The Best Australian Stories 2013

by Kim Scott

  ‘Dad hates you, you know,’ says Emily. ‘He told me.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  She runs out, fast.

  I see Walker the following Saturday at the Fourth Ave deli. He’s playing Street Fighter II. God knows he needs the practice; I could beat that bitch with Zangieff.

  His knee is strapped-up, and he’s had a haircut, bowl style. He looks like a total knob.

  ‘Hey Ringo,’ I say.

  ‘Shut up, Mum made me. Hey, guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We sold the house.’ Walker moves Ryu into an uppercut but Guile sonic-booms his ass something chronic, and he falls back onto the ground.

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Shut up. Guile’s hard.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Particularly in the first round.’ I push the coin refund, but nothing comes. ‘Ah, that sucks. What the hell is wrong with your mum?’

  ‘She says we’ll get to be a family again. That if I loved her, I’d want to go.’

  ‘But you don’t want to go.’

  ‘No,’ says Walker. ‘But she won’t listen.’

  We head outside, him limping, and me walking like a normal person. I lift my bike up from off the front verge.

  ‘You want a dink back to yours?’

  ‘Mum’s coming to pick me up,’ says Walker.

  ‘There anything you can do?’

  ‘Nup. It’s all go.’ He limps over to the bin and props himself up with one hand. ‘It’s going to be alright. Not really though, hey.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ says Walker. ‘I swear, you start crying on me, I’ll kick your arse. Shake.’

  We shake hands; palms switch to grip, hold, and release.

  ‘It’s going to be alright,’ I say. ‘We just –’

  ‘Mum’s here.’

  A red Datsun 180B pulls up. She leans over, and pushes open the passenger door.

  ‘Get in.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ says Walker. He slides in as best he can, wincing as he jams his leg under the dashboard. He closes the door and rolls the window down halfway.

  ‘See you Alex.’

  They drive off, me staring at the back of my best friend’s head. I shout, ‘See you tomorrow!’ but their car’s already climbing the hill.

  I ride up Coode, up the hill on Fourth, footpath dodge into kerb jump, over Beaufort Street with a double honk from a dented-up Corolla, faster, faster, and into a back wheel skid near the edge of Inglewood Oval.

  I stay out for an hour until the sun goes down, and the midges swirl around the park lights. Walker says you can waste your life watching things, but for me it’s safety; it stops me thinking about all the other stuff.

  In my dream, Emily is on a boat in the middle of the ocean. I’m shooting bombs at her. If I hit her then the boat will sink and I’ll get bonus points.

  I’m out late that night. The houses light up like signal boards, on and off, and I wonder which home is the happiest.

  I get home around nine, shoes left at the back door, and Mum’s on the couch, a glass of wine half-empty on the tabletop. She grabs me tight, hugs me till my back starts to crack.

  ‘Alex, sit down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it,’ she says. I fall back into Dad’s old chair.

  She says, ‘Walker, he’s –’ and then starts crying.

  ‘You okay? What, what’s happened?’ I say, and she hugs me, hard. She’s shaking her head, her cheeks all wet.

  ‘It’ll be alright, Mum. Promise.’

  She pats me once on the back, and we let go of each other. Mum takes a sip of her wine and swallows, quickly. ‘There’s been an accident, Alex.’

  ‘Like a car accident?’

  ‘No, it’s … give me a sec.’

  She looks as if she’s about to speak but she doesn’t. She starts crying again, her body rocked by grief, and I want to shake her till she starts making sense.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘He’s gone, baby,’ whispers Mum.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The estate agent found him. His mum’s in pretty bad shape … I’m so sorry.’

  When she says it, I barely hear her. I feel something like butterflies in my stomach, only they’re bigger.

  ‘Love? Are you okay?’

  In my dream, Dad’s holding me. He’s taken time off work. He ruffles my hair and says, ‘I’m not going back until you’re okay.’ And, ‘I love you mate, it’s going to be alright.’

  Mum holds me tight, and my vision’s blurred, and there’s this noise, like a yelp, again and again. I breathe, breathe, and then it’s quiet.

  ‘Can I see him?’

  Mum pulls back. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Walker. I want to see him.’

  ‘He’s dead, love.’

  I get up out of the chair. ‘I know he’s dead, Mum. I’m not retarded.’

  That shuts her up.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘No, really, I –’

  ‘I’m going to find your dad,’ says Mum. ‘I think he’ll come home if you need him.’

  ‘If I need him? Like, as a father, you mean?’

  ‘It might help. For a day or two.’

  ‘An hour or so should do it.’

  ‘Alex, I –’

  ‘He’s not coming back, Mum. Don’t you get that?’

  She calls but I’m already on my way out back, pulling so hard on the sliding door that it bucks when it reaches the edge of the track. I lift my bike up off the dirt and hop on barefoot, pushing my feet hard into the pedals, out the side driveway and down the hill.

  I think about Mum crying, Emily’s fingers scaling the piano keys and Walker’s face: laughter lines around his mouth, locks of his hair in piles around the barber’s chair. I want my bike to buckle; to feel the road up against me; I want to lie there like a speed bump, wheels cracking bones and my body past broken.

  We used to run this town. We used to ride the streets. Now I’m chalking circles, the rims flat on the road, thinking, Ride, Alex. Keep riding until the pedals break through the skin.

  Westerly

  Lebanon

  Favel Parrett

  My brother and I were watching TV after school. I had a lot of homework to do – to get done – and it was worrying me like it always did, but I did not want to start. Not yet. I just wanted some time to not have to do anything.

  My brother turned to me and asked me where Lebanon was. He was in year four and I was in my first year of high school. I told him I didn’t know.

  ‘A man came to talk to us about Peace,’ he said. ‘He was from Lebanon.’

  There were often talks about Peace at our school. All I knew about being a Quaker was that there were minutes of silence when we were meant to think about Peace, and there was grey. Grey uniforms and grey walls.

  I got up off the couch and walked over to the small bookcase that was really just a shelf squeezed in between the chimney and the wall. We had a two-volume edition of the World Book Encyclopaedia. They were brown and black, maybe they were leather, and WORLD BOOK was written in gold letters down the spine. Mum had won them in a raffle and that was lucky because I often needed to use them for homework.

  I took down the L–Z volume and carried it back to the couch. I opened it up to the beginning of L.

  LEB.

  Lebanon is a small independent republic at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. The name of the country comes from the snow-capped Lebanon Mountains. In the Arabic language it is called LUBNAN. Lebanon’s capital and largest city is Beirut.

  I read it out loud and my brother nod
ded like he knew, like he was being reminded of something that had just slipped his mind. There was a map of Lebanon – long and thin and by the sea. There were also a few black and white pictures. One of a giant cypress tree, and one of some ancient ruins with Roman-like columns standing tall without a roof. There was a photo of a smart-looking city with lots of cars and people walking in the streets and bright white art-deco buildings against the sky. One building had a sign on the rooftop that said RIVOLI in huge curly writing.

  The caption read – Place des Canons, Beirut – 1969.

  On the next page there was another picture of the city, only there were no cars and no people walking and the art-deco buildings were gone or so altered that there was nothing there to recognise. Smoke rose from missing rooftops and everything was blackened or grey. Everything different. The city had been smashed to pieces.

  The caption read – Beirut 1982: Operation Peace for Galilee.

  My eyes scrolled down the page then, down all the columns about all the wars in Lebanon. The Civil War and the War with Israel and the War with the PLO. My brother had stopped looking at the pictures; he stopped looking at the book altogether and rested back against the couch.

  ‘No one wins a war,’ he said, and he breathed in heavily. ‘That’s what the man said he had come to tell us. No one wins a war, we just all lose. He showed us some photos of his family and he passed them around and told us they were all gone.’

  I closed the book and sat with it heavy on my lap. The TV was still on but we were not watching it. Eventually I got up and walked over to the bookcase. I stood there in the corner with the World Book in my hands and the room was very still.

  ‘Is the man going to stay here now?’ I asked, and I meant forever. I meant was the man going to stay here in Hobart forever.

  But my brother just shrugged. His eyes were back on the TV and he wasn’t thinking about the man from Lebanon anymore.

  Only I was.

  The story was inside me now. I knew I would remember the man even though I had never even seen him or heard him speak. I didn’t know if he was old or if he was young, but I would think about him, here, living on this island without any of the people he loved or even knew at all. Here, so far away from home, knowing that he could never return to the place he remembered because it was gone.

  Island

  Birdcall: 33°21´N 43°47´E

  Liam Davison

  We’re moving my son into my father’s house. Not that we want him gone, but you do no favours by holding on.

  Ethan, a grown man now, has no memory of my father. He shares his middle name and a way of slouching when he walks, like he’s leaning into a wind, but these are not remembered things; any more than the broken cough before he speaks or his ear for music that skipped my generation. It’s only I who recalls the same things in my father and makes the connection.

  My father kept birds. I remember the chatter and plaintive squeaks from behind the hessian drop-downs at dusk, and his own soft murmuring as he nested them down. Ethan would no sooner cage a bird than lop his own hand. But it’s strange, the way he was drawn to them. Even as a child, he would sit by the back porch and mimic their calls. And once he had them, he would write them down.

  Peee-wit. Chukka chucka. Pwit-pwit-pwit. Wark-wark-wark-wark.

  It’s a foreign language to me, as alien as the Latin he mastered from his ornithological guides, then from Pliny and the poets. He’d read the Natural History by his eighteenth birthday and could recite by heart the scientific names of the hundred and twenty birds already on his list.

  Meliphaga pencillata (chick-o-wee). Acanthiza lineata (tist-tist) Pardalotus ornatus (pick-pick whit-a-chew).

  They would have spoken I’m sure, my father and Ethan, in ways I never could with either of them.

  *

  Moving is not so much about relocation as reinvention. Before we can move Ethan in, we have to clear things out.

  We find things in his room that might have belonged to strangers: football cards, a box of plastic animals, a Sony Walkman. Things that mean nothing to anyone but what they are. Then there are the things from before he left, and from after too, when we had him back, that are weighted like stone. Sketchbooks. Journals. An annotated Virgil. He disposes too willingly of them, tossing them carelessly into the skip without pause, while I resist the urge to drag them back.

  My own inclination is to hoard, and I find myself caught between the twin impulses of remembrance and erasure. I remind myself that whatever memory I attach to his belongings is separate to the thing itself. Only in fiction is meaning replaced with things.

  So, in this story, my son disposes of his past piece by piece with neither rancour nor intent.

  ‘It’s just stuff, Dad,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing.’

  There are cassette tapes and music magazines that spill from a cardboard box, and a map of Africa torn from a National Geographic. When he shoulders his way back indoors, I reach for the map. It shows the sub-Saharan migratory patterns of birds in red and the Black Sea flyway as a dotted line running north to Europe. I fold it into my pocket. I’ve already salvaged a compass and a box of colours in the hope of reclaiming something that surely belongs as much to me as him.

  *

  My mother said my father was a different man when he returned from Europe.

  ‘He used to sing,’ she said. ‘He had a lovely voice.’

  I was born ten years after the war. I don’t believe I ever heard him sing. There were photos in the house of him in uniform, and one of him standing beside a plane somewhere on the coast of England, but that was all. Mum called them his vanished years.

  ‘He disappeared and never really came back. Not the way he was. You know what he was like.’

  He wasn’t a difficult man to live with. He worked with radio systems in the city by day and spent his evenings with his birds or tinkering in his shed. Anything broken, he could fix. He would be appalled to see the things we dispose of now. There was a pattern to his days that he rarely deviated from. He rose early; liked his meals at regular hours; waited till five to take a drink. We didn’t go on holidays as a rule, except for the occasional weekend camping or at the beach where he fretted about his birds and became increasingly agitated as dusk approached.

  I think they were happy, my mother and him. There was nothing to show they were unhappy. But it was only after he’d gone that she spoke of the great silence inside him that hadn’t been there before. She spoke of it as a physical thing, like an open expanse of sky that he carried with him.

  ‘There was a gap,’ she said. ‘He spoke to those birds more than he spoke to me.’

  He’d not been dead more than a month before she opened the flaps and set them all free, then swept out the cage in her housecoat to erase all evidence that there’d ever been birds at all.

  ‘I never liked them,’ she said. ‘Furtive little things, they are.’

  *

  My mother lived another twenty years without him, the same number of years she’d lived before they’d married. It’s strange how little of what he left endured. It was like a natural process of erosion. Things that had once carried his seemingly indelible mark outlived their usefulness and were consigned to cupboards or casually disposed of. Gradually, his presence in the house diminished virtually to the point of disappearance. We remembered him, but in different ways. My mother turned increasingly to the young man I’d never known, recalling incidents from a shared past that excluded me. She seemed bewildered by remnants of his later life – his watch; his wallet folded neatly in his bedside drawer – as though they belonged to someone she’d yet to meet.

  ‘Who do these belong to?’ she asked. ‘What are they doing here?’

  And the further she slipped into her elusive netherworld of lost and misremembered things, the more important it seemed to me to hold to
who he was.

  The airfield was in Lincolnshire. It was February 1945. I know this only because I turned to records that deliver, if not the past, then enough fixed points of reference for us to fill the gaps between. He was nineteen years old, the same age as Ethan when he left us. They flew in waves, moving like shadows across the Channel under the cover of dark, then tilting across Europe through a vibrating sheet of sky. Approaching from the north-west at 17,000 feet, they could see the line of the river Elbe guiding them in. From fifty miles out, the city was already a beacon, blazing on a low horizon.

  I’ve tried to imagine what it was like to witness destruction on such a scale. I imagine it’s a thing you choose not to remember.

  *

  It worries me that Ethan is so quick to divest himself of a past that surely shouldn’t yet be a burden. And I worry for his future self and what might be irretrievably lost. So I look for the object, the thing, the particular set of circumstances, that will carry my fears and evoke some sense of shared joy and impending loss that I attribute not only to myself, but by default to Ethan.

  ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘If it means something to you, keep it. It’s already gone to me.’

  It’s barely adequate to the task, but I hold to it. I will significance onto it. It’s a bird-call that he’d saved for and bought when he was still at school. There’s little to it. It’s a small flute of polished beech that fits comfortably in your hand. Its throat is made of bone, and with the right technique, the right weight and measure to your breath through open lips, it becomes an extension of your own.

  He sat, night after night, working at it by the back step, learning the language of birds. Eventually, they answered back and we could barely distinguish the tchich-tchich-sip of the song thrush from the fragile, broken sounds he drew from somewhere deep within himself.

  Tchich-tchich-sip (Turdus philomelos).

  Ch-r-up. Ch-r-up (Alauda arvensis).

  Surely it has meaning beyond what it is.

  ‘Do you remember?’ I say. ‘The hours you spent with it, getting the right sounds?’