The Best Australian Stories 2013 Read online

  Anthony squeezes his hands between his knees again and looks over at Marie clasping her gift basket of toiletries. He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she’s done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win. Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without make-up, does that count?

  ‘Batteries,’ he hears himself saying as Tom takes out the two handsets from their foam boxing. ‘I’ve got just the thing over here, wait a sec,’ and he’s tearing a corner off the wrapping on the Wii to dig inside for the pack of AAs he’s tucked in there for the remote control.

  ‘Do you want to have a go with Tom?’ Margaret asks Hannah, who screws up her nose and shakes her head with the exquisite disdain of a twelve-year-old girl.

  ‘Me!’ Anthony says, leaping up. ‘Let’s check out the range on these things!’

  Once he leaves, he knows the conversation could go two ways: his loyal sister, God bless her, keeping the peace and staunchly championing him as being great with kids; or his mother, voice flat with disparagement, claiming that he’ll never grow up, no matter what sort of high-powered job he seems to find for himself. And what would Marie say about him? Which side would she take?

  ‘Outside!’ he calls to Tom as he sprints down the hall. He’s suddenly desperate for fresh air. ‘Switch yours on, see the rocker switch?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m on to it,’ Tom replies, disappearing into the laundry.

  Anthony hears him stop and begin to negotiate the squadron of deadlocks on the door that leads outside. He does the same with the sliding doors onto the patio and jogs down the steps to the house’s north side.

  They’d paid a landscaper to do the garden, and he’d dug up the grass along this whole stretch and laid down a bed of stones. Anthony’s feet crunch on it now, making him stagger slightly. The stones are too big, really, to be called pebbles. It’s like wading across a big, empty, bone-dry riverbed. ‘Absolutely zero care,’ the landscaper had said, and he’d been right. Anthony flicks on his walkie-talkie, holds it to his mouth.

  ‘Securing the zone,’ he deadpans into the mouthpiece, stifling a grin. ‘Agent Two, do you copy?’

  He flicks the switch and hears a snow of static, moves his arm in an arc to clear it. Rays, he thinks vaguely, are holding them together. Currents zapping between the aerials. He flicks the switch back once the static clears and tries again.

  ‘Commando Two,’ he barks. ‘Do you read me?’

  He hears a gurgle on the other end. His nephew, laughing. Anthony sinks to a crouch, raises the walkie-talkie to his ear, and listens. Tom’s voice, when it starts through the chuckling, is so loud and tinny he almost jumps.

  ‘Reading you, Uncle Ant,’ he says, and starts laughing again.

  ‘Commando Two, request information – who is Uncle Ant? Please repeat code name,’ he rasps. He lowers his head in the shade of the pergola, his ear pressed to the handset to hear the smile again in his nephew’s voice. Instead the voice he hears is Marie’s, her tone hard and skating on pain like it was ice, Well, Anthony, tonight’s the night, this is the window, do you want to have a child or don’t you? and his chest tightening as he tried to think of what to answer her. Then her voice again, rising bitterly from her side of the bed, Just say, just tell me, so I’m not wasting my time anymore, and then Tom is giggling again, saying, ‘Commando Two here, sir, reading you loud and clear,’ and Anthony – gazing at the stones at his feet, then up at the glazed pots full of massed blue-grey succulents on the patio with its two canvas chairs arranged just so – finds his voice has deserted him. His throat has closed up.

  Static and space wash over the line, a sound like the inside of a shell. He can see into the kitchen from here: Marie at the granite bench, straightening mince pies on a platter. She’s using tongs to lift them from the cardboard box, like the woman at the ludicrously expensive bakery did, placing them reverently down in a line.

  He watches his wife’s face pinched with grim concentration, remembers her voice at the end of its tether in the darkness. But tethered by what? He hears a sharp catch of breath – his own, coming through the headset. For fuck’s sake, he tells himself, pull yourself together. He watches as Marie takes the sifter and starts dusting the pies with icing sugar and something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in.

  He watches her wrists flex, the air going out of him, certain, all of a sudden, that nothing of him will ever take root inside that thin, tightly wound body, nothing. Tom’s voice comes through the handset again. Clear as a bell now, the clearest thing he’s ever heard.

  ‘Agent One?’ it says, tentative. Like he thinks Anthony’s given up on him already and tired of the game.

  ‘Copy,’ rasps Anthony, flipping the switch. ‘Ambushed here, Commando.’

  Marie turns and turns the sifter’s handle, the muscle twitching in her face, resolutely dousing the pastries that nobody will want to eat with a deluge of white, a blanketing snowfall of sweetness, covering every track.

  ‘Do you require assistance?’ comes the voice at the other end of the line.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Man down here. Man … inoperative.’ Jesus, what’s he saying? ‘Over,’ he adds hastily.

  ‘I can’t really hear you, Uncle Ant,’ says Tom’s voice. There’s another bubbling of static, the distant squeaking of some other low-band frequency interfering with the line. Anthony thinks he hears Tom add, ‘Can we go and play with the Wii now?’

  He means to say yes. He wants just to lose himself in the big benign glowing screen, crack open Cokes for the kids and have that quiet word with Margaret and Ian, have the day mean something. He’s exhausted, suddenly.

  ‘Man down. Mayday,’ he hears himself croaking instead. ‘Mayday.’

  Okay. He’s got about forty seconds before Tom comes and finds him. That’s all he needs to pull this back together, summon the good energy, get up off his knees and blame the static. But he finds, in the luxury of those seconds, that he can’t take his eyes off the cacti in their pots. They don’t seem to have grown an inch since they were planted there at the advice of the landscaper six long months ago. Totally unchanged. Zero care.

  Anthony puts the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something that even neglect and drought put together can’t seem to kill. He reaches out with a fascinated finger to press a curved spike, hard, against the cushion of skin. He just wants to see a dot of hot, red blood well reliably up, as if he needs proof that such things are real.

  Like a House on Fire

  The Knife

  Laurie Steed

  Walker says we don’t need more houses, not when our city is overcrowded with empties. Papered storefronts dotting the outskirts of town. Call us boys, discipline cases with broken brains and second-hand bikes. Keep us after class for speaking our minds. But don’t you dare say we don’t understand. Ask Walker, he’ll tell you straight up. Our city is dying, the people are dying, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

  I ask him if he gets it like I do. If we have a shot at changing things as long as we stick together. Walker goes quiet, hair falling down in front of his face. Says his family’s moving back to Adelaide in November. They need to be closer to his gran, he says. She’s near the end of her innings.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he says, pushing back his fringe. Kickstand folds and he’s flying down Fourth. I push on the pedals to pick up speed. Sometimes I want to push them through my shoes, so they cut into my feet. Sometimes I get a knife and push the point into my arm. Sometimes it leaves a mark but no one ever seems to notice.

  Walker skids, turns, and waits. I swerve to get past him. He pushes his front wheel into mine, and I bounce him off with a twist of my handlebars. We ride down to Ce
ntral, dodging a bus as we reach the corner.

  ‘You’ll be the death of me, Alex,’ says Mum. She edges the blade as she opens the vacuum pack, the ham steaks sliding onto the chopping board. Our counter is pocked with misjudged attempts at efficiency, most from Mum, swearing as the knife bounces out of her hand and clatters to the floor.

  ‘Are you listening? The death of me.’

  ‘Bit harsh,’ I say, scoffing peanuts straight from the bag. ‘I thought I was your pride and joy.’

  ‘Your teacher said you called her a bitch.’

  ‘I called her a witch. When’s Dad coming home?’

  ‘He’s not,’ she says. ‘Can we please not do this? You’re fifteen years old. Nearly an adult. Start acting like it.’

  ‘Maybe he’s running late,’ I say. I pull back the curtains and pretend to look down the driveway.

  ‘He’s not running late,’ says Mum, as she pulls the steaks apart.

  ‘Is he mad? At you?’

  ‘Al –’

  ‘God. Mrs Melodrama. I was just kidding.’

  Mum asks me to peel the spuds. I ask why Emily can’t do it. She says, ‘She’s at piano. You know that, too.’

  In my dream, I live in the country. My girlfriend picks herbs from out back. She takes fistfuls of chives, chops them up on the board, and puts them straight into the pot.

  In my dream, Dad comes over. We watch the football and the Eagles win game after game as he drinks his beer and I drink my Coke. I say, ‘I love you Dad,’ whenever Sumich kicks a goal, but he can’t hear me over the roar of the television.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘When’s Emily getting home?’

  ‘You miss your sister?’

  ‘I’ll have her ice-cream if she’s not coming back.’

  ‘She’ll be back later. Finish the spuds.’

  Mum dribbles oil on the ham steaks, shifts them to the baking tray. When they’re brown as old leather, she’ll pull out the pineapple, drain the slices and put them on top. She’ll dish the yellow mash – half-cheese, half-potato – onto the plates and Emily will come in just as it’s being served.

  Emily’s my sister. Dad loves her. Mum loves her, too, more than me. It’s not that she doesn’t love us, she explains, it’s just that she always wanted a daughter.

  We used to have family dinners around the table, the wood stained caramel and my knees pushed up against the underside. The TV had to be off, and we were absolutely, positively not allowed to go eat dinner on the couch, which wasn’t really a couch, just a single bed with a cover Mum made from some old beige fabric.

  The idea was you got to eat with your family. Mum, Dad and kids … only Dad left for the second and last time when I was ten. That’s justice; Mum and Emily mess up and now somehow I’m the bad guy.

  Emily walks into the dining room.

  I bow. ‘Princess.’

  ‘Good one. Genius stuff,’ she says.

  ‘Kids,’ says Mum, plonking the ham steaks down at the centre of the table.

  ‘She started it,’ I say, throwing a glob of mash, which lands in Emily’s hair.

  ‘God!’ Emily kicks me, takes her plate, and leaves the room. It’s Mum and me, and I smile but she looks angry or sad or something, so we sit there eating in silence, and then I go to my room and put on Faith No More really loud.

  Walker says he sees adults smoking and drinking, and we’re grown up, so why can’t we? I say I can’t smoke because, well, it tastes like smoke, and he says his dad was a real chimney, probably smoking up in heaven as we speak, and we laugh, though it’s not that funny.

  Out back at mine it’s quiet; we talk there most afternoons. Seek shade in the peppermint tree, play out cricket classics on our sloped back lawn. The weeds by the garden shed is six and out; the back fence is four, and though there’s no bonus for hitting the cat, we both try to do that as often as possible.

  We practise footy bumps, bracing for each hit. I get Walker good, and he grabs my finger, squeezes it in on itself and it hurts like hell. I reach back for his neck, pulling him in. He lets go of my finger. I let go of his neck. Then we start laughing. We head over to the tree, me sat centre, Walker with a head full of leaves, in the shade of the branches.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m going back to Adelaide.’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘No, not really. But we can ring, right?’ I lift my hand to my ear. ‘Uh, hello, I’m calling long distance for a Mr Walker. Yes, I’ll hold.’

  Walker knocks down my imaginary phone with his arm. ‘Dickhead.’

  We sit for a while. I pick a flake of bark from off the tree. ‘Why’d you come to Perth? You said your dad, right? A job?’

  Walker pauses. He looks away.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Something happened,’ said Walker.

  ‘Well, obviously.’

  ‘No,’ says Walker. ‘Not like that … I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ says Walker. Then he’s quiet.

  ‘I could come see you. You know, on holidays.’

  ‘Yeah, good one. You don’t get it at all, do you?’

  ‘I get it, fuckwit. I’m just trying to cheer you up.’

  ‘Well don’t, alright?’

  ‘Alright,’ I say and thump his arm twice. ‘We playing cricket or are you going to go cry to your mum?’

  ‘You’re fucking dead,’ says Walker.

  I grab my Gray Nicolls from under the back stairs, Dynadrive with cherries down the meat, and we head out to the lawn. He bowls a ball, really hard, an in-swinging yorker that cracks me on the toe.

  I swear and lift the bat above me. At first he’s smiling but as he sees me come at him, his smile disappears. He starts running. I catch up and hit him hard, once across his shoulder blades, then again across the side of his knee.

  He falls to the ground, kind of slow motion, and he’s down. He starts blubbing, real loud, and holds his leg, rocking back and forth. I drop the bat and stare at his kneecap; the purplish stain that’s already surfacing around a white, raised lump.

  It looks like it really hurts.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. At least I think I say it but it sounds quiet, far away. Walker starts swearing and crying, and the leg, it’s buckled, kind of bent. I try to help him stretch, but it won’t straighten.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  Mum drives me back to the psych’s office that Wednesday. We park down a side street and wander up Fitzgerald. We stop when we get to 215, the brick shithouse.

  ‘You behave, Alex,’ says Mum.

  ‘As opposed to?’

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ she says. ‘This is serious.’

  ‘Bye,’ I say. I turn away. Open the screen door and intentionally let it bang shut once I’m in.

  Mrs Oliver’s a nice lady. Well she’s a lady anyway. Her office smells of musk and stale cigarettes, and she leaves a teddy bear on my chair for each session, which I promptly toss aside.

  It’s ten minutes in before she makes any sense. She asks if Mum’s looking after me and I say yes. She asks me to talk to a chair. I tell her I’m not saying bugger all, ‘cause only loonies talk to chairs.

  Mrs Oliver leans forward. ‘Why are you here, Alex?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you angry?’

  I stare at her. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No.’ I shift in my chair.

  ‘Why are you sad?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Not for another forty-five minutes.’

  ‘You got any video g
ames?’

  ‘No,’ she says, resting her finger on her jawbone. ‘Why did you hit your friend?’

  ‘Walker doesn’t mind. He knows he fucked up.’

  ‘Language, Alex. What did he do?’

  I try to speak but see only Walker’s face; his eyes scrunched up and a string of saliva stretching from the top of his mouth as he cries. I look out the window, but a dusty white shawl hangs over the glass, blocking my vision.

  ‘He didn’t have to bowl the ball so hard.’

  ‘Is that why you hit him?’

  ‘No.’

  In my dream –

  ‘Have you talked to your father lately?’

  ‘His number’s changed, I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘It’s cold in here. Can we turn the heater on?’

  ‘Why do you think the number’s changed?’

  ‘The old one’s disconnected.’

  ‘You miss your dad?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I say, and push my fingernail deep into my thumb.

  If I push the knife in deep it will break the skin, and the wound will pulse. My heart will beat, and blood will gush onto the floor. Dad will have to come back. He’ll take me on a drive. He’ll close his eyes as we take the turns and I’ll yell at him, laughing, to watch where he’s going.

  Emily walks into my room. She sees me with the knife, the point at my wrist. I say, ‘Don’t tell Mum, you’ll make her cry,’ and I know I’m safe because when Dad left he gave Emily a letter, but not Mum, so I won’t tell if she won’t.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘You. You screwed everything.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I’ll never shut up. I want you to think about it every day.’