The Best Australian Stories 2011

by Cate Kennedy

  The gong sounds for afternoon meditation. I return to my room, hang the socks over the end of the bed and join the line of people making their way to the hall.

  The first hour after lunch is a period of ‘strong determination.’ Be vigilant, observe objectively, sit without moving, do not leave the hall. It is common to experience mind wandering and agitation but perseverance will bring success. Impermanence. Every experience is impermanent. The socks will not be wet forever; eventually they will dry. Now I start to think about having to stay in the hall. What if I want to go to the toilet, feel nauseous, have an aneurism or a heart attack? I scan my body – no chest or head pains, no loss of sensation except in my feet. I do have a dry mouth. What does that mean?

  All around me is silky silence. Under the meditation shawl I’m pinching my fingers, trying to divert my multitasking mind from its repertoire of songs, images and medical problems. Does anyone else have a tribe of chimpanzees in their head, swinging from thought to thought, shrieking wildly? Very slowly I raise my eyelids a fraction, look right and left through the curtain of eyelashes. Everyone is still as stone, row upon row of perfect little Buddha statues.

  What is the collective noun for chimpanzees – a gang, troop, parliament, colony, unkindness, murder, party? A paddling of ducks, an ostentation of peacocks, a crash of rhinoceroses, a kindle of kittens, a pod of whales. A shrewdness of apes. Ah. But it doesn’t quite seem right for chimps. Ground control to Major Tom.

  *

  Day six. Perseverance has brought success. The socks are dry! Liberation from suffering. In the wisdom gained over the past few days I know that my slip-on shoes flick up moisture and debris, so I do not put the socks on till I am safely inside the meditation hall. Clean dry socks. I can dedicate myself totally to strong determination, with no cravings or aversions.

  I am at one with the group, feet warm and cosy, at one with all sentient beings. The air in the hall is warm and nurturing. My mind is alert and vigilant. I am equanimous. The word doesn’t bother me anymore.

  After a while I notice a smell. Occasionally, as well as small sounds, there are evanescent aromas in the hall. Pleasant smells – shampoo, moisturiser – that give delight and harm not. This one is unidentifiable, a blend of old goat cheese, straw, stagnant water, dead rat and a hint of possum pee.

  Is it a test? Are they piping something into the hall to see how equanimous we really are? It’s stinging my nose, getting into my lungs. Very soon I am going to have to cough.

  Someone beats me to it. The cough sets off a cacophony of sneezes, nose blowing and throat clearing. The woman beside me, obviously not perfectly centred in her lotus position, lurches backwards. I hear a series of soft thuds as the entire row behind goes down like dominoes. I try to maintain strong determination. When I put my head under the shawl so as not to be diverted by the goings on around me I get a good strong whiff and nearly fall backwards myself.

  At the end of this excruciatingly long hour everyone makes a rush for the door.

  Back in my room I fill the sink with hot water, pour in liberal amounts of rosemary-scented shampoo, add a shot of lavender oil for good measure and throw the socks in.

  I have enough underwear for ten days; why did I bring only one pair of socks?

  Instead of going to breakfast, I walk past the rooms of other students. There are not only socks and underwear hanging out to dry but T-shirts, jeans, a skirt and even a jacket. I’m having trouble with one small pair of socks, yet here are entire wardrobes. How come everyone else is coping? What do they know that I don’t?

  *

  Evening of day six. I lift the socks gingerly out of the water. Still a faint odour of cheese. Are protracted periods of meditation distorting my senses? Is it an illusion? I’m a very clean person. I don’t smell. How come my socks do? I drop them back in the water, add more lavender oil and clean my teeth in the shower.

  *

  Lunchtime, day seven. I wash and scrub the little buggers. Rinse them over and over. When I wring them out the lettering on the soles contorts into Day Sucks. I try not to take it personally.

  I go for a walk, gaze at the artworks scattered in amongst the trees. Near the boundary fence is a new addition – an abandoned sandal. Then I see its mate in the bushes about a metre away, the strap hanging loosely. What is the point of one sandal if the other is broken?

  There are a few people on the path, prowling like lions, but they are all wearing shoes. The abandoned ones are women’s, size seven. I imagine a muddy-footed woman silently weeping in her room.

  *

  Day eight. Socks still not dry.

  *

  Day nine. The retreat is almost over. Socks improved but still not dry. Tomorrow is the last day.

  *

  Day ten. Noble Silence is replaced by Noble Speech. We can talk. Silent anguish is now given voice. One woman left her towel out in the rain and had to make do with paper towelling. ‘Drying my hair was the worst,’ she adds forlornly. Another had a spider scurry out of her hoodie and onto her face. One man, a sleep-walker, got into bed with his room mate. Imagine the room mate coping with that in Noble Silence, trying to keep attention on the area below the nostrils and above the upper lip.

  ‘How about that weird smell!’ says a man with a shaved head. ‘When was it, day five?’

  ‘Day six.’ Everyone turns to me, wanting more information. How much of it am I willing to share? Eventually I say: ‘I think it was someone’s socks.’ Everyone nods thoughtfully, as if I’m terribly wise. I feel like a liar, a fake. I’m not wise. I did not remain equanimous, I was subject to cravings and aversions, obsessions. I take a deep breath. ‘Actually, they were my socks.’ I expect everyone to get up and leave but no one does. Several people appear to be on the verge of saying something but instead sip their tea.

  Finally, the man whose room mate got into bed with him says, ‘You’ve no idea how grateful I am to those socks. I’d been holding on to a fart till I thought I’d burst. When that smell wafted over I was able to let go.’

  Then others start owning up to coughs, belches and grunts. One man reveals that he’d smuggled in a fitness magazine and some sudoku puzzles. Another confesses to keeping a diary, writing his thoughts on toilet paper.

  *

  End of the retreat. The socks are dry. They don’t smell.

  While packing, I realise that I have managed most of the time without them. Sockless feet took me to and from the meditation hall each day. I have the memory of cold but can no longer feel it.

  One last walk. To the boundary fence. The abandoned sandals are still there. Unobtrusive as a butler I lay my socks down with them, then quietly step back.

  The outside world. At the train station we equanimously observe the newspaper headlines. Even though the news is a week old and now focused on the aftermath, it seems beyond belief. On the day I first washed my socks, the earth shifted along a fault line in the north Pacific; a wave gathered momentum and monumentally made its way towards Fukushima.

  Shooting the Fox

  Marion Halligan

  Would you like to see the fox I shot this morning, he said, as he opened the gate in the wall.

  This is a particular form of words. It is not a question. You do not say no. It appears to be polite – would you – but it leaves no room.

  I went and saw the fox. Exquisite red creature. It does not know yet that it is dead. Its eye is not dim, its brush is defiant. Soon it will droop and decay and know its own mortality.

  *

  His name is Malcolm and he wishes to marry me. I am a 43-year-old virgin and my name is Gloria. An unsuitable name. Except when I sing Gloria in excelsis Deo. Not that I can sing. I lift up my head and open my mouth and pretend to be part of the glorious harmony of the choir. I open my mouth and no sound comes out, but the choir’s sound fills it. We are very
proud of the choir at my school, it is one of the things we are famous for.

  The girls are cruel. Generation after generation they come and flourish and go. They can take all sorts of forms, and one of them is tropical flowers, growing lustily on their vines, their preening tendrils twining and prying, threatening to crush the frail trellis of the school between their vigorous thighs. Flowers that are creamy, rosy, dusky, thickly petalled, with long fleshy throats full of pollen. Even when they sit demurely in class, their blue-checked dresses smoothed down as far as they will go over these strong thighs, the slit between them cries out, I am open and thickly pinkly flesh, I am filled with honey, my sticky juices are waiting for the protuberances of men to find me out and fill me. It is hard to close your eyes to these shameless songs, it is necessary to say in a clear hard voice the tenses of French verbs, words without sentences to give them meaning, possessing only syntax. Pay attention, girls, it is a matter simply of rote learning, of reciting over and over until you know by heart.

  Their hearts beat, the buttons of their dresses rise and fall, they slide undone to show lacy bras and the smooth flesh with these powerful hearts beating.

  The verbs though meaningless alone are a spell to keep lascivious scents at bay, otherwise their languid beguiling odour-songs would drive us all mad.

  *

  Would you like to see the fox I shot this morning, Malcolm said, and I went through the gate in the wall and down to the kitchen garden, where the fox hung, its tail bushy, its pointed little face open-mouthed as if to draw in air.

  I could shoot a few and make you a fur coat, he said, and I remembered women of my grandmother’s age, wearing fox stoles with beady false black eyes and a little chain joining sharp-toothed mouth to legs, bony legs with padded paws. I always wondered how they could bear having a dead animal hanging round their necks. Even flattened out and lined with shiny brown satin.

  Why do you shoot them? I asked Malcolm. Don’t they keep the rabbits in check?

  I shoot the rabbits too, he said. I am cooking rabbit stew for dinner. You’ll enjoy its gamey flavour, not bland like farmed creatures.

  He is a hunter. He wants to marry me. His name is John Malcolm Crape Pembroke. I saw it in a book. I would be the third Mrs Malcolm Pembroke. Though I could keep my own name. Gloria Jones. When the girls ask me for an example of bathos I am careful not to offer my own name.

  The girls call me mademoiselle. I met Malcolm when his daughter was in the boarding house. He came to see each of her teachers when he picked her up at the end of term. She was a good French scholar. Now she lives in Aix-en-Provence, studying translation. She has a brother who is a merchant banker in London.

  Malcolm lives deep in the high country in a tower. It’s old, built by convicts who first made the bricks. You can find arrows and marks like birds’ feet, which ask you to think of the men who made them. It’s like a medieval watchtower, designed to keep an eye out for marauding tribes. It is wide and tall, with one round room on each floor. In the basement is a studio, with presses and machines. Then a room with books and a harpsichord painted with blue-grey landscapes of weeping-barked eucalyptus trees. This floor is surrounded by a rim of rooms he calls his offices, a kitchen and scullery and pantry, a laundry and mudroom and storerooms, opening through arches and doors into the main room.

  Upstairs is a room arranged for me, and then on the top floor his bedroom. A staircase zigzags round the walls to each floor and up through his bedroom to the battlemented roof. Last year the second Mrs Pembroke fell from this roof and died. He was away at the time. Was it an accident or did she do it on purpose? Who knows? She liked the roof and often sat on its turreted rim. She could see the bones of the garden from there, she said. So he told me.

  How can I marry you, I said. I am a schoolteacher. I cannot live here and teach in my school.

  I am a rich man, he said. You do not need to work.

  I thought of the girls, blooming so tropically and self-regardingly, new ones year after year, hardly paying attention to the elderly virgin who teaches them French. Though they do learn the French, mostly, and pass their exams, and blow the air round my cheeks with kisses and thanks when they leave to truly blossom in the real world. Heedless they are, and cruel by nature but without malice. Could I give them up?

  I did not find out then what he did for a living. Maybe I thought he was a rich man by inheritance, that the curious garden and the tower were not earned by him. I am used to rich parents at my school. Later I asked him.

  I’m a writer, he said.

  What of? I asked, because mostly writers I know are not rich.

  When we are married I will show you, he said.

  I asked if I would have seen any of his books. No, he said. I asked if he wrote under his own name. Two of them, he said. John Malcolm Crape Pembroke: I supposed his pen name would be John Crape. A strong and simple name.

  I said, I am a 43-year-old virgin. How can want to marry me?

  People think it is difficult to manage to be a 43-year-old virgin in this day and age, but it hasn’t been for me. It is something that happened quite naturally, and there I am sitting in my school like a rose hip on a branch, tight and firm and yellowish brown, contented. Slender, slim, thin, and that’s hard work, but who could expect otherwise?

  Malcolm told me about being married to him. How we would live. The fruitful life in the tower. The delicious meals we would eat. The fine red wines. The garden. The seasons. The reading and music. The trips to cities. The trips overseas. The art galleries, the plays, the restaurants. It occurred to me that I would not stay slim in such a life. So rich, so full of event. Wonderful narratives, like a book he was giving me, inviting me to enjoy.

  The thing I did not consider then is that a book is for reading. It is not a life. For the space of its turning pages you may believe you live in it, but sooner or later you must close it up. Put it back on the shelf, and look at the room you are in, a room which will say sternly to you, this is where you live, what are you making of this? The life that Malcolm had written for himself, was offering to write for me, it didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t my life.

  *

  My bedroom in the tower was like all the rooms, big. It had a bed with tester and curtains. In the middle was a bath in the shape of a marble boat. It sat on a carpet of pale turquoise wool ruffled like water. There was a table with a lamp, set up for writing. On it was a fat notebook, with marbled endpapers, opened at its first page, blank, and resting on it a pen with a marbled pattern to match. All this is yours, said Malcolm, and I took him to mean the book. I sat at the table and wrote in it. A woman who comes to live in a tower should keep a journal of her days. Of course I wasn’t living here then but visiting, and I was hardly the maiden who ought to inhabit such a story, or rather I was a maiden but not the beautiful young one the context expected. If you squinted, looked sideways, glanced at my childish figure against the light, then, perhaps, but is that a true story? All of these things could be written down, the gold nib of the pen sliding across the silky paper of the notebook, making words with perhaps no more intent or trickery than the fine black tendrils of the quince tree gazebo against the winter white sky.

  The first morning he woke me to come and see the frost. He came walking down the winding stairs into my room. There were no locked doors in this house. No hidden rooms, no passageways. No desks with secret drawers. The staircases curved openly round the walls, and you entered each room on your way to the one above. It said to you, I am a house without secrets. No doors that must not be opened. No keys indelibly staining themselves with blood.

  We went out into the grey morning, through French windows, on to a terrace and across meadow grass to a maze. Everything was powdered blue with frost. When you looked closely there were frail encrustations of ice, holding the cold morning light in their blue refractions. See how beautiful it is, said Malcolm.
The hedges of the maze were so far only waist height, but you could still get lost, he said.

  So you could get trapped, I said.

  I think patience would find you a way out.

  At the top of the slope was the quince-tree gazebo, a dome made of arches of iron, over which were espaliered bare branches, to replicate exactly the shape of the dome. There were spaces so you could walk inside and stand in a small house of intertwined branches. In summer, said Malcolm, the quinces hang upon it, golden globes of fruit.

  At the bottom of the slope was a pond, or dam I suppose, with reeds and a punt and a small wooden shack. There are birds to be watched, said Malcolm.

  When we got back to the house we found a pile of long white boxes on the terrace table. These are for you, he said. Inside were nests of tissue paper and in them stems and stems of red gladioli, every kind of red, crimson, scarlet, vermilion, rose. Malcolm fetched tall glass vases and we put them in, the green thick stems under water through the glass and then the red flower buds just beginning to open. I felt surrounded by tallness and redness.

  *

  My room, Malcolm calls this bedroom. Gloria’s room. The bath like a boat. The wide fireplace. The table with its marbled notebook and pen to match, inviting writing. The bed with tester and hangings in dark turquoise and indigo, the same heavy brocade at the windows. There is always a movement of air in the tower. The candle flames shimmer, the hangings stir, as the air moves through the rooms. As though the building were a creature who breathes, silently but heavily. Every now and then heaving a huge mute sigh. Draughts, I suppose they are, but not cold; the fireplaces are large and log fires burn intensely, but somewhere there is a furnace that pours hot air through the house. I lie in bed wondering if I shall wake to the faint grinding road of machinery, to find the tester a finger’s width from my face, or even not wake up at all because it will have wound its way right down and suffocated me.