by Leah Swann
Review of Australian Fiction
Volume Eleven: Issue Five
Zutiste, Inc.
Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
The Puzzle Ball Leah Swann
Nobody Wants a Sick Man Karen Manton
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“The Puzzle Ball” Copyright © 2014 by Leah Swann
“Nobody Wants a Sick Man” Copyright © 2014 by Karen Manton
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
The Puzzle Ball
Leah Swann
Before the party I stuck ‘to do’ lists to the fridge where I could obsessively re-read them. Pastries, wine-glass hire, mirror ball. Friends comforted me with clichés like it will be all right on the night.
Daisy shook out jigsaw pieces over the kitchen table. Someone had given her a puzzle ball for her seventh birthday but it was beyond her. She considered my furrowed brow and ventured to ask:
‘Can you help me?’
‘Not yet. I will, I promise. I’ve got to add up food prices for the caterers.’
‘I hate your party, mummy.’
‘So do I, pet.’
Three dollars per pastry, what’s that per person… come on, you don’t need a calculator, woman, do you?
‘We’re back,’ shouted my husband Liam, his mate Toby following him into the living room, equipment stacked on their shoulders. A drill started up. Fiona arrived and unloaded fabric picnic chairs in the driveway, five fabulous foldable chairs her parents collected in the seventies. I tried prising open one.
‘Watch your fingers!’ she said. ‘They’re sprung like traps.’
Fiona was a nurse and anticipated injury.
‘Hang on,’ I said, leaving the chair and grabbing the broom. ‘Let me sweep, first.’
I swept the verandah and wiped dead spiders away from the windows with a soaking wedge of carwash sponge. Daisy was now watching from the hammock, blue and green puzzle pieces spread over her tummy.
‘Okay!’
We snapped open the chairs and arranged them in ways we thought conducive to conversation.
‘Are you going to put out buckets of sand for cigarettes, Sara?’ Fiona asked.
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘Cigarettes are yucky,’ said Daisy. Fiona looked over to her and smiled.
‘What you got there, cutey?’
‘The world. But I can’t make it work.’
The morning before the party I woke up in the small hours. Why had I invited so many people? How easily Liam slept beside me, content with his day’s work of drilling holes for cup hooks in the ceiling. In the living room he’d hung the mirror ball, poised and waiting to spin electric rainbows over my maturing friends. Hanging on the cupboard doorhandles were dresses Daisy had picked out.
‘This one!’ she’d said, dragging out a strapless white number trimmed with feathers.
‘Oh, I’m too old for that, darling. It’s my fortieth!’
‘This one, then,’ she’d said, holding up a long satiny navy thing, with slits to mid-thigh. I almost said, ‘my legs will look too scraggy’ but checked myself. She’s too young for those self-conscious woes. For her, there’s simply the joy of a pretty dress.
When the doorbell rang at 8pm, it was a relief. No more last-minute panicky preparations. Guests flowed in, admired the candles and ate the food, and danced beneath balloons. Liam bounced around like a jack-in-a-box, long and spindly and weirdly elfin under the party lights. Fiona’s hips shook in time with I Was Made for Lovin’ You, dimples rippling under the silk.
From the dancefloor I saw my father, small and pink and benign with fluffy hair. He moved about, greeting people, leaving me free to dance. Fragrance from the new potted roses drifted in from the verandah. Daisy and her little friend squeezed the button on the smoke machine, delighting in the white jets pushing through our dancing feet and dispersing over our heads in clouds of sapphire, red, green and violet. Almost everyone I loved was there. I tried not to think about my ex-husband, my late mother, or my brother far away in New York, and yet as I danced, my head loose and soft with champagne, I was feeling their absence sorely, like pieces removed from the puzzle ball of myself.
On the verandah, the air was fresh and sweet. Those roses were worth it, I thought, remembering how I’d hesitated over them at the nursery. The food, too, was worth every cent. Sizzling samosas served on white platters, spices wrapped in the kind of shortcrust that crumbles richly on the tongue.
‘Great party, Sara,’ said my workmate Cam, from where he was sitting on one of Fiona’s foldable chairs, smoking and butting ash into the sand bucket. ‘But there’s some guy by the gate hanging around. He hasn’t come up to the party.’
‘What guy?’ I said, surprised.
‘Do you want me to check him out?’
I motioned to him to stay in his chair.
‘I’ll call you if there’s a problem,’ I said and wobbled down the rocky driveway in my heels, stopping short when I saw my ex-husband Jack leaning against a boulder, lit by party lights festooned in the trees. So solid. A block.
‘Jack! What…’
I was too shocked to find more words. He was more rotund than when I’d last seen him, and the dark curls were streaked with grey. The eyelashes were still thick and pretty but his face had slid a little, coarsened. Of course, he’d see changes in me too.
‘So, a party. Not much to celebrate about forty, is there?’
‘Did you—know about the party?’
‘No. Though you always were the type to celebrate milestones.’
It all rushed back: the petty-mindedness, the generalisations. I was thetype who was jealous. Who nagged. Who spent his money, spoilt his plans and couldn’t raise her thoughts above the mediocre.
‘Still a lover of frivolity,’ he said.
‘What’s life if you can’t have a bit of fun?’
‘Not much,’ he muttered. His mood was as thick as bindweed, fast-growing in the dark. I didn’t want to invite him, not a bit. Nor did I want to be stuck out here with him. The skin behind my ears crawled.
‘Come inside. Have a drink, have a dance.’
I thought about Liam bouncing on the dancefloor. Jack shifted his bulk slightly.
‘Don’t go. I want to talk to you.’
Ah, the ivy was spreading towards me. How fast it grew. That’s why it’s a weed, I thought. Why has he turned up tonight? It’s been years. I could hear Prince’s Kiss and my feet itched to dance.
‘Does it have to be now, Jack? Call me on Monday.’
He stiffened. His eyes shifted towards me, full of resentment.
‘The money,’ he said. ‘I need it.’
‘What money?’
My mind sped backwards through time. How many years since the intervention order? Was it nine? Ten, even? Ten years I haven’t seen him…
‘The settlement, Sara. You know very well.’
‘But—it was a few grand. Nothing.’
‘You stole it.’
I shook my head in disbelief.
‘No, mate. I was awarded it by the court. You got the house.’
‘I need it.’
‘I’m not talking about this now,’ I said as firmly as I could. The ivy crept into me, squeezing. I turned to go.
‘No you don’t,’ he said, lurching forward to catch hold of my little finger.
‘Let go.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, crushing it with a vicious forefinger and thumb. I yelped in pain and fright.
Inside, I found Fiona and we escaped to the quiet of
the bathroom. She got medical supplies out of the cupboard.
‘I don’t want this to ruin the party,’ I said. My face was grey in the mirror and sweat ran under my shiny dress. Fiona examined my hand with an expert eye.
‘Could be broken,’ she muttered. ‘What a prick. You should ring the police.’
She splinted the finger and squirted Rescue Remedy into my mouth. She popped two Panadols out of their silver tray and I took them with a shaking hand and gulped some water.
‘But then—the party’s over. Jack will have ruined another important moment in my life.’
Later, I thought I saw Jack on the verandah, and must have briefly lost consciousness because I found myself on the floor with a crowd of concerned faces peering down at me like multicoloured angels.
‘Too much champagne!’ I said, forcing a smile, and the angels lifted me up and I swayed in the smoke until everyone went home.
Liam was so light, a will-o’-the-wisp, and so different to Jack that I sometimes worried I’d chosen Jack’s opposite on the rebound, which would be the wrong reason to marry someone.
Liam was light but potent enough to make Daisy. He had long hands and a long tongue, which he used a lot in bed. His physiology was coherently long and thin. He fitted himself to me like a key in a lock. I told him about Jack afterwards, downplaying the finger incident.
‘You should have said something! I would have told him to leave.’
‘I didn’t want the party spoilt.’
Liam was silent for quite a few minutes. He said:
‘I’ll protect you.’
I didn’t laugh. He had no idea. I just said, calmly:
‘Darling, he’s built like a brick shithouse.’
Liam fell asleep a few minutes later, breathing cleanly over the sheets. I wriggled uncomfortably, my finger throbbing. I thought about Jack. For the first time in years, I had the wicked wish that he was dead.
When I finally slept, I dreamed that he was dead, and I panicked that it was my wish that made it so. Strangers took me into a child’s bedroom where a corpse lay on the bed. They pulled back a sheet printed with sailboats to reveal Jack’s face.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes—that’s him.’
In the morning I staggered downstairs to the kitchen to make tea. Daisy was curled up on a sofa with the puzzle globe, surrounded by empty beer bottles. The mirror ball was still turning, reflecting over her cheeks.
I dropped a Berocca into a glass of water. The tablet fizzled and I drank the frothy red, hoping the concentrated vitamins would ease the pain at the base of my skull. I toasted raisin bread and took it to Daisy. Outside, the sun ripened in a delicate blue sky.
‘Hungry?’
She dropped the puzzle pieces in order to eat. I saw she had the instructions unfolded beside her and I read them idly.
‘Let’s have a go at this puzzle then,’ I said, pushing aside empty bottles to put down my coffee mug. ‘Look, each piece is numbered, that makes it easier!’
We fiddled and the puzzle took shape, curving into our palms.
‘Some pieces are lost,’ I said.
‘Could we make new ones?’ asked Daisy hopefully. She put her fingers into the three gaps and balanced the globe. I patted her curls.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart. It might look strange.’
She looked so disappointed that I said:
‘I’m sure we’ll find the missing pieces when we tidy up.’
The clean-up took most of the day. There were too many bottles for the recycle bin so I loaded them into crates. I folded the floral picnic chairs gingerly, still nursing my sore finger. I swept. I found a puzzle piece in the hammock and another by the smoke machine. Liam took down the mirror ball and unhooked the lights, and stacked the gear in the car. I polished the benchtops and swept again. The house gleamed. I wanted that last piece. Retracing Daisy’s steps, I looked under the bed and the kitchen table and in the cracks between seat cushions on the couch. No luck. At bedtime, I presented Daisy with the two I’d found and she fitted them into the globe.
‘Does it matter which way up it goes?’ she asked.
‘The tradition is to put the Arctic Circle at the top, see,’ I said, pointing it out. ‘But that’s just a human thing, because we like to use words like up and down. In the universe, there’s no up or down.’
This didn’t mean much to Daisy. She balanced the globe on the hole in the Pacific Ocean on her bedside table. She pulled her head back to scrutinise it, to see if her problem was solved, and said:
‘We might find it tomorrow.’
Tomorrow, or in ten years, or never, I thought as I kissed the smooth brow.
‘I think this is—okay?’ And she raised her eyes to look at me hopefully, still young enough to believe that mine was the final word.
Nobody Wants a Sick Man
Karen Manton
She pushes through the flywire door soft as a spirit so as not to wake the man on the divan. Her eyes are drawn to his feet. They are resting on the once-red velvet arm of the couch that is worn in this spot from generations of stroking hands. Worn to pink threads over straw. The feet look as if they are held up in offering to a stream of sunlight. It is a misty light, warm because of the window that keeps the cold air, the damp earth, the dew-drenched ferns outside.
She stands at the end of the couch and looks at him, hands held out midair just below the soles of his feet. His feet are small, like the feet of a merman, once sheathed in a tail—not made for walking too long on ground. Perhaps that is the reason things are as they are. Perhaps he is not of this world.
They have come to the stone cottage in the south, hidden in the hills, in the forest, with the damp moss, the heady smell of eucalypt, the mud and roots, the wet wood of bark-shedding trunks that grow moss and lichen.
The coolness of the forest is strange to the man and the woman. They are not from here. They keep the house unnaturally warm. When the sun emerges, the room throbs with a smothering, oxygen-less heat. She forces open one of the wretchedly stiff and determined windows. Cold air pinches her nostrils. Not far off a wallaby stops to stare, ears twitching.
Rhiannon looks back to the sleeping man. In repose he seems to diminish. It shocks her sometimes — the unwell pallor, the sunken lids and cracked lips. He has the jawline of a boy, legs and arms that seem wasted. It is like coming across a dead man who draws breath.
—He looks like he just walked out of a concentration camp, people say to her.
—How is his health? Others ask, eyes zoning in on hers. They are desperate for her to say he is on the mend.
The truth is he will not get better. She knows that now. She can see into him, where the inner fabric is torn and cannot knit back together. Like rocks that metamorphose into something else, the elements of him have altered. He is someone else.
Still, people carry the shadow of his former self before them—like an old photo, a translucent shroud around the man now half living. They persist in a hope that he will return.
She has never known the hologram they speak of—the man that was. She befriended a sick man, and married him. She knew what she was getting into, she had told herself. In sickness and health, say the vows. She had believed the second word would come to them. But she sees now there will be no health for her man on the divan. His only health is ill.
She moves her hand closer to his feet, almost touching, not quite. She stops just short of him, avoiding the shiver, the curl away into a rigid pose. People with his illness do not like to be touched. Their skin hurts, pained muscles recoil.
The house is too warm for her. She must get out. The place seems unnaturally quiet without the hiccups and snuffles of the baby boy who is being admired at her mother’s place. She scrawls a note to the sleeping man and leaves it on the bench. Her fingers wrap a purple scarf around her like an old friend. Quickly she flees the house, and the man inside it.
The track she will walk has been cordoned off. Dew from the rope spreads across her back as s
he passes under. For a brief moment she feels a slight guilt at her trespass, but the familiar path takes her beyond, along a way she has known well in the past. Spider webs stretch between trees, catchers of light and dew on their fine silvery intricacies. She steps over the dark green scat of a wombat, keeps her eyes keen, looking for nervous snakes. Past the uncurled secrets of ferns, and the ancient leaves of Gondwana plants, she runs through the forest to the river. She goes to the woody woman with arms outstretched, a headdress of ferns, and climbing vines. In the knots and curls of her trunk are the shadow forms of climbing children. On her arm a small, mossy figure stands, an oracle waiting to speak.
Rhiannon has seen this green tree woman in spring, and in snow. Standing before the tree she can feel the green woman go into her. And all around are tall presences of broad and silent girth, their great quiet a sureness into which she can lean.
She wishes she could bring the sick man here, like a woman carrying her beloved to the pool of healing. To feel the rush of the river, to inhale the spray, let feet absorb the good earth. He would be blessed by this the vibrant tree woman, sprouting out of a dead trunk. Surely this place has the magic, the essence required. If only she could squeeze some of the stuff from a pod and keep it in a vial to take back to him. Because he would say this place is too far for him. He does not walk easily beyond the letterbox, or up the street. He has curled up, immobile. It is as if he is in hibernation, freezing over.
On the way back to the cottage she tries to reason with herself. Each thought coming with another step up the track.
There are those who recover, her mother says firmly.
Cures, dreams, myths, other people cling to them. Anyone who has lived with the ghost of a well soul knows that he is not recovered. A short lease of life is followed by a relapse, a plunge into despair. It is a cycle for which the world has no place. Sick people are too slow. Ongoing illness is a bore. People stop asking how you are because the answer is too difficult. And so the sick man fades into the woodwork, the wallpaper, the threadbare arm of a once-plush red velvet couch. One year, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years and then he is silent. He has drawn the curtains and shut the door, to live away from watching eyes, and those who hope for a return.
