The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read online

  A remnant of my grandmother’s English bedspread blows against my leg, brittle and disintegrating, the bobbles singed and loose on the fringe. A bed that should have been mine. The dividends of my father’s charm: my grandmother’s inlaid vanity attached to the trunk like a cancer and the sight of Sharen Wills watching through the smoke from the quaint bay window, taunting me while my father sleeps elsewhere. The busted-up mosaic table.

  I glance back at Sharen Wills with my watery eyes but turn away in disgust, drawn back to the smouldering aftermath, the last sprays of high-pressure water on the rusted black chassis, a blistered piano stool lodged deep in the back window, its legs reaching out like the haunches of a deer, the shapes of these snickering, adrenalised men in the beams of their truck lights. In the steam and ashes, the remains of the small, incinerated rocking horse. The silver mane and real leather bridle. My grandmother rode it as a child in the Cotswolds, and then rocked me on it in this strange country she called the Frightful Antipodes. The rocking horse is blackened, the painted wood sooty and blistered in the rubble. I move in to retrieve at least something, kneel down to the memories of her pretty English face, ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross. But the remains of the plaything are sodden and the wet, disintegrating feel has me moving away through the smoke.

  With charcoaled hands, I tread through the dark towards the house, past a wheelbarrow, to the figure now gone from the window. I am deliberate, climbing the chicken wire. My father, who cares less for belongings than for the chance at a woman like this, and I, who’ve been striving so hard to divorce myself from this ridiculous history. But it’s me who is pounding the green-panelled door. I don’t shout her name, just beat on the wood, unsure what I’ll do if she answers, or if she doesn’t. Then I realise it’s not even locked and I burst in, and there she is in her washed-out glory, through the frosted glass doors in the sitting room. The stale smell of her pot and adulterating rubbish now mixed with the remains of fresh-split mahogany. She’s had a busy night.

  Sharen in bra and panties slouches in a modern rocker-recliner in a room bereft of my grandmother’s things. The axe that’s done the job leans against the wall like a casual assistant. Despite me, she watches out the bay window, as if it’s all on television, the young fire fighters and their brightly lit truck, all framed with a bottlebrush foreground. Staring out like I’m not even in this entry hall. Her arms are tanned and slender, wrists I could snap in my hands; her fingers loose on a cigarette, legs crossed to support the ashtray in her brazen lap. I want to snatch her up from her tacky recliner, drag her outside by a fistful of stringy chestnut hair, across the hardwood floor, her bare heels furrowing through the chips from my grandmother’s dining-room table.

  ‘How dare you,’ I say.

  She turns, recalcitrant. I move into the naked room, bear down on her.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she says, fending me off with her cigarette, stabbing wildly at the air, her expression still snide but strangely playful.

  As I grab the cigarette, it burns into my palm. I let out a yelp that surprises us both, stamp the fag end into the floor and I can see her suppressing a smile.

  ‘I don’t want to touch you, believe me,’ I say. She leans forward in her small dark bra, shows me what worked for my father, but her ashtray falls to the floor. ‘You’re not that appealing,’ I say.

  ‘Ridden hard and put away wet?’ Her laugh is brittle and mocking but I stand over her with a desire to hurt that unnerves me, to give her what she wants.

  ‘They were my grandmother’s antiques,’ I say. ‘Shipped from England in the twenties.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about your family’s history,’ she says.

  It’s all I can do not to strike her. ‘I’m not my father,’ I say. ‘And I don’t want to go where he’s been.’

  She looks up at me with something stubborn and primal in her bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she says.

  ‘Yes you are.’ I’m behind her now, at the back of the recliner, pinning her narrow hands to the arms of the chair, hefting it up with her in it, moving over the room as she yells about lawyers and the rights of tenants and how I don’t want to do this, but I’m already out in the entry hall and it feels like this is the right thing to do. I think of my grandmother’s rocking horse as I hiss with exertion in the doorway and step into the chill of the night, Sharen screeching and spitting. She bites the arm of my coat as I use her as ballast to thrust her outside; she tries to square her legs against the door jamb but they don’t quite spread that wide.

  ‘I don’t care what you did with my father.’ I rip my sleeve from her teeth, empty her out of the chair and down the bluestone steps. Sharen Wills ends up splayed in a scant-clad heap with her own broken chair on the path of my childhood. She looks back at me like a victim of some horrible crime.

  ‘You are like your father.’

  Firemen run through the darkness, the fastest one almost hurdles the fence.

  ‘You wish,’ I say.

  The breathless young firemen are already there. One kneels at her side and she’s sobbing. It’s a volunteer’s dream, this on top of everything else.

  ‘Take her with you,’ I say. ‘Get her off the place.’

  ‘I’ll tell them what Remy did.’ She curls her lip at me as she’s helped to her feet.

  ‘Tell them what you like,’ I say. Inside, I close my grandmother’s door behind me and lean my back against it. Just don’t tell me.

  In the sitting room echoing with what has just been, I shake with a rage that wants to trash what’s left but there’s nothing – a Women’s Weekly and an empty Tindervick Pizza box on the floor, a wicker laundry basket draped with socks. I punt it clean across the room at a wall bereft of pictures. The Munnings print, thoroughbreds with dust rugs over their loins, is gone. A feeling wells up inside me I’ve not felt since I was seventeen and pummelled my father, bloodied his angular face and then left this farm for the first time. My stupid fucking father. And now I’m back here, back in time, in this sad little house, ridding us all of Sharen Wills. The sting of her cigarette welt in my palm, her teeth marks on my forearm, and out the same bay window, her narrow shoulders draped with a blanket, escorted by firemen across the paddock to the truck. Their shadows like tribespeople travelling through.

  No sign of the black horses, just the silhouetted figures climbing into the cab of the fire engine – then, at the edge of the spray of truck lights, a frail shape in the dark. My mother in her cream nightgown like a sheet in the wind above the grass. A skeletal woman out after midnight, hugging herself in the smoky air now dissipating in the breeze. I walk toward her, past the remains of the broken recliner, climb the fence and move through the paddock. She’s moored to the earth by my father’s oversized boots, monitoring the fire engine as it bumps off through the night, her shiny button eyes tracking the taillights down Hopetoun Road.

  ‘That’s something accomplished,’ she says. Her face shines with a translucent pleasure, as if a lost territory has been retaken.

  In the dark, the burned-out vehicle appears like the carcass of a gutted beast, smoking and sizzling, my mother shivering with victory, her nightie blowing against her ribcage. We watch the red lights recede towards town.

  ‘She’ll be screaming bloody murder,’ I say.

  ‘I doubt you hurt her,’ my mother says, quietly phosphorescent, like she’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, betrayed but undaunted. ‘I was your witness,’ she says. Her hearing seems strangely acute in the smoke-scented breeze.

  ‘How much did you see?’ I ask.

  ‘You poured her out like a load of wood,’ she says proudly. The smile. ‘But you didn’t hit her, did you?’ She neither looks at me nor waits for an answer. ‘Remember that time with your father, after he threw the hammer at you?’

  ‘I didn’t hit her,’ I say. I had my father pinned against the fridge and punched him until his Roman nose was broken and his cheeks were scraped with blood, and I pinned Sharen Wills’ narrow hands to the
arms of that now-busted chair and she disappeared, cradled between men in a truck. I wrap my mother in my jacket and place an arm about her bony shoulders, an unlikely liberty. We move to inspect the steaming remains, the dregs barely visible in the unlit night, just a dark hump and the faint sibilant hiss of water dripping on hot metal. It’s too dark to be reminded of the rocking horse.

  ‘She burned all of Granny’s furniture,’ I say.

  My mother exhales dismissively. ‘That spindly little English stuff, you could barely use it anyway.’ She always despised my grandmother’s gentility, the fact that she was so spoiled and pretty, not to mention religious, that she pledged her modest fortune to American evangelists. A malady equated with madness.

  We turn away from the carnage and trudge through the paddocks, back up to the main house. ‘And the Munnings was gone from the wall,’ I say.

  She looks up, squinting. She loved that painting, the fine shapes of well-bred horses. She’d always had her sights on it, but my father insisted it stay on my grandmother’s wall. ‘Your father is a sloven and a slut,’ my mother says, then stares ahead as I wonder at her unlikely choice of epithets.

  ‘Would he have insured it?’ I ask. ‘Any of it?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry, you’ll end up with all this.’ She stares across the spread extending flat and black as bitumen before us, shrouding me in an old unholy alliance, me the lucky one. Schooled as a boy not to care for my father, her disillusionment placed like a bounty at my feet, advising quietly how his side of the family may have been pretty but they weren’t that bright, letting me know on the QT that his parents were actually cousins. ‘That’s why they left England.’

  My father, the only surviving son of runaways, charming, square-jawed. I could beat him at Scrabble before I was ten, or I would have if I’d bothered to play him. I was too busy doing crosswords with my mother, measuring up to her vocabulary, while he was already out chasing skirt. My mother too tough for him to compete with, on a horse, at cricket or cards. A polo player, she rode jumping horses in England at the Royal Windsor Show, studied agricultural science at Melbourne University, played tennis like Margaret Court, came second in the Australia-wide bridge pairs with Gill the cook. My father who’d begged my mother to marry him until she gave in. ‘He wouldn’t leave me alone,’ she once told me, ‘so eventually I said “yes” just to make him stop.’ My mother proceeded to split me – prodigal son and surrogate husband. My father sought his approval elsewhere. He knew there was no competing here.

  The creak of the windmill above us where the three gates meet, and again the hoot of that unseen owl, the weight of this old conspiracy, my arm around the matriarch – part-parent, part-child, her confidant. I glance back in the direction of the newly emptied house and feel the onslaught of misgivings.

  ‘Bobby Gennaro was amused,’ I say.

  My mother allows another huff. ‘You scared them all off,’ she says. She treads carefully through the longer grass, past the concrete trough in the centre paddock. ‘I’m just glad that woman’s gone,’ she says. ‘Good boy.’ But I wonder if that woman will be back.

  ‘We’ll get Al to clean up the mess,’ my mother says, forgetting that Al’s as old as the Empire. He’s worked here so long he can barely cut wood to keep her in logs for the stove. He could no more clean up that burned-out wreck or the squalor in Sharen Wills’ kitchen than run for government.

  I imagine Sharen at the fire station telling her woes to the boys over a smoke and a beer.

  ‘I should call the police,’ I say.

  My mother laughs. The laugh she uses when she hasn’t heard, in case what I said is supposed to be funny. In lieu of a response she motions at the dark billowed shapes of the heavy horses in the distance, grazing in their fresh paddock. ‘We should just change the locks on the cottage,’ she says and I realise she’s heard all along. She’s reminding me she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders; she’d have preferred we fought the fire ourselves.

  ‘We also need to keep your father out of that house,’ she says. ‘Once he gets wind of all this he’ll want to move in there with bloody Kim.’ My mother seems to be gaining momentum. No longer a wavering stick in white cotton, she steps through the grass erratically, plotting like old times. She must have her hearing aid in. ‘Next thing you know he’ll be dead and we’ll be left with her.’ She holds course for the lantern in her garden on the distant hill, where her dog is shut inside and barking.

  We head along the old tractor path and she hitches up her nightie and starts telling me stories. ‘Remember at Monomeith we had those Dutch people.’ She talks as if I were alive then, on the farm where she grew up. ‘They used our chairs as firewood. Too lazy to go out and chop their own.’ This is why we were taught to hate the Dutch.

  My mother pulls free from my arm at the stile by the chicken coop and climbs unassisted. If she falls we both know she’ll shatter a hip. Balancing on top in the night breeze she looks down at me.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ she says, ‘we used to ride our ponies bareback and help spot bushfires from up on Two Bays Road.’ She shields her eyes as if we’re in broad daylight. ‘The firemen gave us canvas knapsacks of water and we’d spray the remains.’ She goes to step over but stops. ‘I was good at firefighting,’ she says.

  I feel a strange desire to defend the dignity of this old woman, who stands resilient up in the dark like something immortal. ‘No sign of fires from up here,’ she says, the recent one perhaps already shot from her memory while its implications adhere to me like the soot on my fingers, a charred rocking horse and a lost Munnings, my mother up there as if she might just float away. I love the life that’s returned to her eyes. ‘You’re the reason I stay alive,’ she says, then boldly steps down to the ground.

  She walks on ahead through the wood chips by the chopping stump, leaving me this side of the fence, split in pieces of my own – the part that yearns to be here with her, to stay like this forever, and the part that needs to disappear into a city far away.

  Harvard Review

  One of the Girls

  Gillian Essex

  My bed’s covered with clothes and I’m still not sure what to wear because it was only yesterday she rang and first I thought I hadn’t heard it right that she wanted me to have lunch and listen to a band with her so then I had to rearrange things and I didn’t even think about what to wear but I don’t want to embarrass her though now it’s too late so I settle for the skirt because at least it’s black and I don’t look so fat in it and then the doorbell rings and it’s Emma and I haven’t even put make-up on but I ask her if I look okay and she says fine without really looking then on the way I don’t know what to say because it’s been a while and she looks at the road because she’s driving so I just gaze out the window then she asks me where I want to eat but I don’t know so she picks somewhere and orders but I pay for it and then I eat most of hers as well as mine because all she’s done is play with it just like when she was little and she gives me that look and it makes me try to hold my stomach in when we walk into the pub and she introduces me to the band and they’re all flat-bellied skinny girls and I think about how bands always used to be boys except maybe the singer but I call out hello to the girls then one of them comes right over and shakes my hand then Emma leads me over to a battered leather couch facing where the band is setting up and she tells me that this’ll be comfortable for me as if I’m old or something but I think the stools off to the side might be better though I sit on the couch anyway and try to pull my skirt over my knees and think about how it would have been better if I’d worn jeans like everyone else here and I hope the band won’t be too loud then she asks me if I want a drink and I do really but I tell her no because I’m off alcohol now and then I think I should have asked for a lemon lime and bitters but I don’t even know if pubs do that anymore and she says she needs a drink so she goes to the bar and I think she’ll come back but she perches on a stool and doesn’t look m
y way again and I wonder if it’d be okay to get up and join her but it looks like she’s chatting up the barman and at first I think she could do better than that but then I think it’s a start and anyway maybe she’s just relieved there’s someone else to talk to besides me so I stay on the couch and wonder how long it’s been since I’ve been in a bar and if all pubs are like this these days with fake wood panelling and mirrors and stainless steel fittings and metal furniture apart from the couch and hardly anyone here to listen to the band but it’s only three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and it’s sunny outside and perhaps when they start to play people will come through the large doors that open onto the street and I suppose that’s what the band’s for but it looks like they’re being paid in drinks instead of money by the way they’re knocking back red wine in beer glasses and I wonder if they’ll even be able to play and then in walks this woman and I think she’s one of the girls because she’s thin and she’s wearing faded and ripped jeans and a T-shirt with writing on it and her hair’s got different colours in it the way they do it these days only mine’s the same colour it always was except my roots are showing and she greets the girls in the band like they’re all mates and hugs Emma but then she comes over to the couch and she says this must be the mothers’ couch only I think she’s said ‘the mother’s couch’ but then she sits beside me and from close-up I see she’s got wrinkles but they’re covered in make-up and she looks fantastic and I wish I’d put mine on and she says you must be Emma’s mother but I just nod and wait for her to go away because I’m hoping that Emma will come back and then she tells me she’s Sophie’s mother and I don’t even know which one Sophie is because I didn’t catch their names but Sophie’s mother points out the girl who’s adjusting the mike and it’s the one who shook my hand and she tells me that Sophie’s the lead singer and I think that’d be right and I look at Emma and think she must be just the groupie if that’s what they still call them and then Sophie’s mother tells me that Sophie’s studying law but I didn’t know you could be a lawyer with a ring through your nose and she says she didn’t really want her to be a lawyer and I think why not and then she tells me that she supposes Sophie chose law because she’s always been surrounded by lawyers and I guess if Sophie’s parents are lawyers then that’s how come Sophie’s mother can afford to look so good and then she says she’s worried about whether Sophie will have enough time to study with all the band practice she’s doing but she tells me Sophie’s just won a medal at the uni so I guess Sophie does all right and I just think about how Sophie’s mother hugged Emma like it was the most natural thing in the world and Emma didn’t even flinch or not that I could see and then Sophie’s mother tells me Sophie’s going off to work in an orphanage in Cambodia as soon as she’s finished her degree and then she wants to work in human rights and I think oh God she’s going to save the world as well and I wonder if Emma would have turned out better if I’d managed to stay with her father because then she wouldn’t have been so angry and we would have had more money not that she’s turned out badly it’s just she hasn’t worked out what to do with her life yet and she’s never even had a boyfriend or not that I know of but I haven’t been much of a role model there and I wonder if it’s because of me but then Sophie’s mother says she doesn’t want Sophie to go overseas and I think why wouldn’t you because I would have liked to and I think it would be great if Emma got to go like for me and then suddenly the band cranks up and Sophie’s voice sounds like she’s channelling Janis Joplin and yet she’s so tiny and she plays the guitar as well and now the girls are singing songs they wrote themselves about women taking control of their lives and I don’t know where they could have got that stuff from being so young and Sophie’s mother’s sitting there and she’s mouthing the words like she knows all the songs by heart and she says she goes to all their gigs as if it wasn’t obvious and I think Emma must too because Sophie’s mother talks about Emma like she knows her really well and I didn’t even meet Sophie until today and all the time Sophie’s mother’s been talking I haven’t said a word but I suppose I’d better say something so I say you must be very proud of your daughter and I ask her if Sophie got her talent from her and she says God no so I say from your husband then and she laughs in a brittle kind of way and tells me that she hasn’t got a husband and then I say are you a lawyer and she laughs again only this time it’s more like a sob and she tells me she just works for a law firm that’s all well actually she just files and cleans up a bit and makes them coffee but all the lawyers look out for Sophie and I wonder how Emma might have turned out if people like that were looking out for her or even if I’d just encouraged her more but there was always work and bills to pay though I suppose that’s just an excuse really because I wanted to try and have a life before it was too late but then almost before I noticed she’d grown up and then she was gone and if I’d known it was going to be so quick I would have waited and we could have had more of a life together and perhaps if I’d taken her to music lessons she’d be on the stage like Sophie and I’d be the stage mother and now Sophie’s mother is talking about how she and Sophie are close like sisters and I wonder what that would feel like and I ask how old Sophie was when her father left but she says there never was a father and then she starts to cry and she says that she was married once but she lost the baby then her husband left her and had babies with someone else and she was so upset she persuaded a friend to help her have one too but he wasn’t too keen at first because he was worried about the legal stuff so she got a lawyer to draw up some papers and the lawyer took pity on her and he was the one who gave her a job because she didn’t have one and wasn’t qualified to be anything except a mother and now all the lawyers in the practice are good to Sophie but you know how lawyers are she says only I don’t and I think that was some friendship she had but then she says she used a turkey baster to get herself pregnant and I didn’t think people really did that but Sophie doesn’t know because that was part of the deal and I think that anyone who tried that hard deserves to have a daughter like Sophie even if it is a bit weird so I put my arms around Sophie’s mother because she’s still crying and I tell her she must have been a good mother because Sophie’s so clever and she cares about people but then Sophie’s mother says she’s really scared because she doesn’t know what she’ll do when Sophie goes overseas and what if the band becomes successful and goes on tour and she can’t go with them and then she tells me she’s on anti-depressants and the doctor keeps putting up the dose but it’s still not working and she supposes that’s why she’s crying and she does it all the time and then I notice that Sophie and Emma are staring at us and I see the pub’s filled up with people so I move my arms but I keep holding Sophie’s mother’s hand between us on the couch and I give her a tissue to wipe the mascara streaks off her face and then Sophie comes to the microphone and welcomes a new band member to the stage and it’s Emma and she goes to the microphone and starts to sing and it’s just backing vocals but I’m so proud and I have to let go of Sophie’s mother’s hand so I can clap but not too loudly and then Sophie’s mother stops crying and says I didn’t know Emma could sing and then I start to like her better so I tell her that it’s time she started thinking about herself and that there’s lots of things she can do now that Sophie doesn’t need her so much but when I say this she looks kind of panicked and I think she must be scared of being alone and perhaps I should tell her that it’s not so bad when you get used to it but then the band’s packing up and Emma comes over and asks me what I think and I tell her the band was great and she was fantastic and I would have said more if I could have thought of better words but there’s a look on her face like what I said’s enough and then later in the car Emma thanks me for coming and she says it was good that I could keep Sophie’s mother out of their hair because Sophie thinks her mother’s embarrassing and she wishes she wouldn’t come to the gigs but they noticed that I seemed to be getting on all right with her and she asks me what we were talking about but I just say
stuff because I know that’s what Emma would say and I don’t think she really wants to know and then she tells me that the guy at the bar owns the pub and he encouraged her to sing otherwise she would’ve chickened out and that’s why she had to have a drink because he told her it would help and that she should pretend I wasn’t there until after she’d sung and then I start to think differently about him too but by the time she’s said all this we’re back at my place and I ask her in and she hesitates then shakes her head but then just as I’m getting out of the car she gets out too and she tells me how glad she is that I came to hear her first gig and she says she hopes I like Sophie because she and Sophie are an item but they can’t tell Sophie’s mother because she’ll freak and she tells me she’s going to Cambodia with Sophie and all the while she’s looking at my face and I try to keep it the same but I tell her that I think I like Sophie a lot and going to Cambodia with her is a good idea and then she walks right round the car and gives me a hug and tells me I look great and she likes my skirt and she thanks me for lunch and says that maybe next time Sophie can come too and I say of course she can and then with a wave she’s gone and I go into the bedroom and pick up the pile of clothes on the bed and carefully hang them in the wardrobe and then I catch sight of myself in the mirror and there’s this little smile on my face and I sashay into the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea.