New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  All the heat in him suddenly rushes to his breastbone. Michael presses the side of his face to the carpet so he can see below the bed: dozens and dozens of white boxes are lined up like coffins after some terrible disaster.

  The watches, all of them, are meant to be in the display cases at the conference centre. Michael knows this because his father has been through every last detail with him, talking about it constantly since they got back from Melbourne. The conference centre is wound up tight as a prison, he explained: guards with guns on night patrol, complicated laser systems like James Bond, alarms that could deafen the whole city. There are a lot of security issues at a watch conference. His father’s watches would be behind bars for the whole week, unless they sold out in the first couple of days, ha ha ha.

  Michael doesn’t know what to do, so he turns off the lights and climbs back into the overheated embrace of the bed, clutching his swimming medallion in one hand. Above him hangs a heavy grey balloon holding all the things he isn’t supposed to know: the watches, the two hotel suites, his mother’s anxious hands.

  To distract himself he thinks of Henry, wiggling importantly through his perfect blue world, and what the girl at reception said about fish needing water to breathe. Squeezing his eyes shut, Michael pictures Henry lifted from the tank, the great grey goliath gasping and flipping and bashing itself senseless on the ground. Pulled from his aquarium, and left to drown.

  The Place Between

  JULIE GITTUS

  I shade my eyes and look towards the sun. Against the steep rise of the valley the plane has the dimensions of a toy, the type my brother used to make out of balsa wood and rubber bands.

  ‘Must be the aerial-mapping guys I heard about in town,’ Cohen says.

  He’s standing on the boulder above me, watching the plane zigzag across the creek line. I lay my sarong on the slab of rock above the water and sit down. The granite’s gritty texture needles through the cotton into my thighs, so I prop myself back on my elbows to redistribute my weight. It doesn’t help.

  ‘Look at me!’ shrieks Marigold.

  Cohen turns. Assured of her father’s attention, she does a running leap from the rise above the swimming hole, the rope clutched in her hands. Her skinny legs pedal the air until she gathers herself into stillness, then she plummets with her toes pointing downwards. The splash is minimal. She’s already looking towards Cohen when she surfaces. He gives her the thumbs up. Water streams off her skin as she hauls herself onto the ledge below us.

  ‘What’s the score?’ she calls up to him.

  Cohen was just telling me moments ago how since following the Olympics on her mother’s television Marigold has become obsessed with scores and comparisons. But he’s watching the approaching plane again and doesn’t answer.

  ‘Nine and a half,’ I call back.

  She makes no comment, just crouches in the dappled shade and begins sorting through a pile of river pebbles. I know my opinion doesn’t count. I’m a relative newcomer to the Farm plus I live on the opposite side of the valley. So far I haven’t had much to do with either Marigold or Cohen.

  The plane is close enough now for me to make out the wing struts and wheels, yet the noise isn’t as loud as I thought it would be. I cover myself with the edges of my sarong. The plane’s shadow slides over us, a dark cross. I watch disbelieving as Cohen waves upwards, a whole body wave that sets his cock swinging slightly.

  ‘What was that about?’ I ask.

  The sound of the engine recedes to a drone. He stares at the plane skimming over the rainforest towards the head of the valley.

  ‘Thought I’d give them the archetypal hippie performance.’ He turns to me smiling. ‘Something for them to have a laugh about over their beers tonight.’

  The missing front tooth, the full-on beard, the nakedness combine to make him look like a crazy man. Nothing like the dignified teacher who led the meditation retreat last Sunday. That was the first time I met him. Over the communal lunch he happened to mention how he always swam in the Turtle Head swimming hole. I’ve come every day since, hoping to see him again. He crosses his arms. I can feel my skin going tight in the sun.

  ‘You’re mottling pink across your shoulders,’ he tells me.

  He doesn’t mention that my breasts are also burning. I roll over so that I’m lying on my stomach.

  ‘Daddy, look! These tadpoles have got legs!’

  He doesn’t shout back, but instead seems to speak from somewhere deep in his chest.

  ‘Bring one up here for me then.’

  Her voice takes on a whining quality. ‘But they’re too hard to catch.’

  ‘You’ve got to be patient, sweetheart.’ His voice drops. ‘Wait till you and Felix have kids,’ he says to me. ‘It’s a tactic you learn. Saving your energy till it’s really needed.’

  I press my nose against my arm and breathe in the smell of the river trapped in my skin. The mention of Felix reminds me of the watering I have to do before dark. And because the pump broke down yesterday, it’s going to take hours. I count out the days in my head till Felix is back from his trip to Fraser Island — eleven.

  When I told Cohen earlier about Felix being away for a month, he laughed.

  ‘Sounds like the we need some space number that couples go through after arriving here. The one-year itch, we call it on the Farm.’

  I blushed then at the way he’d so succinctly nailed those earnest conversations between Felix and me over the last few months.

  That afternoon in town I learn how the light plane that zigzagged across the valley wasn’t an aerial-mapping company at all, but the police searching for dope crops. The laundromat is alive with talk about the paddy wagons now blocking the valley road.

  ‘You should have seen the cops swarming over the Farm!’ says a woman I’ve never seen before.

  I turn away and watch my doona somersaulting over itself. The rest of her words are swallowed by the hiss of plastic as the laundry attendant bags up wet clothes. Before Felix left for Fraser Island he estimated our crop had a street value close to four thousand dollars. Almost enough to build a one-room shack. But now the notion of another wet season in a leaky army tent seems a vague inconvenience when I think of what I might be facing when I drive home. The waiting police. The escorted trip to the station where the charges will be laid. There’ll probably be a court conviction, even a jail term. And then I think of Cohen with his zero-tolerance stance about growing on the Farm; what he will say when he finds out.

  The dryer stops. I plunge my hands into the folds of hot cotton, trying to find comfort in the warmth.

  I sit out the raid in the Rainbow Café, not leaving for home until after dark. When I turn off the valley road towards the Farm, the moon edges over the range, a saffron-coloured moon that’s more magnificent than any sun. I creep the station wagon in first gear through the hairpin bends. The tyres wallow in the slush of gravel. It seems obvious now that the raid was planned to coincide with a full moon: that way, the police can nab those of us who thought it safe to return. I imagine a whole squad of police cars positioned at the Farm gate, the officers flagging me down. I see it clearly in my mind: the policeman gripping the roof above my window as he peers inside, the smell of his perspiration embedded in his nylon shirt. No, officer, I don’t live here. I’m only visiting from Victoria. I feel absurdly pleased how the details on my driver’s licence, which I haven’t got around to changing since Felix and I shifted up this way, will support my story — despite the fact that lying is in breach of the Farm precept number four. Then I will point to the plastic bag in the back. I’ve been to the laundromat in town. I will smile again, comment on the beautiful night, the whole time conscious of the gun slung low on his hip. But then what?

  The moon is poised above the mountains now, illuminating the valley with a light so strong I can see the barbs on the fence wire, even the mesh of a spider’s web slung between branches. From here lantana smothers the undulations of the old dairy paddocks in brambles, t
he perfect camouflage for growing dope.

  It was only September when I watched Felix place damp cotton wool balls into matchboxes. Like a miniature hospital, I said. He didn’t comment. For days the rain had fallen in silvery veils, the run-off trickling across the kitchen’s dirt floor close to our bare feet. I understood what he was doing when he began plucking individual seeds from a foil packet with tweezers, but I chose not to say anything. One seed per matchbox that he stored in our tin Coolgardie safe, away from the rats.

  I remember his excitement when every seed sprouted; the delicacy of his movements as he transferred the tiny plants into separate pots, which he lavished with fertiliser and spring water. After planting them out he led me down the path to the creek, challenging me to find the entrance in the lantana thicket or a sign of cultivation, but I couldn’t see anything.

  As the road loops down towards the Farm gate, my heart begins to trill like a dawn-crazed bird. I force myself to focus on my breathing, the way Cohen instructed at the meditation session last weekend. Pranic breathing, he called it. Inhale the breath through the right nostril, pause and be present in the place between coming and going, the bridge between worlds, then exhale slowly through the left nostril. Now inhale through the left nostril … I can hear Cohen’s voice; feel the calm spaciousness of the meditation room. I can almost see his straight back, the perfect placement of his buttocks on the orange cushion up on the dais. My pulse begins to settle.

  I ease the station wagon around the council grader jammed on an angle against a bank of lantana. The shovel is poised in the air like a prehistoric creature about to pounce. The mounds of gravel peter out. Now the road is thin and hard, the centre covered with bony corrugations. The steering wheel shudders in my hands, and as I round the final bend, I lean forward and peer through the windscreen, waiting for the police cars to come into view.

  But nothing.

  The parking space beneath the white gum trees has the familiar utes and battered Volvos. The Farm gate is shut, the chain and padlock intact. I switch off the engine and wind down the window. The air is thick with the smell of soil and moist leaves. Behind the silence is the distant rustle of the creek over the stones. Now a mopoke: hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo. There’s the faint twinkle of lights high on the ridge, the hamlet where Cohen lives. I think of the things I have to do down at the campsite: the bed that needs re-making, the lamp that needs filling. Maybe I should chop some wood and light a fire to keep the silence at bay. But I don’t move, I just sit there staring at the gleam of moonlight on the cyclone mesh gate.

  As soon as I step into the clearing above the campsite, I know that someone has been here. Not police though. The scene before me is too orderly, too calm to have been raided. I roll the laundry bag to my other shoulder, trying to discern what’s different. I notice the guy ropes first, the way they’ve been tightened so the old tent doesn’t sag any more. Now the stack of chopped kindling, pale in the moonlight beside the blackened stones of the fireplace. I pick my way down the steps that Felix cut into the slope and dump the laundry bag in the tin shack we use as a kitchen.

  The lamp has been filled with kerosene, and there’s a new box of matches beside the gas stove. I lift the glass flue off the lamp and strike a match. I don’t dare guess who the visitor was, in case I’m disappointed. The dirty bowls I left piled in the sink are now clean and upright in the dish rack. They’ve been arranged in a funny way — facing the back instead of the front so that they look like the roofs of the Opera House.

  The piece of paper is on the bench beside the Coolgardie safe, anchored by a jar of lantana flowers.

  Picnic at the Turtle Head around midday tomorrow? Just bring yourself. Cohen.

  Below the words is a drawing of a mandala.

  Over in the army tent I unpack the washing bag slowly, savouring the pockets of warmth, the sweet clean-laundry smell. I tuck the corners of the fresh sheets under the double mattress with careful deliberation. Bush rats scamper on the canvas overhead, but they don’t worry me tonight. The thought of the note sets up a humming sensation inside my chest. I stretch out the time by re-folding clean T-shirts as I plan tomorrow’s schedule; how I’ll do the watering in the morning so I’ll be free to spend the afternoon with Cohen. Just for a moment I think about ripping up the plants at dawn, dumping them in the old mineshaft near the creek, but it doesn’t feel right to destroy the crop, to leave Felix with nothing.

  As I fling the doona over the mattress, my shadow billows upwards on the tent wall. I’m startled by the way it completely fills the space.

  Static

  CATE KENNEDY

  ‘Anthony,’ says his mother, ‘what’s this we’re drinking?’

  He’d known this was going to happen, the minute Marie showed him the punch recipe.

  ‘You know they’re hyper-conservative,’ he’d said. She’d rolled her eyes, put a post-it note reminder on the recipe page and added it to her list.

  ‘For crying out loud, what’s not to like about melon ginger punch?’ she’d muttered. The glossy magazine bristled with post-it notes, annotated painstakingly by Marie with dozens of clever and simple Christmas lunch suggestions for people with more to do than slave over a hot stove, et cetera.

  Now his mother pokes at a perfectly spherical melon ball in her drink, and looks at him like it was a floating dead mouse.

  ‘It’s punch,’ Anthony says, smiling hard.

  ‘Just something cool and refreshing,’ adds Marie. Anthony’s father, Frank, puts his down and pulls himself off the lounge chair.

  ‘How about a beer, son?’

  ‘Sure, if that’s what you’re after.’

  Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds.

  In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

  Then both of them, his mother and Marie, turning the Evil Rays onto him, as if the whole thing is his idea, his fault, when all he’s done is get out his credit card to pay for the whole bloody shebang: the punch and the Peruvian glass punchbowl it’s in and the gourmet chestnut stuffing mix in the organic free-range turkey out there, rolled and boned for easy slicing — Anthony knows exactly how it feels — and the sighing, put-upon lounge suite still on the interest-free-nothing-more-to-pay-for-ten-months plan, which Marie is already obsessing is the wrong shade of taupe. Are there actually different shades of taupe? It’s news to Anthony. Hell would be like that, he thinks, gulping punch. It would be shades of taupe that drove you screaming into eternal torment, not the flames.

  ‘Let’s open the presents,’ he suggests.

  ‘But the children haven’t even arrived,’ says his mother.

  ‘I meant just ours,’ he answers feebly. True, for a few seconds there, he had forgotten the children were coming. The Children. His sister’s offspring, always referred to in capitals, who would dominate the day. It wasn’t the kids’ fault — they’d be desperate to escape into the study as soon as they could to play with the Wii he’d bought them, the poor little buggers. No, they would be used, The Children, as deflector shields against the Evil Rays, as ammunition against the day’s parries and thrusts of emotional blackmail. Hannah and Tom. They’d have to be twelve and ten now.

  Marie hadn’t even wanted them to come; she’d made a big fuss about having to plan a special menu for them and how they’d turn the house upside down, but Anthony, ducking his chin and ploughing through a veritable snowstorm of Evil Rays, insisted that if they were going to have a family Christmas, his sister and her husband and kids had to be there, or his parents wouldn’t show up.

  ‘I don’t care if we have KFC,’ he’d finally said, gesturing to the pile of magazines hawking sun
shine and patios and people in uncrushed white linen shirts. ‘If we’ve agreed to do it, they have to come.’ And Marie had slammed off into the study to channel her fury into pumping six kilometres out of the exercise bike. You could bounce a coin off her calf muscles, if you were game to try.

  Rays, rays. One drills into the back of his skull as he leaves the kitchen, another counter-attacks with a punch square in the solar plexus as he carries in a platter of smoked-salmon blinis. Marie’s doused them with chopped dill, and his mother looks at them like they’ve been sprayed with grass clippings from the mower. She can get every secret weapon into those rays — contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

  ‘Pikelets, eh?’ says his father, eyes swivelling back to the one-day match, luridly coloured on the plasma screen. ‘Well, well.’ He folds one into his mouth to keep the peace while his mother refuses, mouth like a safety pin. Vol-au-vents, that’s his mother’s style. Cheese straws and a sherry.

  Anthony starts eating the things so that when Marie comes back it will look like they’ve been a success. He’s got four in his mouth when a stray caper lodges itself in his throat and forces him to cough a spray of ricotta and dill and masticated pancake into a Christmas napkin. For a second he’s terrified he might actually throw up, and wouldn’t that be a wonderful start to the day, but he swallows down a mouthful of punch and his stomach settles.

  Where’s Marie? If there’s one thing those magazines kept promising, it was that even though you were a hostess you wouldn’t need to be tied to the kitchen all morning; with your new fresh and fun easy-peasy celebration menu you’d be relaxing with those you loved on this special day.

  He can’t go back out to the kitchen yet. It wouldn’t look right. ‘Who’s winning, Dad?’ he says.

  ‘The Pakis.’

  On the screen the tiny bright figures move as if they’re underwater. Bowl and deflect. Go back, wait, run up slowly, bowl and … block. Christ, it’s like watching paint dry.