by Zane Lovitt
Then it was as if the characters I’d been playing had gotten under my skin: the tetchy old Nonna who commanded respect; the Hippy Chick with so few cares in the world that she probably knitted covers for street posts. I’d spent the past few weeks blending into a community. A door had opened that I’d believed was closed to me forever. Could I step through it? Or should I bolt it shut for good?
I returned my gaze to the mess on the doorstep. My Nonna thought about cleaning it up, burying the body in the park or disposing of it in a wheelie bin. Hippy Chick dreaded the thought of Belinda coming to the door with Charlie on her hip. But I reckoned the baby was too young to get upset at the sight of a dead cat.
Besides, I was only going through with this for Charlie’s sake. Belinda needed to know her house was not secure. She needed to do more to protect little Charlie. The dead cat would be a wake-up call.
A wake-up call.
Would it have saved my baby if I’d called home from work that night? He might not have heard the phone through his drunken stupor. But perhaps the sound would have roused my son before he could suffocate in his sleep.
The transparent tear, that’s for my lost baby. The other tear is for my husband, who put the baby to sleep on his stomach. My mistake was killing the bastard. I did it to punish him, but all it did was release him from the terrible pain I lived with every day. Grief so profound, so permanent, not even tattooed tears can do it justice.
I needed to put distance between me and the cat. I jogged back to my apartment, bagged my bloodied clothes, showered and dressed again to add the bag to the wheelie bin. When I turned to go back inside I spied something in my mailbox. Another letter from the council. I ripped it open and read by the foyer light.
Council wishes to advise that we found no evidence to substantiate the claim that you are in possession of a restricted breed dog. Consequently, the childcare centre has now withdrawn its complaint on this matter and you are no longer under investigation.
I caught my reflection in the plate-glass door as it closed behind me. You see my teardrop tattoos?
Look closer.
Angela Savage
The Good Butler
So mum, do you think this is really Nicole?
Nicole who?
Nicole Kidman.
Hmm, I’m not sure.
Or is it someone made up to look like her?
Or is it her made up to look like someone made up to look like her?
Caroline is the mum and Daisy is the daughter. Caroline has terminal cancer, and she’s got about six months to live. Perhaps a year, they say. She reads a lot of magazines. Daisy is showing her an advertisement where a glamorous woman in a deep red satin dress is stiffly posed on what could be a bed in a motel, staring into the camera half crossly, with a half-smile and half-sneer, as if she is thinking, Get on with it, you idiot. Or does she look a bit scared? It’s hard to tell really. She certainly looks uncomfortable, whoever she is. She has long blondish movie-star hair, groomed and falling over her shoulders. Long arms and hands, knobbly knuckles. Probably a wedding ring. High-high-heeled shoes, coffee-coloured, lie carelessly on the carpet in the foreground. One leg dangling over the edge of the bed, stockings containing her toes in a little silken sack. And the shadow of her foot points to a message.
Look at what is says, Mum. This is hilarious. It’s an ad for Etihad Airlines. You don’t just travel First Class, you travel in a thing called ‘The Residence’.
Listen:
The Residence
Three room retreat. Separate living room. Ensuite shower room. Double bedroom. Personal butler. Flying Reimagined.
Caroline took the magazine from Daisy and read what it said. Her only comment was: ‘No hyphens. I wonder why they don’t do the hyphens? Is it a thing now?’
‘My god, this wouldn’t just cost an arm and a leg, they would have to take your heart and your liver as well. Kidneys too,’ said Daisy.
But Caroline had fallen asleep.
Daisy closed the magazine, added it to the pile of others on the broad table beside the bed, smoothed her mother’s rug, patted the pillows, patted her hands, kissed her lightly and left the room, taking the tray on which the tea had gone cold in the silver teapot, and where the delicate cress sandwiches lay almost untouched on the delicate green plate. A small white vase of pastel poppies, petals crushed, folded, hairy pods open wide. Wide.
Daisy sat in the nearby sunroom, looking out across the tops of two old apple trees that were busy with white blossom, blushing pink. She knew there were bees. Caroline would never see another spring. Daisy had a pot of coffee and a croissant. Her iPhone was charging on the table in front of her. Whenever Caroline needed her she would send her a text. When she was a child with chicken pox she used to have a little brass bell from India beside her bed, and she could summon her mother or her father to her bedside. Her brother, Dan, got jealous and hid the bell in the garden where it turned up years later none the worse for wear.
She opened the newspaper and read:
‘Flight attendant union calls for UN women’s ambassador Nicole Kidman to stop endorsing Etihad Airways over claims its practices are discriminatory towards female staff.’
So it was Nicole in the picture. That cleared that up.
But the main news story was about the Germanwings A320. The picture on the front page showed a crumpled fragment of the plane. The jagged piece of metal bore a clear print of the German flag, bold bright black, red and yellow stripes. The whole thing resembled a battered cigarette packet, lying on a harsh grey slope. Dust.
‘The pilot at the controls of a Germanwings jet that crashed in the French Alps accelerated the plane into the mountainside, killing all 150 people on board, according to French investigators,’ she read.
Caroline was only dozing, drifting in and out of thought and memory and daydream. She had heard what Daisy said about selling your body to pay for The Residence. It would be more apt to sell your house. Then you could reside in the little air-borne house in the clouds. With the butler. The butler? Was that a title and a euphemism? Would he attend to your every need? Did sexual preferences apply? Or perhaps he could procure for you from a wardrobe or refrigerator of gorgeous lovers. All tastes catered for, all things re-imagined. The butler did it. The butler made up to look like someone made up to look like the butler.
Her mind had become strangely fertile in recent weeks. It operated with a startling clarity, but moved into realms before unknown, or untapped. As her body faded, her imagination flourished. She had moved beyond fear into a weirdly manageable world of relentless fantasy. She even realised that this was ‘a stage’ of ‘the process’, and she made a decision to stay in the stage. They told her ‘life is a journey’, but in her private conversation with them, the conversation they never heard, she said ‘death is a journey’. And there were staging posts. She was going to remain forever in the stage of brilliantly-lit imagination. It was strange that Etihad spoke of ‘re-imagining’ even though they couldn’t quite get the hyphen. Caroline had always loved punctuation. The name ‘Etihad’ sounded like some sort of medication. Ten milligrams of Etihad with food.
She opened another magazine. There was the Nicole figure again. The interior of The Residence seemed to resemble a somewhat dreary motel in a grungy suburb of Sydney. Of course, the butler would make a big difference. She turned a few pages and found a story about a house in New York that had been sold for one hundred million American dollars. Was she reading straight? Yes, one hundred million. Good grief! Now if you sold that you could fly round in The Residence for quite a while. Not that she knew how much The Residence would really cost. By a curious coincidence, the New York house was called The Residence also. Like on Sesame Street, it must be the Word of the Day.
Caroline owned her house, the house where she was going to die, leaving the tea cold in the silver teapot – her husband had died
some years before. She imagined selling the house, which was probably worth about one million Australian dollars, and taking off in the flying motel that was The Residence. With Jeeves, a lady’s gentleman. They talked about a ‘bucket list’. She had said she didn’t have one. Maybe she did. Maybe she could sell the house and go for a ride in The Residence. Then she really did fall asleep.
When she woke up, Daisy took her out into the sitting-room where they watched The Antiques Roadshow.
‘Look, that teapot is almost exactly like mine,’ Caroline said.
And indeed it was.
‘Eight hundred pounds!’
Then they watched the News, and the leading story was about the airbus near Seyne-les-Alpes. An image taken from a helicopter – a leaden grey ravine in the base of which lay another fragment of the aircraft, this one resembling a crumpled dark red handbag.
‘Imagine if that had been the Nicole Kidman plane, instead of a cheap German one,’ Caroline said.
‘Well it wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘No, of course not. I just meant that the person in The Residence and their butler, with all their Mouton Rothschild Pauillac 1982, could easily end up as a squish of DNA in the French Alps.’
And that is how the idea took hold. Caroline had always been a bit of the gambler by nature. A punctuator and a gambler. Other things besides of course, but they are probably irrelevant here.
In her bright imagination stage, she would lie in bed devising simple – oh, it was all so simple – plans to sell the house and buy a flight in The Residence on the chance that the pilot would fly into a mountain. The End. Did she spare a thought for the other passengers who would be unlikely to be intent on death by suicide-pilot? Actually, after the first excitement of the plan, she did.
Naturally, she wasn’t silly enough to put any of this to Daisy – Daisy and her brother were supposed to be inheriting the house. How could she be so unkind as to deprive them? She seemed able to brush this thought aside. And gradually the second plan took hold of her. Not a gamble on having a suicide pilot. No. It was this: she would sell the house, pack her bags, take The Residence to somewhere and quickly make her way to Switzerland or Mexico or wherever she could find a good service from Doctor Death. Or perhaps, even better, perhaps the Residential butler was in fact the answer. A good butler, yes, a good butler will do whatever you ask. Oh this was a bucket list and a half. She smiled a lot, and sometimes laughed aloud at the delicious fruits of her imagination. Re-imagining her imagination. ‘Mum passed away in The Residence,’ they would say. It was sad. It was for the best. She would smile and laugh. Sleep. She recalled the old TV advertisements about AIDS – the Grim Reaper comes forward out of a swirl of eerie clouds, he cuts the family down. All fall down. Horrible. But now the Good Butler. The Good Butler. He comes with the goblet of Mouton Rothschild, and there is quiet chamber music soft and quiet and pale velvet cushions and the soft perfume of honey in the sunlight and the coo coo coo of a lonely dove and a goblet of Sèvres crystal sparkle and glitter and here comes the butler and he offers the best cocktail ever ever, in the second goblet, and you lie back on the Residential motel blanket – quiet pointed stockinged feet tiptoe, dark red dress, closed eyes, long blond hair, hair fresh from a blow dry – blow kiss and sip – and kiss and sip – and you sip and you sip – and you drift and I drift – and I sip and I drift – and the poppies shiver in the shade and the sun – and apple blossom clouds go sailing by – and by – and I sail by and by – and bye-bye bye-bye.
Bye.
Carmel Bird
Scott Tallis stood at the whiteboard, attempting to write through the pain. It felt like a nest of fire ants had taken up residence in his skull and were biting into the backs of his eyeballs. When he got to the end of the sentence his trembling hand dropped the marker and he staggered as he bent to retrieve it. He covered the blunder with a comedic reel across the front of the classroom.
‘Bloody loose carpet,’ he muttered.
Nobody laughed. The class stared at him with their characteristic look of stupefied boredom. Beads of sweat formed on his upper lip and the tang of gin wafted out from the pores of his skin. He glanced at the clock above the board: 10.51am. Jesus Christ, he thought, I’ve only been in the room six minutes. The prospect of another ninety-four (it was a double period) almost made him sob. He would have called in sick, but had been unable to come up with a day’s worth of covers at 7am. Besides, he was a new teacher and if he put a foot wrong he wouldn’t make it to the end of his six-month probation.
I’ve just got to get through today. Just today.
*
Scott had been invited to the writers’ festival for the first time in years, to speak on a panel with his old friend Phillip Docker, and Dawn Holland, an up-and-coming author who shared the same publisher. Phil had taken up most of the talk time and all of the questions, but that was understandable – he’d recently won the fifty-thousand-dollar Watson and Moore prize for his war novel, The Drover, so he was the undisputed star of the show. His signing queue had stretched all the way out of the book shop and down Flinders Street. After the event Scott and his wife Natalie, Phil, Dawn and their publicist, Sophie, had retired to the Gin Palace, one of the subterranean Melbourne bars that had so delighted Scott when he’d moved from Adelaide all those years ago. The lighting was low, the furniture baroque and Dean Martin crooned from the speakers. For the first martini, things had been fine. Scott remembered Phil leaning across the table and clapping him on the shoulder.
‘It’s great to see you, mate,’ Phil had said. ‘And again, congrats on the new baby. Must have your work cut out for you. Should I ask how the writing’s going?’
‘No.’
‘Still working on, what was it? Something historical?’
Scott nodded. ‘Set in eighteen sixty-nine. Reams of research, a huge, sprawling mess. I’ve got over six hundred thousand words. Of crap.’ He looked at Sophie. ‘I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’ve already spent the advance.’
She looked clueless for a second. ‘Oh, are you still under contract with Wet Ink? Sorry – I didn’t know.’
‘Difficult second novel?’ Phil chewed his olive with teeth that were a lot whiter than Scott remembered, spat the pip discreetly into his napkin. ‘Tell me about it. Remember Cargo? Sold about five hundred copies, most of which were at my book launch. Sunk without a trace.’ He spoke with the good cheer of a man whose third novel had been subject to a much-publicised bidding war.
‘Cargo was a great book,’ Sophie said. ‘It just didn’t get the attention it deserved.’
‘Thanks, but you’re paid to say that. It was shit.’
Scott remembered when the book had been released and the small, mean thrill he’d felt when it had been savaged by a reviewer in The Age.
‘I was reaching for the stars with that one.’ Phil sighed. ‘But I just didn’t get there. Do you ever?’ He looked at Scott. ‘The gap between what we want to accomplish, and what we end up with…Still, I think I got a little closer with Drover.’
All the women were nodding. Natalie had her hand on her chin.
‘Closer?’ said Sophie. ‘Phillip, you nailed it. Everyone agrees.’
Phil looked down and waved the praise away.
‘Great to see you doing so well,’ Scott coughed. It felt like a piece of olive had wedged in his throat. ‘Gives the rest of us hope.’
‘You’ll get there,’ said Phil. ‘Hey, got a copy of Drover?’
Scott pulled the novel out of his satchel and Phil signed the title page and held it out for Scott to read.
Dear Scott,
Remember – you are not given the desire to do something without the ability to achieve it.
Best, Phillip Docker
Scott smiled tightly. Nice of Phil to acknowledge his talent, but the quote read like a fitness centre poster or a self-help s
logan. If you can dream it, you can do it.
‘Working at the moment?’ Phil asked.
‘He’s teaching.’ Natalie said.
‘Writing?’
‘No, high school,’ said Scott. ‘The Bayside Academy?’
Phil, from Sydney, shrugged.
‘Ooh, hoity-toity,’ said Dawn, dressed in what could best be described as goth-meets-Kate-Bush. Her flaming curls and pale, cantilevered bosom – along with her novel’s many erotic scenes – had seen her plastered on the cover of the arts insert of all the major dailies. Scott would have bet money she’d attended a private school herself.
‘What do you teach?’ Phil asked.
‘English.’
‘How long?’
‘Nearly six months. Finished the Dip. Ed. last year. Got a job in term two.’
‘We really needed the money.’ Natalie slugged back the rest of her martini and held up a hand to order another. Scott followed suit. The gin burned pleasantly as it trickled down his esophagus, the warmth expanding into his chest.
‘I’ve been the sole breadwinner for the last five years; now it’s his turn. Gives me time to concentrate on motherhood and my art.’
*
Scott looked up at what he’d written on the board.
Lennie Smalls is really big and retarded and this is an unsubtle metaphor for the pathetic helplessness of the working class in America. Steinbeck gives him no more humanity than a drover’s dog in order to make his big stupid moral point.
His upper lip trembled as he read the words. He had no memory of writing them. He wasn’t going to make it: his eyes felt dry as rusted ball bearings, his brain couldn’t construct a coherent sentence and he could barely stand. Time for plan B.
‘Actually, ladies and gentlemen, what might be better for you today is to have a look at some key scenes from the film,’ he said and the usual half-hearted cheer went up.