The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  Now that it’s over, the kid by the wall looks suddenly pissed off, his crossed arms defensive and hurt.

  ‘Let’s get on with it then, shall we,’ says Cob, and nobody makes eye contact with anybody.

  *

  The kid’s a midfielder. Michael Reece. Cob said his name casually, along with two other new players, not like an introduction so much as a reminder to the more slow-witted guys who might have forgotten their own teammates. He said it towards the end of a longish speech about moving on from last season, about how the mark of a great team, an enduring team, is how they come back after defeat. The kid is put in the same training group as Ranga, who plays fullback, and Kev – ruck and rover.

  This is Ranga’s fifth season in defence. He knows roughly what the fitness testing will involve and as they warm up in the gym he reminds himself that he’s done it all before and that his body always comes through the pain of the first day. He remembers last year – the same stiffness and soreness carried over from the year before, with the new-skinned feeling of a month in the sun, too much beer, the gentle forgiving pain of a recent massage. All these sensations were just as present, just as urgent then. And he’s been running, of course, he reminds himself that he’s never stopped running (knowing though that what he does on his own could barely be called running in the context of the game – really he’s just a jogger, chasing down the zone, huffing through the first few minutes for the sake of an hour’s calm water, his breathing dropping into a regular pattern and his muscles expanding and contracting with a regularity that feels like rest).

  He and Kev team up for the first circuit – mostly agility. Right and left dodging around the poles, knees up through the ladder then a series of sprints across an expanding pitch. They’re timed as a duo, the theory being that they’ll push their own limits for the sake of their mate, but maybe Ranga and Kev trust each other too much, maybe they know each other too well to care about a little betrayal on the fitness circuit, because Ranga huffs through the last sprint with he and Kev a good thirty seconds short of the pack. O’Brien, the fitness coach, who has none of the cruel finesse of Cob, shouts at them that they’re a couple of burnt-out fatties and they’d better get their bloody acts together before the skin-folds test or they’ll be out on their arses. Then he splits them up and they each get paired with one of the duo who came in first. Ranga is paired with the new kid. Mick? Mike?

  ‘Michaela!’ Ranga says, but it comes out less hearty than he’d like because the pain in his lungs is only beginning to fade. The kid looks like he’s barely broken a sweat; what’s worse, he’s making an elaborate show of relacing his boots, clearly giving Ranga a chance to pull himself together.

  ‘Don’t gimme any of your newbie shit,’ Ranga says, breathing evenly with a drastic effort. ‘Just do like the man says and we’ll both get out of this alive.’

  The kid laughs feebly. Ranga remembers ’05, the preliminary final when he took a high contested mark dead centre in front of goal – commentators called it the mark of the year although it didn’t win mark of the year. That was pressure. That was making the play when it mattered. Not many players could have taken that ball, whereas anyone could be eighteen with an infinite supply of oxygen. They start the first leg of the agility course.

  ‘Three around,’ O’Brien shouts, and Ranga tries to forget about the kid, to concentrate on willing his body forward.

  At the end of three circuits Ranga has given up every semblance of composure – bent double, huffing and spitting with his hands on his knees. The kid walks a little way off, breathing heavily, but Ranga can tell from the straightness of his posture that he’s pretending to be more puffed than he is. Ranga’s played in four finals series and doesn’t need some new kid’s charity, so he jogs up level with him, spits to the side, traps a bubble of oxygen deep in his chest and commits to breathing evenly as they make their way across the ground towards the rooms and towards O’Brien.

  ‘Where you from?’ he says out the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Up north, little place just outside Mt Cobb.’ The kid speaks in a rush. ‘You probably wouldn’t know it.’

  Ranga grunts.

  ‘You must have been all over.’ He’s forgotten to keep up the heavy breathing. ‘With the team, lots of away games last year, yeah?’

  Another grunt.

  ‘I’ve been to Sydney for the carnival last year, and the AIS week in Canberra. My mate went to Perth for the under-eighteen cup but I had an exam and my bloody mum made me stay home for it.’ He blushes at the mention of his mum. Jesus, Ranga thinks, this one’s for real.

  The others are spread out around the oval, going through various circuits. He sees Kev doing a hand passing exercise and thinks longingly of silence – Kev’s comfortable silence on the field.

  ‘You must have been all over, yeah?’ the kid says again, and Ranga shrugs. They jog up to where O’Brien is standing outside the rooms and Ranga’s fantasy of being allowed past, down the ramp and into the cool sanctuary beneath with the drinks table already laid out – this beautiful vision collapses with a wave of O’Brien’s hand. He sends them off to the sprint course. An upsurge of pain and Ranga completely loses the recovering rhythm of his breathing – he hasn’t been concentrating hard enough on his breathing, he’s been concentrating on looking like he’s not concentrating on his breathing.

  They jog towards the witches’ hats around the goal square and the kid says, ‘That finals series, what was it, ’05? Man.’

  He’s talking about the last time they played Ranga up front. Six years into his career, body hardened and ready for the fight. He’d been able to relax into the game in a way that had eluded him in previous finals series. In ’05 he was confident. His body knew what it was there to do.

  ‘Man,’ the kid says again. ‘That mark you took, right in front of goal …’

  Ranga says nothing. They’re approaching the first set of witches’ hats and the kid breaks into an easy canter. It doesn’t look easy – he has an awkward running style, arms too far out from his body, no rhythm to his stride – but Ranga can tell it’s easy because, unthinkably, when they reach the first witch’s hat and double back on themselves the kid is still speaking fluidly.

  ‘I was watching that game with my dad, you know, and he hated you guys.’ He laughs. ‘I was s’posed to as well but I never did, and then when you took that mark I forgot all about Dad and I’m jumpin’ around shouting at the telly along with whatshisname, that bloody commentator who always used to do the finals – you must have watched it, right? When you took the grab and whatshisname yells, “Ranga McPhee saves the season!” That was … man! You must have partied that night.’

  Huffing along beside the kid, Ranga detects a note of self-consciousness creeping into his voice but still no sign of fatigue. It’s unreal. They’re in the last leg of the sprint course, which is a descending series of distances – first a long run to the furthest of the witches’ hats, maybe forty metres away, then two to the one in front of that, three to the next and so on, so that in the end you’re running back and forth, back and forth over the ten metres between the goal post and the closest hat. It’s this ten metres that’ll break your spirit, not because of the sprinting but the turning – every few seconds the quivering flesh of your thighs forced to stop ninety-five kilos of momentum and swivel the machine, start it off in a new, juddering direction.

  Ranga looks up and realises he and the kid are alone on the circuits; the rest of the guys are jogging a cool-down lap up the other end of the oval. It looks heavenly, that jogging – the steady, comforting rhythm of a stable heartbeat. At least the kid’s finally stopped talking, but he’s still keeping pace with Ranga, shadowing him back and forth around the hats. Infuriating, humiliating. O’Brien wanders over and draws a line under the humiliation, loud enough for the guys up the other end of the field to hear.

  ‘C’mon,
Reece,’ he shouts. ‘Stop holding yourself back to that limp dick’s pace. You wanna be a fat bastard when you grow up too, is that it?’ And the kid, with a slippery sidelong glance at Ranga, takes off with the cruellest, easiest spring around the witches’ hat.

  Ranga’s breathing is all over the place now and his thighs aren’t even the biggest problem anymore – it’s that he can feel the lactic acid building, poison leaking from his overstretched muscles and rising in his gut. Everyone gets it at some stage during the season; there are players who’ll go down to the rooms and have a chuck like some clockwork part of their quarter-time ritual, but Ranga’s never been one of them, he’s never been an easy chucker and besides, this isn’t the adrenalin-pumped intensity of a game. The first training session. He swallows hard and tries to empty his mind. The kid laps him; four more to go. Jesus, the pain in his legs, his chest.

  He manages to get to the end of the circuit without losing his breakfast, but by then the rest of the guys are done with the cool-down and O’Brien is bossing them into groups for a game of bash and grab. A tackling exercise no more sophisticated than the old primary school game of bullrush – famous for more broken bones than the asphalt around the monkey bars. Two on one with a lone man shepherding – more like a rugby exercise than footy since the goal is to get the ball past the tacklers without a mark to kick to. Whatever the coaching staff say about this game – about strength and agility, the quick-thinking reflexes of dodge and shimmy – bash and grab is really about one thing: fear. Ranga’s still heaving when he is lined up with three others, eyes blurred with sweat so he doesn’t even register who they are at first. Only when they’re broken into twos he sees that the kid, Mick, is still with him. A surge of something that could be lactic acid – scalding heat bubbling up his torso. That fucking kid will be the end of him today.

  ‘Mate, you right?’

  Ranga turns and finds Kev at his shoulder – O’Brien has given them another chance training together. The acidic tide recedes a bit.

  ‘Thought you were gonna have an eppi on that sprint circuit,’ Kev says.

  ‘Yeah, well, I saw the colour of your face on the jog, so don’t gimme any shit.’ This is easier – much, much easier than the kid’s humiliating solidarity.

  They’re at the fifty-metre line and they line up for the tackle. The kid’s got the ball and Case, one of the small forwards, is shepherding for him. O’Brien is there, watching them warm up, and it occurs to Ranga that the fitness coach has badly mismatched their group – usually he sets up players against others roughly their own size. Maybe during the season, if a small guy’s gonna get a heavy tag, O’Brien might match him with some talls to feel what he’s in for. But this, in the first session – Ranga and Kev, two of the biggest bodies on the team, both of them there to impede the flimsy kid. O’Brien catches Ranga looking at him and raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Thought you might like a chance to show the newbie one area where you can kick his skinny arse in,’ he says.

  Ranga pulls the sides of his mouth into a smile and looks back at the kid, who’s bouncing from side to side with the ball tucked under one arm. Maybe seventy kilos of him, seventy-five, tops; his torso must be the width of one of Ranga’s thighs. Ranga’s still sweating from the sprints but he feels suddenly cold. He tries to jog himself loose, kicking his bum with his heels.

  O’Brien blows his whistle and the kid stops his bouncing and begins to run. The world slows down. Out the corner of his vision Ranga sees another team down the ground. He looks back at the kid running towards him and instead of bracing for the tackle he can’t stop noticing things – the flap of the kid’s left hand as though it’s churning through air; the expression on his face, which reminds Ranga somehow of Kev’s kid Rochelle, when she digs in behind some demand (Don’t wanna go to bed!); and then suddenly the kid’s whole body becomes a suggestion of childhood: the way his chest has developed beyond the scope of his limbs, the extra billowing fabric of his guernsey. And the self-belief of childhood. The kid’s speed and determination as he runs towards Ranga and Kev, towards a wall of grown-up muscle – Ranga sees this for what it is: a stupid decision. In footy there are decisions you make which in life would get you committed to the loony bin. Step backwards into the stampede of bodies, thinking only about the fall of a lifeless knot of synthesis and pigskin (the ball tucked beneath the kid’s arm, dangerous goitre, close enough now for Ranga to see the familiar stitching along its edge). Anywhere else a decision like that would be called reckless, irresponsible. With Cob or O’Brien watching it’s called putting your body on the line. The kid is maybe twenty metres away now, putting his body on the line, the line beyond which there could be, what? Ranga sees the man on the road, the twitching blackness. A punctured spleen is one common tackling-related injury; Ranga knows two men it’s happened to, the organ’s poison flooding out into the body’s delicate mechanisms.

  Or maybe it’ll be nothing like that – probably this tackle is no more menacing, no more significant than any of the thousands, literally thousands of tackles he’s laid before. What’s wrong with him? He must be going soft, which is the worst way for a professional footballer – a hard man – to go. And not even soft for himself but on behalf of some snotty kid – number-two draft pick, probably got footy scholarships to the best schools and now going into the league on a good salary, maybe not that much less than Ranga himself makes.

  Ranga hunkers down and for a moment the world speeds up again and he’s back in the flow of it, the automatic momentum of the game. But the kid’s maybe ten metres away and now he ducks his head down. In a game it could be playing for the free, but the thought of tackling the kid head-first closes Ranga’s window of calm and makes everything a decision again – the decision to send a fire-bolt of ripples down the fragile stalk of a neck. Cob and O’Brien are both watching from the outskirts of the field. Ranga’s sweating badly; he can’t stop thinking about how young the kid is, and how he probably hasn’t even got his end away yet, let alone all the other stuff. Then it all starts tramping through his brain – stuff you’re only supposed to think about when you’re about to snuff it – the first time with Lisa, then the hospital after the prelim final that second season, Lisa and his mum standing over him (good boy, Steve, his mum said, you done well), and then the four of them – him and Kev and Lisa and Linda. The long December nights, the colours of the sky.

  Thinking of Kev makes him aware of the ruckman’s body crouched beside him, and he realises for the first time that the decision, the terrible decision running towards him is not only his to make. It’s Kev’s too. The ruckman’s big body will rob the kid of everything. Cob and O’Brien are watching on, and Ranga’s a man who needs his contract extended, but it’s no use. It’s no use because suddenly he understands with an awful clarity the message of the man on the road, of his twitching flesh. The message is matter. Contracts don’t matter as much as cells, and it’s not really Ranga’s decision so much as the decision of survival itself that makes him shift his tackling position away from the kid and towards Kev, towards his best mate’s menacing bulk. Now he has both the hard man and the running kid in his sights, and he braces for impact.

  Meanjin

  Space Under the Sun

  Liam Davison

  It’s light now when she’s coming off the wards. The windows are like milk and she feels she’s surfacing, or waking from a long sleep. The foyer is already starting to fill with women. Some are veiled. Some carry bags of food. They come prepared to wait, the same as they do at home.

  As always, she is thinking of Udai, and the thought of him now is linked to the smells and cries of birthing and the soft hiss of the rain that has been falling all through the night. Udai. Her beautiful boy. Her space under the sun.

  He would be waking now to the same morning light with no mother to smooth his hair or warm his breakfast. There would be no sweet cake or spiced chapati for his midday me
al; no one to hear his prayers. They are apart together now, and it pains her that they have travelled so far only to be alone.

  The floors are wet where people have brought the rain in. She signs her discharge summaries and ticks the boxes in her log: two assists and an unassisted rotational. All girls, poor things. She can still smell their mothers on her, despite the gloves and scrub. There had been no complications and the midwives had let her know she was in the way. Excuse me, doctor. Doctor, if you wouldn’t mind. Their polite dismissal made it clear she wasn’t needed.

  They were big women, and capable. Thank you, doctor.

  She has delivered more children than they could dream of: boy babies and girls; wanted and unwanted; damaged and perfect as hope. But as Dr McNee says, there are many different ways to skin the cat.

  She’s back on in six hours. There’s a daybed in outpatients, but she wants for the comfort of her own space and the knowledge that the small bag of Udai’s clothes is safe beneath her as she sleeps.

  If she’s lucky, she’ll be out for four hours then back for clinic before her talk with Dr McNee: his little chat. She’s rehearsed what she wants to say but when the time comes, she won’t say it. She’ll listen to him and nod. Yes, doctor. Thank you, doctor. I will try harder.

  Her assessment is after rounds, with Mrs Al-Garni.

  *

  Outside, the forecourt is wet and shining and a small queue of yellow taxis is already waiting in the rain.

  ‘Good morning,’ she says

  ‘Good morning, madam.’ The driver looks at her in the mirror. ‘Namaste.’

  The windows are fogged from the heater, and the hospital dissolves to a soft blur of light and shade as he slides the big car out of the service lane.

  ‘Do you work here,’ he asks, ‘in this hospital?’