

  With everyone watching on, Ranga can’t let the kid get away with it, even though he’s thrown back to his own first training session – a different, smaller gym, but they always seem to keep the ratio of chairs to guys a humiliating constant: forty men, thirty chairs and a terrible decision to make. All the boys are waiting to see what he’ll do, and the sense of expectation puts Ranga in mind of that moment when the ball’s trajectory gets you in its sights, and for that second before action the spectrum of possibilities is endless. Physical possibility is what he thinks about as he moves towards the kid in his chair – the possibility of, say, himself standing in the back line during a game and watching the ball float by like some graceful unpredictable insect, relative to the possibility of a cyclist dodging safely out of the path of a moving car. And at the same time he’s taking a closer look at the kid – skinny and unfortunate-looking, freckles to blot out the sun (at least Ranga escaped that red-headed genetic betrayal) – and, with his head back on straight, Ranga knows exactly who the kid is. The draft pick (Mike? Mick?), the one they scored partly because of Ranga’s screw-up in the last game. There’s been a lot of fuss about him in the footy press – supposedly the second coming of Ablett or something. You’d not think him a big shot to look at him – the matchstick arms and legs, and something in his face that’s too eager for a number-two pick (you can generally tell a high draft pick from a rookie just by the way they carry themselves, a slight glow of entitlement around the older blokes). But the realisation still adds force to Ranga’s advancing buttocks. He sits down in his regular place, first row second seat from the wall, on top of a pair of skinny freckled thighs.

  The guys behind him laugh – Steve and Buta the loudest as usual – and he hears the boy laugh beneath him, a dry sliver of a laugh. Ranga shifts his weight to give the kid a chance; there’s a lot of mulchy flesh noise and he oozes out one leg at a time. With nowhere else to sit he hovers beside Ranga for a few seconds, then backs up slowly till he’s against the wall and leans back all casual like
he’s waiting for a bus. His face is flaming. His posture puts Ranga in mind of a man he once saw waiting for an actual bus – a man who leant back against what he thought was the solid wall of a bus shelter and kept going, shooting through the vacancy where there should have been glass. What struck Ranga as funny was the deliberate, devil-may-care casualness of the man falling through space – he’d looped one ankle over the other and folded his arms like some kind of case study: Man Waiting for Bus. The ginger kid’s stance is exactly the same, which is all Ranga needs; he didn’t mean to be cruel, but the stress of the morning, the cyclist’s twitching body on the road and the knowledge of what his own body’s about to be put through, all of it builds up inside him – tinder that the kid accidentally strikes a match to. He gets the laughing up-chucks, and by the time Cob walks in to punish them all with the fierce glow of his belief and disappointment, by that time Steve and Buta, and Kev beside him, and most of the guys behind him and most of all Ranga himself – all of them are in different poses of out-of-control. Ranga is bent double, his body shaking, and there’s the new kid blaring red while a sallow little smile maintains the fiction – for himself or the rest of them or the dour coach who just walked in – that he’s in on the joke. Ranga catches Cob’s eye mid laugh-spew and the coach raises one eyebrow in that way only he can – might almost be seductive on anyone else, but on Cob it’s pure distilled threat – and Ranga stops laughing, sits up straight and looks down at his big hands. The other guys stop laughing too.