The Best Australian Stories 2011 Read online

  The day it happened was clear and cold. It must have been close to six-thirty; I could hear the thin pipe of a whistle intermittently from the oval. My book was open at a colour plate of Zurbaran’s Saint Agatha, who was holding her severed breasts on a tray like, the caption said, two heavenly pink scoops of gelato. Her face was pale and soft, and the rich red cloth was spilling off her shoulder like a ribbon of blood. The image was strange, savage; it seemed to me to signify neither revelation nor transcendence.

  It was September, so the water would have still been freezing. Lines of flags snapped overhead in the wind. Jamie dived from the blocks and struck out at a sprint. The water churned white behind him, then stilled. I felt a thrill rush through me. Watching him swim was my first apprehension of something approaching beauty: the dark lines of his back, his hands dragging and reaching in the water.

  By the time Jamie was finished training there were a few other swimmers, and he lingered with them at one end, his arms folded on a plastic barrier. As always, he was at the centre of it all, laughing with someone I didn’t recognise in a blue swimming cap.

  At any rate, it was far too late when I realised I was being watched. Two of the boys had seen and one of them elbowed Jamie. I ducked my head.

  ‘Wentworth,’ Jamie yelled.

  I stared at the page. The words winnowed and slid.

  ‘Wentworth.’

  I could see his chest beaded with water, the sliver of his smile. I lifted an arm.

  ‘You fucking fag.’ He was grinning. Behind him, the boy in the blue cap laughed and said something I couldn’t hear.

  ‘What’s your problem, Maynard?’

  ‘You’re a fucking fag.’ He was drying his back with a towel. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here, anyway?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was reading, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ My voice sounded reedy, weak. I felt as if I was seeing myself from a great distance – from the future, even – as a wretched, faltering thing, an insect trying to make itself invisible.

  ‘What, Arsefuckers? Cocks and Frocks?’ Jamie laughed. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck off,’ one of the others yelled. Anders, from Sinclair. ‘Jamie’s already got a girlfriend.’

  Everyone was watching now, from the shallow end. The one in the blue cap smiled mockingly at me.

  ‘Get stuffed.’ My heart was beating dizzyingly fast. I scrabbled for my things.

  ‘You wish,’ Jamie said. Someone whistled. ‘Now fuck off out of here.’

  *

  From the Maynards’ pool, the city was faint as a backdrop in a play. Blocks and bands of light glinted coolly in the sun: windows. And behind them, people working; behind one of them, my mother. Beyond the city, suburbs stretched out in an endless expanse. Hidden somewhere in the cubist mosaic of roofs was our house, but it was impossible to make anything out from this distance.

  ‘Istanbul.’ I said it more to myself than to Toby.

  ‘What?’ Toby asked suspiciously, propping himself up on one elbow.

  ‘Why would you go to Istanbul?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Toby sighed, then laid back down. His skin was mottling pink in the sun.

  ‘Would you stop that?’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘You’re staring at me. I can feel it. Just stop.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Why are you always staring at everyone?’

  ‘I’m not. Don’t be ridiculous.’ I felt a sudden swerve of hatred for him. ‘You’re going red, you idiot.’

  ‘Don’t call me an idiot,’ Toby said sharply.

  ‘I’ll call you an idiot if I want to,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you one if you’re acting like one.’

  I could feel the rage roaring up in me. This perilous sliver of time might be the only afternoon I would ever be here, at the Maynards’, and Toby, thick, fatuous Toby, was ruining it.

  ‘Porter.’ My pulse was thrumming.

  Toby shifted his leg slightly and said nothing.

  ‘Porter, you stupid arse. You’re burning.’

  Up close, there was nothing to like in his face: the disturbing translucence of his cheeks, his fleshy lips, the bulbous flare of his nose. Before Jamie came to tolerate Toby, he used to call him Pufferfish, and even once the nickname died, the image remained, lodged in my mind for good.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said. He was the one who was staring now, dispassionately, at me.

  ‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’ I said irritably.

  ‘I mean here. What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Jamie doesn’t even like you. He said he wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.’

  ‘You suggested this, you imbecile.’ I was shaking all over.

  ‘You wanted to come.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ I said. ‘I wanted a fucking swim! You wanted one too, remember?’

  Toby just looked at me. There was nothing to read in the glaze of his eyes, his slack, slightly opened mouth.

  ‘Everybody knows, you know,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the pool.’ Toby said. ‘Everybody knows.’

  I let it sink in once, quickly, then I turned and dropped down into the water. I sank to the bottom and held my breath, then pushed back up to the surface for air. I sank back down again and again and when I finally turned around, Toby was gone.

  *

  It was late by the time I realised Toby had taken my clothes with him. The houses next door were quiet and dark and the sky was pale and washed out. I could see the lights across the river beginning to flicker in the water’s surface. There was nobody anywhere.

  I walked around the house a few times, looking for a sign. Nothing. The Maynards’ pool was a faint silver and I could see the lines of the roof cut up in it. The city looked cold and sepulchral over the water, a dark echo of its daytime self.

  I thought about going around and smashing in the Maynards’ windows, but I didn’t do anything. I just sat there.

  My mother and Katie would be standing, now, in front of the sink, listening to the radio and clearing the dinner plates, probing my absence like a bad tooth.

  I picked the ashtray up. Behind me, the lights in the house clicked on; the Maynards must have set a timer. I let my hand sag with the weight of the glass. I could throw it, now, through one of the second-floor windows, Jamie’s perhaps, so that when the family came home, they would find it. They would stand around the bed for a long minute like a nativity, trying to divine some message in the pattern of splinters and shards fanned over the sheets, then someone would gather the glass away.

  The Adelaide Review

  The Men Outside My Room

  Michael Sala

  When my brother used to beat me, a part of me wanted to encourage him. It felt like he was getting something out of his system. He’d be focused on the task, like when he was juggling a soccer ball with his feet or threading a worm onto a hook. I’d usually curl up and play dead, but there were times where my outrage became too much, and I’d scream. He’d keep going, although a bitterness would kink his closed mouth – he saw this as a betrayal – and through my screaming, I’d hear the creaking stairs carry our stepfather’s heavy breathing and guttural curses to the room we shared: God Verdomme! God Verdomme!

  Dutch is an awkward language. It sounds humorous to me even now, except when used in anger. When my stepfather cursed, I imagined dirt in his lungs, old black farming earth from the north of Holland, clotted with blood and bone.

  The door swings open; Harry enters the room and my brother backs away. My brother is particularly han
dsome at times like this, upright, very alert. He doesn’t show fear, not like I do.

  My stepfather’s head swings from him to me, and back again. ‘What did I tell you? Idiyote! God Verdomme!’

  From where I sit on the floor, I can see the crack of his arse, huge and pale, with a swirl of black hair plunging into his corduroy pants. He wrenches off a paint-stained work boot and lifts it over his head. My brother throws a hateful glance my way before Harry’s back obscures him.

  I wish that I could take satisfaction in what happens next, but I’m not at all well. I am sick – I should be in hospital – I have a watery core of illness and my spine is disintegrating. I am not going to hospital; I am waiting for my turn with my stepfather. I am always second in line when we are due for a beating. With each lift of that boot, I glimpse my future. Whenever I hear the word ‘anticipation,’ or try to imagine what will happen next in my life, that feeling laps up against me, even now, thirty years on, with my stepfather nowhere in sight.

  *

  Metal chains squeal in protest with each thrust of my arms. May is two, and she has learned how to say ‘more’ and ‘push’ and ‘harder.’ With these three words, she keeps me busy. I push her on the swing and she keeps returning to me, hair floating on the air like an afterthought, a determined line in her jaw when she throws me a quick glance to make sure I won’t give up.

  This is one of the things we do together. Half of every week I take care of my daughter by myself and we wander around the city looking for things to do. The other half of my daughter’s week belongs to my wife. We are not divorced, we live in the same house, but our lives are neatly separated all the same. There are times when we do things together as a family, visits to the beach or the park or some other outing, and my wife always says, ‘This is good, isn’t it?’ and I agree although my eyes don’t. My eyes have always betrayed me. But I have learned to look away at the crucial moments. I have learned that it is possible to do this with an entire life.

  The time that my wife and I spend alone together happens after May is asleep, when we sit in front of the television. We massage each other’s shoulders with oil for lovers and exchange conversation in the advertising spaces that dismember the usual television programs about crime and death. I don’t mind talking then, because we are staring in the same direction. I have come to see television as one of the sacrifices you make for love.

  *

  After the park, I take May to the library. We walk in through the large, open doors, just as a young woman walks out. She is wearing those pants that look like a cross between jeans and tights. My gaze snags on her and I glance over my shoulder as she walks off. I experience regret, and an erection that withers with the next few steps.

  Whenever such longing comes, I think of my real father. One of the ghosts of my childhood left behind when my mother moved us to the opposite side of the world with a different man. My father, I am told, was famous for his wandering eye, though he was generally forgiven for it because of his charming nature. I know more of my father through what my mother has given me than through my own interactions with him. He still lives in another country and is caring for his other ex-wife, who is dying of cancer. We haven’t spoken in twenty years but information trickles through.

  ‘It’s strange,’ my mother will tell me, ‘how you hardly saw him, but then you laugh or move your hand, just like that and I can see him there, just like when I fell in love with him.’

  May is singing a song. I lift a finger to my mouth and catch her eye, and she smiles, then frowns and falls silent and runs ahead into the open spaces of the library. I imagine sometimes that I am moving through life like some kind of blundering surgeon, pinching off possibilities as if they are arteries.

  *

  This is the story I have of how my parents fell in love: my father was dating my mother’s best friend, but he was always close and talking to my mother whenever her friend was out of the room, a brush of his hand, a smile, playful and light, as if they were brother and sister. One day, he hugged his girlfriend, stared lingeringly at my mother and winked, like they were sharing a joke.

  It was the kind of joke that never gets old.

  A year later, my brother was born, and three years after that, I came along, a home birth on the thirteenth floor of an apartment block in a town near the southern border of Holland. My first words were Dutch, but I can’t remember them.

  I arrived early by kicking a hole in my mother’s stomach; so I believed as a boy. I was always accused of a terrible clumsiness when I was young, and this version of events made sense to me. The midwife coughed and smoked through the whole labour and had to wipe the ash from my face before she announced in a voice dry as paper that I was the handsomest baby she’d ever laid eyes on. When my father returned from whatever errands had been absorbing him, he borrowed money from my grandfather for a bunch of flowers, came into the bedroom with the flowers in one fist, his other hand in his pocket, and stared at me long and hard, with a look equal parts disappointment and doubt.

  ‘Are you sure that I’m the father?’ he asked.

  We moved on from Holland to England and rented an apartment where everything was coin operated: the heating; the stove; the shower; the phone. We didn’t have a lot of coins. My father was struggling to find work. He had borrowed five thousand guilders from my grandparents, but most of that money had vanished. There was a mystery to this money that I would hear of years later, but what I grew up knowing is that we didn’t have anything; that it caused the inevitable conflicts; that I would often turn blue with cold of a night-time; that the walls ran with condensation; that my father was not often around; that I was not a good sleeper. My mother would walk the streets of London by herself, driven by loneliness and the crying that leaked out of me as if I were connected to some limitless reservoir beneath the city. ‘The moment that I saw you,’ my mother said, ‘I knew that you’d been here before.’

  I think that my mother confuses unhappiness with experience.

  *

  In the library, May wanders into the wide-open spaces of the children’s section and fondles the spines of books. She pulls the books out and leaves them splayed open in her wake. Someone ought to pull her into line. I take a book about the decline of the Roman Empire from a shelf and sink into a chair. My daughter comes up to me and touches my knee.

  ‘Done poo poo,’ she tells me.

  We collect our things and go to the toilet. I use up half a packet of wipes to clean her and her underwear goes into the bin. My daughter stands on the counter next to the sink, catches sight of herself in the mirror and starts swaying her hips from side to side and humming under her breath. I tell her to stop, and she puts more sideways thrust into her hips.

  ‘Just cut it out,’ I tell her in a sharper tone and her body tenses and stops.

  I regret my tone immediately. My daughter is not afraid of my wife, only of me. I get irritable when I am tired, and these days I am tired all the time. I have lost control of what I had always assumed would be mine: sleep. I knew that it was coming – plenty of people warned me – I just didn’t know how bad that lack would be. My daughter wakes sometimes in the middle of the night crying so fiercely that her face develops a rash, and in that hysteria, she is impossible to communicate with. She looks enraged, as if she does not recognise a thing in this world. My wife, who gets up exactly half the time with her, holds her and rocks her and pleads and eventually starts crying herself. Please go back to sleep, she tells my daughter. Please, please, please go back to sleep. This can go on for hours. I can’t help but listen. The muscles in my arse are like the workings of a clock that mark the passage of this time by winding more tightly into themselves.

  When it is my turn, I pick my daughter up and I too tell her to stop. If this doesn’t work, I take her to the shower and hold her head near a stream of cold water and threaten to put her under. Twice
I have put her head under. When I make this threat, she bites at her own sobs until they retreat back into her chest. Sometimes I imagine my daughter, twenty years from now, shrugging when someone asks about her overwhelming fear of water. I hold her after she has calmed down until she goes to sleep and feel tender at her peacefulness, her vulnerability, but I am ashamed rather than satisfied and my wife treats me with a wounded contempt that transmits itself in the angle of her body as it turns away from me in the bed.

  With my daughter asleep, I lie down beside my wife, separated from the mattress by my own knotted muscles. I lie there, listening to my wife breathe, and wait to fall asleep myself. Something clicks in the back of my wife’s throat when she sleeps. I imagine it is the last sound someone might make before they die. I know that my daughter could start up again at any moment. Her distress stays with me like the pain of a burn long after she has drifted off. Falling asleep is like putting my head between the jaws of a lion.

  Keep it open, I think to myself, keep it open, but I am no longer talking about a lion and instead thinking of a door that connected me to the outside world when I lay in bed at night as a boy.

  I was terrified of the dark. My stepfather, who did not share my father’s doubts about paternity, would open the door and look in at me over his thick black beard.

  ‘You’ll never learn,’ he would say, ‘if I don’t teach you.’

  Then the door shuts.

  *

  May and I have left the toilet and returned to the library. I sink into a chair with my book. I start flicking through the pages, reading summaries about the late Roman emperors and how they spent their lives going mad or patching up ruptured borders, chasing barbarians out of the slowly disintegrating limbs of the empire, quelling the mutinies of their own armies. The decline of civilisation, onset of the dark ages, all of that. It must have been daunting for an emperor to wake up every morning knowing that there was just one problem after another, making decisions that could wipe out cities or nations, just to keep something going for a few decades more. It fascinates me how all the intricate struggles of countless human beings over several decades can be shoe-horned into a couple of paragraphs on a piece of paper. So many people can disappear between those words.