The Best Australian Stories 2010 (22 page)

‘You didn't cop the twelve years.'

‘That's why you came back?'

‘No.'

‘To rub that in my face?'

‘No.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Actually.'

‘I would've done that, I would've copped it.'

‘Actually, I came back to ask for your forgiveness.'

‘What?'

‘You heard me.'

‘You don't have to. I told you I'd do it again.'

‘That's what I mean. I'm sorry I made you that way.'

*

The next morning he was gone. In hot February my brother came back to me, and stayed for only two nights and one day. I haven't seen him since. My life, such as it is, I owe to him. If guilt is for what you've done and shame for who you are, then how could I feel shame? I was a brother, and my brother's brother. Forget, he tells me, but does he taste them in his tap water, the savour of their hair and skin in his herbs? They too were brothers. Melbourne's in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. The river hasn't water enough to wash the foreign matter out.

I have my work, and my garden, my mother in her glassy loneliness to attend. I have my mornings. Who knows if he'll come back? I have my dreams, too, which have come to seem coextensive with my memories. My sleep is shallow, and my dreams never seem to go all the way down. I step out of my night window and the river wipes the field before me, a smear of silver noise, the great fishes climbing the water by the plate-glass glint of their eyes, in their indigo and orange glows, mastering the dark. I am underneath, plunging as the grey scrim of surface blackens above me. Breathe, lungs, and let me time. We live our lives atop the body of emotion of which we're capable. I follow my dim thought-embryos, I see by my feeling, I sink with my words, for words are shadow, and shadow cannot explain light.

Where've you been.

You started a thought and you could end up anywhere. Like watching a fire: its false grabs and reachings, its licks and twists, you stared into the guts of it and came out in the nightlight glow of a shared childhood room, the cheap groan of a bunk bed, you're awake and listening to the breath snagging in your brother's nostrils, the low whistle of his open-mouthed sleep, the insideness of his life and its promise of protection from the harmful world outside.

Where've you been. You're late.

He's dragging a suitcase into the street. He makes it all the way out of the driveway, to the cherry tree, before I stop him. The air is full of pollen and sunscreen. He emerges from the concrete tunnel with a rueful smile on his face. He's bent over me on the couch – he rooted in his terrible motion and I in him.

I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

I bite the red cushion. I feel his ribs on my ribs. My body an anvil and he's beating something upon it, shaping it into a truer shape, seeking to prove it, the strength, the ductility, the temper of his love.

Brothers and Sisters

Goodness Gracious Hello

Tim Herbert

Roland was feeling lucky on Google, looking for secrets on Facebook, browsing the Web for Mary Jane, the girl who told the world.

Mary Jane Gulliver, still the face he knew, though back then she was a Livermore, a Jannali A-Grader with a lethal backhand down the line, a double-grip on her father's catgut Slazenger. They lived on Binalong Avenue, a battle-axe block with the stump of a chook yard at the back of their quarter acre. Through rusting chicken wire to a few abandoned nesting boxes, a millet bin and a stringy-bark from which Mary Jane and Roland would swing the fence to land on council property: a pair of recently laid tennis courts. A dismount onto unforgiving asphalt and a discernible lump beyond the service line. Roland the only boy who knew the secret of what lay underneath, how Mary Jane had finally resisted the sting of a fly swatter across her legs and grappled with her mother, breaking the plastic handle clean off. The daughter gathered up the parts. In time would pick her moment and give Roland the privilege of bearing witness. A symbolic burial on a molten summer's day.

Roland had his secrets too. The diary he received at Christmas. His big brothers had teased him. A girly thing. In the chook yard, Mary Jane listened and examined as an eleven-year-old boy expounded on the muted floral pattern and the edging of solid brass, like the rivets of the lock and the keyhole too. But Mary Jane soon found a flaw. She slipped an index finger behind the security clasp, testing the re-inforced cardboard. He can still see her on those sticky afternoons. Feel her. All vibration like those cicadas, the shrill song of the furrowed bark. She would sit alongside him on the stringy-bark branch, peering over his shoulder in her white tennis dress. Skin flushing above the neck to his serious flow of words. When Easter came, Roland's diary was half full of entries. On Good Friday, she led him away. Reckoned there was a nest of Argentine ants inside her father's dilapidated shed. Mary Jane saw the bare globe was fading, so she located a torch, only to lag once Roland's knees dipped to oily concrete.

A searchlight over slaters and dottle beneath Doug Livermore's lathe, Roland probing with an offcut, brushing back the cobwebs while Mary Jane swept up the diary. No need for a key with a wrist like hers.

He searched for hours to find her, uncovering just the diary, flung into the millet bin, the clasp broken with a page torn out. Roland could laugh about it now, the misadventure, the betrayal. He should never have boasted about being a writer, of being taken by the muse, though most of what was contained in his round, legible hand had been gossip from the neighbourhood, snide notes about his illiterate brothers and about the Liver-mores themselves, how they served up grits and leftovers and home-made ice-cream that tasted like rancid buttermilk.

Mary Jane would have found a reason to justify, always defending her family, making claims. Like the one about her father being a Spitfire ace over Europe. Roland had recorded everything, the shuffling in his seat, the crossing of arms, the baulking at his brazen question: ‘Did you really shoot down six Messerschmitts in the war, Mr Livermore?'

In the end it was his daughter who strafed the air and dived low for the kill. Roland's confessional a schoolyard auto-da-fé. Grilled for a song to the lock forward in the football team, to the long-limbed school captain with the beautiful eyes of palest blue. Roland saw all of him in the change rooms at the swimming carnival, the curlicues of pubic hair, the Donatello bottom. Scripted everything in black and white with a pencil sketch of him mounting the blocks of the pool. A boy roiling in the blue deeps as his classmates sent the page around. Grabbing and tearing and soiling until the teacher intervened, but enough for Roland to be bullied until his last day of primary school.

Mary Jane ended up at a different high school with a quicksilver gang and a glam rock induction. Roland had crept up a gutter pipe in the night, spied through a blazing side window and found Gary Glitter posted up and staring out from every wall of Mary Jane's bedroom. And then at the railway station he saw her, six-inch platforms and electric-blue flares, staked in a huddle of satin-sheen girlfriends, parroting the chorus to ‘Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again.'

*

Goodness gracious, hello Mary Jane
Message sent

She had pages of friends on Facebook and Roland was just a novice who was sceptical of this new social interface.

Roland Finkel hello. Goodness gracious Gary Glitter? I should know the song. I've added you to my list. It must be 30 years!

He was Mary Jane's friend again now. His very first friend on Facebook. Mary Jane's wall posts were criss-crossed with numerous links to other websites. He would amuse her by posting the YouTube original of ‘Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again.' Gary poking out his fat tongue, baring his chest alongside his prancing Glitter Band in silver suits and a star-shaped guitar. But then that link to a Christian rock website had him reconsider. Stryper. Petra. Sonic Martyr. Blessthefall.

He scrolled through those other icons and profile photos. Mary Jane's friends and family. Even her father was there, a tight smile in an air-force uniform. Roland clicked the publisher's hypertext. All about a poor boy from Tarcutta, who kept his bare feet warm in winter, the squelch of fresh cow pats in a misty paddock. A memoir about a Spitfire ace. For Doug had worked through his demons. A daredevil blurb about fear at 10,000 feet above France, of low fuel and a spluttering engine and of several mates not returning.

Roland surveyed a handful of photos but the medals and stripes were thin on the ground. Simply young Doug with a buzz cut and pipe. Such a modest line in honour and glory and Roland felt the hairs tingling. There was regret certainly, to not have believed, but he had only been a kid in that adult zone of repressed urges and sublimation. Instinct and observation, that was the child's metier, though Roland could see his own failing on that score. Never before had he noticed the colour of Doug Livermore's eyes, almost identical to those of the school captain, to Gary Glitter himself – an arresting, pale blue.

Mary Jane had four children. Roland clicked top to bottom. The daughter must be the real rock chick. A photo of her scrambling out of some moshpit for Jesus in a black T-shirt and a dangling crucifix. ‘The praise pit was awesome,' said the caption and there was a link to
rapture.com
. There was no Armageddon prophecy from the twin brothers even if they did share a Mormon glaze, their lips thin and unforgiving. The posts from the twins were in scattergun Gen-Y argot, though Roland got the drift about their epic hangovers, towelheads on Cronulla beach (‘Osama don't surf') and digs at their kid brother Anthony, twirling around the lounge room to
Dancing
with the Stars
.

Roland scrolled straight to Anthony. Turning thirteen next month. Roland saw a long-limbed lock forward coming to life, though ballroom dancing was this boy's favourite thing. He even had a Yahoo link to an AFL player, the celebrity winner from season five of the television dance show. Anthony Koutoufides. Young Anthony's blog was there too. His own hot-pink heading as infectious as a high five. Mad about Paso Doble. Salsa. Jive. A radiant smile and those blue eyes, not pale but closer to cobalt, like daedal pools of beauty and grace.

Grace. Despite the knocks, Roland liked to think it was still his to carry. A concern that young Anthony might be tripped up, defeated in a family like that one. Unless he was the one to confound them all. Roland was not asking to be godfather. Not guardian or life coach either, though something more daring than acquaintance or guide. To lure Anthony away from the beaten track. Help find his feet among the stars.

You must be friends with Anthony Bassenthwaite to see his full profile

Roland considered the options:

Add as Friend; Send a Message; View Friends

He did not say much on the message. An old friend of his mother's. That was kind of a lie considering he revelled as her enemy for many years after. The claim that his niece was a huge fan of
Dancing with the Stars
was a falsehood too, though Roland expressed a genuine delight about the many coloured fonts the boy splashed across his blog page. Outasight. That was the lad's tagline and Roland wished he had a smart one of his own. Unreal, Anthony. Was that still the patois for a young adolescent?

After three days there was no response. Not from Mary Jane nor Anthony. And then a revelation:

hi roland funny thats our cats name … well its always been the cats name and this one is roland the third
i didnt tell my mum about your message though ive heard about you before from mum who reckons you are a writer can you dance too?

Roland was laughing in his chair. He felt exultant. What a brilliant young fellow. The sense of humour, the curiosity about a man more than thirty years his senior. Only a small obstacle in not being a writer, not since those days in the chook yard at least. Roland had to admit that being an architectural draughtsman sounded a bit pedestrian. Maybe he could keep on pretending. After all, Mary Jane seemed to cherish the idea of his being a writer. Roland even suspected some conflation of guilt about that day in the schoolyard, the day when she unveiled that page from his own diary. So he would send a message to Mary Jane. Ask her to join him and Maxy, the retired song-and-dance man, for lunch in the studio. Don't forget to bring Anthony.

Roland was beginning to feel that as the thread played out, everything gathered to heal, that the human world was benevolent at heart and that even Facebook was part of the mystery.

‘Hello, hello, tell all of your friends,' sang Gary Glitter. ‘I'm back, I'm back as a matter of fact, I'm back.'

The verse was running through Roland's mind when he logged on again that evening. A matter of fact on his Facebook page.

The profile photos were gone. The promise was gone.

Roland has no friends

The Notorious Mrs K.

Dorothy Simmons

Benalla Ensign
, 21 October 1871
Benalla Police Court, Tuesday, 17 October, before Mr Butler, PM
Ellen Kelly v. William Frost
Mr McDonnell for complainant, Mr Pow for defendant

Smile away, smile away: smarmy bugger that you are. What I ever saw …