The Best Australian Stories 2013 Read online

  Then both of them, his mother and Marie, turning the Evil Rays onto him, as if the entire thing is his idea, his fault, when all he’s done is get out his credit card to pay for the whole bloody shebang: the punch and the Peruvian glass punchbowl it’s in and the gourmet chestnut stuffing mix in the organic free-range turkey out there, rolled and boned for easy slicing – Anthony knows exactly how it feels – and the sighing, put-upon lounge suite still on the interest-free nothing more to pay for ten months plan, which Marie is already obsessing is the wrong shade of taupe. Are there actually different shades of taupe? It’s news to him. Hell would be like that, he thinks, gulping punch. It would be shades of taupe that drove you screaming into eternal torment, not the flames.

  ‘Let’s open the presents,’ he suggests.

  ‘But the children haven’t even arrived,’ says his mother.

  ‘I meant just ours,’ he answers feebly. True, for a few seconds there, he had forgotten the children were coming. His sister’s offspring would dominate the day, though it wasn’t the kids’ fault – they’d be desperate to escape into the study as soon as they could to play with the Wii he’d bought them, the poor little buggers. No, they would be used, the children, as deflector shields against the Evil Rays, as ammunition against the day’s parries and thrusts of emotional blackmail. Hannah and Tom. They’d have to be twelve and ten now.

  Marie hadn’t even wanted them to come; she made a big fuss about having to plan a special menu for them and how they’d turn the house upside down, but Anthony, ducking his chin and ploughing through a veritable snowstorm of Evil Rays, insisted that if they were going to have a family Christmas, his sister and her husband and kids had to be there, or his parents wouldn’t show up.

  ‘I don’t care if we have KFC,’ he’d finally said, gesturing to the pile of magazines hawking sunshine and patios and people in uncrushed white linen shirts. ‘If we’ve agreed to do it, they have to come.’ And Marie had slammed off into the study to channel her fury into pumping six kilometres out of the exercise bike. You could bounce a coin off her calf muscles, if you were game to try.

  Rays, rays. One drills into the back of his skull as he leaves the kitchen, another counterattacks with a zap square in the solar plexus as he carries in a platter of smoked-salmon blinis. Marie’s doused them with chopped dill, and his mother looks at them like they’ve been sprayed with grass clippings from the mower. She can get every secret weapon into those rays – contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

  ‘Pikelets, eh?’ says his father, eyes swivelling back to the one-day match, luridly coloured on the plasma screen. ‘Well, well.’ He folds one into his mouth to keep the peace while his mother refuses, mouth like a safety pin. Vol-au-vents, that’s his mother’s style. Cheese straws and a sherry.

  Anthony starts eating the things so that when Marie comes back it will look like they’ve been a success. He’s got four in his mouth when a stray caper lodges itself in his throat and forces him to cough a spray of ricotta and dill and masticated pancake into a Christmas napkin. For a second he’s terrified he might actually throw up, and wouldn’t that be a wonderful start to the day, but he swallows down a mouthful of punch and his stomach settles.

  Where’s Marie? If there’s one thing those magazines kept promising, it was that even though you were a hostess you wouldn’t need to be tied to the kitchen all morning; with your new fresh and fun easy-peasy celebration menu you’d be relaxing with those you loved on this special day.

  He can’t go back out to the kitchen yet. It wouldn’t look right. ‘Who’s winning, Dad?’ he says.

  ‘The Pakis.’

  On the screen the tiny bright figures move as if they’re underwater. Bowl and deflect. Go back, wait, run up slowly, bowl and … block. Christ, it’s like watching paint dry.

  ‘I got all my shopping done early and out of the way this year,’ says his mother. ‘And what a relief that was. I can’t stand having to shop when the place is such a madhouse just before Christmas.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ He recalls going to Safeway just the night before, running up and down the aisles searching for cranberries in syrup. The person ahead of him at the checkouts was buying four barbeque chickens, salad mix and a big tub of choc-chip ice-cream, and Anthony had felt an overwhelming, childish longing to follow them out and curl up in the back of their car and go home to their place.

  ‘And I got everything boxed,’ his mother is saying, ‘just big square boxes. I’ll never forget the terrible problems we had wrapping that rocking horse for Tom.’ Seven years later, and she’s still talking about it.

  ‘What did you get him this year?’ says Anthony. He can see the packages under the tree – all the same red paper with identical bows.

  ‘A walkie-talkie set.’ She looks at him shrewdly, and Anthony does his best to simulate admiring delight.

  ‘Oh! He’ll … Was that something he said he wanted?’

  ‘You know how much he loves all his electronic games. He’ll be able to play police games with this, with his friends. You know, hiding round the house.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  She’s on to him in an instant. ‘What? Don’t you think it’s a good idea? Lord knows it cost me enough. I just try to keep up with what the children seem to want; I don’t know all the latest gadgets. I just do my best.’

  God, where is Marie? ‘No, no. It’s a great idea. He’ll love it.’

  When Tom sees the Wii, Anthony knows, the walkie-talkie’s going to get dropped like a dud Tamagotchi.

  ‘I’ll just see if Marie needs a hand,’ he says, weaving through the lounge chairs to the kitchen.

  ‘Honestly,’ he hears his mother tut as he exits, ‘how hard is it to roast a turkey?’

  Listless applause sounds from the TV as someone finally hits something, and the lounge chair exhales a gust of weary depression.

  Marie’s face, as she glances up, is murderous.

  ‘Pit those,’ she snaps, flicking her eyes to some cherries. ‘If your father cracks a filling on a cherry pip I’ll never hear the end of it.’

  She’s – what the hell’s she doing? Anthony stares at his wife’s hand, vanished to the wrist inside a Christmas ham.

  ‘I’m getting the fat and skin off. I’m not going to drop dead of cholesterol even if they all want to.’ She extracts her hand like a doctor completing an internal exam and peels back the great flapping layer of fat. ‘Look at that. Disgusting.’ She wraps it in a plastic bag, shuddering, and drops it into the bin. ‘We’ll just have this ham cold, sliced and arranged on the platter with some rocket garnish and a scattering of cranberries.’

  Anthony grimaces. He can hear the pitch rising in her voice, the manic brittleness that has nowhere to go but up, up, up into hectic hysteria. It will break later, after everyone has gone, and the tic that’s jumping now under her eye will somehow afflict her whole face and pump itself down her arms and legs.

  ‘Try not to get upset,’ he says as calmly as he can. ‘I’ll do all that before we eat, just come in and sit down for a while.’

  She’s scrubbing ham grease off her hands in the sink. ‘I hate that lounge suite,’ she mutters. ‘I told you it was the wrong colour.’

  Anthony scrabbles in the cutlery drawer for the cherry pitter he remembers buying at Ikea. ‘So I’ll just do these cherries then.’

  ‘I’m not going back in there by myself,’ says Marie, who fronts a whole courtroom five days a week.

  ‘Well,’ says Anthony, keeping it light with everything he has, ‘I’ll bring this bowl in, and do them in there.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Sure. It’ll give my mother something to correct me about. Make her happy.’

  She flash
es him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the hand-tooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one – lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

  ‘I don’t have any explanation for it,’ she’d told the fertility specialist last week when they had their first session. ‘I’m doing everything right: diet, exercise, monitoring ovulation …’

  How reasonable she’d sounded, how level-headed. That lawyer’s tilt to her head, the voice pleasant and determinedly non-aggrieved. And the specialist nodded and said, ‘Sometimes these things take more time than we expect,’ and she’d replied, in a voice a shade or two firmer, that she’d done her own research and was ready for the first stage of conception enhancement.

  That was the term she’d used: conception enhancement. Like they were joining the Scientologists rather than trying to make a baby.

  Anthony takes the cherry bowl and the Ikea pitter and an extra saucer into the lounge room and sits at the end of the dining-room table. Marie is at the stereo, riffling through the stack of CDs for something suitable, his mother pointedly brushing dill off a blini she holds in her palm.

  ‘Aren’t you the domestic one?’ says his mother when she sees him, and he waits, counting tiredly to himself, and getting to seven before she adds, ‘Just watch you don’t splatter that shirt with cherry juice because it’s the devil’s own to get out.’

  He starts on the first cherry, and his mother writhes with the discomfort of not interfering.

  ‘Would you like me to do it?’ she blurts when she can no longer endure it after ten seconds.

  ‘No, thanks but no. I’m enjoying the challenge.’

  The cherry stones drop onto the saucer, and the repetition of the task lulls Anthony into a light trance. The cherries are huge, bigger than any he remembers from his childhood. He and his sister Margaret used to sit on the back step and eat them, collecting the stones for that rhyming game about who you’d marry, and Margaret would always eat the exact number required to get her past tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, all the way to rich man. He remembers spiking her pile with an extra stone, just to bump it up to poor man and drive her crazy.

  It’s worked too, that trick. She and Ian are in some dire financial straits. He’s under oath to say nothing to their parents, but it makes him feel uncomfortable, having the big new house, and that’s what made him overcompensate, probably, with the presents. Thunk, thunk, go the cherry stones, sliding obediently from the dripping flesh. Slippery as hard little rocks you’d remove from someone’s gall bladder. In fact, one time he’d had his ears syringed after they’d blocked up during a bad cold, and he was astonished to hear a thunk into the kidney dish the doctor had instructed him to hold beside his head. Looking down as the warm solution sloshed around inside his ear, he saw a hard ball of wax just the size and shape of one of these cherry stones lying there. Anthony couldn’t believe something like that had been wedged in his ear all along, slowly building up like a small, solid boulder. And what amazed him even more was the sudden clearing of sound as the water drained from his ear canal. It was like finding the treble knob on your sound system at last and hearing, really hearing, everything that had been dulled and muted before.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind our funny little present to you, Marie,’ says his mother. ‘It’s just that you’re so hard to buy for, the two of you – I mean, my goodness, there’s really absolutely nothing else you need, is there?’

  ‘No,’ says Marie, smiling that gracious close-lipped smile. ‘We’ve both worked hard to get the house the way we want it, haven’t we, Anthony?’

  Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, he counts before he answers. ‘Yep, but it’s been worth it,’ he says. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. You couldn’t have that rhyme now – kids wouldn’t get it. You’d have to update it. IT, banker, accountant, defence-force personnel … human-resources manager …

  She used to call him Ant. He can’t put his finger on when it started being Anthony. It was like his attention had waned momentarily, and then there it was, a new name and a new smile, to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house. He’d closed his eyes signing the mortgage on the house, suffering a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG.

  The front doorbell rings its two-gong Tibetan chime, and he jumps up.

  ‘That’ll be Margaret and Ian!’ he cries, making for the door just as his mother rests her hand thoughtfully on the upholstered lounge chair, readying herself for the next bout, and says, ‘What colour do you call this, Marie?’

  At the table Anthony stands hunched, looking through the viewfinder of his digital camera. He’s starting to breathe a bit easier now, with lunch almost finished. He looks at the group of them reproduced in pixels, their movements at the table making the image shift and shimmer like a 3-D postcard.

  ‘Oh, good, get some photos,’ calls his mother, a little loud now after three white wines. ‘Get one of all of us, Anthony. There’s so few occasions we’re all together like this.’ She waves her hand extravagantly to bring Tom and Hannah over beside her and gestures again at Anthony. ‘Put it on the timer thing and be in the photo too; get a record of all of us before we all change forever.’ She’s gone a bit slurred and maudlin, he sees with alarm – blinking hard and giving her eyes a surreptitious blot on one of Marie’s linen napkins. ‘Time goes so fast,’ she says to nobody in particular.

  Anthony stands tilting the camera a few millimetres back and forth, mesmerised, as the group arranges itself before him. The pixellated image oscillates, scanning and reading the shifts of light and shade. One moment he sees his sister, overweight and worn and dowdy in her Target outfit, frumpy beside the immaculate blonde Marie, who outshines them all. The next he sees Margaret, kind and comfortable, touching Ian’s arm and smiling warmly, with Marie pale and cold and stick-thin, face grimaced into a close-mouthed rictus. Back and forth the shimmering image goes; how she sees them and how they see her, this life and that life, with Anthony in the middle, trying to hold the camera steady and depress the button for auto-focus at the same moment. He’s looking at the faces of his niece and nephew as he takes the picture, the way they’re holding their smiles frozen, crouched compliant beside his mother, waiting for it to be over. Where do we learn those smiles from, Anthony is thinking as he preserves it all, megabyte by megabyte.

  ‘Now, Tom,’ he says to his nephew as they’re clearing away after lunch. ‘I really hope you enjoy your presents and everything, but I just need to have a quiet word with you, man to man.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tom says. He’s trying hard to behave himself today, dressed up in new shirt and jeans. Brand-new, like he got them that morning, and it makes Anthony’s heart contract in small, constricting aches to think the kids have got good clothes this year for their Christmas presents.

  ‘I’ve bought you a present I reckon you’ll love, and I think you’ll really want to play with it, but the thing is, Grandma’s also got you a present she’d like you to play with, and I think it would be nice if just for today you played with hers. Okay?’

  ‘Why?’

  Why indeed? Why is he pandering to the domineering old harridan? She’s just spent Christmas lunch behaving as if it’s a cardinal sin not to serve roast parsnips. Asking for a cup of tea, of all things, instead of dessert, sending Marie
back out to the kitchen to make it specially. Why is he trying to embroil Tom in this too?

  ‘Well, she’s tried hard to get you something she thinks you’ll like, you see. The thing I’ve got you’ – he gives Tom a big indulgent-uncle grin – ‘let’s say you need a TV for it, but we can play it anytime, my place or your place.’

  ‘I don’t think we have the right attachment thing for it,’ says his nephew, his face beginning to fall. ‘Our TV’s too old. If it’s a Wii, I mean.’

  ‘Right,’ says Anthony, owner of three plasma wide-screens, possessor of a seven-figure debt, master juggler of every line of credit. He’s smiling hard again now, his face feeling numbed with it. ‘Right, well. I’ll have a talk to your mum about maybe … um …’

  How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it’s been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they’d like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what’s expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

  Later, when they’re assembled in the lounge opening the presents, he winks lightning fast at Tom as he eases the sticky tape away from the walkie-talkie box.

  ‘Thanks, Grandma!’ the boy says, getting up to give her a dutiful kiss, and Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can’t, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they’re babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?