The Best Australian Stories 2011 Read online

  ‘It is a service, Sanghmitra,’ he’d said. ‘We have a responsibility. One can do no harm to something not conceived.’

  She ticks the boxes in her log and walks through the foyer to the line of taxis. She’s back on in six hours. As always, she is thinking of Udai, her beautiful boy. At home, she slides the small bag of clothes from beneath the bed and lays them out: trousers, shirt, a knitted cap her mother made. She assembles them before her on the bed, tracing the contours of a shape he has outgrown already. And she lays beside him and shuts her eyes, alert to the weight of the empty bag beside her.

  Where There’s Smoke

  Chris Womersley

  Once, when I was about nine years old, I was kicking a football around in the back garden late in the afternoon. I was alone, as usual – or thought I was – and the day was nearly over. It was late autumn. The air was still blue and smoky from the piles of burning leaves in the neighbourhood gutters. Shooting for goal from an impossible angle, my football bounced into a tangle of bushes beside the high wooden fence that bordered our neighbour’s house and when I crawled in to retrieve it, I discovered a woman crouching there, damp leaves stuck to her hair like a crown. She clutched her knees, which were bare and knobbly where her dress had ridden up. I was too stunned to say a word.

  ‘You must be Nick,’ she said.

  I nodded. My scuffed football was just behind her.

  ‘How did you know?’ I said when at last I found my voice.

  She glanced up at the old house, at the lighted lounge-room window warm as a lozenge in the failing light. Soon one of my sisters would draw the curtains and the house would be absorbed into the falling night, safe and sound against the cold and dark. Realising I was clearly not the sort of child to run screaming upon finding a stranger in his backyard, she took a few seconds to adjust her position, which must have been quite uncomfortable.

  ‘Oh, I know lots of interesting things about you.’

  I heard Mrs Thomson singing to herself in her kitchen next door, the chink of cutlery being taken from a drawer. Having stopped running around, I was getting cold and a graze on my elbow where I had fallen over on the bricks began to sting.

  ‘I know that you love football,’ the woman went on, looking around as if assembling the information from the nearby air. ‘Aaaaand that you love Star Wars, that you’ve got lots of Star Wars toys and things. Little figurines, I guess you’d call them.’

  This was true. I’d seen Star Wars four times, once with my dad and then with my friend Shaun and then twice at other kids’ birthday parties. In addition, I had a book of Star Wars, a model of an X-Wing Fighter, comics and several posters on my wall. The distant planet of Tattooine – with its twin suns, where Luke Skywalker had grown up – was more real to me than Darwin or the Amazon.

  I inspected the stranger more closely in the fading light. She was pretty, with long hair and freckles across her nose. She wasn’t as old as my mum, but maybe a bit older than my teacher at school, Miss Dillinger.

  It didn’t seem right that this woman was sneaking about in our garden and I was mentally preparing to say something to that effect when she leaned forward, whispering, her red mouth suddenly so close I felt her breath on my ear.

  ‘I also know that it was you who broke Mr Miller’s window last month.’

  A chill seeped through me. Several weeks ago, Shaun and I were hitting a tennis ball around in his grassy garden when we discovered a much more interesting game; by employing the tennis rackets we could launch unripe lemons vast distances. Green lemons the size of golf balls were the best and, if struck correctly, would travel across several houses – maybe even as far as a kilometre, or so we imagined. With no one around – who knew where Shaun’s parents were? – we amused ourselves in this fashion until the predictable happened and we heard the smash of a distant window, followed by furious shouting that went on for several minutes. Terrified, we stashed the tennis rackets back in the shed, cleaned up the lemons and scurried inside to watch television and listen out for sirens or the blunt knock of a policeman at the front door. We heard later that the police were indeed summoned, but no one thought to question us about the damage because it happened so far from our houses and who would have dreamed we could throw lemons so far? Nothing was ever proved and he vehemently denied any involvement, but blame was sheeted home to an older kid called Glen Taylor, who lived closer to the Millers and was known to be a troublemaker. Our apparent escape didn’t stop me from dwelling on our crime most days and even now, weeks later, the sight of a police car filled me with dread, with terrifying visions of handcuffs and juvenile detention.

  The stranger sat back on her haunches, evidently satisfied. I felt the shameful heat of incipient tears. ‘Are you the police?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  She coughed once into her fist and looked around again, as if she were unsure herself. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said at last. ‘It’s all right, I won’t hurt you. My name is … Anne.’

  I wiped my nose. ‘But what are you doing hiding in our garden?’

  A fresh pause, another glance towards my house. ‘I’m not hiding, thank you very much. I’m always here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m waiting for my turn on the throne.’ The woman looked at me again, and it seemed to me her mouth had tightened. ‘Princess Anne, waiting to enter the castle as queen at last.’

  By now it was almost dark. The woman’s dress was indistinguishable from the foliage surrounding us, so that only her pale face was visible, the deep pools of her eyes. She jumped when my mother called out for me to come inside for dinner – looked set to run off, in fact – before relaxing again at the sound of retreating footsteps and the screen door slapping shut.

  ‘Yell out you’re coming,’ she whispered.

  Succumbing to the innate authority adults wield over children, I did as I was told.

  ‘Smells delicious,’ she said a few seconds later. ‘Like lamb.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I hear your mother is a good little cook.’

  I was suffused with filial pride. ‘She is. She makes a beautiful apple crumble, too.’

  ‘Keeps a nice house. Tucks you in, reads you stories, makes biscuits.’

  My mum didn’t make biscuits. The curious woman didn’t even seem to be addressing me but, rather, talking out loud to herself.

  ‘That’s very nice,’ she continued, as if I had agreed with her summation of my mother’s housekeeping capabilities. ‘Why don’t you bring me back some of that lamb later. Wrap a few slices in some wax paper or something. Let me try this famous lamb.’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Go on, be a sport. And one of your father’s cigarettes.’

  ‘He gave up.’

  The woman sniggered. ‘Like hell he did. Look in his study. There’s a green volume of Dickens on the top shelf of his bookcase. Great Expectations, naturally. It’s hollowed out and there’s a packet of Marlboros hidden in there. Bring me a couple. Don’t forget the matches.’

  I didn’t ask how she knew this. I had become unaccountably afraid in the past minute or so and stood up as best I could beneath the low branches to leave. At school they advised us not to talk to strangers in the street or at the park, but no one said anything about finding one in your own garden.

  ‘I suppose you want your ball.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She slung me the football. ‘Nice manners. Don’t forget to bring me those cigarettes after dinner. I’ll be right here.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Don’t smoke them all yourself, will you, now you know where they’re hidden? They’re for grown-ups.’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Good boy. It was nice meeting you at last. You can’t tell anyone you saw me,
though. Remember what I know about you and those lemons. A certain broken window. Don’t want your mum to find out, do you? Or the police. Tell anyone you saw me here and I’ll blow your whole house down. Just like whatshername, Princess Leia.’

  I didn’t bother to correct her version of who Princess Leia was or what she might be capable of and went inside for dinner. Afterwards, when everyone was watching TV, I went into my dad’s study and found the cigarettes exactly where she said they were. I stood there a long time staring at them before lifting the packet out of the miniature grave carved into the book. The smell of dry tobacco was both familiar and exotic, full of dark promise. On the calendar stuck on our kitchen wall were marked the months since my father had smoked his last cigarette and the money his hard-won abstinence was saving our family. The ways of adults were as mysterious to me as a forest; they spoke often in their own unintelligible tongue. In the other room my family laughed at M*A*S*H, even though they were all repeats.

  Without really knowing what I was doing – much less why – I withdrew a cigarette from the packet, put it between my lips and lit it. The flavour was strong and terrible. Smoke wafted into my eyes. My immediate coughing fit brought my two older sisters running to the study doorway, where they stood giggling with disbelief after calling out for our mum.

  When she arrived, my mother slapped the cigarette away and demanded to know what the hell I was doing. My father was the last to arrive on the scene and he weathered my mother’s tirade with his gaze fixed not on the book with its cigarette packet-shaped hole that my mother brandished at him as evidence of his flagrant dishonesty, but on the curtained window, as if expecting to see something unwelcome step in from outside.

  The Big Issue

  The Sleepers in That Quiet Earth

  Debra Adelaide

  ‘Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done.’

  —Charlotte Brontë, preface to Wuthering Heights, 1850

  She had planned the story and already written something that could be an opening chapter. From time to time when ideas came she would write them down in a book her mother had given her. It was not the sort of notebook she would have chosen to write in, not stories anyway, but it happened to be there when she needed it. A spiral-bound notebook, the paper rough and absorbent. The cover was the wrong colour, a fake kind of purple, a purple trying too hard, a purple that didn’t even fool small children. She wondered if it was meant to be a children’s notebook, if her mother, in her frail condition, had bought it not thinking about it as much as she normally would. The cardboard cover felt like plastic. Her fountain pen would not work on the paper. She would write the story on her laptop computer.

  But the purple notebook contained a list of recent contact details, and Dove had brought it into bed with her one evening along with the phone. She reached for the notebook early the next morning. She had had a restless night and had woken several times, then again before five. For ten minutes or so she lay there, seeing the story in her head, the story she would write, she could write, when she had emptied her mind: that day’s work, then the bills and emails that needed attending to, calls she would have to make before the end of the day. Her mother’s caseworker had left three messages, of increasing frustration and, she suspected, hostility.

  Yet her mind seemed unusually focused on the story already. She wrote down the ideas that had awoken her, then showered and dressed, but she continued to see it unfolding. Unlike in a dream, she could see details of the clothes upon her character, the colours of the houses and the lawns that she was passing, then the bus that she was riding and where she sat on it, three seats behind two women with rose-tinted hair and string shopping bags. The bus was almost empty.

  As Dove made her breakfast and put a load in the washing machine, she continued to see her character and hear her voice. The cat butted at her ankles, wailing. She bent down to the floor with its bowl. ‘Here you go, puss cat.’ She rarely used its name. The cat pushed its face into the biscuits and Dove ran her hand along its back. It could eat and purr at the same time, or maybe that was growl. Dove had little affection for it, and even less knowledge of cats, but it had had nowhere else to go. The mewling wail barely abated as it chewed its food then sat to lick its chest. But even the cat could not block out the sound of her own story in her ears as she tidied her breakfast things and went to the bathroom.

  ‘See you, puss.’ By the time she grabbed her bag and keys and shut the front door, the whole story was clear already, again, clearer than a dream. She even knew the weather that day, could see the sky with its shredded-tissue clouds, on that warm day in the suburbs. It was mid-morning, a Tuesday. Her character’s name, Ellis, was unusual for a woman.

  *

  Ellis was visiting her father, in his home in Ashfield. Riding the bus, Ellis thought about the names of these suburbs, on this summer’s day when men like her father were busy in their gardens. Ashfield, Haberfield, Strathfield. She thought, as she pushed open the window of the bus to let in more air, how odd a name like Ashfield was, how the negative connotation of the first syllable contrasted with the romantic one of the last. How the place was, in its orderly suburban way, filled with houses and parks, cabbage tree palms and eucalypts and camphor laurels – so unlike that of an ashy field – but that once it must have been something like a wasteland, to gain the name. On this particular day the air smelled like a field, a great one, of hay perhaps, or wheat, recently mown. As if all its men had conspired to cut their front lawns that morning, infusing the warm air with the smell of freshly sliced grass, which Ellis breathed in as she pushed her face up to the window of the bus. She wondered if the inhabitants of Ashfield, so comfortable and untroubled, ever thought the name, Ashfield, was odd, discordant.

  It was a slow journey, but once they had turned off Parramatta Road, she didn’t mind. At this time it was a pleasant way to travel, if one were not in a hurry, though at other times the buses could be frustrating. Into town, for instance, where the journey past Railway Square and down George Street was always slow. She had not yet learned to drive, although she thought she would. Vince had urged it, especially now, but she had not been keen for her husband to teach her. She suspected that his amiable nature would change once she slid behind the wheel of his Valiant. Her father, who rarely went out these days but who held strong opinions, thought Annandale where she and Vince lived a lowly, seedy suburb with too many migrants and not enough footpaths, and that if she at least drove she could get away more. But Ellis’s father had never gone all the way down to the waterside and seen the gardens, the massive homes on the escarpment, and experienced the grandeur of the place. He equated Annandale with the grimy strip of shops on Parramatta Road, the crowded terraces closer to Glebe, the motor workshop on the main road where Vince worked. Ellis suspected he had never dwelt on the name, Annandale.

  *

  Dove did not know why her character’s name was Ellis, but as she saw her alight that bus, at the stop before the gate of her father’s house, she knew without any doubt that this was her name. Lately she had been reading Wuthering Heights. It was possible that the name Ellis Bell had stuck in her mind, although every way she examined it, she could find no connection between her character, a young woman in suburban Sydney some time in the late 1960s, and that of the novel or its author or the author’s pseudonym. She was only aware that she liked names commencing with E and with the El sound especially. They seemed natural, mellifluous (a mellifluous word, itself) and rolled pleasingly across the tongue and out the lips. Eliza, Ellis, Ellen, Elizabeth, Eleanor. If she were going to have a character in a novel – and it seemed that this might be the case – she would want to utter that character’s name over and over, at least in her mind, and roll it around, easy and smooth, a sweet lozenge.

  At what point she knew that Ellis had a baby she could not say. But the baby must have been there all along. Reviewing the scenes she had already vis
ualised – it was like pausing and replaying a film in her head – Dove now saw Ellis well before she reached the bus stop where she would alight. She saw her shifting the baby on her lap. The rose-tinted elderly women had cooed at him as Ellis had boarded and made her way past them to her seat. But after she had passed them, what Ellis did not see, preoccupied with propping the collapsible pram against her seat so it would not roll away, and settling the baby in her lap, was these two women whispering something disapproving about babies needing to wear more than singlets even if the weather was warm. One of them remarked on the absence of his sunhat, but Ellis had removed this and placed it in her shoulder bag before boarding the bus, since he was prone to flinging it off. Her father had given her the hat, and she would place it on the baby’s head again before she walked through her father’s front gate. It would make him glad to see his grandson wearing it. He was so very happy to have a grandson.

  *

  During her lunch break, Dove phoned her mother’s caseworker, then the hospital ward manager, and finally the care facility ten minutes’ drive from her home. She had been ringing every day lately.

  ‘Good news,’ said the Grange’s residential services officer. ‘We can take your mother soon. Possibly even next Monday.’

  If there are no further hitches, Dove thought. Instead she said, ‘Wonderful. I’ve been waiting for ages. We’ve been waiting.’ Then, in case this was construed as a complaint of sorts, ‘It’s such a relief. Mum will be so much better off with you.’

  She tried not to think about why the room, which last week was only a possibility, was now available.

  ‘And,’ he said, with finality, ‘we won’t be able to … accommodate any other changes. Again.’

  ‘I realise that,’ Dove said. She would try and discuss it tonight, though her mother could only speak with great effort, rationing her words out one or two at a time. Her lucid periods were mainly in the early evenings. A month or so ago she had breathed the words, ‘Nursing home, Dove. Less trouble,’ into her daughter’s ear and reached for her hand and pressed it. Dove had spent considerable time at work on the phone, and later at home in the evenings sending emails. Except on the designated day of the move, having taken the morning off work, she had arrived at the hospital to find her mother sitting up in bed, preternaturally alert.