The Best Australian Stories 2017

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  Anyway. There it is.

  Do I make it through childhood without staking every possible biological claim on the man who calls us both my beloved savage? I’m ashamed to say I do not. I’m content to share him only in his lesser moments: it is my dad who used to play bass in an almost-famous blues band, but it is our dad who, before the blues band, used to play clarinet in a high school orchestra. It is my dad who promises to buy us a pair of albino axolotls, our dad who reneges when Fynn and I neglect our goldfish duties and Skeletor’s tank is all slime and fug.

  (There was a time, some years, where it was just Fynn and Mum, and this is maybe what I’m getting back at him for. Or else I’m getting him back for all the names he isn’t called in school, the way no one ever asks where he’s from, whether his parents are reffos. Or else it’s the fact that, even though one of them is dead, he has two fathers, doesn’t have to share his, and is allowed to wander off without telling anyone, to give reasons like ‘just thinking’ or ‘just walking’, getting soft looks instead of strife.)

  Does my brother find some spiteful way of getting even, of undermining my full-bloodedness? He never does. Maybe he never feels the need to. Fynn takes these pissing contests for what they are. In actual pissing contests, there is no competition, and really no point. He gets halfway to the bougainvillea tumbling over the top of the fence, while I try (no hands) not to dribble on my runners.

  *

  At the deepest point of the crossing, the ocean reaches my lower lip, and I hold onto Mum. Feel my feet levitate from the shell grit below. Become cargo swinging from her strong gold shoulder, safe in her smell of coconut oil and warm bread as she pushes on towards the island.

  Around us the ocean thickens to an algaeic soup that stinks of dead things; proof that the plankton are here, all around us, though invisible for now – it isn’t dark enough to give them away yet. This is the point where Fynn’s raft begins to keel, the empty buckets unhitching, and Sara responds with a lot of high-pitched wailing and clutching at salty air.

  When the raft breaks apart, Fynn keeps his word, and Sara scrambles up from the wreckage to ride his bony shoulders, her little grabby starfish hands clenching fistfuls of his tawny hair. It must hurt badly, his eyes pulled to teary slits, but he says nothing while trying to shepherd pieces of the debris ahead of himself.

  Waves slap at his face, trying to get in through his mouth and nose. He screws his eyes shut, snorts water, while higher up Sara sings, oblivious, her stubby little feet hooked under his wrists.

  Hey mate, Dad offers, I can take her. But both Fynn and Sara shake their heads, so Dad just cruises alongside in a coastguard sort of way, until the ocean finally slips from Fynn’s shoulders and leaves Sara cheerily marooned up there.

  There are no photographs from that day. Mum dropped the disposable QuickSnap crossing back to the mainland, and though we groped and kicked around no one found it. Perhaps that’s why I remember it so vividly. Fynn stumbling through the breakers with Sara, delivering her safely to the dry sand and waiting until Mum had led her off to squeak into some penguin burrows before he doubled over and gushed out all that swallowed seawater into a patch of saltbrush. Fiery stinger marks striped his quaky legs.

  Years later, somewhere into adulthood, I’ll decide that this is a story to one day tell at my brother’s wedding. Or else his funeral. Possibly both – as with a certain kind of suit, it seems workable for either occasion.

  Instead of the wedding and/or funeral speech (though sure, there’s still time enough for both), I’m delivering this story to my wife. Trying to wrest my brother back from what local mythology has made of him. Careless Idiot at best; Murderer at worst. Ti has been driving past those crosses at the shoulder of Highridge Road for years, since before we even met. Shed-made, white as desert-bleached bones.

  Coated with a fresh layer of paint every spring, strung with teddy bears, ribbons, other sentimental lark. Trinkets refreshed each September, along with the paint. The grandparents’ work, we suspect; the father too modest for that sort of rubbish.

  This is all Ti knows of my brother. This, and the couple-three cards he’s sent, and the shedful of furniture he left behind; all gliding teak curves and high-tension wires. Mid-century harpsichord, Ti calls it, explaining how their father was a luthier when friends admire the coffee table, the only piece that makes sense with the rest of our house.

  My father, I’ll sometimes add. My father was the luthier.

  Why, Ti wants to know, would your brother come back here?

  I ask myself the same.

  After the hearing, depending on who you care to ask, Fynn either ran, slunk, snuck, crawled, choofed-off, fucked-off, hauled arse, or simply went to the Northern Isles of Scotland, where the Atlantic rushes in to meet the North Sea, and where he got some shit-kicking work at a whisky distillery. There he works five or six shifts a week, making nothing that anyone could put his name to.

  I still draw sometimes, he told me once, glitchy at his end of our sole Skype attempt. His face freezing then catching up with itself.

  I still sketch out ideas for things I might make one day if I ever [garble].

  Last year Mum and Dad retired to Norfolk Island. Mum phones every Sunday to talk politics and weather and to ask what the hell she did wrong. Sara is twenty-five, working as an image and style consultant in Sydney. Who knows what she thinks; she’s less scrutable than a butchy boy. She doesn’t remember that trip to the island, or the raft, and I’m not sure she remembers a time when she liked either of us, Fynn or me. Her first memories start at five, and by then Fynn was sixteen, flakey as a box of Frosties, and I was a monster. Long gone are the days when she would laugh along with whatever jokes we told, not understanding but not wanting to be left out. Sometimes we would laugh just to make her laugh, tell jokes that weren’t funny, or weren’t even real jokes but had the rhythm of jokes. Just to test her, just to watch her go. Now she doesn’t find anything funny.

  I think you ruined her, Mum says down the phone one weekend. You and your brother.

  When did he become mine is a question I do not ask.

  Fynn arrives on a Saturday morning with one duffel bag, his blondness gone to seed, hair brushing the collar of the bomber jacket he wears in spite of the January heat. Dead pine trees still line the curb, flung out for green waste.

  My brother lopes across the scorched front lawn, looking even older than he looked in court, older than I figured possible. Walking taller than he wants to be, ghosting up the morning. Out on the street there’s his rental hatchback, some hairdryer, crouching as though it also hopes not to be seen. As though six years might be too soon.

  I’m waiting behind the flyscreen, feeling everything I’d neatly flat-packed springing up in me. I will punch him, I think. No, I will bring him in close. I will tell him … I don’t know what.

  Yes, I might have picked him up from the airport, travelled that 80 k’s with him – school doesn’t start back till February, the course is all set, no one needs a thing from me till then. But I was thinking, stuff it. After this long and this much silence he can manage at least that much.

  He’s turning silver grey at the temples, and when he finally looks up his blue eyes waver as though he is looking at something unstill. He reminds me of those huskies that people, out of vanity or stupidity, see fit to keep as pets in this climate. Ti’s hands ball into little fists when she sees them: bewildered, patchy-coated animals paraded around Perth’s richer suburbs, humiliated wolves.

  Fynn is humiliated, of course. He is beyond humiliated.

  Hey! I say. Then, like an idiot, Welcome back!

  Raf, is all he says, putting his hand forward like I’m about to go and shake it.

  I step out into the glare and grab him around the shoulders, and he stands there stiffly for a few seconds, finally relenting to the hug.

  Still in the doorway he rummages through the duffle bag. Brought you a gift, he says, but he says it like geft, this new lilt in his voice. Your wed
ding, he says, handing over a fancy wooden booze box.

  Sorry I missed … Then he waves a hand to mean: everything.

  It strikes me that this is what strangers do. Make offerings before stepping over the thresholds of each other’s houses. That this is what we are now.

  Get in here, would you?

  Inside he shucks off the bomber jacket. His skin is the bluish-white of those axolotls Dad never bought us.

  Six summers, he explains, like an apology. A lot to make up for – mind if I go photosynthesise? Then he spends the next few hours just lying in our backyard, stripped down to his undies. Ti will be at work a few hours yet, dislodging pieces of Lego from the throats of small, stupid dogs, treating pissed-off cats for gingivitis. Fynn keeps his eyes closed as we speak about nothing much: Mum and Sara synching up their mid- and quarter-life crises; the Perth mining boom; the resulting ice boom; the inevitable rehab boom.

  I rant about my students, mostly write-offs. Teaching them the difference between Rhizaria and Chromalveolata when it would be more use teaching them the difference between papillomavirus and chlamydia.

  All the while my brother’s face is turned directly towards the sun. I study the frail red and grey blood vessels on his neartranslucent eyelids, limpid as rock-pool creatures down there in the deep set of his skull. The drive from the airport would have taken him past those crosses, the gleaming reinforced barrier.

  What? he says from behind his closed eyes.

  Nothing. You’re burning, you know.

  Beaut. Fine by me. Six bloody summers …

  Yeah yeah.

  My wife falls in love with him, of course. Not in any way that could really be considered dangerous, just in the way I knew she would, the way people have always fallen in love with Fynn: quickly and easily and faithfully. It is so so so good to finally finally meet you, like a record jumping, and suddenly the crosses planted at the shoulder of the highway do not stand for two tiny girls and their singing-teacher mother. They stand for small-town intolerance, grudges borne longer than is fair or necessary, nourished by the kind of rural oxygen a larger city would have starved them of.

  The two of them stand at the kitchen sink, elbow to elbow, debearding mussels. Cracking up over something I don’t catch. In high school the couple of girls I managed to bring home laughed just as easily for him, like they were trying to wake up some sleeping thing. Fynn, my older, whiter brother, who never felt the need to take me down a notch. Who’s always had everything going for him. Why do I still think of him this way? And why is there a moment, a flash in which I also think, skulked, snuck, hauledarse … after all the defending I’ve done in the years since the accident. Especially in the first couple, with people shaking their heads in the tinned fruit-and-veg aisle. Murmuring behind their hands at the cricket though all I have in common with Fynn is some blood.

  I’m watching them over the top of my beer, my brother and my wife, somehow knowing, before it happens, that one of them is going to slice the paring knife through their palm, and the other is going to have an excuse to come at them with Dettol and cotton wool, and that I’m going to have to sit here and watch this. Then Fynn goes Ah Christ! but the gouge isn’t deep, doesn’t need Ti’s attention, and he gets on with the job of scraping away the hairy tendrils that once anchored the mollusc someplace it thought sturdy.

  Soon enough we’re sitting around the table, butterflying shells between our fingers and using the halves for slurping up the briny liquor, the house filling with a fragrant, kelpy smell.

  Ti has a theory about labour-intensive food, the kind where utensils are a waste of time and attempts at grace just make you clumsier. This theory holds: the empty shells pile up between us and the talk spills easily, as if we’ve been doing this every Saturday for years, the three of us.

  The work’s mostly just menial stuff, Fynn says. Bottling, labelling. Keeping the mice off the malt floor. Things I can’t mess up too bad. No hand in the art of it. But it’s enough to be in that landscape – that old, that immense. Part of you just disappears.

  All of you just disappeared, I think.

  Got a little boat, he’s saying. Take it out for sea trout on my days off. Bay of Isbister, Inganess …

  When he says these names it’s with that lilt, as though the words have been kept in the wrappers they came in.

  We drink all the wine that wasn’t used to steam open the mussels, and when that’s done we crack Fynn’s wedding present. I uncork the heavy-based bottle, and the North Sea rushes into the room. I slosh out three glasses and we lift them to the wedding. We lift the next round to Dad’s bypass, then another to the cousin whose dive gear let him down, and all the things that Fynn shouldn’t have missed but did and oh well what can you do he’s here now, hey?

  Ti’s giving me that watch it look; Fynn clears his throat and unfoots a mussel with a twist of fork, then goes back to seducing her with northernmost Scotland’s beauty and gloom. The peat slabs cut and lifted out of the ground, snaked-through with heather roots and reeking of time. The salt air and natural violence that make their way into the bottle. The ocean and how it differs, how the memory of Western Australia shrinks right down to a pinhole. Standing at the edge of the Yesnaby Cliffs, clouds of guillemots beating frantic overhead.

  Like the very ends of the earth out there, Fynn says.

  Like the afterlife …? And I can tell from how he looks at me that he doesn’t remember ever saying that, that he thinks I’m taking the piss. None of us are quite drunk enough to not be embarrassed by this, so I refill our glasses and we drink to our sister, whose sense of humour we incrementally destroyed.

  The bottle makes seven or eight rounds of our glasses before it’s drained, and by that stage Ti has tapped out, her sturdy brown legs drawn up beneath her on the couch, her dark hair curtaining her from our nonsense.

  Without her voice to anchor us there comes a drift, a silence so big and awful that it could be holding anything, but I know what’s lurking. I try to head it off with small talk, but Fynn just nods. Here it comes, I think. Here it is.

  You’ve seen him around, I s’pose?

  Who?

  Fynn shakes his head, as if I’m the coward.

  Yeah. I see him sometimes. Not all that often.

  And?

  Look. Fynn. There’s nothing I can tell you that’s going to make you feel less shitful about it. Last year I saw him at the Farmers’ Arms, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died five years ago. A few months back I saw him at the post office, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died six years ago. What else is there to say?

  It happened in a heartbeat. In a glisk, Fynn has since said. Swerving to miss the dog that came trotting out of the scrub. Swinging his ute into the oncoming lane, into the oncoming sedan. Just a glisk, then. And the safety barrier just for show, apparently, eaten through by salt air and melting away like bad magic at the first kiss of fender.

  I met a woman, Fynn says. Sweet clever type from the library. When I’d stay with her overnight, there’d be the sound of her kids running around the house in the morning. Sound of them laughing downstairs or talking in funny voices to the cat. It was too much, Raf. I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t stay.

  I keep looking for something, my brother goes on. Something that’ll fill up this scooped-out place but drink doesn’t do it. Sex doesn’t do it. I walk a bleeding lot, and the wind there wants to rip you open, but it isn’t enough. I’ll think maybe I can lose it in a roomful of people, like it’ll be made to seem smaller somehow, but no, it’s like everyone can all already see it, smell it on me.

  I make to recharge our glasses then remember there’s nothing to recharge them with.

  You want to know the best it gets? Really, the best it gets?

  Come on, I tell him, get your stupid jacket.

  I’m further under than he is but I know the last thing he wants is a steering wheel to hold. I climb in the driver’s side of Ti’s Golf, fix the mirrors while F
ynn hides his eyes behind a pair of aviators.

  You don’t want those. Anyway, you still look like you, just more of an arsehole. Everyone looks like an arsehole in aviators.

  Right, he says, flinging them into the lantana.

  Since Fynn left some Perth kids came down and reopened the Kingfisher Hotel. The smoke-damaged collection of taxidermied birds that made it through the 2009 fire (suspected arson) are still roosting about the liquor shelves. The fibre optic thing is still there, the pool table is still there. But the bar’s been refitted, a big slab of reclaimed redgum – behind it the top tier stuff is seven tiers up, and the bartender has to put down his copy of the DSM-5 or whatever and hop a ladder to get to it.

  These boys don’t know Fynn. These boys will pour him his drink without asking just how he likes being back home.

  We take bar seats opposite a singed black cockatoo, its glassy eye on the rum selection. Fynn wins the wallet race, the leather split like overripe pawpaw, gaping fifties.

  You need to carry all that around?

  From the Travelex. I closed all my accounts when I left Australia.

  You really weren’t planning on coming back, huh.

  Guess I wasn’t.

  There are Fynn’s hands, threaded mangrove-like around his glass. Roughened by work that has nothing to do with him, work that carries nothing of himself. In my shed there’s a second table and a set of chairs and a bookshelf. In February it heats up to a million degrees in there – six bloody summers – all the wood has buckled and split along the joins, the wires gone slack or snapped, all that careful tension ruined. I should have kept them inside. I should have driven into Perth this morning, been there waiting when he hefted his bag off the carousel. Now it’s all I can do to lift my pint glass and meet his.

  Of course the guy was always going to appear, his company cap pulled low, eyes shaded from the glare of pool table fluorescents. It takes him a moment – I see it, my brother sees it – to register that it’s really Fynn sitting here, and when he does it’s as if all the doors have blown open at once, the air pressure changes that fast. And if the glasses in their corral don’t shatter, and the stuffed birds don’t take flight … if the tables don’t upend of their own accord, it’s only because of the steadying hand someone puts on the fella’s shoulder, guiding him back to the game, to his shot, to the rip of felt as he jabs too hard with the cue, the crack of the white against the five and the grinding roll in the belly of the table as the ball is captured there.