The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  *

  I read something else: your life has a single story that gets repeated over and over, with a succession of understudies playing the role of your first co-star.

  Let’s say it’s true. My story might go like this: a beautiful dress held my chest in her fist, and when she started to unravel I incinerated her remains. Make way for the understudy, you might say. Let’s get this story restarted, you might say.

  I log in, check the new pale-blue listings. I log out, I log in, see if anyone wants to befriend.

  But the problem is this: you can’t force her out of the story. You can’t delete her or incinerate her or send her to your trash. She’s your co-star, after all. And she might be a tenacious fighting bitch.

  I log out. I log in. Out in out in.

  Try whatever you like. I wish you all the best. But believe me when I tell you: that bitch has to leave for your first story to end.

  (Favoured by) Babies

  Tim Richards

  While cradling Natasha, Sam automatically croons a song his mother sang to him, having learnt it from her own parents. How can he recall the words to a song he hasn’t heard for three decades? He continues to sing through a breaking wave of nostalgia. If the child notices this mood-change, it doesn’t curb her delight. According to Sam, Natasha has his mother’s eyes.

  *

  Having disagreed about most things since their wedding day, Stavros and Brittany suddenly find themselves in accord on a serious issue. Parenthood. This agreement represents a major change of position. When Stav wanted her to help with the business, Brittany chose to keep teaching, and when he took the view that children should be their first priority, she argued that family would require an upstairs extension.

  Each imagined the other would rush to the police in a situation like this, but they agreed to wait. They would act only if they heard a media report of a lost or abandoned child. In the meantime, the boy would be Michael. Despite their confusion, the couple couldn’t stop smiling.

  *

  Karen and Marie had each entertained sperm provided by a mutual friend. When the turkey-baster failed Karen, she blamed Jason for shooting blanks, but Marie became pregnant first try. Conceiving was no problem. But after the older woman’s third miscarriage, the couple chose to take a break, which may have been their way of making a decision they couldn’t make. The lovers couldn’t allow their feelings for one another to be swamped by an endless tide of grief.

  At first, Karen thought Eamon was a cruel practical joke. A misogynist neighbour trying to set them up.

  Stuck behind a funeral procession on their way to the police station, Karen saw Marie gazing deep into the child’s eyes. Eamon needed them. They decided to take their chances.

  *

  None of these individuals, or others yet to be introduced, would describe themselves as careless when dealing with important matters. Yet all chose not to mention these children when speaking to friends or relatives, and none chose to contact authorities. Instead, they began to shop in distant suburbs where no acquaintances would see them purchasing cots and nappies, and the foods favoured by babies.

  *

  The babies were transported to their doors by a discreet tsunami. So far as the recipients knew, their baby was the only such child, a fluke of divine providence, an infant to be loved by those who hadn’t known how much their lives were missing that love.

  Even now, no one can say for certain how many babies there were, since recipients remain cautious about coming forward. Some headed overseas the moment they obtained a false birth certificate.

  So far as we know, the phenomenon was peculiar to the bayside suburb of Hampton, though one should be careful about inferring too much from this geographical coincidence. Seers versed in ancient knowledge of the earth’s energy zones might be less hesitant. Childless couples have now rushed the area, paying above-market rates, desperately hoping that Hampton hasn’t seen its last foundling, but these hopes may betray a need to misinterpret the facts.

  *

  When little Trish became feverish, Kylie and Nick resisted calling a doctor, fearing that she’d be taken from them. Finally, they drove forty kilometres to a clinic in the outer east, and fudged when Dr Wendt, a mature GP who’d encountered most situations, asked about the child’s medical history. The parents didn’t know their daughter’s blood type. Nor could they answer questions about immunisation or childhood illnesses. Aware that the hospital where they said Trish was born had no maternity ward, Dr Wendt notified local police. Two detectives soon discovered that none of the personal details Kylie and Nick gave the doctor were valid.

  *

  Hampton traders would notice an unaccountable downturn in sales as Beachcomber mothers and fathers took their business to people who couldn’t know that they weren’t the natural parents of the babies they so clearly adored.

  Whenever someone asked Ross and Ingrid too many questions, they made excuses and decamped. If a parent on television began to speak about the distress of having lost a child, they changed channels lest they discover that Jeff was the child in question. Ross and Ingrid found it impossible to believe that Jeff’s natural parents could love the baby more than they loved him. This gift was no accident. They had been chosen because they had the exact qualities of love Jeff needed.

  *

  Many resentments attend this episode.

  Allie and Martin had been desperate to have children for more than a decade. They’d tried everything known to medicine, interventions humiliating as they were costly, but it proved impossible for them to conceive. Allie’s sister Robyn even offered to carry a child for them. If ever a couple deserved to receive a foundling, they were it.

  More than anything, they resented the secretiveness of friends like Sam and Beth, who’d often said they never wanted children, friends who’d pretended to be sympathetic to Allie and Martin’s plight. If they’d been sincere, the couple would have given them Natasha. People like Sam and Beth had no right to a baby. Their dishonesty made them undeserving. For all the talk of miracles, these events have been unspeakably cruel to couples with no outlet for the love they wish to offer a child.

  *

  We now know of thirty-seven incidents where Hampton residents woke on the cool morning of June third to find carefully swaddled infants waiting on their doorsteps. Only three of these foundlings were left at homes where there were already children. Among the recipients were four single women, two single men, three lesbian couples, two gay couples, and two elderly childless couples. Not one of the chosen said a word to anyone until irrefutable assertions were put to them, or until certain that mention of their find would not threaten the loss of their child.

  *

  Dinner parties were impossible to plan. Overnight, Hampton became a suburb of dodgy excuses, of sudden illnesses and unexpected urgencies. Habitual entertainers put up the shutters. Mothers complained of daughters-in-law who’d polluted their sons’ affections.

  Loving a child so much that you’d lie to safeguard that love involves difficult trade-offs.

  Local sporting stars announced sudden, unexplained retirements. Fiercely resolute businesswomen like Harriet Song withdrew so abruptly from their regular activities that associates suspected cancer. Harriet said nothing to curb these speculations. She needed time with her baby. Hamptonians became weekend stay-at-homes. Some discovered the pleasures of cooking.

  *

  We should hesitate before speaking of miracles. None of the recipients had prayed for a child to be delivered to their doorstep. Inexplicability doesn’t make an event miraculous.

  Nor is seeking an explanation the same as expecting to find one. The novelist Manuel Primm describes a similar episode occurring in a small Spanish village during Cervantes’ time. Half a dozen foundlings appeared, and no one could ascertain the identities of the infan
ts’ parents. These babies, and the middle-aged couples who received them, would later be put to death by the Inquisition.

  *

  We’d considered having kids, and not having them. If Annie was hankering, or if starting a family had been a major issue, I might have gone along with her, though I was always the one who said, Why add another hungry mouth to a fucked-up world? I meant it, too. It really pisses me off the damage we’ve done to this continent in two hundred years. Everything: the forests, rivers. Fish are disappearing, and the water’s full of shit … Annie can be pessimistic too, only she says that if sensitive, thoughtful people give parenting the arse, we’ll end up fouling the gene pool. She thinks we take ourselves and our business on the planet too seriously. And maybe that’s the deal, for us to go on playing Chinese Whispers with the genetic code and let entropy take care of itself … Before the Pill, you didn’t have the luxury of thinking like this. If you wanted to get your tail in, you had to face the consequences … This stuff is confusing as fuck. If someone had asked me what I’d do, I would’ve said that I’d be onto the cops in a flash. I mean, the days when you dump unwanted kids on a doorstep are long gone. And there must be a distressed young mother out there who needs help … I dunno. It’s impossible to rationalise the emotions. When I picked Jules out of the basket, he started crying, but then I jiggled him, and he went straight back to sleep. It was like something I’d always done. Something I was meant to do. After that, right and wrong didn’t come into it. Annie was the same. Neither of us mentioned what it would do to our career or travel plans, whether we could afford to raise him, or if we might regret it ten years from now. Jules looked just like Annie in her baby photos, and the sky could have caved in for all we cared. Nothing else mattered.

  *

  These babies are too perfect. They don’t challenge the recipients to prove their mettle as parents. Always grinning and gooing, good sleepers. They were, are, healthy, even-tempered and adorable. Everyone’s idea of what a baby should be.

  If the envious couples who’d spent half a lifetime wishing for babies ever knew just how undemanding the foundlings were to their undeserving finders, their resentment would turn psychotic.

  *

  P had been about to tell S that he was leaving her for a sales manager at work, that he and this colleague had been having an affair for six months. He felt certain that S already knew.

  Did he still love his wife?

  When S stopped laughing at his jokes, P stopped asking what she felt or cared about. If you’d told him that a baby held the solution, he would have jumped on you. The very worst thing a couple in crisis can do is have a baby.

  As finder of the child, S chose the name, Chrissie – this before she’d even checked its sex, or informed P. But when she told him, something opened up inside the man, as if a wizard had shot helium into his chest. When his wife asked what they should do, P told her to say nothing to anyone. Chrissie had chosen them. This man, who’d never lifted a finger to clean, now tore through the junk room like an uncorked genie, creating a nursery fit for royalty. That night, he told S about the sales manager, and agreed to his wife’s terms. She would forgive him provided he never saw the temptress again.

  *

  Were we selfish? Absolutely. But we didn’t know how to be otherwise, and weren’t capable of understanding that selflessness brings its own joys.

  Our selfishness was also the product of something much bigger than ourselves. Fear, mainly. We were too conscious of our place in time, too aware of the difficulties the future would hold, unable to see trade-offs as anything other than negative. We were terrified of showing fear, or need. Winners are never needy.

  So we let time paint us into a corner. You don’t schedule a nappy-change in a diary, or trade up to the latest model in model sons. If the jargon describes child rearing as basic task-orientation, that task defines itself as demand at any hour of the day or night, till time, and your consciousness of time, become re-calibrated.

  You are not heroic because of what you’ve done, or intend to do, you are heroic because you are present when these instinctive demands are made of you. The present. When you finally learn to live in the present, with the soiled nappies and shrieks that mightn’t go away, you begin to appreciate that the big game we’ve been signed up for is geared toward optimists, persons fool enough to believe that no crisis is more challenging or inevitable than a succession of nappy-soiled, chuck-stained immediacies. Trapped in this present, the only sensible course is to insist that you are generating a future where happiness will remain possible.

  *

  When Major Crime Squad detectives questioned Nick and Kylie about baby Trish, both swore they were the child’s natural parents. The lies they’d told the doctor were purely to keep the baby’s existence secret from hyper-religious grandparents.

  In order to buy time, Nick played a bluff hand, volunteering his blood for DNA analysis. Since the right to grant permission for a sample to be taken from the child was germane to the issue at hand, police had to proceed with caution.

  Releasing the pair without charge, the inspector warned that there would be further investigation, and Nick and Kylie should expect to be contacted by Hampton detectives.

  *

  Though some recipients imagined themselves to be chosen, they understood that God’s elect tend to be vilified by those who can’t imagine a deity that would exclude them. Knowing that it never pays to advertise a special relationship with God, the recipients smeared Vegemite on rusks, and pushed discretion to the limit.

  *

  Danielle was too young to know what she was taking on when she married Tom, a man left paraplegic by a head-on smash that killed his father and sister when he was nineteen. There was a hole in her life that not even Tom’s charm could fill. If Tom had said that she couldn’t keep Ingrid, Danielle would have left him on the spot; but Tom knew, from the moment he gazed into the child’s eyes, that he needed to love her more than he needed anything else in the world.

  *

  Sooner or later, police were bound to ask Kylie’s sister Fiona if she knew about an infant niece named Trish. Detectives thought Kylie’s oddness about the child might pertain to a surrogacy pact.

  The sister was extraordinarily nervous when the police arrived at her door. Once they said that Kylie had a child, Fiona couldn’t contain herself. ‘My God, it’s happened to her as well.’

  *

  The early theories linked these babies to cult activity. The detectives thought tests would reveal the foundlings had the same father, an ego-monster who’d brainwashed his sex-slaves. Extortion or madness would prove to be the motivating factor.

  The DNA tests on Kylie and Nick’s baby, Trish, and Fiona and Greg’s child, Declan, did uncover genetic commonalities. But the last thing police analysts expected were commonalities stemming from the fact that Kylie and Fiona were sisters. So far as science could establish, the recipients were the natural parents of their foundlings.

  *

  Once rumours of this story began to leak to the press, more recipients gained the confidence to introduce their babies to the world. Grandparents were notified, and christenings arranged. When the Bayside Council wanted to list baby epidemics among Hampton’s distinctive features, the finders lobbied against publicity. Believing these children to be aliens, troubled types had already threatened to abduct them. Bad seeds. Sleepers. Incubi … Everything a disturbed mind could imagine.

  All the while, these babies looked and behaved just like babies.

  *

  Lisa and I couldn’t love Stephen any more if we’d attended his birth, or spent six years trying to conceive him. I’m not bothered that the boy resembles his mother’s father more than he resembles me. I’m sure he’ll have the good grace to adopt my personality flaws as his own.

  We’re thankful Stephen keeps us so
busy. Otherwise, we’d have time to consider questions of justice: why we received this blessing when so many more deserving couples didn’t. My mother-in-law, Pam, has a theory that the babies bypassed the people who knew they wanted them to find people who had no idea how much they needed them.

  According to Lisa, Stephen and his miraculous cousins embody the Control Paradox. The more choice we have, and the more we strive to preclude accident and error, the more we stand to be subverted by contradictions at the heart of orderliness. Since vulnerability and conflicted emotion are essential to our humanity, control alone can never make us superior beings.

  If I look closely, I see my face reflected in the boy’s eyes. And maybe my one hope of seeing myself truly is through those eyes. Or through the eyes of an equally miraculous sibling.

  Lisa didn’t need to speak for me to know that she was expecting our second child. We kissed, smiled broadly, and wondered where the money would come from. We then promised to remove the words convenient and inconvenient from our vocabulary.

  *

  The babies are settling down, settling in. They’re just a little unsettling, too. All through Hampton, you can hear the babies bubbling and burbling. Becoming.

  Thought Crimes

  Look Down with Me

  Jennifer Mills

  There’s one swinging tonight, but only one; it’s all they could catch. In the stable I water the horses and I take my time about it.

  I stop with Queenie. I want to cut the sores from her hoofs. She lifts them for me when I think it. I scrape pieces from her feet with the sharpest knife and check her shoes are all intact. When I’m finished I touch her side, gentle, and she puts her foot down. Horses trust me. I fold the knife and put it in its place on the beam above the horseshoes and the brands.