The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  There’s a wind up, a chill from the south, and it moves the branches, but the sack hangs limply, as if it has been painted onto this picture. Painted blue from the moon, which is swelling to full like the gut of a dead kangaroo filling with maggots.

  The moon will burst when its skin gets too thin and all the flies will spill out of it. They will come down out of the sky and crawl all over us. They try to get in at the mouth, the ears, the eyes. I can squint, dig my pinkies into my nostrils and my thumbs into my ears, but eventually I have to breathe.

  The house is full of troopers and syrupy air smelling of port wine, fat and tobacco. There aren’t enough chairs so the troopers stand against the walls and my sisters seem to take up all the rest of the house. They seep out of it like honey poured into a sack. I want the men to leave so I can get in and embed myself in Mother’s lap and hear her say, Look at this boy to Father, the way she says about the sulky dogs.

  But they won’t go until they catch them.

  I want to paint the swinging sack out of the night but it peeks in at me from every gap and crack in the stable which is only a shack no better than a lean-to, and gives splinters wherever you put your hand.

  I put my hands down on the horses. I lean into a neck that leans into a basin of water. I put my nose into the place the mane starts and smell horse-sweat like rotten straw. I stay there until Queenie finishes and lifts her head and then we lean against each other, saying nothing. Neither of us could speak even if we wanted to.

  I could stay all night and sleep standing like these animals. When the stable is full there’s a space the right size for me. There are four of ours brought in tonight and the four the troopers came with. I’ve watered them all now. Tomorrow they’ll be taken out again, taken by those troopers and the two trackers who are resting on the porch on the other side of the house, tobacco for them and a little fat but no port wine.

  I hear my father’s voice and I can’t stay. He says Alfie and just as loud Where is that idiot boy. They all know I know my name, but they think because I don’t speak I am deaf. I touch the horses in the loving way of a mothering mare, wiping my hand down over their eyes like their mothers licked them at birth. It calms them like it calms me to bury my face in my own mother’s skirts.

  I step out of the stable and move toward the house. My feet as silent as my throat. I walk slowly across the dark dirt yard, looking at my quiet feet. I walk in my own blue shadow. If I don’t look up I won’t see it and it won’t be there.

  But it is still there. When I reach the porch the tree creaks. The sack will be turning.

  The trackers see me, they are watching. They’re only cigarette ends under hats in the shadow but I can feel their eyes on me. I go into the house, wanting to press myself into its warm honey.

  Alfie will have watered your horses, he’s so good with them. Might have made a trooper himself, Mother tells the policeman with the white moustache. There is a space where they think about what I could have made if only. The moustache twitches but the lips don’t move. He’s troubled by me, so I give him my reassuring idiot smile. I know she means to tell them I am good, so I don’t mind that she talks like I’m not there. They all do this, and also to the horses.

  Long day tomorrow, says Moustache, and tips the sweet red liquor into his mouth. The glass looks tiny in his hand. He pats the barrel of a rifle that leans against the wall like a stiffened snake.

  *

  The troopers sleep in my room. I sleep on the porch with the trackers and the dogs. Mother and Father offer their bed to the men but are refused. My sisters sleep in their own room. They file into bed like obedient children but I know they will dream of troopers riding, dream with their delicate honey-hands pressed between their legs. I’ve seen them like this before. They whimper gently in their sleep like dogs.

  I can move as quietly as a snake in this house at night on my mute feet.

  I slip into the hammock that’s hung on the stable side of the porch. I can hear the horses snort themselves to rest and the troopers snoring in a rhythm. I close my eyes and make myself still and small and shapeless.

  The tree creaks. The tree creaks and the sack will be turning. The moon is bright over the edge of the roof. I can see the painted-in shadow of the hanging sack. I can hear the dogs breathe, alert, knowing they’ll be called to hunt. The tree creaks and sleep won’t come.

  I slip out of the hammock and pad barefoot to the stable.

  I walk from stall to stall and touch each of them on their eyes, and when I have seen that all are held fast by sleep, I stop and lean into Queenie and I take my knife from the beam. I return to the beginning of the line and start with the troopers’ horses.

  I keep one hand over the horse’s eye. I press hard, expecting thick skin, but the knife slices easily through the soft place under the chin. I am calm and I stroke each of them like a mother and they do not bark with pain. Blood slips over my hand, warm and thick, warmer than my own. It smells good, like wet metal.

  Queenie is last in line. When I reach her, I think I should just let her go. They will only catch her again. I look down the row of stalls, at the steam rising from the floor, and through it, through a crack in the wall, I catch the movement of the sack. I know what to do. I wipe the knife on my sleeve, and I work it into Queenie’s neck. She sighs as she slips and falls.

  I don’t fold the knife. I have one more sinew, one more thread to sever. I step out into the chill night, walk across the dark dirt yard on muted feet. I hear the tree creak and I face the sack.

  It is not a sack at all, but a man. I feel the man-sized weight of him as I stand close. The knife slices through the rope and I let him fall.

  Look down on his body, meek against the earth with me, moon, I think. But the moon doesn’t answer. Its belly is beginning to split.

  I fold the knife and go to my hammock. The tree doesn’t creak anymore. I sleep sound through the night, until the flies wake me.

  Bruno’s Song and Other Stories from the Northern Territory

  Visitors’ Day

  Mark Dapin

  For eighteen months, all I thought about was my baby girl, and how I was never going to miss another minute of her sweet and precious life. I was going to teach her at home until she was twelve years old. I would have to start with the subjects I already knew, like spoken English and art – because I can paint, I was going to be a painter, I had a man who was a painter, but he was a drinker, as well – and I would learn the others, like history and geography and chemistry and science, by reading books the night before then reading them back to my baby in the morning, and explaining to her about everything in the world and how it is in books and how it is in real life. Except I wouldn’t tell her how it is in prison, because she wouldn’t need to know.

  I was going to get us a place with the housos in Waterloo – a tower in the sky – and move my bed into her bedroom, or her bed into my bedroom, or just have one room and it could be our room where we would have both our beds from the beginning, so neither of us would feel like an intruder, or a guest, or a cellmate.

  I would stay up all night watching her sleeping, stroking her liquorice hair, holding her caramel hands. If she was having a nightmare, if she was making fists or screwing up her eyes, or grabbing the sheet and pulling it over her chin and pushing it into her mouth and biting down so hard her gums bled and her jaw ached in the morning like she’d been punched, I would whisper, ‘It’s OK, baby, everything’ll be fine,’ and I would climb into bed beside her – or take her into my bed – so I could smell her and she could smell me and she would know she was not alone in the world with only her own breakable body to draw strength from, and her own soft brain to understand things.

  I taped Polaroids of my daughter to the ceiling of my cell – nothing else but photographs of my baby girl in her pink dress with pink ribbons in her hair – so I could see her smi
le when I woke up in the morning and before I fell asleep at night.

  One day last winter, the screws charged in and tore them down – and tore down everybody else’s pictures of their baby girls in their pink dresses with pink ribbons in their hair – because prison isn’t some kind of five-star holiday resort where you can go horse riding along the beach and put up pictures of your family, which you might be using to hide razor blades, or works, or your baby’s kisses drawn with crayon on the back.

  Auntie Olive looked after my baby for eighteen months, like she looked after me for eighteen years. When I told her I was getting out on visitors’ day, she said she would meet me at the gate in Lenny’s shitbox, with my baby in the back seat strapped into a plastic chair.

  Fat-pig Screw came into my cell to check that I hadn’t stolen any government property, such as the bed that was part of the wall, or the bowl that stank of other women’s piss and blood, or the noticeboard that said ‘1958’ and ‘boongs R a bunch of food theef.’

  Sweet Caroline, my cellie, turned over in her bunk to face the wall. She’d seen her boyfriend in the morning, across a table in the visitors’ room. Fat-pig Screw pulled on her gloves and stuck her pork sausages into every dip in my mattress, every crack in my brickwork, then she jammed her hand inside my pillowcase and pulled out the smallest foil of yani you’ve ever seen.

  Janelle, who had strangled her baby in its little pink dress, stopped in the corridor to say goodbye, because she was getting out today too. If you take a life you gave, you are only stealing from yourself, so five years is all you owe to the cops, who have to make sure the books balance at the end of the day and nobody is thieving minutes from the till.

  ‘She’s loaded me up,’ I told Janelle, whose lips shone with the gloss she had painted on for the pimp who wouldn’t live with another man’s daughter.

  Janelle shrugged – because what can you do? – and blew me a kiss made from the curls in her baby’s hair. Big-arse Screw steered her away.

  ‘That your girlfriend?’ asked Fat-pig Screw, crinkling her snout, snorting a kiss. She wanted me to slap her, so they could keep me another month – my yani was only worth a week, and where was the fun in that, eh? – but when I lifted my hands all I could do was push them into my eyes. I cried, because my baby was waiting for me in a plastic chair in Lenny’s shitbox outside the gate.

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ asked Fat-pig Screw.

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Sweet Caroline.

  Fat-pig Screw looked at me like I was potato peelings.

  ‘So she’s your girlfriend,’ she said.

  Sweet Caroline did that thing with her hips like she was bucking a mug, and touched me tightly on the shoulder, to give me muscle for the afternoon.

  The funny thing is, they call her Sweet Caroline because she is such a sour, twisted bitch.

  *

  Nineteen months ago, I tied my little girl to her cot with a big buckled belt, and she was lying in her own dirt, hungry and screaming, and my auntie found me on the pavement outside Derek’s pub, chatting up some mug through the window of his Falcon, and she said if I ever used again, she’d never give me back my baby. She’d change her name and take her to Queensland. Nobody would come to my funeral.

  Fat-pig Screw wrote up Sweet Caroline’s charge while I picked up my property. I had to count twenty-five dollars and sign for a miniskirt and a denim shirt and a wide belt – not the same one, not the same one – broken heels and a handbag. The screw at the main gate queried the signature on my pass, just to piss me off.

  When the gate screw let me out, Janelle was standing in the car park, smoking through strangler’s fingers.

  ‘You seen Auntie?’ I asked.

  ‘I told her you’d been busted,’ said Janelle. She crushed her smoke into the wall. ‘Sorry,’ she said, then her pimp drove up and pushed his buffalo head out of the car window, and it hung there like a trophy that some mug had shot and stuffed, until Janelle kissed him like a mad, murderous lady buffalo, with no horns to show what she was.

  ‘You wanna ride?’ her pimp asked me, and he made it sound as if he was offering a disease.

  I tried to ring Auntie, but there was no credit on my phone.

  I crossed the road with cars shooting past my ears – I could feel their speed on my legs – and I froze. Drivers shouted at me to move on, get out of the way, shave my legs, find my auntie, see my baby.

  Between McDonald’s and KFC, there were two hotels, a bloodhouse for visitors and a sports bar for screws. I knew the screws’ pub would be empty until shift change. I walked through the burning lights and accident noise to ask the barman if I could use his phone, but he didn’t like my skin. I’ve got the name of my baby’s daddy tattooed across the knuckles of my love hand – he has my name on his neck, I have my name on my neck, I would break his neck if I saw him again – so the barman threw me out, and it was no use crying or threatening him because he’d heard every story before.

  I didn’t want to go into the bloodhouse. I’d already lost enough blood – I’d seen it fly up and fill my works like a fat mosquito – but I had to phone Auntie and tell her to wait with my baby, and not change her name and carry her to Queensland, and keep her from my graveside when I died.

  There was a user hanging from the payphone saying, ‘OK, OK,’ and I wondered if he was buying, because this was the pub the visitors came to hook up.

  Sweet Caroline’s pirate was sitting at a table in his earrings, signet rings and chains. He said, ‘Hello, beautiful.’

  Oh, I used to be pretty, and I haven’t lost it all – it’s going, I know it’s going, heroin took it and used it for itself – but I’m not beautiful. It’s nice to be called beautiful. The young mugs all told me I had nice eyes – a drunk copper blacked them with a sucker punch – and my skin is still smooth, you wouldn’t take me for a user until you saw my arms.

  Sweet Caroline’s pirate – I can’t say his name, but you’d know it; you couldn’t spell it but you’d recognise it – managed Hemispheres in the Cross. I asked to use his phone, but he said the battery was dead, ‘beautiful.’

  I waited until the junkie was finished, then tried the payphone, but you couldn’t use it without a card. Eighteen months ago, they didn’t have those cards.

  Sweet Caroline’s pirate was drinking with a wog, and the wog bought me a Bundy.

  It was my first drink for eighteen months. I swallowed it whole and it made my feet shake. The wog laughed and bought me another, then Sweet Caroline’s pirate bought me another and I bought a packet of Holiday, and I bought Sweet Caroline’s pirate a Bundy, and the wog a Bundy, then we moved up to doubles.

  It was good to be with men again.

  The wog was wog-handsome, with skin like hash. Sweet Caroline’s pirate had a soft voice and gentle fingers on my thigh.

  I told Sweet Caroline’s pirate how I was going to read all the books to my baby, how I was going to be a real mother, how I was going to get square and keep off the street and stay off drugs – maybe a little smoke now and again, eh? – how I was going to meet a nice guy and clean the house while he fixed the car, and we were going to move out of the city and live on a farm – I once grew roses on a prison farm – where my baby could grow up safe from dope and dealers and mugs and pimps.

  The wog said I should live my dream. Sweet Caroline’s pirate gave me a hug – oh, it’s been a long time since I had a hug like that one, wrapped in arms as hard as house bricks; smelling rum and aftershave and sweat and smoke – and said, ‘I hope it comes true for you, beautiful.’

  ‘But you’re going to need some money first,’ said the wog. ‘Why don’t you come back to work at Hemispheres?’

  ‘We could pay you in dope,’ said Sweet Caroline’s pirate.

  ‘I’ve got to phone Auntie,’ I said.

  Sweet Caroline’s pirate and the wog we
re the same type. I don’t mean they were the same type of wog, they were the strip-club type. They wore their Rolexes loose, as if they didn’t care if the watches slipped off their wrists, and laid their wallets on the table, stuffed with fifties, like they might slip one into your bra to buy a feel.

  The wog let me use his phone, but I couldn’t get through to Auntie. I thought maybe the hotel roof was blocking the signal, so I took the phone into the car park. I dialled another number, talked quickly to a machine, sat back with the wog and waited.

  I could hypnotise the wog with my tits. They were part-covered, half-secret. I brushed his arm with a cup of my bra while I scooped his wallet into my bag. Because you are what you are, and prison can’t change that.

  ‘I need to try Auntie again,’ I said, then picked up the phone and walked slowly to the car park. I could feel the wog’s stare on my arse. I kicked off my lame heels and ran – when I was a little girl, I could run like a horse, I used to run barefoot to Auntie when she picked me up from school – and I waved down the cab I’d called.

  I was pulling on the taxi door when I heard Sweet Caroline’s pirate galloping behind me. I swung my bag into the front seat, but the cabbie saw two waving beer bottles and he slammed the door and drove away with everything inside.

  The wog threw me into the wall. My shoulder blades scraped down the brickwork. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ he shouted, running his hands through my clothes while Sweet Caroline’s pirate held me upright. I pointed to the cab, which was gone, and he started punching me in the stomach and kicking at my legs. You’re hurting me, oh stop, please stop. Sweet Caroline’s pirate held me with an arm twisted behind my back, whispering filthy ideas, biting my neck with his ugly gap teeth, and the two of them pushed me into their car. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all.

  They said I was going to have to compo the wog by working at Hemispheres, to pay him back for the money he’d had in his wallet and the business he’d lose without his phone.