New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  ‘Without knowing whether or not they exist?’ I considered this for a few seconds. ‘That’s kind of nice.’

  ‘No. Anyway they did exist.’ She emphasised the word as if, lacking substance, it didn’t fit. ‘But then they died anyway.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, my mouth tightening to prefigure a little smile. ‘It’s a nice idea.’

  There was a period of silence in which, I thought, we seemed almost to be analysing each other’s willingness to let that silence continue. We didn’t always see things the same way, Jess and I, which could result in some disjointed conversations. She’d just ignore some of the things I said, or else wait quietly until I returned to good sense.

  ‘Sorry,’ I started to say, or had decided to say, but she spoke at the same time.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, taking a deep breath, composing herself, ‘so I’m coming home tomorrow. I’ll email flight details.’

  ‘Right. Well, that’ll be good.’

  Then she asked if I was okay. I sounded weird, she said. There was a hint of maternal reserve in her tone.

  I looked up at the patterned, pressed-tin ceiling and recited from memory: ‘Such, as I was before, I’m now left to be: reckless, susceptible.’ She didn’t respond. ‘Aleksandr Pushkin,’ I explained. ‘Eighteen twenty-six.’ Then I noticed the wooden carving beside the sink. ‘Hey, did you send this fucking wooden thing?’

  ‘… think it was?’ was all I heard. I squinted as if to put right the squalling connection. ‘… like it?’

  ‘It’s fucking grotesque,’ I said.

  She laughed, I think, then said, ‘It’s the likeness of some animal they found up in the mountains or something. A few months ago. A bad omen, they reckon. Part human, part something else, totally hairless. Supposedly they’ve got it in a cage somewhere.’

  I sat up a little. The bathroom light, coalescing with the steam, seemed to take on some physical properties. So, I found myself thinking, they finally found the island. I shook that thought from my head, then asked: ‘Why did you send me a bad omen?’

  ‘It isn’t actually a bad omen,’ Jess said. ‘… tourists. It’s fun.’

  The interference grew louder, now containing a thin continuous whine, finally culminating in silence.

  Later I walked around the house mindlessly collecting bottle caps and pieces of scrap paper, pausing to scrutinise some trivial thing: the pair of dusty old pedestal fans by the front door, for instance. Even the slightest details seemed to suggest some fearsome consequence of my existence. I’d acquired a thoroughgoing fear of terminal illness. I opened all of the doors and windows, wanting fresh air.

  The days had all been the same. I seldom left the house. I’d gotten into the habit of reading and writing until the early hours of the morning, or later, then cooking some noodles and falling asleep, drunk, in front of an old film. Jess had only called a few times. Once to tell me she’d made some friends, another time shouting and slurring and urging me to listen while she sang karaoke. I heard male voices in the background.

  I resented her for leaving me alone for so long.

  I sat down to reread my work from the night before. I lit a cigarette. I made some notes in the margins but couldn’t concentrate, eventually deciding to walk to the pub for a meal.

  The air was cool. I took a long coat from the wooden hatstand by the door and set out, imagining myself as some Russian. Our street was lined on both sides by tall peppermint trees which almost joined above the middle of the road to form a remarkable canopy, and all of it was glowing deep pink with the beginnings of sunset. The sky seemed like a great, stitched wound.

  The bar was quiet. I ordered a bottle of house wine and a basket of bread. I stayed there reading for several hours.

  As I was finishing the last glass of wine a woman approached my table, offering to buy a round of drinks. I accepted without thinking. Trying to picture her now I can only conjure an impression of sorts, something near formless and shifting in the half-light; first convulsing with garish laughter, next pressing up against me, smelling stale.

  We talked for a while, and she kept buying the drinks. When the bar closed I invited her back to the house and poured us both some whisky.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked. At the end of each sentence she addressed me as darl. Her eyes, I noticed, were small and dark and alert.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said, affecting total self-confidence, handing her a glass. ‘A writer and a doctorate student.’

  Her reply was basically unintelligible.

  ‘You have an accent,’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘American by birth.’ She turned the glass in her hand, looking into it for her responses. ‘Manhattan,’ she added. ‘Ever been?’ I said that I had. ‘Weird island,’ she said, which I thought was a dull assessment. Still, I nodded.

  ‘Surreal,’ I said. We stood quietly in agreement.

  In fact, Jess and I had visited Manhattan only a few months before. We rented a place in SoHo. We walked the streets, interpreting. Banks of blackened snow, frozen solid, lined the sidewalks like geological formations. Christmas trees, out with the trash and wrapped in black plastic, were mob victims. The yellow cabs, I said, were herd animals at a standstill and honking as if to gauge one another’s position, or just to declare their being. One day, outside the Museum of Natural History, there was a spooked horse running uptown through the traffic. It came into sight — at first a monstrous, changeable thing — two blocks away, seemingly fashioned from the commotion surrounding it. It got to within a few metres of us. What might have been fear shone from its eyes as purpose, and Jess, I remember, was remarking upon its beauty just as one of its legs buckled and the poor creature skidded a short distance, all limbs, attempting recovery, then collapsed in front of us, making a terrible sound unique even to that city. At length a police officer covered the animal’s trembling head and shot it. He straightened up, the officer, apparently having mistaken necessity for heroism, and searched our faces for appreciation. Impossibly hungover, I vomited in the snow. That evening was the first time Jess mentioned my drinking.

  The American woman — I never got her name — kept making advances, and finally I let her stay, more out of interest than anything else. Her skin was mottled, brown and hairless. Unwrinkled but spongy. When we kissed, her lips were dry and, I realised, slightly asymmetrical. A faint scar ran between her upper lip and her nose. She had long bleached-blonde hair and fake, stone-firm breasts.

  More than once her manner struck me as inconsistent. Her generally dizzy, flirtatious bearing was prone to frank interjections. At one point she was straddling me, keeping her eyes closed and making small, breathy sounds. Then, as if startled, she halted, looked at me and — newly lucid, her voice an octave lower — said: ‘No anal.’

  I repeated those words in my head until they lost their import, then their intonation, and soon I was certain she’d said, and was maybe still saying, as the room spun: ‘I’m real.’

  Afterwards we lay on top of the bedspread in silence. She was on her side with her left arm in an angular figuration, her open hand supporting her head. I was tracing her curves with my index finger, more brooding than affectionate, watching ripples of skin swell, roll and level out.

  The windows were still open. The room was incredibly cold.

  The best thing to do, I thought, would be to call James. I drank the last of the whisky and went into the bathroom to find the phone.

  James is married. He lives on the other side of the country with his wife and two children. I realised when he answered that it was well after midnight.

  ‘I just worked out how late it is, man,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I can call back.’

  ‘Drew?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, sorry man. I didn’t want to wake you. I didn’t want …’

  ‘What do you want?’ He was clearing his throat a lot.

  ‘If you have a second. Just, like, one minute.’ My mouth felt inordinately small. My tongue was mostly unrespo
nsive to commands. James was waiting for me to speak. ‘I thought you’d want to know,’ I managed to say, ‘that your animals have come to life. Or they’ve been discovered. Or whatever.’

  ‘Drew,’ he said, more loudly, in rebuke, ‘what the fuck?’ I thought I heard his wife say something in the background.

  ‘The mural,’ I said, feeling at my jaw as if to recalibrate it. ‘That you painted on my ceiling. The animals are fucking alive man. At least one of them is here. Two maybe.’ He didn’t answer. I lost balance, then steadied myself against the wall. My hands were trembling. ‘Is it cold where you are?’ I asked. I could hear him breathing. I was seized by this fear that I’d disappointed him. ‘All right, forget that. I’m sorry, man. But one … another thing.’ I suppressed a hiccup, unsubtly. ‘Is it possible that you don’t like Jess? Like, you can just say it. You know what you think means a lot. More than you know.’ I paused, then added: ‘I can get rid of her.’

  There was no response. James had hung up. I dropped the phone and sat down on the cold tiles, listening to the steady hum of the retractor fan, shivering uncontrollably.

  At one point I heard the front door close. A while later I got up to make some coffee. I spent the rest of the night trying to tidy, reciting poetry to the empty house.

  Sometime around dawn I drove Jess’s car to the airport. I had no idea what time her flight was getting in, so I just found a seat in the arrivals lounge and tried to read. The west-facing wall was composed entirely of windows. I watched the planes as they negotiated the sky with what seemed an impossible weightlessness, and I waited, unable to shake the idea that the sunrise was some kind of celestial wreckage.

  Birdsong

  MYFANWY JONES

  When he should be turning sausages with the others, patting backs, he is instead in the rented shed at the back of the rented garden in Lalor with a six-pack. He won’t be going anywhere today.

  One of the slat windows is rusted open, but he shuts out urban birdsong with country music. He still can’t listen to the birds, cannot tolerate their high-pitched hopeful calls. They don’t sing of wildfire; of death and devastation, homelessness and starvation. It’s not in their repertoire. He can’t listen but at the same time he misses them, with an ache that feels strangely like unrequited love, as if his joy in them will forever now be out of reach. He turns up the volume on Adam Brand and cracks open the first can.

  This reminds him of playing truant as a boy in short pants: the thrill of taking off up the bluestone alley near the school at the final lunch bell. I’m outta here! Just try and stop me! It was an eleven-year-old fuck you to the world. All too soon, the buzz would wear off and the fear would set in, and he’d spend the stolen afternoon loitering in the back streets with a bag of mixed lollies, scared and bored and lonely. But it didn’t stop him from doing it again, anything for that first rush, and probably, too, he half hoped he’d be caught, get the strap and some of his mother’s attention. Would you just stop me already?

  The light in here is bad, so he sets up the two long-necked lamps, one at either side of the workbench. They glow hot and yellow. He takes down a small square of sandpaper from the shelf and starts working on the latest piece, rubbing away at the wood in a gentle, circular movement. It’s small, this piece; fits neatly into the palm of his left hand. This one’s his favourite so far. Leigh calls this his therapy and says at least it’s cheap, though she is set on a holiday when the money comes through. Somewhere like Bali with lots of water and sand and not too many trees, all blue and yellow and noncombustible.

  It’s just gone midday. The shed is warming up. Today they are predicting low thirties, barely a flutter of wind.

  He drinks and sands, keeping time with the music. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Leigh moving about in the garden. She planted a vegie patch before Christmas, but he’ll have nothing to do with it. This is not home, these flat grey streets with their piddling nature strips. Leigh is trying to build herself a new nest, but he is dreaming, every night, of running away. Through the burning trees. The rushing, roaring heat. But to where?

  They say the more sedentary birds are always the hardest hit — the thornbills and scrubwrens, treecreepers and lyrebirds. The cockatoos, the honeyeaters, they can sometimes outfly the flames.

  He puts the sandpaper down and scrutinises the piece, turning it over and over in his hand. Then he takes up a knife and starts whittling again. There is something not quite right with the head.

  Leigh is coming up the path. He opens another beer.

  ‘Won’t you come out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ve had their minute of silence.’

  ‘Good on ’em.’

  ‘We could go for a drive. Just you and me.’

  ‘Gotta finish this.’ He holds up the piece in his hand, but she is staring at the corner of the shed, at the heap of salvaged, blackened timber, his raw material. It smells of wood and smoke in here.

  She is frowning, her two worry lines just like her mother’s, crooked and deep. ‘People are ringing in on the radio, you know, praising the CFA.’

  He doesn’t say anything. He reaches to turn the music louder. When he turns back she is already walking up to the house.

  He wouldn’t switch the radio on today if you paid him a year’s salary. He will not watch the TV, or listen to the latest from the Commission. He will not light a candle, or talk about it, or observe a minute of fucking silence. All this pantomime is for the pollies and for the people who weren’t there but who bang on nonetheless about the indelible scar and the great Australian spirit. They turn up at funerals, in their suits, standing up the back, putting their arms around grieving families, uninvited. They are the kestrels and kookaburras that move in after wildfire to exploit the open canopy, all the dead and injured animals.

  He drinks, and takes up the sandpaper again. This is the best part, the smoothing out. He folds the paper to make a cone, uses the point to get into the crevices. He is nearly finished. This one is definitely his favourite. He looks at the others, lined up on the narrow shelf between the rusty jars of screws and nails. They look back at him with their charcoal faces of red gum and yellow box and mountain ash. One year today. He moans, a low growling moan like a dog’s.

  Sometimes he thinks if he could just get back there and rebuild it would be all right. It’s the transience that’s hard. Then in the early hours of the mornings when he can’t sleep, he makes very different promises to himself, to still his heart: that he will never return; that he won’t ever, again, be caught out like that. And so he goes, back and forth, like a tennis ball, with the rubber underneath beginning to show. He has fallen behind at work. Leigh’s patience is running out. No one complains — to his face.

  He drinks. The music in here is much too loud. Would you just stop me already? Please?

  He is soaked in sweat. The piece is finished. He turns off the lamps, and the music player, and the tears, for once, stream silently down his face.

  Pulling the shed door closed behind him, he walks up the garden path, past the vegie patch with its neat little rows, and the lorikeets and house sparrows, raucous in the almond tree and still, somehow, sounding like lost love.

  ‘Leigh?’ he calls out.

  ‘In here.’

  She is ironing in the living room, with the radio on. He walks over and flicks it off, then hands her the wooden bird, perfect, with its small, beautifully rounded head, its wings outstretched in flight, burned black.

  She bursts into tears. He holds her. ‘Shall we go for that drive?’

  And as they head north-east on the back roads towards Strathewen, where the boys will be drinking beer on the oval by now and the women cleaning up, he thinks of the five lyrebirds that were found in a sheltered gully just after the fires, far from their natural habitat; huddled together, alive.

  How My Father Dies in the End

  PATRICK CULLEN

  My father didn’t die the night he left my mother and me alone in our
house on the outskirts of town. No, he did not die then. Instead, he left my mother for a woman he’d met in the office where he worked. It was his job to watch over the hours kept by construction workers; it was not his job to reluctantly dole out their wages as though they came from his own pocket, but it’s said that that’s how he did it. Like my father, the woman — the daughter of the man who owned the construction business — was married at the time. But maybe she was more inclined to leave her own marriage because it was without children and the pleasure they are supposed to bring.

  What happened — all that really happened — was that after he left I lay in the darkness of my room, wondering if it was not something between my father and the other woman, or between my father and my mother but, instead, something between my father and me.

  He may have left that night but he did not die, not then.

  He died a week later, the day of my tenth birthday. At the urging of my mother — ‘Whatever you want!’ — I had made my birthday wish and I imagined that she’d be as pleased as I was if my wish — the return of my father — was granted.

  But that morning, I crept down the hall and found my mother alone and weeping in her bed. I knew that the day I faced at school was one of awkwardness, and that the awkwardness would follow me after school and into a party with friends who would already know — just a week later — that I was from a ‘broken’ home and — even at the ages of nine and ten themselves — know that it meant something. Something big and insufferable.

  Rather than suffer the likely day ahead, I feigned illness: stomach cramps, intense but widespread; something hard to pin down, and less pointed than the hint of appendicitis. My mother had to work that day, and I knew that there was no one on whom she could call to care for me. The greatest suffering, for both of us, was those few seconds she hovered beside my bed, that awful expression on her face as she weighed up what she would lose — or if she would even gain something — by not going to work. And my greatest joy was when she drove away; I’d never felt better. She left me with more space and silence and solitude than I had ever known. I wandered around the house, entering rooms as though for the first time. The newness of things was fixed in those moments and in those same moments disappearing, because as I left each room I felt that I would never return.