The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  *

  The Board has made the completion of the stadium roof a priority, and allows those artists working on the roof to come out during the daytime to put on the finishing touches.

  One day, an abstract sculptor loses his footing and drops to his death onto the Field. No-one hears his scream above the roar of the crowd. The players dodge his body. Two graffiti artists run out and carry him off so that play can proceed uninterrupted.

  Above and below ground, artists continue to die. The sixteen-year-old who has been brought in to replace his father has a heart attack.

  We make makeshift coffins for the dead but the Board deems them unnecessary. The Manager arranges for the bodies to be dumped back down the manhole. The Board feels this is appropriate so that we can deal with our dead in whatever heathen way we like.

  The problem is, there’s nowhere for us to bury the bodies. We don’t know what to do with them. They’re starting to smell.

  *

  I try to convince Paul that we really have to stop disregarding the reality of the situation.

  ‘You’re right,’ he says.

  He pulls out his fountain pen and we start a petition demanding better working conditions, or release from our contracts. The Manager, however, tells us that the Board will only allow us to present the petition once we have one million signatures. We don’t even have a million artists living underground.

  It takes so long to complete the petition that, underneath the Level Playing Field, whole generations of artists reproduce, die and are reborn before the petition can be presented to the Board. Paul and I have already been through one life cycle and are nine years old again by the time the Chairman grants us an audience.

  We are taken to the Chairman’s vast boardroom, where he’s sitting at the head of a long table.

  ‘Well,’ he says, leaning back in his chair. ‘We’ve considered your petition at length. After much deliberation, we are able to offer you the opportunity to protest the Level Playing Field in an assigned area outside the stadium. We understand that you do not have the means to organise a protest, so if you would like to be allotted funding, you must first submit a grant application. A panel will assess your proposals on the basis of merit.’

  ‘We’re not going to sit here for another three generations waiting for you to read our grant application,’ says Paul.

  ‘Vicious ingrates!’ says the Chairman, folding his arms. ‘The Level Playing Field is good to us all. The Level Playing Field enables each and every one of us to manifest our own chandelier and swing from it. If you can’t manifest your own chandelier, don’t take it out on us. Don’t spit on our hard-earned money.’

  ‘Fuck this shit,’ says Paul as we’re taken back underground. ‘Disregard it all! Let’s be artists again.’

  ‘We don’t have any funding,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about one final piece,’ says Paul, adjusting his tweed cap. ‘We can call it Funeral I. Then we’ll be done with the Level Playing Field.’

  After the meeting, the Manager tells us we have to whip up a rain cover for the Field because there’s a ninety per cent chance of torrential rain overnight.

  ‘Hey,’ says the Manager, grabbing my shoulder. ‘You’ve been letting the stadium get shabby during this whole petition saga. I better see a crapload of work done by start of play tomorrow.’

  We work like crazy overnight on the roof and the grass. When we’re done, we make a rain cover and drag it out over the Field.

  *

  In the morning, the crowd returns.

  The commentators talk about the overnight rain, and the cameras zoom in to show officials walking onto the Field to remove the rain cover. The cover is translucent, and stitched together like patchwork. One camera does an extreme close-up, revealing fine hairs on the surface. The cover is made of specially treated human skin.

  Officials rush to drag the cover off camera, unveiling a field made of human hair, grouped in patches of black, blond, brunette and red. On the big screens, a camera casts its gaze over the stadium roof, which has been completed using human bones.

  The crowd gags. Their beer tastes like sweat; their soft drinks taste like tears.

  They rush to the toilets to throw up. Standing under each toilet is a video artist collecting the puke in buckets.

  The big screens show the players waiting in the tunnel. They’re refusing to put on their new shoes, which have spikes made from sharpened human nails.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I say to Paul.

  I carry his head onto the Field and place it in the centre, ready for kick-off.

  Captial Misfits

  How Is Your Great Life?

  Jo Lennan

  At college, Arjun Mishra had the room across from Ana’s. Then a devout boy with a liking for overalls, he had possessed an unfailing sense of what was ‘fishy’ or ‘fancy’, these being the words he used to express his disapproval. At their university, which catered to foreigners in Tokyo, they were both scholarship kids among wealthier students. Yet three years after graduation, when she telephoned her old friend, he was living the high life in ritzy Azabu. He worked in IT for a Japanese bank and rented an apartment whose rent, he was proud to say, was more than Priya Vajpayee’s whole monthly pay-packet (Priya having been, at college, the student marked out for success).

  It was a humid night in July, just past ten o’clock. ‘So Ana,’ Arjun boomed. ‘How is your great life?’ An hour and a half later, she fronted up to his building – a steel plate gave its name as the Imperial Satellite – and, entering, took the lift up to the eighth floor. In jeans and a t-shirt and with freshly combed-back hair, he opened the door with a blast from the air conditioning unit. Letting her in, he gave her a key and a thick fold of yen ‘for groceries or whatever’.

  What could she do but take the money? She had no apartment and no job. She had fallen out with Shigeko, her flatmate and friend. She was waiting to receive a renewed Japanese visa, without which she could not find gainful employment. She didn’t really want to go on hostessing, which was how she had made her living since her final year at college. She had never had a problem with what she did for work, but in recent dates with clients she had felt her smile grow wan and feeble, like a bulb about to blow. Worse, the greater her disaffection, the more some clients pursued her, perhaps attracted by what they took for an air of melancholy.

  At least Arjun was too tactful to ask her awkward questions; it made it easier that he was brusque and businesslike. Pushing his hair back with his hand, he ran her through his week: on Tuesdays he fasted, on Wednesday nights he met friends for dinner, and on Fridays he went out to a strip club in Roppongi. Or that was what he had done last Friday, he added. Before that, he kept Friday evenings for cleaning and ironing. Now he was thinking of hiring a maid, a Filipina woman who would wash and iron his clothes and vacuum the apartment’s fifteen tatami squares.

  To Ana’s immense relief, he didn’t try to entertain her. He offered her the bed but she took the foldout futon, which she packed away each morning along with her possessions. She saw him when he was home late of an evening. At these times he poured red wine, cranked the air con up to full and settled on the couch in an expansive mood. He often spoke about his work and his colleagues at the bank. ‘This is consumer banking,’ he told her with a shrug. ‘It’s not a huge amount of money, a few million a branch. The technology is ancient. We’re talking 1998, 1999. I was in high school then. When the system goes down, most times it’s the temperature. Sometimes the branches don’t have dedicated server rooms. The idiots don’t realise, they put their coffee cups on the servers, turn off the AC when they leave. These machines are like grandfathers. In the heat they fall asleep. Oof.’

  He would also ask her opinion on all manner of things, like whether it would hurt ‘a great deal’ if he waxed his chest. Eventually, though, his comments would turn to Fatima, the Iranian beauty he had fallen for in college. He still spoke of her with wonder, and seemed compelled to go over time
s he had spent with her.

  ‘Once she came to see me on my break at work,’ he recounted one night. ‘The job was what we called grooming, which is brushing away cement. It was seven floors up. We worked without safety chains. I was the lowest of the workers, earning 600 yen an hour and plucking chunks of cement from my nostrils every day. My skin was dust, my voice hoarse. On a fifteen-minute break, I met Fatima in a park. I’ve never seen you like this, she said, her eyes brimming with sorrow. Oh Ana, if you could have seen those big doe eyes of hers!’

  He shook his head. ‘The jobs I worked! A summer labouring at a farm. A job in a factory crushing plastic in a furnace. My hair would change colour with the plastic in the air. The others left me their time cards and had me punch them out. Come on, they said. Mou yamerou! Let’s go. But I would stay crushing that plastic until five p.m. exactly.’

  Ana was shocked. She knew Arjun had worked through college; she had done the same. Yet she never would have guessed at the conditions he described. On campus he was always clean and crisply dressed. He was the student their lecturer for Asia Pacific Trade, the jovial Professor Gupta, would single out to ask, ‘And how is your great life?’

  But this, Arjun explained, was why he took such pleasure, coming home each night, in hearing his black Bellini shoes strike the lobby’s marble tiles. He was pleased that his couch was upholstered in fine-grained leather, and that his curtains were resistant to sunlight and heat. He was buying his parents a new house in India (it had four spacious bedrooms and brass door handles throughout). He would also wire another ten thousand US dollars, which was a sort of apology for not going home for Diwali, the main holiday of the year. He couldn’t leave just now, he said, with how things were at work. Still, he toyed with the idea of going to the States. It was a dream of his to work there and start a sushi chain. Then again, he said to Ana, what if Fatima tried to call him, as perhaps she would one day?

  Most of his calls, though, were from colleagues or his mother. ‘But Manu – she calls me Manu – how is your health, she asks.’ Sitting back against white leather, he swigged his wine and grimaced. ‘I’m tired of answering this question.’

  *

  In Tokyo that July, a series of typhoons threatened. Ana had never acclimatised to summers in Japan; in Tallinn, where she was from, there was nothing like this humidity. It made cowlicks in her hair, it made her top stick to her back, and worst of all it made her feel stupid and sluggish. It was hard to reach anyone among her old group of friends, most of whom now worked in ‘office flower’ jobs, menial roles that meant long hours and low-level harassment. She whiled away the hours at the nearby Segafredo, and listened idly to the talk of diplomats and bankers. After a long, lacklustre decade, Tokyo was booming again, they said. It was a sign of the times that the hospital up the road was building a new unit for cocaine overdoses. ‘But it’s only another kind of bankruptcy in disguise,’ she heard an American declare. ‘Pouring money into Tokyo while the rest of the country is stagnating …’

  A waiter was tipping a pail of water on the footpath to cool the air. One table over, a man read Nanami Shiono’s Stories of the Romans. The sky was a soft, close grey; there never seemed to be a sun. Checking her phone – it was near six – she saw a text from Shigeko: ‘I hope you are not ungry.’ Did she mean hungry or angry? Angry, probably. Ana didn’t answer but just then the phone rang.

  ‘So you’ll be okay?’ said Arjun. ‘With the eel guy, I mean?’

  ‘Takuya? He’s fine.’

  She was still seeing a few clients, Takuya among them. Generous as Arjun was, she had to make some money. And Takuya, who made his living advising restaurants, liked to dine in the company of European women. That night he was taking her to eat hamo, a type of eel you could only get during the summer months.

  Takuya was one of Shigeko’s circle, like many of Ana’s clients. The first such introduction had come soon after she had moved in to the comfortable, large apartment not far from the college campus. Ana had answered Shigeko’s notice on a board: ‘Single Japanese woman seeks English-speaking flatmate.’ She turned out to be in her early thirties, with a pale oval face, prominent teeth and demure clothes. She did not ask for a lot of rent, although she did require key money of eighty thousand yen, up front. When Ana moved in, Shigeko made her feel welcome by inviting her along to drinks and dinners out. The first of these dinners was with a policeman named Akimoto. He was kind and unassuming, though Ana wasn’t sure why he would take them both to dinner. If he was dating Shigeko, why would he want Ana there? Perhaps it was just kindness to a student on a budget. Anyway, she ate the meal and swapped pleasantries. Afterward, Shigeko gave her a slim white envelope containing twenty thousand yen. A gift from Akimoto – ‘for textbooks’, she said. Ana tried to refuse the money, but Shigeko pressed it on her, smiling and saying, ‘Take it, it’s a gift, what’s wrong with keeping it?’

  Now, just after six, Ana sat at the café, toying with her iced coffee straw. Takuya showed up not long after wearing a blue basketball vest. His greeting came out oddly – ‘Thank you for your cooperation’ – but that was just his English. He always spoke to her in English, never in Japanese. As they walked toward Roppongi, he talked about business. ‘The Japanese food industry is very difficult now,’ he said. ‘I have to persuade foreign investors to look at Japanese businesses. Profitability is down. You have to work hard to make money.’

  Takuya’s steps were long and loping; Ana hurried to keep up. They passed the deep green glades of Arisugawa Park, the private hospital and expensive apartments where heady-smelling jasmine flowed from iron-lace balconies. When they reached Roppongi Hills, a newish entertainment quarter, there was at least a tepid breeze waving the pond-grass in the courtyard. Early for their restaurant booking, they rode the elevator up to the viewing deck. Ana knew she was supposed to marvel at the view, to make out like she hadn’t lived in Tokyo for years. But when they stepped out of the lift, she was genuinely staggered. The city stretched out in the dusk, a pastel metropolis. Dragonfly-like helicopters were sweeping the pink haze, and the roads were arteries of neon, pulsing and converging. As Takuya led her to the glass, she was filled with a sharp dismay. This was a vertigo not of height but a huge and lateral whirling. How completely the city effaced the earth, she thought. Then she recalled the earthquakes that were a constant in Japan, which showed the ground beneath the lights retained a violent will. She thought of Priya Vajpayee, whose company had been hit – a big tremor had taken out their semi-conductor factory – and felt a perverse relief at the land’s defiance.

  At the restaurant, she ate the eel, which was suitably exquisite. All the while Takuya spoke in his stilted English, saying of the wasabi, ‘Please do have some horseradish.’ At one point he declared, ‘I’m proud of Japanese food. But not of Japanese guy. Japanese guy is shy and ambiguous.’ Ana nodded politely; she was back on autopilot. Still she felt somehow offended by the vest he wore; a few sizes too big, it gaped under his arms. Thankfully he released her when they finished eating; he got involved in talking business with the proprietor. Outside, she looked for taxis. Then without warning someone grabbed her. It was a bouncer for the club next door. He gripped her shoulder and, as if playing a game, a game where you guessed the origins of passing women, shouted, ‘You! Ukrainian!’ and let out a harsh laugh. Wrenching free, she hailed a cab. It slid to a halt, wonderfully black. Its driver wore white gloves. God, she thought as they pulled away. She had seen the bouncer’s face, his grin as hard as his grip had been.

  *

  The next night, she phoned her parents while taking a walk. Her father, who picked up, asked about the weather, then said in his gravelly voice, ‘That’s one thing I don’t miss, Tokyo summers. And your mother’s asthma.’

  He had retired three years ago from his import-export job. Working for a company that dealt in commercial ovens and catering equipment, he was posted to Tokyo when Ana was in high school. He settled their family in a poky house in Chiba. Ana and her two brothe
rs soon made new friends and thrived, but their mother felt out of place and socially isolated. At the end of the three-year posting, the family had moved back home, while Ana stayed on for college.

  ‘Hold on. Your mother is saying something. She asks if you have a boyfriend.’

  ‘She always asks if I have a boyfriend.’

  ‘She worries you’ll settle down and stay in Tokyo. She also worries Estonia will be re-conquered by Danes.’

  ‘And you, are you worried?’

  ‘I am a fatalist, Ana. You’ll do as you will.’

  When she got off the call, she found she had reached the park. The air was velvety and soft, and she stopped to sit on a bench. She thought of boyfriends she’d had. Real boyfriends, not clients. She thought of Daisuke too, though he hadn’t been her boyfriend, only a friend. He knew what it was like to live in another country. He had done a high school exchange to Adelaide, Australia and endured racist jibes from neighbourhood boys. Yet this experience hadn’t soured him on the West. As an adult, he preferred coffee to green tea, and he read philosophers like Montesquieu and Bentham.

  Daisuke – where was he now? Probably still in Tokyo, working for some company. In college, he’d been impressed by Made In Japan, a book by Akio Morita, the founder of Sony Corporation. An account of Japan’s rise in the postwar period, it made him want to work to better his country. He also decided, as he told Ana, it would probably be best if he married a Japanese woman because of all the strictures of Japanese society. ‘It would be too difficult for her,’ he said, referring to a hypothetical non-Japanese wife. ‘It’s even difficult for us Japanese.’

  Some time after that, she had stopped seeing Daisuke. Not because of his marriage plans, but because she didn’t want him to know she was hostessing. It was a part of her life that she kept separate from college – a world of nice restaurants and bars, of Shigeko and her friends, of drinking parties that went on until the men were shiny-faced and had trouble sitting upright. At college she had boyfriends who were students like her. She slept with some of them, but the sex was awkward, experimental, like she was mimicking a desire she did not really feel.