The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5)

by Kaaron Warren

  He was yelling.

  He wanted to know where she got it.

  “The money,” he shouted. “You tell me where’s the goddamn old money.”

  * * *

  The grass, Miranda thought. That’s what she hated the most of all the things she could name and hate. Its profusion and fecundity. The dark glossiness of those dark-green blades as they rose up at the corners of the yard, fellating the quarter-acre of rear yard with buffalo creepers and razors. Slutty grass, as grass went, not willing to confine itself to the concrete edging she was sure she’d seen on the sale day.

  The civilised architecture of the concrete was now a geological layer somewhere between the reactive clay and a tonne of composting greenwaste. After her first few abortive attempts at getting the mess under control, the epic weekend of snapped brushcutter wires, disturbed snakes and lawnmowered stones peppering her shins like sniper fire, Miranda called defeat and vowed never to set foot in the yard again.

  Even still, she had made an enemy. Sometimes she imagined it was waiting for her, in that watchful way of predators who have not the speed for a chase, but with endless reserves of patience. She would see it outside the kitchen window, a magnet for gnats and mosquitoes, taunting her. She dreamt of glycophosphate and stealthy watering with poison.

  Then there was the house, but she didn’t hate it so much as despair of it, buyer’s remorse coupled with a desire not to flee a situation without making some kind of defensive effort. The house had been kind of run down when they’d bought it, languishing at the bottom of a real estate agent’s kill-list after cannier couples had opted for the housing developments a street over. The neat-as-a-pin first-home-buyer’s bargain turned out to be a too-small panelboard cottage with the roof slumping at the end corner, down where the termites had been found but were not there because here’s the certificate of inspection and pest control, bit outta date but it’ll be alright. The floor listed like a ship taking on water in horse-latitude doldrums. In cold weather the nails worked themselves out of the wood, their iron heads catching unwary feet, tearing divots of skin. Over the course of a week Noel came home with armloads of carpet offcuts, not a matching metre of pile among them.

  In the heat the wood swelled and shrank, made doors fly open or refuse to close. As the night temperatures fell, the timbers would shrink incrementally through each floor joist, sending a thrumming along the main corridor like scattered footsteps.

  They shouldn’t have bought so suddenly. But they were eager to get out of their rental apartment, on account of the feud they were having with the housebound guy next door who, while waiting for his workplace injury payout, funnelled his indoor life into creepy obsessions, spent his days with his ear pressed up hard against the wall, listening for each toilet flush or too-loud breath. The guy would go through their recyclables, call up the body corporate upon finding a non-renewable biscuit wrapper among the milk cartons. His obsession bordered on cruelty. Miranda worried that one day he would front up to their door with a shotgun, told Noel so, demanded they move. Noel was a bit of a softie. He said, yeah, okay.

  Then there was Noel’s sister. Plastic DeDe who smoked all through the place even though Miranda told her to fuckin’ quit doing that, go outside, the landlord will kick us out and DeDe was all, you’re not the boss of me bitch and left butts in all the coffee cups and the body corporate planter-pots, and Noel wouldn’t do a thing because, DeDe’s got a condition, Miranda, c’mon.

  So on account of DeDe’s condition, on account of Noel’s last words to his dead mother to look after the younger sister through her unspecified disorder, questionable friendships and defaulted loans, on account of the guy next door who thumped on the walls every time a tap turned on and yelled at them to shut it or I’ll come round and kill you, on account of the cops who looked at him in the wheelchair he only used on occasion and laughed and said I doubt you’ll have a problem Ma’am just ignore it and keep the noise down, for all those little irritations mounting and compounding, they moved.

  Moved too far out, one of those satellite country towns swallowed by urban sprawl, about as part of the city as the far side of the moon. A deceased estate, the house was pretty beat up. Miranda, a little more worldly-wise than Noel, smelt marijuana and bong-water leavings in the mouldy carpet. The yard—huge—was on first inspection, a mess. By their second visit the real estate agent, on the behest of an overworked legal executor, hired someone to do a mow of the lawn before sale. A desultory clearing had appeared in the centre of the grass and brambles a day before their final inspection, but the edges still rode up about the fence, like the bow wave at the prow of an absent boat. A week before handover, you wouldn’t have thought a gardener had looked sideways at the place.

  “We’ll bulldoze the lot next year,” Noel had said, “or perhaps the year after that, as soon as we get some equity in the place. Soon as we reduce DeDe’s debt and get her back on her feet. Like I promised Mum, before she died. Just do what you can.”

  Miranda had seen the monthly repayments DeDe’s credit card debt was costing them. More than the mortgage, and growing. No wonder they couldn’t afford anywhere better than this to live.

  Unable to find an equitably paying job nearby, Noel took up commuting to the office, two hours each way. Miranda hardly saw her husband any more. She worked from home. Day after day she would digitally construct the layout of pedantic council websites and supermarket leaflets with the gnawing resentment of an indentured worker paying off a distant relative’s political prison sentence.

  Occasionally something interesting would come in the deluge, like the playbill to an amateur production of the Turandot opera in the local hall, a bouldering guidebook or a game hunter’s magazine article. Page mock-ups of husky, stout men standing next to gutted animals strung up on welded frames. Sometimes she imagined DeDe hanging there, the men grinning, winking eyes saying: darlin’ we fixed your problem for ya.

  Her life wasn’t supposed to be this way. She had walked into the wrong theatre production, an operatic tragedy, when she should have been a character in a fluffy rom-com. Once, while punching mountain climbing ratings into a table, Miranda imagined configuring her situation a difficulty, the hump she would need to get over. Yosemite Class 5.12, she thought. ABO, Abominablement difficile. Equipment failure likely. Nothing on the pitch will hold a fall.

  * * *

  Days after the last of the moving boxes were unpacked, DeDe Barker had appeared one morning on the doorstep, lugging a leopard-print trolley case and a make-up bag big enough to hold a human head.

  “Took ya long enough to answer the doorbell,” she had said accusingly.

  “Why are you here?” Miranda blurted, then regretted, because dealing with Noel’s sister required the kind of mewling diplomacy reserved for tin-pot despots and hermit kingdoms. DeDe was the kind of person to dwell on verbal slights, take a pun the wrong way, feel as if the merest criticism was an affront and a challenge.

  On that awful, dream-ending day, DeDe’s face had been as flat and featureless as a supermarket model hawking the latest pleather sofa. On top of the Botox, she’d had one of those multi-shaded, frosted haircuts with glued-in extensions that couldn’t cost any less than five hundred bucks at a salon. Miranda’s thoughts spun like a vulture over the rising sum of money Noel’s parents had paid the credit card company so DeDe wouldn’t go bankrupt, the bulk of their will that went towards DeDe’s in-home care once they were gone and she could no longer mooch, slotted it in the list of shitty things like the length of time it had taken Noel and her to save a housing deposit, the senior Barkers refusing to give a loan or go guarantor for Noel, but willing to pay off a fucking credit card for his no-good sister, that made Miranda lie awake some nights.

  “Got no cash. My condition got me kicked out of a job las’ week.”

  With a sinking horror, Miranda saw the taxi that had deposited her nemesis still parked in the driveway, the driver’s arm lolling out of the window as if panhandling for alm
s.

  “What’s he waiting for?”

  DeDe breezed through. “Just fucking pay him, all right? I don’t want to hear your bullshit.”

  Something broke in Miranda then, and she took hold of DeDe’s hair, the extensions separating in her hands, threw her out, yelling and yelling, not making much sense, locked the door, her heart hammering as if she’d been a character in one of those horror films Noel so adored. And DeDe pounded on it, screaming, and then pounded on the window until it broke, and the screams became higher pitched and hysterical, punctuated with I’m bleeding I’m bleeding.

  Miranda tossed DeDe a tea-towel through the broken window and called for an ambulance, an affront to DeDe far greater than the gash in her forearm.

  The ambulance turned up with the police eleven indeterminably long minutes later. The taxi driver had called in a tale of civil unrest and an unpaid two hundred and eighty-five dollar fare. DeDe screamed blue murder. She went off to hospital in the back of the divvy van on account of the medics refusing to take her while she was raging.

  Half an hour later Noel called from work.

  “How could you do that to my sister? You know she’s got a condition! There’s five hundred dollars in the biscuit-tin, you could have just paid it and called me.”

  Miranda’s mind went to the biscuit tin. Fifty dollars a week went into it. Her little habit, one given up on when last year two thousand dollars disappeared over the course of a month and Noel had flat-out lied and said he’d needed it for car repairs.

  The lie burned, when the head-gasket blew on the Commodore and Geoff at the auto-shop remarked he’d never seen Noel come in, not once. At least if he’d been having an affair Miranda could have wallowed in self pity, but Noble Noel was protecting his sick sister. DeDe had taken the money. Her new clothes had littered the bathroom floor, worn once, discarded, hundred-dollar lipsticks mashed into the carpet.

  DeDe returned a day later, pale and weak from blood loss, but triumphant. Noel fussed over her. Miranda lost the spare room, the one she had set up her painting easel in, the one where the sunlight came through the window so buttery and creamy you could have frosted a cake with it. There was no room in her wardrobe office. All her paints went into the cellar under the house, with the easel, with her untouched canvases.

  Unable to take out her anger on the smirking, narcissistic thing waiting in the sunshiny room, Miranda attacked her other enemy. Slaughtered the grass with the petrol brush cutter until the green chaos snarled up in the blade, and whipping debris flew up, slicing her arms with a hundred paper cuts.

  She returned to the shower that afternoon, already littered with DeDe’s makeup and cheap chemist-store perfume, rank with alcohol and fake-civet, more animal secretion than scent. Miranda wept from the pain of the water on her grass-bites, her own self pity.

  Fucking grass, she thought. Fucking grass.

  Tomorrow I’ll make plans to leave, she decided. I’ll transfer some cash into my savings account and I’ll leave.

  But the next morning a wave of nausea gut-punched her. She clung to the toilet as if enduring a storm. And when she checked the little-used app on her phone, the pink one that checked periods, she was nearly two weeks late.

  * * *

  She didn’t tell him.

  Miranda knew she should have; but all of a sudden she was pregnant and had the harsh crystal clarity, even when the rest of her mind seemed to have caught a weird brain-flu, that she could not support a child on her own. A little part of her hoped that the malign tide that had washed DeDe up on their shores would one day soon wash her back out again. There was only so much daytime TV Miranda could stand.

  The pee-on-a-stick test turned blue.

  For three months she tried not to think about it. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Stress made periods stop, right? Could cause false positives. And she was stressed.

  But one day Miranda woke and the lingering nausea was gone, and it might have been three months or maybe four, and she hadn’t shown, or got a belly yet (and had been waiting until that time to face up to it herself).

  DeDe was out of the house. Miranda’s nemesis had taken to long benders in the city with new friends, had not come home the night before. The miscarriage was so painless, a spot of blood, and a gush, and the bathroom floor was smeared with blood as if someone had clubbed a seal to death on the tile floors.

  A twist of muscle, an expulsion as subtle as clearing her throat. Wrapped up in a gob of dark blood and mucus, Miranda knew that it was the baby, or the foetus, really, not much bigger than her thumb.

  And it was over. The three-month diversion was over. She knew she should have been sad about losing the baby, but deep in her secret heart she could only feel a whirling, blessed relief.

  * * *

  Miranda didn’t know how to dispose of it. Didn’t want to flush it down the toilet or throw it out in the garbage. Burial was too personal. She tossed her body’s issue into the back yard, into the grassy pile. Let nature consume it the way nature did, she thought.

  Noel didn’t come home that night. The company’s contract meetings were being held up by an international firm’s reluctance to concede on a few points. Something.

  DeDe had developed a habit of partying into bad hours. Miranda heard a man’s voice out in the livingroom tonight, nasally, whiny. A druggie sort of voice. DeDe had returned late, with him in tow. Miranda sat up with her back to the bedroom door and fretted over the nicer pieces in the display cabinet. A car pulled up after midnight, then left, twelve cylinders growling down the street, waking the neighbours.

  Even in the silence Miranda couldn’t sleep. Thought of her baby, tangled up in the grass, consumed.

  In the dawn’s first light she had a notion that maybe she should go outside and see if she could find the little corpse, do something proper. No sooner had her bare foot stepped onto the back porch than the instep of her foot drove directly into a thick, bladed hunk of metal.

  * * *

  “Well,” the doctor said, “You shouldn’t be leaving your mother’s jewellery outside.”

  Miranda gave a grimacing kind of smile. “Not my mother’s. Picked up some things from the op shop. Cleaned a few pieces yesterday. Forgot I left it on the patio.”

  He put in the last stitch, wrapped Miranda’s foot in gauze, gave her a tetanus shot and firm instructions. But all Miranda could think about was the brooch in the kidney dish. A cursory wash in the doctor’s office revealed an ugly gold thing covered in pearls and paste-diamonds. It was too big to be anything other than costume jewellery.

  “Where’d you get it again?”

  “Op shop.”

  “You must have paid a lot. Real gold? They look like real dimonds to me. Know a bit about mid-century cuts. My wife’s a gemologist.”

  Flustered, Miranda mumbled she didn’t know, but her next stop took her to a pawnbroker in town. He offered her a weird amount with such gimlet-eyed insouciance, two hundred dollars for something that surely wouldn’t fetch five bucks at a Salvos. At his affectation of casual disinterest, the distant panic at her refusal and a price higher by a hundred dollars, she began to suspect she wasn’t in the possession of any old tat.

  A trip into the city then, and the jeweller who had made her wedding ring.

  “Wow, nice find. A handmade memento mori, gotta be nineteenth century. For a child, I think. The photograph of the deceased goes here. If there was one, it’s gone. These are bluebirds. The gems are significant. It’s old. Do you know anything of its provenance?”

  “Provenance?”

  “Where the brooch is from. It’s an odd design.”

  A funny thought made her want to blurt out, my backyard bought it. The grass brought it to me after I gave it my dead baby, like a cat will bring you a dead bird if you feed it.

  She declined his offer to sell the brooch. Even by diamondweight and gold alone the brooch was pushing upwards of ten grand.

  She stopped by the supermarket on the way back, hobbled home w
ith their shopping. In two days Noel didn’t once comment on her funny walk. He had turned into a zombie-husband throwback from the nineteen-fifties, food in one end, money out the other, a ghost in between.

  “What’s for dinner?” he would ask, as if making an afterthought comment about the game show on telly.

  “Steaks,” Miranda said.

  * * *

  Half a kilo for them, the rest for the yard. The steaks brought a coin. So at least there was some transactional weight attributed to whatever you fed the yard, she thought. It was a nice coin, something that might have been recovered off a sunken ship. She quickly discovered that the grassy knoll had no time for bone and cooked leftovers. The fresher the meat, the more it gave up.

  Soon Miranda collected a small trove of gold coins from different eras, and once, a particularly expensive slice of veal brought a Roman denarius with a worn-down bust of some wreath-headed Caesar. Occasionally she would entertain the thought that she was going mad, a housewife on Quaaludes madness, but it was a pleasant kind of insanity. She was feeding her tame grass-monster. It gave her something else other than DeDe to think about.

  Miranda kept her booty in an empty container of Gumption in the cleaning cupboard, somewhere DeDe would never go, on account of the caustics that would ruin her acrylic nails, and the general requirement to do physical labour.

  The knoll and Miranda forged an agreement. She let the yard grow wild and soon the backyard was covered in a veritable forest of rampaging lawn.

  Which earned a visit from the council.

  * * *

  “Your grass is rather long,” the council man said. He was as bowed and nuggety as the guy who had restumped the south end last week, courtesy of their new wealth. His polo-shirt had the council logo on the left pocket. “It presents a fire hazard.”