The Best Australian Stories 2010 (30 page)

I missed him then, under the highway sign and drowned roadhouse. I turned the board homewards and paddled. I crawled into the bottom bunk and saw his eyes were woven shut with salt. He'd been crying. He looked so young. I saw our two sons in his face. I put my face in his neck and kissed his skin. ‘I'm sorry. I'm sorry,' I said, over and over, prying my arms around him. I lifted him off the mattress and held him. Tears, his and mine, ran down my neck and onto my breasts. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I kept saying. ‘I love you.' And it's true. I still love him. We sunk into each other like we had been starved by the silence. Butting our heads hard. Like horses. For a moment I thought I felt the bunk beds lift, bobbing in the flood, until I cried out, a spasm going through me and into the empty town.

We lay together, on the bottom bunk, for the rest of the wet. Our bodies shifted into their habitual curve around one another, as if in sleep we knew no grudge.

Things will be different when the water recedes, as though sucked away with a straw. The crows will be the first to return. Picking at the bloated flesh of drowned dogs and sheep stuck in the mud, river shrimp and crabs coming out of their mouths. Pecking at the eyes of stranded fish, the silver gills fanned open. The hovering powerlines will return to the ground, and puddles will remain, like a great big mirror has been broken over the town, each reflecting pieces of the sky. They'll find him. Jason Strand. Blue like a swimming pool. Toes and fingers nibbled. Stuart's thumbprints all over him. The streets will fill up with new cars, tyres spinning in the bog. And our house will probably collapse, its knees rotten.

Griffith Review

Get Well Soon

Antonia Baldo

My sister Rebecca is fierce and has always carried something inside connecting her to a beat I can't hear. I'm the fusty one, ready with a stable hand and an aspirin. I can imagine myself standing at the gate, waving a little hankie to all my loved ones as they leave. It's true that I walk slowly in the hope that we'll all be kept safe.

At the fag-end of summer dogs piss up against letterboxes and then sniff around the twisted frames of bikes that the kids have dumped on front lawns. Fathers drag nets through backyard pools that are as blue as toilet bowls while mothers put their feet up and sigh. I can imagine those sighs coming together to form a single cloud that bounces down our road like a huge wobbly balloon, shaking hedges as it goes but unable to get off the ground.

Upstairs, Rebecca lies alone, throbbing with woe among a twist of Bo-Peep sheets. Time is very slow in her room. It moves backwards, a long way back, to a past before either of us was born. It crawls forward to a future where the whole race is dead or dying of our own malignant humanness. Sometimes, in that room which is full of things from a more joyful time, when objects were fingered and scrutinised, when her mind was a wonderful child that clasped onto everything that came near and squeezed, time doesn't move in any direction at all.

*

My grandmother Teresa left Malta in 1949. Over the years she's given us many reasons why her family migrated, none of them heroic. She bores her mates in the Italian café rigid with talk of a home more imagined than real.

‘The most bewdiful place in the world,' Nana says over her coffee. ‘And friends that know your family right back.'

‘What the hell you know about Malta? What kinda history you got there anyway?' shouts Ugo from behind the counter. He's wiping grease off the plastic menus. ‘I leave you to your memories, Teresa,' he says, and scratches a fat belly. ‘Enjoy.'

‘Don't get me started on history.' My Nana's mind is groping for some detail about Mussolini. She's trying to waggle her finger at Ugo but she's pointing at the cash register instead. Her joints, riddled with arthritis, are askew. And then Nana goes silent. Details have slipped.

*

My father, Frank, is home all day now. He sits at the desk in his office and scribbles. There's a line that he can't finish. He can't find the rhyme. He's been staring at it for nearly an hour and now he reaches for the whisky bottle beneath his chair, optimistic that one little drink will be the key to unlock his thorny arrangement of words.

All my father's drawers are bottom drawers, stuffed with reams of scrawled pages. Before he was a compulsive poet he was a teacher of ancient history, a specialist in oracles and divination. His walls are covered with certificates and postcards of eroding stone sites. But knowledge that has no market value, the dean of his old university told him, is difficult to fight for. Looking at Frank the dean didn't see a fighter.

My father likes to joke that ancient history is ancient history. He took his pay-out with a shrug and decided he'd be a poet instead.

*

And here's my mother, Helena, parking her shiny car and clacking her way up the garden path in silly shoes, the office laptop swinging at her side. She peeks in the door of Dad's study and kisses him somewhere between his eye and his ear. She can't find his mouth anymore, even though it's right where it's always been. His neck is stretched up, his own lips are parted, ready to give and receive.

‘Where the hell is my mother?' asks Mum, disappearing. ‘If she's gone off to that damn café again, I'll send her to a home. Don't think I won't. And I suppose you haven't made a start on the dinner.'

*

Outside, the gutters are clogged with leaves and the shrubbery needs a prune. My Nan's two goats gnaw the yellow grass. Ford looks at Holden and Holden turns his efficient head to Ford. They stare a while before returning to their meal. God, how simple it is to be a goat.

I spread out the vegetable peelings and watch them chew.

We're a disaster of a family; rootless, no religion or politics, no sense of a culture beyond the concrete buildings and the football fields we visit. Our past is a mishmash of Irish and Maltese. Migrants hunger after dining suites and qualifications and somewhere along the way something important gets lost.

I look up and see that Rebecca's curtains are drawn. She's depressed. Her cannibal mind is eating itself.

*

She got back from overseas a week ago. We celebrated her homecoming with wine and watermelon on the back lawn. Nana opened the windows wide to hear Juliette Greco on the record player and danced a two-step with the goats.

‘When I was young,' began my mother, ‘we thought we were lucky if we made it over to the beach. Fifteen miles was all we dreamed of.'

Rebecca didn't say, ‘Mum, you should have dreamt more. If only you'd dreamt more.' Instead, she lolled against our father and started handing out presents. There was a bottle of brandy for Dad. For Nan, a crushed packet of biscuits. A watercolour of fishermen for Mum, who put it to one side with barely a glance. A T-shirt with an inane slogan for our little brother, Karl.

Karl, lying in the paddling-pool and glugging wine from a Vegemite glass, shouted, ‘And I got this for you, Becs!' bashing the plastic pond with his still-hairless calves. ‘I nicked it from K-mart!'

Nana chuckled but my mother looked away as she does when people spit in the street.

‘There's nothing like the wide blue ocean!' laughed Karl.

‘So, Rebecca, are you going back to uni?' asked Mum.

Rebecca took off her shoes and sat in the paddling pool with Karl, her jeans getting soaked through.

I was watching from the sidelines as usual, poised to fetch napkins or answer the phone should it ring. Looking back, I see that we were all trying to act normally but our humour was strained and we were cautious with our words. Tiptoeing, inching our way. Candour is impossible amongst us. We'd have to be at the end of the world, on the edge of a crisis bigger than any puddle of blood we've ever seen, and only then could we whisper what we really feel.

But there was no chance of honesty that day, with Rebecca's backpack still in the hall and the fear she wouldn't come home at all still present with us. So we smiled, tipping our heads back into the sunlight, and we didn't admit we were half-expecting her to break apart before our eyes. I think she understood all this and was happy to talk nonsense too, dipping her hand in the water to save another black beetle from drowning.

She gave me my present later; a little straw doll with wings to hang in my car. A little crackly angel to hover over my dashboard.

*

A week later, Rebecca has crept back under the covers and we fear it's all going to happen again; the silence, the tears, the horrible gnawing fear of her harming herself. She's decided not to eat or move, although
decide
is far too dynamic a word.

‘I can't stand to hear her crying through the walls,' says Karl.

My father gives up trying to reason with her through the keyhole and goes to his study to write, the loops growing larger, the focus looser. To forgive him his dependency, we've tried to convince ourselves that he's a genius, that the whisky is as essential as his sharpened pencils. ‘I'm a traditionalist!' he shouted once, lurching in the corridor. ‘Longhand and booze!' We kept our alarm to ourselves. One casualty is enough.

My mother has turned on her laptop and spread her work out on the dining-room table. She puts together development proposals for dead areas of the city, spending her days walking up alleyways and taking snapshots of defunct factories. She conspires with architects and members of the local government. If she could, she'd see a shopping mall or a block of luxury high-rise apartments on every corner.

‘I don't know what I can do about your sister,' she tells me. ‘I have to finish this report by the morning.' Her face looks sickly in the glow of the computer screen. My poor mother. Her hopes for us have been thwarted; we are so plodding and mediocre.

*

On the first night after Rebecca's arrival, Nana pulled the disintegrating shoebox of photos from the back of her cupboard.

‘This was your grandfather cutting cane up north,' she said.

Sitting either side of her on the bed, we gazed with adoration at the sun-blackened face of this man we never knew. We could smell the stink of working men and hear the flies buzzing round the amber cane as loud as helicopters.

Nana held out dog-eared photos of peeling weather-board houses we've never lived in and strangers with all manner of moustaches. The craggy coast of her flat island home.

I got up and gave Nana her medicine – steroids to keep her blood moving.

‘Bloody asteroids,' she whined. ‘They send me to outer-space.'

When I'd got her under the covers, she took Rebecca's chin between her fingers and said, ‘Isn't she bewdiful, eh? When she was little, she'd cry to see a lost dog. Cry over nursery rhymes. Jack fell down and broke his crown! Owwwooohh!!'

Rebecca giggled and then Nana turned to me. ‘And you were the one who was always thinking. All the time working it through in that computer you got in your head.'

It didn't seem so much of a compliment.

‘We should go back to Malta,' she went on. ‘You two wouldn't have a chance to float away. There'd be people, eh. Real family to hold on to.'

*

That night the sky seemed so very high above the tops of the swaying blue gums. Rebecca and I sat on the back lawn. Rebecca said she saw falling stars but I was looking the wrong way at the moment each one appeared.

‘Going away did nothing at all,' she said later. ‘It's with me. It's always with me.'

*

Karl's best friend, Paul, with his acne and prominent bones, is loitering in our kitchen like a stray dog round the tip. My mother is kind to him and I'm proud she remembers how to be warm.

He looks at her with some kind of devotion and says, ‘Hey, Mrs O'Brien, I remember one morning when me and Karl got back here from drinking all night' – my mother does a comic frown, never sure of the part she should play – ‘and you were in the kitchen in your dressing gown. You gave us a glass of pineapple juice to drink and that juice was the sweetest, most pineapply thing I've ever drunk in all my life. I always remember the taste of that drink, Mrs O'Brien.'

My mother is rendered oddly speechless. Perhaps she feels how strange it is that this boy has held on to a memory of her goodness.

But then Karl comes down and the boys crack fists. ‘Let's get out of here,' they say and they're gone, loud and rude and taking with them any last trace of summer.

*

The dean was wrong. My father is a fighter. He brawls with anyone who opposes his truth of universal goodness. He battles pessimism, lack of communication, the hospital with their clinical diagnoses and my mother's inhuman composure. Most of all, he fights the part of Rebecca that's chewing up the other part. When he's drinking, he can fight with most vigour. Wildness floods his muscles. He rages against her doorframe.

But I'm the only one she lets inside her room. Once there, I sit by her skinny body offering sandwiches while she carps on to me about economic doom and rising oceans, about spiritual emptiness and the absence of an afterlife.

I want to tell her that if she doesn't move then neither can we, but instead I say, ‘It's okay, Becs. I love you. I won't stop. I'll keep on giving you love.'