The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  Karl, lying in the paddling-pool and glugging wine from a Vegemite glass, shouted, ‘And I got this for you, Becs!’ bashing the plastic pond with his still-hairless calves. ‘I nicked it from K-mart!’

  Nana chuckled but my mother looked away as she does when people spit in the street.

  ‘There’s nothing like the wide blue ocean!’ laughed Karl.

  ‘So, Rebecca, are you going back to uni?’ asked Mum.

  Rebecca took off her shoes and sat in the paddling pool with Karl, her jeans getting soaked through.

  I was watching from the sidelines as usual, poised to fetch napkins or answer the phone should it ring. Looking back, I see that we were all trying to act normally but our humour was strained and we were cautious with our words. Tiptoeing, inching our way. Candour is impossible amongst us. We’d have to be at the end of the world, on the edge of a crisis bigger than any puddle of blood we’ve ever seen, and only then could we whisper what we really feel.

  But there was no chance of honesty that day, with Rebecca’s backpack still in the hall and the fear she wouldn’t come home at all still present with us. So we smiled, tipping our heads back into the sunlight, and we didn’t admit we were half-expecting her to break apart before our eyes. I think she understood all this and was happy to talk nonsense too, dipping her hand in the water to save another black beetle from drowning.

  She gave me my present later; a little straw doll with wings to hang in my car. A little crackly angel to hover over my dashboard.

  *

  A week later, Rebecca has crept back under the covers and we fear it’s all going to happen again; the silence, the tears, the horrible gnawing fear of her harming herself. She’s decided not to eat or move, although decide is far too dynamic a word.

  ‘I can’t stand to hear her crying through the walls,’ says Karl.

  My father gives up trying to reason with her through the keyhole and goes to his study to write, the loops growing larger, the focus looser. To forgive him his dependency, we’ve tried to convince ourselves that he’s a genius, that the whisky is as essential as his sharpened pencils. ‘I’m a traditionalist!’ he shouted once, lurching in the corridor. ‘Longhand and booze!’ We kept our alarm to ourselves. One casualty is enough.

  My mother has turned on her laptop and spread her work out on the dining-room table. She puts together development proposals for dead areas of the city, spending her days walking up alleyways and taking snapshots of defunct factories. She conspires with architects and members of the local government. If she could, she’d see a shopping mall or a block of luxury high-rise apartments on every corner.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do about your sister,’ she tells me. ‘I have to finish this report by the morning.’ Her face looks sickly in the glow of the computer screen. My poor mother. Her hopes for us have been thwarted; we are so plodding and mediocre.

  *

  On the first night after Rebecca’s arrival, Nana pulled the disintegrating shoebox of photos from the back of her cupboard.

  ‘This was your grandfather cutting cane up north,’ she said.

  Sitting either side of her on the bed, we gazed with adoration at the sun-blackened face of this man we never knew. We could smell the stink of working men and hear the flies buzzing round the amber cane as loud as helicopters.

  Nana held out dog-eared photos of peeling weather-board houses we’ve never lived in and strangers with all manner of moustaches. The craggy coast of her flat island home.

  I got up and gave Nana her medicine – steroids to keep her blood moving.

  ‘Bloody asteroids,’ she whined. ‘They send me to outer-space.’

  When I’d got her under the covers, she took Rebecca’s chin between her fingers and said, ‘Isn’t she bewdiful, eh? When she was little, she’d cry to see a lost dog. Cry over nursery rhymes. Jack fell down and broke his crown! Owwwooohh!!’

  Rebecca giggled and then Nana turned to me. ‘And you were the one who was always thinking. All the time working it through in that computer you got in your head.’

  It didn’t seem so much of a compliment.

  ‘We should go back to Malta,’ she went on. ‘You two wouldn’t have a chance to float away. There’d be people, eh. Real family to hold on to.’

  *

  That night the sky seemed so very high above the tops of the swaying blue gums. Rebecca and I sat on the back lawn. Rebecca said she saw falling stars but I was looking the wrong way at the moment each one appeared.

  ‘Going away did nothing at all,’ she said later. ‘It’s with me. It’s always with me.’

  *

  Karl’s best friend, Paul, with his acne and prominent bones, is loitering in our kitchen like a stray dog round the tip. My mother is kind to him and I’m proud she remembers how to be warm.

  He looks at her with some kind of devotion and says, ‘Hey, Mrs O’Brien, I remember one morning when me and Karl got back here from drinking all night’ – my mother does a comic frown, never sure of the part she should play – ‘and you were in the kitchen in your dressing gown. You gave us a glass of pineapple juice to drink and that juice was the sweetest, most pineapply thing I’ve ever drunk in all my life. I always remember the taste of that drink, Mrs O’Brien.’

  My mother is rendered oddly speechless. Perhaps she feels how strange it is that this boy has held on to a memory of her goodness.

  But then Karl comes down and the boys crack fists. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ they say and they’re gone, loud and rude and taking with them any last trace of summer.

  *

  The dean was wrong. My father is a fighter. He brawls with anyone who opposes his truth of universal goodness. He battles pessimism, lack of communication, the hospital with their clinical diagnoses and my mother’s inhuman composure. Most of all, he fights the part of Rebecca that’s chewing up the other part. When he’s drinking, he can fight with most vigour. Wildness floods his muscles. He rages against her doorframe.

  But I’m the only one she lets inside her room. Once there, I sit by her skinny body offering sandwiches while she carps on to me about economic doom and rising oceans, about spiritual emptiness and the absence of an afterlife.

  I want to tell her that if she doesn’t move then neither can we, but instead I say, ‘It’s okay, Becs. I love you. I won’t stop. I’ll keep on giving you love.’

  ‘And how will that help?’ she asks, alarming me with the power in her two dead eyes.

  *

  I like to imagine a scenario where Rebecca and I are soldiers in a war. Wearing combat greens and rubber boots, we’re sheltering in a trench while everyone around us fights. In my dream, the disease she lives with is a real wound with a real cause. I can see the gaping hole and the blood that seeps out. And in the dream, I know how to fix her. I have my needle and thread. I say, ‘Stay still Rebecca. I’ll do everything I can not to hurt you but you must be brave.’ She cries out as I sew her up and tie the thread. The stitching doesn’t look like it will hold – the raw skin puckering around it. Her eyes are squeezed shut but we wait while the war rages and soon the rawness begins to mend, the stitches dissolve and then we can run our hand over that wound, see the scar, but know that it’s gone.

  *

  I have my own flat now. A tiny box floored with charmless lino. I have phone calls to make, bills to file and a boyfriend called Jack who needs to be held and inspected. Twenty-six last April, Jack reckons he’s found grey hairs in his sideburns. I suspect he’s feeling old for the first time in his life.

  ‘I’m moving out,’ I tell Rebecca.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Fuck off.’

  An old song I hear in the car cracks open this nearly numb chest of mine and makes me long for those hot-blooded days when she and I lay on my bed, feet out the window, watching storms explode above the telegraph wires, or when we hypnotised possums with flashlights, or snuck into a hotel pool up the coast and swam, watching the shiny underside of bats fly above us.

  R
ebecca’s disappointed that I don’t live for these moments of rapture anymore. It’s true. I’m ordinary. I’ve accepted the inadequacies of living. But I can’t sit beside her forever and whisper that discovering the world is a matter of choice. I can’t remind her of the smile on her face when she wore that strapless sea-green dress to her formal. I can’t tell her she’s so alive she just might have to die while I, half-dead, can afford to go on living. And so I leave her, a white frame twisted on a bed, those sharp-angled thoughts cutting into her brain.

  *

  I climb the stairs to the new flat and find Jack washing dirt from under his nails. He starts telling me about the native plants that have just arrived at his nursery and asks if I can help with planting the seeds on Sunday.

  ‘I’m going grey,’ he says, smiling at me in the bathroom mirror. ‘Do you want to leave me?’

  I come close and explore his scalp, my fingers creeping like pincers. I can’t exactly remember but I think we’ve done this whole routine before. There’s reassurance in our familiarity. Rebecca would say how dull we are but I soak him up.

  ‘How is she?’ he asks.

  I won’t say. Being here with him now is so healthy.

  *

  It’s late. Karl and Paul are spinning pearly bottle tops in the park, talking about the engines of cars they don’t own. My mum sits in bed alone, a travel magazine open on her lap. She’s staring at an image of New York, thinking that perhaps she’ll take a trip one day when Rebecca is strong. My dad, growing sober, is about to cry through her keyhole once more and Nana sleeps, galloping over fields that might exist in Elysium but certainly nowhere in Malta.

  Rebecca rolls over and scratches a heel that’s going tender from under-use. She stares at a smudge on her wall from a livelier time.

  Listen, I tell her, there can be beauty in a rectangular house, in a slab of sky and a doorbell. There can be enchantment along hot carbon roads. There’s dignity in all this, I promise her.

  I can’t sleep. I’m not used to the new place. And so here I am, wide awake and hoping that she’ll come flying back to us through this husky summer air she thinks is dead. I’m sending Rebecca all my faith, this faith in life that hangs about like a vagrant in a doorway.

  I Forgot My Programme So I Went to

  Get It Back or 101 Reasons

  Joshua Lobb

  Reasons not to say anything:

  1. You don’t want to make a fuss.

  2. You don’t want to make this any more complicated than it is.

  3. He won’t remember anyway.

  4. It’s nice enough that the usher said she’d get the house manager. This is London, after all.

  5. You don’t want to have to buy another one. £3.50. Think of the exchange rate.

  6. She didn’t need to bother. The theatre was all locked and they were just about to go home. She could have said No or You’ll have to buy a new one or You came all the way back up that long street for a stupid programme?

  7. She could have stood there in that stolid stony-faced English way and frozen you out. Instead she said Oh let me see if – just wait there. And fetched the house manager.

  8. You’re standing there, sweaty from the sudden turn around and the rush back up the black-lit London street. Your Fortnum & Mason’s carry bag filled to the brim with tourist detritus: postcards from the National Portrait Gallery and a refilled water bottle and an umbrella and a half-eaten Double Decker bar.

  9. Nobody likes sweat.

  10. She went that extra mile for you. And now the house manager’s gone that extra mile for you. The least you can do is thank him politely and get out of there.

  11. It’s late.

  12. The moment has passed to say anything.

  13. You should have said it as soon as he came through the auditorium doors. What a thing to remember.

  14. Let’s face it: you don’t have any proof that you bought one in the first place. And he’s just unlocked the cupboard with all the programmes – all the £3.50 programmes – and he’s handing it over to you.

  15. He had to squat down to get to the cupboard. Cut him some slack.

  16. You may have to get into a conversation about the play. The play was not really worth talking about. Not awful – not like some plays you remember – but not worth talking about.

  17. He couldn’t care less what you think, I’m sure.

  18. Be grateful that he’s not making you pay for a new programme.

  19. He’s probably heard it all before.

  20. And – even now with your student days behind you – £3.50 is a lot of money.

  21. You’re in London, not Sydney.

  22. You’re grown men, not students.

  23. You’re fat now. You’ve got a beard.

  24. He could say It’s bad enough that I had to come all this way down the stairs through the auditorium doors down the access ramp and squat down in front of the programmes cupboard: now I have to engage in an awkward conversation?

  25. What would you say, anyway?

  26. The Fortnum & Mason’s bag is heavy. You still have to lug it all the way back down that long street.

  27. There’s grey in your beard. You’re fat.

  28. Just take the damn programme.

  29. He’s handing you the programme. He’s being friendly. Don’t make this awkward.

  30. There’s awkward, and there’s awkward. Don’t go there.

  31. Yes, you did say something when he came through the doors, but he may not have heard it.

  32. He’s busy. He’s had a long night.

  33. You said Oh I know you, and he didn’t respond. Just leave it at that.

  34. Oh I know you is not something that you want to hear when you’re busy, when you’ve had a long night.

  35. But he’s had ample opportunity to notice me. He should recognise me.

  36. It could be worse. Rather than handing me the programme, smiling politely, he could in fact have said Well! You claim to have left your programme in the auditorium but my ushers found no programme left behind. He could say My ushers have better things to do than to listen to the ravings of some fat grey-flecked beardie weirdie with a tatty Fortnum & Mason’s bag. Take your Double Decker bar and get out of here.

  37. It’s unlikely that he would use the phrase My ushers, not from what I remember of him.

  38. It’s likely to rain. You still have to traipse back down that long street carrying your packed Fortnum & Mason’s bag.

  39. He could have recognised you and is choosing to ignore you.

  40. More probably, he doesn’t recognise you.

  41. It was – Jesus – fifteen years ago?

  42. It was in Sydney, not London.

  43. We were students, not grown men.

  44. He probably doesn’t even remember. Why should he? It wasn’t his moment. It was mine.

  45. It’s not like it was anything memorable. One song.

  46. I don’t even remember his name.

  47. You can’t say Oh I remember you but I don’t remember your name.

  48. Keep it clean and simple. Let him give you the programme and get out of there.

  49. Blazey’s boyfriend is all I have to say.

  50. I wonder if Blazey remembers?

  51. I can’t say You were Blazey’s boyfriend, weren’t you?

  52. Maybe he doesn’t want to remember Blazey. What if the break-up was terrible? What if he spent fifteen years blotting Blazey out of his mind and now I come in with Oh I know you – you’re Blazey’s ex, aren’t you?

  53. It’s stupid to say Oh I know you when you don’t even remember his name.

  54. And it’s clear he doesn’t remember me.

  55. This is probably the least important moment of the day. The National Portrait Gallery and St Paul’s the Actor’s Church and a walk up to Islington and a night at the theatre. Don’t dwell on moments.

  56. He’s giving you the programme. Just take the programme, you idiot.

  57. What do y
ou want to say anyway? Thank you? Thank you for what?

  58. If it was important then he’d remember it.

  59. It doesn’t matter to him.

  60. There’s only so long he can squat there, his arm outstretched, offering you the programme.

  61. It wasn’t sexual if that’s what you’re thinking. Maybe he does remember and he’s thinking that I was in love with him or something. It wasn’t that.

  62. It’s too late. The moment has passed.

  63. Let it go. You’ve got the programme in your hand now. You don’t have to fork out another £3.50.

  64. It was such a small moment anyway. You idiot.

  65. You’re an idiot. Fifteen years have passed and you still remember that tiny moment. Other people have let it drift away like the small moment that it was. Just one song in the night. Just one quiet moment after a horrible year.

  66. It was an indulgent moment. Let it go, you idiot. One song can’t save a life. One Blazey-boyfriend listening to one beardless student singing one song does not save a life.

  67. It’s not that I remembered it before tonight. I only remembered it when he came swinging through the auditorium doors. I’d completely forgotten about it. But it was an important moment for me.

  68. He may not even remember Blazey. He may have moved to London, become a grown man, forgotten Sydney, forgotten Blazey. He may not have to hold little moments in his head. He may not need little moments to keep him moving forward, away from Sydney, from student life, from Blazey.

  69. How would you even remind him? Oh I know you is all you’ve come up with so far and that didn’t really make an impact. Probably because you don’t know him. He was just Blazey’s boyfriend who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

  70. It may not even have mattered who had been there. It could have been any one of Blazey’s boyfriends who needed to be there. Or anyone’s boyfriend. Or anyone at all. The important thing is that it had to be someone I didn’t know. Someone outside the horribleness of that year.