Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  By next morning the glow has gone. My skin is oversensitive. I feel separate fibres in the cloth of my shirt. My face will not settle comfortably in its covering. My thighs shiver as if with cold.

  Sammy picks up my Valentine’s card.

  That’s just like your writing, Mummy, he says.

  I book for another massage. In the waiting room, I read about an autistic woman in America. She isn’t able to relate to people emotionally. She doesn’t have relationships, doesn’t understand how they work. Yet hugging and holding are the things which ease her edgy autistic world. Since childhood there hasn’t been enough hugging in her life to meet her needs. So she has designed and built herself a hug machine. It is based on contraptions used for holding calves, wedging them between two pieces of metal and tipping them up. She has controls within reach and can change the pressure of the hug at will. She clamps herself in this crush whenever her need is great. She stays there for hours at a time.

  I imagine being pressed—as if held in the strongest arms— for hours, a day, as long as I like. My whole body responds, relaxes, at the mere thought of it. Calm enters my limbs.

  I have a mission. I ring around metal fabrication companies trying to describe what I want without giving away its purpose. I am met with puzzlement, suspicion. My father would have been able to build it. On his farm he sized up any need, considered materials and design, then set to work. Posthole diggers, tree stump removers, self-opening gates. He also made a crush for the cows. Something like the autistic woman’s but less elaborate. He used it for drenching, castrating, branding. If only he were here, we could have pored over designs on butcher’s paper, made adjustments, additions. He would have built it for me.

  Or perhaps he simply would have hugged me.

  Finally a man returns my call, saying he’d like to come over and discuss my project. He says he is a one man operation and prides himself on being able to make anything.

  If you can imagine it, he says in a reassuring voice, Max Assunzione can build it.

  We arrange a time and I sit with a pencil and paper making drawing after drawing and scrapping each one until suddenly the doorbell rings.

  Max Assunzione at your service, says the man on the doorstep.

  I take in his tree-like frame and a smile as wide as a wedge of watermelon. I warm up under the sunlamps of his eyes. But mostly what hold my attention are his hands. He spreads them in front of him like an offering.

  I know we said Wednesday, Yvonne, but I was in this area on another job when I called you and I ended up with a bit of time up my sleeve. So I thought I’d drop by and maybe we could make a start.

  His hands are like the largest knobs of ginger you can buy if you go very early to the farmers’ market stalls. They are buckled and blunted and ridged. My fingers itch to trace a callous back to its source. The hands clasp like a priest’s against his overalled chest.

  So what do you think?

  What do I think?

  Shall we make a start?

  Oh. I think…My son…There’s no time…

  His smile widens and he says,…like the present.

  I smile back at him. I suppose you’re right, I say. Come in then. I’ve been making some drawings.

  We sit on opposite sides of the coffee table. I watch the way he listens to me. His concentration is such that I see my crush taking shape in his mind and almost expect it to materialise in the room beside us. He looks at my drawings. He makes new ones.

  Suddenly the door flies open.

  Sammy!

  Mum! You didn’t come and get me!

  Sammy. Oh my god. Did you walk home by yourself?

  No, I walked home with Sky and her mum. They live further down the street. Hello.

  Sammy climbs onto Max Assunzione’s lap as if he’s known him all his life.

  Sky is my girlfriend, he tells Max. She sent me a Valentine.

  Sky’s a beautiful name, says Max.

  He puts his hand on my son’s hair, cradling his head. I let my own neck relax and drop my head slightly backward.

  Mummy got a Valentine, too.

  Max’s sunlamp eyes turn my way. I’m sure she did, Max says.

  From a person who writes just like her, Sammy adds.

  My head snaps forward again. My neck tenses. The sunlamps only burn brighter.

  Funny, isn’t it, says Sammy. Why are your hands like that?

  Sammy!

  Because I make things with metal. Metal’s hard on hands.

  Sammy, go and wash your own hands and you can have something to eat.

  Water trickles in the bathroom.

  I’m sorry about that, I say.

  That’s alright, Max says. I like the way kids are so straight. And anyway I’m aware of my hands. My hands tell me who I am. When I get anxious or uncertain, I only need to look at them and think, I am a man who works with metal, who makes things that other people need. The only thing is…

  He opens his palms and looks them over.

  Yes?

  The only thing is, they are so hard and ugly that… He puts his hands palm-down on his knees. That women don’t…

  He smiles down at the floorboards. You know, he says finally.

  No. I can’t believe it, I say.

  He looks up at me. Yes, he says, it’s true. I’ve felt them cringe away. I don’t dare to try any more.

  I reach out and put my hand on one of his. I turn it over and look at the rough terrain of his palm. I take the other and lift both hands to my cheeks, slide them down my neck and over my shoulders.

  Mum, Sammy calls, are we going to have cake?

  Yes, I say. First let’s get the fire going.

  Max Assunzione and I gather the drift of scrunched and twisted butcher’s paper strewn on the floor to light the fire. We touch whenever we are within reach. My body begins to turn yellow. We stuff the papers into the fireplace, make a tepee of kindling sticks, load in wood. Soon the air is crackling. An orange glow enters the afternoon.

  What are you going to make for us? Sammy asks at dinner.

  Max looks at me. I have put on my purple dress. A spark spits and fizzes in the fireplace. A log falls into red coals with a sigh.

  I’m going to make you a swing set, he says.

  Sammy claps his hands.

  Oh Mum. Cool!

  WHY CUPID IS PAINTED BLIND

  The Lesson

  KEVIN BROPHY

  At the end of his street, which is at the top of a hill, there is a medieval church with tombstones lolling around at all sorts of angles right up to the walls. Hundreds of years ago there would have been a neat parish cemetery in the block of land beside the church and a garden of flowers between church and graves. It took those few hundred years for the multiplying tombstones to tumble across the lawn into the flowerbeds and up to the walls of the church. Now the April jonquils and the bluebells grow any which way in surprising corners and gaps. The whole place is fenced off, but people still gather in the church to hold services, sometimes for a new funeral. They can always find a place to squeeze a shiny new plaque between the old tombstones. There is always room for more if you have yourself cremated. The names on the tombstones are the names of the streets around here. There’s a Mr Thorobold, ‘Barrister’, who died in the eighteenth century, he has two streets named after him. There are two signs at the gate to the church grounds, one listing the names of local men who died in the Great War and the other asking people to take away their rubbish.

  He goes in to his mother. She is watching television and drinking beer. She looks beautiful, he thinks, as she sits there in the sunlight that slants through the side window. Her red hair shines. She has chosen to sit right in the sunniest place in the room. Her sleeves are short, her crumpled blue dress is pulled above her knees. Her eyes are red because she has been crying. The television laughs, and laughs again. His mother doesn’t laugh.

  Where have you been? she asks.

  At the church, he tells her. I didn’t leave any rubbish
. It’s their small joke.

  And you didn’t lie down on a grave? Never lie down on a grave. It’ll bring you bad luck. And never sing in a graveyard either, that’s bad luck too.

  What kind of bad luck?

  You don’t want to know.

  He had in fact been lying down on a grave. He had enjoyed being down there at what he thought of as bone-level. He knew that the older boys took girls in among those tombstones at night and lay down with them in the dark where shadows helped them do whatever needed doing. He had seen couples go up there holding hands and drinking, the boys usually looking like they wanted to pick a fight with someone.

  Beside his mother on the lounge chair is a box of tissues, one new bright white paper bloom coming from its centre slit. Her hand hovers there above it as though she is considering how much more crying she needs to do. The can of beer in her other hand is probably already too warm to really enjoy. There would be fish and chips again tonight or maybe a kebab from the corner shop. That’s all right with him. Neither of them is really interested in meal times.

  What would you do, he asks, if a homeless person camped on our front garden outside your bedroom window?

  Don’t start, just don’t.

  What if there was an old man in the street who had forgotten who he was and where he lived? What would you do?

  She finishes her can and gets up to get another from the fridge, which is making a lot of mechanical noise as usual. She shoves the closed door hard because sometimes this settles the fridge. It is suddenly quiet.

  Easter is coming but this year there will be no holiday on Beeston Road in Sheringham. He will not be able to go down to the murky sea and watch the waves come in over those blue-grey shingles, so many of them and each one placed there by the infinitely patient and repetitive North Sea. No walking along the crumbling cliff top, waiting for some part of it to give way, imagining that eventually all of Norfolk could crumble into that dull sea. Two thousand years ago Vikings had come across that sea and stepped out onto those stones, shocking the villagers who never expected the sea would deliver Vikings to them. Those mad pagan Vikings taught the men of Beeston how to make the boats that would make them famous for hundreds of years, so you can’t know, can you, whether what you see coming out of the water in front of you is a dog of doom or an angel of salvation. There is just no way of telling until maybe a thousand years have gone by.

  Everything changed when they were driving back from Beeston Road last August. His father had taken them away for a holiday when he had lost his job again. They had rabbit traps and fishing rods in the back, because his father usually returned to his dream of being ‘self-sufficient’ when he was out of work. They were arguing, his mother and father, they looked ugly when they did that. His father’s face became larger in a bursting kind of way and hers was stretched and twisted and the tears would come springing out of her eyes. ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she’d say. ‘Bitch,’ he would answer under his breath. He would toss his cigarette out the window. He did it as though he might toss his own son out the window too at any moment. ‘Your fucking brother,’ he would say. It was always her brother who had done something bad. ‘I could murder him. He still owes me, and now, now…’ She put her palms out on the dashboard in front of her as if the car was a mad thing she had to restrain. The car was a poor thing that hardly went. It coughed and lunged at hills so that you thought it would never get up them. It wobbled through corners. ‘Bitch,’ his father would mutter when he glanced across at her. His job was gone and that probably meant they would have almost no money again, and his father would be at home all day in his bad way. His father’s hands had been shaking too much to hold the steering wheel steady.

  Yesterday he kissed Aileen Cowan on the way home from school. They did it among the graves as they cut across the churchyard. He had stopped and she had bumped into him because as usual she was walking right behind him talking wildly about a book she was reading or it might have been about something her brother had told her. She had a slight lisp, and a huskiness about her voice, which he listened for more than her words. They had been playmates in pre-school, so she was really close to him, she might as well have been his shadow. He spun round and grabbed her and kissed her because he had been imagining doing this for about a month. She did not run away or turn away. She laughed a short, quick laugh and pushed him in the chest. ‘Caarn, get going,’ she said. He turned back to the path and they went on past the list of war dead and the warning about rubbish out onto the street where everything seemed normal but wasn’t. ‘Sorry,’ he said before leaving her, not because he was sorry but because he wanted her to say something about what she thought about the kiss. She shrugged and just walked away from him.

  He thought he had learned something important, or had taken an important step toward learning something. Whatever it was he had learned he could not say, for it was not clear to him: but he felt that there was something ahead for him now. He had his father’s weak chin and his mother’s red hair. He knew he would never be handsome. He would never stand on a corner with life coming right up to him and wanting him. He was more like that North Sea going at those grey stones again and again, tasting each one over and over blindly, just doing what it does. He would be like that, just doing what he needed to do day after day, and Aileen Cowan would love him for it. Or she wouldn’t.

  What if you could reverse your life like you reverse a car? Would you?

  Go away, go away.

  He would not go away.

  The Vikings were pagans weren’t they, but you can’t hate them for that can you?

  He remembers the way his father had slammed the door of the car when they got back from Beeston Road. There was a banjo song being played on the car radio. He liked it and wanted

  to keep listening to it but his mother took the key from the ignition and threw it toward her husband.

  Go on then! she had called in her ragged way. Get out of here, get away from the bitch and her loafing brother, the one you want to murder!

  Bitch, he had said again with his back turned to her as he went into the house.

  What if dad came back? What would you do about that? he asks, but his mother was gone into her bedroom.

  Dreams are things that don’t exist, his father used to say. There’s only these hands and this street with its stones stuck in it and we’ll be driving over the faces of these stones back and forward, back and forward, till we die. Dream about that if you can. He would pull a cigarette hard into his face and blow smoke all over the room. He was a man and everything about him was manly. He loved to show the muscles in his arms at home.

  That was his lesson, the one about stones. He said it whenever he lost his job or something went wrong like some man disappointing him or his mother’s brother coming round for money. Trying to charm the money out of them. His uncle’s laugh was high pitched and silly but his eyes were dangerous in a way that made his parents give him money. Well, he guessed they gave him money because of the way it always ended with his uncle shaking his father’s hand at the door and his father’s eyes on the floor.

  The box of tissues is still there on the chair with some used ones dropped around it, lipstick marks on some of them as if she had been practising kissing. Tomorrow he would walk home with Aileen again. She might now walk beside him despite the narrowness of the path through the churchyard. Their hands might touch, casually, and their bodies would wait for the meaning of this touch to take hold. It might take years or it might be instant. Why does the sea keep swallowing those stones on the beach at Sheringham, bleaching them and rounding them, testing them for thousands of years? It is as if there is something big for the sea to think about, something that has not yet occurred to him. If he could think of it, too, he would be occupied like the sea for the rest of his life. He thinks of how the sea is locked inside itself really, imprisoned, and how his father looks like this sometimes, all the troubles of a whole sea inside him, but in the end his father is just another priso
n.

  I’m going to be me forever, he thinks, not quite miserably, but sensing the decisiveness of a trap springing shut.

  What if there was a lesson you could learn at the beginning of your life that would keep you safe, what would that lesson be, Mum? He calls so that she can hear him from her room.

  She ignores him.

  What if you got a phone call from someone who was about to commit murder, what would you do?

  She returns, sipping another can and sucking on a cigarette thoughtfully, glancing silently at the laughing television.

  What if I was not here, where would you look for me, Mum?

  She would drive to Sheringham and look for him down beside the volunteer lifeboat workshop just where the cliffs begin. She would expect him to have an ice cream in one hand and a grey sea stone in the other hand, a stone not much larger than his boy’s heart.

  Why Cupid is Painted Blind

  LEAH SWANN

  The people longed for summer and when summer came it was too hot and they longed for autumn. Blasted, exhausted and boiled, the people looked up from their backyards into the still skies and hoped for clouds. In the suburbs people crowded the beaches or the ubiquitous shopping malls, and fought over shaded car spaces. Among these people was Mallory, a woman who’d danced with a man who was not her fiancé and could think of nothing else.

  She’d heard that love could be a madness that descended on you, like an illness, like the flu, with symptoms that nagged and whined; but she had never experienced such a thing. It began when the man chose her as his dancing partner at a folk festival.