The Best Australian Stories 2013

by Kim Scott

  Michiko shrugged, her yellow gumboots impossibly clean, impossibly juvenile in this room lined with fetid brown mud. ‘I don’t know – I am not with him. I see him through this. He does not think to come. He does not think to help. I think, I need a helpful man – I need a gentleman. I tell him this is how it is. Four years,’ she said. ‘Four years and it comes to this.’

  Four years. There was a bad taste somewhere at the back of Adam’s throat.

  She slipped out of his hug, squatting down amongst the ruin of her life. ‘My grandmother gave me this,’ a tiny teapot, made for a doll. ‘Kept safe through generations. I suppose, if this is here, if I can clean this, then there must be a way to keep going.’

  Adam crouched too: ‘We’ll do it together, Michiko. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ And she leaned against him again as Lucy arrived with a thermos and a clutch of inappropriately mud-coloured mugs.

  ‘They are clean, don’t worry,’ she said, laughing a little. And they stood, the three neighbours, drinking their first communal cup of tea. ‘Any sign of your cat?’ Michiko shook her head. ‘Tam and I used to wave at her as we went down the street,’ Lucy said then. ‘And once, she lifted her paw back, rested it on the glass, for all the world like she was waving back.’

  ‘She’d come,’ said Michiko quietly, putting down her mug and turning to Adam. ‘She’d come if you called. You were the only other person she trusted, the only other person she liked.’ She finished the tea, and passed Lucy her mug, scooping her hair back taut from her face and fixing it with an elastic band. ‘This is another reason to leave Robert – Sakura didn’t like him. He is not a gentleman, you see. I should try to find a gentleman to look after Sakura and me.’

  Staring straight ahead, the sound of his own pulse pounding at the inside of his skull, Adam nodded and chanced his hand on her arm, registering its warmth, its smoothness, the fine flax of her skin’s hairs. ‘She’ll come, Michiko. She’ll come back to us soon.’

  And they returned to the mud, shovelling it out through the doors, the windows, irrespective of the detritus of possessions embedded in its grip.

  ‘What will happen to this?’ Michiko asked presently. ‘What will happen to all this’ – her mouth moved a while, as if trying to shape the right word – ‘all this shit?’ Spat out in the end; it was probably the first time she’d ever sworn.

  It was Alex who answered. ‘We just need to get it all outside, and piled onto the gutters, as fast as we can, and before the mud dries. They’ll send bobcats then, bobcats and dump trucks – haul it all away for landfill, I expect. And at least your old house is fibro – we can hose it out when we’ve emptied it, and it’ll dry off right as rain. Sorry,’ he said, catching himself at the last word. ‘Not much “right” about that at the moment.’

  ‘Just pile it on the gutter?’ Michiko frowned. ‘No containers? No rubbish bins?’

  ‘You’d not get much into a wheelie bin, would you?’ said Lucy as gently, Adam suspected, as if Michiko had been the same age as her own little boy. ‘And most of the bins have washed away anyway. I heard on the news this morning that someone found a dead cat in one, stranded in the middle of their driveway – poor thing must’ve crawled in there to get away from the water and then … well …’ Blushing as she realised how inappropriate the story was.

  Adam dragged the shovel across the wooden floor, and saw he was making the shape of an asterisk, or a star, in the muck. ‘Probably enough of that,’ he said, glancing at Lucy and feeling masterful. ‘Let’s get on, like your husband said, before it dries.’

  They would call their child Mizuchi, for a water dragon, he thought, dragging the word in from some long-ago neighbourly exchange. After all, this flood would bring them together. And perhaps, after a while, after the pregnancy was done and the baby safely grown, he would get Michiko another cat.

  ‘Indigo,’ he’d say, ‘let’s call her Indigo.’

  Review of Australian Fiction

  The Eagle

  John Kinsella

  The school bus was a few minutes early, so he thought, I’ll just stand here by the side of the road and wait. But his mum had never before failed to be there, even when the bus was early. The bus driver had asked if he’d be okay, and the boy said, Yes, Mum must have been detained. She won’t be long. Detained. He was eight and used words like that. The bus driver was familiar with the boy and his family. He was the only passenger who spoke in such a – formal way. Okay, son, but don’t stand close to the edge of the road and just stay put until your mum turns up. I am sure she won’t be long. As the orange school bus pulled off, the boy felt a lump rise higher in his throat with each grinding gear change, and he fixed on schoolfellows waving sarcastically as it vanished further up the hill and around a curve, through the bush.

  For a moment he forgot his anxiety, if such a thing can truly be forgotten, and explored with his eyes. It looked different under these conditions of – freedom. A good feeling worked along with the bad. He considered the sheep in the paddock opposite; he searched the breakaway and bush for signs of roos, and watched magpies and small songbirds singing out their territories. The smallest birds puffed up, their song large and echoing through the valley. He loved the place and knew all the animals, but he found himself reaching out for his mother’s hand, and since it wasn’t there, pulled his hand back to his side and shrugged his shoulders, adjusting his backpack which was starting to sag and make his back ache. He crouched down to reduce the burden and began to study some red ants. Meat ants. He loved all ants.

  He counted a hundred and twenty-three ants in the vicinity of the ‘empire’ near the bus stop. There were other kids who occasionally caught the bus at this stop. They were usually driven the twenty ks into town by parents who worked at the bank or the school. But on the days when they did catch the bus, he grew distraught watching them stamp on the ants, stirring up a craze of defensive vengeance among the surviving soldiers. Stop! Stop! he’d cry, but the kids would just laugh. They were older than him. Sometimes his mother watching from the car on the opposite side of the road would call out, Kids, that’s mean. Leave those creatures alone. They’re not creatures, they’d reply, they’re just ants!

  Still no sign of Mum. He looked up to the bush and imagined the paddocks of home beyond. He could walk it, if he had to, he was sure he could. He would stay off the road, because it was harvest, and grain trucks thundered along. They were worst returning from the bins, when unladen, driven fast and carelessly, with trailers fishtailing on the gravel. He guessed at least ten minutes had passed, maybe longer. Something was wrong. Maybe Mum had had an accident and needed help. Dad was a long way away and wouldn’t know. He’d have to get home.

  He set off, walking in the drainage ditch with its odd broken beer bottle glinting in the sun, which even at this time of the afternoon was hot and damaging. He pulled at his hat, hitched his backpack, and moved three or four metres before stopping petrified, staring up ahead.

  It was one of the two great wedge-tailed eagles that patrolled the skies of this valley. He’d not seen either of them for ages, though he looked out for them every day. They were massive and magnificent. They soared in ever-widening spirals and then narrowed to a point before one of them dropped down to lift a monitor or a rabbit out of the bush or a paddock. They grew out of his earliest memories. But he’d never been this close to one. Maybe two or three times his height above and in front of him, hanging there, looking over the hook of its beak, black and brown feathers of its wings like hands, talons down and like knives. The boy had heard the stories of eagles taking lambs and his mum’s voice was in his ear, a voice from that morning, Did my little lamb enjoy his breakfast? Yes, Mum, it was exquisite. Exquisite. Well, I am glad to hear that, my darling. When Dad was away Mum always spoke to him like that. When Dad was away he was her little lamb.

  But he also remembered that Dad had told him farmers just said
that because they wanted the eagles killed, but eagles were protected. It’s true, he’d said, they do sometimes take newborn lambs, but not often, and not the big lambs. And these are rare, majestic creatures that look over all of us. Respect them, son, respect them. And the boy did. He was in awe.

  Yet now he was afraid, quickly calculating his size in relation to a lamb’s. What was the difference between a newborn lamb and a ‘fully grown lamb’? Was there any such thing as a fully grown lamb? He didn’t yet know the word for the puzzle he was considering, but he soon would. He would describe, ask and find out. This oxymoron had him transfixed between fear and wonder and his aloneness became something different.

  The eagle made a strange harsh-soft sound. He’d heard this before, though rarely and only faintly, at a distance. But so close it was like a sad and angry and curious cry all in one. The boy made the same sound back and the eagle, drifting there, repeated it, then slowly swept his wings and lifted away.

  The boy’s mother pulled up in the car, windows down, and called, My little lamb, I am so, so sorry I am late. Are you okay? Come on, jump in. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I am so sorry.

  The boy gathered himself, dropped his back from his shoulders, opened the back door, swung the bag in and followed it onto the seat. I was walking home, Mum, like you said I should do if you didn’t turn up. I would have got the spare key from under the rock and gone inside and rung Auntie.

  You’re a sensible boy. You’re my smart, sensible boy. There was an accident and the road was blocked on the other side of town. It was so upsetting. The policeman let me through in the end even though no one else was allowed through. I explained about my poor little lamb being left on the side of the road with no one to collect him.

  It’s okay, Mum. I waited then I started to walk. Just like you always told me to do.

  But you look distressed. Did anything happen?

  No, nothing at all, Mum. I am just tired. It was a hard day at school. Sorry, but I didn’t eat all my lunch.

  Well, I am not going to tell you off in the circumstances, but you know you’ve got to eat your lunch. You’ll get weak and sick. I suppose you took two bites and went straight to the library again?

  Yes, sorry, Mum. It won’t happen again. Really, it won’t.

  I believe you, my lamb. I want you to grow big and strong like your dad. Now, let’s get home and have some afternoon tea. Then you can play until dinner. I’ve got your favourite.

  The Warwick Review

  The Eulogy

  Eric Yoshiaki Dando

  One Blind Crone

  She painted until her eyes did not work anymore. She was very good at painting eyes and is remembered in the painting community for her eyes. The eyes in her paintings would meet your gaze and follow you around the room. It was creepy. I will always remember how drunk and stoned she was back then, with a glass of champagne in one crow claw and a brush in the other crow claw. She had a very strong grip for an old lady. She would grip my arm and tell me all the stuff I needed to know to survive in this town.

  ‘You are my blood relative,’ she would say. ‘I am you.’

  My Great Aunty Alien had always been a powerful lady from another planet. Even if you didn’t want anything to do with her she would still manage to have her way with you, she had that supernatural power over people. Even after she was dead she would reach out to you from beyond the grave and fuck your shit up.

  The Big Monkey Puzzle

  The funeral is being held in the old bluestone church opposite the other church. I ask my dad, ‘Is it the one with the pine tree?’

  Yes, but both churches have a pine tree of some kind. I think it is the one with the big monkey puzzle or bunya nut tree, but that church is made of sandstone, not bluestone. I don’t even know if bunya nuts and monkey puzzles are true pines and I am supposed to know everything about plants. They both look like some sort of pine. I admit that I do not really know anything about what I am supposed to know about.

  My Great Aunty Alien was very old when she died, and lived in the past. She was raised a certain way and just outlived anybody that thought the same way as her. Even my Great Uncle Oren was a baby when my Great Aunty Alien first made her name as a difficult person.

  Thousands and Thousands of Dead Cats

  Sometimes my father would leave me with my Great Uncle Oren for the weekend or for a week or two while he was away on holiday with a new wife or in the middle of a divorce with an old one.

  My Great Uncle Oren did not have a TV or a radio. He would tell me about the people he had killed and seen killed in the war. He told me what a dying man sounded like. ‘It’s not like it is in the movies,’ he said. He had taken photos while he was fighting. I found them when I was going through his stuff. Some of the people in the photos were only half dead. They were in the middle of dying when the photo was taken.

  He had a collection of mummified cats that he brought back from Egypt. I was allowed to play with them as long as I put them all back on the mantle. Some of the cats did not have heads. He was hanging on to them because he thought they might be worth a lot of money one day.

  Everybody was selling these cat mummies really cheap when he was in Egypt and he bought as many as he could carry home. He told me about all these stupid English scientists that had broken into a tomb in the hope of finding gold but only found thousands and thousands of mummified cats wrapped up in cloth like little mummies. Thousands of mummified cats stacked on top of each other for God knows what purpose. And the English scientists were angry because the cat mummies were not popular with the museums or with collectors of Egyptian artefacts. So most of them were ground up in an old mill and turned into fertiliser for English farmers. It was the only way the English scientists could make money out of those stupid cat mummies.

  They were ridiculed in the scientific world. They were haunted by those cats.

  Chinese Food

  My Great Uncle Oren was very critical of all of the Chinese people that had either moved into the area or had been in the area since before he was born.

  ‘Chinese people took all the gold,’ he said.

  He would not even eat Chinese food.

  The Last Crop

  The people around here have always been poor but very greedy. They no longer own the land their families grew potatoes on. It was all cut up into holiday houses and sold off long ago. You may have been promised a piece of it but it is long gone now.

  You should see this place on the weekend or a public holiday. There is nowhere to park your car. You need to be a fucking multimillionaire to buy the land your family once owned. It can make you sick if you think about it for long enough.

  Some of the people here are angry and hurt and disappointed. ‘If I owned that land now,’ they say to each other, ‘I would be rich. I would be happy now.’

  Just Like the Surface of the Moon

  The first thing you should know about my Great Aunty Alien is that she was from another planet. Nobody knows exactly where in the galaxy she was born. She may have been deposited here in some kind of interstellar meteor shower like in that book Day of the Triffids. She may have just materialised fully formed as a small precocious eight-year-old girl in the Victorian gold-mining town of Daylesford in the early thirties.

  I believe this to be true.

  Sub-terrain

  It is true that she did not have enough to eat when she was growing up in Daylesford, that she was a difficult troubled child, that the family moved around a lot to find work, that they all helped to grow potatoes and worked the family gold mine and did anything else they could to get food or earn money to buy food. They did not grow enough potatoes – they were always hungry for something else. They were good at finding things to eat in the Wombat Forest. They believed things tasted better when you didn’t have to pay for them.

  They did not have a bathr
oom. They lived in a little two-room shack on Bald Hill and planted potatoes on the top of it and dug great shafts through it looking for gold. But all of the gold had already been found. All around, in every direction, the earth had all already been dug. When my Great Aunty Alien was an eight-year-old girl, Daylesford still looked like the surface of the moon.

  Most of the trees were the same size as her but now just look how big they have grown.

  Crack a Fat

  I remember her telling me a story about a life model that had an erection and she made him lie on his stomach and just kept painting. He told her it hurt him to lie on his stomach because he was so hard. I think I was about eight years old when she told me this story.

  Personally, I would never dream of retelling this story to an eight-year-old child. It’s just not a good story to tell to a young child. They may still do it on other planets but they do not do it on this one anymore.

  A Perfect Circle

  Aunty Alien behaved like she owned the whole town. She would request my presence. I was like a little monkey butler that my parents delivered to her in a bag. They would drop me off at the gate, beep twice and then drive away in the Range Rover. They didn’t seem to notice me when I was home anyway.

  I may have been invisible.

  I spent a lot of time with her because she was unwell and needed an assistant. I would help her mix paints and clean up spills and make lunch and cook dinner and feed the cats. She let me have a corner of my own and gave me paper and clay and pencils. She taught me how to draw a perfect circle. She said that I had no natural talent and would never be good at ceramics. Would never make it as any sort of artist.