The Best Australian Stories 2017

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  ‘No more, Pete. It’s done. I’ve started the pill. Can’t go through it again. Can’t.’

  *

  She could feel it up ahead, not too far, around the hill and down in the valley, the dam waiting, concrete, crouched. A monstrosity that carved its way through, eating the landscape and greedily stoppering the river for the better part of the year. But in the summer months, when the monsoon rolled over the state, and the creeks fed the streams, fed the rivers until it grew and grew and it was water roiling and branches breaking and clods of dirt falling from banks and houses slipping into the mire, it would overspill the dam wall, and pour over the road to seethe down the valley and rip up small trees and polish the rock and throw boulders along the bottom.

  They turned the corner and the dam came into view. Her heart surged. Water everywhere. Pouring over the spillway, overflowing the road, tumbling down the valley and tearing at the banks.

  She stopped the ute and stared. Tyres would labour in such a torrent, even good new ones. The ute would be carried away and both of them in it.

  Peter began to convulse.

  She opened the back door and slid in beside him. Drool streamed from the corner of his mouth. It was disappointing to see him like this. He was a strong man. A man who worked with his hands, who hammered and drilled and dominated. She had seen him wrestle a cow to the ground. She had seen him kill.

  She stroked his head. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  *

  ‘Oh my little Ruthie, how I love you so, ’specially your fingers, and all your little toes.’

  He was singing that stupid song again. They were sitting in the old bathtub in the yard, and he was washing her back. Late summer, the last of the evening sun streaming through the eucalypts. Cicadas thrummed in the trees, the first evening mosquitoes droning around them. A few cows stood nearby, watching them with heavy-lidded eyes, mouths full of cuds, chewing, the occasional moan as a calf strayed too far.

  ‘Oi, ya bunch of pervs. Quit making eyes at my wife.’

  ‘They’re just enjoying the last sun. Been a long day.’

  ‘True, love, you’re that dirty, think I’ll be scrubbing all night. Always knew you was a dirty girl though, didn’t I?’

  She said nothing.

  His fingers stole around her side and rested on her belly.

  ‘You think it’s a boy?’

  She shrugged him off. ‘How would I know, Pete? Right now it’s a nothing. Hasn’t even got fingers and toes.’

  She hoped it was a boy. They had that in common.

  ‘Maybe we could call him Frank, after me old pop.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You think I’ll be a good dad, Ruthie?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Build him a cubby, just like I had as a lad. Think he’d like that?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He put his arms around her body. An unexpected gesture, she wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  ‘Oi, now, don’t come over here, you great sods. You’ve got your own trough.’

  ‘That’s it, Pete, I’m out.’

  She leaped out of the bath, naked, dripping, as a cow pushed its head in and Peter yelled.

  She couldn’t help but smile.

  *

  The rain had slackened and the dam, visible once more, loomed above them. She could see the sign: Road closed ahead, do not attempt crossing. She could see the water running over the road.

  They wouldn’t question it if she did nothing.

  Peter in the back.

  His body breaking down. Blood running from his nose, she’d tried to stop it with a cloth, but it soaked through and still it flowed. He drifted in and out.

  Couldn’t really leave a person to die like that.

  She edged the ute towards the crossing, keeping close to the dam wall, crawling in first gear. Water pushed back against the front tyres, a slight tug on the wheel, then the back wheels flooded and they were in the current. Water formed a bow wave at the front, splashing up over the windscreen, wipers back and forth, back and forth. Slowly – you know the drill, Ruthie – she crept forward, any sudden move, the tyres’d slip.

  Peter was silent.

  But she remembered his voice: ‘Ease down on the clutch now Ruthie, shit, you’ve stalled again. No, no, don’t worry, everyone does it when they’re learning. We’ll get her started again, no harm done. You’ve got this, love. Stay calm, you’re doing great.’

  Almost there, almost there, they hit a dip in the road. A horrible letting go and the ute was floating. It dragged sideways, towards the edge, towards the rocks and the river that churned beneath them.

  She’d lost control.

  She undid her seatbelt, started to wind down the window. Peter, how to get them both out, she couldn’t.

  It’d be beyond her.

  She’d leave him.

  A jolt, the ute bumped against the lip of the road, tyres on one side catching. She felt the rumble of gravel, of sediment, piled against the edge of the road. Grabbing the wheel, she slowly pressed her feet down, clutch, accelerator. The ute moved with her once more and they were on the other side.

  *

  He pushed her against the back wall of the pub, her skirt pulled up around her waist. The night was crackling with heat. Somewhere a fire was burning. She buried her face in his neck, his hair, breathed deep the scent of smoke. It was hot, too hot, and she was combusting.

  A man staggered out of the pub and over to the bushes nearby. They froze, Pete’s hand over her mouth. So still, but she could feel the pulse of him inside her. A crack of lightning illuminated them, and for a moment she was afraid someone might see. It went dark again. Her nostrils filled with the stink of old man’s piss, and the drunk wove his way back and disappeared inside.

  When Peter started thrusting again she thought she might scream.

  *

  At the last moment, as they neared the hospital – squatting at the edge of town with its rooms full of weeknight drunks and domestic assaults and limbs severed by heavy machinery – her foot had pressed down on the accelerator hard, so she almost sped right on past and on, on to the next town and the next.

  But she braked, and parked, and watched as they wheeled away her husband. Somewhere back there they were injecting anti-venom into his body.

  She looked down at her hands. They were red, red with iron mud and blood, Peter’s blood. And in his leg those two black holes. One for each of them.

  She sat in the waiting room, plastic chairs and polystyrene cups of machine coffee, dark smells disguised with bleach.

  She waited.

  At the far end of the hall, a door opened and a doctor walked the length of the hallway towards her. She tried to guess, but he was an upright man with an unreadable face, he delivered news like this every day, and still went home to cutlets and peas and mash with his family.

  Outside an ambulance pulled up, its lights flashing red, blue, red, blue through the window.

  ‘Mrs Walker?’

  She stood so she could look him in the eyes. The lights from the ambulance lit his face so it appeared garish, carnival-like.

  ‘My husband?’

  Now his face rearranged and he spoke – the well-rehearsed platitude he recited night after night.

  ‘There was nothing you could have done.’

  He cleared his throat, a little uncomfortable now, the way she was staring at him.

  ‘He was dead from the moment that snake bit him.’

  Ruth sat back down in the chair. The ambulance lights went dark.

  Miracles

  Jennifer Mills

  It was Deirdre Emerson’s boy who was first affected. He went off to school at six and a half years old, ready for a day of alphabets and animals, and crept home a man of five feet ten, dressed like a fool in teenaged things from the lost property.

  Deirdre said she very nearly closed the door in his face.

  ‘Ma, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Andy.’

  She scrutinise
d his embarrassment. He was beginning to lose his hair.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said. Her son reached out his arm, tugged up the too-short sleeve of a stranger’s hoodie, and showed her the birthmark shaped like a whale on his right wrist. His skin was sweet and pale, she remembers, not quite as changed as the rest of him would indicate.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  But he would not talk about it, not then. He went into his room and stood there for a minute, looking at the teddy bears and the wooden trucks lined up along the sill, and then he began to pack them all away. Deirdre rang Jane Sweeney, the mother of a little girl named Elsa, a bright girl with a good ear for music with whom Andy had been accustomed to socialising. Jane was another single mother, a straight-talking woman and a great help whenever she felt she might go mad. She lived just down the road.

  ‘Jane, Andy’s come home all grown,’ said Deirdre.

  ‘It happens fast,’ said Jane.

  ‘Not this fast,’ said Deirdre. ‘He’s about my age now.’ She was only thirty-three. It had felt young the day before. Jane went quiet for a minute, then said she’d come right over. Deirdre stayed by the hall phone, listening out for movement upstairs.

  ‘Elsa’s home alone,’ said Jane when Deirdre opened the door to her.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ said Deirdre. ‘You have to look at him.’

  They found Andy sitting on the floor in the middle of his Lego and weeping silently. They watched him together.

  ‘Shite,’ said Jane. ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Sweeney,’ said Andy, looking up at last. ‘Where’s Elsa?’

  The two children had been in love in the pure way of the under sevens. Their mothers often made jokes about the wedding.

  ‘She’s safe at home,’ said Jane Sweeney, beginning to doubt it. ‘Are you all right? What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Andy. ‘I can’t remember.’ His forehead gathered itself into a pained and grave expression that Deirdre Emerson knew well. She knelt on the floor, took his head into her arms and held it against her chest. Her breasts still hummed for this, but it was all wrong. She kissed the odd-smelling crown of his head. She hadn’t even asked if he was okay.

  ‘What are we to do,’ she said, not expecting an answer. She stroked her son’s hair, laying it flat behind his ear. There was a little grey coming through in places.

  ‘I suppose you could try the doctor,’ said Jane. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back.’

  *

  The doctor gave Andy a thorough examination and pronounced him a perfectly healthy thirty-five-year-old male with exceptionally low blood cholesterol. Andy breathed into a contraption and was told his lungs were functioning at 110 per cent.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him at all,’ marvelled the doctor. ‘Quite the opposite.’ Over the years the doctor had developed the kind of face that could be both stern and deeply humorous. She looked at Mrs Emerson until Mrs Emerson accepted the look and left the room. There was a rule about minors but the doctor felt it didn’t apply.

  The doctor rolled her chair over to sit beside Andy, close but not too close. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Andrew? Anything at all you might feel ready to talk about? It can be just between us if you like.’

  Andy shook his head. His long nose pointed at the floor between them as if it were too heavy for his face.

  ‘What happened, Andy? How did it happen?’ asked the doctor. There were clear regulations about making suggestions.

  Andy looked up. Her eyes were too bright with the wonder of living. He shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything before I got home.’

  *

  The rumours in the town ranged from time travel to alien abduction, but most reasonable people settled on a medical explanation. The doctor sent him to the hospital in the city for tests and observations, including at Deirdre’s request a DNA comparison with his birth data, which the hospitals then kept on record. Since he was still technically six years old, Deirdre had no problem confirming that her son was indeed his own unique self without informing Andy she had enquired, but she felt awful about it and told him as soon as she got the results.

  ‘It’s okay, Ma,’ he said. ‘You can’t be too careful. I would have done the same.’

  Who was this grown man with a formed and empathetic character? He was washing the dishes without being asked. She’d been cheated of creating him, and yet there was so much to be proud of. He had a fine posture, a calm voice, he wasn’t panicking. Apart from the crying jag among the Lego just that once, she hadn’t seen him suffering from his situation.

  ‘They asked if they could study you,’ she said. She put a hand to his shoulder. The new T-shirt she’d bought him was a dull grey-green that seemed to suit his subdued personality. Her boy had always been a little sensitive. He thought for a while before he turned.

  ‘I just want to get on with things, Ma,’ he said. ‘Put it behind me.’

  He was qualified for nothing but neither was he lacking in intelligence; wherever he had been, he seemed to have been educated well (and, Deirdre could not help but notice, very cheaply). Once he was cleared of known contagions, Howard found him a position in the council office, where he registered dogs and photocopied planning applications. It was entry level but there was room for advancement and Andy spent most of his time behind the scenes so did not have to see the people craning for a look at him through the inky glass. There was nothing much for them to crane at. He was handsome enough for his mother and orderly about his work and made no trouble in the council or the town. If anything he was a little boring, a man of few words and fewer stories.

  For a while things returned to normal. Andy became a regular citizen. The legal centre helped him to apply to have his birth certificate backdated so that he could vote and drive, which he did well enough; so whenever Officer McKinley pulled him over he knew it was just to get a closer look at him. He was good to his mother, helped around the house and did the shopping, volunteered once a fortnight for Meals on Wheels, and seemed to be ageing now at a regular pace. There was nothing much else you could say about it apart from that it was strange.

  About seven months after Andy had surprised her, Deirdre Emerson opened the door to another apparent stranger. This one was a younger man, perhaps in his late twenties, and she put her hand to her chest as in a mild panic of nerves he introduced himself as Harry Sifton. The paper boy. Just that morning she had waved to his retreating eleven-year-old figure as he rode off down the street, straw hair sticking unruly from beneath his baseball cap.

  ‘Can I talk to Andy?’ he asked. He held the baseball cap in one hand and ran the other through his hair, which he still wore long, although it had browned a bit. His hands were large and his voice had developed a lovely baritone.

  ‘Of course.’ She let him in and called Andy into the kitchen. The two men declined her offer of tea, and soon retreated into Andy’s room where they talked for over an hour. She peeled the potatoes very quietly, but the one time Deirdre heard their voices raised it was in laughter.

  After Harry Sifton had refused dinner three times, shaken her hand, embraced Andy and gone home to tell his parents, they sat down over a simple meal of lamb chops, broccoli and mashed potato.

  ‘Well?’ she asked Andy.

  ‘He doesn’t remember anything either,’ said Andy. She watched him eating, slow and focused, but his skin, flushed from the excitement, emphasised the boy’s features hidden beneath the man’s. She wondered if she’d ever stop seeing them.

  ‘You used to hate broccoli,’ she said.

  He squinted at her for a second. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘You told me it was tiny trees they’d cut down on a miniature planet. Gone to all that trouble just for me.’ He used his knife and fork in the emphatic way his father used to have. He was four years older now than Jeff had been when she’d last seen him.

  ‘I stole the idea from The Lit
tle Prince,’ she said. Her fingers made the shape of the tiny chainsaw but she didn’t make the sound. ‘You always fell asleep before the chapter was over.’ There was a heaviness in her throat. She had learned to think of it as gaining a brother, but the appearance of Harry Sifton, and then the effort of imagining Mary Sifton’s face, reminded her of what had been taken away. All that time they might have spent together, all that growing. And yet it was hard, with his healthful figure across the table, to justify bad feelings.

  ‘Could it have been, perhaps,’ she asked, ‘another planet?’

  In the distance she could hear Elsa practising on the piano Jane had bought her. The girl had a wonderful ability, and time to build upon it.

  ‘It could be anything, Ma,’ said Andy. ‘I really don’t remember. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you apologise to me,’ she said, ‘you’ve done nothing wrong.’ Surprised by the anger in her voice, she swallowed down a whole glass of water. He laid his knife and fork neatly on the empty plate and waited for her to finish her meal before he cleared the table.

  *

  Andy had been treated as an anomaly, but after word got around about Harry Sifton, some families with young children began to leave the town. The wealthier ones went first, their principles about the public school unravelling behind them like a cotton thread caught on a nail. Deirdre and Jane sat together in the park, friends again after a brief but necessary conflict. They were watching Andy pushing Elsa on the swings, his long arms strong in the sunlight. Deirdre herself felt indescribably heavy in comparison.

  ‘I suppose you could send her to her father’s,’ said Deirdre.

  ‘Not on your life,’ said Jane. ‘And anyway, there’s the piano now.’

  Andy glanced at his watch between pushes. Andy and Harry Sifton had started going round together, and it was wonderful for Deirdre to see Andy with a friend again, even if it meant he was off drinking. Most of his old playmates were still in Yvonne Yang’s first-grade class and he would sometimes watch them wistfully from outside the fence as they ran across the playground at lunchtime. Only Elsa had not faltered in her friendship. If anything, her adoration of Andy had intensified. It was almost concerning, though it didn’t seem to concern Jane.