The Best Australian Stories 2011 Read online

  ‘Really?’ I say with my back to her. ‘Good job Miss Jean wasn’t on that day, then.’ Manjit stands still for a moment. When I face her, she opens her mouth and inhales as if she might continue the conversation, so I cross over to the next bed and say with a brightness that makes me feel sick, ‘Look, Mrs Porteous, you get a purple one today. Your favourite!’

  Maeve, strapped in her bucket chair, does not look up. She cowers bald and wrinkled as a fallen chick. You could almost cup her in your hand and see her heart fluttering under her skin, grey and translucent as her cotton nightdress. I look down at her twisted body in the chair and imagine scooping her up and cradling her across the shiny, disinfected floors, away from the strip lights and out into the fragile morning sun. I might leave her at the base of a tree covered in autumn leaves. Instead I put my fingers in Maeve’s mouth and prise it open, slotting the pills into her like coins. I close her jaw around a beaker of juice and massage her throat.

  ‘Maeve, my lovely,’ Manjit says. ‘How are you?’ She takes Mrs Porteous’s fingers, veined and blue as old china, and folds them over her own, the colour of tea. ‘She’s uncomfortable today, Toni. Don’t you think?’ She hooks a finger under the old woman’s chin and runs a thumb over the muscles in her jaw, locked grimly as if wrestling some invisible force. Manjit is good at reading the signs: she understands the writhing, chafing hands, the whittling tongues, the rocking and huffing and humming. She can read them like Shona reads medical charts or operations procedures. I’ve taught Manjit these things. At visiting time families seek her out now instead of me to translate the secret language of the demented and dying. Manjit can show them the vacant stare, the slack mouth, the contorted, shaking limbs and retrace for them the father, the uncle, the mother that once was there.

  ‘Do you think we should speak to the doctor about upping her meds?’ Manjit asks. I busy myself with ordering the little trays of drugs, their Technicolor glory winking through the plastic, making everything else look pasty. ‘Toni?’ Her delicate brown hand is on my own, fat and ruddy as a butcher’s. She wants more than a yes or no.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ I say. ‘You know what it’s like.’ She doesn’t, of course. She is too young and bright and full of hope to have felt the suffocating panic of the past, the gnaw of old resentments.

  *

  Sometimes when I’m to feed him his pureed pumpkin or potato I find some small job that needs attention. When I get back to him I take the spoon and stir up the food, making sure it’s completely cold and unpalatable. Then I shovel small balls of it into his mouth and watch him grimace with the effort of swallowing, pulling down his bottom lip with disgust, and with greed because he is hungry. It is exactly how his mouth looked when it was just the two of us in his office, all those afternoons, all those years ago. That same grimace from the effort of landing the cane on my palm, hard and flush along the welt already pulsing there, like a plumped vein; that same tight repugnance beneath his nose as he looked down on me; that same hunger in his eyes as if he couldn’t help himself. I remember the slow-motion walks down the corridor back to class, holding before me that strange object in the shape of my hand, waiting for the blood to blossom from the scars below like some exotic flower he’d just given me. I have to look away, then, away from his mouth smeared with pumpkin, because I have the taste of blood in my own.

  *

  By the aviary, at the cheap outdoor setting the staff use for their breaks, Manjit and I slip off our shoes in the sun. I curl my toes on the chalky plastic chair and look at my throbbing bunions and chipped toenail polish. Her feet are thin and brown, delicately veined, too beautiful for the bleached industrial paving. ‘Mr B doesn’t like you, Toni,’ she says, tossing the words into the air, like a child teasing. I squint at her mischievous little smile for a moment, then I light a cigarette. ‘He told me.’ She laughs.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I say and blow smoke down my nose.

  ‘No, seriously. He flinches when you walk in the room … and he wets himself. I’m always having to change him after you’ve been near him.’

  I scratch at the psoriasis in the folds of skin behind my knee, psoriasis I haven’t had for years, not since I was a kid, not since school. When I look at my fingernails there is blood underneath them.

  ‘Yeah, well it’s like Pavlov’s dogs, isn’t it?’ I say and toss my ash into the pot of an umbrella tree. ‘Except instead of food, he knows he’s going to get a bed bath or a needle or a mouthful of pills.’ When I see her frown, I add, ‘Poor bastard.’ She smiles wanly as if to say, ‘Don’t treat me like I was born yesterday.’

  I grind out my cigarette in the soil of the pot plant and heave myself out of the plastic chair.

  ‘Just don’t,’ she says. ‘Not on my shift.’

  My gut tightens and I reach for the psoriasis again. ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Just don’t do that with your cigarettes. It’s revolting.’

  *

  Shona finds us by the aviary.

  ‘Mrs Porteous, bed five, has gone.’ She glances briefly at her wristwatch. ‘Twenty-five minutes ago.’ Even announcing death Shona runs a tight ship. She wields her clipboard before her like she’s some auditor for the Grim Reaper. Her lips barely move when she speaks and she blinks with rapid efficiency. ‘Her records show a morphine increase that wasn’t approved by a doctor and a DNR order not signed by the correct family members.’ Shona looks at Manjit’s bare feet and the cigarette stubs in the plant pot. We do not speak. ‘This will have to be revisited in a staff review. You are aware of that?’ We nod simultaneously, like children. Shona flares up, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Kaur, get some bloody shoes on and see to Mrs Porteous before the family arrive.’ She turns in the doorway to the ward and comes back to lift up Manjit’s fingers, compulsively. Then she shakes her own hand free of them, like she would inconsequential coins or car keys. As she leaves she says with her back to us, ‘And get those earrings out. You’re not at the temple now, Kaur.’

  *

  When she has gone, Manjit rests her forehead on the table for a few seconds and I hear her breath against the plastic. But when she stands she is sure and elegant, slowly pulling down her hair and coiling it back into its clip in one smooth manoeuvre. She unhooks her earrings and looks at me. I lean sideways to scratch at my knee again but the folds of fat that gather at my waist stop me short. I straighten up and head to the door.

  ‘Toni,’ she says. She has already shaken off Shona’s bullying and is back on the job. ‘Mrs Porteous’s family wouldn’t sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Don’t you remember? They said they couldn’t bring themselves to. You were there when I asked them. Remember?’ I shrug and turn to leave. ‘Antonella?’ she says gravely.

  ‘Yes, Kumari Kaur?’ I tease her. She doesn’t laugh. ‘No idea,’ I say finally. ‘Let Miss Jean worry about it – she’s the one on the power trip.’ Then I say, ‘Don’t take it so personally.’ But my voice sounds lame. I’m thinking of Mr B and wondering whether someone can be destined to hate another person the way others fall in love: irrationally, uncontrollably, obsessively.

  *

  His family visits on Sunday afternoons. A daughter, mainly. She’s about my age, almost as fat. Sometimes she brings her teenage kids. They hover uncertainly in the aisles, all oversized clothes and open-mouthed absence, as if they too have forgotten who they are and why they are here. The daughter tidies his bedside cabinet and stocks it with Sorbolene and folded white handkerchiefs embroidered with his initials. They get stolen by the cleaning staff or by more mobile patients on walkabout from other wards. Every week she hopefully replaces them, thinking he has used them. It assuages her guilt, this one small service. One week she asks me about them.

  ‘White handkerchiefs?’ I say. ‘No, I don’t remember seeing any. Perhaps they’re in the laundry.’ I smile at her but all the while I’m sick with the memory of those little starch
ed squares.

  *

  In the afternoons before the home bell rang he’d send for me. It was always worse at the end of the day, when everyone else had gone. I’d wait in the corner of his office listening to the squeaking of chairs and hurried feet in the corridors, the parting shouts on the other side of the closed door, while he leaned back in his chair, swivelling slightly, the newspaper in his lap pressed into a crisp rectangle around the crossword. He’d mumble the clues to himself as if he was alone and fully engrossed, but I’d already learnt how he liked to tease out the thrill of anticipation. I’d see the tips of his neatly trimmed nails turning white as he squeezed his pencil; watch the way he rolled his thumb excitedly backwards and forwards over the rubber bands he kept lodged around his knuckles; try not to notice the red lines where they cut into the skin on the back of his hand. His desk had the same brutal order to it: the immaculate leather writing set with fountain pen upright to attention; the glass paperweight of Pope Paul always to the left, his two fingers raised in stern benediction; the jar of fiercely sharpened HB pencils always to the right, behind the plaque of thanks from the Rotary Club; and at the very front, the clean line of the cane resting on a folded white handkerchief embroidered with his initials in deep blue thread. I’d wait, tracing the monogram, the letters almost hidden among the loops and curls, and I’d try to guess his middle name from that one clue, as if that single character might unlock the man behind the neat rectangle of newspaper, might make me understand the why and where of it all.

  *

  His daughter stops bringing the handkerchiefs. It doesn’t matter anymore. I already know his middle name from the Do Not Resuscitate order in his records. She brings him orchids, prearranged in a coloured box with loops of ribbon. After a time, when she is at peace with her decision, when she has grown used to wishing for the end to come, she will bring cheaper flowers wrapped in service-station cellophane and busy herself arranging them in the ward vases. It gives her something to do and shortens the time she must look at him. She will read her book and pat his hand for the twenty minutes it takes to feel her duty is done, and she will not have to look at his crooked jaw, the hollow of his cheeks, the way his tongue worries a rotten molar. And when she is gone, I will skimp on his morphine and give him tea from his crossword mug, as Manjit likes me to. It’s our duty – offering these small pleasures for as long as possible.

  ‘Thirteen across, seven letters,’ I’ll say. ‘A dish best served cold. Blowed if I know. I bet you know, though, don’t you, Mr B?’ And I will remember the way that Do Not Resuscitate order twitched on my open palm before skating like a dead leaf on a draft, up and up towards the strip lights and down under the filing cabinets.

  Carrying On

  Gretchen Shirm

  It was the car idling in the driveway that woke her, the headlights on the wall through the frame of the old fig. The engine did not cut; it just purred, as if in a trance. Her eldest had taken the Mazda to an eighteenth birthday party. There’d been a run of them lately, as if all his friends were suddenly realising they were adults and their exams were over.

  Tracee’s friend Rhonda, from down the street, had said, ‘You just have to let them go at that age,’ the tip of her cigarette flaring as they sat together on Tracee’s back step.

  And that’s why, now, Tracee doesn’t get out of bed and move towards the wardrobe for her dressing gown; why she doesn’t go downstairs; why she lies, staring at the wall, listening to the alarm clock tick out its steady rhythm as her heart knocks against her chest.

  After the motor chokes, she hears the car door close and footsteps. She pushes off the covers and goes to the window, looking down to the driveway. Tracee sees his lanky body folded in half, looking at one of the headlights. A scrape, she thinks to herself. He’s gone and had himself a scrape – just what he needs right now, before he gets his exam results, before he leaves for university.

  Then he disappears from view and she throws herself back on the bed, as the back door shudders in its frame and the stairs creak. Her bedroom door opens with a yawn. It’s been so many years since he came to her bed. Not since the separation, when all three of them used to sleep together in her bed, tossing like a boat every time one of them rolled over.

  *

  ‘But how do you let go?’ Tracee had asked Rhonda, as she scraped the tip of her cigarette along the step.

  ‘Oh, letting go,’ Rhonda sighed. ‘Letting go is easy. Letting go is just like walking around and pretending you don’t see anything.’

  Tracee’s eldest boy was the school captain, and now they expect him to get dux, or that’s what his teachers tell her. She knows she should be happy – any other mother would be happy – but Tracee worries that this early success will spoil him.

  *

  She stays facing the wall when she hears his breathy little sobs from the mattress behind her. And when she asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ she does not take his shoulders and demand it of him. She asks him flatly, as if she doesn’t care to know the answer.

  ‘The car,’ is all she catches through the straining in his throat.

  The smell of alcohol on his breath drifts to her. He hasn’t even bothered to brush his teeth. It’s funny, that strange complicity between adults and their children; this I won’t ask, as long as, whatever you do, please don’t tell.

  ‘Go to sleep. We’ll worry about it in the morning.’

  She says this, but all through the dark night her eyes are fixed on the grey wall beside her bed and she lies stiffly, conscious of the body of her son spread out on the mattress beside her.

  *

  In the morning, she’s up before the boys. The sun is ready to rise, pink, like a damp mouth about to swallow the sky. She drives the Mazda up the driveway, into the garage, and steps outside slowly, bracing herself for the damage. But when she surveys it, there is nothing except a small dimple in the bonnet, where it looks as though something hit and bounced.

  Then she turns the key in the ignition and the engine sniggers and turns over. She flicks on the headlights and they illuminate the back wall of the garage suddenly, as if it’s a stage, revealing the lawnmower and the rake and shovels huddled together. She walks once more around the car and at the headlights stoops to see a brown smudge over the Perspex. She bends down and rubs her finger against it, but it doesn’t lift, so she scratches it off – first with her fingernail and then with a key – until it has all flaked away, and she sweeps it up with a dustpan and broom. When she’s finished, she stands in the garage for a moment, feeling the air thicken with carbon monoxide, the smell of it scratching at the back of her throat.

  She leaves the boys to fix their own breakfast and drives into town. At the panel beaters, she says something about driving behind a semitrailer and a stone hitting the bonnet. The panel beater just nods, wiping his oil-stained fingers with a damp rag.

  At ten, right on time, the ex comes to collect the boys, parking out on the street at the front of the house, as though acknowledging it is not his driveway anymore. The youngest clings to Tracee’s leg: he is shy around his father, and this – of everything about the separation – is what pains her most. Travis has them every second weekend and for a week in the school holidays, but the youngest doesn’t like moving between the two places. Travis leans against the car, the way he used to when they were teenagers, but the smile, the we-can-go-anywhere-smile, that is what is missing now. When Travis smiles at her, his smile is swallowed by his mouth, his lips one straight line in his face.

  While they are waiting for the boys, they talk about their friend Charlotte, who is finally remarrying. They speak of it carefully, dancing around the details and stealing little glances at each other. It wasn’t so long ago that Tracee visited his new apartment for the first time. It isn’t new anymore; he’s had it for four years now. It’s a small, two-bedroom place, right near the beach. Neat as a pin, he used
to say, as if quoting from a real-estate brochure. It has a small balcony and a galley kitchen. The boys like it, at least, because there is an Xbox to play.

  ‘Where’s the Mazda?’ Travis asks, looking towards the empty garage.

  ‘I took it to the panel beaters,’ she says, ignoring the pull of her eldest’s gaze. And then she repeats the story, word for word, the same as she told the panel beater.

  ‘Will you be right without a car?’ Travis asks, as if the very thought of it pains him. And all she can do is nod.

  *

  Sometimes, she thinks they could have mended things, Travis and her. But she was busy going to university and then, for a year or two, he had a new girlfriend – a woman with freckly skin and a heavy fringe. And now it’s too late. Now they’re like two old bones that can’t knit back together again.

  When the boys have gone, she sits out on the back step, fondling the almost full packet of cigarettes that she hides in her underwear drawer, where she knows the boys will never look. The eldest begged her to quit. She would die of lung cancer, he said, if she didn’t give them up. They show them now, at school, pictures of tar squeezed from dead lungs like molasses and solidified fat clotting the aorta. In her day, there were no pictures: they just let you work it out for yourself. So she quit when the eldest was ten and she does not tell him about her occasional lapses.

  Tracee strikes the match to the box; it flares and she holds it to the end of her cigarette. Beside the steps, hydrangeas bob up and down in the breeze like nodding heads. Every time Tracee looks at them now she has to remind herself to come back out to them later with the secateurs – they’ve grown thick and bushy. She draws in a lungful of velvety smoke, exhaling it evenly from her nostrils. She practised this as a teenager; the art of smoking a cigarette is all in the exhale, she used to tell her friends.