The Best Australian Stories 2011 Read online

  Around her mud wasps hover like jumbo jets, their dangling legs like wheels preparing for landing. It’s not until the third breath of smoke that she starts to feel giddy, and it reminds her of when she used to smoke at school, behind the tin shed at lunchtime. On the step beside Tracee, their black and tan kelpie rests her head on crossed paws. Her ears prick at the thud of the Saturday morning paper on the front lawn.

  Tracee takes a drag of the cigarette. From the corner of her eye, she sees something move in the grass. She blinks hard: sometimes the rush of nicotine plays with her vision. She walks towards it and stoops down. It is moving in short pulls, but even up close, she still can’t make it out. Furry bands of orange and black and something attached to it, brown. Then it takes shape: it’s a wasp carrying a huntsman. The spider is bigger than the wasp. She watches it labour over the grass, pulling at the weight of the spider, a load too heavy for flight. It stops at intervals, as if gathering its strength. The wasp carries it all the way across the lawn to the grille underneath the back step, where it disappears, pulling the spider in behind it.

  When she can feel the warmth of the cigarette too close to her fingers, she drops it in her glass of water. Then she rubs her fingers on the grass, a trick she learnt as a teenager, so that her teachers couldn’t smell cigarette smoke.

  Tracee lets the dog through the back of the house and she skids on her nails across the wooden floorboards, down the hall to the front door. She scrambles down the front steps, diving for the wrapped newspaper like it’s a moving prey. Tracee takes it from the dog’s mouth and flattens it out on the kitchen table. On the front page there is a grainy image of the pedestrian crossing on the main street. A girl was hit by a car there last night and found unconscious by passers-by in the early hours of the morning. They rushed her to the hospital, the article said, and removed a small piece of her skull to minimise the inter-cranial pressure. There’s a photograph of the girl above the article; she’s in her school uniform and her unblemished face is smiling straight at the camera. Anyone with information is asked to contact the police.

  Tracee recognises the girl from the supermarket deli, where she scoops chicken thighs into a plastic tub on Saturday mornings, her slack jaw working away at a piece of gum.

  Tracee doesn’t read the rest of the newspaper. Instead, she goes to the bathroom and squares herself off in the vanity mirror. She does this sometimes, when she feels herself slipping, to get hold of herself. She pushes her fingers into her skin and lifts it upward, trying to remember what she looked like before gravity started to take effect.

  *

  Later on, in the afternoon, when she and Rhonda have come back from their walk to the beach, she fingers through her old leather-bound yearbook. She had all her friends sign it on their last day of school.

  The pages are now fragile and tea-stained. There are poems and tributes and friends who promised to stay that way forever. There is that poem she copied out, the one she liked, about footprints. About how there are two sets of footprints in the sand, and how there are places where there is only one set of footprints, and about being carried during the hard times. At the end of the poem, in her uncertain teenage handwriting, ‘ANON’ is written in capital letters.

  *

  Her boys probably wouldn’t believe her if she told them she was popular at school. That she had friends, lots of friends. That she was the girl everyone looked up to. Not like now, since Travis and her separated and the boys have become the two planets she orbits in figure eights. She used to roll her school uniform up at her waist to make it short on her tanned teenage legs. She used to go to all the parties down on the beach on Saturday nights, where they lit bonfires from old driftwood. She used to walk behind the dunes with the boys who had wandering fingers and glance back over her shoulder to her friends, who watched her leave.

  That’s what happened one night with Travis: the nervous boy in their year, the one that they were all surprised she left with that night, that she chose. Then it was an early marriage and a difficult labour at nineteen, and then people stopped looking at her in quite the same way.

  At thirty, though, she finally put herself through university. She studied psychology and now she has her own practice. Sometimes she thinks she ended up this way, sorting out other people’s problems so that she’d never have to confront her own.

  *

  Now her eldest has a girlfriend, Amy, a girl from school. She comes over for dinner occasionally during the week. Tracee likes Amy; she’s quiet and polite and she crosses her cutlery over her plate when she’s finished eating.

  Tracee bought her eldest a packet of condoms one day and when she handed them to him, the colour rushed violently to his cheeks. It had taken her a long time at the chemist to find a packet not coloured or studded or flavoured in some way.

  ‘Mum,’ he groaned.

  ‘I just want to make sure you’re practising safe sex,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You’re almost an adult now.’

  He took them and walked to his room, shutting the door quietly behind him. That was before Rhonda had told her about letting go.

  *

  On Sunday afternoon, Tracee is upstairs in her bedroom, looking out from her window, when she sees the boys walk back up the front steps. Travis drives away with three toots of the horn. He probably knows she’s up here, looking down. It’s five o’clock: he’s right on time.

  She always seems to be looking out of her window at this time. There is something sad and inevitable about Sunday afternoons. She notices, out on the street, the old fig tree is starting to sprout leaves again. Soon, there will be little fig balls strewn all over their front yard.

  The kelpie rushes to the boys, dancing around them in little circles, nipping their heels, guided by some innate sense for herding, back along the garden path and up the stairs to the front door.

  *

  That night, Tracee is reading to the youngest and they have almost finished Charlotte’s Web. They are at the part where Charlotte’s babies tell Wilbur they are leaving the farm, and the little one’s eyes well with tears as Tracee reads it to him. He is teary, her youngest, he cries at the smallest things. He was young when they separated – too young, really, to have understood why Daddy had to go and live in another house and why Mummy just needed some time on her own. It was almost as if all the sadness she held on to about the separation seeped out through him.

  She takes him in her arms and says, ‘They have to make their own life.’

  ‘But can’t they just stay with Wilbur?’ he says, between bursts of tears.

  ‘No, they’re going to use their webs to fly to a new home.’

  Only the fact that three of them will remain at the farm stems the flow of tears. She stays with him, with the lights out, until his body starts to twitch and surrender to sleep. He always sleeps this way, with his head tucked under his arm, like a small bird.

  Downstairs, Tracee stands in front of the fridge, looking for the milk. Then she sees the empty bottle poking out from the top of the bin. It is always a surprise to her, how much milk the two boys go through between them.

  ‘Mum,’ says her eldest from behind, in that croaking pitch his voice so often takes. She turns around and sees him in the cool light of the fridge. Lately, his nose and mouth look too big for the rest of his face, as if he hasn’t quite grown into his features.

  ‘About the car …’ His voice is straining.

  She closes the fridge door and the light goes out. Suddenly, they are in darkness together. She takes his hand and feels it tremble.

  ‘Shhh,’ she says. ‘Shhh.’

  And he leans in towards her and his two manly shoulders are shaking against her. Then she leaves him in the kitchen and walks upstairs to her bedroom.

  *

  A week later, she drives into town, past the pedestri
an crossing in the main street. There are flowers taped up to the stop sign; the girl is still in hospital, quietly lying in an induced coma. They look so ineffectual, the colours are purple and pink, and they are all bruised and browning with age.

  The wheels screech as Tracee turns the steering wheel hard, U-turns on the main street and drives home. In the backyard, she tramples over the flowerbed to the waratah and cuts through the woody stem with a sharp kitchen knife. She pulls off a forked branch with two waratahs brimming crimson at each end. Then she drives back down to the crossing and ties them up to the stop sign with an old piece of twine. They hang there like two throbbing hearts.

  *

  In the new year, early one morning, the three of them drive down to the post office, before the mail is sorted. Her eldest collects the crisp A4 envelope with his name showing through the cellophane frame. His fingers shake as he rips the envelope open.

  He leaves three weeks later to study in Sydney. His father drives him up there – he borrows Tracee’s Mazda for the trip, which is better for long distances. It has a smooth, flat bonnet now; you can’t even see where the dent was. The little one is in the back seat; he’s taken his pillow along for the drive.

  After they leave, Tracee will be out on the back step again with the same packet of cigarettes, dragging the swirling, cancerous smoke into her lungs and holding it there, as if she is smoking out a wasp’s nest.

  Beside her, on the lawn, she’ll see how her single set of footprints has flattened the wet grass. And then she’ll think, as she starts to feel giddy, that mostly it doesn’t feel like she’s carrying; it feels like she’s dragging, and not turning around to see what’s left behind along the way.

  Having Cried Wolf

  Blow In

  Rebecca Giggs

  The feet were the first to break away. I put on weight quickly in the months following the fires, and so my feet spread out for balance. They reverted to feet from some human prehistory, all stiff hair and hide, the toes blackening. Whose feet are these? I looked on dumbfounded as they tried to stuff themselves back into the shoes at the end of the bed. Stamping around the hotel with that Neolithic gait, the unfamiliar, cavewoman pelvis; and whose feet had I dragged out of the aftermath?

  When we were told it was safe to return, I didn’t. I got in my car and drove straight to the city. For two days running I did nothing except eat, and eat, and eat. Sleepless at the all-night food palaces – hummocks of dumplings, tapioca milk and those edible ghosts that dangle in the tanks. But no matter how much I ate I couldn’t get full, so I booked a room. Now, when I wake in the dark, I can no longer feel my feet. How women say, ‘She’s let herself go.’ I’ve uncoupled them.

  There’s a lightness inside all this heft you can’t measure. A buoyancy of accumulating fumes and heat that I’m fighting to weigh down. It threatens to slit me right open. The problem is, I am not fat all the way through. It’s the empty parts inside me that are expanding, and so I have to keep adding kilos, layering on lipid thickness, to keep myself contained. But in the dark recesses of my body something is still on fire. There are embers that won’t be put out. I can feel the flames crackling in my gullies and burning through the sawdust walls of my stomach. Every morning I am starving again. The pillow smells like cigarettes, although I’ve never been a smoker. I dream of Pompeii. Casts crouched speechless in the ash.

  Sometimes, I don’t think I will survive it. The sinister contracts of electricity in me will fail, wires fried, and I will have a stroke. I spend whole days staring at those dusky feet beyond my ankles, or into the distant traffic far below the window. Waiting and eating. But even looking down from above, I can’t get things in perspective. Where are the edges of the burn? When do the fires end? I am not myself here. What I thought I left outside has become ingrown. The swallowed weather gathers fuel.

  *

  Today I am considering a cube of air on the other side of the glass as Paul Jarrow is directed over to the table by the maître d’. Paul has arranged this – a truce, a lunch. I’m reluctant. We’re in the Cirrus Club, a few floors above my suite. Clouds mottle the light that falls into the plates and the music is featureless.

  Paul is visibly nervous, even from this distance. This is because he is over forty and he thinks he knows what I am responsible for. Who I am responsible for. I don’t mean he is mistaken, only that he has been misled. Which is an entirely different thing to say. Paul is marrying my daughter, Alice, tomorrow. It goes without saying that he intends to put the hard word on me – to wheedle, bargain or beg – until I descend from the upper levels of the Broadbeach Tower Suites and drive back into town for their wedding. Alice doesn’t expect it, but he doesn’t know why he shouldn’t. He brings high hopes of brokering our reconciliation.

  I know that Paul has been married before, without any children, to the pharmacist who works at the town chemist. He was a secret Alice kept from me for over a year, or, to put it another way, she was his secret, in the advanced CPR class at the Dugong Park Aquatic Complex. Alice confessed later that that’s where they met: in the recovery position, trading breaths through a mannequin with a chest built soft for compression practice. Mouths slicked on British plastic.

  Alice plays water polo. She wants to be an opera singer. My daughter reads science fiction and before all this, she worked weekends at the gardening centre with me. Alice is fierce. She is creative, she is impressionable. She is full of lungs. She is twenty-two.

  And although Paul doesn’t know it, Alice is a criminal.

  Smiling too widely as he approaches, he catches his lip on a dry eyetooth. He surveys the table, chewing the lining of his cheek, and notices the open bottle. Good, he is thinking. Paul would like me to be a little drunk, a bit pulpy to begin with. We’ve all been through a great trauma. The communal drowning of communal sorrows might be one of the few things left to inspire community in any of us.

  I know how that goes. And I won’t say I’m above exploiting it. I told the staff where I’d come from, the macabre password, on the day I arrived at the Broadbeach. They knew it from the news coverage. By then, no one in the country didn’t recognise the name of our town. The maître d’ put a hand on my back and whispered wetly into my ear: how I am entitled to vices that expand the hotel’s definition of responsible service. As he steers Paul Jarrow over to me now it is not beyond his imagination that Paul is here as my lover, summoned up from the back pages of a magazine. In previous conversations the maître d’ has implied he can source things like this, things I have a need of ‘in excess.’ Drugs, presumably, and men. Those are only two examples of what he thinks I might need. Or deserve.

  Paul kisses my cheek and grabs my hand awkwardly, clasping the thumb in a partial handshake. We’ve never been this close.

  ‘Well,’ he says, still holding some of my fingers in his fist, ‘Mother of the bride, mother of the bride.’ He shakes his head. Up close Paul has a certain thinness of expression, as of a rat looking in through a picket fence. But the maître d’ seems disappointed. He gives an almost imperceptible nod and leaves the table. Now I wonder if that hand, rested cosily on my shoulder blade, conveyed a more complex message.

  ‘In the flesh, Paul.’ I turn my attention to this future son-in-law, much too old to be called that. In all this flesh. ‘Calm the heck down, and sit down.’

  *

  Like all mothers who have their children after the time of motherhood is expected, when Alice was born I was petrified. She came into our lives late, but tiny and early, at a time when no one else we knew had a newborn. The first few weeks were unspeakably awful. Delivered premature – premmie, the word inappropriately cute for the rawness of her small body – she was placed into a ticking humidicrib at the hospital. Alice. Horrifying and precious, mammalian and wired. We didn’t name her for the Lewis Carroll books, and yet she arrived trapped in that electrical wonderland, the disembodied grins of the
nurses scything above.

  When Tom went anywhere near our baby girl he was scared witless that she might die. In white beds and pacing the blue hallways I brimmed with self-loathing. The nurses insisted there was no trigger for an early labour, but the conviction wouldn’t dislodge – it was my fault. Impatience, unease and condemnation. I raced through a list of culpable acts while our daughter stayed untouched, every organ matched by a machine. The little argonaut.

  Finally the day came when they lifted Alice out of the crib. Her heart thrummed against my collarbone like a bug in a jar. We took photographs of her hands set with their impossible fingernails. She was ours, after all. The living thing we switched on. She yawned once, and we were hers.

  Later on, everywhere I looked I saw lethal, poisonous, maiming things, and for her part, Alice was intent on getting to them. It was more than what you’d expect – what’s under the sink, or on the road. Everything Alice reached for was something I knew you shouldn’t give to a child. I’d be baking in the kitchen or digging the flowerbeds, but she would not be distracted by the cooing singsong of cake or blossoms. She wailed for the boiling pot and the herbicide. Put her down in the centre of a room and she’d crawl straight for the closest power point. Threats went unheeded. Bribery was futile. Before she’d started to walk Alice was back at the hospital for burns and coins that she scoffed straight out of my purse.

  After we settled her down each night we would just stand there, holding one another, aghast. Why had we done it? This was a terrible mistake. We’d put life into what didn’t want it. Our baby ghoul.

  It is true that I had unmotherly thoughts. And I may have done some unmotherly things. A few times I tied her into her highchair. Thinking once bitten, I watched her scoot right up to the oven and put her hands on the door. After a furious tantrum I gave her three dollars to suck on. Tom was at work, so he had nothing to say about it.