The Best Australian Stories 2017

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

In Year 4 my sneakers were beige and too big (stupid op shop). I did not like Callum much. He was too lucky.

  Fire.

  Tim was my best friend. I did not like him much either but I liked visiting his house. His mum baked cupcakes and they came out of the oven spongy, round, in silver trays. We ate them in Tim’s lounge room, by the fire. It had no matches or logs because it came with a remote. Tim pressed the rubber buttons then the flames went blue or bigger. Tim said his father bought it because charcoal stains the carpet.

  Tim’s house had an upstairs but it was only for adults. Tim said he had snuck up once and the rooms had plusher couches. His father invited guests there so upstairs had to stay clean. Guests meant work friends, and some of the other mothers, who would all be offered coffee and asked to chat for a bit. But when he came to pick me up, guests did not seem to mean my dad.

  Fish.

  The pot plant on our deck was dead, but Dad watered it just in case.

  When we went to the hardware store I waited outside, near the pond, and counted all the coins that people had tossed to the bottom. It was hard to see sometimes ’cause there were fish there, who I hated.

  Dad bought tinned paint or rope, then gave me change to make a wish. I wished the pot plant on our deck would please un-die, but it did not. When we got home it was still wilty and I knew Dad’s change was wasted.

  At the hardware store, the next time, there were no coins in the pond. The fish were bigger. I knew they’d eaten my wishes.

  Trains.

  Tim said a group of mothers from our class would meet for picnics every Sunday, and that each one brought a tub of their home-cooking. Tim said you could cram chunks of all the best cakes in your pockets, then go play.

  All the mothers loved my dad, except he never got invited to these picnics.

  I still dreamt them. I imagined they were in the park with the train playground. My entire class was there and all the mothers flitted round placing a rug, opening tubs. They had brought cupcakes. Also cookies, muffins, scones and all the other special things that you can bake in silver trays.

  But my dad has no trays like that. He brought burnt toast. And when the picnic got packed up, all of the plastic tubs were empty except his, which no-one wanted. So Dad took the toast home cold as it was bad toast, square and wrong and my dad brought the spare umbrellas, but No, George, no extra letters.

  Facts fold into other facts.

  Seagulls.

  Once Tim asked me: George, what is your dad?

  That lunchtime he had played badly in cricket. I’d played worse – but it never seemed to matter.

  I said my dad was the best reader, the best fixer; he was also the best sailor. I had not watched him sail but I knew that he was good ’cause of the trophies. There were lots tucked in his wardrobe. They were topped with metal ships. The gold paint was a bit scuffed but they still meant my dad had sailed and he’d won a lot of races. But Dad said that what with one thing and another you stop sailing – you’re doing other things, but that’s okay.

  Sometimes, if Dad looked tired, I would ask him for a good fact about ships. Dad glowed when he talked about ships. I learned that while you’re racing you read weather by watching the seagulls tilt like metal windvanes. I learned Dad built his first boat and it was a racing dinghy – it had sails on each side, they were called wings. Dad said they were made of canvas but I still pictured them feathered.

  I told Tim all of this that time he asked: What is your dad?

  He didn’t listen. He said: Your dad is a fag.

  Shoes.

  In Year 5 we get a notice about Callum. We have to give the notice to our parents so that they will know the news. The news we got told in the morning. The notice also says there’ll be a service at the school and a support plan for the students who are grieving.

  I read Britannica as soon as I get home. I look up shoes. Shoes are part of fashion but also of archaeology, and horseshoes have been thought to hold good luck.

  You would think that silver sneakers would hold good luck in them, too.

  Words.

  On Mondays, now, I see a man. He has an office near my classroom with two chairs, also some crayons in a mug. On his door there is a photo full of cows.

  I think he saw me count them our first Monday ’cause he said: They’re highland cattle. He said they are a joke, because he’s Scottish.

  Today the man says I should tell him what I’m thinking. I could tell him words are wild, but I do not want to scare him. So instead I lie and say I’m thinking how I’m still the worst at spelling.

  The man nods (crinkled forehead) then he asks: Do you feel perilous?

  I do not understand what he means by perilous. It’s an odd word, it just makes me think of spacemen. I guess perilous could sound like a good word about exploring: a good word for muddling boundaries, shuffling rules?

  I had felt perilous the day we got that notice for our parents, ’cause I did not give the notice to my dad. I tore it up. Then chewed the pieces. So you could not read the print. Not even if you found them in the bin. That night Dad asked me George, how was your day? and I said Fine and then I asked him for a good fact about ships.

  I picture Dad tucked in a boat with feathered wings. Inside it smells like buttered toast. He’s fixing sails, reading weather – wearing polished pirate boots – and even though it makes no sense it is the bravest, brightest boat, and so if anyone is perilous it’s Dad.

  Then I remember that the man is Scottish. And he has a Scottish voice. And so he had wanted a different word, he just couldn’t pronounce it.

  He had meant to ask: Do you feel powerless?

  The Boat

  Joshua Mostafa

  His name is Paul or Peter, I forget. We sit together, squashed among a couple dozen others like the human luggage that we are, below the deck, where years of putrefying fish have left their stink. No windows. Someone’s puked. An infant cries.

  I fold my arms and try to think of nothing, but he’s talking in my ear again. About a boat, not this one, not the filthy bucket that we’re crammed inside; a sailboat, one he used to own, his pride and joy, it seems – though he insists it’s not a yacht. The word’s incongruous, as if it’s from another language, moulded by the habits of a foreign and exotic world. I try it on my tongue, repeating: yacht. A laugh begins to bubble up, or is it just a retch, the air is hot and thick.

  He won’t stop talking, god knows why he thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, maybe just because I’m softly spoken, or that when he said that this last fortnight, crammed inside a fishy tin, had spoiled his love of seafood, I agreed, and when he rhapsodised about a little place in Darlinghurst that used to serve the most delicious oyster bisque, I said I used to eat there too. And now, despite the fact that Darlinghurst is just another wasteland – gutted houses, burned-out cars, a battleground for warring gangs, where feral dogs and beggar children prowl for scraps – it lives in both our memories, the strolls we individually took, a coffee on a Sunday afternoon, an exhibition opening. He seems delighted by this reminiscence, puckering his flabby lips as if it brings him closer to the life he’s lost. Our country. Just a dream, a make-believe. I don’t know when it ceased to be, but it was well before I paid my passage at the dock: ‘No Aussie dollars! Euros, yuan, American or gold’ (I gave the smugglers all I had: my ring, my granddad’s watch). Perhaps it stopped existing when the riots started, tearing through the CBD. Perhaps it faltered in the drought, and dried up with the dying crops, and hollowed out as shops and supermarkets closed their doors. Perhaps when all the television channels flickered out, and then the power stopped. That global warming nonsense, Peter says (or Paul), the Chinese wouldn’t buy our coal – they caught a cold, we sneezed – a perfect storm. I envy him a little: even now, when everything’s collapsed, his stock of simple clichéd explanations is intact. Like all the men, our beards are growing wild – no razors anymore – but he, I reckon, must have had a pale moustache, a perfect barrier that filtered any doub
ts or contradictory thoughts as he inhaled. But maybe not. There’s something in his eyes. A trembling of the iris, creature-panic that he can’t conceal, for all his talk. He flinches when the hatch is opened, sunlight streaming in, but it is just our daily meal.

  The smuggler bringing us our food descends the rungs and pauses, screwing up his face, disgusted by our stench and, when he sees our eager hands outstretched to take the meagre rations, laughs and taunts us in his language, holds the first container out of reach, and toys with us, enjoying his contempt. I’m not too proud to beg – I lift my arms and wait until he’s bored of tantalising us and hands the plastic boxes out. It’s rice, again – the grains are hard (half-undercooked, half-burnt) and indistinguishable puréed vegetables whose blandness is enlivened by the tang of slight decay. I’m hungry, though. I force down every scrap.

  My neighbour on the other side refuses his; instead, he takes a strip of jerky from the stash inside his jacket and begins to chew it with his bony jaws. Can’t stand that Asian crap, he says, his nostrils flaring as he eyes my rancid meal. His weathered skin is lizard-like, a mass of blotchy freckles, taut across his bones. With spindly fingers he withdraws a few tobacco threads and rolls a tiny smoke. I’d go a parmy, he says meditatively, you reckon they have pubs in Indo, probably fucking not, shariah law. But where you’re from – the Middle East, wherever – what’s the go there: can you get a drink? I tell him I’m from Erskineville; he’s obviously sceptical, but lets it pass. He asks the smuggler, how much longer on the boat, you said a week, you lying cunts. The smuggler isn’t listening; a shout above has made him stiffen in alarm. The mocking smile is gone, he glares around at us and puts a finger to his lips. He leaves the last containers in a heap and climbs the ladder, slamming tight the hatch. A frantic, hungry scrabble for the boxes. A young and hefty man – from Tonga, maybe – breaks it up, and passes out the food. The very last container goes to Paul (or Peter), who is unimpressed – a bloody outrage, are they trying to kill us – but he eats his portion anyway, his blunt and pallid paws delivering each morsel to his plump and ginger-whiskered mouth. That fleshy head. A walrus, like the song. And all at once I want to get away. But if I stand, I’m sure I’ll spew, and I’m too weak to lose today’s allotted meal. I’ll bide my time until the nausea’s passed. And then I’ll stumble to the other side and sit between that Tongan lad and some old woman who has been asleep for hours – that’ll be a better spot than sitting here between the lizard man and Paul.

  He’s droning on; I’ve mentioned, foolishly, I used to play the violin, and now he’s telling me about the time he went to see an opera – Carmen, something shit. I try to be as blunt as possible: I don’t like Bizet, and the Opera House is just an empty shell, there’s nothing there. But Peter doesn’t seem to understand. It’s such a tragedy, he says, and launches into yet another elegy to leisures lost: to single malts, to wagyu beef, to dinner parties, wine and cheese; to golf, to watching cricket on a Sunday afternoon; to nights at the casino, getaways in the Barossa, harbour sailing in his boat that’s not a yacht. I cannot bring myself to say shut up. Politeness has no purpose in this world, as utterly redundant as his cultivated tastes, but I can’t shake it off. If I can take one shred of bitter satisfaction from the chaos that’s engulfed my country, killed so many thousands, scattered friends, destroyed my home, it’s this: the likes of Paul, the status-conscious, vain, self-satisfied, adept at office politics and purchasing investment properties, a little poison now and then for pleasant dreams, this species, homo mediocris, isn’t – after all – the last of men. There are no crafty, well-timed deals to strike, no stocks and shares, conspicuous consumption, status signals, subtle as a horse turd steaming on a lawn – they don’t exist. And yet in any conversation he returns to them, like some old fool repeating senile stories, stoking feebly at the embers of the glories of his youth. I almost pity him, undignified and obsolete, unkempt, a dirty crumpled suit, anonymous, another in the mass of human maggots wriggling out the orifices of the national corpse. And even here, as cargo in a smuggler’s hold, the only way he can communicate is with his repertoire of boasts and humblebrags: the brand of car he used to drive (before the petrol pumps were seized for the exclusive use of this or that militia’s vehicles), the house he used to live in (waterfront – he wouldn’t call it absolute, not quite) and then, most casually of all, the boat that’s not a yacht, but which, no doubt, if I could see it, would impress me with its yacht-like qualities; its almost-yachtishness would validate his understated taste – as well, of course, as wealth with which to use it – not to mention the exquisite modesty he shows by claiming that it wasn’t quite a yacht.

  The gaunt man with the lizard skin, who’s sat in silence listening and chewing on his strand of jerky, coughs a gob of brown saliva on the floor before our feet. Aw, yeah? You going fucking sailing, cunt? Wank on. The only boat for you is with the rest of us, in this old piece of shit. Your precious boat is gone, cunt: bloody gone. Some arsehole might have sunk it just for shits and giggles – if it’s still afloat, some eastside mob has got it, bet you anything your fucking yacht is full of little soft-cock Jew-boys, leather jackets, think they’re gangsters, showing off for Bondi bimbo whores. The lizard-man lets out a wheezing laugh. He’s odious in every way, but I can’t help but chuckle at the face that Paul makes, mottled outrage, ruddy with affront. He splutters out an angry word or two.

  From elsewhere, suddenly, a deep but startled cry booms out and echoes round the hold. The Tongan guy is staring, horrified: the woman who’s been still for hours at a stretch has pitched facedown upon the floor. My God, says Peter, is she dead? – she’s dead! For fuck’s sake, says the thin man, she’s been dead since yesterday, and none of youse cunts knew? The shock has made us all – well, all but me – forget to keep our voices down, but even through the din of shouting I can hear a thud of footsteps on the deck above. I try to hush my fellow passengers. It’s hopeless, they’re oblivious. More steps. I think I know, or fear, who it must be. I find I’m screaming: never mind the dead! We’re still alive! And they can find us here!

  A sudden silence. All eyes on the hatch. It jolts, and creaks, and opens, slowly, and as if my words have brought him into being, there he is, a soldier, sailor, coastguard or police, it doesn’t matter: haloed by the sun, a man in uniform. He stares down at us, at our filthy faces, slumped together in this squalid hold, a smudge or smear of humankind that might have once played violin, or sailed a pretty boat that wasn’t quite a yacht; so what? He speaks some language we don’t need to understand: his eyes, triumphant, speak for him. It’s over now, they say. Your boat’s been stopped.

  Glisk

  Josephine Rowe

  We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.

  Ahead of me, my tiny sister sits regal and unafraid in the middle of the raft that Fynn has built from packing foam and empty chemical buckets, lids fixed airtight with caulk. He’s already tested it out in our neighbours’ pool and declared it seaworthy, but if the thing falls apart he has promised to carry Sara himself. Fynn is thirteen, older than me by five years, and the only one of us three kids who has been to the island before. Our mother had long hair then, and Fynn’s dad was still around, hadn’t yet skidded his motorbike underneath a roadtrain. My dad – Fynn’s dad too now, Mum constantly reminds us – shoulders a picnic basket filled with Sara’s favourites, Fynn’s favourites, Mum’s favourites, mine: cheese and apple sandwiches, salt and vinegar chips, slivers of mango doused with lime and chilli, ginger beer. Enough food to last a week, though we’ll be crossing back to the mainland this same night, lit by a quarter moon and a two-dollar torch.

  The people around us hardly seem like people. More like a muster of herd animals. They move steadily through the water in ones and twos, feeling for the slope of the sandbar underfoot, the treacherous edge where the ocean floor falls away. That’s how people – tourists,
mostly – get themselves drowned, snatched off by rips.

  The sea the sea the terrible …

  Yep yep, we say, we know; Dad gets wordy sometimes.

  There are other families, some also towing small children on boogie boards, inflatable lilos, nothing so fine as Sara’s raft. Eskies bob alongside silver jellyfish-balloons of clothes tied inside plastic shopping bags.

  We’re lucky, Dad’s telling us, today’s a neap tide – safest time to make a crossing. The highest tide not as high as normal, the deepest part not so deep.

  Further out, the island looks like a rough dog slouching up from the ocean, muzzle pointed north-west. What’s out there? A lot of putrid birds, Fynn’s already told me, and some all right caves, mobs of bogans sinking tinnies. Nothing awesome. But tonight, after sunset, the shores around the island will be phosphorescent with the visiting swarm of bio-luminescent phytoplankton, on their anxious, brilliant way to who-knows-where. We’ll perch along the highest bluff in a sprawl of blankets and eskies while the waves crash iridescent against the rocks below, sweeping back to leave lonely blue stars stranded here and there, then charging back in to reclaim them.

  It will be spectacular, an eerie sort of magic, and I will never see anything like it again.

  But whatever, this isn’t the point. In the end, the island is just a dog-shaped rock covered with birds and sunburnt gawkers, temporarily surrounded by terrified dinoflagellates.

  It’s this wading out that matters, this crossing: the bright, migratory-animalness of it. Going waist deep, chest deep, waist deep again.

  What matters is how, halfway over, Fynn looks back at us, then ahead again, and says to no one, or everyone, or maybe just to Sara:

  I reckon this is how the afterlife must look.

  I see Dad look back at Mum and mouth the word, afterlife?

  Fynn is the palest of us, lighter even than Mum; blonde right to his eyelashes, the only one who crisps up in the sun. He looks adopted. A thing we all know but know better than to say.