The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read online

  I notice the lights from the house out the back, bay windows appearing as beacons through the trees, the house of my first night terrors, where my mother discovered my father in bed with Kim and ordered them both away. The house where my parents’ marriage ended.

  A dark hump appears in the headlights, a car abandoned in the field. It hunkers low in the grass on bare axles. An old Mitsubishi sedan with its tyres removed, brimming with trash and what looks like a chair leaned up against the door. Beyond the car, the garden fence, and the yard that was once tidy emerges as a carnival of corrugated iron, engine parts and overgrowth, a rusted clothesline whining. There were once hibiscus, black-eyed peas and black-eyed Susan, a twelve-foot passion-fruit vine.

  I park the hybrid under a eucalyptus near the fence and wend my way among rusted fenders and a sunken laundry trough to the sagging carport, and knock on the brown waterlogged door of my childhood. A shout from inside and then footsteps; the door opens a crack. Then the face of a woman with creased smoker’s cheeks and turquoise eyes, her hair in a tangled nest. Nipples pressed through a long Cold Chisel T-shirt stretched down to bare, slender legs.

  ‘You must be Daniel!’ she says, suspiciously. ‘A chip off the block.’ She is nervous, speaking more with the urgency of speed than the drawl of a stoner. ‘Excuse this dreadful mess,’ she adds. She clasps her shoulders, blames ‘the boys’ for the maze of laundry on the floor, but there are no signs of boys just the smell of cannabis. In a kitchen I barely recognise she offers me coffee. She’s probably only my age but looks like she’s done it harder. I glance away from her angry but curious stare, down at a floor now bereft of linoleum, to a sink where leaning plates and angled saucepans tower precipitously. The kitchen where my grandmother once stood with the sun beaming in on her delicate English face, pouring tea and placing scones on a silver tray, baking her special rice pudding.

  Sharen Wills’ arms are tanned and her hands are shaking as she plugs in a kettle. She announces, ‘The Landlord and Tenant Act of Victoria requires twenty-four hours prior notice for a visit from the landlord.’

  ‘I’m not your landlord,’ I say. ‘Just making sure things are okay.’

  She puts the kettle down. ‘I’m having trouble with your father,’ she says. No mention of the letter.

  ‘We’ve had trouble with him ourselves.’

  ‘He appears on a horse at the window at all hours and I rarely wear clothes in the house.’ She looks down at herself, the cotton clinging to her narrow body and I wonder if I’m supposed to find it appealing. She offers me a cigarette.

  ‘He hasn’t ridden for years,’ I say. ‘He can barely walk.’

  ‘He’d crawl if he had to,’ she says. ‘He’s at the door at midnight … and when I don’t answer he pulls out my marijuana by the roots.’

  I imagine her in tight-fitting, camel-toe jeans. ‘It’s his mother’s house,’ I say. I don’t tell her the whole five hundred acres, houses and all, are now in my mother’s name, after he was sentenced to life with Kim. Now I’ve got two bitches in my soup, he once told me on the sly. I look over at this woman pouring me coffee and wonder if there aren’t now three. A rat gets caught in its own trap, my mother says of him. ‘He wants me out of here,’ says Sharen, hugging a cup of coffee between her breasts. ‘He wants to move back in here; he wants to die in his mother’s house. But I want to die in his mother’s house too,’ she says.

  I’m not sure what to say. My father, almost eighty, thinks he’s my age, despite the fact his hips are fusing. I look at the squalor of plates and piles of paper, a place I wouldn’t want to live or die in. My grandmother’s quaint English furniture left in this woman’s hands, and the last time I visited, my father on his death bed in the Dandenong Hospital, pale in one of those paper gowns, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, a shriveling man in a narrow metal cot. But he still thought he was virile, working the nurses, wheezing, flirting, something to live for. Bright young nurses in robin’s egg blue attending, the glint in his wrinkled farmer’s eyes. He offered them trips down here, said he’d take them out riding, as if he could still get on a horse. Half-dead and still handsome.

  ‘I’ll take him to the tribunal,’ says Sharen. ‘How dare he try to evict me after all I’ve been through?’ She looks over at me, gauging loyalties, more defiant than tearful, angry at these unexpected visits, the skulking, or maybe angry that he skulks no more, that I’m not moving to comfort her. I don’t need to tell her he’s always been a hands-on husband, women pressed against the fridge, my unsuspecting girlfriends bailed up on the hallstand, that Lipman woman emerging with him from the haystack in the middle of the night while my mother slept alone up in the big house, the lantern standing dim above the roses.

  Nervously, Sharen lights a second Marlboro. ‘I’ve had him up to here,’ she says, the cigarette in her nail-bitten fingers cutting across her throat.

  I wonder where she’s really had him up to. I lean on the ledge and try to summon my lawyerly training – her claim could only be against my mother, since she’s the one who now owns all this, but Sharen Wills has no cause against my mother, except perhaps a bifurcated empathy. Still, I recognise a stake laid out on the grease-stained living room floor. A black oil patch where someone dismantled an engine, take-away food containers adorning my grandmother’s inlaid mosaic table. Furniture from some ancestral home in Norfolk.

  ‘Are your horses still here?’ I ask. The pair of plump Anglo-Arabs out in the couch grass. Last year one of them foaled unexpectedly and my father went ballistic, ordered them off the place, but they kept reappearing, mare and foal and other stray horses, munching on his precious grass that really belongs to my mother, grown for the cattle he thinks are still his.

  Sharen has a hand on her hip, reminding me she pays her rent. I’ve heard how she visits the big house, speaks loud enough so my mother can hear, charms her in front of the Aga stove, brings treats for the dog and drinks Earl Grey tea and partakes of stale Teddy Bear biscuits, laughing. Sharen Wills isn’t stupid. She probably helps with the crossword, places difficult pieces into the blue miasma of a jigsaw sky.

  ‘I’m working as a psych nurse at Dalkeith.’ She’s trying to impress me. She has an income; she specialises in old people. She will not be railroded.

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell Dad to piss off?’ I say.

  ‘How could I?’ she asks. ‘He’s the landlord.’

  ‘But you tell him to piss off now.’ I’ve heard how she has my father agitated, taunting him in her T-shirts, shouting epithets out these curved bay windows. I’ll have your balls for breakfast.

  Nodding, feigning tears, ‘I have no choice here,’ she says.

  ‘Did he ever touch you?’

  ‘Not really.’ She’s suddenly defensive, almost shocked. ‘He just chased me around.’ But I’m not sure I believe her. He can barely walk. Maybe he’s touched her in ways she’s not even sure of. Despite the charm he’s predatory, under his guise of playfulness. I watch her and pretend to drink her tepid coffee, thoughts of my buckled-up father before the Tenancy Tribunal, fending off assertions, an old man accused of shuffling around his own mother’s furniture, brandishing his cheeky smile in some fumbling pursuit, then yanking out her marijuana as his only vengeance. A man possessed by lust. It’s not his reputation I care about; that’s long lost and gone. It’s him on the dock of some petty assembly, collapsing, carted away without a chance to limp down the end of this short, dark hallway and climb alone between the sheets of his mother’s four-poster bed.

  ‘You’ll kill him,’ I tell Sharen Wills.

  She stares past me, out into the bay-windowed night, as if the pleasure would be all hers.

  *

  I drive back past the dark, abandoned car, through the milling horses then along the grass track to the big house. The night is clear, the garden lantern turned on for my benefit. When I open the door to the kitchen, my mother doesn’t ask where I’ve been – she’s used to her men disappearing at night. She stands li
ke a twig in pyjamas, heating her wheat bags in the ancient microwave with her mottled sun-spotted hands. ‘Hello, Foozle,’ she says with curious enthusiasm, a nickname I’ve not heard in thirty years. The dog still in its perch among the pillows.

  ‘Do you have everything you want?’ my mother asks, her blotchy terracotta cheeks, her small bird face with small bird eyes. Eyes that could pierce holes in steel. But she doesn’t wait for an answer. Wheat bags in one hand, she slinks up into the dark hallway with a goodnight wave over her shoulder, heading for her narrow bed. She says the bed spins when she lies down in it. She forgets she suffers from vertigo and what the doctor called left-side neglect, a skewed awareness of one side of her body, the effects of a stroke.

  I roll my luggage further up the hall, glimpse Aunt Emma Charlotte’s portrait in the shadowed dining room, her face streaked with possum piss, which gives her a thin damp smile. From behind my mother’s bedroom door, I can already hear her wireless blaring – 3AW talk and oldies, the throaty roll of Burl Ives from her rickety bedside table.

  I no longer sleep in the meatsafe, with its hooks in the tongue and groove ceiling and the freezing bluestone floor, or in my old room in the shearer’s quarters, festooned with dusty horse-show ribbons; I sleep in the Senator’s Room, named in honour of a television show once filmed here. The light unveils the familiar ornate moulded roses on the fifteen-foot cobwebbed ceiling, a fresh rent where chunks of plaster have fallen, a dark hole up into the cold slate roof. The room is still decked out as the master suite of the television senator’s house. The familiar blue floral wallpaper, the only wide bed in the place. My parents once had their two single beds parallel parked in here, separate and unequal. In a house where men find it hard to survive.

  I heft my bag up onto the re-covered chaise and wonder which came first – was my mother unwilling to share her bed with him because she realised what she’d married, or was it that she didn’t share herself and he went elsewhere, to sleep in the campervan or his mother’s house out in the bush? I imagine my conception here, forty years ago, my mother looking up into the cobwebs, a vague disgust in her eyes, or maybe just wondering what all the fuss was about. The irony of them still strangely in love even now, a love so fraught with disappointment it manifests as acrimony.

  On the mantel, a sepia photo of my mother swinging wide at a polo ball, her body clinging like a monkey to the side of a horse at a flat-strap gallop. Her childhood clock on a small, varnished table beside the bed. Its hands dead parallel at 9.15 p.m. Branches scratch the corrugated roof, up where possums gnaw the electrical cables. A vague smell of burning, as if the whole house is quietly smouldering, the slow combustion of oak beams plundered from vessels shipwrecked off the coast.

  I undress to the lilt of Burl Ives. Out in the windmill paddock I can hear horses; one begins to canter, followed by the thunder of elderly geldings galloping, pummelling the dark sandy earth. I get into the senator’s bed, the same cream sheets unwashed from last time, the stale smell of my own night sweats, but also the smell of wheat. Against my leg, a wheat bag of my own, heated and carefully placed by my mother. I try to sleep but am wide awake. The spurned look in Sharen Wills’ bright blue-green eyes, a kind of stricken ferocity that’s never quite left my mother’s. Sharen Wills who will not leave under these provisions.

  I hold the warm wheat bag against my body and listen to the burr of talkback radio, the groans of the cypresses. I dream I’m clambering up through the hole in the plaster, crawling through attics crammed with rows of wooden coat-hangers, leather handbags hanging from hooks like small curing pigs. Possums, eyes wide with beady judgment. The sound of a distant explosion and I’m wide awake. Two a.m. on the bedside clock. The muffled noise of my mother, her bedroom door shoved open against the carpet, her quick jolty steps out onto the windswept veranda. A sound so loud even she heard it.

  I pull the curtain and watch her out there, her nightie blown against her narrow body, her wild night hair pushed back from her face, glaring into the distance. Flames rope up from a fire at the edge of the bush. Within seconds I am joining her in my boxers and T-shirt, our eyes glued on the flicker of orange. ‘Is that the house?’ I ask.

  ‘I hope so,’ she says, rubbing her favourite spot below her hairline, pretending to be inured to the sight of fires, how things here start and end in flames – like the time there was a fire in the Station Road paddock and she searched for my father so he could help. She found him out there in bed with his girlfriend, in the house that now seems to be burning, lit like a candle on the horizon. In a wind like this with the trees so dry – I watch my mother hug herself, knowing this could incinerate a thousand acres and the town.

  ‘Don’t let the bush burn,’ she says, as though it’s up to me. The remnant vegetation, native plants and species, bandicoots and mallee firs, the bush is a place of Aboriginal significance. Not to mention the field where those big dark horses live. I know how horses get panicked by flames, run through barbed-wire fences.

  I’m already back in the house, dialing the Country Fire Brigade, the number on the list taped to the wall, above my father’s number at Kim’s, above the vet and Sharen. ‘A fire on Rawson’s place, the end of Hopetoun Road.’ I talk as if I’m not from here, and now I’m pulling on clothes, running cross-country, wondering if the whole place might just combust in the wind, the bush and the houses, cattle and horses trapped in dry carpets of grass, feathery fetlocks catching like torches.

  Down at the windmill, fumbling with the latches on gates, I realise it’s not the house that’s gone up, but the car in the field. That’s what exploded. The great shadows of the heavy horses circle it like spectres, a dance of retreats and advances between the bounds of their fear and fascination. I leave the gates wide open and call out with my father’s cry: ‘C’mon, c’mon.’ One of them turns but not for long, back to its wary appraisal, the orange and crack of the flames, the floating of embers to sniff in the air, while the small house on the rise lies dark as the night, feigning innocence. The car wrapped in flames and the fire-engine wail bathing the thick night air.

  I race near as I dare to the blue-orange heat and stamp fire that spreads from the vehicle through the midsummer grass. The horses circle behind me, quizzical, mesmerised, nostrils flaring at the smoke, as if daring me closer. But it’s too hot here and the sparks make me wary of another explosion. The sound of the crackling. I pull off my coat to thrash the ground where a flame is causing a new patch to smoulder. Luckily the growth is so short from grazing that it doesn’t just flare up like broom straw. Then, at my feet, a piece of my grandmother’s headboard, an ornate hacked-off corner, and at the base of the flames I see more – a dining room chair, the spindly leg of a bridge table thrown onto the bonnet. An outrage whips through me like the earth quaking. Pieces that survived the passage from England haven’t survived Sharen Wills. I stare at the top of my grandmother’s mirrored armoire, cast out like a demon in flames, but it’s too hot to lunge in and salvage anything. Embers float from my grandmother’s bedhead chopped into sections, from the bed where she died with The Book of Common Shrubs on the now-burning end table, her small round specs on the still-open page. When she was alive and this house was as it should still be.

  I turn from the bonfire and make out a shape in the dimly lit bay window, not fifty yards between us. Sharen Wills, gazing at her accomplishment. She who will not be railroded is railroading us. The sight of her makes me want to snatch a burning chair leg and set her alight, but I’m saved from myself by the fire-engine lights turning up into Hopetoun Road, like an ambulance arriving for the already dead. The siren turned off now, just the hissing of vinyl car seats and sparks from lost antiques.

  I slap my jacket at another scorched swath of grass as the truck rattles silently over the cattle grid and sweeps its lights across the paddock. The arch-necked horses canter off and I’m left here alone with my face lit by flames and the charcoal smell in my nostrils. Up in the truck cab it’s Bobby Gennaro. We once playe
d tennis as boys, when my mother allowed me to mix with the townies.

  ‘You know it’s a total-fire-ban day,’ he shouts at me, jumping down from the running board. He seems invigorated by the blaze, and I sense the divide between us. The two young volunteers unwind the canvas hose. No one asks why a car is on fire in the middle of our paddock; they know weird shit happens out here. My tears are caused by the smoke but my anger is gilded with shame. I might have fled eight thousand miles from this place but it’s a feeling as old as the corduroy coat I flail at the grass. Yes, I’m a Rawson. And they haven’t even noticed the furniture yet. But a new hissing sound and a gust of the high-pressure shoots on the windshield and a burning chair goes flying, charcoaled pieces of French-polished wood. Bobby Gennaro aims lower and smiles to himself as if he’s hit the jackpot. He hoses the flames that light up the delight on his face.

  ‘Fucking Sharen from the house,’ I shout, as though it has little to do with me, ‘she’s pissed off at my father.’ But my voice feels like kindling in the wind. They know Sharen, surely, the way she shows her tits and midriff, and they must talk about my father, the Eccentric Millionaire from Tindervick, despite the fact he now owns nothing. And despite the fierce sprays of precious water, sparks still fly from Sharen’s old burning car and his burning heirlooms, sprung from the house he rented to her regardless, when my mother called him a loon for leaving it furnished. My mother who knew Kim wouldn’t be enough, that he’d keep a keen eye on his dead mother’s stuff and his hands on his slender new tenant. My frail mother, still out on that far dark veranda, smelling the wind for embers, hosing the remains of her garden or hosing down the cypresses in case this gets away and rips through the rye grass towards her. And I’m out here with the nearly doused fire, water sizzling on the white hot metal of the car, attempting to contain these inherited feelings, and ignore Bobby’s stifled amusement. They’ll dine out on this, wake their wives as they walk in their doors in the early morning: ‘You shoulda seen what that Sharen Wills did to old Remy Rawson.’