The Best Thing

A sensuous, passionate story of first love, first baby,
The Best Thing
captures brilliantly the turmoil in Melanie’s life and the intensity of her pleasures and pains. Margo Lanagan uses words as though they were new minted—as though she were inside the skin of a teenager. But there is more to the novel than that. In a natural, unforced way it shows Mel’s growing understanding of love, individuality and responsibility.

This is a thought-provoking, life-affirming book—and a great read.

MARGO LANAGAN
was born in 1960 and has lived in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Perth, Mundrabilla and Paris. She studied history at the University of Sydney. She works as a writer and book editor, and lives with her partner and their two sons in Sydney’s inner west.

Her writing includes novels for teenagers and adults—
The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly
—and for younger readers—
Wildgame, The Tankermen
and
Walking Through Albert.

MARGO LANAGAN

The writing of this book was assisted by the Commonwealth
Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding
and advisory body.

© Margo Lanagan 1995

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

A Little Ark Book
First published in 1995 by
Allen & Unwin
9 Atchison Street
St Leonards NSW 1590
Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:     (61 2) 9906 2218
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:
http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Lanagan, Margo.
The best thing.
ISBN 1 86448 824 7.
1. Title.
A823.3

Set in New Baskerville
Cover designed by Ruth Grüner
Text designed by Rosanna Di Risio
Cover photograph by Thomas Schweizer
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Victoria

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Muhammad Ali’s words on page 7 are from his autobiography,
I Am the Greatest.
The definitions of ‘pug’ on page 14 are from the
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
Oxford University Press, 1993 edition. The paragraphs on life before birth on pages 24, 27, 39, 43–4, 51–2, 53 and 77–8 owe a great deal to two articles in
Life
magazine: ‘Drama of Life Before Birth’, 30 April 1965 and ‘The First Days of Creation’, August 1990. Any errors arising from their paraphrasing are the author’s responsibility. The quotations on pages 54, 97 and 113 are taken from the Right Honourable Dame Edith Summerskill,
The Ignoble Art,
published by William Heinemann in 1956. Muhammad Ali’s words on page 87 are quoted in the introduction to Peter Heller (ed.),
In this Corner! 40 World Champions Tell Their Stories,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973. The quotations on pages 92 and 105–6 are from National Health and Medical Research Council,
Health Aspects of Boxing,
AGPS, Canberra, 1975. The scoring guidelines on page 99 are from the Australian Boxing Association,
Referees’ and Judges’ Manual,
10th edition, 1962. The neurologist’s words on page 101 were cited in an article by Peter Fitzsimons published in the
Sydney Morning Herald
on 14 February 1990, ‘The hazy zone was unknown to Tyson’. The quotation on page 124 is from an article
by Peter Fitzsimons and Daniel Williams in the
Sydney Morning Herald
on 20 March 1990, and is used with permission. Kostya Tszyu’s words on page 127 are taken from an interview by Alan Attwood, ‘Eyes on the Prize’, published in the
Sydney Morning Herald
on 12 November 1994, and are used with permission. Jeff Fenech’s words about Johnny Lewis on pages 133–4 are from an article by Peter Muszkat, ‘Lord of the Ring’, published in
The Australian Magazine
on 23 September 1989, and are used with permission. The quotation on page 140 is from Peter Corris’s history of Australian boxing,
Lords of the Ring,
Cassell Australia, 1980, and is used with permission. The quotation on page 159 is from Casey Meyers,
Walking: A Complete Guide to the Complete Exercise,
Random House, New York, © Casey Meyers 1992, and is used with permission. The quotation on page 169 is from Deirdre Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography,
Vintage Books, London, © Deirdre Bair 1990.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use these quotations. The author welcomes contact from publishers to rectify any errors or omissions.

The feeling is like being half awake and half
dreaming … And your awake half knows what
you’re dreaming about. A heavy blow takes you to
the door of this room. It opens and you see neon,
orange and green lights blinking. You see bats
blowing trumpets, alligators play trombones, and
snakes are screaming. Weird masks and actors’
clothes hang on the wall.

Muhammad Ali

I find a condom in my locker, with a jelly baby poked right down to the tip. The baby’s had to be flattened to fit through the locker slots. I glimpse its squashed round face as I gather it up in a tissue, find myself tracing its life history, back into the box with its fellow babies, up into the machine that counts jelly babies into boxes, up along the conveyor belt through the drier, to the nozzles that squirt the exact amounts of jelly goop into the baby moulds. Gloved, hair-netted, white-coated workers in attendance: mould scrubbers, defect spotters, nozzle cleaners. These thoughts get me through the crush, out of the building, through the gate.

Brenner comes up to me—no, he comes
after
me. Wants to know why we ‘broke up’. Why we can’t be friends.

‘Oh, you tell
me
,’ I say, not even stopping.

‘Why?’ he says, all innocent. ‘We didn’t have a fight or anything, did we?’

‘No, we didn’t. You just disappeared off the face of the earth at the first stupid rumour, that’s all.’ I stride on, trying to get ahead of him.

‘What rumour?’

I snort.

‘Honest, I didn’t hear anything!’

‘Bullshit you didn’t.’

He jogs up the path behind me. ‘Okay, so I did hear rumours. But there was nothing to ’em. I didn’t
believe
’em or anything.’

‘You’re talking too much. Go away and leave me alone.’

He walks along beside me to the crossing, expecting me to wait there. I go straight across the street, forcing cars to stop for me.

‘Hey, wait on!’

‘What’s the matter, Bren?’ I say over my shoulder. ‘Suddenly you’re all matey again. I don’t want you coming home with me, so you’d better tell me quick what’s on your mind.’

‘I dunno. I just saw Lisa today, and, gee, she’s being such a ratbag about you. Like, she was your best friend, wasn’t she?’

‘What, you feel sorry for me, do you? Well, wow, so I suppose I should feel flattered. What is it, three months now? A quarter of a year? I appreciate your concern, Bren, I really do.’ My throat is starting to close over, and I have to walk on.

‘Mel, don’t be like this.’ He’s following me again.

Like this!
I turn on him, way past anger. ‘Hey, Brenner, I think it’s really, really big of you to come round to my side of things after dropping me like a hot potato, for no reason, without even discussing it, three months ago.’

‘Come on, Mel, I didn’t know who to believe!’

‘How about
me
?’ Our faces are only centimetres apart before he backs up a bit. I go on yelling. ‘What was wrong with coming to me, for my side of the story? I was the girlfriend, I was the one you were supposed to be able to talk to about
anything.’

Brenner’s eyes are all over the place looking for a way out. He’s pathetic. ‘Well, I felt uncomfortable, you know? The things people were saying about you—’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, Lisa said you were—’ He looks at me and his eyes have got a horrible expression in them. He’s really curious, greedy to know. ‘That you were pregnant, and everything.’

‘What do you mean,
and everything
? What else?’

‘She said you hadn’t told her who, but that she figured it couldn’t have been me, from what you said.’

‘“She said, she figured.” You two’ve been having a good old chat, haven’t you?’

He’s not pretending to want to be friends any more. He’s just busting to know. ‘Well?’ he says. He’s practically twitching, practically on his tippy-toes.

I almost start to enjoy myself. ‘Well what?’

‘How much of it’s true?’

I look him up and down, very slowly. It’s not as if he even cares. Not about me, not about what happened. He’s just digging for gossip, hunting for stuff to shout at me tomorrow, when I walk past him and his mates at the school gate.

I shake my head. ‘It’s too late for you to expect an answer to that.’

‘What?’ He puts his hands on his hips. Oh, he’s just
so tired
of dealing with idiots like me.

‘Three months ago you might have got a straight answer. But after all that carrying on during the exams last year, and pretending I didn’t exist over Christmas—no
way.
And all this shit you’ve been giving me since school got back—God, what Lisa’s doing is nothing!’ It’s not true, but it sounds good. ‘You can get stuffed. I don’t need you around. I don’t need shits like you.’

He grabs my shoulder. I slap his hand away and back off.

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ His face turns ugly. I start to put distance between us. He shouts across it, ‘You
were
up the duff to some bloke, like they all reckon!’

They all.
They all.
Who? How many? I concentrate on keeping my head up, my steps steady.

‘You
did
have an abortion! You’re just a
slut
! You were sleeping with this guy all the time, weren’t you!’ I can’t see why he’s not following me, hitting me. I try to walk faster without seeming to. ‘It’s no wonder no-one talks to you. No-one likes a
slut
!’ He loves saying that word. He loves being angry, being so
right,
and swearing at me. Words of Power, that’s what Mum calls swear words. I call out over my shoulder, ‘Sticks and stones, Brenner.’
My voice is too high, but he’s not listening. A dog behind a tin fence starts yapping like a maniac.

A stone whacks my schoolbag, another hits my leg. The Words of Power beat on my back. I feel as if there’s a whole posse of schoolmates and parents behind me; Brenner’s their mouthpiece, no more than that, just the noisiest, angriest one in the pack. ‘Fucking bitch! You’d sleep with anyone! Do you do it with
animals
too? With
dogs
?’

So I think of Pug. Sometimes he wears a crazy-about-me expression that for a second makes me feel like a good person, a nice person. Then Brenner is just a mistake anyone might make, Lisa a nobody. Sometimes Pug says, in a really
doleful
voice, ‘You’re so
smart,
you know? You’re too smart for me, I reckon.’