Pool
Bettina walked out. She had had a spray tan and her hair cut and coloured for the holiday. I wondered if Susy had done the same. Ned was in the pool. The dog tore up and down the side, biting at the water, and I was in the banana chair trying to give Caroline Finch’s novel another go.
‘How was it?’
‘The piano sounds good,’ I said.
‘How was Frank?’
‘Ok,’ I said and looked back at my book.
The glare on the page hurt my eyes.
‘He had on Lynx,’ said Ned as he got out of the pool. ‘Heaps of it, didn’t he Mum?’
‘Really,’ said Bettina.
She smiled knowingly.
‘Told you,’ she said to me. ‘When are you seeing him again?’
‘Mum said he’s lazy,’ said Ned. ‘She reckons she could do a better job.’
I smiled at my sister.
‘He used a free iPhone tuning app,’ I said. ‘It didn’t look—’
‘How do you expect anything to change if you don’t make an effort?’
Ned did a bomb. Sparkie went berserk.
‘That dog is impossible,’ Bettina said.
She went inside, slid the glass-door shut and disappeared. As Ned climbed out of the pool, I heard Bettina bang around in the kitchen. I thought of her insistence for change. Whenever I thought of change, it was hard not to feel sideswiped.
I took a long drink of warm cordial. Frank had changed. I saw so little of his teenage self in him. But neither of us were kids anymore. I finished the drink, recalling how I had felt when he got out of the van, then I had a flash of the way he had looked at Ned.
I reached over and put the glass on the table and stayed there, holding the glass, my arm outstretched. I had got it wrong. Daydreams were daydreams, making the impossible possible, I knew that, but it was the wrong daydream. Where was Ned in it?
The thought made me sit up.
Ned emerged from another bomb. I called out to him. He kicked through the water and came up at the side. Sparkie joined him, twitching with excitement.
‘Ned, if anything happens to me and I can’t talk anymore or move my arms, don’t let Bettina do my hair.’
‘Can I?’
‘You can,’ I said.
‘Mum, can I get Lynx. Lynx Africa.’
Someone was on the trampoline next door. I didn’t look over. My book had fallen onto wet tiles and begun to curl and swell. I watched it warp, and then I picked it up. Who can blame Caroline Finch for choosing to write about death over divorce? Who’d want it to be public knowledge that someone had chosen to leave you.
I moved over to the edge of the pool. The trampoline’s squeaking went on. I slid into the pool and underwater. It was bracing below the warm surface. I kicked off the side towards Ned. I heard Sparkie’s muted barks, but not the trampoline squeaks. I thought of the neighbour next door and wondered what she’d make of Frank. What did she imagine he thought the twenty dollars would get him? I couldn’t wait to find out.
Manyuk
Mark Smith
Monica wakes to him pushing inside her again, his morning breath hot on the back of her neck and his hands kneading her breasts. As she feels her milk begin to seep onto the sheets, she focuses on the curtain print – sailing boats on an aqua sea. He finishes with a muffled groan, rolls away and stands up, still catching his breath. In the half-light his grey shape pulls a singlet over his head and walks to the bathroom. She hears the heavy stream of piss hitting the water. When she rolls over he’s standing at the foot of the bed, cupping his balls in one hand.
‘I love ya babe. Ya know that, don’t ya?’ he says.
‘Mmm, love you too Frankie.’
He disappears into the kitchen, his weight on the creaking floorboards near the sink, the tap turning on and off, the click of the kettle. Fluorescent light floods the hallway and the baby stirs. Frankie pads through to the front door in his bare feet and she waits to hear the low rumble of the diesel that will need to warm up before he leaves. The engine kicks and the walls of the flat vibrate in time. The aqua sea shivers.
There’ll be weeks without him now, doing the run down to Adelaide, then over to Perth if he can get a load. Weeks of damp quiet in the build up to the wet. Her milk has saturated the front of her t-shirt so she swings herself to the side of the bed, her hands resting on the damp sheets. They’ll need washing again.
As she sits on the toilet and pisses him out of her, she can feel the dull ache where the stitches were, an ache that becomes a sharp pain when she tries to stand up.
The doctor had said, ‘She’s young. She’ll heal quickly.’
‘How quick?’ her husband had asked.
*
In the kitchen he sits and pulls his work boots over newly darned socks, his stomach stretching the hi-vis shirt, his head sinking into his shoulders. Monica stands in the doorway and watches him, her arms folded tightly across her breasts.
‘Be a good trip this one, babe. Coupla grand clear if I get a Perth run. Maybe more. We’ll go out for a real good dinner when I get back. You could wear that nice blue dress I brought ya back from Broken Hill.’ As he talks he looks past her to the flat-screen TV mounted on the lounge room wall.
The blue dress fitted her last year, before the baby, but she doubts she could get into it now.
‘That’d be great Frankie,’ she says.
The baby cries, woken by the voices and the scent of her mother’s milk.
‘She got some lungs on ’er, our Layla, eh?’ he says, buttering two pieces of toast and smothering them in jam. ‘Ya better give ’er some brekky.’
As he squeezes past he kisses the top of her head. She runs her hand up under his shirt and across his chest to the sweat already gathering in his armpits.
She picks the baby up and brings her to the door. As he opens it, the heat pushes in.
‘You got some money for me before you go?’ she asks.
He stops and makes a show of opening his wallet and pulling out a fifty.
‘A pineapple do ya?’
‘You gone maybe two weeks Frankie. We gotta eat.’
The smile leaves his face as he pulls out another note.
‘Jesus Mon, I’m not made of fuckin’ money.’
He slaps the notes into her hand and jams his boot in the door.
‘An’ none of that blackfella nonsense while I’m away, ya hear. Her name’s Layla, like the song,’ he says.
She eases the door closed and his heavy frame recedes through the opaque glass. He was never that big, she thinks. He’s put on weight since last year.
She returns to the kitchen, turns on the ceiling fan and listens to Frankie shift though the gears as he nurses the truck out towards the highway. The flat is losing its morning coolness. She sits down, eases a swollen breast out and the baby attaches herself and begins to suck. Monica strokes the soft down on the baby’s cheek.
‘Slow Manyuk,’ she says. ‘Don’t be greedy now.’
Monica leans back in the chair and turns her face up to the fan. With her toes she traces the joins in the lino floor.
‘Your Dad, he gone for a while. Coupla weeks. We gotta make do, you and me.’
The baby’s hand is wrapped tightly around her finger. She pulls her little head away and Monica switches her to the other breast.
‘You wanna hear a story, Manyuk? How your Dad and me met?’
She waits a few seconds, listening for the sound of the diesel above the hum of the morning traffic, but he is gone.
‘He always bin a truck driver, Frankie. Long haul. Road train. An’ he says he always lookin’ forward to that Adelaide River stop. Not far from Darwin now he always says, when he’s comin’ up from down south. He like to freshen up, have a shower an’ a bite to eat.’
Manyuk stops sucking, looks up at her mother, closes her eyes and starts to suck again.
*
‘I was workin’ there, just on the weekends and he starts comin’ in an’
humbuggin’ me, you know, but he got that sweet smile. Says I’m pretty and one day he gonna take me up to Darwin with ’im. After coupla times he says he wants to take me out for dinner, real romantic like ya know. So we go in the bistro and everyone’s lookin’ cos I’m so young and with this white fella. But he don’t care. He buys me this big meal, steak an’ all. Tender. An’ then he’s talkin’ serious ’bout me comin’ with ’im soon, maybe nex’ month. Then he gets me dessert too. Strawberry cheesecake. I still remember that cheesecake. So smooth an’ sweet it was.’
*
She eases the baby on to her shoulder and pats her back, like she’s seen her mother do with her little brothers and sisters. Manyuk’s body is hot against her skin so she stands under the fan and gently rocks her.
When the baby settles she manoeuvres the pram into the kitchen and lays her down. Manyuk’s arms are raised above her head, her palms open, her eyes closed. Monica opens the fridge. There’s last night’s leftover Thai takeaway, half a dozen stubbies and, in the crisper, a mottled lettuce. The milk has been left out overnight and has curdled. Frankie has eaten the last of the bread. She dips her finger into the jam jar and sucks the sweet stickiness into her mouth.
She returns to the bedroom, peels off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror. Her skin has lost its glow and her breasts still hurt. There is slack skin on her belly that had been stretched to envelop the baby. The postnatal nurse visited for the first two weeks but didn’t come after that. She had explained the pelvic floor exercises but Monica was never sure if she was doing them properly. She turns around and looks at her back and legs. Even when she was pregnant her legs looked like stilts, too thin to support her swelling body. She likes them though. They remind her that she is only eighteen, that she can still run and dance if she wants to.
*
In the bathroom she runs the shower. Even with the cold tap on, the water is lukewarm. She leans against the tiles and allows the stream to wash over her. When she closes her eyes she sees the big banyan tree outside the one shop in the community. The women would be gathering there before the day gets too hot, sitting cross-legged on the grass and talking in circles. Someone would pull a deck of cards from their bag and the first game of the day would begin. It would be interrupted by a dozen conversations as people walked in and out of the shop.
‘Hey, old man! You bin fishin’ yesterday? You catch me some barra?’
The man would dismiss her with a grunt and a wave of his hand. She would laugh and return to the game.
Old Kitty Kamartama would shuffle through leaning heavily on her walking frame, stand above the card players and wait until someone asked, ‘What you need from that shop today Aunty?’ She would hand over a list, written on the torn side of a cigarette packet, and her Basics Card, and return to overseeing the game.
*
Monica opens her eyes and uses the soap hurriedly. She dislikes the film it leaves on her skin. Stepping out of the shower she stands for a few seconds allowing the air to cool her. She leans into the mirror and curls her wet hair into a bun. She thinks of her mother sitting behind her, drawing the brush through her long, dark hair. Her sisters had to have theirs cut short because her mother said they didn’t look after it, but Monica was allowed to keep hers long.
‘Pandella,’ her mother would say, ‘you my princess.’
*
By ten o’clock the flat is too hot to stay inside. She wheels the pram to the door and draws the netting over the top. It’s a two-kilometre walk to the supermarket but she doesn’t mind. It gets her out of the flat and eats up hours in the day while Frankie is away. And the heat reminds her of the community in the build up, the kids running in and out of the sprinkler on the oval while the young men in council shirts rake leaves backwards and forwards, trying to look busy.
Monica walks to the side of the pram, her bare feet sinking into the grass next to the footpath. At the end of the street, where she leaves the shade of the front gardens and pushes out onto the highway, she slips thongs onto her feet. As she crosses at the lights she looks up at a woman sitting in the cool of her four-wheel drive. The woman swings around to talk to the two children sitting in the back seat. They look at her for a moment then return their attention to the iPads in their laps. Monica drops her head and pushes a little faster but she can feel the woman’s eyes following her.
The asphalt of the supermarket car park is hot enough to penetrate the soles of her thongs but at the automatic doors the cool of the air-conditioning envelops her. She leans over and pulls the netting from the pram. Manyuk is wide awake, her eyes blinking in the artificial light. Monica sits in a chair outside the Bakers Delight and looks around. Shoppers idle in the food court, middle-aged men in too-big shorts and floral shirts, their wives in loose, patterned dresses with perspiration stains under the arms. A couple of backpackers walk through, tall blonde girls not much older than her, their lean bodies wrapped in tiny shorts and singlet tops.
Monica rustles in her bag and extracts one of the fifty dollar notes Frankie has given her. She flattens it on the tabletop with the palm of her hand as though this will make it stretch further. She plots her way through the next two weeks – nappies, wipes, washing powder and food. She treats herself to a slurpee and returns to her seat, sipping slowly through the straw as she rocks the pusher back and forward.
‘Hey,’ a man in the Bakers Delight calls across the counter. ‘Sorry luv, these seats are for customers only. You’ll have ta move.’
Monica keeps her eyes down, waves and moves to the bench seat by the toilets entrance. Manyuk is restless and begins to cry. She shouldn’t need feeding again but Monica doesn’t want to draw attention so she drapes a thin blanket over her shoulder to cover herself and allows the baby to suckle her breast. She slips her thongs off and spreads her feet on the cool floor tiles.
She begins to talk softly to Manyuk.
‘You know little one, this the best time for turtle hunting, out in your grandma’s country, out there past Peppi Crossing. Chicken-hawk dreamin’ country. She Ngan’giwumirri woman, like your Momma.’
She dips her finger into the slurpee and runs it across the back of her neck.
‘We go out there one day, you and me and your grandma. She sing us into that country. Big waterfall there. Stone country up top and a big spring bringin’ the water right outa the rocks. We go swimmin’ there with that old hawk up above us, keepin’ us safe.’
She repeats the words to herself. ‘Keepin’ us safe.’
*
A woman, skin dark against her bright yellow vest, walks towards the ladies toilets and places the Closed for Cleaning sign at the entrance. Pushing a trolley and a mop bucket ahead of her, she looks at Monica then disappears inside. A few minutes later she reappears and replaces the sign with a new one: Caution, Slippery Surface. She walks past Monica to the men’s entrance, turns back and stands above her, one hand on the mop.
‘I know you, girl. What your country?’ she asks.
Monica looks up at her. Her voice seems familiar but before she can answer the woman says, ‘You that Peppi mob. One of Gracie’s girls. What your name?’
Monica looks at her carefully now but she can’t place her.
‘Monica.’
‘What your real name?’
‘Pandella. But we livin’ in Darwin now. Husban’ and me.’
The older woman leans forward on the mop. ‘Las’ time I seen you, you was swingin’ on your Momma’s clothes line, gigglin’ and carryin’ on with your sister.’ She nods her head as though the memory is precious to her. ‘That your little one there?’
Monica slides her hand down, detaches the baby from her nipple and quickly buttons her top. ‘This Manyuk,’ she says.
The woman’s mouth softens into a half smile. ‘Manyuk? Like your aunty.’
Monica lifts the baby onto her shoulder and begins to rub her back. The woman eases herself onto the seat and brings her hand up to touch Manyuk’s face. ‘She Ngan’giw
umirri, this one,’ she says.
The two women sit in silence listening to the baby’s murmuring.
A minute passes before the older woman says, ‘Your brother, that T-Bone, he in Berrimah now. Got six months, muckin’ up down there. Your Momma, she on dialysis, two times a week. Your aunty, that Molly, she lookin’ after her.’ She doesn’t look at Monica as she speaks.
The older woman struggles to her feet and pushes the bucket toward the mens. Without turning, she says, ‘They needin’ you, that mob.’
*
Monica watches as the woman disappears through the doorway. She quickly places Manyuk in the pram and pulls the netting over the top. When she turns the woman is standing there again, pulling the rubber gloves off her hands and rummaging in the large pocket of her apron. She pulls out a folded fifty dollar note and hands it to Monica.
‘What this for, Aunty?’
‘Bus fare,’ she says and walks back into the toilet.
Monica slips the note under her bra strap and turns the pram toward the supermarket entrance. As she picks up a basket a man approaches her and touches her shoulder. He flashes a badge and says, ‘Store security. I’ll be watching you girl.’ Monica nods and drops her head. He waves her through and returns to his post by the checkout.
*
Later that night, as she undresses, Monica unclips her bra and the folded note falls to the floor. She bends wearily to pick it up, feeling the sharp pain again where the stitches were. She opens the wardrobe and wedges the note into the little gap between the trim and the plaster.
The night air hangs heavily in the flat. She lies on the bed, still keeping to her side even without Frankie. There is a crusted patch where her milk has dried on the sheets and she reminds herself to wash them in the morning.
In her dreams she follows the highway south to Adelaide River, her face pressed against the glass, Manyuk asleep in her lap and the hollowness inside her gradually filling until she can hardly bear it anymore.
The Best Australian Stories 2015 Page 22
