The Best Australian Stories 2017

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  He was six weeks premature, a knuckle of skin and hair in the incubator. His immune system was so weak I had to wear gloves and a surgical mask when I finally got to hold him. The doctors said it was unlikely he would ever reach a healthy weight, that there could be developmental delays. I nodded along as they spoke, but I wasn’t really listening. I was praying to a god I didn’t believe in that he would survive. Even if he was stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, even if he couldn’t speak to me, even if he didn’t know who I was. I cupped his welt-red body in my hands and I prayed.

  ‘Have you spoken to the police about the door?’ Audrey unloads the shopping onto the kitchen table. Cans of soup and tinned peaches, a 10-kilogram bag of rice. Food for an apocalypse.

  ‘Bloody animals. You shouldn’t have to put up with that, you know.’

  Audrey’s been bringing us groceries to save me from showing my face in town. Her son Jackson was in Seth’s year at school. We met judging the long jump at the boys’ athletics day. I was a good ten years older than most of the other mothers, the only one with liver spots and crook wrists. Some of them mistook me for Mrs Hawkswell, the English teacher who was set to retire at the end of term. One of the mothers even stood in front of me and grilled me about her child’s performance.

  Audrey was the only one who bothered with me. We measured the jumps, chatting about our sons’ teachers, their marks, what we wanted them to study at uni. Jackson was top of the class and dead set on engineering. I said that Seth was a whiz on computers, that he was passionate about current affairs. I didn’t tell her that he’d put a padlock on his door, that he never seemed to sleep. I didn’t tell her how worried I was.

  While I jotted down the distances of the jumps on a clipboard, Seth was trudging round the track, headphones crammed over his long black hair. The other kids snickered as they bounded past. He clumped along, glaring at the ground, annihilating it with his eyes. I wanted to do something, to reach out, but I knew how it would look, the ancient mother with the daggy sunhat, trying to hug her son.

  Now Audrey and I sit across from each other at the kitchen table, both of us looking down at our laps, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Audrey says, gripping my hands in hers. I can smell rosewater on her wrists.

  I’ve been asked that question so many times: by counsellors and by the journalists who were camped outside our house, by the police even. By Karl, by my second cousin on the phone. The truth is that I don’t know. Dr Joyce says it’s important to try to label my feelings, to give myself permission to grieve, but it seems dishonest to say that I’m feeling fine or bad or sad or empty or numb. Audrey’s hands are still in mine and I have the mad idea to squeeze them, to squeeze them so hard that her fingers break, but I keep my eyes on the tabletop, use my bitten fingernails to pick at the divots that Seth used to score into the Formica with his knife and fork at dinnertime.

  ‘Let’s not talk about that,’ I say in that voice which doesn’t sound like mine. ‘Tell me about Jackson.’

  She gets up and tips the tea leaves into the pot, leaves it to steep. When she sits back down she’s looking at me warily. ‘Jacks is good. He got through all of his exams okay, but he said that Chemistry was tough. He’s heading down to the Gold Coast for Schoolies and then he’s going with his mates on a road trip. We’re trying to get him back for Christmas because Paul’s family is flying in from up north.’ I swim in her voice, her easy, normal words. ‘If you and Karl don’t have any plans you’re welcome to join us, it won’t be anything fancy but —’

  ‘He told us he was going to Schoolies,’ I say. ‘Seth did. A few months ago he said that he wanted to go with mates to Bali. We were just happy that he had friends, though we’d never met any of them. He seemed, I don’t know, content since the start of this year. He’d cut his hair and the teachers said he’d started paying attention in class. Sometimes he’d even talk to me when he’d get home from school. He just seemed like he was getting better, like he was finally becoming a regular teenager.’

  ‘But there’s no such thing as a regular teenager,’ Audrey says. ‘You never know what they’re thinking. Sometimes I’ll try to talk to Jackson and he’ll just stare right through me. Sometimes I think, “Who is this person?” How could you have known?’

  ‘We bought him the passport. We bought it for him. It was supposed to be a reward if he passed all his exams, but he disappeared before, well, you know all that. The police think that the recruiters gave him the money for the ticket to Turkey.’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself. It could have happened to anybody.’

  Audrey’s nodding along as I talk, head cocked in concern. I imagine her getting home in an hour or so, popping her head into Jackson’s room to make sure he’s had something to eat. I imagine her getting him ready for his trip, making him promise to take plenty of photos, telling him to call her if he needs extra cash, feeling so thankful it wasn’t her son. Momentarily I hate her, I want to throw her out, but I don’t know whether I can bear sitting alone in the house, waiting for the phone to ring.

  ‘You probably think there were times when Seth hurt animals or something like that,’ I say. ‘But I never noticed any anger in him. It just seemed like he was never really there. I don’t know. Karl and I tried to get through to him, but maybe we were too old.’

  At my last session Dr Joyce said I’m in control of my own story. I can choose to interpret this however I want to. It’s my decision how I remember Seth, how I choose to think of him.

  I walk over to the fridge, take the laminated newspaper clipping from under the magnet. I bring it over to Audrey. It’s a photo of Karl and me standing at night in front of the fig tree down the side of the house. We’re bathed in a milky light, from the white fairy lights wrapped around the tree’s branches. The caption says, ‘Karl and Clementine Kenny: the King and Queen of Christmas’.

  ‘We won that silly competition that the local paper runs, you know the one, for best decorations.’

  ‘Of course,’ Audrey says.

  I take the photo from her, hold it up to my face. Karl had come home from Bunnings one day, his car loaded with boxes of fairy lights. Dozens of them, all white.

  ‘He said we were going to have a white Christmas.’

  ‘Who did?’ Audrey asks, confused.

  Karl would get up on the roof in the mornings and sometimes in the late afternoon when it wasn’t too hot, piling the lights into mounds so they looked like banks of snow. When he turned them on at night, it looked like we were in Europe in the middle of winter.

  Seth, who was ten or eleven at the time, spent most of the summer holidays on the computer. One night, I heard him walk out of his bedroom and into the garden. I followed him down the side of the house, tiptoeing so he wouldn’t hear me. He was standing under the branches of the fig tree, looking up into the light, as if in a trance.

  ‘He looked so peaceful.’ I put the photo down on the table.

  ‘Who did? Seth? I can’t see him in the photo.’ Audrey sneaks a look at her watch. ‘Well, Clem, it’s getting la—’

  ‘Wait. I’m trying to remember.’

  When Seth finally noticed me standing there he smiled and said, ‘I’ve never seen snow before.’ We kept the lights up for months after that. Every night when it got dark we’d take our dinner plates and eat on a rug under the tree. Then there was a big storm and the cabling was wrecked. It took Karl a few days to get it working again, and the next time we took Seth out to look he said that the light hurt his eyes.

  Audrey doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about, but I’m seeing things clearly for the first time, I’m seeing that this is the Seth that I should choose to remember.

  ‘They think they’ve found his body,’ I say. I’m speaking so quietly I can’t hear myself over the rain. I say it again. ‘A bomb blast in a shopping centre. They came this morning for his teeth.’

  Maybe I didn’t say anything, because Audrey is yawning an
d standing up from the table. ‘I better get going, Clem, before it starts hailing.’

  She pauses for a moment to see if I’m going to say anything, then disappears down the hall. I feel the storm building in my ankles and wrists, the way it always does since my arthritis got worse. How could I feel the weather changing, in my own body, but I didn’t pick up the change in him? Feeling tired, I get up from the table and walk to the back of the house. I haven’t been in his room since the police came for his things, but I lie on his bed. The glow-in-the-dark stars on Seth’s ceiling are dimmer now, but I can still make them out. I count a couple of dozen before they all blur together.

  *

  I can hear Audrey’s footfalls coming down the hallway. She’s knocking at the door, pushing it open.

  ‘There are people outside. Where’s Karl?’ Audrey starts shaking me. ‘Clem. Clem. Get out here quick.’

  Light’s shining through the frosted glass panels on the sides of the front door. We rush into the living room, peek through the curtains. The sky’s still dark but our front lawn’s lit up, the grass soupy with mud. The sound of an engine over the rain. I see the outline of a ute and a spotlight on top of the cab shining into the house. Figures jump down from the tray, walk through the front gate. They’re wearing hoodies and sunglasses and they’re carrying golf clubs.

  There are thumps on the front door, on the roof, on the outside of the house. Audrey grips my hand like Seth used to when he was young. Something smashes through the window beside us and lands on the coffee table. There are cackles of laughter. I see a smear of red on the broken windowpane. The next one lands on Audrey’s sandals. It’s a cane toad, with a hole in its side from where the golf club went in. Its heart ripples in its chest as it bleeds over Audrey’s toes.

  ‘Bastards. Call the police, Clem,’ shouts Audrey as she runs for the front door, flecks of glass flying from her hair. I follow in slow motion to the threshold of the door. Outside I can see two figures waiting by the birdbath with buckets in their hands.

  ‘That’s the mother.’ I recognise his voice from the night before. One of them trips Audrey as she runs past and she skids into the grass. They hoist up the buckets and dump the cane toads over her. They roar like they’re at a football game, as the toads writhe and skip across her hair her face her chest.

  ‘Not on our fucking watch, you terrorist bitch,’ one of them jeers.

  I can’t move from the doorway. I should be running for the phone, or to help my friend, but I just stand here and take Seth’s tooth from my bra, squeeze it as hard as I can.

  Seth found the teeth the day before he left. I kept them in a Milo tin at the back of the pantry. When I came home from work he was sitting at the kitchen table in his school uniform, looking disgruntled, the teeth arranged in front of him.

  ‘I’ve been saving them.’ I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘But why do you have them?’ He stared at me blankly.

  ‘Because they’re a part of you.’

  ‘That’s fucked up.’ He wrenched my hand away, scattering the teeth on the floor. He stared at me from his chair while I crawled across the tiles, counted the teeth back into the tin. Maybe that’s how I should remember him instead, staring down at me with those blank blue eyes. Maybe this will help me harden my heart.

  *

  ‘Mum?’

  The spotlight shuts off and someone jumps down from the cab of the ute, runs over and crouches beside Audrey. The rain’s so heavy it takes me a moment to recognise Jackson, her son, the captain of the rugby team, with his long lean arms and pink cheeks. Frantic, he flicks toads off her, hugs her close to him. He helps her up and ushers her into the ute. The others stand around as if deciding what to do.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ Jackson calls from the driver’s seat. They climb in and the ute careens down the street, flicking mud behind it.

  I still haven’t moved. I watch the Christmas lights glowing on our neighbour’s roof as they drive away, glance down at my hand. A runnel of blood is trickling down the middle of my palm, from where the tip of Seth’s tooth has pierced the skin.

  He swallowed one when he was nine years old. He shook me awake in the middle of the night and told me in a breathless, lisping whisper that he thought the tooth would grow in his tummy, that it would eat him up from the inside. I was just so glad he was telling me what was wrong. I took him into the kitchen and made him a cup of Metamucil. We played Battleship until he could go to the toilet. I reminded him to wipe. I told him that in a few days the tooth would be gone and that seemed to calm him down. I took him back to bed and we counted the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling until he fell asleep.

  *

  The phone starts to ring in the hall. I walk in from the verandah, stand in front of the cradle. I don’t pick it up. Instead I take Seth’s baby tooth, the last part of him that hasn’t been taken from me, and place it in my mouth. I remember when Seth woke me that night, I remember his wild white face swimming in the dark. This is how I choose to remember him. At first the tooth settles in my throat, but after a few swallows I get it down. I rip the phone’s cord out of the socket.

  Karl’s stirring in the bed when I get in beside him, put my head on his chest. He’s slept through this whole night, it seems like he’s slept through all of it. I can smell beer and sweaty skin under his leg brace, but I nestle in as close as I can.

  ‘I thought I heard Seth before?’ he says, still half-asleep. ‘Is everything all right?’

  The hailstones sound like teeth chattering on the roof and we lie there, thinking of him, side by side in the eye of the storm.

  The Encyclopaedia of Wild Things

  Madeline Bailey

  Fox.

  In Year 4 we built a fox. We made it out of facts, so it was bigger than a real fox, and slinkier. It prowled between the bushes in the scrubland behind the oval. We pretended to play cricket, but we were watching the shrubs swish. We lost score each time we thought we heard it padding.

  Somebody said the fox was red like jam – except its tail and its paw-tips, which were milky. Tim was my best friend, he said the fox loved eating children (chewy hats). He said the only taste she loved more was shortbread. This meant that if you fed her all the biscuits from your lunch box you could pass. These were good facts.

  I said all this explained why Callum hadn’t been in class: Callum never shared his shortbread. When the fox found out she ate him. Everyone agreed that this was also a good fact, because in Year 4 no one knew Callum had cancer.

  All of us built the fox but it went wild. It kept soaking up stories, so we couldn’t stop it growing and we had to make a plan to protect parents. We never told about the fox because we didn’t want to scare them. We just said school rules had changed and now they always had to wait in the top car park – which was concrete, with no shrubs.

  Space.

  My dad was good at reading and he knew a lot of stories. Sometimes he brought his volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica to read to me and scanned them for the good bits about stars. Stars can look faint from the Earth but still be bright, you just can’t tell ’cause there is interstellar dust. I like space. I like how space is never stable, it is relative (relies on your perspective).

  Sometimes my dad brought newspapers. He read me sections about politics and culture, also travel. I watched his mouth move through the gaps. The newspapers were gappy ’cause my dad tore out the sections that had smashed cars or pictures of wars. I knew because I found them in the bin and read them all. I wished I hadn’t.

  My dad was good at reading. He was also good at fixing. He bought my backpack from an op shop but he fixed it: he stitched stars on. While I was at school he fixed the house, he handwashed dishes and he ironed all the crushed parts out of clothes. When we got home he fixed us toast. He burnt it often but I didn’t mind (we added butter).

  Dad fixed our sink, our car, our gutters – and my rocket, when I dropped it. He glued the fins back on and
they stopped being cracked and wonky. After it was saved, it was shinier. It glinted like my dad’s earrings, and his polished leather boots.

  Weather.

  My dad never forgot the stuff I’d told him. This meant that when the bell rang he would be in the top carpark, with a cluster of the mothers. All the mothers loved my dad, he gave them novels to borrow, knew good facts, brought spare umbrellas on damp days to make sure no-one else’s windcheaters went soggy.

  I would linger in the cloakroom so he’d have time to talk to other people. Sometimes he had too many facts. He had nobody he could tell.

  I wished that I was good at fixing, but I was not good at much. Out of my class I was the worst at spelling. On Tuesdays we had tests and it was often the same words. I still forgot them. I thought perhaps their letters could have shifted round since last week.

  We had to write the plural word for woman. I wrote whimen (it’s a shifty word, sounds like it might be open to an h).

  The teacher said: No, George, you cannot keep the extra letters. She said I had to read more, to remember better English.

  I would read an awful lot. I’d read Britannica whenever I was worried. Britannica said foxes are land mammals with large natural distributions and in Greek myth one got turned into a star. It also said about the foxtrot, foxglove flowers, and Fox Films. Words slipped into other words: the more I read, the worse I’d spell.

  Silver.

  I did not like Callum much. He always wore these silver sneakers. They were crinkly like space boots – and they flashed.