The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  I walked all over the city. I wandered around the streets as if in a hallucination. I was scared that if I went back to my hotel I’d fall asleep there in my cool, clean coffin room. I took photos in the fish markets; I bought a small bunch of peonies and carried them around all afternoon like a fool. I walked through the park I kept seeing from my hotel window. In a quiet suburb full of trees I sat in a tiny café styled like a French pâtisserie. Charles Bradley was playing over the speakers. The coffee was pale and sweet. Ordinarily I would have hated it, but I ordered another and a cake the size of my palm topped with gelatinous fruits and read my book for an hour by the window. It was late afternoon. The light was swimming-pool green. I caught another train, met Eri again for dinner. She brought her boyfriend. I wasn’t hungry. I was beginning to get nervous. Afterwards the two of them headed off to sing karaoke with some friends. I turned down their invitation. I had to get up early the next morning.

  I sat on the end of the bed to call Dad again. The bed was neatly made from the day before. I told him about the earthquake museum.

  ‘The Life Safety Learning Centre,’ he repeated, and laughed. ‘But how did you bloody end up there?’ He laughed harder when I told him about the man at the station, uniformed and well-intentioned, and how I’d gone out of politeness. I told him about the earthquake simulator.

  ‘It was frightening,’ I said. ‘It went on for longer than I expected. I was surprised.’

  He asked if I wanted to speak to Mum. I said I had to get up early the next morning.

  There was a car accident. It wasn’t me driving round the Black Spur, it was Tommy dozing off in the car on Swan Street, me in the passenger seat reaching over to grab at the wheel. He ruptured his spleen and in hospital he got high on pethidine. He had a vision – colour and dreams in his arms– and all I got was to sit by his chair. He went off the antidepressants after that. We learnt about them when I did my psych rotation, their uses and side effects. Of course that doesn’t happen to everyone. Of course if you feel drowsy or otherwise affected, you shouldn’t drive. Of course. He went cold turkey, like you’re not supposed to.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ I’d heard Sigrid ask him once. One of the afternoons when we’d cycled round the Merri Creek trail with bottles of Mercury tinkling in our crates, sprawled out in the sun, read to one another, done the quiz in the paper. We had so much time.

  ‘Dizzy,’ Tommy had said, ‘these sort of – electric-feeling brain zaps. Like shivers in your head that roll through.’ He’d pressed his hands to her hair, scrunched his fingers, raked them down her skull to her neck, but tenderly. Sig’s shoulders had tensed. They’d thought I was asleep. I realised it was too late to let them know I was listening. ‘Like looking through fog. I just feel out of it.’

  ‘Must be dreadful,’ she’d said.

  ‘Gunna be good when it’s over,’ he’d said. My brother with his silly, lovely grin, withdrawing from the good pills. That was May. He went to Japan in September. We’d all waved goodbye to him at the airport. He’d swaggered off singing ‘The Internationale’ for reasons I’ve long forgotten, waving his windcheater at us until he disappeared through the silver doors. The security guard had laughed and Dad had laughed and Sig laughed, too, but she’d been crying. Her eyes were leaking and her breathing was ragged. I thought she was just getting ready to miss him. In a way she was. Maybe she knew something the rest of us didn’t.

  I’d brought a book to read on the bus but ended up with my face to the window the whole way. I slipped in and out of light sleep, tiny flickering dreams. A sign in a window I couldn’t read; tunnels into the earth; my father with white smoke rising from his belly or chest, he was on fire and didn’t realise. I woke with a start and looked around me. I wondered if I’d cried out. I kept my headphones on and looked out at the mountain drawing closer.

  Mr Ukai met me at the bus stop. He was a small, slim man in a parka. He held out his hand for me to shake. In the car he played Bob Dylan.

  ‘Osewa ni narimasu. Thank you for doing this,’ I said.

  ‘It’s good to be able to help. I go there to help anyway.’ His English was clear. His eyes did not move from the road.

  ‘Even so. It’s a big ask – it’s a big favour. I’m grateful. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.’

  ‘Ii-i-e. I think it is not so good for you to go there by yourself,’ he said gently. ‘I think, if you are not too tired, we will go to there now. We don’t want to be in the forest after dusk. It is a dense place.’

  ‘I’ve read a little bit about it,’ I said. ‘I read about that book. Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru.’

  ‘The Complete Manual of Suicide.’ He shook his head. ‘I think it is maybe a hysteria. I think you cannot blame a book. This sadness is an epidemic. It did not come from bookstores. But,’ – we slowed at a corner and he turned to look at me, one hand on the gearstick – ‘I have not read this book, so maybe I don’t know.’

  The roads were wet. The trees were fat with the sort of haze I imagined would burn off later in the day. I felt as if I’d been awake for a long time, but it was still morning.

  ‘Yui tells me you are medical student. Very good.’

  ‘Well, I’m not very good. I’m just passing,’ I said. ‘And I still don’t know if it’s what I want to do.’

  ‘I still don’t know either. And I am a doctor for thirty years.’ He laughed. ‘What do you like most?’

  ‘I want to be a diagnostician. I like solving puzzles,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if I work hard enough for that.’

  We pulled in to a car park. We’d arrived suddenly. I hadn’t been looking for signs. Mr Ukai sat for a moment after he cut the ignition, looking at something I couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror. I thought he was going to ask me if I was ready, but he just reached into the back seat for his plastic water canteen.

  From the car boot he took out a smaller women’s rain jacket and handed it to me. He retrieved a backpack, a torch, and a length of fluorescent-yellow nylon cord, neatly coiled. That nearly brought me to my knees. I had a bad feeling in the guts. It smelt like new earth out here, petrichor; like bright air. I tried to think about that instead of the nylon cord.

  Mr Ukai shut the boot gently. He slung the backpack over his shoulder, and his waterproof jacket gave out a rustle.

  ‘Ja, ikōka?’

  We started towards the entrance. The leaves were wet underfoot.

  ‘People say it’s a mystical place, they say, nanka, many kind of things, but it’s just a forest,’ he said. ‘The mystery is why are so many people sad.’

  It struck me as a distinctly un-Japanese thing to say. The woods were darker than I’d imagined. It was all electric green moss and untamed tree roots crawling over the forest floor. It felt prehistoric. We came to a length of yellow rope stretched across the path. There was a sign that said No Entry. Mr Ukai stepped right over it, then held it down so I could do the same.

  ‘I think it is best, from here, if I walk first,’ he said. He inclined his head. I nodded.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Cammy-san. If the experience becomes too heavy, nanka, tsurai – we will go back to my car. Please do not be troubled. Do – not – hesitate.’

  He pronounced my name kami, like ‘god’. I nodded again. I had my thumbs looped through the straps of my backpack. I felt like a child on an excursion.

  We fell into step single file, me behind him. I wondered what he’d meant, exactly, with his polite, broken English. There was such a chasm between us. I thought about Eri saying I can’t go with you.

  I kept my eyes fixed on Mr Ukai’s back, or on my own running shoes, caked with wet leaves. When he started humming to himself, I thought it must be safe to look up. There was tape everywhere, strung between trees. Some of the trunks had numbers spray-painted on them. Mr Ukai stepped off the main trail onto a smaller one. He looked back at me. He said, daijōbu? and I said daijōbu. I could feel sweat cooling on my neck.

  It had been weeks before the fune
ral took place. There were complications bringing Tommy’s body back. For a while the Japanese seemed to think there should be an autopsy, and that they should be the ones to undertake it, but that faded. I took half a valium before the service and another after I’d read my eulogy.

  There was no word for closure in Japanese. I’d looked it up online in my hotel room the other night.

  Mr Ukai had stopped humming. He was walking respectfully, if that were possible. Everything he did was gentle. He surveyed the forest calmly. His eyes went everywhere. I flinched at it.

  There was human detritus everywhere. Plastic umbrellas, food wrappers, mittens, lengths of rope, a bicycle, a pair of scissors, a blue tarpaulin. The trees were so thick overhead, I wondered how they let any light through. I could see why Tommy would have loved it here.

  Mr Ukai paused. He waited until I was beside him, then he pointed at the base of a tree a little way off the path. There was a marker at its base. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers, pink cellophane, and a tiny banquet of food, laid out on a piece of cloth.

  ‘It is recent,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘Maybe someone else is making our same journey today.’

  A few steps further I saw a skull turned green and a rotten shoe. There was a crop of tiny mushrooms growing by the heel of the shoe. Their stalks were young and firm. I squatted with one hand on a damp tree and vomited. Mr Ukai handed me a pocket pack of tissues. I wiped my mouth. I waited until I was sure I wasn’t going to do it again, then I stepped past Mr Ukai. I zipped my water canteen back into my backpack. I apologised in a way that sounded too formal.

  ‘Maybe a place near here would be good,’ he suggested when we started walking again.

  ‘It’s beautiful, but there’s no light.’

  ‘Aokigahara is a very dense place. That’s why it is jukai. Sea of trees.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I felt rude. ‘I just thought maybe we could find a clearing.’

  We walked for a long time. I watched the soil under my feet. The trees closed over almost completely, so that I had to bend my head in parts, but we did come to a clearing. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I think this is a good place.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed.

  My mouth tasted like vomit. I took off my backpack and fished out the plastic bag.

  ‘Cammy-san. If you wish, I can go somewhere else. So you can be discreet.’

  I looked up at him. I shook my head. ‘I don’t need to be here long.’

  I took the letters and the hammer out of the plastic bag. I chose a tree. I lined up the pieces of paper. They were neatly folded into four, no envelopes. I fixed them to the tree. The nails were probably too small, but they held. I nailed Eri’s Phillip Island photo to the trunk, too, then the yellowed poster from our bathroom in the Yarraville house, the one with the constellations.

  When I finished hammering I stood back to look at my shrine. Mr Ukai was on the other side of the clearing, sitting on the trunk of an enormous fallen tree. He was watching me with a placid face.

  ‘Please take your time. Do not hurry,’ he said.

  ‘I think I’m done,’ I said. I left the hammer by the tree. I had no further use for it.

  Afterwards Mr Ukai took me back to his house. His wife served us green tea and small sweet cakes and mandarins with tough skins. We sat at a low table. Mr Ukai said it was all right not to kneel. Mrs Ukai looked at me the way you might look at an orphan. She asked gentle questions. We winced at each other. Once the sugar sadness in my mouth was almost too much, but I looked down at the table and it passed.

  Their daughter Yui was my age. She arrived home from university and introduced herself.

  ‘Yui has just been on student exchange. For one year. In Austin,’ Mr Ukai said.

  ‘Texas,’ Yui said. She gave a little smile. Fathers and daughters were the same everywhere you went. Mrs Ukai insisted on cooking me dinner. She made yudofu, tsumire and daikon. I was surprised at how hungry I was.

  ‘Yudofu is my favourite,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘I have tried to cook yudofu myself, but I am not so good as my wife.’ He laughed pleasantly. His wife did not speak English. She smiled at me through the steam rising from her bowl.

  After dinner Yui and I stood in the dark outside on the wooden verandah and smoked a joint. She spoke with an American accent so convincing she even had a slight drawl.

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

  ‘It’s okay. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop him.’ My arms were feeling warm on the inside. I had the sudden urge to stand close to Yui, to let our arms touch, to see if hers were hot, too, but some part of me realised I was high.

  ‘Why did he come here to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He did a student exchange here when he was in high school. He never knew what he wanted to do. I’d never heard him talk about Aokigahara before.

  But now I’ve seen it, it makes sense to me.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Yui said. I wanted my mother.

  The last bus to Tokyo left at 8.10 p.m. Mr Ukai drove me back to Kawaguchiko station. As we approached the station I began to thank him again, clumsily. We parked beneath a floodlight.

  ‘There is a Japanese saying: nodo mo to sugireba atsusa o wasureru. Do you understand?’ Mr Ukai asked. I shook my head. ‘It means, one forgets the heat once it has passed down the throat.’

  My backpack was heavy on my lap. I went on thanking him. He got out and waited until I was on the bus. I waved at him from the window. He was still standing there when the bus pulled away. I waved until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  I felt as if I’d been gone for days when I got back to the city. I couldn’t bear the trains and the streets. I couldn’t bear this country.

  I felt filthy. In my hotel room I took off my muddy running shoes and threw them straight into the wastepaper bin. I started to undress to get in the shower, and then I thought I’d better phone my dad if I was going to do it at all.

  ‘I went. I saw it.’

  ‘Oh, Cammy,’ he said. ‘Are you alright?’

  I sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Do you remember that time we went to get Tommy from the mountains, and we drove home through the Black Spur? The trees were thicker than that.’

  He began to cry. I heard him sucking in air through his teeth.

  Australian Book Review

  The Same Weight as a Human Heart

  Nick Couldwell

  Harry’s up ahead ducking and weaving between the seaweed and bluebottles washed up at the high tide mark. He keeps his eyes on the dirty horizon, huffing through his nose when he throws his jab. Hfff, hfff. He’s slower than he used to be, arms as stiff as a 4×4, but you can see he still has it in the way he shifts his feet, bobs his head. He circles the debris left at the shoreline, his t-shirt billowing in the northerly like a raised flag. Hfff, hfff, hfff.

  It’s September 22nd, the same date Jack Dempsey lost the heavyweight championship of the world to Gene Tunney. He was Harry’s favourite boxer after Grandpa played an old black-and-white tape of his most famous fight, dubbed the Long Count. Even asked Mum to cut his hair with a side part. We never heard the end of it. I’d catch him in front of the mirror in Mum’s room with his mitts up, toilet paper around his knuckles and he’d say, ‘Tall men come down to my height when I hit ‘em in the body,’ and he’d see me in the reflection and wink like he was three gins deep.

  When his cheekbones glisten and his shoulders brew with lactic acid, he stops, and ambles back towards me with his arms swinging like oars. He bursts bluebottles with the callused part of his heel and sometimes little pieces of tentacle hits me in the leg and sting like nettles in a cow paddock. As we drift towards the edge of the dunes where the softer sand is, the bluebottles thin out and he has to run down to the tideline to find more.

  We pass sandbars and deep gullies perfect for bream and flat-head but we keep walking and I don’t mention it. I don’t really want to fish. Couldn’t be stuffed. But I have to try, at least for Harry�
��s sake.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs his shoulders and toes crab holes in the sand. His finger traces a line down the front of his shirt like he’s pulling down an invisible zipper. When he sees me watching, he rips his hand back to his side.

  His scars have always been tender. The first week home after the operation he woke the whole house trying to tear his chest open because it felt like ants were trying to get between the stitches. When I walked into his room, Mum had a paper bag to his mouth while Dad trimmed his fingernails on the bed. The paper bag was brown like the ones we use to hold our school lunches. It expanded and crumpled with every breath and if you shut your eyes it sounded like waves lapping the shore. When he finally gave in and fell asleep, I looked at his limp hands resting on his chest, the nubs of his fingers tender and bloody.

  Dad was waiting for me beneath the skylight in the hall. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him so I stared at a crack in the tile next to my big toe. He grabbed me by my chin and brought my eyes to his face.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ he said.

  He took my fingers in his fist and ripped down the collar of his shirt.

  ‘Watch.’

  He squeezed my fingers, pulled them to his bare chest and dragged my nails down right through his skin.

  He gripped my chin again.

  ‘You see?’

  Beneath the strange glow of the skylight, even through the tears, my father’s blood looked blue under my fingernails.

  I keep an eye out for rips and currents. I search for floating debris and darker water like Dad taught us. I remember him walking us up to the river mouth where the waters boil like blood and dredge out past the waves. He dangled me over the sweeping current until my feet were skimming across the highway of water, just so we could see how fast it was, how dangerous the sea could be. Then Mum slapped him in the face and walked ahead, sobbing into her sarong. Dad stood behind us with his broad hands on each of our shoulders and he talked about what’s best for me, what’s best for all of us.