Editor’s Note
I am pleased to introduce readers to this second instalment in our New Australian Stories series. Once again, I strove to select a wide range of stories in order to provide a snapshot of what’s happening in short fiction. Moreover, given the limited opportunities to publish short stories in book form these days — whether p-book or e-book — one of the central aims of the anthology is to offer new and emerging writers the chance to appear alongside more established names.
Those dwindling opportunities for single-author collections concern me, both as an editor and as a reader. Many of the foremost novelists in Australia today — Gail Jones, Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, Joan London, Peter Goldsworthy — began their publishing careers with story collections, but that trajectory no longer seems available. Yet short stories are vital training grounds for our writers: they allow a flexibility and scope to experiment with an idea or a character or a voice — to perfect something in miniature.
Scribe Publications would like to thank all the writers who submitted their work either directly to us or to our partners. For New Australian Stories 2 we collaborated with Varuna, the Writers’ House, for general submissions. Varuna received 825 stories from a total of 330 writers. Ultimately, I chose stories by Claire Aman, Sonja Dechian, Anne Jenner, Jane McGown and Jennifer Mills.
We also teamed up with the Ned Kelly Awards, which in 2009 introduced the S.D. Harvey Short Story Award in memory of the fearless investigative journalist Sandra Harvey, who worked first for The Sydney Morning Herald and later for the ABC’s Four Corners. Scribe has committed to publishing the winning stories: Scott McDermott’s ‘Fidget’s Farewell’ in 2009, and Zane Lovitt’s ‘Leaving the Fountainhead’ in 2010.
On a personal note, I want to thank Ian See for his meticulous copy-editing, his invaluable advice and his constant good humour.
Short stories are often much more open-ended than novels: they kickstart your imagination, whereas a novel gives you the whole flight path. I hope these stories will send you off on many satisfying and unexpected journeys. Happy reading!
Aviva Tuffield
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
PO Box 523
Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054
Email: [email protected]
First published by Scribe 2010
Copyright © this collection Scribe 2010
Individual stories copyright © retained by individual copyright holders
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
New Australian Stories 2.
Edited by Aviva Tuffield.
9781921753503 (e-book.)
Short stories, Australian–21st century.
A823.0108
This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
www.scribepublications.com.au
Contents
PADDY O’REILLY HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY
GEORGIA BLAIN FLYOVER
SONJA DECHIAN THE CATS OF UNSPEAKABLE KINDNESS
TONY BIRCH AFTER RACHEL
PETA MURRAY INDIGESTION
FIONA MCFARLANE EXOTIC ANIMAL MEDICINE
JON BAUER REWARD OFFERED
PEGGY FREW NO ONE SPECIAL
ANNE JENNER THE WAY WE WED
MARION HALLIGAN IT’S THE CHEROOT
SUSAN MIDALIA PARTING GLANCES
JENNIFER MILLS MOTH
KATE RYAN THE GOOD MOTHER
SCOTT MCDERMOTT FIDGET’S FAREWELL
JANE SULLIVAN FALLEN WOMAN
RYAN O’NEILL FOUR-LETTER WORDS
JACINTA HALLORAN THE SIXTH CYCLE
MELISSA BEIT INSEPARABLE
DEBRA ADELAIDE WRITING [IN] THE NEW MILLENNIUM
A.G. MCNEIL RECKLESS, SUSCEPTIBLE
MYFANWY JONES BIRDSONG
PATRICK CULLEN HOW MY FATHER DIES IN THE END
RUBY J. MURRAY OUTBACK
TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT LIKE A VIRGIN
MARK O’FLYNN TALES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE
BROOKE DUNNELL BLUE WATCHES
JULIE GITTUS THE PLACE BETWEEN
CATE KENNEDY STATIC
JANE MCGOWN PAPAS’ LAST COMMAND
MEG MUNDELL THE CHAMBER
ZANE LOVITT LEAVING THE FOUNTAINHEAD
CLAIRE AMAN LOUIS
KAREN HITCHCOCK BLACKBIRDS SINGING
EMMA SCHWARCZ HARRY
CHRIS WOMERSLEY THEORIES OF RELATIVITY
LESLEY JØRGENSEN THE TREES
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
How to Write a Short Story
PADDY O’REILLY
Ingredients
A person
Another person or more people
A place
Method
Take the first person, gender her, name her, crack her, separate the body from the soul and set body aside. Place Meg’s soul in a bowl and whisk to a soft peak.
Put the remaining people into the place. Name the people and the place. Leave Tanya, Laird and Pauli to marinate in the Fitzroy share house for at least a week.
Preheat the situation to at least 250 degrees, or 230 if fan-forced.
Fold Meg’s soul back into her body, making sure not to overbeat or the air will go out of her and she will be flat.
Transfer Tanya, Laird and Pauli into a large bowl. Beat well. Add Meg slowly, stirring after each addition.
Grease the share house. Pour everyone into the house and place in the superheated situation. Cook for 2500 words.
Test whether the story is done by inserting a reader. If the reader comes out clean, the story is done. If the reader comes out sticky, place the story back into the situation for another 500 words.
When cooked, remove the story from the situation, turn onto a piece of paper and allow to cool.
Serve with a title and bio. For a special occasion, sift a few asterisks in Copperplate Bold over the transitions.
Flyover
GEORGIA BLAIN
Sometimes, as I wait in a line of traffic near the turn-off to Glebe, I glance up to the three apartment blocks pressed tight against the tangle of roads. I wonder which of the windows in which of these buildings looks out from the room where I once spent the night with a man I didn’t know. I have no idea, although I think perhaps he was living in the first block, the one closest to the flyover.
I had just turned nineteen when I stayed with him. Sydney was new to me, and I had no work, little money and only two friends, both of whom had come from Adelaide as well. Each Friday night we went to a bar that had once been a funeral parlour. Upstairs the music was loud, a deep thud in the smoky darkness, while downstairs it was quieter, and you could sit in armchairs and drink.
He was the barman.
He was certain he knew me, or so he said the first time he took my order. He leaned across the counter, his long black fringe falling over his eyes, his skin pale in the blue light from the mirrors behind him. He had given us double shots, he told me, and I could taste the bitterness of the gin before I even had a sip, the inside of my mouth dry with the memory of what was to come.
The next time he asked me what I did, and I said I was looking for a job.
‘Modelling? Acting?’ He slid the money I was offering back towards me, one hand still on top of it.
I said that I wanted to be a journalist, ignoring the no
tes he had pushed across the counter.
Cate was bemused by my refusal. ‘It’s not like we don’t need it.’ She examined him, eyes narrowed. ‘Not bad-looking,’ she decided. ‘But not my type.’
She was the only one of us who had a job. As a production assistant on a television show, her wage wasn’t high, but she was earning, and had hopes of a rapid ascent to something better. Loene and I were staying on the floor of the house she was minding until the end of the month, nibbling away at the edges of our savings, anxious about each dollar we spent.
And so I ordered for us again.
‘Where do you live?’ His fingers rested on the damp cardboard coaster, as he tilted his head to flick his hair out of his eyes. He shrugged away my offer of payment, and this time I accepted.
We were looking for a place, I said. I reached for the drinks, unable to avoid touching his hand, his skin soft.
He told me I reminded him of someone.
‘An actor,’ and he leaned towards me.
‘That’s so corny,’ and I shook my head in embarrassment.
‘Want to do something when I finish my shift?’ His hand was on my arm. ‘It’s only an hour away.’
I said I was busy, despite knowing it would soon be obvious I had no plans other than staying here and getting drunk.
‘I won’t give up,’ he told me.
And he didn’t: the next Friday he asked me out again.
‘I have Tuesday nights off.’ He held his hands in prayer position.
It had been a bad week. I had been called in by a magazine, only to be told by the editor that she had asked to see me not because she had work for me, but simply to give me some advice.
‘You’re wasting your time sending a CV like this around.’ She tapped my neatly typed pages with the tip of a long crimson fingernail. ‘You have no experience. None at all. Your whole approach is wrong. The way to get into this industry is either contacts, or you start at the bottom of a down-market publication.’
She was right. It had been a waste of time. Worse, she had succeeded in making me feel small, but I thanked her for trying to help me.
‘I could take you out for a meal,’ the barman pleaded. ‘At least give me your number.’
I could see the back of his head reflected in the mirror, obscuring my own face. In the dim lighting, my arms appeared to come from his body, and I smiled.
‘That’s yes?’
What would it hurt? It wasn’t like my life was particularly good as it was. I took the pen he gave me and wrote my name and number on the back of the coaster, the ink barely legible as it bled into the damp.
A few weeks ago, when I was waiting in the airport lounge for the plane back to Sydney, I thought I saw him again. I don’t remember much about him — the exact location of his flat, his name, and the finer details of how he looked are all gone. There is only a vague sense of his dark hair and the white of his skin. But as I sat there with my work files unopened on the table in front of me, a plate of wilted salad on my lap, I found myself staring at a man two seats to my left. He looked up and I glanced away. Moments later, he caught me staring at him again.
Embarrassed, I tried to smile. He turned back to his magazine. He was pale and slightly overweight, his shirt stretched a little too tight around his waist, his hair still falling foppishly across his forehead.
The announcement for the flight echoed through the lounge, and I stood, forgetting the salad on my lap. The plate thudded onto the soft carpet, the contents leaving an oily stain as I tried to pick up the mess.
I was one of the last on board, and in the cramped aisle I waited for another passenger to force her bag into the overhead locker. When I finally took my seat, I saw that he was sitting by the window.
I apologised while trying to extract my seatbelt from the gap between us. As he shifted his weight, I noticed the softness of his hands, a single gold band around his wedding-ring finger.
I was forced to tug the belt out from underneath him, and he looked across at me momentarily. I wanted to say then that I was sorry for having stared at him in the lounge, and that I wasn’t sure if I knew him. The thought, however, of opening up what could be an awkward conversation, with no escape for the next hour, kept me silent; instead, I took the magazine out from the seat pocket and flicked through articles I had read on the way down a week earlier.
I had been covering a conference on global warming, filing stories on a regular basis and working on a feature for the weekend edition. As an industrial reporter, this was not a job I would normally have taken, but in the last month Jason had decided to return to his wife and children. It was a decision we had discussed for some time, moving from a bleak awareness that his wife’s illness meant this could be necessary, to realising that this was, in fact, the inevitable place to which we had come. At first we had talked constantly, picking over and over the decision until, weighed down by the inadequacy of words, we had pared back all discussion to the cold practicalities. This was the week in which he was going to pack and organise a truck to clear out all he owned from our house. It would be easier if I wasn’t there and he could just get the job done.
Now, at the end of what had been a busy five days, I was bracing myself for the return to Sydney. Ultimately I would be all right. But there was first the space between now and a time somewhere in the future when we would have either let each other go, or negotiated some form of friendship. That was what made me anxious.
Once again, I glanced briefly at the man next to me, wanting to distract myself from the thought of my homecoming. I was careful to keep my head lowered and my eye contact barely noticeable. He was gazing out the window at the tufts of cloud that wrapped us, grey and insubstantial, drifting like floss around the plane. I wished I could remember his name but I couldn’t, and I knew I had no hope of even touching on the edge of what it might be. Nothing out of the ordinary, that was all I could recall. Robert, perhaps? His hands were resting in his lap, fingers curled tight into the palm with a tension that seemed at odds with the softness of his flesh. As he turned, I glanced away, careful not to be caught out again.
Robert, and I will call him that because it is a name as good as any other, phoned me the morning after I gave him my number. I had woken, my sheets pulled back to reveal the bare mattress on the floor. The lounge room where I slept still smelled of cigarette smoke and the sour wine we had drunk before heading out the night before. Through the gap in the curtains I could glimpse a sliver of sharp light that hurt my eyes.
When I first decided to move to Sydney, I thought I would find work almost immediately. I saw myself in my own house. I envisaged friends. Lately I wanted to go home, back to South Australia, but I could go no further than a general desire to return because there was, in reality, no family house to go back to, no work there, just a few friends who would welcome me but would probably not shift or adjust their lives to fit me once again within the fold. I had my sister, who lived with her husband and children in the foothills. They went to our church each week, and talked a language I had never understood, one of Christ and heaven and hell, and absolute rights and wrongs. My mother was in the granny flat at the rear of their house, although she would soon have to go to a home. Sometimes she knew who we were, sometimes she didn’t. She sat in the lounge room and called the grandchildren over to sit on her lap, making up different names each time and wondering why they never answered. She was only sixty, but she seemed so much older.
Next to me, Loene stirred, snorting slightly as she rolled to one side, her hand flung out onto the floor; while upstairs Cate slept in the one bedroom, a narrow white chamber with a small window that looked over the back lane.
Outside, in the brightness of the courtyard, I sat on the step and drank a cup of tea, staring at the gate, loose on its hinges from drunks and junkies trying to break in.
We were meant to be inspecting a house for rent in less than an hour, and I knew I should wake the others, but I wanted to shower first, ensuring that I got
some of the hot water from the small tank out against the back wall. I tiptoed into the darkness of the lounge, careful not to trip over the edge of the mattress, lurching for the phone as it rang.
Robert — he is becoming that name as I use it more frequently — wanted to meet me at a café in Glebe. I wrote the address down on a scrap of paper, although I knew the place he suggested.
‘What are you up to today?’ he asked.
I told him we were house-hunting. ‘It’s what we always do,’ I said.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Darlinghurst, Newtown, Glebe.’
He wished me luck. He said he was looking forward to seeing me. ‘Tuesday,’ he reminded me. ‘Seven o’clock.’
I hung up and crumpled the paper in my hand.
‘Who was that?’ Loene wanted to know, and I blushed as I admitted it was the barman. But she didn’t wait long enough to hear my reply. She had pushed past me, closing and locking the bathroom door behind her before I had time to protest, leaving me waiting in the corridor.
When I arrived the following Tuesday, he was already at a table. I could see him through the window, and I felt only a desire to walk away and go home, but I stood there watching him turn the menu over and over, the plastic coating slipping between his fingers. He saw me and stood, beckoning me inside.
The café was crowded, and I had to squeeze past other tables to get to where he waited for me in the corner. As he tried to kiss me on the cheek I pulled back, but he held my hand firmly, drawing me close.
‘How is it all going? The house-hunting? The looking for work?’ There was a wetness to his lips that I noticed as he slurped the soup from his spoon, leaving a fine coating of liquid over the metal.
I shouldn’t have come. This, too, was not going to be what I had tried to fool myself into thinking was possible. I had never liked him in the bar and being alone with him in a café hadn’t changed that. But still I continued to try, hoping that, at some stage in our conversation, a magical transformation would occur, lifting the veil to reveal a man whom I could find attractive.
When I told him I had had no luck with either, he sat back in his chair and wiped at his mouth with a paper serviette.
New Australian Stories 2 Page 1
