The Best Australian Stories 2013 Page 22

  This sense of shared isolation bound them together to some extent, but within that isolation they were ever more distant. Although they still lived together each retreated into their work, her into her commissions, Adam into his research.

  And as they did Adam found himself searching for new reasons to resist. Together with his colleagues he understood the scale of what was happening, the urgency of the challenges, yet the rest of the world seemed unprepared to listen. For many years he believed they would find solutions, react, pull back in time, but as time passed he found himself growing more pessimistic, more alarmed about what was to come. Each new week brought new evidence, new predictions of doom. In the Arctic, methane was bursting free in great plumes and burps. The oceans were growing more acidic by the week, and their currents were beginning to shift. Yet nobody listened, nobody took action. With every passing day, with every passing hour, the pressure on the planet grew, the consumption of resources increasing, the population increasing.

  One day in his office he did the sums, multiplying population and projected population by emissions and consumption, and saw, perhaps for the first time, the conundrum mapped out in black and white. The problem wasn’t just that they needed to consume less, to bring their impact on the biosphere under control, it was that there were just too many people, that even allowing for technological change and economic restructuring they were on a collision course with disaster.

  That night at home they argued, not about his findings, nor the cycles, but about money, and family, about her resentment of his mother, his irritation with her refusal to try to get along with her. But, even as they rehearsed their irritation with each other, he could not get the equations he had scribbled down out of his head, could not let go of the fact that bringing one more mouth into the world was just part of a larger problem he could not hold in his head or solve. One of his colleagues sometimes talked about the deep structures of intelligence, of the way our brains are shaped by evolution. ‘We don’t change because we don’t believe in the problem,’ he would say, ‘at least not at the deep, intuitive level we need to. We can see it when it’s in front of us, see what it means, know we must change. But as soon as we’re away from it our old thinking reasserts itself, our desire to reproduce, to build power.’

  In the United States and India floods covered millions of square kilometres, in Africa and Europe the heat grew ever more intense, in Indonesia and Brazil and Malaysia the forests were burning, yet they were talking about having a child. But what sort of world would that child inherit? Were they really doing the right thing by bringing one into it?

  Things were different after that night, as if Ellie sensed Adam’s withdrawal and responded against it. And so when he was offered the chance to be a part of an expedition to the Antarctic, he had taken it almost immediately.

  His role here is limited: as a member of the team he is to take samples and work with the others. But that has not made it any less extraordinary. Travelling south, he watched the temperate seas give way to the heaving vastness of the Southern Ocean, the water darker, denser, heavier, before the water changed again, the great swells of the Southern Ocean giving way to the Antarctic, the drifting fields of sculpted ice.

  They are scientists, of course, and so much of what they see is couched in the language of professional interest, the slightly gung-ho language of people who see the world as a system to be understood and analysed. But now they are here, there is something else as well: a sense they are in a place of the infinite, a place that exists without reference to the human, or indeed to any notion beyond the passage of the seasons, the ceaseless motion of the ice.

  On his first day he walked out along the headland, saw orcas playing amongst the ice in the bay, their black-and-white, snub-nosed bodies bobbing up and down like the horses on a fairground ride. Standing there, the only sound that of the skuas and the wind, he had felt himself altered somehow, as if all the anger and unhappiness were washed away.

  The others feel some of this, too; he knows it. Sometimes he sees it in the way they grin and laugh, as if they are suddenly alive in a way they never have been before. But he also knows they all feel the urgency of what they do as well, that beneath their banter lies an awareness that what is around them is passing away, and they are at the end of something. This year the ice retreated further than ever before, the glaciers moved faster, meltwater hollowing them out and sending them towards the sea.

  Just as in the north the ice is melting, faster than any of them had predicted, the continent moving around them. Only a few weeks before, he travelled out onto the shelf west of the Station to take samples, the helicopter rising over the whiteness before settling down and allowing them to step forth. As they unloaded the gear the pilot turned the engine off, clambering down to help them with the cases. And as the engine faded it was replaced by another sound: a deep, almost geological creaking and groaning that rose and fell and echoed to the horizon.

  Turning back to the helicopter, Adam saw that the others had heard it, too, that he was not imagining it. And as he did he understood what it was, that the sound he was hearing was the ice shifting beneath them, as it slipped and fell towards the sea.

  That night he hardly slept, the implications of what he had heard chasing through his mind. He found himself thinking of Ellie, of their life together.

  The next morning he rose early, hoping to catch her before work, excited by his returned desire for her, his sense that they were not wrong to be doing this thing. But she was on the way to the clinic for her hormone shots already, unable to really talk.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she said, ‘when I get the result.’

  And so, a week later, he is here, on the day when the long day finally reaches its middle, when the progress of the sun across the sky begins its downward turn. Winter is coming, but after it summer will come again, and again, each one warmer than the last, each one bringing with it the promise of change, of loss. Yet here, in this moment, it feels as if they are poised on the brink of some new possibility, upon the turning of the year. They will have the child, or not, he thinks, and the world will go on, and they will go on, and he will love her and they will see where tomorrow takes them. For what else is there to do, except hang on, and hope?

  Overhead the sun shines, white and weakly warm against him, to the south the ice is moving, to the north the sea spreads back out into the future. And in his hand the phone begins to ring.

  The Big Issue

  Lungfish

  Madeleine Griffeth

  Although the electric kettle had stopped working before Miloš and his father moved in to the flat, it was still there, plugged in at the wall by the stove. To boil water for the coffee, Miloš had to fill a large, dented teapot of his aunt’s at the sink. He carried it carefully to the stove, his skinny elbows sticking out on either side, and set it down on the hob. He lit one of the gas rings with a match, listening for the low whoosh of the hob lighting. Then, with the pleasant tang of gas in his nostrils, Miloš pushed through the bead curtain separating the kitchenette from the living room.

  Beyond yellowing net curtains, the window gazed onto an eight-lane highway that pushed deep into the outer suburbs. The traffic was quiet; it was Sunday afternoon. The two old men were watching the SBS news, sunk in the brown velveteen armchairs. As Miloš edged past the sofa towards his bedroom door he heard one of them – his father – say, ‘Seen and not heard; a little domaćica.’

  It was said without malice, but Miloš quietly closed his bedroom door and pressed the palms of his hands flat against it as though an additional force were required to keep it shut. Domaćica. Housewife. Miloš was only thirteen, and it is never easy being thirteen.

  Through the door Miloš could hear the muffled cadences of newsreader speech. His aunt Dora, who owned the flat, didn’t really watch television, except for the Serbian news. But Miloš’s father, Sima, seemed incapabl
e of receiving visitors without the noise in the background. Miloš barely noticed the television noise anymore. Instead, his ears were carefully tuned to the regular hiss of the oxygen cylinder, which reassured him every two-and-a-half seconds that his father was taking another breath.

  Sima was sitting on the most evenly sprung armchair, his saffron-dipped fingertips preoccupied with a worn and empty clay pipe. Miloš had never met the other man. He was one of the men who had grown up with Sima in Yugoslavia. They’d been appearing at the door of the flat for a few months now – men who were beginning to stoop and shuffle, whose hair was beginning to silver, who spoke only Serbian – coming to spend some time with Sima before he died.

  Before Sima became too sick to work, they’d lived in Brisbane. They’d shifted into Dora’s flat in Melbourne a couple of months ago. Melbourne: where the sky was flat and the colour of aluminium sheeting. Dora was Sima’s older sister. Her ground floor flat was dim, and dense with smells: of aniseed, pickling brine, hard old toffees, and liniment. Miloš slept on a squeaky folding bed in his aunt’s sewing room, where the wardrobe was full of the clothes of a dead uncle he’d never met.

  Eventually the whistle of the kettle carried through the thin walls of the flat, and Miloš had to leave his bedroom again. In the kitchen he pulled a tea towel from the handle of the stove and, placing it under his hands, lifted the kettle. The sharp steam loosened the collar of the school shirt that Aunty Dora made him wear to the Orthodox church on Sundays.

  His aunt and sister Danijela were talking in the good room at the front of the flat. Every morning Dora would rise at five-thirty and strip the sofa bed where she had been sleeping since Sima and Miloš moved in, folding it up and restoring the linen and blankets to the hall cupboard. She had retired from nursing at sixty, and now, a year later, she was her brother’s primary carer.

  The women appeared in the doorway behind Miloš and seated themselves on the matching coal scuttle boxes on either side of the gas heater. Danijela was twenty-four and the youngest of the four children Sima had had with his first wife, Nataša, who died of cancer in 1990. Miloš hadn’t met the two elder stepsiblings. They had families of their own and lived in Belgrade. The youngest stepbrother, Damir, was a bricklayer living in Townsville. Miloš didn’t know him all that well, but the few times they had met, Damir had at least seemed to like him. Danijela definitely didn’t like Miloš; she was religious, Miloš was a bastard, and as for Miloš’s mother … Sima had once told him that the less Miloš knew about his mother, the better off he’d be.

  The džezva and tiny matching cups of filigreed brass had already been arranged on the coffee table. Miloš stooped to carefully pour the water from the kettle into the džezva, watching the coiled steam rising from the mouth of the European-style coffee pot.

  He didn’t like drinking the kafa. The taste seemed to twist in his mouth, at once bitter and excruciatingly sweet, clinging to the root of his tongue. When they were finished, Dora poured a little water from the kettle into each coffee cup to break up the grains. Miloš could remember a time when he was a child, when Dora had visited them in Queensland. She would turn the cup slowly and read each person’s fortunes in the dregs. She didn’t do that anymore.

  At the train station lorikeets chattered and screamed in the trees. Miloš stood down the very end of the platform each day and watched the boys and girls clustered up near the vending machines, swinging each other around by their backpacks, spitting onto the tracks and flashing illicit cigarettes.

  Because they’d moved down in the middle of term, Miloš needed an extension on the science project that the rest of his class had already started. They were finishing a unit on evolution, and Miloš had been assigned to give an oral presentation on the lungfish. At recess, he looked up ‘lungfish’ on the school computers and found a photograph of an ugly, blotchy, thick-bodied fish with a wide mouth and tiny eyes.

  The first time he saw Babydoll, she was standing on the opposite platform, smoking a cigarette. Miloš scuffed his shoes on the bitumen, sneaking glances at her. She could have been twenty, thirty. He still struggled to place the age of anybody older than he was. She wore a lot of black eyeliner make-up that made her look bug-eyed and watchful. She had two silver rings in one nostril, one in her septum, one in her eyebrow and at least three in each ear. She walked in an agitated circle, puffing smoke out between her teeth. Miloš’s train honked as it rounded the bend, and he hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder and glanced once more at her. To his surprise, she was staring at him, unsmiling.

  ‘Cheer up, kid,’ she called, before the train sprang between them.

  She wasn’t there every day, but Miloš began to watch out for her as he crossed the overpass on his way to the station. During lunchtimes he sat in the library, completing catch-up tasks for his teachers and taking down notes for his science presentation. The process of natural selection has been termed ‘the survival of the fittest,’ constantly occurring in all natural scenarios. Following the survival impulse, stronger species will isolate weaknesses in lesser species, preying on these weaknesses in order to maintain predatory status. Some afternoons she didn’t seem to notice him at all; other times she stared, pulling aggressively on her cigarette, and he would look at his feet.

  It was written on the back of her neck, in large, flowing script. Babydoll. Her clothes were shabby: pilling tracksuit pants, dirty Ugg boots, and an oversize jumper with a large marijuana leaf logo and the word BLAZIN’ printed across the front. One unexpectedly sweltering day at the end of May, when drops of sweat crawled like beetles down Miloš’s spine, he saw her in a faded blue singlet and denim shorts. At a distance, it looked as though she’d been burned in a childhood accident; a pan of boiling oil perched handle-out on the stovetop; a synthetic romper suit, pressed up against the heater for too long. But Miloš, peering from beyond his sweaty fringe, could clearly see the hundreds of scars corrugating the pink skin of her arms and laddering up her legs until they disappeared beyond the hem of her shorts. They covered any skin that was within her reach. The middle of her back, Miloš realised, would be smooth and untouched. The traumatised skin was a palette of the colours of healing: quartz-white or silvered, pale-pink or mauve, the wider scars dotted on either side with delicate suture marks.

  He’d seen, and there was no chance of un-seeing. She’d done this herself, and she’d done it over time, changing her skin.

  Miloš had never been in love before.

  When he got in that afternoon, Miloš found Sima sitting in his armchair in the living room with the curtains drawn. His eyes were closed. He had on clean, pressed slacks and a shirt – he refused to wear pyjamas during the day, even in hospital. The shirt was open at the neck, showing the thick gold chain that sat against the thatch of hair on his thinning chest. The veins in his hands stood out ropey and blue under the spotted skin. Miloš, looking, leaped back as Sima opened his eyes, recovering enough to kiss his father briskly. Sima turned his cheek for the customary following kiss, but Miloš drew away, and they looked at each other for a moment.

  ‘Tri puta, ne?’ Sima’s voice was hoarse from sleep and sickness. ‘Three times.’

  ‘I’ve got to work on my science project,’ Miloš said quickly, moving towards his bedroom door with his eyes down.

  On Free Dress Day Miloš wore his Serbian football shirt to school. At lunchtime, Aleksei Nikolić and his friends crowded in behind him at the drink taps.

  ‘What’re you wearing those colours for? You’ve got slit-eyes!’

  ‘My mum’s from Thailand,’ Miloš said. ‘My dad’s Serbian.’

  ‘What’s his name then?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Sima Moljević. We just moved down from Queensland.’

  ‘I know who that is,’ said one of the other boys. ‘Your dad’s dying, isn’t he? He knows my grandad!’

  Miloš wilted internally. Sima was fifty-eight, and it was
only since he’d started the treatments that he’d really begun to look old.

  ‘Are you sure you should be wearing that shirt?’ Aleksei asked.

  As they walked away, Miloš called out, ‘Whatever! I’m Australian, anyway!’ Aleksei turned and looked at him, holding up the three-finger salute and striking it against his chest. As they moved off in a pack, Miloš felt like he’d gotten away with something.

  Crossing the footbridge on his way to the station that afternoon, he saw them hanging out down the far end of the platform where he usually waited. Unease clutched at the back of his neck. The city-bound train was slowing as it approached platform one behind him. Without hesitation, Miloš turned and jogged down the platform-one ramp. He slipped through the gate and between the nearest pair of doors, dropping into a seat and sliding out of sight as the train moved off.

  Once the station was out of sight he relaxed, sitting up and pulling his backpack slowly from his shoulders. Someone had sat down on his right, and he muttered, ‘Excuse me,’ as he dragged the bag from behind him.

  ‘No problem,’ said Babydoll.

  He stared at her. She pulled a face and said loudly, ‘What?’

  ‘My name’s Miloš,’ he said breathlessly.

  She didn’t respond straight away, but gazed at him sidelong.

  ‘It’s Serbian,’ Miloš explained. ‘It’s short for Miroslav.’ She’d begun staring out the train window again. Miloš frowned. ‘We see each other all the time,’ he said. ‘Once you told me to cheer up. Remember? I had only just moved to Melbourne.’

  She glanced at him again, and he noticed a twitch beating in one of her eyelids. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked. It was a genuine question. He nodded, then said, ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘Mee-losh,’ she said experimentally. Then she frowned. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I get confused sometimes. I live at the Eden Group Home.’ She started to get up. ‘This is my stop. Sorry.’