The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  And it had been in Dahab, smoking shisha and drinking a lot of fresh pawpaw juice, that she found herself thinking about these things, and then discussing them, upon a swathe of pillows overlooking the sea, with a young Frenchman: François, as he called himself then.

  *

  Alice lay still and, at last, from far away, came a long beep, and then the sounds of the technician clomping around the room.

  She dressed quickly in the small change cubicle, leaving her singlet straps twisted and not bothering to pin up her hair or put her rings back on, eager to get out into fresh air and away from the antiseptic smell of the room, which had begun to transmute into an uncomfortable sensation on her skin.

  She walked down to the river, enjoying the wash of orange that had settled over the late-afternoon bay – tasting it at the back of her throat. She felt light, as though something had been excised from her; but she knew it was nothing more than the weight of waiting that had lifted, the familiar relief of an exam being over. The question of whether she would pass still remained.

  *

  When Dr Kline’s receptionist phoned she was in the supermarket again. She waited on hold for him while a tinny strain of James Taylor fought its way through the earpiece, a song she had loved as a child. It came to her then that time was capable of containing infinitely disparate experiences. This whole event – from her initial symptoms until this moment of diagnosis – had unfolded in precisely the lifespan of a twelve-pack of double-ply toilet paper.

  The music cut off and she heard Dr Kline clear his throat. For the moment of silence that followed she wondered if he had forgotten she was on the other end of the line, but then she realised the pause bore an indefinable gravity.

  ‘Alice. I’ve got your scans,’ he began. Then a sound like laminate being shook out, a wobble board, the clang of metal.

  ‘Sorry, I’m trying to look at them as we speak,’ he continued. ‘There’s an area of concern. It makes sense, in terms of your symptoms – ’

  She saw her hands on the trolley, the fine movement of her metatarsals slipping up and down under her skin like thread in a loom.

  *

  It was a growth. Shadow-grey, smaller than a pearl, burrowed in between her occipital and temporal lobes. They would need to do a biopsy, Dr Kline explained. He had booked her in with a neurologist for the next day.

  She clung to those words, occipital, temporal, anchors to lower with assurance into this unseeable internal terrain. She had made her way into adulthood with a constant sense of unease, fuelled by stuff only of the imagination: impossibly slippery cliffs, aeroplanes that fell to earth like stones. Never death by illness; a tumour. In her wildest nightmares she would never have anticipated such a plausible ending for herself.

  She asked Frank that night, ‘Do you think one day they will be able to send tiny drones in to the body to retrieve cells, through your ear or your mouth?’ She had begun to imagine her brain as the moon. And wasn’t it as treacherous, she decided, hanging brashly in its vast space, but all the while unknowable.

  ‘Non,’ Frank replied, sleepily. He squeezed her arm tightly where it lay beside him, the two of them staring into the thick black night of their bedroom. They lay like that for hours, the steady beat of Alice’s now certainly fatal headache carrying her out onto a plateau of half-sleep from which she felt herself wade into memories long discarded: Frank, smooth and pale and somehow exotic in his European swimming trunks, so different to the men in Australia in their fluoro boardies, salt-stung and red from the heat. In Toulouse when they went back to meet his family; at his university, his friends talking fast and raucously through wine-stained teeth at the student bar about their PhDs. They had smoked a few joints and she’d retreated happily into a stoned state of observation, making what she wished of their words even if she didn’t know their language. Their very difference, their Frenchness, excited her.

  But François was Frank now, spoke almost like her, watched the footy and went for the Bombers, and, just as she dipped into sleep, she felt this realisation as a physical pain.

  *

  ‘I’ll take you through it slowly.’ The neurologist had bright eyes, neatly clipped nails.

  Alice’s scan hung, like a world map, behind her desk, and the doctor used a white pointer to direct her to the relevant anatomical areas.

  ‘The growth is a tumour,’ she explained, ‘but we don’t know if it is malignant. If it’s benign, it could well be left alone. There are other scans we can do to try to ascertain this, but a biopsy would tell us. The procedure, though, is tricky in your case.’

  She drew two shapes resting on each other like a yin and yang, and then circled their shared curve.

  ‘The growth is located between two of the brain lobes. Those in-between areas are like computer cables. If they are damaged, we’re risking cognitive impairment. It’s a small risk, but we’re talking potential damage to your vision, to your capacity for emotion and memory.’

  They left the hospital with a bag full of brochures, infrared brain images blooming like bouquets across shiny pages, medical insurance forms, staid and official in dull green. Alice noted colour all the time now; it was a code of sorts, she was sure.

  *

  They decided to go away for a few weeks. It was impulsive. Frank wanted to head to the Peninsula. She had always found the ocean soothing, but the water’s expanse, the illusion of its glinting surface – it was too symbolic. She insisted they drive inland, towards the mountains, find a town with a pub, a bed and breakfast.

  She had scrapped the spreadsheet. Words couldn’t seem to touch on the depth of how she had begun to experience things. Feelings had become multidimensional, with texture, taste: shock was an ice shard of lime water in her mouth; deep sadness she felt as a slightly nervy tickle along a scar she had on her left arm.

  The endless drive to Canberra, her wonder at the new trees budding from black where bushfire had swept through, a tinge of melancholy when a song came over the radio – she felt these things as a collage of senses, fluid and connected.

  They stayed in a cabin one night, with a log fire and a bath out on a deck, then a caravan by a lake, waking to the caw caw of galahs. They were travellers again, thrifty and vulnerable to the world.

  *

  In the second week on the road, Alice woke up and it was not Frank with her in the bed. It looked like him, but she knew it wasn’t him. It was the body of Frank but another person inside. She saw his hands – yes, there was the small scar on his thumb from a fishhook – his arm, resting along his side, the fine sandy hairs. But when he turned and asked if she wanted her coffee yet she saw something of the essence of him was missing. It was like he was an avatar.

  At first she was alarmed. He, whoever this man was, had roused her with the noise of his knuckles cracking. Frank did this too: stretched and limbered when waking.

  She lay quietly with her eyes half closed, panic setting in, watching him move about, embody Frank’s habits: heat the milk for the coffee, flump back into bed, bend his book over at the spine, breath noisily through his nose.

  Why would he do this? If anything about this replica gave away Frank, it was in the impeccable set-up of this scenario. He was nothing if not an auteur when it came to his work: always devising impossible research projects; always talking about his frustrations with the limitations of existing studies in identity, how we couldn’t study the mind because observing it could only be done from within. That had to be it: this was a body-double, some elaborate experiment. It didn’t seem ethical. Or perhaps it was: could it be designed to help her come to a decision? She couldn’t imagine how, but it was possible. Either way, it would be necessary, she realised, to not let on what she knew; she’d play along.

  *

  The next week was inevitably difficult for her. They made their way inland, back towards National Parkland, through towns small and barren, on roads so straight and new that it felt the car wasn’t moving at all.

  A few times,
not-Frank asked her if she was alright. ‘You seem – quiet,’ he said, and she smiled at how, just like Frank, he assumed her silence was anxiety.

  They stopped for a day and a night at a camping area near the Snowy River, where she watched as not-Frank set up their tent and started a fire with the wood they had gathered earlier on their way through Jindabyne. This man insisted on placing a large tarp over the tent for extra measure. She marvelled at the pointillist detail of his imposturing, at the same time wondering where real Frank was by now – he must have had a lift waiting to take him back home; or perhaps he was still back at the hut where she had woken to find him replaced.

  It was impossible not to be self-conscious; she was both aware of being with a stranger yet determined not to reveal what she knew. And it was a challenge to be intimate with this man, though strangely exciting, too: the knowledge that she was permitted to be with someone else.

  And all the while her mind was ticking over and over, trying to work out what the purpose of this not-Frank was, and how he would help her know what to do.

  *

  On the last evening of their time away, they sat on the verandah of a homestead they had come upon, sharing a bottle of wine. She was reading the newspaper – an article about a court case that was raging over two young children whose Australian mother had taken them from their father in Spain. It was hard to choose sides; both parents were bereft. But the law would find a certain path, fall where it must.

  And it was then that it came to her. It was not for Dr Kline or the neurologist or Frank – via not-Frank – to show her the way. Equations or risk-calculations would be of no help, nor would there be compensation delegated for the parts of her that were changing. And there could be no injunction on what was to come. What would happen to her was happening to her already.

  Not-Frank shook wattle pollen from his deck chair, beat the underside of the fabric, unaware that the particles were flying into his wine glass. He would begin sneezing soon, Alice was certain, and she smiled now at the nuance of his act. She breathed in the sweet evening air, heard it as a call, a joyous bell-tinkle, felt the bristle of the sunset on her tongue.

  She had to think about the real Frank in all this, of course. She would play it cool, wait till she was home and he had swapped places again with his double and collected his data and resolved whatever crazy hypothesis he had now gotten her involved in. There would probably be a questionnaire, no doubt a waiver; universities were so careful these days.

  The important thing was that she didn’t want him to worry. She would tell him the doctors had reviewed the scans and deemed it benign. She might even say it had gone altogether. Shrunk.

  Twenty Dollars

  Annette Trevitt

  Carnival

  A distant starter-gun fired, followed by the boom of a false start. Another delay. I didn’t think I could take much more. Everything – the sky, the track, the day – was over-bright and baking hot. It all felt endless.

  ‘Attention,’ Lyn shouted into the megaphone. ‘Attention. Under-13 boys 100 metres to the call room. Under-13 boys.’

  ‘Lane five, what’re you doing?’

  Lane five, I’m lane five.

  I looked up. Lyn had the megaphone detached from the mouthpiece and pointed at the boy’s shorts where I was pinning on a six instead of a five.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, Lyn.’

  Lyn Beale had been a call-room manager for athletics carnivals for years. She ran her cordoned-off section of ground as if Sergeant Major to a useless platoon.

  My phone rang as I pinned a five onto the shorts.

  ‘I have to get this, it’s my sister.’

  ‘Can you make it quick … and why haven’t you got your vest on?’

  Because, I’m not putting on that fluoro piece of nylon shit for anyone.

  I walked to the furthest corner, next to a sapling wilting in the dirt. Its pencil-thin shadow fell over my sandals.

  ‘Hi, Bettina.’

  ‘How’s it all going?’ my sister asked.

  ‘I’m ready to test the new synthetic track under a blowtorch,’ I said, squinting against the glare.

  ‘How’s Ned doing?’

  ‘He’s through to the final of the 200.’

  ‘Terrific,’ she said.

  I kicked at some stones. When she used that word, Bettina sounded a generation – not three years – older.

  ‘The race is at five,’ I said. ‘We’ve been here since seven-thirty, it’s furnace-hot, no shade and I’ve been stuck behind marshalling tape for three hours with a psycho.’

  I looked over as Lyn marched boys into lanes.

  ‘We’ll have to stay the night somewhere on the way,’ I said to Bettina. ‘It’ll be too late to drive all the way through.’

  ‘Stay in Taree. George’s cousin, Ron, is the chef at the Criterion. Anyway, Camille, guess who I just spoke to?’

  ‘Don’t make me guess in this heat.’

  ‘Frank Walsh,’ she said.

  ‘Frank Walsh?’

  ‘Don’t pretend. He was in the year between us, led the school band, always up the back of the bus. You had a huge crush on h—’

  ‘Frank Willis,’ I said instantly.

  ‘Ha, I knew you’d be pleased,’ Bettina said. ‘And all this time he’s been in Sydney. He’s coming to tune our piano on Thursday. I won’t be home, but I told him you’ll be here. When he heard my name, he wanted to know if I was from Walcha and had a younger sister, Camille. He wanted to know all about you.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘He couldn’t believe you stayed in Walcha after your divorce.’

  ‘You told him I was divorced?’

  ‘He is too. No kids,’ said Bettina. ‘He sounds keen.’

  Lyn glared at me over a group of girls entering the marshalling area. I signalled I was on my way back and smiled. She didn’t.

  ‘Better go, Bet.’

  ‘Wish Ned luck and hey, thanks to you, Frank gave us a twenty-dollar deal. A discount. I tell you, he’s keen.’

  ‘Lanes four to eight,’ Lyn said as I walked past her.

  I nodded. All of a sudden the carnival felt bearable.

  Service Station

  The old woman in front came up to my shoulder. She was shaky on her feet and her head bobbed as she moved to the counter and reached up to hand over her card to the attendant.

  ‘Pump five,’ she said.

  He held the eftpos machine over the counter and looked away as she pressed in her PIN numbers. He tore off the receipt from the machine and gave her card back. The woman didn’t move.

  ‘Do you want a copy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes … I knew I was waiting for something.’

  He printed one out and handed it to her.

  ‘Waiting for my life to take off,’ she said, shoving it into her over-stuffed purse.

  Road to Sydney

  We pulled out onto the road south to Sydney, heading to my sister’s for the first week of the school holidays. We were looking after her house and pool while she flew to Singapore to meet her husband on his way back from Japan, and have a holiday. They had met in their first year at university and married after their graduation. They were successful. They were high flyers. The family always said Bettina had the gumption, as if she’d taken the family’s quota.

  My son put his feet on the dash.

  ‘Ned, your toes. They’re the toes of a man.’

  They looked absurd on a lanky nine-year old.

  ‘They’ve got to be the first thing to stop growing,’ I said.

  He had come fifth in the final race. He was happy. I was happy the athletics season was over. I was happy, too, that I’d got a laugh out of Lyn, even if it had been at the expense of a couple who had been sent to help her. They hadn’t realised their holiday in Bali was over. Their hair fell in tiny, beaded braids, each toe had a toe ring and they had their sarongs tied like nappies. They looked ridiculous.

  I dropped gears to climb the
mountain. We overtook a truck. As we pulled back into the slow lane, I noticed what I had on.

  ‘Ned, why didn’t you tell me?’

  We looked at the vest.

  ‘I thought you liked wearing it,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘You look important,’ he said.

  I overtook another truck.

  ‘Then maybe it will come in handy in the city,’ I said. ‘I can redirect traffic, stop construction, climb power poles.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ he said.

  ‘Rewire telephone cables, enter manholes.’

  ‘You don’t look that important.’

  We slipped into silence as we drove over the mountains.

  By the time the road levelled out and begun to ribbon through a forest of tallowwood, the sky was flame-pink and shadows had merged. It was a relief to be off the steep mountains, and to have hairpin turns behind us. My thoughts drifted back to my sister’s call and to Frank up the back of school bus, where we had smoked cigarettes the driver had left behind after his naps. He napped on the backseat. Frank and I sat close to avoid his smelly, oily hair patches on the vinyl. We didn’t talk, not even when we fell against each other on sharp bends and sudden turns.

  Frank had left town in Year Eleven. Mid-year. He left one weekend with his mother and two sisters. I hadn’t seen him since. I thought I had once, on the main street, two years out of school. It wasn’t him, but my heart kept double-skipping beats long after the stranger had gone.

  I wondered how it will be to see Frank again.

  *

  We had come out onto open river flats and were driving past major road-widening construction. I had no idea how long we had been on the flats. I could no longer tell what colour anything was. I turned on the headlights. A sign came up on the left telling us Taree was ten kilometres away.

  ‘We’re nearly there, Neddy,’ I said.