The Best Australian Stories 2011 Read online

  *

  The day before. A day more like a night, like a dark that won’t lift. Alice walked in from the gloom. Shaking, staggering, horrified. Holding out her hands like someone who wants to show they are unarmed at a checkpoint. Here, my daughter’s hands said, I am without weapons. And I held her there, because I knew she was lying. I knew what she’d done.

  But then I let her go.

  *

  I push the skin around on the plate, like a soothsayer reading omens in the entrails. The maître d’ and the other waiters are watching. I have lived through one thing and so they expect me to be able to see the next. Soon, they hope, I will turn to forecasting their simple endings: their stair-falls at eighty, their last breaths drawn in sleep. This is the quid pro quo for how they feed me. ‘Indecently’ is the word. But all I can do here is glut. I bury myself deeper into myself, until I can see nothing of the future. Tags of fat hang over my eyes and those feet are still mouldering under the table.

  *

  Many lifeless vegetables were brought into the gardening centre in the weeks leading up to the fires. Plants turned directly to powder under the sun without ever catching alight, and whole orchards of fruit went black. The ground was as loose and as pale as bottle formula. Some customers came in with jars of soil scooped from their land, to show me. In disbelief we pored over it on the counter, let it fall through our fingertips in search of missing humus. Nothing would grow in this. One customer said something I can’t get out of my mind: she said, It’s like we’ve slept through the worst bushfire in Australian history. That’s exactly what the ground looked like. As if it had fallen backward from the aftermath, thin and sterilised by extreme heat.

  It was around that time, a fortnight or so before the fires, that the pharmacist came by the gardening centre because she wanted to kill a tree. A white box eucalypt suffering in the heat, the tree had shrunk back to its wet, green wick inside the woody coffin of its trunk. Several large branches had been dropped near her house – the tree giving up deadwood, as is its way in a drought – and she wanted to know how to cut it down. But that was only the ruse, her cover story. Really, she had come to gloat because after some indecision, after loud arguments and threatening phone calls, Paul had returned to their marital bed, while Alice – grief-stricken and inconsolable – had moved back into her old bedroom at my place.

  ‘Don’t they call those trees “widow-makers”?’ the pharmacist said, gripping the counter with her nails. ‘I won’t have it anywhere near my home anymore. It disgusts me, this tree.’ I refused to serve her and then someone else sent her away.

  The days burned long. In snatched naps I dreamt I was digging with a shovel and instead of water pooling in the pit, a fire started there. There were no birds in the garden. Alice wailed, as pained and low as a wounded animal in her bedroom, refusing to eat, showing no sign of getting over the affair. She wouldn’t be reasoned with, bribed or cajoled; it was Paul that she wanted. Sometimes I could hear her hyperventilating behind the locked door, spilling into panic, but she refused to let me in. I went on long walks. In the forest dozens of brightly feathered bodies studded the leaf-litter. Entire flocks of parrots had dropped dead of thirst.

  Late on that last evening, drawn narrow in the heat, I came home and caught Alice cutting herself. Not with suicidal intent but with the desperate, sawing motions of a creature caught in barbed wire. Trying to free herself from herself. The bread knife flashed fast against the gristle of her forearm, her teeth were clenched. It felt as if I was falling, the rushing in my ears, all the air taken out from under me. I seized her and sent the knife skittling across the kitchen tiles. There was blood in the crockery drawer, and in the sink, and in my hands. My baby. She slumped to the floor, exhausted.

  After that there finally came a calm. We sat together on the tiles, sticky and beaten. I sopped her in Betadine and bandaged the arm. She found the last of Tom’s best whiskey and poured it into two eggcups. Everything moved slowly, night beating back the daylight. As the shadows lengthened Alice began to talk of the pharmacist, how Paul truckled to his wife, and how she manipulated him in all the ways a wife is able. Their house was the pharmacist’s trump card. Paul had built it with her, brick by brick, and it was newly completed when he met Alice at the aquatic complex. An elegant homestead, it featured in design quarterlies; wide porches and wood restored from a ship. High ceilings with fans that peeled off a breeze and let it settle in loops like orange-skin over the occupants. Paul had considerable debt sunk into it.

  Alice’s breath was flammable and close as she explained what she thought about doing. Exacting revenge on the pharmacist, acts of fevered and hateful retaliation, terrible things that made her want to cut off her own hands. How every morning she wrote Stop It in texta on both of her palms. I held her close and remembered the time I stuffed coins into her mouth until she went quiet. Alice would tear herself up in this house, trying not to want what she wanted. The thought of her being involved with Paul left a bad taste in my mouth, but now that she was, if she gave in there would be nothing left of my daughter to take care of. She would hurt herself more seriously – accidentally or deliberately – and I would be powerless to stop it. What would my hands say about that? So I made up a smaller deed of vengeance, a retribution with symbolic logic. Not because I believed Paul would leave his wife, but to show Alice she wasn’t defeated. I confess: I pushed the seed of the terrible idea into her mind.

  I told Alice how we sometimes killed trees, when we had to do it. Poison at the roots. Pool salt will work, I said, if you can get it. And I told her, hypothetically, how to drill the holes in one side, so that any strong gust would cause it to come down on top of a house. Alice sat thinking as I emphasised that she should make it so the tree hit the carport or the laundry, a room no one was likely to be in. That’s the lesson you want to teach her, I said. That’s the threat to make.

  Alice plucked at her bandages, and stared into the skylight. ‘Pool salt’s a bit obvious, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Given where I met Paul.’

  *

  ‘Dessert menu, sir?’ asks the maître d’, but Paul doesn’t answer. He’s ready to take his jacket and leave, inwardly seething. I can see that in him – swearing impotently at the steering wheel, in the tunnel, slamming doors. All Paul’s anger is subterranean, without fruiting body. He’s wondering how Alice will take it, now that he’s failed to convince me to return for the wedding. What he’ll find surprising, I imagine, is that Alice won’t be surprised.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I say, and open the menu. Paul thought we’d finished, but this thirst is not quenched and my insides stay empty.

  ‘Coffee, Paul?’ I ask, ‘or will you indulge? Sugared almonds aren’t enough, if we’re celebrating.’

  He allows a sallow grin and yields to the ceasefire – ordering chocolate slice and an espresso. It’s the day before, and he deserves it. He doesn’t have to watch his weight like I do. For Paul there is no danger that he will collapse in on himself at ground level, as I would, if I were to descend from the elevated regions of the hotel. There is a kind of pressure system at the Broadbeach that keeps me from combusting. Flames need oxygen, and up here there is very little of that. We drift in the smothered atmosphere of the Cirrus Club.

  The special, Bombe Alaska, sounds delicious. Whisked oil and syrup, honey and cream; who wouldn’t be pacified? I order. After Paul leaves, I will probably get a second and a third dessert, and choke myself blue on sugar.

  What I can’t do is go back and tell him the truth. The way in which he’s been misled into marrying my daughter. How when the distant fires started burning, Alice saw a chance to drive over to the pharmacist’s house and fell the tree. No one was home. As she’d expected, Paul and the pharmacist had decided to leave early. The doors were locked, a hose dripped over the eaves and the paths were raked clear. Alice took my drill and some poison, but then she couldn’t bring h
erself to kill the white box eucalypt. The tree was strong and ominous, and in the heat it rippled. She lent against its thick muscles and listened to the water tweaking inside it. Those trees drink to fill themselves up when the lightest shred of smoke is in the air. All her life I’d taught her to watch for the life around her, for plants and birds. But here is the backfire: thinking about the single tree, Alice lost her sense of scale. She did something so out of proportion to anything Paul or the pharmacist was guilty of that it would later be called ‘unimaginable,’ a thing so awful it can barely be thought about or written down.

  She went back to the house. Some of the windows were open so that the heat wouldn’t shatter them. And Alice, my ghoul, my daughter, found a box of matches on a ledge.

  You strike one match. And maybe you think the wet roof and the cleared paths will hold it, but when you strike one match in that weather, with other fires raging all around, you burn back through every kind of boundary. Through time, through birth. You burn back into yourself, like a terminal star. In the end, your edges become its edges. Heavy and lit. Alice’s burning house joined to the other fire fronts and swept through the town.

  *

  The maître d’ is bringing our desserts and his compliments. Paul is magnanimous, the old groom, taking admiration and a pat on the back. I open up my face and smile, trying not to show the glimmering behind my teeth. I say something about bowl-food eaten in a garden of ash. And here is my Bombe Alaska, a little glacier leaking sugar-water onto the plate. The lights are dimmed. The maître d’ has a small pitcher of rum and before I realise what is about to happen he is tipping the liquor over my plate. The waiters applaud. There is a flick, and a spark. Again, the whole world is ablaze.

  Overland

  Istanbul

  Sarah Holland-Batt

  Toby said Istanbul, though not even he really knew where the Maynards had gone. In the end it didn’t matter. The point was they were gone, Jamie was gone. He had taken his scrawny hand-rolled greyhounds and his careless, wolfish mouth with him, and Toby and I were at a loose end all summer. January in Newstead stretched out, dangerous and glittering as the lapis at the lip of an artesian well, deceptively far off. So far off, you felt you could drown before you reached the end of it.

  Toby and I played squash that month. We were hardly even friends; he barely spoke to me back at Knox. But there was nothing to do with the hours except waste them, so we met Monday and Thursday afternoons at Ascot and hammered a rubber ball as hard as we could at a black smudge on the wall. Sometimes Toby would feign an injury when he was out of breath.

  ‘Christ,’ he would say, bending over. ‘My ankle.’ He would rub his shin, wincing, then fiddle with his racquet head.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I would say, exasperated. ‘Get on with it.’

  We would turn back to the wall. Squash must be the most draining sport on earth. The rhythm of it made everything recede. Toby cut across me, a clean white blur. After a while, I could feel something in me hurtling off and breaking up. A dangerous feeling, a falling away.

  *

  It was after one of those sweltering games that Toby suggested we go to the Maynards’ place. We were in the change room, a dank space where the closed-in smell of men – sweat, Right Guard, menthol salve, Lux – was both arousing and vaguely sickening.

  ‘February,’ he said.

  I looked up. Toby was eating an egg sandwich. He must have packed it in his bag.

  ‘They’re not back until February. Jamie said.’ His face was bland, freckly. I knew that expression from school.

  ‘So?’

  ‘They’ve got a swimming pool.’ He angled the sandwich into his mouth artfully, so as not to lose any of the egg.

  I tried to imagine it: Jamie’s pool. My stomach turned. ‘Porter, you’ve got a bloody swimming pool.’

  ‘Not like that. It’s half-Olympic.’ He paused. ‘You’ve never even been, have you?’

  ‘Why would I want to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Why would you?’

  Toby must have known it even then. There wasn’t an instant that summer I wasn’t excruciatingly aware that Jamie wasn’t here, was out there somewhere, with his parents, with the witch Cecelia. It was a kind of fever: my mind kept reaching out airy feelers, sweeping its corners for some scrap and returning with dust.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Toby said smugly, pulling his shirt off. ‘Jamie told me you like swimming.’

  I felt a slow burn creep across my face. I thought, quite disconnectedly, that I could kill him, that it would be easy to do it.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘God, calm down.’ He sounded pleased with himself. ‘Look, you don’t have to.’

  ‘Piss off. I’m coming.’

  I felt for the key in my pocket. No one would be home. My mother would still be at work; my sister would be at her pottery class, making another one of the lumpy vases that were converging in an unruly line on the kitchen windowsill.

  Coming home for the holidays had become an awkward, uneasy affair. I had grown inexorably apart from the both of them, from my mother’s solicitous attempts to read my essay on Whiteley’s Summer at Carcoar, from Katie’s pitiable infatuation with David Bowie, her tatty photos cut from magazines and sticky-taped to her school books. I felt further than ever from our house on Kingsholme Street, its chipping gunmetal-green stairs, the tired orange trumpet creeper shrinking against the fence.

  Even Brisbane itself had begun to feel limp, burnt out, sun-blasted. As Toby and I left the building, the air was smothering.

  Toby swore. ‘That bastard.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That bastard’ll be lazing about, being fanned by palm leaves. Jesus Christ.’ He grinned. ‘They’re probably feeding him horses’ bollocks.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I unlocked my bike chain.

  ‘Jamie, idiot. In Istanbul.’

  ‘They don’t eat horse, you dunce.’ I felt victorious. ‘They eat dates and chickpeas. Apricots. It’s not China.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Toby said casually. ‘Anyway, we’re going to Greece again for mid-year. To Milos.’

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. In July I would be killing time back in Brisbane, holed up in the State Library reading Caulaincourt or Horace, or cycling along the river to prolong going home to Countdown with Katie and my mother.

  ‘What about you?’ Toby said.

  ‘What about me.’

  We pulled up at the bottom of the hill. Hamilton rose up in front of us, block by block, sandy brick and cream. There was a patch of green up the top, and an enormous gothic revival house, its roof gleaming in the sun.

  Toby was breathing hard. ‘What’re you doing for break?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. It was true.

  ‘You’re on scholarship, aren’t you?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  We pushed our bicycles up the hill in silence. The houses on the road were large and shaded by trees, their fences tall and uninviting. A dog was barking steadily somewhere. I tried to imagine Jamie walking up this hill when he was young, before Knox, but I could only conjure an image of the Jamie I knew, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, his waist slim and firm, his back coolly turned away.

  *

  The Maynards’ place was just below the hill’s crest, a white and brown mock-Tudor monstrosity behind a patterned brick wall. Through the gate, the garden looked mannered and spare; the footpath was lined with mock oranges and there was a row of savagely pruned rose bushes beneath the front windows. I kicked my bike stand and let Toby go ahead.

  Inside the gate, a little path of stepping stones led along the side of the house to a lattice gazebo. There was a set of white wicker chairs in there, and an empty
glass ashtray on the table. Perhaps Jamie smoked here at night once his parents had gone to bed. I traced the edge of the ashtray. I was in Jamie’s garden. I was going to swim in Jamie’s pool.

  Toby yelled something from around the back.

  ‘Porter?’ He didn’t answer. I slung my shirt and shorts over a chair and followed his voice to the pool.

  Jamie hadn’t been lying: it was half-Olympic. I could see the sky cut up in its surface, splinters of sun peaking and breaking. In the shallow end, Toby was floating on his back in his boxers, which ballooned like parachute silk around his thighs.

  ‘Not bad,’ Toby said. He kicked a few times, then cupped his hands behind his head. ‘That prick. Not bad.’

  As I dived in, the water shattered over my head, cold and clear. Veins of light rippled over the tiles. I swam along the bottom until I could feel my lungs burn, then I pushed up. Hold your breath: it was an old game Katie and I used to play at the Spring Hill baths. In those seconds before breaking through to air, I imagined I was a corpse, drifting dumbly towards the surface. I dived down again and again, sinking and rising until my heart was hammering and I couldn’t swim anymore.

  *

  I had probably only been going down to the Knox pool a few weeks before Jamie caught me, although those hours feel endless now, inviolate; nothing can or will ever touch them. The mornings he trained I left the dorm early, in the half-light, and took my books down to the pool. I would crouch in the stands with my scarf wrapping my mouth and nose; then when I picked out Jamie making his way across the grounds, I would pore over my book with a pencil. I never lifted my head until he was in the pool.