The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  The owner, with a complexion of weathered hardwood, directed them through a maze of tents to a piece of worn turf at the back of the ground.

  Perhaps it was a blessing he hadn’t been able to run to the eight-metre Esperance, settling instead for the slightly inferior 7.2-metre. Still, it featured the toothbrush and toilet-roll holders Ray envisaged showing fellow travellers at a more salubrious location.

  Pat unfolded two chairs and a table.

  ‘Bickies, dip and wine time. Best part of the day!’ she said like the seasoned camper she wasn’t.

  Ray headed off to find the barbeque. He had just finished scraping some unidentifiable goo from the hotplate when a man of similar age ambled over carrying sausages. This was more like it.

  ‘Been far today?’ said Ray. ‘Mine’s the Willebago Esperance up the back.’

  ‘No, mate. Shirl and I live ’ere. In the donga, down the front.’

  Ray didn’t stop to talk about Dick Smith. He carried the steaks and lamb-with-thyme gourmet sausages back to the site, noting with irritation the grease marks on his shorts.

  Pat was inside tossing a salad – out of a packet into a Tupperware container. Pages of her Hello! magazine flapped in the breeze that had suddenly come up.

  ‘Trisha!’ he called too loudly. ‘Bon appétit!’

  *

  Ray awoke at one a.m., his body bombarded with a cacophony of sound. Rain was drumming on the metal roof of the cab about eight inches from his pillow. The motorhome chassis was vibrating to the sounds of dance music.

  ‘What the hell?’ he thought, climbing down from the bunk to find his clothes. Pat lay on her back, fast asleep, snoring gently.

  When he opened the door, rain was coming down in oversized sheets. Nobody else in the whole campsite apart from Pat appeared to be asleep. Music thudded; there were lecherous screams; torch beams scanned across the night sky. Somewhere a glass broke, followed by laughter, and from a nearby tent the unmentionable sounds of two young people getting to know each other.

  ‘It’s like bloody Woodstock,’ he muttered as he trudged off, mud caking his Colorados, to find the owner.

  At nine a.m. two pimply youths helped tow the Willebago from where it had become stuck in the mud using their P-plated bomb and the towrope he had been keeping for the croc-infested waters of Far North Queensland.

  ‘I could drive,’ said Pat.

  More chance of her being allowed to cook steak on the barbie than sitting behind the wheel. Ray said nothing and swung out of the campground at a pace some may have considered reckless.

  And as he did the corner of a tile overhanging the roof of reception caught the side of the Willebago, ripping along its length like an old-fashioned can opener.

  *

  The owner said he’d seen it happen before.

  ‘Young couple from South Australia. Same thing exactly. Apparently insurance wouldn’t pay as it happened off-road.’

  Pat and Ray didn’t speak until they were back in Rockdale. Ray seethed in apoplectic rage while Pat stared out the window. He dropped the Willebago off at the panel beaters and they took a cab home. He’d be damned if he was going to let the neighbours gloat. He’d tell them they’d returned early because his mother had been taken ill and hope they wouldn’t remember she’d died in her sleep three years ago.

  The map was stuck back on the kitchen wall and new lines in red-tip marker were drawn.

  ‘We’ll head south,’ said Ray. ‘Maybe meet some Melburnians in Merimbula. But, Pat, this time let me choose the campground.’

  Pat stopped stirring her Tony Ferguson milkshake and looked up.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind “Patsy”. You know, like that singer Patsy Cline.’

  The Gills of Fish

  Karen Manton

  Sand burns underfoot. The sun is high, merciless. No clouds dare share the sky with it. It seems a long way to the Point today and Nina wonders if she’s going to make it. Each of her footsteps sinks deep into hot sand under the weight of the unseen boy child in her belly. She feels as if she’s moving in slow motion. Unlike her one-year-old, Samuel, who is dancing his way across the white glare, weaving a path between rocks. He inspects them all for tiny shells or foot holes he might use to climb.

  She squints her eyes against the brightness to see him. The heat on her shoulders burns. He sees her approaching and flings aside his hat to run a giddy caper away from her. His hair flares out white blonde in the salty breeze.

  ‘Samuel!’ she pants. Her voice scatters in the wind, unheard by him.

  Ahead of her marches Luke. She watches his legs thudding to the ground, feet out to the side like a ballet dancer or a merman. The muscles in his calves bulge with the strain of carrying such a walk. His cap is jammed down on his head. He is pacing ahead in some kind of impatient funk. Why can’t he be calm, even if only for her, this day when she needs him to be steady? Instead: chaos, exasperation, tension. He is annoyed with the hour of the day, the height of the sun, the fact they are an hour later than planned. The shade around the corner, that he had predicted to be there for all of them, may be gone by now.

  She tries to walk near the waterline for firmer sand, but her footsteps sink lower, craters in the smooth surface. She looks out to the great expanse of water, warm as soup and no comfort with its stingers and crocodiles. She has not thought carefully enough about the shade and how little she will like this whole expedition if she can’t sit down soon. If turning back was on offer, she would. But Luke is out of earshot.

  *

  It had been his idea to go for a beach walk. It seemed a good idea at the time. The day before a planned caesarian has a strangeness to it, like being in a waiting room to catch a spaceship to another planet. Neither of them wanted to hang around the house. We’ll have to go early, they’d agreed. Before the sun gets too high. Luke had in mind a possibly shady place around the Point – if they could get there in time.

  But the lateness of things delayed them. The more Nina tried to get everyone ready, the more things seemed to unravel. Luke was getting wound up. Nina’s mother didn’t want to trek across a hot beach looking for shade and thought her daughter should stay home and rest. Fraught discussions followed. At the last minute no one could find the camera. Samuel was wailing for a missing toy. A glass fell off the bench and broke.

  *

  It is almost noon. The beach is deserted. Hardly anyone braves the heat at this hour. They walk quite a way before coming across a fisherman wilting by his line. Fish are laid out on the sand nearby, air popping from heaving gills. Another in a red bucket listlessly wanders its circle out of life.

  ‘Oh!’ the little boy is fascinated by this one.

  ‘Just leave it,’ Nina tries to say calmly, with a jaded smile to the fisherman.

  Her breath is fading with the effort of walking. This is how it must be to be old. To just stop. To have the will but not the power to keep going.

  *

  They round the Point at last. There it is – the shade, and with it an expanse of shallow water, trapped between sand and rocks after the tide has gone out and free of any dangerous creatures. The water is dark in the shadow of the sandstone cliff, its surface rippling softly in the breeze. An oasis.

  ‘See,’ Luke says, ‘Just as I said. Plenty of shade.’ He sighs. ‘So it’s a pity your mother isn’t here …’

  He looks behind him to a spot way up the beach where Nina’s mother is lying prostrate under a tree in a real and definite piece of shade not far from the car park.

  ‘She could’ve held the camera,’ Luke is muttering. ‘You know, to take footage of the three of us. On the last day. It’s symbolic.’

  Nina has never heard him mention the symbolic before. Not long ago she had to explain what a metaphor was. For a moment she feels a glimmer
of hope. Perhaps, after all, they do have a connection. These are the kinds of thin threads that hold people together in a family. But then, she thinks, the thread is as thin as a spider’s web. She feels herself flailing at the end of one such tenuous, silvery rope, about to drop.

  Sam scampers into the water. Fish flee his stomping legs. His white skin looks greenish in the water, magnified. Puffs of sand curl slowly from under his feet. His little hands splash with mad delight, stopping now and then to lift up in the air so he can watch drops of water bejewelled with sunlight flick from his fingers.

  ‘Stay still,’ says Luke, ‘and the fish will come back.’

  They wait, father and son, for the return of underwater travellers. Here come the brave ones, fins waving to and fro.

  ‘Give me the camera,’ she says. ‘I’ll film you.’

  ‘Yes, but I wanted the three of us.’ He hesitates, looking back up the beach to a distant place where his mother-in-law has gone.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to make the best of it.’ She takes the camera from him.

  ‘Look at all the fish,’ Luke is saying to Sam, trying to get the boy to be still enough for the fish to gather close and nibble at their toes. But Sam will not pause in his exuberance. It is all about splashing.

  ‘Look at the fish,’ Luke insists.

  She is about to ask Luke to film her and the child, but decides against it and presses ‘pause’ on the camera. Never mind, she thinks, and starts the walk around the water in all her heaviness. She doesn’t want to be on camera anyway. It’s not just the current bulk of her, but the demise in general that mortifies her. Something has happened between thirty-one and forty-one – the fall, the decline, the decay. She feels keenly that she is not beautiful. She lowers herself onto the rock she has chosen as a throne for this her great weight. She hopes the stone doesn’t dent the unborn child’s head.

  Luke comes to retrieve the camera.

  ‘I want to film the fish,’ he says and then remembers himself. ‘Do you want me to film you two now?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she lies, at the same time trying to stop the truth from drowning. ‘Later maybe … when there’s the right moment … you take it,’ and she holds out the camera to him.

  Despite the shade cast by the cliff, the glare of the sun is all around. She shields her face, looking up the sandstone wall to a single tree growing out of the rock face, its roots reaching down the cliff into the shadows while a narrow, twisting trunk edged in a halo of sunlight reaches for blue sky. Along the cliff top grass wavers.

  Sand bugs crawl over her feet, bringing her gaze back to her toes. In the shadows Luke is intent on his project of fish in the dark.

  How can he see them, she wonders. How can he not see us?

  She wants someone to be with, to ponder the stillness of this secret lagoon behind the shadow of the sandstone wall, absorbing the quiet hum of sand and stone the day before a second child is born.

  A peal of laughter from Sam interrupts her thoughts. She wishes she could hold him in a moment of recognition of what is about to pass from them and what is about to arrive to become part of them. He splashes with increasing vigour until he stumbles, crying out as he falls into the water.

  ‘Watch him,’ she calls to Luke.

  ‘I am,’ he says, eye to the viewfinder.

  ‘Watch him,’ she calls again more urgently.

  Exasperated with the interruption, distracted by the underwater opportunities, Luke hauls the one-year-old out of the water. Sam is crying now.

  ‘I’m just trying to film the fish,’ Luke protests.

  Sam is too sad to care about fish.

  ‘Come here,’ she calls and the little boy runs, wailing at first and then laughing at his own speed. He hurtles towards her between rocks sticking up out of the sand that bear razor-sharp shells. She tries to see the lethal peaks of jutting rock as little stepping stones and keeps the smile of welcome on her face as his feet haphazardly approach each point, missing every one. He runs at her, full pelt, laughing his head off and she calls out to Luke because this is the moment she has waited to capture, the sheer love of everything that comes running into her and holds her in a hug, the last hug of a kind.

  But Luke with his eye to the viewfinder will not hear.

  The world spins around mother and child – rocks, the tree and its halo of light, the luminous band of grass, the shady water, the sand and beyond, the sea with its wavelets tumbling in. As the world rights itself Sam is looking up, breathless, into her face, and the sky, around. Suddenly he is off again, whooping free, his footsteps the only echo of his track to her.

  ‘I’m just getting these insects on the wall,’ announces Luke, eye still to viewfinder, camera pointed at the rock face made dark in the shade.

  She gets up and starts to follow the little boy’s footprints.

  Luke pauses as she walks by. ‘Did you want the camera?’

  ‘Don’t worry, the moment’s passed.’

  Salty water drops fall down her legs. She marches resolutely back, eyes smarting. It is as if great rocks are set down between them – stones made of things like predicted shade and symbolic moments. They become boulders with time and cannot be shifted.

  Familiar tentacles of doubt creep in to sting. Perhaps the silver thread is tearing. Perhaps it is already torn and she is just freefalling. Too late to be thinking like this now. Nothing to do but lumber on.

  She calls to her mother, so far away, a cheery wave mustering the much-needed disguise.

  *

  Three a.m. Nina wakes suddenly, gasping for air. Her fingers are swollen and aching. She shifts herself higher up on the pillows to breathe more easily, and tries to flex her fingers. If it’s not her dreams it’s her body that prevents her from sleeping these days. Strange nightmares creep in as she rests, like the one from which she’s just escaped. She goes over it again in her mind, searching for a happy ending.

  She is walking along the beach. The rocks that in the day had just protruded through the sand have grown. They are enormous boulders, pillars of rock, immoveable. She is lumbering across the sand, Samuel on her hip, the great weight of the unborn child making a boulder of her body. Luke is leading the way. They get to a ridge of sandstone. It is smooth, unable to be climbed without ropes and pegs. It stretches across the sand in both directions, even into the water. They must get over it for some reason. Perhaps the hospital is on the other side. Perhaps her time has come. It is the rock Luke must move. But he is just standing there, quoting Samuel’s favourite book – We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – ‘We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ll have to go through it!’

  Meanwhile the tide is coming in. Soon they will all be under water – husband, toddler, mother – weightless corpses. And the unseen child? The sound of bubbles fills her ears. The large shadow of a fish glides by, weightless, elegant, at ease, weaving between the rocks on a warm current, every now and then passing so close its silver scales caress a stone.

  *

  The dream will not alter its storyline, and Nina lies awake. On the bedside table her alarm clock ticks. Three hours to go. The lamp is not working so she can’t turn it on to read. She lies in the dark, a woman in waiting.

  Beside her Luke does not stir. He sleeps in a kind of deep, undreaming way, uninterrupted at last. On the other side of her lies Samuel, breath whistling through his nose. His face is so trusting in repose. She wonders how it will change, this little face of the child on the outside, soon to be joined by the child on the inside. In the next room her mother the matriarch is asleep with thoughts of a new grandchild coming and the challenge of minding the grandson for a few days on her own. She will get up early tomorrow when she hears her daughter stir, stumble out and say ‘Good luck,’ and wave them off.

  The unborn child rolls. The night Nina first felt him move he was like a
sea creature brushing behind the skin of her belly. Now he is a creature of weight, a ball with feet and toes and hands and fingers that leave an imprint. She will miss this sensation. The inner kicks and stretches. The quiet humour between them. The link, the talking, the language of it. The friend within. She wonders what are the hidden thoughts swimming through his mind; does he absorb her private musing through the secret water they share? Do they traverse together, her thoughts and his, in shoals of fin and silver eye?

  He pauses again. A different kind of silence, the silence of his stillness returns.

  She thinks of the gills of a resting fish, opening and closing. Her underwater boy breathes in a similar way, lungs submerged. In three hours it will all change. Valves in the heart will shut. Others will open. The whole system will alter to disable his talent for breathing in fluid and enable him to inhale air. The way of a fish is a state to which he will never return.

  What must it feel like, she wonders, to breathe through gills?

  *

  ‘I’m here,’ says a voice.

  A hand squeezes hers tight. It is the obstetrician, swathed in white gown and mask. Luke is by her on the other side, warm hand on her shoulder. She keeps her head bowed as the needle sears into her spine.

  ‘Don’t move,’ instructs the anaesthetist.

  It is a quiet and chilling order. The hand in hers holds tight, the hand on the shoulder is firm. She is glad of them both.

  ‘That’s it,’ says the anaesthetist and they lay her down, a great bulk on a narrow table. Suddenly everything is happening. They are stringing up the pale-blue curtain in front of her – although they tie it so low she can almost see over the top.

  ‘Incision now.’

  She feels nothing and breathes easier. For some reason she’s had nightmares about the spinal block not working.

  ‘I’m going to vomit,’ she says.

  A silver bowl waits by her mouth.

  ‘What is it with vomiting and childbirth?’ the obstetrician laughs. ‘Everyone seems to vomit.’