The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  It was not sharks. It had never been sharks. Mara knew that. Her father’s death had been a freak occurrence; the only shark attack in thirty years for a hundred kilometres up or down the coast. Sharks rarely attacked humans and even more rarely killed them. She was not afraid of sharks. It was the water itself that worried her.

  She remembered riding on her mother’s back, arms clasped around her neck, head held high to miss the spray of waves. She remembered David, all white and gangly, paddling over the breakers on his new boogie-board—brilliant fluorescent yellow with the profile of a bullet—with all the grace of a crippled stick-insect. She remembered the sun arching overhead to its zenith, harsh rays like fire on her back.

  These could have been memories from any of her childhood holidays—they were all so much the same—but Mara knew this was not just any memory. She knew that soon her mother would grow tired and head back to the beach, leaving her to play on the shore’s edge.

  “Not too deep, Mara”—her mother’s voice—“you’re not as old as David yet.”

  I’ll never be as old as David, she’d thought, he’ll always be ahead of me.

  Two years was not a lot of difference in age and Mara could swim almost as well as her brother. She had swum out into the calm waters beyond the waves many times when her mother’s back was turned, or when she had fallen asleep on the beach. So Mara swam out to where her brother lay flailing on his board. He’d been attempting to catch a wave for ages without any real success. The board was his first and the technique was obviously quite different to the more familiar body-surfing.

  “Why not just body-surf like we use to?” she asked when she got there.

  He looked back at her with boyish disgust.

  “Go away,” he snapped, “this is a skill. It takes practice, and I’m going to master it”.

  Another wave passed under them and David paddled furiously, but much too late to catch it. Mara had already turned, her body imitating the bullet shape of David’s board, legs straight and moving swiftly from the knee. In less than a second she felt the sudden tug of the wave. For an exquisite moment she was flying, planing across the surface of the wave with ever-increasing speed. She could feel the spray whipping up behind her; the wind rushing across her face; the incredible force of the wave as it tried to pull her back up along its surface. She could see her mother drying herself on the beach, her back to the surf, towel around her butt.

  Mara was on the face of the wave now heading for shore, the peak just starting to curl above her. The water around her was getting louder—a deafening jumbo-jet roar that rattled the skull—and white foam bubbled from the waves collapsing just ahead.

  Mara was smart and decided to pull out. She still had a couple of metres before the wave would end.

  But then, just as she started to turn out and away from the wave, her mother turned as well. Their eyes locked across the gulf of sand and water and Mara saw the fear that lurked in her mother’s heart. The fear that she might lose another loved one to the ocean while she stood on the beach and watched.

  It was not a big wave and there was plenty of time but the recognition that her mother was scared—and probably always would be—was enough that Mara hesitated in her turn. The face of the wave caught at her foot, sucking it in. It sucked her leg in too. Suddenly she was being pulled in two directions at once. Gravity wanted her down; the wave wanted her up.

  Mara felt an instant of panic as her face hit the water and her head was forced under too. She tried to curl up into a ball, to hold her breath and protect her head. She tried to work out which way was up. But there was no up. Only around and around through swirling foam and sand, the roaring of water in her ears and its saltiness filling her mouth and nose.

  She hit something hard. Maybe it was the sandy bottom or the edge of the rocky shelf she knew must be somewhere to her right. Either way, it hurt and she tried to scream but more water filled her mouth and rushed down into her lungs. She skimmed across sand that felt like a cheese grater tearing at her flesh and the murky light grew darker, her limbs heavier.

  Strangely though, her head felt lighter, like a balloon strung by a tether to her neck. All I need is a good rest, a sleep, she thought, right here in this spot. And then her head broke the surface.

  She was kneeling up to her waist in water. Inexplicably, the stars were out above her. Where has the day gone? she thought, staring for a moment up at the moon that had replaced the sun.

  Her mother and father were there, splashing and playing further out. Their heads bobbed just above the water. She had only ever seen her father in photographs and her mother looked much younger than Mara could remember. But it was her. It was them. She knew it.

  She watched fascinated as they trod the water between them. Her father’s arms reached out, strong and powerful, and caught her mother by the shoulders. Her mother kicked in towards him, her lips meeting his, bodies rising out of the water just enough for Mara to see they were both naked. They kissed and moved against each other in the water, rising and falling with the tide.

  Mara, eight years old, did not understand. She did not understand when her father’s arms wrapped her mother, tighter and tighter, and her mother let out a little cry, eyes closed and face turned starward. She did not understand when her mother kicked her way back to shore laughing and smiling as her father roared with joyful triumph, both arms raised to the night.

  Mara’s mother was paddling closer, standing up in the water only metres ahead, and Mara panicked. What if her mother caught her watching? She knew she’d seen something she shouldn’t. Something personal and private. She had forgotten all about her brother boogie-boarding a wave somewhere in the bright summer sun and her mother drying herself on the beach and the wave that dumped her. She had forgotten that her father had been dead eight years. She just didn’t want to get caught.

  But her mother was not angry. She barely seemed to notice Mara crouched in the shallow water and she was smiling as she approached. She did not stop but passed straight through, like a fog that had no substance, and Mara turned to watch her as she continued up onto the beach, laughing as she reached her towel, body all jewelled and glistening soft in the moonlight.

  But her mother’s laugh was cut short as her father’s jubilant cry turned to a scream. Her mother started running back to the water, face contorted with dread as she called and screamed his name over and over.

  Mara turned, a broken foamy wave almost knocking her on her back, and saw her father struggling with . . . with something. His arms were rising and falling like hammers pounding the water. His body moved like he had become stuck in an out-of-control washing machine—swish to the right, swish to the left, swish to the right again—and even in the moonlight Mara could see the water around him growing darker in an ever widening slick of what could only have been blood.

  She tried to swim out too and follow her mother but she was paralysed, her body a lead weight submerging into the sand.

  Her father stopped screaming and her mother too. There was only the lapping of waves against the shore. Mara saw her father was sinking into the sea, his head just above water, arm raised as if to point out some constellation. Mara felt herself sinking too, her body folding, collapsing into the waves.

  “Remember me, Mara,” her father had said. She had heard him clearly, shouting his last, and then they were both swallowed by the ocean.

  * * *

  Mara remembered staggering out of the surf on that bright summer’s day. She had screamed and screamed as her brother paddled wildly to the shore and her mother ran down the beach towards her. She could not remember what she had screamed but David had told her later that it was all about Dad. She had screamed at her mother: “Why didn’t you tell me!” and “He never knew, he never even knew about me!” and “I was there. I saw him die!” and her mother had started screaming too and hitting and hitting and telling Mara to shut up, just shut up, shut up! until David had pulled them apart.

  Nothing was eve
r said after that, but Mara had never been back in the ocean. Or swum in a river. Or danced in the rain. She couldn’t. Its every drop seeped through her pores, whispering memories, exciting neurons into wide-screen displays of someone else’s life. Everyone else’s life. Everyone who had ever been.

  Only tap water was dull enough, bleached of life through chemistry, for her to endure its touch.

  Now she looked up and realised the sun had set behind her. Twilight painted the sky a deep indigo and splashes of orange and pink tinted the encroaching storm clouds.

  Mara had no idea how long she had been sitting there, thinking of her father, but the tide had definitely risen. Its foamy fingers crawled the beach in front of her, tickling her toes. She gave in, too exhausted with emotion to fight, and let the memories wash over her. They flowed in and out like the breath of the sea through her mind. A murk of hates and fears and loves and lusts. Dreams. Nightmares. A slow settling sediment of lives and lies. She breathed them deep and her panic settled, fluttered, drifted away. The flood of memories cleared, becoming as soft as the sound of a sea-shell, and Mara started to trawl their depths.

  She tried to think of who her father had really been. For the first time in years the touch of the water was soothing and calm. She stretched her foot out further into the foam, feeling it caress and flow around her toes.

  “Remember me,” her father had said. But she had nothing to remember him by, except that one instant of her creation and his death. Even the woman he loved was gone, her memories lost.

  But David was right, she thought as the water crept slowly up her thigh, warm and inviting. She could almost feel her father, here at the edge. Could sense the man she had never known. But it’d been too long since he’d trod this beach. He’s out deep now, the ocean whispered against the sand, where memories drift when they’ve not been thought in a while.

  She listened to the rhythm of the tide, the susurration of the wind, her eyes reading the undulations of deepest blue out beyond the breakers. They all told her, but you can find him, we’re sure of it.

  Mara stood, her feet planted firmly in the water, and stripped off her shorts and top. She unstrapped her bra and dropped it over her shoulder. She walked out into the sea.

  The water was almost the same temperature as the air. She could barely feel it but for the slow roll of waves against her calves, her thighs, her waist. And then she was in, up to her chest and kicking off from the bottom.

  Out here, this way, the ocean called with a voice of many memories.

  Mara moved her arms in lazy arcs, cutting smoothly through the surface and scooping back. The motion was tireless and soon she was at least a hundred metres out. The storm to the south appeared to be moving again and great sheets of grey rain fell from the clouds. It would hit the beach soon.

  She turned for a moment and looked back to the beach and the rocky slope of green above it. There were lights amongst the trees up there, shining through holiday house windows. Through one of those windows she imagined David looking out, searching for her on the beach. He’d be worried if he couldn’t find her. Worried that she’d done something stupid and drowned herself in her sorrow.

  But it doesn’t matter in the long run, nothing does, she heard all around her and she was sure it was her father’s voice. Even if something happened to you, nothing is lost. Your memory and his will mingle again. Come along, it’s not much further now, and I’ve waited so long to meet you.

  Mara turned and kicked out again as the rain began to fall, joining the heavens with the earth. She headed east, into the depths of the storm, out to where the old memories ran deep. Out to where her father would be waiting.

  Wood

  Grant Stone

  I am M_, a puppeteer. You will not have heard of me. Forgive me if I do not dwell on further biography. I have much to say and there is little time.

  But where to begin? Ah. With the oranges.

  Three days ago I was ensconced in my usual spot, a corner of the market away from the noisier stalls. A gaggle of children sat at my feet, entranced. Rabian, my marionette, was serenading them with lyrics of my own devising, set to a melody I stole from a bawdy tavern song.

  From the other side of the square I heard shouting, then a crash; I looked up in time to see a carriage, bearing the duke’s standard, disappearing through the harlot’s gate. A river of oranges rolled across the cobblestones: the carriage had caught the edge of a market stall and tipped it. Old Preshan the fruitseller shouted and grabbed his crotch in insult, but he stopped that quick enough when another carriage rattled through, squashing fruit under its wheels.

  The children cheered and raced off, some trailing the carriages, hoping for thrown coin, others scooping up as many oranges as they could.

  There were cries of disappointment as the second carriage left the square. Gaben, one of the older children, walked back to me, splashing water from between the cobbles with his bare feet. He was not, strictly speaking, a street-lad. His mother worked the costermonger stall and was content for him to tarry as he pleased.

  “Mam says they’re coming for the Spectacular. Come from all over, Mam says.”

  I placed Rabian in his case. “Your Mam’s right.”

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Saw a bear come in last night, led in on a chain. Didn’t half set the dogs to barking.”

  I nodded, not listening as I pushed the few coins I’d collected that morning into my purse. Enough for a few beers, at least.

  “Are you performing? In the Spectacular?”

  “The duke has no need for a humble puppeteer.”

  “But you’re the best.”

  “I’m not a dancing bear though, am I?”

  I closed the case and made my way across the square to the Broken Lion, the closest tavern I had not yet been thrown from.

  It was a small place, and dark: I stood just within the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust and my nose to get used to the stench of stale oat beer.

  The proprietor of the Broken Lion stood behind the bar, cleaning a pottery jug with the front of his shirt. Occasional Jack he was called, given that occasionally he’d lash out at paying patrons for no apparent reason. There were stories of how he’d come to own the place: he’d won the bar throwing alley-dice, or a poker game, perhaps. The rumour I thought most likely to be true was that he’d walked in one day, liked the look of the place and commenced to kick the living shit out of the previous owner. I slid a couple of coins across the bar and Occasional Jack picked them up with a grunt.

  I sneered at Gaben’s estimation. The best. Best what? Puppeteer? Fuck that. I’d had dreams once that my art would make me famous. Not out in the fields of course—the streets of Youngston were paved with gold, they’d said, people who had never been more than a day’s walk from their Mam’s hovel. But I was young and bored, so I spat in my palm and smoothed down my hair and came east. Turns out they were right—there was gold in the streets. I saw it every morning when I pissed out my window.

  I held up two fingers and Occasional Jack slammed two more flagons down in front of me. I traced a finger through the beer spilled on the bar. Gaben’s words still chewed at me. True, my station at present was pitiful, but was I not an artist?

  I slammed another empty flagon down on the bar and ordered another. Rabian would be no good. The thought of presenting myself to the revels master with the marionette I used to entertain urchins—No. I needed something new. It would not be enough to make the audience laugh; the bears would do that. “Let them dance, the stupid hairy bastards,” I shouted to nobody in particular, “I am an artist. Can a bear—” I stood and spread my arms to address the other patrons. “Can a bear make you feel love, horror, heartbreak?”

  “I’ll make you feel something in a minute,” someone called from the back and laughter ran through the room. I was about to march over and break my flagon over the bastard’s head, but I caught Occasional Jack’s eye and sat back down instead.

  It was true, though. I
was more than a trained animal.

  I would audition for the revels master. More, I would deliver them a performance of such heart-rending beauty that every face in the room would be streaked with tears.

  * * *

  When they finally shoved me through the door and barred it behind me I knew what I would do. The streets were empty as I staggered away, following the Carver’s Path downhill. The gate was open and unguarded, as always. Nobody had tried to bring arms against the city since the Duke did to the previous ruler of Youngston what Occasional Jack had to the last owner of the Broken Lion. Life is never a gift, I thought. The best of it must always be taken.

  The eastern wall was ten times my height bottom to top, but it had been left to ruin: the stones were thick with moss, though in the past week a half-hearted attempt had been made to apply a fresh coat of whitewash. No guards were posted. The other side of the wall was just as ill-kempt. Every time I came this way the forest seemed to be a little closer to the city walls. The full moon shone above the trees, lighting the way ahead.

  * * *

  The moon had traversed a quarter of the sky by the time I reached Niam’s hut. Niam yawned as he opened the door and ran a hand through grey-streaked hair. He didn’t seem surprised, though it had been years since I’d knocked on his door. I held up the wineskin I had brought and he opened the door wide. I kissed him and then, before he could say anything, pushed him back into the hut.

  A simple table and chairs occupied the middle of the single room. Niam’s woodworking tools sat neatly in shelves above the bench. His axe rested against the wall by the door. Against the back wall, half-hidden in shadow, was an ornately carved bed, more like something the duke would lie on than a woodcutter. Niam had carved the bed himself, same as he had built his hut. I pushed him again, down to the bed and reached between his legs.