The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  ‘Whoa,’ Manu said, helping him up. ‘It was only two beers,’ he joked. The couple at the next table laughed as well. Rohan felt humiliation burning in his face. He struggled to get up. Manu’s face was lined with worry. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘I am fine,’ Rohan said. He stood again, remembering to put all his weight on his right leg. He gestured for Manu to walk ahead of him and then he limped painfully down the stairs. Outside the bar, Manu flagged down a taxi and insisted on giving Rohan a lift.

  ‘Looks like you injured yourself,’ Manu said as Rohan gingerly sat in the backseat and pulled his legs away from the curb. Rohan didn’t reply. He was thinking of where to ask Manu to drop him off. His own suburb was miles away from the city, at the end of a train line, and he had a vague sense that they were traveling in the opposite direction. He wanted Manu to see his house. Not the apartment where he squeezed past other bodies while cooking dinner, where he had to stand in line for over twenty minutes just to brush his teeth on some mornings. The house that he had described to Prima.

  ‘Take a left here,’ he commanded the driver. ‘Right there.’ They wove into a suburb where tall hedges guarded the properties from view. Rohan would never hide a luxurious house this way. It would be on full display for everybody to see.

  He noticed Manu looking closely at him. ‘Look,’ Manu said gently. ‘It seems you’re a bit lost. Shall we go out to the main road and start again? What’s your address? Which suburb?’

  A house came into view. It was shrouded by shadows but Rohan could see the brick exterior, the white fence bordering a neatly-trimmed lawn. ‘Right here,’ Rohan said triumphantly. ‘I live here.’

  Manu peered out the window and glanced at Rohan. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I live here,’ Rohan repeated, opening the door.

  ‘Right. Okay,’ Manu said. ‘Well have a good night, and do call me if you need anything. That was a nasty fall you had back there – if your leg’s still hurting, go see a doctor.’

  ‘Thank you. Very nice to meet you,’ Rohan said. He left the taxi and lingered on the curb, pretending to check his phone until the cab shot off down the street. The pain in his ankle persisted, and a dull ache had begun to spread through his leg, lodging in his hip. He walked close enough to the house without seeming suspicious and looked at the brick facade, the fence. How much would a house like this cost? He had no idea. He did not know which suburb he was in. There had to be a station nearby where he could catch a train home and walk to his apartment. He began walking in the direction of the main road. His ankle slowed him down, forcing him to notice the details of the other houses in this neighbourhood. There were more tall hedges and landscaped gardens. There were paved driveways and trampolines. Through most windows, a warm amber light glowed, as if the people within these houses only needed enough light to see the soft shapes of one another. He reached the main road and chose to go left but after fifteen minutes of walking, he seemed no closer to a train station than before, and his eyes had begun to fill with tears. Everything was closed. He sat on the front stoop of a milk bar and watched the occasional car pass by, wondering if they would stop if he stood in the street and waved his arms.

  The phone buzzed in Rohan’ pocket. Prima’s name flashed across the screen. He picked up the call reluctantly, feeling the truth rise like a lump in his throat. ‘There’s no house,’ he blurted out. Instantly he regretted saying it. Why disappoint Prima with the truth? Now she would never come to Melbourne.

  ‘Hello?’ Prima asked. ‘Hello?’ It always took a few seconds for the connection to become clear when she called from India. There were mismatched hellos and how are yous until the line settled. ‘Hello, Rohan?’

  ‘Prima,’ he said, grateful for his confession to be swallowed by static. ‘I am just out at the moment. Can I call you back?’

  ‘There was a long pause. ‘Rohan, can you hear me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will call you back.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Something is wrong,’ she replied. ‘You don’t sound like yourself.’

  He was surprised that Prima could distinguish the nuances of his tone over this cheap connection, where everything sounded tinny and faded. ‘I’ve hurt myself,’ Rohan said. ‘I fell and twisted my ankle.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Not yet. I didn’t think it was serious.’

  ‘Book an appointment to see one right away.’

  ‘Prima, doctors are expensive.’

  ‘But it’s your leg. How will you do anything if you can’t walk?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s just a bit sore for now – ’ he said, but Prima was talking over him.

  ‘How will you work? How will you do your grocery shopping? Or take your clothes to the laundromat?’

  ‘The laundromat?’

  ‘That’s what people do there, isn’t it? I was reading about student life in Australia on the internet and they said that taking clothes in the laundromat is a cost-effective alternative to buying a washing machine.’

  ‘It is,’ Rohan said. ‘There’s no washing machine in the house yet.’ It occurred to him that he had rarely described what was inside his home in these conversations. ‘You know what else? There is an electric stove, but it’s old and the oven takes a long time to heat up. There are two sinks in the kitchen but there’s a leak in one of them. I’m trying to figure out how to repair it.’ These were truthful admissions, and as he listed more details, he gained the courage to speak another truth.

  ‘I want us to have the best life,’ he said, ‘a life filled with nice things and only small worries.’ There was silence on Prima’s end. Rohan told himself it was just the connection’s delay but he was nervous. None of the other men in his situation, all trying to make something from nothing, none of them had dared voice this wish. Because what would happen if it did not come true? Enough disappointment hovered in the cramped spaces of his flat; hope was a private, precious thing.

  ‘I do too,’ Prima said. Rohan smiled, feeling the rich warmth of her voice filling him with calm. After the call ended, he watched the passing traffic – cars gliding to their destinations and the occasional cyclist whose back lights flashed urgently to other vehicles: see me, please see me. A light breeze made dancers of the thin tree branches. He stayed on the milk bar stoop and waited till he was ready to stand up again.

  Meanjin

  Aokigahara

  Jennifer Down

  I phoned my father when I arrived.

  He said ‘Your mum’s just round at Aunty El’s’ in such a way that I knew she wasn’t; that she’d left the room with her hand to her mouth when he’d first said hullo, love, and I felt so sorry for us all.

  The hotel room was cool and masculine. I drew back the curtains and looked out. The cityscape glittered through two big windows, like a part of some vast computer. My fingertips tingled if I stood too close to the glass. I wanted to sleep and slipped between the starchy sheets. I couldn’t hear the city below, but all night I kept waking up and going over to the wide glass panes. I don’t know what I expected.

  In the morning the view was different and I could see it all as more than a billion lit squares. There was a sprawling park down below. Far off, the symmetrical peak of Mount Fuji. I sat in front of the window, naked, with the glossy map they’d given me in the lobby. I tried to work out where I was.

  I met an American woman in the elevator. She was here for work, she said; she visited twice a year. Her husband had long since stopped coming with her.

  ‘He thinks it’s exhausting. The sort of place you visit once or twice in your life. He’s from Montana.’ She gave an apologetic smile. She took out a palm-sized mirror and inspected her mouth. ‘Are you here on business?’

  ‘I’m visiting my brother,’ I said without thinking. A small mercy: her mobile phone rang, and we smiled at each other as the elevator doors opened into the lobby. I walked away with blood b
uzzing in my arms. I thought I’d better get my story straight.

  In the house I shared with him and Sigrid we’d lain on the living room carpet in an oxy dream. I was too fucked to lift my arms. Tom and Sigrid kissed in a slow, decadent way, faces turned towards each other, but not for long. I dozed there on the floor in a thick shaft of sunlight, my face pressed to the carpet. When a knock came at the door, the three of us were paralysed: Tom gave an indulgent laugh, but nobody moved.

  It was all summertime and glory that year: pikelets, braided hair, and blood oranges; television, speed, flower crowns, silver dreams, tricks of the light. Long walks home from the city after a night that ended in tears and new jokes and pissing on someone’s front lawn, me and Sig giggling with our skirts up around our hips. Power-pedalling up the big hill at night, foreheads spangled with sweat.

  We had a poster of the Milky Way tacked up on the wall opposite the toilet, and another poster of constellations beneath it. I learnt the names of stars and the pictures they made.

  I had no friends – only Tommy and Sig. I was the spectator, the sister; the joyful witness to their Great Passion. The three of us loved one another very hard.

  Eri called to say she was running late. I drank a beer and read my book in the greyish light. When she arrived she said hisashiburi and gave me a quick, tight hug. Her hair was cut to her ears. I liked how small and tough she looked.

  ‘I was late at work,’ she said. ‘Osokunatte sumimasen.’ She inclined her head in a parody of her own culture and shrugged out of her coat.

  I explained what I wanted. Eri might have known. She looked at me levelly while I spoke. A cigarette burned low between her knuckles.

  ‘I can’t go with you,’ she said. I was the one who looked away. ‘But my friend Yui – her father will take you. He’s a doctor, but he volunteers there sometimes. You can take a bus to Kawaguchiko station.’ Eri stubbed out the cigarette and took up a pen. She said she’d organise it for me. She wrote down her friend’s name and phone number on a square of paper, and passed it to me with both hands. I never knew when to be humble, when to be reverent. I remembered the set phrases from high school, but not the feel of them in my mouth.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again and again. ‘Osewa ni narimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.’ Thank you for caring for me. Sorry to be a burden. It’s the thing you say. We did it all back to front: first there was hardness; afterwards, decorum. We stayed there until after midnight. We talked about our jobs, about our families. Eri lied and said my Japanese was still very good. She was engaged to a schoolteacher. She hoped I’d come back for the wedding. I lied and said I would. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a blue envelope. Tucked inside was a photo – Eri, Tom and me on Phillip Island, smiling grimly into the wind. Eri wore the pained expression of the exchange student; Tommy grinned from under a ridiculous knitted beanie. He looked healthy, indefatigable, victorious. I was blinking.

  Eri leant on my shoulder, so close that I felt her hair against mine. She looked down at our pale adolescent faces. ‘I thought that I had taken more pictures that day, but I could only find this,’ she said.

  I had the spins at Koenji station. I sobered up on the train back to the hotel. In my room I called Sigrid; lovely Sig who’d stayed with him all that time, who’d weathered his shit when the rest of us no longer could.

  ‘It’s all sorted. I’m going the day after tomorrow,’ I said. I realised I was going to sob.

  ‘Come home. You don’t need to do this for anyone else. You’re only doing it for you,’ Sigrid said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s it like there? Is it cold?’

  ‘You know Buddhists get a new name when they die?’ I told her. ‘To move away from one world and into the next – the afterlife, or whatever, a dead person gets a new name. So they don’t look back.’

  ‘Like Lot’s wife.’

  I wanted to stick my head into the night, to run around a cricket oval until I was ragged in the lungs. I was aching with a mad, violent energy, but all I could do was curl up like a child in the cool bed. When we were kids walking home from school, Mum wouldn’t let me cut across the oval without Tom. It’s not good for a little girl to walk there by herself, she said. I did it anyway, but with a thrumming heart and quick legs, thinking of strange men and bodies in paddocks. It was a much shorter way of getting home. Whenever I banged through the screen door out of breath, schoolbag thumping against the small of my back, Tommy laughed. He’d say, ‘What are you scared of, Cammy? Worst thing you’re gunna see is Jade Pitrowski getting fingered in the tunnel.’ He never told Mum. Mostly we walked together.

  Dad and I found him once living in a shack up near Marysville. He’d been gone from home a few days. Detective games and phone calls to his friends led us nowhere: we had to wait for Tommy to contact us. He did at last, and we went to retrieve him. We left Mum standing in the driveway at dusk, telling us to ‘drive safe’. I was still in my school uniform. Everyone was frightened of what we’d find that time; of what fool’s gold lay at the end of the treasure-hunt instructions he’d made Dad scribble down over the phone. In the end, it was a monstrous Tommy, huddled like a dog in his windbreaker and filthy jeans in some abandoned shed. We couldn’t go home, he said; we couldn’t leave yet. And so we stayed with him in that wormy wood shack. It was not far from the town. Dad drove in on the second morning and bought food and polar-fleece blankets and we tried to make an adventure of it. I was impatient. When it got dark I lit all the candles and sat at the wooden table with my textbooks, highlighting the words someone else had coloured before me. I learnt nothing. I did it only to say, Look, you selfish shit, it’s not always about you. See what you’re doing. I copied notes into my exercise books with their ruled margins, and did every revision question surrounded by my lumps of molten wax. I remembered nothing.

  Dad and Tom went for walks that lasted for hours. It was never that I was not invited. Once I looked out the window and saw them standing twenty yards apart, knee-deep in grass. Tommy was bellowing something and they were too far away for me to hear at all, but I could see the strain in his neck, his Adam’s apple tight and tired, and I imagined him hoarse-voiced. He flung out an arm in a posture of desperation. Dad waited for him to finish.

  We stayed there for three days. On the fourth day we drove home, all of us grimy and sour-breathed in our greasy wool jumpers and boots. Me, the learner driver up front of the station wagon, easing the car around hairpin bends. Tommy in the back with his headphones, snarling at me to fucken’ step on it, will ya. Dad beside me mouthing to his Buffalo Springfield tape and looking over the sharp, ferny ledges when I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road, or tell me I was taking the corners too fast, because I was afraid. And the asphalt unfurling impossibly before us, canopied by the thickest forest I’d ever seen.

  I slept beside a man I’d met in a bar. He was Dutch, an architect, thirty-two, here for a conference. I didn’t care. We fucked twice, and afterwards we rolled away from each other and I told him everything. He tried to put his arms around me.

  ‘He was your older brother?’

  ‘Sixteen months older.’

  ‘Almost like twins,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about it, the jukai. Sea of trees.’

  ‘I don’t know what it will be like,’ I said. I felt the grief rising in weak spasms. I got up and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water from the tap.

  ‘In some ways it’s almost a pilgrimage that you’re making,’ he said pleasantly. His accent made everything sound silly. I wished he’d stop talking. Above the bedhead was a mirrored pane. I could see my own body reflected in it, the shadow of pubic hair, the faint tan lines from a summer ago. White breasts, glass of water in my hand, flesh settled on my hips. There was a smudged handprint on the mirror, not left by either of us. We’d fucked efficiently, neatly.

  I thought I should leave, but he said I should stay. I got back into bed beside him and he reached for me again.
He had his arms around me for a long time. One of those blokes who hated silence and loved touching. I wondered if he had a wife or a girlfriend. We must have slept, because I dreamed lightly of flooded fields. I was seeing them from above; I was seeing the water-damaged crops.

  We said goodbye in the morning. I got lost trying to find my way back to my hotel. I ended up on the wrong train, then another. I stood on a train platform I didn’t recognise, looking at the map with its complicated coloured lines. I might have started to cry, but one of the white-gloved station employees approached. He had a badge of the British flag on his lapel. He asked if I needed help.

  ‘This is Yamanote line,’ he said. His fingers traced the map. He showed me where my hotel was, where Tokyo Tower was, where Ginza was, where Akihabara was, smiling the whole time. I kept saying thank you. I felt as helpless as an animal by a roadside. ‘Since you are here in Ikebukuro,’ the man went on, ‘why don’t you try the bōsai-kan?’

  ‘Bōsai-kan,’ I repeated dumbly.

  ‘It is a special and interesting earthquake museum. You can experience an earthquake. To feel the feeling.’ He held out both gloved hands, fingers splayed, and bent his knees as if bracing himself. ‘Wa-a-a-a-a!’ He laughed. ‘Actually, there is information on various type of emergency situations. It is a good attraction. The entry is free of charge. I recommend this place.’

  He’d been so helpful that I didn’t know how to refuse him. I couldn’t simply get back on a train and head off in the right direction. I thanked him over and over again. He gave me a foldout map, the one I already had three copies of. Marked the route to the museum with a series of neat dashes; warned me it was easy to miss. I kept saying thank you. I wanted to wash the sex off my thighs.