The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  Now the girl was really quite happy to be inland. It was warm and dry-smelling, and the mountain had been purple. The boy had told the truth and she trusted him in the thickening dark. He was bigger than her, and seemed someone she could lean on if she had to, though she’d never have to, she was sure. And there were bats. Best of all, there were bats. She wondered what they looked like, really looked like, up close. And then she shook her hair in the dark-light with excitement, thinking she’d light up the night with her blondeness. She did this for herself, but also for the boy, the mountain and the bats.

  And at least one bat heard her. There was a pulling and a tangling and a clawing in her hair and she screamed a short, stifled scream.

  There was a bat tangled in her hair. The boy knew straight away and took her arm and directed her towards the lights of the house. Keep calm, he said, bats often get caught in people’s hair. Keep calm or it will tangle worse.

  She was sobbing but his steady matter-of-fact voice kept her calm. She knew the bat must be confused and in terror – this knowledge overrode everything.

  The boy was amazed at her ‘self-control,’ as his father would have said. Get some self-control, son! And here she was, terrified and in pain and in control. It was as if a spell had been cast. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t normally swish her hair about, it’s just that it was a special day. That it was because of him.

  They reached the front door and he called inside for help. The adults rushed out, her mother instantly upset, her father looking sheepish. Somebody said, Calm, calm ... scissors, we need scissors. And the scissors were found. Leave plenty of hair around the bat or it will get hurt, the boy said. And the girl, gritting her teeth and fighting the ultimate hair fight, said the same.

  Nasty bat, said one of the mothers. And such beautiful hair.

  It looks repulsive. Looks like a dead hand. Watch its little claws. And those teeth!

  I am sorry, darling, but you’re going to be a sight by the time we’ve got this beastie out, said the boy’s mother, all practicality and dexterity.

  I don’t care! I don’t care! exclaimed the girl. I ... and then she paused to feel the bat clawing and making a distressed sound, maybe echolocating the scissors and her hair and her skin and the blood pumping warm beneath. I want to see it, she said.

  Bats are dirty creatures, said the boy’s mother. They carry disease. The boy’s father squeezed the mother’s arm and whispered, You’ll frighten her more.

  But the girl no longer cared. I want to see it!

  And she did – caught in a hank of her hair. Entangled and frightened. She starred at it with wild eyes, then looked to the boy who had been closely watching the operation. Take it, she pleaded with him in a way that made the adults shrink back. Take it and let it go so it can fly back through the dark to reach tomorrow’s sunset, to wake when the mountain is purple, to fly into the dusk, the night.

  The bat was placed on the veranda, struggling under the moth-light in the net of translucent and blackening hair. It started a slow, agonising clawing towards the edge of the veranda.

  The boy flew from the veranda, through the flywire door, to his room, where he retrieved an old shoebox. By the time he was back, the bat had almost plunged over the edge, watched by the stunned and possessed. Deftly, he scooped it into the box with the lid.

  Be careful! his mother said as the boy gently pulled strands of hair away from claws and membranes between limbs, watching the sharp teeth, the tiny half-moon eyes, the veined ears, the fur.

  Come inside now, said the girl’s mum. You look a fright, darling. She kept saying this as if to soothe herself.

  No, please, Mum. I want to see the bat fly free.

  So the adults stepped gingerly inside, unsure about everything, watching through the window as the girl and the boy worked together to disentangle the bat.

  And then it clawed its way up the wall of the box to the edge as the last strands were extracted, its heart visibly beating in the vein-work, through the fur, mouth open and panting. The boy said, It will remember you forever and it will tell the other bats of the light in the dark, how it really saw you.

  She smiled, and reached without thinking to the bald spot on her head.

  As the bat suddenly flew into the darkness, they grabbed for each other’s hands, and the boy said, I like your hair like that. It looks cool.

  Agni

  A Neighbour’s Photo

  Mike Ladd

  They appear suddenly in the dogbox flats behind us. Arwan and Niall, tall and slim and Sudan black. A generation ago they would have become ‘Alan and Neil,’ but now at least they can keep their names intact. Arwan is about thirteen. He meets our son on the school oval one evening. He says his older brother Niall is angry with him and he doesn’t want to go back to the flat. Their mother is in a refugee camp in Kenya and their father is still in Sudan – doing what, we never find out. Niall, at eighteen, is Arwan’s guardian. They walked thirty days from Sudan into Kenya and now here they are, stark against our horizon of cream brick flats, trying to learn a new language, trying to understand how this place works.

  This place where dogs are fed fresh chicken breasts, and swimming pools are fenced off for the exclusive use of just two people. This place where the religious days are as mixed as the styles of food and it’s all ‘go easy, cruise along, don’t take too much interest,’ but then suddenly a minor traffic incident makes strangers explode into punch-throwing violence. These dead-quiet streets interrupted by hotted-up cars driven by men yelling out something savage as they go past. This place where the magpies sing and the eucalypts form silhouettes against the orange west and their bark clatters and falls to reveal new phosphorous green and mars-violet skins. In this strange world at evening, Arwan waits out on the oval.

  Arwan stutters badly – he’s in trouble with his brother because he went out all day without telling Niall where he was. Niall cuffed him about the head when he came home, so he ran out and has been wandering the suburb. Now that it’s dark he’s worried Niall will be even angrier. He shows us a bruise above his elbow, ‘My … brother … he … hit … me.’ His stutter is a series of gasps before each word, a gulping for air. We’re not sure how much English he understands. When our son brings him into the house he doesn’t react when we ask if he wants a lemon drink. He stands there observing. I am cooking dinner and he finds this funny, a man in the kitchen chopping vegetables, as odd as a horse in a tree.

  We feed him. He’s hungry though we can tell he doesn’t like the chilli we use in the stir-fry. ‘H ... H ... H ... Hot,’ he says, fanning his tongue. After dinner we go with him to the flat to tell Niall that Arwan has been with us. The front door opens straight into the lounge off a treeless pen of cement enclosed by a high metal fence. Inside there is almost nothing. Two plastic chairs. No television. A couple of beds in the next room.

  Niall’s English is much better – and he speaks another three languages, Swahili, Arabic and Dinka. He explains how hard it is to discipline Arwan. Niall must be the father now, but he’s only a teenager himself, and the boy doesn’t show him enough respect.

  Arwan appears next evening in the middle of our lounge while we are watching a DVD. One of us turns around and he is simply there, standing quietly in the dark. We explain about knocking on doors and being invited in. Now he is at our front door almost every night. He would like a drink of water. Can he use the telephone? He needs a lift to his married sister’s house. He would like to live with his sister but since he has reached puberty, their tradition prevents it. He wants to play with our son. Arwan likes basketball but dislikes the egg shape of Australian Rules footballs. Later, he appears with a half-wrecked pushbike donated by the local church. It has no brakes and its tyres are worn through. The front tyre is flat. I fix the brakes and repair the punctured tube, but tell him it will keep happening with such threadbare tyres. He comes two, three, four times to have punctures repaired. I should really buy him new tyres, but never get around to it.
In the end, when our son gets a new bike for his birthday, Arwan inherits the old one.

  Arwan’s English improves, but his stammer does not. We often wonder what it’s like for him in a foreign schoolyard with a stutter like that. He says Niall has ‘girlfriends’ at the flat and he has to go out. He picks the grapes from our vine without asking. He comes over so often our son says he’s sick of him – he’s too annoying.

  One afternoon Arwan gives us a badly torn black and white photograph. The bottom left-hand corner is missing, and the whole picture is crushed and dog-eared. He asks if we could fix it for him. The image shows a young Sudanese woman in a Western tailored dress and an older Sudanese man in a Western suit. They stare seriously, unsmiling and slightly off-centre, at the camera. The stamp at the back of the image says ‘Modern Photographers Khartoum.’ We imagine the heat and the dusty light outside the studio walls – how sweat patches are hidden in the Western clothes by arms held formally at their sides. Arwan’s mother and father in this family portrait are as impersonal as a mugshot. Nevertheless, this is Arwan’s only picture of his mother and as it turns out, the only sight he will have of her for the next several years. We do not understand the delay in his mother’s arrival from the Kenyan refugee camp – that is, if she is really there – and we see it causes him distress, so we stop asking him about it. He tells us the man in the photograph is not his father, but his uncle. Another aspect we don’t really understand.

  Arwan and his brother move out of the dogbox flats. Everything they own fits in one carload. Niall has a factory job and wants to be closer to it. Arwan continues to visit, turning up unannounced, having walked kilometres across the western suburbs. He never phones first. Sometimes our son is not home, and after a glass of water, Arwan walks away again. We had forgotten the photo. My wife pulls it out of a drawer and carefully repairs it with sticky tape and puts it into a spare frame. It waits on a side cupboard for Arwan to collect next time he walks here. Two strangers stare down our hallway, watching the front door.

  The Adelaide Review

  Still Here

  Anna Krien

  Enormous things are in the water now. Bull sharks roll below the surface and carp with whiskers like whips slip under the house. A great swatch of brown cloth, the water won’t break – it just bulges and inhales as if it were a single living creature. Stuart and I make promises, like when the water gets this high – and we mark it on the stilts with blue Texta – we’ll leave. But we’ve made eight blue marks, first from the ground in our gumboots, and the last three Stuart hung upside down from the veranda to draw them. Each blue mark disappears overnight, regular enough to make us paranoid that someone is floating past to rub them out, rather than the waters actually rising. And so, on account of our suspicion, we’re still here. On his haunches, feet wrinkled and blue from the cold, Stuart spits at the water from the veranda. His phlegm clings to the stumps. The air rings with the tinnitus of mosquitoes. The lichen that grew on the shower curtain is spreading all over the walls like a pale-green flocking. The carpet squelches under my gumboots. In Beth’s old bedroom, the pink paint is lifting off the walls, bubbling like a rash. Her single bed, neatly made with a colourful crocheted rug, stands solid in the water. The stilts at the back of the house have sunk lower than the front, so the rear of the house is filling with water and collecting in the belly of her old wardrobe. Tadpoles dart through the ground-floor rooms of her flooded dolls’ house.

  Each morning I get dressed in town clothes, as if the water might suddenly recede and I’ll be able to do the errands. Stuart doesn’t bother. He’s been wearing the same shorts and T-shirt since the sky broke down. If Beth was here – not as the nineteen-year-old university student she is now, whose shoulders stiffen whenever we talk to her, but if she were eight again – she’d have insisted on staying in her room despite the water, and listened to the lap of tiny waves against the skirting boards. She’d have enjoyed the adventure of her bed slowly lifting and floating like a raft. She and the boys could make boats from Paddle-Pop sticks, and the sample perfume bottles I used to bring home from the chemist would wash up in the corridor with tiny notes inside them. But we haven’t heard from Beth for months. Not since Stuart pulled out the internet cord in a rage and told her she wasn’t welcome home until she took everything – her photos, her poems, everything – off the web. I didn’t mind it so much. Some things she wrote were hurtful – but we don’t know for sure that she was writing about us. I tried to tell Stuart that, remind him that she always did have a good imagination. But Stuart was furious. ‘I am a goddamn English teacher,’ he said.

  Without telling him I used the computer at the library to look her up after he disconnected our internet. The photos aren’t as slutty as he thinks they are. She looks like she is having fun. And she has hundreds of friends. I study all the boys in the pictures with her and wonder which one is her boyfriend. I opened a Hotmail account and emailed her a few times. I thought we were getting along, but her last email was too much. Susie told me what happened. Tell Dad he is a hypocrite. No, actually, he’s worse than that. He’s disgusting. And you’re an idiot for staying with him. It was a cruel email to receive. I deleted it and shut down my account. As for the boys, I don’t know if they know. They haven’t said anything. I called them and asked them to help after the sandbags we laid out around the stumps kept getting nicked. But they were too busy and couldn’t get time off work. I tried to speak to Beth but her housemate said he’d get her and then left me on the line. I don’t know if he forgot about me or if she was home and refused to come to the phone, but I sat there for some time, listening to the sounds of our daughter’s life. Eventually someone must have seen the phone off the hook and hung it up.

  The rescue boats pass us everyday. Once we even saw our cat on it, sitting proudly on the bow. But we can’t call out. Stuart says what’s the point; they’re just staying at the community centre, eating and shitting together. We may as well stay put and be civilised about it, he reckons. But it’s more than that. No one on the boat even looks at us, let alone checks to see if we’re okay. I’m surprised they let our cat aboard.

  We can tell who’s left. The hovering orange glows of cigarettes and drifts of smoke give them away. Eddie Rollins is in his place behind us; the Bertie sisters across the road; and further down the way Joe Feltham is still there. During the day the boat checks on all three households, trying to persuade them to leave. But so far they’ve stuck to their guns, probably convinced that if they go they’ll never return. A couple days back, Eddie’s wife went with the boat. She has emphysema. The poor woman never smoked a cigarette in her life but got it from Eddie’s smoking. Their cockatoo, Frankie, got it too but died pretty quick. For the past three years, Narelle sat at the window with a plastic oxygen mask attached to her face. Eddie had a lit cigarette in his mouth as he helped her down to the boat.

  The Bertie sisters must have a stockpile of cigarettes. They light their smokes off each other’s, as if to keep some vigil going. A single orange glow leans in, blossoms and then after the brief flare separates into two pulsing lights. My grandpa used to always talk about cigarettes as the perk of serving in Papua New Guinea instead of Europe during the war. ‘You could smoke at night because of the fireflies,’ he’d say. ‘The damn things were everywhere. They made us right jumpy at the start but after a while we stopped shooting at them. We didn’t have enough ammunition to shoot at a million specks of orange just in case one of them was a Jap having a smoko.’ He laughed as if he were the luckiest bastard in the world because he and his mates could smoke while knee-deep in mud and leeches. Even coming back with one arm couldn’t dampen it for him. ‘I can still smoke,’ he’d say when we pointed this out, holding up a cigarette in his sole hand.

  At night we can hear a canoe cutting the water near us, wooden paddles stirring the night. The whirr of fishing line is followed by the plonk of a sinker. Stuart and I hold our breath, staring hard at the black, trying to make out the shape of the boa
t. I rub my calves, using the last of the eucalyptus oil on my shin splints from netball. My muscles are locking up from the wet. Like the worms that showed up at the beginning of the storms, wriggling red all over the footpaths, the veins on my legs are swelling and rising to the surface. The lumpy feel of them makes me sick. Eventually in the black, a fish is jerked out and slaps against the surface of the flood, trying to get back under its wet covers but it is as if the river has hardened, leaving the fish to the metric clicking of a spinning reel.

  The storms began a week and a half ago. Stuart kept saying, ‘What’s everyone complaining about? We need the rain.’ But anyone who knows anything about farming knows that a flood after a drought is just as bad as no rain. Stuart is a typical city man like that. Thinks he knows everything. Or at least, that everything that can be seen can be known. There’s something about how a flood can change all that. It has cloaked this town like a sheet over the dead. The spill of water as it coagulated around the cattle, muting the bleats of drowning sheep; the branches of ti-tree rubbing against each other sounding like rusty swings until their roots loosen, let go and tip over. And then silence. That’s obvious, I suppose, but it’s a different kind of silence to the one we had been getting used to.

  Stuart emptied out the supermarket after it happened. He did the shopping anyway, all five aisles, including the toiletry aisle – which is a first for him – but at the checkout no one would serve him. They had turned off the lights above their registers and put the folded closed signs on their conveyor belts. Then, so they wouldn’t have to look him in the eye, they stood outside on the street smoking. Not even Susie, Beth’s best friend, served him. After that, Stuart didn’t bother going back to the high school to clear out his desk. Said he didn’t need to be told he was fired. When his graduating class got their marks back – the best final-year results in the history of the school – the local newspaper rewrote history by stating the Year 12s were taught by Mr Robbs. Which they are now.