The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  But I slept, and woke to the sound of shots. Another fox. What do you do with them? I asked Malcolm. Until now, he said, I have given them to Anne the gardener, she buries them under the trees she plants. And last summer we had some fine vegetables grown over dead fox. But now – and Malcolm pulled the fox’s brush between his fingers so it sleeked down and then sprang out – now I am going to have them made into a fur coat. It will match your hair, he said.

  For that is the colour of my hair. Reddish, russet, foxy coloured. By nature once, these days less so.

  So, will I walk through the maze spangled blue with frost like a large dainty upright fox? In the borrowed pelts of a dead animal? Perhaps I will.

  After breakfast Malcolm played the harpsichord, such gentle intricate music. You listen entranced to its melodic entwining and interleavings, it belongs to a world that is safe and ordered. Anne the gardener brought in wood and stacked it by the hearth. I sat and read. Malcolm went out again, in boots and coat and taking a gun. I didn’t go. I sat and read. I sat and looked at the room.

  By the staircase was a big wooden sea chest, old, worn, polished. It had brass clasps and a lock with a key. After a little while I got up and turned the key, but the chest had not been locked, I had to turn it again. Inside were folded pieces of fabric, smelling of peppermint. Ikat, and batik, brocades, embroidery. Most of them were old, some ancient, most had had another existence. I sat on the edge of the chest and lifted them out, unfolding them a little to look at them.

  Malcolm came back and I started, so engrossed was I in the chest’s contents, and nearly fell in. I remembered the story of the bride who disappears on her wedding day and is found decades later, a skeleton in a marriage dress, in a great chest. But Malcolm is here to save me. Unless it was the husband who shut her in. But Malcolm is not my husband yet, and he was saying with delight, Ah, you have found my treasure.

  He shook out several pieces and held them up. It is a pity not to display them, he said, looking vaguely round. Perhaps, one day … though they are fragile.

  He draped a piece of gossamer silk ikat against me. They are not for wearing, really, he said, not anymore, but please, look at them sometimes. They need looking at. All beautiful things need looking at.

  *

  I did marry Malcolm. You may wonder why. Out of a desire to be married, you might think. He did not actually speak of love, but of the delights of marriage. Perhaps because I had been for many years a schoolteacher, and for my girls their time at school is such an interim. It is a stage where they alight, birds with beautiful bejewelled feathers, preen briefly and then fly off to their real lives. I saw the chance for a life of my own, not of other people’s interims.

  So, I married him. He chose a date in the spring. The ceremony was in the gazebo, which was covered in fresh green leaves and the starry flowers of the quince blossom. I wore a dress of greenish white satin – white because I was still a virgin, but greenish as well, to signify time – like a lily it sheathed my body and at wrists and neck unfolded in bias-cut furls edged with pale green piping. A graceful dress that followed the languid movements of my body. I carried a posy of lily of the valley with a wreath of it in my hair, and walked across the meadow thick with daffodils and bluebells, to the piping music of a recorder. Afterwards we spent the afternoon feasting at the long table; Malcolm and I sat together and watched and listened as people drank toasts and laughed and talked. The food was prepared by Gareth, the husband of Anne the gardener, who is a painter but sometimes cooks for Malcolm and cleans the house. He is not a very good painter, Malcolm says, but he can spend nearly all his time at it, which makes him happy. A trio played harpsichord and various recorders and viola da gamba, the lovely intricate slightly melancholic music which is the leitmotif of this house, and is in music what the delicate complicated espaliering of the quince trees is in gardens and my lily-sheath with ruffles at neck and wrist is in dresses.

  At twilight Anne drove the guests back to town in the bus Malcolm had hired and we went up to my room where the fire was burning and champagne sat in a bucket, beside a large book covered in fine-grained red morocco. The candle flames shimmered in the warm draughts of air. Malcolm poured some wine into flutes and said, Now that we are married I will tell you what I write.

  What he writes is pornography. One volume a year. Produced on his printing press in the basement, illustrated with etchings, or woodcuts. Limited editions of a hundred, selling for five thousand dollars each, more if he hand-washes them with watercolour. A lot of money.

  What kind of pornography?

  It varies, he says. Any kind, really.

  Children?

  Of course.

  But that’s paedophilia, it’s disgusting.

  No. It’s graceful and delicate, small pretty creatures. Remember, they’re not people, they’re not photographs, they’re drawings. No one is harmed by them.

  The eyes that look at them are.

  He shrugged.

  And you, making them.

  Do I seem damaged?

  What else? I asked. Homosexuality?

  He nodded.

  Bestiality?

  Yes. And harems. Orgies. Lesbians. Nubile schoolgirls. And the intercourse of beautiful ardent lovers.

  I knew what he was talking about. The antique style of pornography. For rich men, whose wealth and honourable standing in the community was presumed to protect them from corruption. Not the vulgar cheap effects of television and movies. They use real people, said Malcolm, that is where corruption comes in, they are degrading their bodies for our delectation. But me, I am drawing lines on a page. No one is endangered.

  He took up the red morocco book. It had nothing on the cover but the number ten tooled in gold. I opened it. It smelled of ink and rich paper. The pages were creamy and thick, the ink had that satisfying faint unevenness of hand printing. It was in the Japanese style, with woodblocks of lovers, entirely explicit. Had I been as ignorant as I was virginal, it would have been handy. As it was I had not quite considered that people could make love sitting up like that, opening themselves like flowers to one another’s gazes and fingers, looking into one another’s eyes as much as at their vigorous sexual parts. They were lewd, but tender and delicate as well.

  My tongue felt thick in my throat and my skin was hot. So I had married a pornographer. I suppose I might have thought that it was not too late for an annulment, that the marriage had not been consummated. I think I thought, he will know what to do. I stood up. Malcolm unzipped the long sheath of my dress. Underneath I was naked, no lines of underwear to mar its fluid lines. I stood there in my white satin shoes. Dressed I had been a flower, elegant and languid, undressed I was my dry tight pod-like self. He took my hand and led me to the bed, tucked me in under the doona, took his clothes off and was soon white and naked and just a little chubby in the bed with me.

  Taking off the dress was my true deflowering. What followed was … it was like acid, corrosive and rough. He dipped his fingers in a bowl of scented oils and anointed himself and me but still there was the tearing and piercing and stinging. His weight. The reluctant sticky brown blood. Is this what lies in wait for all the cruel innocent cheerful girls?

  Malcolm said, It is hard, the first time. It will be better. He rolled over and went to sleep. I wished I were a delicate etching in a book, in hand-set type on creamy paper for a connoisseur to read.

  He was right, of course. It does get better. And soon I think I shall begin to enjoy it.

  *

  I asked Malcolm if he would prefer me not to go up on the roof. If it was so dangerous. No, he said, why ever should that be? I said, your late wife, and he replied that it was hardly the roof. It was like a railway line, he said, not at all dangerous, unless you happened to lie on it when there was a train coming. Then of course it was lethal, but it was the train, not the line. The same
was true for the roof; it was quite safe, it was the ground that had killed her.

  I was not sure about this argument. There seemed some twist or bend in its logic, but I could not quite discern it. But then that is the thing with metaphoric language, it persuades you to see connections and parallels where there are none.

  *

  I wondered if the second Mrs Pembroke was up on the roof looking for marauding tribes. There never were any. Building a tower in this place against marauding tribes was like building a tower against ghosts, they melted through the landscape and you only saw them if they wanted you to. The beat of drums and the glint of sunlight on cuirass and helmet: they belong to the tales of other continents, other civilisations, they never translated here.

  I am still Gloria Jones. When we go to Paris in the northern spring for our honeymoon, then I will be the third Mrs Pembroke.

  *

  I wondered about the first Mrs Pembroke. What she died of. Maybe she drowned in the pond. It is quite deep, and treacherous, Anne said, be careful not to fall out of the punt. Anne and Gareth are not chatty. They speak when necessary, but they do not converse. They go about their work quietly and say things like, We need some more toilet cleaner. Or, Mind the pond.

  Your first wife, I said to Malcolm. How did she die?

  I’m planning to have lunch with her, next week probably, he said. She’s not dead, we agreed to part, it’s amicable enough. Why don’t you come and meet her? It’s time we had a trip to Sydney.

  I didn’t go. I didn’t care about meeting the first Mrs Pembroke; there could be time for that. I decided to stay in the tower. To go up on the roof. I sat on the crenellated parapet and looked at the bones of the garden. They were fleshing out with the spring growth. Maybe I could learn the pattern of the maze from here.

  I felt but had no trouble resisting the pull of gravity, that seductive invitation to jump off, see what it’s like. People are supposed to be charmed by heights such as this and allow themselves to fall; they don’t want to die, they just can’t resist the pull. At least, people speak of this pull, but they don’t do it, they live to tell the tale.

  Perhaps the second Mrs Pembroke was pushed. Not by her husband, he was elsewhere, so he said, and must have been believed. But maybe he hired a hit man. For not many thousands of dollars, I believe, you can hire somebody to kill a person for you, and Malcolm has a great deal of money.

  I suppose a question is, why would he want to kill her? Why did Bluebeard kill his wives? Because that’s what he did. It’s a given. It’s the plot. Until the lucky one, who is saved.

  The even more interesting question is: why did Mrs Bluebeard feel utterly unable to resist opening the door? Don’t we all think, when it comes to these stories, that we’d have made it work? So much freedom, and one tiny forbidden thing. Not important, a token in fact. So easy to obey so small a prohibition. We think, if I had been Eve I wouldn’t have picked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I wouldn’t have given a piece to Adam. I and my progeny down the millennia would still be multiplying fruitfully in the Garden of Eden.

  How crowded it would be. For there would be no death. And there of course, when you think of it, is the answer. Eve had to do what she did. She was following the script. That was the story. The fruit must be picked. The room must be unlocked, and the lady turns the key, staining it with tell-tale blood. The pomegranate seeds must be nibbled, and Persephone complies. The box must be opened, and Pandora obliges. Otherwise there is no narrative, it is just endless shapeless vegetable calm.

  And it is in the hands of the women that the narratives lie. They are the ones who must make the stories happen. All through history, they have been depended on, and never failed.

  Malcolm is away, but he forbids me nothing. There are no locked rooms whose key I am not allowed to employ. No boxes I must not open, I am enjoined to look at everything. No fruits I must not eat. When the quinces are ripe, he will cook them for me himself, with honey and verjuice.

  I am waiting for him to tell me what I must not do.

  Shooting the Fox

  What Love Tells Me

  Nicholas Jose

  Climbing up and then down, they found their seats in the front row of a box overlooking the orchestra. James took the inside seat and ushered his son Joe to the empty seat beside it. The boy hung his head over the parapet to check the musicians as they threaded their way through the music stands to their places, the strings tuning up, the drums, the gong, the giant clam-shell cymbals, readying themselves almost directly below. He turned excitedly to his father, who rubbed his neck as if to confirm that they were in this together.

  On their way in they had gone to the narrow viewing platform at the front of the building where James wanted his son to see the panorama of bridge, boats and islands, and the brows of the opposite shore, receding in dusk. But he felt tense and distant as they stood there, peering, as if he were a vessel too, chafing on the surface against a rope that tethered him deep to the ocean floor. And the boy had not looked at anything except the swell as it approached and retreated, over and over.

  The seats were the same ones that James and the boy’s mother had occupied the first time they came to a concert, when there was nothing else available. They had enjoyed watching the activity of the orchestra close-up, from that acute angle, its inner workings, its heaving heart. They asked for the same seats at the next concert, and kept them for the next season when they became subscribers. They liked to see the striving of the individual players, and the rubbery contortions on the conductor’s face, and hear the occasional scrape or knock of wood and metal. They could spy on the players checking their mobile phones for messages. From the vantage point of those seats the orchestra’s sound became three-dimensional. You could feel the time between eye and ear, a lagging reverberation as wind, brass, percussion and double bass travelled through thick space to join the leading strings up front.

  That was where James’s and Cindy’s courtship took place, as if the particular vector of those seats on the rich harmonics of the symphony had aided and abetted their relationship. At first it was an awkward, non-committal acting out of an interest that two work colleagues discovered they shared, something they could do at the end of the week, from time to time, instead of heading for the gym or going home alone. Then it became something they looked forward to, even depended on. It turned romantic one night, as they walked back beside the water’s black sheen after a performance of Brahms, so snugly arm-in-arm that they stopped in their tracks and stared at each other in wonder, before attempting a first deep kiss. Cindy let James see her home that night, and invited him inside.

  By their second subscription series they were married and by the third Joe was born. It all happened so fast. Cindy went part-time, James was promoted, and they had moved into their four-bedroom family home by the time baby Charlotte arrived.

  The orchestra was tuning up now, the leader craning her neck as notes hopped from one instrument to another. Horns blurted and were upended, draining their tubes. Patrons edged along the rows to their seats, some with hair up and out, with opalescent flashes against the gold of their bare skin, others more cropped, covered in dark suits and sharp accessories, lithe youth and stiff age alike. James and his son looked out at the hall, its tiered caverns almost full.

  ‘He’s too young,’ the boy’s grandmother had objected. ‘He’s only four.’

  ‘It will be an experience,’ James said.

  ‘But Mahler, my God! Those things go on forever. So grim. Which one is it? The Third! You can’t expect a little boy to sit through something like that. It’ll be midnight before he’s home in bed.’

  But James was determined. He could not bear his son not to be there for the first concert of the season. Cindy had always said they should introduce the children to music as early as possible. Joe rocked to Vivaldi in the womb. Charlot
te, who was two now, went for Carmen. Of course she needed to stay at home with grandma this time and be a good girl, James explained, hoping to calm his little daughter.

  ‘Didn’t you start Cindy on music at the age of three?’ he reminded his worried mother-in-law.

  ‘That was The Nutcracker! That’s magical.’ The woman’s lip trembled with the memory. Her daughter had grown up wanting to be a ballerina. She had always loved music.

  This was the sixth year of their subscription and James would not let Cindy’s seat be empty for the first concert. Their ritual place, where they had felt the orchestra’s rumble in their faces. Cindy had renewed the subscription not long before she died and James knew what she intended.

  It was six months now and James wondered how that eternity felt on the boy’s time scale. The absence that would last forever was still as raw and warm as the prickly red cover of the seat where Cindy had sat less than a year ago. He gave Joe a cuddle, a little too tightly, with a tight grin to match.

  ‘Try to sit still, mate,’ he said, as his son wriggled away. ‘Be as quiet as you can. No clapping until everyone else claps. Just sit there quietly through the quiet parts. OK?’

  The boy looked stern with the responsibility. There was to be no intermission in the six-movement symphony. The conductor, a compact, boyish-looking fellow with carrot-coloured hair and apple cheeks, raised his baton and set his mouth in an agonised pout. They were off, into Mahler’s Third, the longest work in the symphonic repertoire. Langsam. Schwer, the opening mark. Slow, heavy. With low thunder and the twisted restraint of funereal brass, the fanfares of musical descent began.

  *

  What happened to Cindy was the worst possible thing. The tests picked up the cancer through a routine blood test, the doctors pleased to have got it early. The operation, though radical, was deemed a success. But when she went on to treatment, they found that it had spread. More difficult surgery ensued, and further treatment, none of which made her feel any better. They missed things in the subsequent procedures and it kept spreading. Then Cindy just came home and waited. She was heroic throughout, and always protective of the children, calm, strong, loving, as loving as anyone could be.