The Best Australian Stories 2013 Page 5

  ‘Not really, Dad. It’s a long time ago,’ he says.

  The wood is hard and smooth against the skin of my hand.

  *

  Before he left, Ethan ordered maps of the Mesopotamian Marshlands and Euphrates Valley, and added the various species he might sight there to his list. Marbled Teal (Marmaronetta angustirostris). Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus griseldis). Iraq Babbler (Turdoides altirostris).

  Whether it was for our benefit or to distract his own thinking from his purpose, we couldn’t say, but all correspondence we had from him in the months leading to his departure, and afterwards, focused on his birds. He had marked places on his maps that, at the time, meant nothing to us: Basrah, Nasiriyah, Amarah, though they would later take on a significance beyond the boundaries of our imagining. He wrote to us about teams conducting winter surveys of the central and western deserts out of Tikrit to Haditha and Al-Qaim, though it seemed hardly possible such things were happening.

  They had spotted an endangered Sociable Lapwing (Vanellus gregarius) and we learned that he was joining the survey to track the migratory patterns of the Lapwing and the Black-eared Kite (Milvus lineatus). We knew nothing of what else he did there.

  *

  My mother died quietly while he was away. We left the house largely untouched, more unprepared than unwilling to embark on the task of disposing of its contents. We drew the blinds and pulled the doors behind us.

  When Ethan returned to us, he moved back into his old room and spent more time there than we felt was good for him. He rarely socialised. He showed no interest in the territorial squabblings of the Wattlebirds and Honeyeaters in the backyard or the ranks of Grey Teal riding the thermal stream in formation high above us. He ate in his room and only occasionally ventured out to engage in strained, awkward conversation with us. The truth of the matter is, we didn’t know what to say. He had retreated to a place that was not on any of our maps.

  I tried to interest him in his books. Unreasonably, perhaps, I thought the certainties of narrative might bring an order to his days that would bring him back to us. The pattern of words. The familiar turns of plot; the forward momentum of it all. But there seemed no way in for him. His Latin grammars lay unopened by his bed. Poetry offered no comfort either.

  ‘Words aren’t things,’ he said. ‘Things change. It’s a lie to think they can mean the same when everything else has changed. Everything.’

  I could have argued that was the very point; that everything is a constant negotiation. But that required a leap of faith he was no longer prepared to make.

  *

  My father’s house is a good twenty kilometres away from us across two flat and sprawling suburbs. But geography is not really my concern and a flat landscape is a blank page. So instead, there is a gully that runs between the two, and from the back porch of our family home, you can see directly across to the closed-up house I used to live in.

  It’s a neat arrangement that serves my current needs. If there’s something symbolic about shifting Ethan to the opposite side, it’s not my only purpose. He needs somewhere to go. The house is empty and available, and the longer he stays with us, the more reliant he will become on us for meals and what passes for conversation. He needs his own space now. His own friends. If nothing else, he needs a reason to leave the house, even if it’s only to visit us across the gully.

  There was nothing of my father’s left apart from a box of tools and radio parts that had been consigned long ago to the space once occupied by his birds. For me, it was the empty space, inadequately enclosed as it was by rusted mesh, that carried memory. Nothing about it spoke to Ethan. The rooms he had only ever known as my mother’s were cluttered with china and cushions. The bathroom cabinet was filled with make-up she hadn’t worn for years. The moment I opened it, she was there again, a fragrant presence in the room as though the younger woman she had once been had just stepped out.

  ‘Chuck it, Dad,’ he said. ‘It’s not like she even used it.’

  I wonder if it’s sentimentality or nostalgia that holds me to remnants of a past that has long since vanished. But then, there’s a whole territory he has no access to. I remember the two of them here, together, happy. And with nothing now to contradict it, that’s how it was. We construct our own pasts from the fragments that endure. The scent of Cusson’s Talc. The radio whispering in the night. The flutter of startled birds behind the hessian blinds. These are my coordinates.

  *

  He lays his small collection of belongings on the Ikea bed we’ve assembled: a toilet bag, a laundry basket full of clothes. We’ve stocked the cupboards and fridge. The hallway smells of fresh paint. When we leave, he’s standing by the window looking out across the gully.

  Back home, the house seems emptier than when he first left us. I stand at the back porch and can see the dim glow of his lit windows through the trees. I had always assumed an affinity between us based on something other than shared experience, but there’s a gulf between us now that seems untraversable. It stretches from the day he left to the day he returned a stranger.

  Despite everything he’s discarded (in what I take to be a deliberate act of self-effacement), he has left behind his life-list on the shelf beside his bed. If it’s a parting gesture, I struggle to decipher it. The first entry was when he was twelve years old: Spotted pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus). The last was a month before he returned to us.

  He wrote as he walked: the hunched shoulders of his consonants leaning into a wind. They had headed north-west from Tikrit with an armoured vehicle and three patrols as support. The morning had been cold and clear with the sun rising from a low horizon. There had been pigeons and sparrows and an egret standing stock-still by the side of the road. His list stood at 512. There were six additions in the week before his final entry.

  His observational notes had become increasingly erratic since his deployment, recording the quality of the light and wind direction in a small, cramped script that seemed crouched against the invisible weight of something opposed to bird flight. He had included lines of poetry and Latin phrases as though to test his memory or hold to something that had anchored him in the past. The Lapwing and Kite were not yet crossed as sighted, but he’d recorded a set of coordinates on the opposite page and, below them, his last entry.

  It was a quote from Pliny’s Natural History. His handwriting grew smaller and tighter with each word until the last line was barely legible.

  And when I came thither I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number, and there were heaps of spines, some heaps large and others less large and others smaller still than these, and these heaps were many in number. The region in which the spines are scattered upon the ground is of the nature of an entrance from a narrow mountain pass to a great plain.

  And after that, blank page after blank page.

  *

  The day my mother released my father’s birds, I stood beside his empty aviary and wondered what had driven her to do it. Now, I can appreciate the fine line between liberation and destruction but at the time, I took it as an act of kindness. She was my mother. One bird, a grey zebra finch, kept returning to the cage. It clung to the outside of the mesh, peering in at the empty space that had been the only world it had known.

  There are waypoints that ground us, even as every shifting reference forces a renegotiation of what we thought we knew. I’ve put the box of radio parts in Ethan’s room beside his list. I have his maps. I have the wooden bird-call. The gully is uncharted territory between us, a gap between the fixed points of shared experience and the vicissitudes of memory.

  If the gully is my own invention, it answers to things beyond my control. Some days it opens to a chasm; others, it narrows near to closing. There can be pathways through it, narrow tracks through thickets of tangled undergrowth that push toward the other side b
efore looping back or stopping short in open clearings. Now, with dusk approaching, there is no clear way out. Each step takes me deeper in. Above me, in the fading light, the tops of the trees are alive with birds.

  Surely, Ethan must see them too. From the opposite side of the gully, he could identify each one, assign its Latin name, fix it to a point that we could both recognise as belonging to a time when we weren’t strangers.

  My breathing is slow and measured. When I put the wooden bird-call to my mouth, it emits a sound that surprises me with its clarity.

  Ch-r-up. Ch-r-up.

  The bone throat channels my breath to the open sky. When I tilt my head, there’s a change of register. The sound is clean and pure, the frequency beyond anything that has come from me before. I sing each breath and listen, waiting for a reply. Ch-r-up. Ch-r-up. Ch-r-up. Ch-r-up. It’s like a radio signal, sounding the bandwidth for a fix. And for a while at least, I delude myself that all it takes is this thing from his past to be able to speak their language.

  The Traveller

  Ryan O’Neill

  Lockhart was lost. He crossed a border of shade to stand in the sunlight, looking around for a sign. At every step the coins in his pocket jangled. He was in the habit of carrying loose change about him to throw to beggars. An airplane flew far up in the sky, travelling away from the sun, which hadn’t appeared to change its position all day, as if it too had lost its way. Seeing no sign, Lockhart continued down the street, thinking once again how well stocked the shops appeared, how solid the houses. He turned a corner and found himself in a part of town he remembered from his childhood, massive steelworks and a railway line running behind an endless row of neglected houses. He stopped and closed his eyes. There was a smell of sewage from a broken pipe, acrid smoke and the thrum and clank of machinery. It might have been Mogadishu. Since he had returned to Australia, everything he saw reminded him of something.

  The bell rang as he walked up to the school gates. Children dashed from the building, smart in their uniforms. There seemed to be a car waiting for each of them. He caught sight of his nephew, a small, red-haired boy, and automatically held out his hand. Paul shook it, awkwardly, and Lockhart said, ‘Mr Livingstone, I presume.’ Though Paul’s surname was Livingstone it was not a very good joke, and Lockhart had already used it three or four times before. Lockhart found it difficult to speak to his nephew. Paul had the look of someone travelling through life without the correct papers.

  ‘Chile,’ Lockhart said abruptly, after they had walked side by side for a few moments.

  ‘Santiago,’ the boy said.

  Paul had won a prize from his school for memorising the capital cities of a hundred and fifty countries. Lockhart was proud of him. He himself had left school at fourteen.

  ‘You’re very clever, isn’t it?’ Lockhart said. ‘I mean, aren’t you?’

  After all his years there, Africa had colonised Lockhart’s English.

  ‘Shall we foot it?’ he said, and Paul nodded.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked. The boy’s blue eyes always seemed to be moving, looking this way or that, but always settling back to his uncle.

  ‘At the doctor’s,’ Lockhart said. ‘Just a check-up. She’ll be home soon. I said I’d pick you up. Canada.’

  ‘That’s easy. Ottawa,’ the boy said.

  ‘Excellent,’ Lockhart said. He tugged at his nephew’s schoolbag and the boy turned to face him.

  ‘Did you pick up the sponsorship forms?’ Lockhart asked.

  Paul nodded and unslung his bag from his shoulder. He took out a sheaf of forms and a sealed envelope. Lockhart glanced at the forms, then opened the envelope and counted the money inside. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘This means three months of square meals at the orphanage. Well done, son.’ The boy grinned at him and Lockhart, looking up, realised he had lost his way again.

  ‘Where’s your house?’ he asked.

  Paul pointed to a nearby street. ‘It’s your house too,’ he said, but Lockhart was silent.

  They soon came to the place, a small white weatherboard cottage with a well-kept garden. Paul unlocked the door and they went inside, Lockhart taking his watch from his pocket and putting it on. It was an old habit, from living in Nairobi. If you wore a watch in the street there, it would be ripped from your wrist. His nephew, he noticed as he fixed the strap, had also put his watch in his pocket for the walk home from school. Lockhart made his way through the clean, bare hallway; the only decoration was the small crucifix nailed to the yellow wallpaper. Lockhart wanted a shower, partly for the pleasure of it, and partly to avoid his nephew who he knew would hover around him, as insistent as any beggar. In the bathroom, he took off his clothes and regarded himself naked in the mirror. He had been careless of the sun since coming to Australia. While his chest was white, his arms were an angry maroon, his calves brown and his thick thighs pink. He reminded himself of a map of colonial Africa. Standing there, he practised his smile.

  Lockhart stood in the shower for ten minutes, until all the hot water was gone. As he dried himself he could hear music from Paul’s bedroom, the throb of an insistent bass like the war drums in old Tarzan films. He changed into a pair of dark blue trousers and a blue shirt that his sister had given him. The clothes were brand new. There were no names written on the label, no burns or small, repaired tears. It was a pleasure to wear clothes that hadn’t belonged to someone else.

  He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Neatly spaced along the walls were several photographs of African children in wooden frames. On the bottom left of each frame, in Lockhart’s handwriting, was the child’s name: Faith, Prosper, Charity, Innocent. When he heard his sister at the front door he sat down at the kitchen bench.

  ‘Hello!’ Narelle called out as she came into the kitchen, carrying a heavy leather bag. She was ten years younger than Lockhart, but she seemed older. Her hair was grey, the skin on her thin face mottled with veins. She worked in a hospital canteen, and wore a neat, white uniform that smelled of disinfectant.

  ‘How was your walk today?’ she asked him.

  ‘It was lovely, thanks.’

  ‘Are you making tea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could I have a cup?’

  ‘Of course.’

  It struck Lockhart how much their conversations resembled the dialogues in a phrasebook. She put her bag down on the kitchen counter and a thick manila envelope fell out. As she leaned over to pick it up, Lockhart caught sight of her scar, where they had cut off her breast the year before. It was long and still red, with raised dots on either side of it from the stitches, like a disputed border on a map. Lockhart looked away.

  ‘Here’s the money from the fundraiser at the hospital,’ she said, handing him the envelope. ‘You had better put it in the bank tomorrow. I don’t like having that much cash in the house.’

  ‘I will,’ he said, as he opened the cupboard to find a cup for her.

  ‘I haven’t had a letter from the orphans for a while,’ she said. ‘Are you sure they’re okay?’

  ‘It’s just the postal service,’ Lockhart said. ‘Once, in Swaziland, I posted a letter to a village two miles away and it took a year to arrive. Don’t worry. When I left, Faith was just starting school, thanks to the money your Rotary group sent, and Prosper was being apprenticed to a carpenter.’

  He poured out her tea, spooned several sugars into his own. He couldn’t remember if she took sugar, but he didn’t want to ask. He stood for a moment, blowing on his mug.

  ‘Are you all right for money?’ she asked suddenly, reaching for her purse. ‘It must be so expensive here, compared with what you’re used to.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Lockhart said. Then, ‘For the moment.’

  ‘Where’s Paul?’ Narelle asked. ‘Here, let me do that.’ She took his mug and washed it in the sink.

/>   ‘He’s in his room,’ Lockhart said. ‘We had a nice chat today.’

  ‘He’s very fond of you,’ Narelle said.

  She put one of her hands on the kitchen table, and a moment later the other on top of it, as if she was comforting herself.

  ‘He’s a good boy,’ Lockhart said. ‘Very smart. I’d have gone far with his brains.’

  ‘You did go far,’ Narelle said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he replied. ‘A few thousand miles, anyway.’

  They drank their tea, neither of them speaking for a moment. ‘Because, you see,’ she said, ‘the doctor found a lump, in my breast. The right one. Obviously.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lockhart said, putting down his cup. He had little desire to become person A in the dialogue, but he knew what questions were expected. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘I’ve to go to the hospital tomorrow, for tests. They think the cancer may have returned. And …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re worried it’s travelled to other places. In my body. They’re going to take some tissue.’

  ‘A biopsy,’ Lockhart said. His hand had jerked up nervously, like a student desperate to answer a question.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A biopsy. I don’t like that word. Greg went in for a biopsy, and never came out again.’

  Greg was Narelle’s husband. He had died when Lockhart was in the Congo, several years before.

  ‘Paul will be upset,’ Narelle said, sipping her tea.

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  ‘His father didn’t tell him, and I don’t think Paul ever forgave him. We have to.’

  Lockhart nervously noted the use of first person plural.

  ‘Could you?’ Narelle asked. ‘It will be better from you. He admires you so much. If you say everything will be all right, he’ll believe you.’

  ‘When?’