The Best Australian Stories 2013 Read online

  He turned his head. Melinda? Yes, it seems to be.

  Melinda, of course, she said. Of the relentlessly mellifluous name.

  He froze. Raised his head slowly. Sally was telling him she knew. This was the catastrophe. But she was tranquilly eating her lobster, glancing through the window with an idle gaze.

  Who’s she with?

  He’s a tutor in the history department. A pretty boy.

  A pretty boy. With rather long blond curls and a cleft chin. He felt sick. First with jealousy, then with rage. The jealousy was a sharp knife in the heart, the rage was a thick, bitter reflex of violation. Perhaps the rage washed the jealousy away. After all, he didn’t need to assume they were in a relationship. The boy was just a convenience. The rage felt good, simple, implacable. How bad was this behaviour. Then there was wonder. How had she found out where he was going? He hadn’t told her, not politic to tell your lover where you are taking your wife for dinner.

  Sally said, Are they an item?

  No idea. Every time I see him he’s with a different girl.

  Poor Melinda.

  He had written it in his diary. When he booked, he wrote the time and place. She was sometimes on her own in his study, he could picture her going through the pages, checking up. Inviting that bloke, what was his name, Gary, to come out to dinner with her, so she could present herself to him, to Ralph, inescapable, unattainable, there.

  He grabbed that thought. Unattainable. Yes. And he wanted it like that. Nothing to do with him. Uninteresting. So he could tell himself, and even come to believe it. He shifted his chair slightly so he wasn’t looking in Melinda’s direction, he would escape her, and tried to smile at Sally.

  How’s the lobster?

  It’s good. Very succulent. Every time I eat lobster I think, why don’t I do it more often?

  You should make a resolve: eat more lobster!

  They aren’t that easy to come by. Maybe we should make a resolve to go to places that have fresh lobsters as a matter of course.

  Okay. A non-New Year’s resolution.

  He hadn’t given Sally the ring yet. He’d remembered to bring it, it was in his pocket. He should have done it at the beginning of the meal.

  They ordered lavender crème brûlée for dessert, it was famously Ralph’s favourite, not lavender, necessarily, that was unusual, and not very evident. Sally sometimes made it for him. She’d bought one of those little sugar blowtorches just so she could do the caramel on top.

  Delicious, he said, but not as good as yours.

  She smiled at him, indulgently. Maybe.

  When they’d eaten them, and the last of the red wine was drunk, he said, I am feeling reckless, and ordered two glasses of champagne. They drank a toast, and he gave her the small black velvet box. Her eyes sparkled, and she held it for a moment, scrunching her shoulders in excitement. When she opened it, her eyes popped. Oh, it’s beautiful, she said. He took it from her, slid it on her finger, then brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, slowly, his mouth on her fingers. They tasted smooth and a bit lemony, of the finger bowl she’d washed off the lobster in. Then he held her hand up to look at it. He’d slipped it on top of the narrow band of gold, and the three wavy planes of different coloured golds sat on the long knuckle of her ring finger very prettily. The tiny diamonds sparkled, catching the candlelight. Yes, he said, it’s right.

  Yes, she said, it is. Oh Ralph, it’s so beautiful. Oh, you’re so good. He was still holding her hand, she drew his to her lips and kissed it, her eyes shining on him. One of the things he liked about her was she never said, Oh you shouldn’t have. He hated it when people said that, after you’d gone to the trouble of buying them a present. It was like a slap.

  He glanced at the lake again. The bridges were necklaces of light strung across its dark shape. Remember, he said, that Maupassant story, ‘The Necklace,’ how terrible it is.

  Yes, she said, once you read it you can’t get it out of your head. That poor woman, a life of drudgery for twenty years to pay the lost necklace back, and then she finds out it’s not diamonds at all, but paste. She shuddered.

  He glanced the other way, into the restaurant. Melinda and Gary were standing up to go. He stared at Melinda, and when she looked in his direction he gave her a small wave of his hand and the sketch of a smile, and turned back to Sally.

  To our next twenty years, he said. Definitely no drudgery.

  Meanjin

  J’aime Rose

  Tegan Bennett Daylight

  It was Thursday, and we had a free period before lunch. This gave us time to get to Ben’s new house and watch Days of Our Lives before coming back for maths. The way to sneak out of school was not to sneak. You walked with your back straight, your head high, and you didn’t look to see if you were being watched or followed. You had to believe no one had any reason to stop you.

  Ben was short, with brown hair and a face that had been smooth and pretty when we were ten-year-olds. At sixteen he still had the same lush black eyelashes and brown almond eyes, but now he also had acne, and didn’t wash his hair much.

  Ben had always wanted me, even before we started high school. When we started French in year seven we were asked to write down and then read out loud the things we liked, starting J’aime. I can’t remember my own list, only Ben’s, which ended with J’aime Rose, with our special fake French trill on the R of my name. I wasn’t really embarrassed. Ben was the sort of boy who could do things like that. He seemed quiet and even shy, but in fact he was clever, fierce and defiant, and he cared nothing for what other kids thought. He was the most entertaining friend I had. He was the only boy I knew who laughed when things were funny, rather than when they were meant to be funny, or when everyone else was laughing.

  I had female friends at school, two of them, misfits like myself who read too many books or became spluttery about The Cure. I sat with them at lunchtime, and also with Ben and his friends. We were together as a group if you saw us from a distance, but in fact the girls sat in a circle of their own, on old pieces of sandstone, and the boys sat to one side, on milk crates they’d stolen from the canteen. Our spot was under a fig tree at the edge of the school where the land, briefly, became bush. It was private, neglected. It looked like an old campsite.

  Ben and I didn’t talk at recess or lunch. Neither of us knew how to cross from one side to the other, and Ben scorned my friends anyway, particularly Janice, whom he’d made cry by saying that the lead singer of The Cure was gay. That was a bad day. Through angry tears, Janice said that Robert Smith had been with his girlfriend, Mary, since they were teenagers. Ben, pretending to disbelieve her, said, But there’s nothing wrong with being gay, and Janice couldn’t deny it, because that was the code she lived by. This was what Ben could do, if he chose – lead you somewhere you didn’t want to go, and leave you there.

  I called us misfits before. I wasn’t quite a misfit. I didn’t have the courage for that. Not for me the glories of triple-pierced ears, or a radical devotion to a singer or a style. I couldn’t commit to standing out like Janice did, with her black-ringed eyes and hair teased into a dyed dandelion. With her unconsummated marriage to Robert Smith. In this part of my life I was watching, and waiting. I was waiting to be transformed. I would be nobody until someone chose me.

  I didn’t like being alone with Ben, but this time I hadn’t been able to think of an excuse.

  Ben’s father had died when he was six, and recently his mother had got married again, to an advertising executive. Now Ben had a stepfather and a stepbrother. Two weeks ago he and his mother had moved into their house, which was next to a wharf, and overlooked a stretch of river with boats clustered at its shores – yachts, and cruisers, which are like mansions on the water, only streamlined, a mass of architecture pointed at Sydney’s bays and private beaches, at its harbourside restaurants.

  T
wo weeks ago, too, Ben had given me an ultimatum. It had happened over the phone. Every afternoon after school, when I’d said hello to my mother and got myself something to eat, I used to sit in the study with my feet up on the tooled leather desk and phone Ben. I could tilt the office chair back and use my legs as pivot, as anchor, swinging myself back and forth as I stared at the ceiling. I’d been doing this for years, it seemed: talking over the day that had just passed with Ben, comparing the idiocies of our teachers, gossiping about the people we sat with, the kids in our classes.

  This is what my parents were like when my father came home from work. They didn’t wait for us to go to bed to begin comparing notes about their day; they talked over our heads, impatient to exchange impressions. I’d thought that perhaps Ben was meant to be my boyfriend because we had this too, this intense kinship, this shared bounty of laughter. I didn’t want to wait much longer for a boyfriend, but something had stopped me settling for Ben.

  Suddenly Ben said, ‘I’m sick of this.’

  ‘Sick of what?’ I said.

  ‘Waiting for you to make up your mind.’

  So it had come. I didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. I sat up in the office chair, and brought my feet down to the ground.

  ‘It’s obvious we were meant to be together,’ said Ben. ‘I know you better than anyone does. I know you better than you know yourself.’

  He’d said this before. It made me feel small, and imprisoned.

  ‘Just give it a go,’ he said. ‘See how you like it.’

  I didn’t need him to explain what he meant. He meant for me to let him hold my hand, to submit to his body, let him tell people we were together. He meant for us to sit apart at lunchtime, kissing.

  ‘Just give it a try,’ he said, and I agreed to.

  We were not really going to his house to watch Days of Our Lives. This was Ben’s way of cornering me into sex. Guess how I knew: I looked in the front pocket of his schoolbag. He had two condoms, things I’d seen before but never held in my hand. In their plastic packets they made me think of surgeon’s gloves – as though he was preparing for an operation on me. Two weeks of being boyfriend and girlfriend had passed; two weeks of having my neck nuzzled by him in assembly; two weeks of my damp hand in his on the way home from school; two weeks of gaps and halts in our phone conversation and Janice and Vicky looking pityingly at me when I moved to a milk crate next to Ben’s at lunch.

  If only I had been pretty, I would have had more choices. Ben thought people were fools for not seeing how beautiful I was. I thought only someone very kind could love me, with my round, cheerful face and dark, thick, horsey hair, with my soft stomach and breasts. I dreamed of a pair of scissors that could cut off extra flesh. I would slice away the mound of my stomach. When Ben put his hand there I had to draw breath very suddenly, stiffening, holding it in.

  The house was a stack of concrete rectangles with tinted windows looking onto the water. There was a tall security gate with a keypad. Ben pressed the numbered buttons and the gate slid to one side with a shriek of metal, making us check behind us as if we were intruders.

  I always take a breath when I walk into a house for the first time. This one smelt of cleaning fluid. We dumped our bags in the wide front hall and went through the cool of the air conditioning into the kitchen. There were two boys, one blond, one dark, a little older than we were, standing in front of the open fridge. There was nothing in the fridge but drink: rows and rows of champagne, aimed at us like missiles.

  As we came in the blond boy popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, laughing as it hit the ceiling with its pattern of downlights. Then he put the bottle to his lips and drank and drank, not seeming to mind the bubbles. He passed the bottle to his friend, gasping and grinning at us.

  What I remember best about this moment is a sense of the boys’ sleekness, their look of good health and pleasure in being; a look that Ben, with his acne and his skinny shoulders, lacked utterly. They were like beautiful dogs, or horses, well-fed and adored.

  Ben said, ‘This is Rose.’ He pointed at the blond boy. ‘That’s Alex. Who lives here.’

  ‘I’m Rob,’ said the other boy, and held out the bottle. ‘Alex’s friend. Drink?’

  I remember, also, a long moment of Alex looking curiously at me.

  There was a TV in the kitchen, but Ben would not stay there to watch, or drink from the bottle of champagne. He led me down to his bedroom in the bowels of the house, the air becoming colder as we descended, and less fresh. His bedroom was a concrete box with French doors giving onto a courtyard that was a dark tangle of ivy. The doors looked as though they would not open. He had all the things from his old house: his stereo, his TV, his boxes of tapes and stacks of LPs. But he had a double bed now, that I couldn’t look at, and a poster of Brigitte Bardot on the wall, astride a motor scooter. I stood in the doorway. The smell of his room was already the same as in the last house. Musty more than anything else. Not bad. I could hear Alex and Rob crashing round in the kitchen, shouting with laughter.

  ‘Let’s go back up,’ I said. ‘We could get drunk.’

  ‘With those idiots?’ Ben sat down on the bed and patted the mattress next to him. His sheets were new, black and horribly shiny. He smiled at me, and then pursed his lips, a kiss. I shook my head. The inside of his mouth tasted like sandwiches or baked beans.

  I crossed my arms tight over my chest. ‘I want to get drunk.’

  ‘What about Days?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said and he stared at me, and crossed his own arms.

  ‘Please.’ If I could get him drunk I could get away, and put off the sex. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  Ben gave a long, weary sigh and got to his feet. I was already out the door. He stumped up the stairs behind me. I was running, taking the steps two at a time – I had a feeling, a superstition, that if I reached the kitchen before he got to the top of the stairs I would be free of him. I swung, panting, into the kitchen and Alex and Rob turned to look at me.

  ‘I want a drink,’ I gasped.

  We didn’t go back to school that day. As the afternoon went on I got lighter and lighter. It was my dream, I think, to disappear. The more I drank the less substantial I felt, almost coming apart, like a rag of cloud in a breezy sky. I drank and listened to the boys, and didn’t speak. Once, just once, Alex came to stand next to me. Then he took my hand, and looked down at me, his eyes as startled as mine must have been. Ben didn’t see this. He had given up needling me about getting back to his room and was becoming incoherent, staggering around the kitchen, challenging us to drinking games.

  None of them noticed when I took the bottle of champagne I was drinking from and went out into the hall. There was a set of metal spiral stairs leading up a concrete stairwell. The edges of the steps were irregular and the concrete was bare and grey. It was as though the house was not finished, was a shell, and that the family had moved in before it was ready. I started to climb, holding the bottle by the neck. Four floors up and I had reached the single room at the top, which I knew must be Alex’s. From it you could see the Harbour Bridge, shimmering in the distance. The sun was behind us now. A breeze had sprung up. I could feel it on my hot face through the open window, and hear the tink of stays from the moored boats. I was drunk; it was a summer afternoon; there was an opening out, a flood of possibility.

  I turned back to the room. In one corner there was a cricket bat, on the desk a pile of folded clothes, on the wall a poster with a picture of a red Porsche. There were no books. I finished the bottle of champagne sitting on Alex’s bed, and then went down the metal stairs as quietly as I could. I grabbed my bag from the hall, let myself out, skipped through the shrieking gate, pressed the button to close it and was up the street and round the corner as fast as I could go, my heart beating quickly.

  I walked home, my schoolbag on my back. The leaves on
the trees were bright in the glassy air. There was no one around – there was a lull at that hour, when fathers had arrived home from work and mothers were making dinner. Televisions were on in the front rooms of houses. Perhaps it would be autumn soon, after this long, bright summer. When I got home my mother was cooking in the kitchen with the lights off, the twilight rounding the edges so the room was gentle, soft. She turned and smiled at me as I came in.

  In maths on Friday, Ben passed me a note that said How do you like my new big brother?

  I read the note and then wrote, He could be worse, and passed it back.

  Ben looked, and then covered the note with his hand. I tried to think of something else to write about Alex, but he hadn’t struck me as funny, as most things did when I was with Ben. Our friendship flourished in confinement, like maths class, where our notes to each other made us sick with laughing and sometimes caused the teacher to send us out. Then we would push each other in the corridor, stagger against the clapboard walls, knees bent with mirth. But today we did our maths. We did not even pretend to hide our answers from each other, the way we usually did, in imitation of Mary Ann Wilson, who would be dux eventually and didn’t want anyone else to share it.

  Walking from maths to history, I told Janice about Alex. She preferred punk boys, skinny ones with stick legs in black jeans and winkle pickers, but she understood the appeal of the private school boy. Every girl, even Janice, wanted to be asked to a private school formal, where, we believed, some thoughtful parent would arrange for a party beforehand with actual drink being served, where the boys would not wear pale grey tuxedos with pale blue bowties but proper black ones. Where the boys would be capable, handing us in and out of a taxi, talking to us at the dance instead of getting so slaughtered that they spent most of the night vomiting in the car park. Janice said nothing about Ben.

  On the way home from school I walked with Ben as far as his street, allowed him to kiss me and put his tongue in my mouth, and then took the back streets to my house. I liked the quiet, and not having to think about cars when I crossed the road. I could daydream so intensely that reaching home was a surprise; my body had carried me there without me knowing. I told myself a story as I walked, of Alex coming up from the ferry, inexplicably early from his turreted school, liking the back streets as much as I did, meeting me under the arch of leaves. Neither of us would go home. We would choose one of the streets that led down to the river, one that ended in a tiny reserve, we would sit on the bench next to each other and talk and kiss. We would still be there when it was dark.