The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  ‘Can I come back?’ asks Jase, collecting his bike from the side of the house. His helmet squashes his hair down but it protests out the sides.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. My father hadn’t told him to leave, which I take to be a good sign. Then I remember the slow wipe down the trouser leg. I smile to take the sting out of my words. ‘But not too often.’

  *

  I eat each night to the screech and ring of cutlery. Most of our meals are mute affairs.

  ‘The school gave me a laptop today.’

  There’s a very long silence while my father cuts his rissole into small pieces, all the same size. ‘You will not use it.’

  I wait to see what will happen. All the things I could say (they gave them out to everyone in my class, we have to learn how to use them, we have to use them, this is the twenty-first fucking century) are, one by one, sent out of my mouth on a breath, without ever being spoken. I place a piece of potato on my tongue with immense care, and spend the next moments considering the texture of the skin compared with the mealy body, the brown and white taste of it. The first of the Three Treasures is compassion.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I say at last.

  My father’s relief is palpable. He wipes his mouth on the red serviette, visibly stained, and then stares at it for a while, as though in confusion.

  ‘Who was that boy?’

  Which boy? I almost ask. I don’t think of Jase as a boy, or a girl for that matter, or even a human being. Just as himself, Jase. ‘Jason Reilly.’ I stop myself from smiling, just in time. ‘He’s in my grade.’

  ‘Does he play footy?’

  I don’t even consider lying. ‘No.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  My father exists within the uncomfortable belief that other people act only out of greed and need. He has no friends. None of his co-workers down at the depot ever come here, although they wave at me on the street, and clip me over the earhole after a good rugby match.

  The possible retorts crowd my mouth and I wait until they’ve wandered off, single file, before saying, ‘He’s my friend.’

  My empty mouth feels dry all of a sudden, because I can already hear him saying the terrible words, in the same way he’s just dismissed the laptop, lying in my schoolbag across the hall, filled with unfulfillable potential.

  You will not see him. He cannot come here.

  It’s some time before I realise that my father has aligned his knife and fork and risen from the table without speaking.

  *

  My father spent several years in prison, before I was born. I’m not sure what crime he committed, but I think it was one of the felonies that get you a ride in the electric chair in some American states: armed robbery, murder, rape. I know nothing about his childhood, or his family of origin, whether he was an only child, or if I have aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents somewhere on the planet. My mother ran off when I was four, with a man my father worked with at the depot. I don’t remember anything about her, not even what she looked like, but once, when I was in the supermarket with my father, we walked down the laundry aisle and I smelled her. I kept going back to that aisle and trying to pin down the exact bottle or box that her smell had emanated from, but it was elusive, like the scent coming out of a lomandra flower, that disappears when your nose is right up against the spikes, but nearly knocks you over the moment you turn away. Eventually my father tired of my absconding and smacked me, hard, although I was almost nine years old.

  I tower a foot or so over his head these days and since I’ve become a closet Taoist we’ve moved past the yelling→cheek→smacking→defiance→hitting cycle, I believe, but my stomach still roils whenever my father is displeased with me.

  *

  Mrs Hatten was my teacher in year six. When I made some comment in Health about the origin of babies and the class dissolved in hilarity, Mrs Hatten thinned her lips and asked to see me after school. When all the other kids had gone she gave me a book to put in my schoolbag: Where did I come from? I read it when I got home from school, sitting on my bed, and I remember finding it fascinating, and not in any way disgusting or rude or dirty. But those were the words my father used when he found the book where I’d left it on my bedside table, and those were the words he shouted at Mrs Hatten the next day, so that the whole school heard, even though they were in an empty classroom with the door closed. Mrs Hatten shouted too. She shouted, if George comes to school with any more bruises, I’m calling DOCS. That made my dad stop shouting and leave.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, that night at the dinner table. I still wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, but I wanted my father to stop looking frightened. Even inexplicable anger was better than the terror I’d seen in his face since his blue with Mrs Hatten.

  I remember that he picked up his knife and fork as usual but then held them like drumsticks for a long time, an Energiser bunny all out of batteries. Then he dropped his cutlery and put his hands to his face. I still remember the way his shoulders shook.

  When I found the book about Taoism in the school library, I made sure I never brought it home. I keep it in my locker and read it in the lunch hour or in between classes.

  *

  At 10 p.m. my father switches the light off in the shed, and comes back to the house. He shuts off the lights in the kitchen, locks the front door, enters the hallway and stops outside my room. I lift my head. He knocks.

  ‘Come in,’ I say. I mark my place in the chemistry textbook and turn to face him.

  He looks out my dark window and clears his throat. ‘That laptop,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘What would you be using it for?’

  ‘Assignments mostly. Typing out assignments. I have computing once a week, I’d use it then too, in class.’

  My father frowns at the window, possibly at his own reflection. ‘You couldn’t use it to look up porn or something?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I say gently. ‘We have no internet here. And I’m not interested in porn.’ It’s the truth, so I make sure it sounds like it. The second of the Treasures is moderation, which porn ain’t, from what I’ve seen of it.

  My father digs deep in his trouser pockets as though looking for change. His discomfort is catching. Then he looks at me. ‘Because, you know, I wouldn’t want you finding out where babies come from or anything like that.’

  My father has made a joke. His first ever joke.

  I smile. ‘No, sir.’

  He nods and turns, stops at the door. ‘I’ll have to think about it, the laptop.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Goodnight, son,’ he says.

  I love you, Dad, I don’t say. ‘Goodnight, sir.’

  *

  ‘You know they have machines to do that these days,’ says Jase watching me sweep, twirling a football in his hands. My father is out but he’ll be home in an hour. ‘They’re called blowers. My mum rang up this lawn mowing company once and asked for a mow and blow. I nearly pissed myself.’ The north-easterly has scattered gum leaves all over the driveway, even though the nearest tree stands a hundred metres away. I love that. ‘Where’s your mum?’ Jase asks.

  ‘Gone. Where’s your dad?’

  ‘Dead. Hey! I see what you mean. We could set them up, my mum and your dad, make our own Brady Bunch.’

  The thought of my father making anything as commonplace and convivial as a blended family is laughable. But I don’t feel like laughing. My throat is thick and tight, so the next words are forced out of it, against any will of my own.

  ‘I don’t want to be your brother.’ I make myself meet his eyes, even though it’s as painful as looking straight at the sun.

  He plays with the ball in his hands, rolling it, patting it into the air, and then drops it on the ground and lets it roll away. He looks out across the farm with a 180-degree glance that lasts for several seconds and ends up on my face. ‘I see,’ he says, and there’s no mockery in his eyes. He does see.

  He walks over and takes the broom ou
t of my hands. My arms fall to my sides as though they’ve been deboned. He lifts one of my hands and places it on his chest, over his heart.

  The third Treasure is humility, not putting oneself first in the world, but sometimes things happen without any warning or deliberation.

  Still Life

  Little Toki

  Colin Oehring

  1.

  I should have known better than to demand my father stop the car. We were on day one of a projected three-week trip and my father’s much-reiterated aim was to check in at the Zululand Safari Lodge before dark. But we’d been on the road for three long, uninterrupted hours and I was tired and twelve and willing to seize upon any opportunity to stop, to spend money.

  Roadside stands were a common enough sight on the highways and byways of South Africa and there was nothing to suggest that this one – set up on the otherwise empty stretch of highway between Mtubatuba and Shikishela – was anything special. But I was drawn to it, irresistibly.

  Normally my father would sigh at my avidity: he might moan or discreetly roll his eyes heavenward, or cast a look of weary allegiance towards my mother. But in the end he would always give in. This time, though, he shot boldly past the stand. And without a word. I sulked. I cried. I made an exhibition of myself.

  I remember the jingle playing on the radio, ‘we love braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet, braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet …’ as my parents began to argue, as there rose from me a crescendo of complaint, a demented throbbing chorus that grew louder and more intense until at last my father gave out a strange cry and hit the brakes hard, bringing the big Chevrolet to a skidding halt.

  For a time no-one spoke. Then my mother began to cry. I felt torn between wanting to flee and wanting to make things better, for already I was feeling guilty. But the lure of the stand was strong and I got out of the car and walked back along the hot road in the direction of the makeshift table set up in front of the parked kombivan.

  In the passenger seat sat a white man with long stringy blond hair, smoking a cigarette, one tanned arm hanging from the window. Behind the table, on which were arrayed trinkets and brooches, pendants and beads and figurines, some beaded jewellery, a couple of little boxes, a clumsily fashioned giraffe, nothing to interest me, stood a black man of about thirty-five. I didn’t like his scarred face, nor his insincere smile.

  I was about to head back to the car when I saw, tucked half out of sight, two little wooden legs. I reached out and discovered that they belonged to a little dark stick creature. I stared, captivated, breathing deeply in and deeply out, before taking him up into my hands.

  The Tokolosche is a familiar figure in South African folklore, a small hairy creature – rarely if ever up to any good – and about whom I had first learnt from Iris, our Zulu maid. Iris liked of an afternoon to gather up all the shoes in the house and to sit cross-legged in our courtyard polishing one after the other while relating to me African folk tales that purported, in their final sentence, to explain how things had come to be how they were: And so that is how the hippo lost all his fur!

  What I liked to hear about were the Tokolosche. These creatures terrified Iris and she told me that her husband had placed their bed up on paint tins to prevent them from ‘joining her’ at night. She cautioned me always to sleep on my back, and blushed when I asked why.

  At school, Garth de Mierwe told me that the Tokolosche was a sex maniac and endowed with a penis so long it had to be slung over its shoulder.

  There was no sign of a penis here but of course this little Toki was only a wooden approximation crafted of stick and a greasy sort of twine, a cheaply, crudely fashioned thing with little patches of fur, like a cheap nylon, glued to his little legs, his arms, and on his head. His plastic eyes, not the least bit lifelike, were glued haphazardly, crude white paste leaking out of the side of its left eye like the crust of sleep. Sharp teeth cut bluntly from white cloth. And a little red smudge of tongue.

  I held it up to the black man who smiled knowingly and took the figure from me. My mother was standing beside me now and it was to her that he made his pitch. Speaking in fluent English he claimed that the figure protected its owner against evil spirits, that it brought good fortune, prosperity and excellent health, guaranteed. I turned to my mother, who reluctantly asked the man how much it was. He told her. And my heart sank. Even I could see that this little Toki was overpriced. And yet she smiled a little smile, and paid.

  2.

  It was after eight, and dark, by the time we turned off the third and final exit and drove up the dirt road to the Safari Lodge. A young black woman showed us to our huts by torchlight and once settled I examined my little Toki.

  He was a fragile thing and although I wanted to keep him close I worried that if I took him to bed I might, by rolling about, destroy him. There was a small stand beside my bed, with two drawers. In the top one I found a Gideon’s Bible. I took it out, dropped it into the bottom drawer and slid Toki in the top drawer.

  I slept until six, when I was woken by a single brisk knock on the door. I sat up and watched as a young black man came into my room, bearing a wooden tray upon which sat a tea pot and a single cup. He smiled broadly at me and placed the tray on a small stand at the end of my bed. After checking that Toki was safely in his place I fell back to sleep for another two hours, wondering when at last I woke to full daylight whether the young black man had been an apparition. But there it was, the tea tray, perched on the table at the end of my bed.

  3.

  We saw, on our first day at the lodge, antelope and impala, warthog and giraffe. None distracted me long from the thought of my little Toki waiting for me in his drawer. And as soon as we returned I rushed back to my hut to check that he was where I’d left him.

  And there he was, looking, I thought, in his wooden, expressionless way, pleased to see me. I set him beside me on my pillow and began to talk. I told him about my parents, and about our house in Durban, and about Iris, and how at night you could see from our backyard, glittering beyond the sugar plantations, the lights of the township she lived in. And when I told him about the time my uncle, on a hunting trip to Tanzania, had shot an elderly leopard out of a tree, I could almost hear him laugh.

  That first day set the pattern for the following week – a pattern to which, day by day, I increasingly did not, or was not able to, conform. For I soon started to weaken, to sicken, in fact, to the point where, on the fourth day, a doctor had to be called in.

  But first I must explain what happened on our second night.

  4.

  We’d gone that day on yet another game drive, further afield this time, beyond the confines of the Safari Park and into Umfolozi National Park, where lions and rhinos and elephants and leopards freely roamed. I went to bed early and had started telling Toki about my day when my father came in and asked me who I was talking to. I pretended not to know what he was talking about.

  I fell quickly asleep, forgetting entirely to say goodnight to Toki. Perhaps it was this oversight – this omission – that led to what happened next. I woke sometime in the early morning to a scratching sound. It was coming from the drawer. Carefully I opened it and there erupted a great shriek. It was a sound like that of an animal caught in a trap, and it echoed alarmingly around the hut. I slammed the drawer shut. It took me a moment to realise that the shrieking in fact was my own.

  My father was the first on the scene. I pulled myself together. I told him that I’d had a bad dream, that he should go back to bed, that I was fine, absolutely fine. And when I was once more alone I slowly, and with thundering heart, opened the drawer again.

  Apart from his eyes, which had taken on a new sheen, a new depth, which had come to luminous life, the thing that struck me most forcibly about Toki’s transformation was the way he was breathing: rapidly, as a terrified animal might. For some reason I thought of a crouching frog, breathing in and out great bellyfuls of air – but of course he looked nothing like a frog. He was f
ar too hairy, for one thing. No longer a bundle of sticks and glue and nylon fur he was now completely covered with a black glossy pelt. It looked silky to the touch, almost but not quite oily.

  I could see by his swivelling, fear-filled eyes that he was more terrified than I; even so it took me several minutes before I reached out to touch him. He made a little squeaking sound and scampered further back into the corner of the drawer, breathing even more rapidly. I put my finger to my lips and shushed him. It was clear that he understood. He continued to cower, but quietly.

  The Tokolosches I’d heard about were trickster figures, brim full of devilish confidence, and possessed of sexual mania. This little creature, which shuddered under my softest touch, whose little heart beat and trembled, when eventually he let me stroke him, inspired in me tremendous love. I no longer felt myself in any kind of danger.

  After he had settled somewhat I reached into the drawer and ever so gently levered my hand underneath him – he felt strange and moist: had he wet himself, I wondered, in his terror? – and very slowly I lifted him up. I held him for a time in the palm of my hand and once his breathing had settled I placed him very lightly on my pillow.

  I can’t say how long I lay there, looking at him, while he, sitting on my pillow, inches from my face, looked back at me with his rich dark shining eyes. I soon discovered that my voice, far from alarming him, appeared to calm him. I murmured at first sweet nothings, which he quickly appeared to grow bored with, and so I told him instead about our visit to St Lucia two days earlier, and about the way the ranger banged on the side of the boat each time we went round a bend in the river so as not to startle the hippos. I talked just to keep talking. And when after a time he seemed to grow tired – his eyes narrowing, his chin dipping – I put him back inside the drawer.

  I lay awake for a long time, though I must eventually have dozed off because at six-thirty I was once again startled by the knock at the door and the delivery of my tea tray.

  5.

  The first thing Toki demanded, when eventually he spoke, was food.