The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  Next, he stares across the space to your boy and points him out to his mate.

  Prickles run down your spine.

  ‘If he looks at me that way again,’ says Ethan, sitting up, ‘I’ll ram his head through the window.’ He throws a brace of savage looks across the carriage. His bloodshot eyes roll before he subsides on the seat again.

  Kasi replies, in a pleasant-enough tone, beating his oddly sensuous, long eyelashes. ‘Not before you tell him. Then, we’ll put him through the glass.’

  You feel an urgent need to get away from both of them but, simultaneously, you want to manoeuvre yourself between them and the angel on the floor. You can’t sit and watch someone beat up a prepubescent kid.

  Meanwhile, the beautiful boy refuses to lift his concentration from the patterns on the floor but his tears have stopped. Two wise but ineffectual moves.

  You place your hands on your book and lean forward. You intend asking Kasi questions about the suburbs through which you’re passing, establishing yourself in a light and animated tone as a harmless tourist. Which you are.

  He grunts and turns to face you.

  ‘Can you tell me about Claremont? From here, I can see a lot of trees. Are there places to moor your boat by the river?’ you ask.

  ‘It’s a rich suburb,’ he says ‘Next to Peppermint Grove. Where wankers live, often just the two of them with fourteen bedrooms and ten bathrooms. Stinking rich.’

  ‘Mining money?’

  ‘May…be.’

  ‘What about Swanbourne? Would you like to live there?’

  ‘How do you know I don’t?’ he replies, dragging his eyes away from the boy on the floor, to glare at you.

  ‘Do you?’ You smile, hoping to amend your mistake.

  ‘Watch this space.’

  Station signs flash by. The Manga man alights at Cottesloe. Kasi begins to confide his backstory or at least one he thinks you will find appealing. He comes from Melbourne, didn’t like school, but Perth is okay. He sounds articulate. You decide he has a mother and a father who at some point showed an interest in him. You keep trying verbally to hold him at bay. Ask him questions that lead away from the school’s failure to keep him. What does he like doing best? Does he like music?

  You get nothing back. He shrugs. Then recommends that you go to the Maritime Museum at Freo for the shipwrecks, and to be sure and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf.

  You nod and while you think of more questions, you point out the unsettling sight of a black hawk, buffeted by wind, flying backwards past the train window.

  He barely turns his head. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he stands up – how can this happen while conversing with someone once adept at social discourse? – and with no further warning but a reflex fondling of his balls, launches himself across the carriage.

  Your heart lurches.

  The beautiful boy looks up from examining the minute striations on the palms of his hands: life lines, ancient scars. You think, after all, he can’t be more than twelve.

  But his potential aggressor has your full attention. His hair is unfashionably spiked and glitters with some kind of stale fruity gel that you smell as he passes. He wants you to watch. Perhaps to intervene and stop him. You, rupturing his performance will delight him. It will cause a scene. He will draw out the moment before he acts. You know this and you will not rattle his cage.

  Kasi drops on his haunches to whisper into the boy’s ear. Through his spiky hair you notice scars like evidence of lightning strikes on the back of his scalp. Hairdressers should be compelled to notify authorities. The boy turns his head to the window, doesn’t speak. His skin shines with perspiration. The older boy weighs up his seeming passivity. Perhaps he is warning the kid to keep away from his friend Ethan – knows his work – wants to save him from chemical violence.

  You glance uneasily around the carriage. You think of the shape of a body in a shattered window, on a train travelling at speed. The damage to the boy’s beautiful skin when flung by angry young gods.

  Kasi retreats to his seat and begins flexing his skinny arms. They look quite white in the sunlight, with their smattering of black moles.

  You resume your burble with less confidence. He pretends an avuncular politeness beyond his years – the little shit has made his point and you should treat him with respect – relaxed, leaning back in his seat, left ankle crossed across his right knee. So erratic. Earlier, you could not help but like the positive aspects of his personality. His intelligence. His certain acceptance that an educated fellow-commuter will play this game with him. Could he mean well, after all? Your ignorance about Perth pleases him, you know this, as he points out landmarks, tells you he will help you find the Fremantle Arts Centre, once the Claremont Mental Hospital, when you arrive.

  Intermittently the boy on the floor lifts his head and sniffs the air around him like quarry or like someone selling something. The train carriage has lost any hope of being a neutral space. In either case, who among the passengers, deep in books, tapping on keyboards, chatting on their phones, massaging leather bags, will defend him? None, you surmise and he knows it although people often surprise you in crises. What looks like suturing thread but is probably acrylic cotton holds parts of his worn, green coat together. In his disguised agitation he has snapped a section apart revealing only the golden curves of his immature chest. He tugs the lapels together and attempts the difficult feat of disappearing into the floor.

  Get off at the next stop, you send by telekinesis. Don’t stand up until the last possible moment. Then run.

  *

  The train brakes at Mosman and a grey-skirted schoolgirl jumps on, taking the seat beside you. Instead of wearing her ribboned straw hat she holds it against her blue blazer; no doubt a hangable offence. You will her to be quiet.

  Kasi appears immediately drawn to her and deftly restarts your conversation in an effort to show his best side. Now that is charitable.

  An ostensibly respectable adult talking to the boy upsets the girl’s radar and she gives him eye contact. She should not. She should keep her head down.

  He becomes excited again, leaning forward from his bench seat, baring his rickety teeth in our general direction. You imagine his mind discarding and ticking points that he thinks will interest the schoolgirl. Nothing too personal. He tells you again which road you should take when you disembark at Freo. He asks her if she likes to study.

  The schoolgirl has scraped her hair back from her forehead and pinned service badges on her lapels; she is an advertisement for the values education offered at her expensive school. She wants to help and she begins to chip in on your tourist conversation with the boy. You are gracious and try to steer the conversation away from him but it is too late.

  Her voice is sweet, refined and pleasant. Friendly.

  He is not unattractive with his wide crooked smile, his eagerness to engage. But unpredictable.

  He speaks more slowly. Moves smoothly into an anecdote about his stay in a Melbourne hospital. There was nothing physically wrong with him, he says. They’d locked him up and pumped him full of drugs for nothing. He’d had to do a heap of tests. More details slide into place. Although he doesn’t say so, it is clear he has been detained for three weeks by mental health provisions.

  The schoolgirl seems curiously unaware of his sense of thwarted entitlement, or is scrupulously polite. ‘I quite like tests,’ the girl says. Perhaps she acts deliberately obtuse. Is she passive aggressive?

  Momentarily, he switches his attention back to the boy on the floor, who places his head in his hands. Kasi reminds you of your dog, toying with two mice … letting one limp away a certain distance but keeping an eye on it as he bats the second one with his paw.

  ‘Well done,’ he says, his attention returning to the schoolgirl. ‘To do so well at exams. I hope you like university. Not for me. I couldn’t concentrate at school. I was smart and everything but …’

  You turn your head away to the window. You want to take the girl’s hand
and apologise. Don’t talk to him. Really. I misled you.

  To your great relief, the girl rises and reaches for the strap, leaving you to focus on the cherub-faced boy on the floor. He is dragging small change from his jacket pocket, cupping his hand to count the coins, perhaps to see if he has a sufficient number to buy food or a bottle of water.

  Kasi and the schoolgirl continue chatting until the next stop where she gets off.

  He stares at her legs as she alights. ‘Nice girl.’ He waves to her. ‘I can take you to the Maritime Museum if you want,’ he says inviting you back into the conversation.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ you say.

  He points it out in the distance, layered wings of silvery-white on the point, rather like the Sydney Opera House.

  ‘I should find both places, I think.’ How will you shake him off? ‘Perhaps you could give me directions.’

  ‘Really nice girl.’

  ‘Sweet.’

  ‘She was a bit suspicious of me,’ he adds.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘Well, you can’t blame her in a way.’

  He prickles up.

  You lost his trust.

  ‘Do you mean my tattoo?’

  You shake your head. It is small, as far as tattoos go; you hadn’t noticed it on his scrawny shoulder.

  He clenches his fists. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, some boys don’t have a good track-record with girls. Not everyone is kind and polite like you.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘She has to keep herself safe,’ you say.

  He nods. His friend sprawls looking half-alive, throws out a fruity cough that makes him nurse his chest with one hand.

  You look away, scan the carriage for fascinating details. The boy on the floor remains motionless. Perhaps he is frozen, in terror. Resignation.

  Before the last stop you try to ease out of the conversation, watch the beautiful boy stand up and move to the middle door to exit at Fremantle. Two passengers queue behind him, preparing to alight. When the train screeches to a stop Kasimir and Ethan swing out of their seats and into the aisle – in no great hurry but close enough to reach around and touch him – once more gripping their damp, scrunched tee shirts against their crotches, as they shoulder their way up behind him. Ethan sniffs and coughs into his tee shirt. You stand, fingers searching your tote bag for your phone. Who should you call? The postdoc? He shouldn’t be far away? A transit guard? Haven’t seen one. One hand on the strap you edge forward.

  They swing away on the balls of their feet following the boy, who has his head down trying to weave around disembarking passengers as he trudges forward through the railway turnstile. He hides behind a curtain of hair that has flopped into his face.

  Before they reach the roadside, Kasi lunges forward to hiss something in the boy’s ear and takes hold of his arm. And as if to dismiss you, he spins around so that you are face to face again and calls out, ‘turn right here and follow the next street to the water.’

  You nod and thank him. Even from a distance, you hear his mate grumbling, only compos enough to fling hostile looks about him.

  The first blow falls. In your struggle to reach the boy you drop Greer’s book. ‘Stop it,’ you cry. ‘He’s my nephew.’ You call on your inchoate friendship. ‘Please. Kasi…mir.’

  He releases him, punishing his arm with one last thump, and turns towards you as if you’ve betrayed him. ‘Why didn’t you say so, you dumb bitch?’

  His friend shambles forward, stepping over a bedraggled black bird facedown in the gutter, a stream of blood trickling from beneath its beak. Poor kite.

  You seize your newly adopted nephew, slinging your arm around his slight shoulders. He tries to shrug you off. You decide to reschedule your date with the young academic until you’ve clarified your thinking about Rembrandt’s transmogrification of Michelangelo’s famous drawing of a beautiful boy. You tug the boy through the graceful 100-year-old station archway, into the twenty-first century, towards the esplanade and a feed of fish and chips. Glancing back, you see them, Kasimir and Ethan, giving you the finger before turning in the opposite direction.

  Breaking Beauty

  On Ice

  Eleanor Limprecht

  Deb knocked on the door of Room 17 and tried the handle. It was locked. She pulled the set of keys from her lanyard. Patients weren’t meant to lock their doors but Mrs Ciszek forgot, as she forgot many things. If the head nurse listened to Deb they would have disabled the locks by now. She found the right key, turned it and pushed down the handle, breathing in the corridor scent of bleach with the ammonia tinge of adult nappies beneath. Mrs Ciszek’s room smelled like the lavender soap – Yardley’s – that reminded Deb of her own Nan.

  ‘Mrs Ciszek, it’s Deb. Wake up, time to take your pills.’ She rolled the meds cart inside and flicked the light-switch on the wall beside her. The fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered, lazy, like they needed to be woken as well. She walked over to the window to open the blinds and glanced over at the figure in Mrs Ciszek’s bed.

  Oh shit, not this again.

  The blankets were moving and shifting, two white-haired heads lay side by side on the plastic-lined pillow.

  Mrs Ciszek propped herself up on one elbow, spry for a woman of her age. She looked down at herself and pulled the sheet across her wrinkled, flattened breasts. Her hair was a halo of frizz, her eyes blinked. She reached to the bedside table for her specs and put them on. ‘It’s not what it looks like, Rob,’ she said. ‘He needed a place to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not your husband,’ Deb said. She grabbed the dressing gown from behind the door and brought it to her. ‘But Mrs Ciszek, we can’t do this anymore. It’s not allowed.’

  The figure beside Mrs Ciszek rolled away from them, still asleep, taking the blankets with him. He exposed a back covered with fine, downy hair in a trail to the crack of his arse. How the two of them could fit – much less sleep – in one of those single beds was a miracle in itself. Deb wanted to handle this on her own, but knew she’d lose her job if they found out. She picked up the handset beside the bed and dialled the nurses’ station. ‘It’s Deb,’ she said, covering the mouthpiece, like Mrs Ciszek wasn’t going to hear her. ‘I’m in Room 17. We have a situation. Yep. Like before.’

  While they waited for the head nurse Deb helped Mrs Ciszek into her dressing gown and gave her a little white cup of pills, another cup of water, and watched to make sure that she swallowed both.

  ‘Say aaah,’ she said.

  ‘La la laaaa,’ Mrs Ciszek said, and Deb smiled. It was their little joke. Every morning. Other nurses hated the dementia ward but Deb thought it was okay. Sure, they forgot everything, sure it was like living in Groundhog Day, but they woke up like babies: blinking their eyes at the brand new world. One, Mr Aslam (Room 27) devoured his toast and jam each morning as though it were a miracle. As though a crappy slice of Tip Top, a smear of margarine and a glob of strawberry jam was as good as it got. She didn’t mind at all.

  Deb could hear the squeak of Jill’s white leather shoes coming down the long corridor. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you really shouldn’t let Mr Abrahams into your bed.’

  ‘Where are we meant to do it?’ Mrs Ciszek said, ‘On the floor?’

  *

  That was Luke’s favourite line when she told him the story. They were sitting in front of the TV, watching The Voice, eating pad Thai and red beef curry from plastic takeaway containers slick with oil. She picked up the takeaway from Thai It Up on her way home. Luke put the mute button on, even though one of the contestants he liked was singing – the one with no legs who zoomed onto stage in a motorised wheelchair.

  ‘Are you shitting me?’ he said. ‘She asked you that? Are they getting it on in there? These people are like, what, ninety? A hundred years old?’

  ‘I think Mrs Ciszek is in her eighties, Mr Abrahams is younger – he might be in his seventies. He’s in
good shape for a seventy-year-old guy.’ Deb grinned. Luke thought her work was boring, once he figured out that she wasn’t going to bring him home any veterinary-strength horse tranquilisers or Viagra he wasn’t interested. But he kept the show muted, put his beer on the floor and jumped off the couch.

  ‘That shit’s crazy,’ he said. ‘Does she even know who he is? Mate, I need to hook up with some Alzheimer’s chicks. They’ll be like – ooh, fuck me, then they’ll forget, and two minutes later, they’ll be like – oooh fuck me, all over again.’

  Luke was standing on the carpet, blocking her view, thrusting his pelvis back and forth as he acted out the scene. Deb laughed, but she put down her plastic fork.

  ‘Yeah, that’s just what it’s like. Just what dementia is like. It’s like porn, Luke, like non-stop geriatric porn.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, you dickhead. I feel sorry for them. But it’s weird as well, it’s like they’re lovebirds. Young teenagers who are really into each other but don’t know how to act or how to talk.’

  Luke sat back down and punched the remote to turn off the mute button. ‘Did you see what Kylie is wearing?’ he said, ‘Where does she find this shit?’

  Deb scraped the last bite of pad Thai into her mouth, leaving nothing but squeezed out lemon in the plastic container. ‘Do you want to know the saddest part?’

  Luke didn’t look at her, just raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Mrs Ciszek is still married. Her husband still comes to visit her once or twice a week, and sometimes she even remembers him. This morning she thought I was him. She started coming up with excuses, as if she knows what she’s doing is wrong. Jill said we need to tell her husband about the situation with Mr Abrahams.’

  ‘Wow, that’s fucked,’ Luke said, taking another swig from his beer, not taking his eyes off the screen. ‘Wait till I tell the guys at work this one. Demented old ladies, huh? Who’d have guessed it.’

  *

  There was a police officer at their staff meeting the next morning. She kept her hat beside her on the table as she spoke about what constitutes assault and what constitutes consent, how the police determine whether someone is even capable of giving consent. She tapped her fingernails on the top of the table as she spoke. Deb sat on her hands to keep from biting her nails. Her stomach felt queasy. She’d gone to bed after dinner, after cleaning the kitchen and making Luke his lunch to take to work the next day. She felt a heaviness; a lethargy that she couldn’t trace to one particular thing. Luke stayed up late, his eyes flicking between the screen of his phone and the TV.