New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  I still had the dull feeling in my chest but I thought I could do it. Even with Andy gone for the whole evening and the twins out of control and the prospect of Eve waking up at about two or three a.m. because lately she’d been scared. I thought: I can do this. But I did feel tired all of a sudden, maybe it was because I’d relaxed a bit — I knew the two glasses of wine had been a mistake.

  I followed Eve into her room to get her pyjamas on. She was pink from her bath and her bum was all mottled and her legs round and I felt I would die of my love for her, it seemed to course down inside me like a liquid. She was holding a teddy, concentrating, trying to get it into a cardigan that was too small. I said brightly, ‘Come on, Eve, let’s get your nappy on.’ She ignored me, they all ignore me at least three or four times when I ask them to do something. I go through all these stages from a hopeful maybe it’ll be easier this time, to this tightness and then sometimes to a full-on rage which I suppress as best I can. ‘Come on, Evie,’ I said. ‘Just lie down and I can put your nappy on and then I’ll read you a story.’

  I could hear the twins downstairs opening cupboards in the kitchen and Gemma shouted out, ‘Mum, can we have a biscuit?’

  I didn’t reply the first couple of times and then she called out again and I shouted back, ‘No! It’s bedtime.’ Then I said, ‘Evie,’ soft again, the good mother, ‘come on, let’s get your nappy on.’ She sat down and I somehow levered the nappy under her and then she wiggled back and said in the firm flat little voice she has started using lately, ‘No,’ and she kicked the nappy away. She was still fiddling with the buttons of the cardigan, trying to get it done up over the teddy’s chest, despite the fact that she can hardly do buttons. I was sort of admiring her persistence when I heard Gemma from the kitchen again shouting, ‘Mum, can we have a biscuit, please?’ even louder this time and the sound of the fridge being opened. I felt the tightness right up into my throat. ‘Eve … please,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I’d been holding her by the waist and then suddenly I just let go. I shouted, ‘Fine. Don’t put your nappy on then.’ And I stood up and put my hands over my face.

  I hadn’t thought I was supporting her. She is three, so she can sit perfectly well but somehow she lost balance and fell back onto the carpet and she started to cry. At least her mouth opened as if to cry, but it was silent at first, building up in her throat like someone before they are about to sing. But it wasn’t like that. I waited, feeling a wash of horror; I had so rarely got angry with her and now I felt I had tipped over into the realm that I had come to exist in with the twins, the one that was terrible and from which I could never get back. There was a neee neen ee sound coming out of her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ I said, gathering her up in my arms. ‘I’m sorry to shout.’

  But when I picked her up she was really crying, hard and high and inconsolable as if she had gone to some other place too. She was holding one of her arms at a weird angle and the cry was one of pain and she didn’t want me to hold her and it wasn’t just because I’d given her a shock. And I felt it going into my brain with a sort of looseness like fog or alcohol. I’d hurt her. ‘I’m so sorry, darling, I shouldn’t have let you go like that.’

  ‘Oww oww oww,’ she said. And there was the sharp cry like a cat’s. She kept crying and I didn’t even try to get her dressed now, just sat with her on my knee without moving and pulled a blanket off the bed to put around her. I sat there and Eve cried and I thought I don’t know what to do. I could see her arm hanging there awkwardly as if it was without nerves. So I sang nursery rhymes and wished I could cry myself and then eventually I laid her naked under her doona on the good side, and even though she said every now and again, ‘My arm hurt, Mummy,’ mournfully more like an adult than a child, with the nursery-rhymes tape on, she did fall asleep.

  When I came downstairs, I was so relieved Eve had gone to sleep that when I found the twins on the couch eating Teddy Bear biscuits by the handful I just said in a dead sort of voice, ‘Come on, you two, it’s time for bed.’ We went upstairs and I even read them a chapter of Pippi Longstocking and though Gemma asked for another and I said no, they accepted it. I tucked them in and then looked in on Eve. I stood for a minute, looking at her, and I wanted so much to crawl in next to her and hold her small warm hand — but instead I went downstairs.

  By that stage I felt as if I had been in a war or a car accident and my head wasn’t healing. I sat on the couch and turned on the TV. I flicked around and found a telemovie. Some young girl’s father had kicked her out and there she was wandering the streets at night. It was all sinister yellowish lights and swishing rain and the girl with her big eyes pulling her inadequate jacket around her, being passed by creepy-looking people. She went into a café and was too embarrassed to ask for a coffee because she didn’t have quite enough money. There was a close-up of the board with the prices and the girl’s palm with its coins and her lips being licked and the rows of cakes and salads and wraps in the glass case. And the shop guy saying, ‘Can I help you, love?’ and the girl shaking her head, turning around and walking out.

  After half an hour or so it looked like she was going to be raped for sure, down in some warehouse near the docks trying to find somewhere to sleep and the sky all dark, and my heart started beating too much so I had to turn it off.

  I sat for a minute and then walked upstairs, so tired I could hardly do it. I checked everyone and they were all asleep. I put my head right close to Eve in the dark and listened to her breathing. She seemed okay.

  I woke when Andy came home, him too hot and big and beery in bed, and just after that Eve woke. It was the cat’s cry again and it cut straight to my gut and I pushed off the covers as if I had never been asleep. I gathered her up, she was crying and I brought her back to our bed, saying ‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ over and over as if just by saying that it would become so, but inside I felt like the world had changed: it was dark and frightening and terrible now and I was the cause of it. I turned on the light and Andy sat up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, a bit blurry and half drunk, and I felt so alone, maybe more than I ever had.

  I said, ‘She fell back when I was trying to get her nappy on and she landed weirdly on her arm.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Andy said.

  ‘No Daddee, no,’ Eve said, her voice all quavery and high.

  ‘She won’t let me touch her arm, but she fell asleep okay. I thought she’d just jarred it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have to take her in. I’ve had too much to drink,’ Andy said.

  I didn’t say anything, just left Eve with him, threw my clothes on and went and grabbed clothes for Eve, came back and got her dressed. I draped her favourite coat around her shoulders, but she wouldn’t let me put it on.

  ‘Oh god, oh god,’ I wanted to say. But instead I said, ‘It’s all right, sweetie, I’m going to take you to see a doctor at the hospital to look at your sore arm.’ I didn’t look at Andy then, I couldn’t. I knew if I did I would hate him for having said we should have a third child, that it was nice, the chaos of a big family, how he had always wanted that. I carried Eve downstairs with her whimpering and crying a little and Andy following in his undies and I got the keys and handed Eve back to him and opened the front door. I crossed the road, got in the car and started the engine. I drove around and double-parked the car outside our house. I went in, Andy passed Eve to me and I got her in the car. She was still whimpering and I put the blanket over her and only then did I realise that I hadn’t put socks on her. There I was, bundling my wounded child into the car at ten-thirty at night, the hazard lights blinking and as horrible as it all was, it was almost a relief to be outside.

  Fidget’s Farewell

  SCOTT MCDERMOTT

  The pub is hot with bodies and brings the stink out of him anew. Smudges of grime cover the glass that all but disappears inside his big, oily palm.

  The talk around Bartlett is loud and insistent, but his
mind is captive to a Zen riddle, and none of it registers. He doesn’t know shit about Zen or Buddha or any of those slanty-eyed religions but he knows what a Zen riddle is. One hand clapping and all that shit.

  Across the room the Fidget shouts a round. The pay packet from which he draws a twenty bears a name that isn’t his. Its rightful owner doesn’t exist except as a name on a roster. The Fidget is one of the ghosts, men you won’t see between paydays. It’s an open secret. Better for the company to part with the extra wages and have the work done than not have it done at all. So the ghosts get paid like those that work. They take their cut and kick the rest along to the union office on Lorimer Street. If the Fidget has a real name, nobody seems to know it. He is just the Fidget; a small, twitchy boy that grew into a small, twitchy man.

  The pub is a payday obligation. Sweating jugs are pushed at you to refresh your glass quicker than you can empty it. The dockers have the run of the pub. Any other bloke that wanders in by mistake doesn’t stay long.

  Whelan’s kid is selling the skirt behind the bar on the idea that if you look close at the sleeve of Exile on Main Street you can see him in one of the photos. She asks whether he’s the one with golf balls in his mouth. He says he thinks they might be eggs, but anyway that’s not him. The kid is all lank hair and attitude and doesn’t know when to shut up. Anywhere else he’d get his head punched in. He’s Whelan’s kid though so that’s not going to happen. Whelan is the union welfare officer and takes up the collections for the old blokes and the sick. Union or not, touch his kid and he’ll send you to the emergency room. If you’re union, the difference is it’ll be Whelan that organises flowers for your wife.

  Bartlett’s father was also a docker, crawling over and into the great steel hulls berthed at Webb Dock as Bartlett does now. He attaches an importance to this that his wife, understanding though she is, cannot appreciate. She is distrustful and more than a little scared of the men that work the docks. She knows better than to call them crims and couches her reservations in softer terms. They’re a rough bunch, she says.

  The docks attract men with histories. His father spent time inside, and on his release only the docks would have him. The chance to work, however, comes loaded with the sorts of opportunities that men who’ve done prison time tend to attract. Sticking to the straight and narrow is no easy thing.

  The Fidget is trying to empty his beer to leave. When a bloke fills your glass you don’t leave it half drunk. This is understood. His eyes dart around the room, and his weedy frame spills nervous energy.

  Bartlett catches a whiff of himself. Even in a room abundant with the pong of men at the end of their shift, he stinks bad. Cleaning a fuel-oil tank leaves you covered in muck from arsehole to breakfast-time, and though he has scrubbed his skin to redness the grime is deep in his pores. He knows from experience he’ll sweat it into his bedsheets and catch hell from his wife. He doesn’t mind working though. There is satisfaction in the stiffness he stretches from his back and arms in the early mornings when he rises. Better to work and be clear of any obligation to the men that control the rosters, the union men that can tap you on the shoulder and offer you a place around the pay truck while working days become your own. He knows better than to look upon ghosting as a free ride. It is a due paid on your loyalty and on any occasional service this might require.

  The Fidget has put himself in the service of the current union administration and has proved himself as a triggerman more than once. Maybe the lack of threat in his size and skittish demeanour means they don’t see it coming. Maybe he’s just been lucky. Whatever the case, he has form: a fortnight ago, when a page-three story ran under the headline Shotgun Pair Found in Scrub, the chatter around the docks pegged the Fidget as the shooter.

  What would Hawkey make of the docks? His halftone likeness stares out from a newspaper left on the bar. Robert James Lee Hawke is approaching three years into his term as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Defender of workers’ rights, Rhodes scholar and yard-glass champion, he is a superhero by any Australian standard. There are places, however, that even superheroes know are best avoided. Kryptonite places.

  Outside, the after-work traffic has thinned, the last of the day’s tide of family men and women drawing back to the suburbs. Drink has taken hold of Whelan’s kid, and he leans across the bar, attempting a grope at the barmaid. She pours him another at no charge and tells him to enjoy it because he’ll be leaving afterwards. She’s dealt with worse than him before.

  The shotgun pair found dead were Jimmy the Louse and his de facto, Teresa Mitchell. The Louse’s death wasn’t unexpected. He was a talker that would pin you down at the pub and fill your ears without let-up, pumping you full of chatter, turning you to liquid nonsense inside your own skin. He wanted to be liked, and with him it was pathological. What he knew and who he might tell put the wrong people on edge. Nobody was surprised that he met his end with a hole in him but he should’ve died alone.

  The Fidget downs the remainder of his pot in a gulp and belches the gas into a closed mouth, hissing it through his nostrils. He inclines his head towards the door, signalling his intent. He nods a few goodbyes and is gone. Those he has left behind shake their heads and wheel their conversation in the direction of his shadow.

  The Louse was fair game but the Mitchell girl should have been left out of it. This too is understood. You could mete out what violence a man was due, but the price he paid was his alone. The Fidget knew that. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to be there when he blasted a hole in the Louse. Maybe she got a good look at him, good enough to ID him. But he knew the rules and he did something stupid anyway, and all the excuses in the world wouldn’t help him now.

  Bartlett gets out the door and is grateful for the cooler air. He breathes it deeply. He knew the girl. Not well, not as a woman. Her old man and his worked the docks together. They were mates. When Bartlett was ten and a heart attack claimed his father, it was Mitchell that mowed their lawn, split their firewood and gifted them fresh-killed rabbits for stewing.

  For some time now though, Mitchell has been an entry in Whelan’s log of old and infirm dockers, the bedridden and the ill. The union looks after its old men regardless of what factional allegiances they might have held. All are equal when the years catch up, and the union shares among them such money as can be raised from their membership for the purpose. Old man Mitchell can’t even stand to piss anymore. He mourns from his bed and apologises for his tears.

  Someone from the Louse’s camp would sort the Fidget or make the attempt. From that Bartlett takes no comfort. He needs the old man to know that the price the Fidget pays is for his daughter, that she is not simply incidental to a score settled for another.

  Dusk has settled into place over flaking paint and overgrown gardens. Battered cars wait for rust to have its way. A cool breeze raises small bumps on his arms. The place he catches the Fidget is not private but nor is it the type of neighbourhood inclined to share its secrets. At the hand on his shoulder the Fidget turns, but there is little he can do to stop the blade that plunges into his gut. He looks down to where a fist is held against him, the knife buried to the hilt. Blood blossoms into the fabric of his shirt.

  Bartlett leans into him and speaks quietly into his ear. This is for the girl, he says.

  The Fidget looks up into the face of his assailant, and this time the blade is drawn across his throat. It takes him a moment to fall, as if his own death is something beyond comprehension.

  Bartlett squats over the body and wipes the blood from his knife. He checks the Fidget’s pockets for a wallet or something that might identify him. There is only the pay packet and a union card that belong to a man that never was. Again the riddle starts to loop inside his skull. If you kill a man that doesn’t exist, is it really murder?

  One hand clapping and all that shit.

  Fallen Woman

  JANE SULLIVAN

  They say the long train on her gown tangled around her feet. What do I know. I�
��m good with horses, but not so good with women. Maybe that’s because of this notion of mine that I was made to love my little brother.

  He was an uncommon large baby, weighed ten pound. At last, said Ma and Pa, a big strong boy to work the farm. Not like me, bonny Rodnia, named after my father, a sturdy lad with a bumpy brow and tight whorls in his hair like a young billy goat’s, but not tall, not even at four years of age.

  To love means to protect. I stood on tippytoe to peer into the crib at the baby’s curling fingers and vowed that I would take care of George Washington Morrison Nutt, even if George would one day tower above me.

  I grew slowly and made it to forty-nine inches. George stopped at twenty-nine inches. So I did the towering. When George wanted to see the world, he sat piggyback on my shoulders and together we were as tall as a big boy. Then he felt free to shout all kinds of rudeness at his boy enemies. We roared around the town of Manchester, New Hampshire, me scowling and George crossing his eyes and poking out his tongue. We were so like an Indian totem pole that some folks started and crossed themselves in the Roman way when we rampaged past.

  We weren’t much use around the farm, so Ma and Pa fixed for us to join Mr Lillie’s travelling circus and show of wonders. My brother at fifteen was the wonder — Tiny George, the smallest man in God’s creation — and I at nineteen was Hey, You, to work for my keep at whatever came up. I had some notion to save up all my money and run away from the circus, but I had no idea where to run, and in any case I couldn’t abandon George. Whenever I thought of my little brother, the muscles in my arms went tight, and I breathed hard and locked my hands together and pulled, one arm against the other. I had taken on all the bullies at the Manchester school and I would take on any blackguard, were he as big as an ox.