The Best Australian Stories (48 page)

From the moment I arrived in my air-conditioned Korean car I began to feel sheepish. Police were pulling down their tape barriers and a few news trucks wheeled away. The action was over. I sat behind the little steering wheel feeling the grit of fatigue in my eyes. What had I been expecting to see, more bones,
the
bones, perhaps, have them handed over for my close inspection? Would that suddenly make me sanguine about Alan Mannering?

The swamp has a cycleway around it now and even a bird hide. Around the perimeter, where the wild oats are slashed, signs bristle with civic exhortations. Behind the pine log barriers the straight lines give way to the scruffiness of natural Australia. The sun drove in through the windscreen and the dash began to cook and give off a chemical smell. Down at the swamp's receding edge the scrofulous melaleucas looked fat and solid as though they'd see off another five years of drought. I pulled away and drove up our old street running a few laps of the neighbourhood in low gear. I took in the gardens whose European ornamentals were blanching. Only a few people were about, women and children I didn't recognise. They stood before bloody mineral stains on parapet walls with a kind of stunned look that I wondered about. A man with rounded shoulders stood in front of my old house. The jacaranda was gone. Somebody had paved where it stood to make room for a hulking great fibreglass boat. No one looked my way more than a moment and part of me, some reptilian piece of me, was disappointed that no one looked up, saw right through the tinted glass and recognised me as the kid who was with Alan Mannering the day he drowned down there on the swamp. It's as though I craved discovery, even accusation. There he is! He was there! No one said it when it happened and nobody mentioned it since. People were always oddly incurious about him. He was gone, time, as they say, moves on. They all went on without him while he rose and fell, came and went regardless. And they had no idea.

It's kind of plush-looking, the old neighbourhood, despite the drought: houses remodelled, exotic trees grown against second-storey extensions. Middle class, I suppose, which is a shock until you remember that everyone's middle class in this country now. Except for the unemployed and the dead. The city has swept past our old outpost. The bush has peeled back like the sea before Moses. Progress has made straight the way until terracotta roofs shimmer as far as the eye can see.

As I left I noticed furniture on the sandy roadside verge around the corner. Some black kids hauled things across the yard in Woolworths bags under the frank and hostile gaze of neighbours either side. An Aboriginal woman raised her fist at a man with a mobile phone and a clipboard. I pulled over a moment, transfixed. Another man with a mobile phone and aviator glasses came over and asked me to move on. They were expecting a truck, he said; I complied obedient as ever, but as I gathered speed and found the freeway entry I thought of the Joneses being evicted like that. I was right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn't click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognised from the old days, only confirmed what I've thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

Cloud Busting

Tara June Winch

We go cloud busting, Billy and me, down at the beach, belly up to the big sky. We make rainbows that pour out from the tops of our heads, squinting our eyes into the gathering. Fairy-flossed pincushion clouds explode. We hold each other's hand; squeeze really hard to build up the biggest brightest rainbow and bang! Shoot it up to the sky, bursting cloud suds that scatter escaping into the air alive.

We toss our bodies off the eelgrass-covered dunes and down to the shore where seaweed beads trace the waterline. Little bronze teardrops – we bust them too. Bubble-wrapped pennies.

We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam. Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles, and sometimes periwinkles, bleached white. We snatch them up, filling our pockets. We find shark egg capsules like dried-out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone. We find coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles – we bust them with a stick. We find weed ringlet dolls' wigs and strings of brown pearls; I wear them as bracelets. We get drunk on the salt air and laughter. We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes' heights. We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive and we tumble. We empty our lungs and weight ourselves cross-legged to the seabed; there we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we swim up for mouthfuls of air.

We're not scared of the ocean, that doesn't come until later. When we're kids we have no fear, it gets sucked out in the rips. We swim with the current, like breeding turtles and hidden stingrays as we slither out onto the sand.

We climb the dunes again, covered in sticky sand and sea gifts. We ride home and string up dry sea urchins at our window. We break open our pipis and our mum places each half under the grill or fries them in the saucepan with onion and tomatoes. We empty our pockets and line the seashells along the windowsill. Mum starts on about the saucepans; she wants to tell us stories even though we know most of them off by heart, over and over, every detail. The saucepans she says, the best bloody saucepans.

Billy and me sit at the window while she fries and begins her story. I'm still busting clouds through the kitchen pane, as they pass over the roof guttering and explode quietly in my rainbow.

It was Goulburn, 1967, Mum would begin. Where's that? We'd say. Somewhere far away, a Goulburn that doesn't exist anymore, she'd answer, and carry on with her story.

*

Anyway, Goulburn, '67. All my brothers and sisters had been put into missions by then, except Fred who went to live with my mother's sister. And me, I was with my mother, probably cos my skin's real dark, see, but that's another story, you don't need to know that. So old Mum and me, we're sent to Goulburn from the river, to live in these little flats, tiny things. Flatettes or something. Mum was working for a real nice family, at the house cooking and cleaning; they were so nice to old Mum.

I would go to work with her, used to sit outside and play and wait for her to finish. And when we came home Mum would throw her feet up on the balcony rail, roll off her stockings and smoke her cigarettes in the sun. Maybe talk with the other women, most of them were messed about, climbing those walls, trying to forget. It wasn't a good time for the women, losing their children.

Anyway, all us women folk were sitting up there this hot afternoon and down on the path arrived this white man, all suited up. Mum called down to him, I don't know why, she didn't know him. I remember she said, ‘Hey there mister, what you got there?' A box was tucked under his arm. He looked up at all of us and smiled. He come dashing up the stairwell and onto our balcony. I think he would've been the only white person to ever step up there. He was smooth.

‘Good afternoon to you ladies. In this box, I am carrying the best saucepans in the land.'

Mum sucked on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the tin. ‘Give us a look then.'

The suit opened up the box and arranged the saucepans on the balcony, the stainless steel shining and twinkling in the sun. They were magical. All the women whooped and wooed at the saucepans. They really were perfect. Five different sizes and a Dutch oven, for cakes. Strong black grooved handles on the sides and the lids, the real deal.

‘How much?' Mum said, getting straight to the point. The suit started up then on his big speech about the saucepans: Rena ware, 18/10, only the best, and this and that, lifetime guarantee, all that sort of stuff. The women started laughing. They knew what the punchline was going to be, nothing that they could afford, ever. Their laughter cascaded over the balcony's rails as they followed each other back into the shade of their rooms. ‘Steady there, Alice, you got a little one to feed there too!' they said, seeing Mum still entranced as they went inside.

Mum sat there, watching his mouth move and the sun bouncing off the pans. He told her the price, something ridiculous, and Mum didn't even flinch. She lit up another fag, puffed away. I think he was surprised, maybe relieved that she didn't throw him out, and he rounded off his speech. Mum just sat there as he packed up the saucepans, getting himself together to leave. ‘You not gunna let me buy 'em then?' Mum said, blowing smoke above our heads.

‘Would you like to, Miss?'

‘Of course I bloody do, wouldna sat here waiting for you to finish if I didn't!'

He laughed. Mum told him then that she couldn't afford it, but she wanted them. So they made a deal. Samuel, the travelling salesman, would come by once a month, when money would come from the family, and he would take a payment each time.

Mum worked extra hours from then on, sometimes taking home the ironing, hoping to get a little more from the lady of the house. And she did, just enough. And Samuel would come round and chat with Mum and the ladies and bring sweets for me. He and Mum would be chatting and drinking tea until it got dark outside. They became friends after all that time. Three years and seven months it took her. When Samuel came round on his last visit, with a box under his arm, just like the first time, Mum smiled big. He came into the flat and placed the box on the kitchen bench. ‘Open it,' he said to Mum, and smiled down at me and winked.

Mum pressed down the sides of her uniform, then folded open the flaps and lifted out each saucepan, weighing them in her hands and squinting over at Samuel, puzzled. With each lid she pulled off, tears gathered and fell. ‘What is it, what is it?' I was saying, as I pulled a chair up against the bench. Under one lid was a big leg of meat, under another potatoes and carrots, a shiny chopping knife, then a bunch of eggs, then bread. And in the Dutch oven, a wonky-looking steamed pudding. Mum was crying too much to laugh at the cake.

‘I haven't got a hand for baking yet. Hope you don't mind I tested it out?' Mum just shook her head, she couldn't say a word and I think Samuel understood. He put on his smart hat, tilting it at Mum, and said, ‘Good day to you, Alice, good day, young lady.'

And when Mum passed, she gave the pots to me.

*

When my mother finished her story she'd be crying too, tiny streams down her cheekbones. I knew she would hock everything we ever owned, except the only things we did – five size-ranged saucepans, with Dutch oven. Still with their hard metal case, only a few handles chipped. I run my fingertips over fingerprints now, over years, generations. They haven't changed much, they still linger patiently. They still smell of friendship. I suppose that to my grandmother, Samuel was much like a cloud buster. Letting in some hope from the sun. And I suppose that to my mum, Samuel was someone she wanted to stay around, like a blue sky. To Samuel, I don't know, maybe the exchange was even, and maybe when those clouds burst open, he got to feel the rain. A cleaning rain; and maybe that was enough.

Reading
Madame Bovary

Amanda Lohrey

It was the end of her final year in law and as a graduation present her aunt gave her the money to go trekking in Nepal. But she didn't like it there: too cold, too steep, too dirty. She found she didn't do well at high altitudes and in any case she had never liked camping. She liked comfort and above all she needed to be warm. She hated the feel of dirt under her nails, of small stones beneath her ground sheet and the sense of zipped enclosure within the fuggy padding of a sleeping bag. Nor did she like being in a group of backpacking Americans and Germans who had endless banal discussions about the best kind of walking boots or the merits of brand-name packs – or worse, sat around the campfire singing so-called ‘Rainbow' songs or offering up recollections in sacramental tones of their own feats of abseiling. The nadir was reached when they drifted into tedious and shallow raves about Tibetan Buddhism. Nirvana? It was all just dirt and squalor to her.

Just three weeks after leaving Sydney she arrived, broke, in Amsterdam. There she hooked up with an English guy called Tom, who corralled her in a dark corner of a bar on the Zuyderzee. Before long they were bunkered in on the top floor of his cousin's apartment overlooking one of the canals, and she found herself just a touch smitten. Tom was one of those big hunky men she had a weakness for. It was a particular kind of body she craved, almost independently of the person who inhabited it. He might be infuriatingly taciturn – an enigma – and bloody hard to talk to but with a body like that it didn't matter. You could let it smother you until the breath stifled in your chest or you could fight back with abandon and get into a good heaving sexual scrap with just enough spite to sharpen the senses. Tom invited her to return to London with him and she said yes. Though he appeared to be one of those stolid Englishmen who are unable to express their feelings it was clear that he was serious.

Within four weeks of having met they were crossing the English Channel. Almost immediately she found a job as a receptionist for a computer firm in Camden Town and moved into Tom's flat, half of a bare-fronted, red-brick terrace in the East End, a block away from where he taught maths at the local high school. The school was a grim place, more like a gaol, with high wire fences, asphalt yards and bricks the colour of soot. The buildings even had wire mesh along the upper-storey walkways that made them look like cages. Sometimes on her morning walk to the tube station she would glance across at the school and thank God she didn't have to work there.