The Best Australian Stories 2013 Read online

  ‘She’s a cold little thing, isn’t she?’ she said to my father, dabbing her mouth with her lace-edged handkerchief, pressing it into the creases. Lilla, gazing at my embarrassed father, braced herself and threw her arms around the stout mass of our grandmother, who bent over her, moist-eyed and fond. ‘Bless,’ she said. My father beamed.

  But I saw Lilla’s face. Her quiet triumph. I got her behind a door later, and told her that if she tattled I’d hit her harder another time.

  Before I finished school, Lilla was chafing at the cocoon of adoration she’d grown to fill. When there’s something that close about you, you have to strike hard to escape. By increments she hacked her way out. Her hair changed like the fairy lights on a Christmas tree. Then it was piercings: thirteen holes in one ear, three in the other, a bolt through her nose. Her clothing reconfigured every couple of years: from punk to goth and, not long after I left home – as the drugs took hold and wasted her flesh – short skirts and high heels. Clothes with a sheen to them that, on a street corner at night, would catch the light.

  The night my mother came to my room she asked if I wanted to know what Lilla had done. I didn’t, but I gave her my attention. I couldn’t do more than that.

  ‘She went to Jen’s.’

  Jen was an old family friend, a whippety woman with impeccable ash-blonde hair and noticing eyes. I pictured her opening her screen door to my jittery sister, Lilla flicking her hair from her eyes, picking her cuticles.

  ‘And?’ I said to my mother.

  ‘Lilla asked for taxi money to get home from some party.’

  ‘Of course she did.’

  My mother frowned. ‘She wasn’t at a party.’

  ‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

  ‘Then why did you –’ She shook her head. ‘No, never mind.’ She began to quiver. ‘I can’t say it.’

  I put my hand against her back, flat. She was warm but bony, like a small hot bird. Her shoulders pumped with her sobs. ‘Jen asked if Lilla had a drug problem.’

  ‘Obviously she does,’ I said. (A sharp intake of breath, as if I’d slapped her.) ‘Don’t tell me that’s news to you.’

  ‘You knew?’

  Her face annoyed me. It was as if the opportunity to display distress was some kind of compensation for Lilla’s fall. ‘I’d say everyone knows,’ I said. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t. You must have known for years.’

  She dropped her head and the tears splashed into her hands. ‘Oh, you can be hard,’ she said in a rush of anger.

  ‘Don’t be soft then.’

  I wrote some more of my essay, but kept an eye on her. Finally, her head came up, and she sat on the edge of the bed, leaning towards me. ‘Could you do something? Introduce her to some of your friends, show her the university, give her something to aim for? If she had a hobby …’

  I looked into her grey face, and stretched from my seat to hold her hands. We rarely touched. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it,’ I said. I didn’t agree to any of the rest.

  When she left the room I wiped my hands, straightened my doona, finished the essay, packed a bag, and the next day I was gone, before guilt and duty and her face could change my mind.

  I don’t think much about Robert, these days. He was just one in a line of boyfriends. I’d only known him for a month or so when I left home. I stayed in his Fitzroy house for a week before I found my own place further north. Coburg proved to be handy for freeways out of the city, when I was headed to Buchan or Mount Gambier, Elk River, underground rivers and streams and caves. In the long run, it was my relationship with Kirsty that lasted.

  The morning we met, the day after I left home, she was drinking a cup of tea near the open kitchen door, her feet up on the edge of the table, so carefree it seemed like insolence.

  ‘You Robert’s latest?’ she asked, tilting on the chair’s back legs.

  ‘I suppose I am.’ I didn’t mind that there had been women before me and that there would be more after.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Help yourself,’ and she swept her hand around at the fridge and kettle and sink.

  By the time Robert came down, jeans dangerously low and nothing more, I had my own cup of tea and my feet up on the table. Kirsty was telling me about cave diving. ‘It’s so fucking boring round here,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get some thrills somewhere. We don’t all have Robert to keep us happy.’ She looked at him in a way that suggested she had experienced that thrill.

  That was the beginning of the diving lessons and certificates, and the slow days under water and stone. My first time, I thought I would die of terror. There was dark rock all around, pressing in, a cold membrane containing lightless water. But quite soon I began to feel the advantages. I learnt to be slow and gentle, and in doing so I learnt to stop the eruptions of silt – rock can be crumbly. As my builder father would say: ‘It has no structural integrity at all.’ Bits sometimes break off if they’re knocked; in a tight passage the route can block.

  In some tunnels the stone presses in, and I imagine it convulsing as I worm my way through. There are stories of ceilings collapsing. I can’t even lift my head for thinking about it. But here’s the thing: it compresses my thoughts too so there is no room for anything else – or it used to.

  My mother died with alacrity a year after I moved out, riddled with the cancer she’d been ignoring the signs of for who knew how long, hollowed out by degrees until she more or less disintegrated. She never forgave me, not really, for not loving Lilla as she and my father did. Her looks of reproach and wondering were bad enough. The pretence of forgiveness was unbearable.

  Lilla swayed along to the funeral on the arm of a man in studded leather and cowboy boots. Her hair was yellow, her clothes crow-black, her lipstick red. Her face without its cushion of innocent fat had turned foxy. Who knew about her eyes? They both wore dark glasses throughout.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Meggy,’ she said afterwards, clutching my arm with her ragged little paw.

  ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘You know. Like you see through everyone, like you always did. Be nice.’ And when I raised my eyebrows, she added: ‘Fuck. You always were a tight-arse bitch.’

  ‘Nice to see you too, sweetie,’ I said. ‘Let’s stay in touch, shall we?’

  I went back to my father’s to supervise the wake. He walked around like a lost man in a desert, the guests as disappointing as a mirage.

  I had to dive the next day. The thought of it kept me going that afternoon, pushing things away.

  Underwater, distances have a way of distorting. Ripples in the sand a few feet below become giant sand dunes seen from hundreds of metres above, a desert I am flying over. At such times, life feels distant. Other times there is so much space around that I can’t see its limits. I watch the bubbles rise in front of my face, leaving me behind until they do their slow mercury roll along the cave roof or disappear into the dark. They tell me which way is up.

  My mother left a letter for me, which I didn’t open until a couple of days after my father gave it to me. It would be her final reproach, from beyond the grave. To get it done, I tore it open when I stepped from the shower one morning, my wet hands bleeding the ink. She must have written it a while before she died: the writing was still steady.

  She knew I was a good girl, she said. She knew I’d do the right thing, look after Dad, and Lilla whenever she turned up. Saying she ‘knew’ was her way of saying she wasn’t sure.

  I tried not to think of walking through the Lilliputian farms Lilla used to make in the sandpit: the neat rows of mint sprigs for lettuce, the branchlets of shrubs for trees around the sand house, the daisies poked into the sand at the windows, the farm animals in their pens, the three-legged cow with her twisted horn and kind eyes, and the lambs with their funny long waggling tails.

/>   Once or twice I made a farm too, to show her how easy it was, this thing that she did. But my lettuce rows would not stay straight, my trees fell over, the daisies faced the ground and the lambs just stared at the sand walls as if the thought of escape had never crossed their minds. But who needed a dumb old farm? And why did my mother think it was so great? I stepped on everything while Lilla went to get her. And then I walked away. That was the person I was.

  My mother left me a ring that had somehow escaped Lilla. Lilla was to have all the old family things, the lace and so on, though they should by rights go to the eldest daughter. My mother said she knew I’d understand why she was breaking the tradition. They meant more to Lilla. She’d spent so much time with them as a child. Could I take care of them, she asked, until Lilla was all right? They were in the roof, in case Dad had forgotten.

  The roof was reached by a pull-down ladder in the hallway outside my bedroom. Lying awake at night, as a child, I had imagined it inhabited by savages of violent compulsions, stained teeth and unblinking eyes, who might one day surge from its darkness. I hadn’t been up there for years. There was no rush. Those things could wait.

  After reading that letter I went caving more often – every weekend instead of every few weeks – with Kirsty if she was around. But she was diving less. She had a serious boyfriend who wasn’t a diver, and there was talk of houses and jobs. She asked me why I was diving so much.

  ‘I like the quiet,’ I said. I didn’t tell her about my father’s disintegrating mind and my mother’s grave and my sister, the golden girl junkie. ‘Do you ever find it hard to come up?’

  ‘Not so much. You?’

  ‘After a while, it gets too cold.’ I imagined letting go at the end of the line – seeing what was around one corner, and then another, and then another, until the moment I looked at my air gauge and saw it was too late. Swimming fast would make no difference. All that would be left is to live those moments well, to feel the pleasure of it, not to thrash at the end, to draw the cool water in until what was outside was within.

  Clem joined the dive club around then. He fitted in with Kirsty and me. There was the incident with his valve, but he came back from it. Some people take that sort of thing as a sign not to tempt fate: to stay on the land’s surface, squeezed between the earth and the sky. Others are looking for that moment again. It is the nearness of death that makes them feel alive. I mention this to Clem and he says that sometimes when he’s driving down a country road at night he shuts his eyes and counts the seconds, and dares life to expel him. Eleven seconds is his record. The mind plays tricks, he says. It senses the car veering off the straight when it isn’t. It is the imagination not reality that creates the danger.

  After a dive I come home and shower. On Sunday afternoons I visit my father, who is ageing by the week. I pick him up to take him shopping, and when that seems like too much, collect a list that he makes between my visits and do the shopping for him. Afterwards, while he wavers about in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards trying to remember where things go and trying to disguise that he has forgotten, I clean up. He doesn’t notice, as is my aim.

  My father puts the house on the market. He can’t manage it anymore, not even with my help. Dust is building up on shelves and books and on the floor. Crusty bits of old food on dishes – gluey when wet, a hard glaze when dry – have built up in slow accretions. The house smells. My father does, too, of old sweat and sweet dirt and, a little, of mould (clothes put away damp). His mind is clouding, comprehension and memory becoming fitful, as if the muck spreading across his mind can only settle for a while.

  The house – a rambling weatherboard my father built himself, with wide decks and bay views – sells to a developer. I don’t tell my father that. He doesn’t need to know about a wrecking ball smashing his past.

  He rings one morning a few weeks before settlement, desperate clarity upon him, demanding that I come around and take the things my mother left me, and the things I am to look after for Lilla. By the time I get there he swings the door wide and stares as if I am one of the persistent salespeople or evangelists he used to delight in intimidating. He was a man who could fill the doorway, adjusting his pants with a practised hitch, head back, eyes narrowed. ‘Ah now,’ he would say, ‘we will not be requiring anything for body or soul today, thank you’ – and watch them back away. Now it takes a moment or two for him to recognise me.

  ‘It’s me,’ I say, as he peers into my face. He moves his feet. ‘Meg,’ I add.

  ‘Hello –’ he pauses, blinks and stares a beat, as if will alone could command memory, ‘dear,’ he adds, and lets me in. It’s my voice. I sound like my mother, even to my own ears.

  We stand in the hallway, which is dark since all the doors leading from it are shut and the lights are off. The air is stale.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ he asks.

  ‘Thanks. Shall I start getting things down?’

  His eyes flutter with the alarm of incomprehension.

  ‘Lilla’s things. And the ring. From Mum.’

  His face comes alive. ‘Yes. The roof.’ And he turns – the relief of purpose. Well, it’s a relief for me, too. I follow him down the hall. He gets the long, hooked pole and supervises its lowering. The ladder descends in squealing articulated folds. ‘That’s it, careful now,’ he says, patting at it with a shaking hand. He holds the ladder, steadying himself rather than it, as I climb into the dark above.

  No torch needed these days. There’s a light switch at the top. Once, the torch light had thickened like cloud at loose overlaps, picking out glints in the shadows that might be jewels or crystals or eyes. The mystery is gone now. I can see the route ahead like a map. It’s a squeeze – past plastic tubs of artwork and school reports and bags of clothes (Lilla 5 yrs, Meg 8 yrs etc.) and dust and empty boxes of Ratsak. My clothes catch on the corners of things. Dust lifts from surfaces and makes me sneeze. The ceiling lowers at the back, where the important stuff is: the old china, the silver, the lacework, and tea towel and hankie collections. These boxes are like the family tombstones. Someone has to take care of them. I can hardly turn and I have to get all this stuff out. But it’s not like there’s a choice. It’s this or destruction.

  When I leave I put them in the boot. The Salvation Army will come in a few weeks to take what’s left in the house; the wreckers will take care of its shell.

  Three weeks later I take my father to his new home where he’ll be looked after well. It’s a low cream structure erupting from larval flows of pink carpet roses. I help unpack his boxes, put the photo of my mother on his bedside table. She is wearing her camera smile and her pearls. Lilla sold them years ago for a couple of hits.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ he says.

  We walk him down a long corridor to a vacant table in the dining room where he sits. I tuck the napkin into his collar. He looks small and distant from where I am, looking down.

  ‘Lilla?’ he asks.

  ‘She’s not here,’ I say, and shove the napkin until my fingers are down inside his collar.

  His face falls.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes.’ He brightens. ‘Tomorrow.’

  I bend and kiss his cheek, rough and smooth. He forgets to finish shaving sometimes. ‘Bye, Daddy,’ I say.

  At home I take all the things from my car, the bags of embroidery and yellowing lacework. I go through them. I never paid them much attention as a child; it was Lilla’s thing. I can see her sitting and sorting in the sun, even now. Finding her ten favourite handkerchiefs, dividing into lace, children’s, rhymes and checks. The one she liked best had a girl with blonde ringlets playing with her toys in a garden of flowers. At least that’s the way I remember it.

  I don’t look at the handkerchiefs, just pour them out of the big old box into the washing machine. Mothballs ping against the drum. They rattle and grind like river
pebbles in a flood until they dissolve. And after that into the dryer, scooping out great hot clutched handfuls at the end, like flowers after a heatwave. I spend the afternoon ironing them, a task that has its satisfactions. They mound up in piles. I begin to sort them. There are four hundred and eighty-seven of them. There seem to have been quite a lot of blood noses over the years; fifty-three of them are stained. Lilla’s favourite turns up somewhere into the three hundreds. I stretch each side straight, looking for the first line, and then turn the hankie at each corner to read. It starts, ‘There was a little girl who had a little curl.’

  I put that one aside.

  I have dinner – two-minute noodles and a cup of tea – at the kitchen sink, then open a bottle of wine and drink while I iron, first the lace, then the tea towels. For a while I have the television on, but it’s a distraction.

  I’ve been on my feet since early afternoon, and I’m tired. But I resist sitting, shifting from one foot to another like one of the monks in a religious order I read about once. They take a vow to stand until death, donning a harness when sleeping. They are in pain, which they believe is spiritual and leads to enlightenment. Their legs swell, so perhaps it’s just as well their robes are long. It is almost midnight when I finish. There is a hot, singed smell in the living room. The wine is finished. I step outside.

  It is clear and cold. I can see the stars between swaying branches and hanks of leaves. Gumnuts rattle down in a gust of breeze. I lay a few twigs on some bits of paper on the gravel path and set a match to them. Then I add a couple of bigger bits of wood. It makes a crackling sound. I go back inside, easing the screen door so that it doesn’t slam, and pick up all the cloths and hankies and lace and take them all outside, feeding them into the fire, poking and stirring to keep it going. They burn well.