The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  James on the other hand was blown apart by anger that misfired in every direction. He overloaded himself with compensatory tasks. Eventually he was sent home from work, a jangling wreck.

  There were pools of peace that might almost have endured. So they were able to believe. They laughed at how they had been taken by surprise. It was not fate, but a trap. Son and daughter, wife and mother, husband and father, they tumbled on the sick bed together holding each other, laughing. Cindy suffered, and smiled, with a benign whisper. Then she was gone.

  On the stage, a grand dark woman stepped forward in a ball-gown and started singing, her voice round and low. Joe smirked to his father at the sight of the woman’s bare back, her cream skin squeezed by straps of crimson silk that stretched as her volume expanded. Into what space was she headed, rising there like the prow of a ship?

  The boy had growing pains in his legs. He wanted to kick the barrier that kept them from toppling headlong into the throng of brandished instruments. He cast his father a defiant glance. It was going on so long. But his father sat rigidly fixed. He might not have been hearing anything at all.

  At last there was a break. Coughing and shuffling burst out, unstoppered. Joe felt his father’s hand clamp down hard on his arm. He fidgeted some more. Then the music started again. The dishevelled conductor swayed like seaweed, imploring, reaching wide to draw the sound forward in mighty waves. Nicht mehr so breit. It was torture.

  With teasing slowness, a melody unfolded, gathering in all the forces of the orchestra, building without shame. James recognised it as the song of longing that a songsmith from Tin Pan Alley picked up later and turned into a trashy tune to tear your heart out. I’ll be seeing you … Such yearning for the reunion of souls across time and place … in all the old familiar places … I’ll be seeing you. Such passionate need. He shuddered. Joe felt his father’s grip gouge his arm. He writhed to get free. Now his father was shaking, invisibly. The boy could feel it. Tears were running from his eyes and over his stubbled chin.

  Then James emitted a choking sob that caused people to turn their heads, as the music rose to a crescendo of blasting and pummelling and smashing that must surely drown all grief.

  The boy was scared. ‘Daddy,’ he whispered. ‘Stop it.’ There was nothing he could do to shake his father’s manacling hold. James was somewhere else.

  *

  It was as if James were Joe, the boy blocked out by his father. He was back in the country town where he grew up, in his father’s study, in their weatherboard house on the edge of town, the winter light pale through the square windows and thick curtains half-drawn. His father sat in the corner armchair near the teak veneer of the new phonograph. He had headphones on, like Mickey Mouse ears, a brace around the brain, making any sound that came from the turntable inaudible to the boy who stood at the door.

  The cold, high-ceilinged room was dark and orderly with neat bookshelves and a four-drawer filing cabinet. Pens, folders, a bottle of ink, a slab of blotting paper for the signing of documents, were set out on a desk with the slight degree of disarray that suggested work abruptly ceased. There was always enough business in a lawyer’s practice in a country community, but never too much. Work was passed on through the family, like the practice itself, like the house they lived in. Lawyers for three generations in the town, they had prospered into respectability from their first pioneering publican entrepreneur ancestor whose disreputable past was now a gauzy legend. Others in the family may have gone off the rails, possessed by demons. Some had been hopeless or merely lazy. But in that country world of endless hard work and low horizons no one was ever cast out completely for such failings.

  In James’s father’s family the upward aspiration was steady and firmly directed. Their law degrees, their time away in the city, gave a modest warrant for wider interests – books, music, politics even, and an expected civic-mindedness towards the town library and School of Arts. In James’s father’s case the tradition extended. The World Record Club sent him LP records in boxed sets to be played at home on the latest equipment, music he wouldn’t share with the town nor even with his wife, who had no taste for it. She preferred to be outside in the garden for all to see, working in the fragrant thickets of flowering shrubs and greenery that set off their bone-white house so amiably. She joked about her husband, in his dim study with his headphones on, climbing the peaks of classical music. He was no different from other men, she laughed, who gave their Saturday afternoons to the track or the football on the radio. She tended the garden lovingly, leaving its corners deliberately wild.

  Beyond the garden was a fence with a gate to the vegetable patch and the hens and the cows that the neighbours milked each evening. Patrick, James’s elder brother, had recently taken over the old shed there as his own space. He moved his things out from his bedroom, put his posters on the walls, his clothes in a pile, and a mattress on the floor for a bed where he slept all day. Because he was awake all night, his mother worried, listening to the music that he played so loudly she could hear it all the way across the yard in her own room, where she lay awake too, in the darkness. Patrick would come and go to the shed through the paddock at the back, or down the pathway beside the house, without coming inside to say hello. The loyal dog that had been his puppy never barked at him either. Barely stirred in its sleep. So you never knew whether he was there or not. For that reason it was almost a comfort to her to hear that discordant music through the quiet night and know he was safe home.

  She did not know why her first-born son was so unhappy. She did not know why he stopped speaking to them, first to his father and then to her, or what he did to his younger brother to make James slam the door and stay away, hurt, fearful, warned off. Why was Patrick so angry? When she saw him in town sometimes, hanging out with other kids his age, he looked away from her, avoiding her eyes as if to order her to walk on. She heard how he was bashed one night outside the pub. And Father Kenna told her that the police were on to the drugs being peddled among the young people in town, and mentioned her son.

  She wondered if her husband thought about this when he put his headphones on and listened to those massive symphonies. No. 3, no. 5, no. 9.

  She had pruned a rose bush within an inch of its life and was on her knees digging around its root ball to enliven the soil, when the horror happened. She heard the shot from the shed. A cry came from her, as if in reply, and an instant after she was running, falling through the gate to the shed to throw open the door on the body of her son, slumped backward on the floor by the makeshift bed, a bloody mass scooped out where his face had been. He had put the gun in his mouth. The rifle his father had taught him to shoot. The spatter of blood and stuff – bone and brains – everywhere on the walls and ceiling, speckled like stars across heaven, spinning in her head as she moaned.

  He was warm as she held him, covering herself with his blood as her fluids had covered him at his birth. Then she came shouting for her husband who was in his study with his headphones on and had not heard a thing.

  *

  A year later, on the anniversary of his brother’s suicide, James came into his father’s study wanting a ride to a friend’s house on the other side of town where there was a party and he was invited to stay overnight. He was carrying his bag, ready to go. His father was sitting in his armchair with the headphones on, listening to a record. Gustav Mahler, James saw, on the side of the box, though he had no idea who that was. The man sat rigidly fixed, staring out the window at the dull winter afternoon, the half-drawn drapes obstructing the light. His mouth was firmly closed, his face grey, his eyes dry. There was no expression on his face of any kind, nothing that could be called an expression except what the passive set of a face’s habitual incised lines might suggest.

  Grief enclosed the man impenetrably, preventing any wave of communication, any current of shared emotion, any touch of catharsis. James stood in his father’s angle of visio
n and his father could not see him. There was nothing in the room but the silence, and an entirely private music on the inside of the headphones, into which his father had disappeared, engulfed in loss.

  James took his bag and turned away down the hall. Outside in the damp silver day he found his mother fondling in the soil for new potatoes, laying them in a wicker basket that was like a nest for her dirt-smeared earth eggs. She was crying. James paid no heed to the tears that blotched her face as he hugged his mother clumsily, an embarrassed boy. He asked if she could drive him to his friend’s place. She nodded and brushed herself down, and trailed after her son into the house to look for the car keys.

  *

  ‘Daddy!’ Joe demanded, shaking until James let go of his arm. The din of the orchestra would drown out any noise the boy made or any reaction he provoked in his father. He was determined to make his presence felt.

  The long last movement returned to its opening tempo, yet all the time the music was straining upward, aching for the sublime. The brass blared its demand that heaven should open. The two harps rippled, riding the uplift on golden winds. The tubular bells chimed. The strings quavered ever higher.

  James felt Joe tugging against him. He couldn’t help the flush on his face, the burning sensation through his body. His ears were ringing. This was the music his father must have heard. He let it come. He felt he was moving closer than ever to the emotion at its source, to the cause. If he could reach that he would understand. He could feel the harmonic resolution, working forward, breaking through.

  And he felt Cindy, present in the music, coming towards him, wanting to be there, until she was there, as if their love had summoned her. The boy moved his arm from the armrest and squeezed it round behind his father’s back in a little hug. James felt the warmth of the boy’s body close to him. They were together, the three of them, Cindy’s presence interposing itself into the midst of loss, undoing their ties to darkness and grief. He was helpless before that wish, that effect, as the music pulled him into its current, its surging flow, upwards into the light.

  Applause broke out in a stamping roar of release. The boy jumped to his feet to join the ovation. ‘Yay!’ he yelled. ‘Yay!’ They had got through it, and something had shifted.

  ‘You’re a hero, mate,’ his father said, blowing his nose on a checked handkerchief, wiping his crinkled eyes.

  *

  The harbour’s equilibrium took the form of a breathing swell that never let its surface settle. The eternal restlessness made lights and stars swim together, elongated, striated, pulsing in oily blackness. Father and son emerged from the concrete carapace of the concert hall onto a platform where the breeze was gusting. It had been designed as a high altar, inspired by ancient ritual, by Mayan sacrifice, where transactions between earth and heaven could bloom like lotus. From there the great flight of stairs descended. Taking wide paces, the boy skipped every second step down to the forecourt, his father following. Above loomed the vaults of the Opera House in lit-up planes and vanishing recesses. On one side the bay curved away into darkness. On the other the city lights bobbed in lapping water, in broken reflection. To reach the car park they pressed through the crowd of late-night revellers who were dancing and shouting to the music that pumped from quayside bars.

  Joe let James hold his hand firmly. They had been somewhere different, in the concert hall, and now it was over, the boy would see his father safe home, as his mother had always done.

  HEAT

  The Index Cards

  Louis Nowra

  When I found the index cards she had been dead for a fortnight. I was about to put my rubbish in the bin on my landing when I saw the words Tell Number 14, that I want him to stop that noise. They were written on a pink index card which had fallen from a cardboard box stuffed into the bin. I pulled out the box and dozens of index cards fell out in a rainbow of colours – pink, green, white, blue and yellow. They all had writing on them, from a single word to a paragraph, in handwriting that was beautiful on most cards but on others was merely a scribble or smudge.

  What intrigued me, of course, is that I am number 14. For weeks Gladys had banged her Zimmer frame against my door and when I answered it she would shout hoarsely at me without articulating a word. Then she’d thrust a blue index card into my face. It said, in beautiful cursive script, Stop that music. Turn off your TV! I was never playing CDs or watching television when she’d knock on my door. Occasionally I’d invite her in to see my living room, but she’d never believe me. She’d yell incoherently, her spit splattering my face, after which she would thrust another blue index card in front of me that anticipated my reply: You are a liar! You turned the music off when you heard me at your door! It was no wonder I thought she was barmy and there were times when I heard her thumping my door that I pretended I wasn’t home.

  It was probably her relatives who had cleaned out the apartment and gotten rid of anything they didn’t want or couldn’t sell. The cardboard box with its index cards was obviously a part of the cleanup. I glanced at some of the cards and saw that they were divided up into colour codes. Yellow cards had written instructions that were obviously daily chores (Tea. Would you run the bath? Time for lunch? I need to have a nap) with three cards containing just a single word (Yes. No. Please.). Blue cards contained abuse directed at me. White, pink and green were more informal questions and statements that seemed directed towards one person, a nurse called Ken. Curious as to what had gone on with she and the nurse, I put the cards in what I thought was roughly their order and, after guessing what some words were, began to read:

  Who are you?

  Where’s Jean?

  She didn’t tell me she was retiring.

  Jean’s husband lives off her like a bludger. He used her money to drink like a fish. Now she has to care for him. She’s a wonderful woman.

  How old are you? You look twelve.

  I have to use these cards. Didn’t you see my files? I can’t talk. I have cancer of the tongue.

  I don’t care if you have other patients, surely you should read their files before you visit them?

  I don’t want a man nurse. I want a woman.

  Ring them, tell your bosses I want a female. I don’t like being naked in front of a man. Nurse or no nurse.

  Yes, I understand that you’re understaffed and I’m grateful for these visits as I can’t look after myself. I miss Jean. She was more than a nurse, she was a friend.

  Do you hear that noise? Like an engine idling.

  She’d check my blood pressure, give me painkillers, bathe me, heat up my baby food because I can’t eat solids.

  How long have you been a community health nurse?

  So I’m your guinea pig?

  Those photographs on the top of the bookshelf are my nieces and nephews on my sister’s side. They’re older now.

  I used to be quite stylish. See how well cut my dress is. Look how lovely my perm is. It’s years since I had a perm.

  No, I never had children. Never married. Came close once – a long time ago.

  The baby food and soup are in the kitchen. It’s the only food I can swallow. Not too hot either. It burns my mouth.

  You don’t have to tell me – I smell lamp chops cooking in the apartment across the landing and I feel so hungry and want to eat real food.

  Those are an original Wedgewood dinner service. My parents’ wedding gift. They’re worth quite a lot.

  Where were you yesterday, Ken? I’m supposed to have four visits a week.

  What do you mean you didn’t know? Jean was organised. You’re not.

  Can’t you do it right? Jean always found a vein.

  You are a flatterer but one of the reasons I don’t look eighty is that I didn’t smile when I was a girl so I wouldn’t get laugh lines.

  I want a bath now. I feel clammy in this heat.
r />   (Waterlogged card) Not so (hard?).

  Never married. During the war I dated a Pommy. He did the dirty on me. I’ve never trusted men since. Are you married?

  I wish you hadn’t told me that. Men should love women, not other men.

  Do you hear that noise?

  Take off your shoes. Feel the noise coming through the floorboards.

  You must be deaf!

  If you won’t go and tell him – then I will!

  I went down there and the liar said he wasn’t playing any music.

  Why hasn’t my niece come?

  Phone again! Phone her again!

  I’m going demented with that noise.

  You look as though you’ve slept in a rubbish tip.

  Why did your tooth fall out?

  Why would you use heroin?

  It’s a weakness. Take me to the bank. I’ll get out $500 for you, so you can buy a new tooth.

  He was a Pommy, that’s all. Handsome and a cad. I could have sued him for breaking his promise to marry me. You could do that, years ago. Now women are not protected from cads.

  No, never. I was not a playgirl. No man for me after the Pommy.

  The dentist did a nice job. You don’t look such an idiot with a new front tooth.

  It’s not quite a hum but one with a thump thump thump sound.

  I know. I look like a concentration-camp victim.

  You can laugh, but old age is dreadful.

  Tie my purse to my Zimmer frame. That way muggers won’t get it.

  I gave you a new tooth, why are you so lazy? Take out the rubbish, please.