The Best Australian Stories 2016

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The Best Australian Stories 2016 Page 2

by Charlotte Wood


  One lunchtime Katie and her friends came over to where I was sitting alone under the windows of the History rooms, in the loose shade of a eucalyptus. I was reading, or pretending to, as the group of girls grew closer, larger. It was only four weeks until our formal, and then the exams two weeks after that. There was a feeling of permissiveness, a relaxing of boundaries, the air already sick with heat and cicadas.

  ‘Jonathan likes you,’ said Katie. The girls fanned out behind her as though she had spread wings.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Jonathan and Katie had something to do with each other. I thought perhaps they were cousins. You saw them walking home together sometimes, or dropped off in the same car. They had the same look of privilege, clear of skin and bright of eye.

  ‘Come to my house this afternoon,’ said Katie.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Have to tell you something.’ Not for a second did it occur to her that I might say no. It didn’t occur to me either.

  *

  Katie led me down her driveway, which was so steep it would have been suicide to run, though the angle made it nearly impossible not to. The house was sandstone, two storeys, with ivy growing across it. There was a keypad at the door; she pressed in four numbers and the door unclicked. Katie pushed it open and showed me where to take off my shoes, which was something I had never had to do in any other house. The air was perfumed. We walked into an enormous kitchen with wide white benches and a TV, which was switched on with the sound down. At the bench, sitting on a stool and reading the newspaper, was Katie’s father.

  He was a TV newsreader. I had not thought to see him here, when all the other fathers were at work. He looked up at us and smiled. He was older than all the other fathers too, with his new hair stitched neatly across his forehead, and those square glasses. He was wearing a richly patterned dressing-gown made of silk, tied around his waist, a few hairs from his chest sprouting from the opening. He looked like his own ailing twin: face and body a little smaller, more withered than those of the man on TV. His white-toothed smile was knowing, as though he had seen many people reading him the way I was.

  Katie did not introduce me, but took a carton of chocolate milk from the fridge. I followed her down the stairs to her bedroom, which was big and light, and which also had a television and a record player. I had been here once before, at the party when Judy had drunk half a bottle of tequila, and I had disgraced myself with Raffaello. Back then I hadn’t noticed how big the room was; in fact, it had seemed small, hot and oppressive, with all the girls standing at the door and Judy weeping and moaning on the bed. There were tall windows looking onto the river, and there was the swimming pool and the jetty and the yacht.

  ‘Jonathan wants you to ask him to the formal,’ said Katie. She put the carton of chocolate milk down on the dressing table, which had a mirror and little crowds of lipsticks and nail polish bottles, like tiny people at a party.

  ‘He can’t come. He’s not in Year 12.’ I looked around for somewhere to sit and chose the bed, which was bigger than last time, and which shifted and gurgled.

  ‘He can if someone in Year 12 asks him.’ Katie leaned in to look at herself. She was wearing her long hair in a side ponytail. She fixed her fingers around the elastic that held it in place and drew it out in one long movement, shaking the thick caramel waves around her shoulders. There were pale, creamy hairs among the caramel, repeated in the lovely arches of her eyebrows. It did seem somehow moral. As though she deserved to look this way.

  I had once thought I might ask Judy to our formal, which was not generally done, but would be understood in the context of me being an outcast, practically a lesbian, and Judy being exiled from our school. Nobody liked Judy, with her big fat bosoms and big fat bum and her way of blushing so hard that she was hot to the touch, but she was a part of the bigger story of our year, and if she had come as my partner to the formal it might have made sense.

  ‘As long as I don’t have to go out with him,’ I said, and Katie shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. I didn’t promise him that.’

  There was the sound of someone at the door – church bells through the house – and, I realised, a shower running somewhere. Katie stood still, listening. ‘I’m not getting it!’ she bawled suddenly. And then the sound of her father shouting something from the shower.

  ‘Fuck.’ She left the room and ran up the stairs, thumping on each step. After a second I got up, the waterbed rocking behind me, and followed her. She pulled the front door open to a blonde woman who I thought must be her mother, but this woman kept her handbag over her shoulder instead of putting it on the hall table, and gave Katie a smile that seemed to want to placate.

  She smiled at me, too, as she passed me on the stairs. She had a Lady Di haircut and a pale blue suit with padded shoulders. It looked right and even enviable at the time, but now, in my mind’s eye, it is as though every woman over eighteen was dressing for a meeting, a meeting in which she was the soft-voiced but iron-willed head of a baby powder company. My father’s wife dressed like this, or had the last time I’d seen her.

  And then the rushing of the shower as the downstairs bathroom door was pulled open, the voice of Katie’s father, the sound muffled as the door was closed on them both.

  I stood there at the top of the stairs, waiting. I hoped that Katie might explain what was happening. If she told me something secret I would immediately be stronger. She knew this, and pointed at my bag and my shoes where they lay in the hall.

  ‘Jonathan’s waiting for you,’ she said. ‘He’ll walk you back across the bridge.’

  She opened the door again and there was Jonathan, grinning expectantly.

  I didn’t need anyone to ‘walk me across the bridge’. When we reached it, down the long sandstone steps that ran through the bush past Katie’s house, I told Jonathan I would go with him to the formal and he clapped his hands together for joy, and then shook his fists at the sky. Then he folded me into his long arms and kissed me all over my face, and then he let me walk away, on my own, with a little push on my behind. He appeared to be playing a part, although it swung between the triumphant young lover and the much older man, experienced in the ways of women. I turned back to see him watching me, and he shook his fist again, as though cheering me on. I turned away, face into the salty river breeze.

  When I looked again he had gone, back up the stone steps. I leaned on the rails and stared down at the water. It was high tide. You could have jumped from the girders safely. The boys from the big Catholic school were rowing. From this distance I could not make their faces out. Now I would not have to go to the formal with Andrew Johnson.

  *

  I still loved Raffaello for himself. But I also loved him for what Katie had made him. She was not meant to be at our school; it was a mistake. She should have been with other girls who looked like her, wearing the knee-length tunic of one of the eastern suburbs private schools, and a hat with a ribbon. Instead she was stuck with the ugly variety of us. She wore our uniform just below the line of her underpants, like all the other tough girls, but her velvety skin and silver necklace made her privilege clear. When you stood close to her you could see those fine pearly hairs on her brown arms, and each eyelash as black as ink against her cornflower eyes.

  Next to her Raffaello looked like something grand, or ancient, despite or perhaps because of the acne and the new thickness in his face and body. The things they did together, like going to restaurants, even the theatre, were beyond anything I could imagine. The things they did to each other were the same. It seems odd now that we all knew Raffaello had lost his virginity to Katie, and odder still that he was not teased or harassed for it. There was a sort of reverence around his goodness, his pure Italianness. His mother loved him, it was easy to see. I heard that now he’d started he could not stop. It was said they had sex in the toilets, behind the weathersheds, in one of the science labs. I would have made do with lying privately in the grass somewhere with the sky sailing above us,
faces close together, hands entwined. I knew everything I needed to know about sex except how it happened, how you came to be close enough, and willing enough, to make that absurd next move.

  *

  I wasn’t able to get away with just the formal, as it turned out. Jonathan wanted me to go to his house the following Saturday. My mother accepted his invitation for me because I would not come to the phone when she called.

  It seemed impossible that I had to go there on the weekend, the only time that belonged to me, which usually I would spend on my bed reading, or sometimes studying. We were doing Hamlet for our exams. I wish I could say I liked it but I did not. It didn’t seem true – just a dreary assemblage of motives for Shakespeare to hang his language on like mad brocade curtains. I did not believe that Hamlet would not be able to kill his uncle. I had blood in me and would willingly have killed, if given the weapon. I liked this: There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. I could see the sparrow when I read this: the sparrow and its flight arrested, its tumble through the air. My father was dead too, but that did not seem true either, more like a thing that had happened and was obscurely my fault. The fault glowed darkly at the edge of my consciousness, like a bad dream not properly forgotten. I did not approach it.

  My mother loved Shakespeare and had all of Hamlet in her head. It was because of Laurence Olivier, who had been Hamlet and Richard III and Henry V when she was young. She was in love with Laurence Olivier and imagined him coming to Australia, and then to her suburb in a black car, seeing her as she walked home from school, inviting her to climb into the car and come to the ‘studio’ with him. She told me that once she had been at the city library and, running her eyes along a shelf, had come to a book about Olivier and Shakespeare, with photographs; plates of Olivier in noble poses. Her knees went weak, she said; she had to sink down right there on the carpet, pulling the book with her.

  This capacity for fantasy would be the reason she married my father, who was also tall and handsome and dark-haired, but was always thrusting her behind him or snatching her away from parties when he realised that one of his other lovers would be present. She believed that only she had his heart, only she could change him or rescue him from his profligacy. This is what she told me. Once they were crossing the Gladesville Bridge in his car and he told her that he was also engaged to someone else, but that it would be fine, he just needed to break it off and could do so by letter, and my mother threw herself out of the moving car. This was the old Gladesville Bridge, which was flat and straight, and it was past midnight, and the car was not going very fast. She rolled a few times and my father stopped and rushed back to her. He picked her up and bundled her into the back seat and took her home.

  It was, she thought, a decisive moment, when her passion had obliterated his deceit. Even though she had been proved wrong, I still believed in the essential truth of this.

  I had been back to my father’s grave in the weeks following his funeral, not knowing that it took some time for a grave to be finished, to become like the other graves. Of course a cemetery is really just a paddock waiting to be filled, and my father’s grave was on the outskirts of this paddock, as he was among the most recently buried. It took me some time walking up and down the rows of the established graves before I found him out in the empty spaces. The orange earth was still in a hard heap above him, like an ant hill. Three other Catholics had been buried since he had. Two had no marker, his and the one next to him had small white wooden crosses: name, date.

  Now, two years later, all the space around him was populated. He was a resident, with neighbours, with his little concrete headstone and its stainless steel plaque.

  *

  Jonathan’s father was tall and wolfish with sleek grey hair. He greeted me at the front door with a wicked smile, with pleasure, like a procurer.

  ‘I’ll get Jonathan,’ he said, his eyes dancing. And then, ‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ after bringing us a bowl of chips and a glass each of lemonade. We sat in their living room, which looked onto the water and across to our school. Jonathan moved closer to me on the white leather couch. He put an arm over my shoulders. I heard a flurry of feet behind us and turned round to see his twin sisters, who were still in primary school, blonde and skinny and shrieking and ducking into the hall when they saw me looking.

  Jonathan shooed away his sisters and nudged his hip and then his shoulder closer to mine. I felt weary at the thought of the formal to come, which would be more of this, only fuelled by booze and thus harder to fend off. I let him kiss me, which was cool and spitty. His mouth seemed too spacious; I could feel his small teeth. It did not matter. I think he had as little desire as I did. But he was enjoying being in the play about love. Today he was the masterful older man, a little tired of passion, but always courteous. He stroked my spiked, sticky hair and sighed.

  In the hall behind us the front door opened. It was his mother, and she came in to say hello. She was the same woman I had seen at Katie Goldsworthy’s, the woman who went downstairs and disappeared into the bathroom with Katie’s father. She was wearing a pink dress this time, also with padded shoulders. She did not seem to recognise me. She gave us the same treatment that Jonathan’s father had, the devilish pleasure in our youthful love. ‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ she said, a low thrill in her voice. She stepped back and pulled the French doors closed, dividing us from the hall and the rest of the house.

  *

  My mother made me a dress, understanding my need for something that swirled from the waist, with petticoats underneath. She had taken me to choose the material and we had seen the same bright stuff at the same moment, both of us reaching for it. She had found black net to make the petticoats from. She seemed to know what she was doing, but at the first fitting I found she had decided to make the dress not sleeveless and scooped at the neck, but short-sleeved and round-necked, like a T-shirt. I said nothing, hoping that she was planning to change it somehow, that this was a first draft, in a sense. The image of the dress had burned so vividly in my head; it was a great surprise to find that it had not been transmitted correctly. Once I had understood that this was so it was too late to stop her.

  We were invited to a drinks party that would be held before the formal. It was to be at Katie’s house. It was a chance for the grown-ups to be together, to celebrate our final year at school, to send us out into the world of adulthood, pushed off from shore like pretty boats. The invitation came on a piece of parchment in a falsely aged envelope.

  ‘Let’s not go,’ I said to my mother, aghast.

  ‘Drinks and hors d’oeuvres,’ she said, reading the calligraphy.

  ‘Argh,’ I said, clutching my throat, watching her through half-closed eyes.

  ‘We really should,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen the Goldsworthys in years.’

  I didn’t know she had ever seen the Goldsworthys. She had never mentioned them.

  ‘Besides, your formal partner will be there and it’s the right thing to do,’ she went on, reaching for the phone.

  Every so often these rules surfaced, and it would be as though I lived in the 1950s, in my mother’s young adulthood, instead of the 1980s. ‘You must say yes to the first boy who asks you,’ she had said when the idea of the formal was introduced. This had led me to accept the invitation from Andrew Johnson. But then Katie had commanded me to invite Jonathan to the formal. I hadn’t told Andrew I was going with someone else. I’d hidden from him at school and hoped he would get the message.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said frantically, but she was speaking now, in her telephone voice, and there was no going back.

  *

  Frances was Katie Goldsworthy’s mother. She was taller than Keith, her newsreader husband. They both seemed to be wearing make-up. She looked like a gaunt older sister of Katie’s, with bony legs and more caramel hair in waves around her tanned shoulders. If you saw her from behind you might think she was quite young, and get a surprise when she turned round and gave you h
er lined smile.

  We were not asked to take our shoes off, which I was sorry about, as mine had begun to hurt me on the steep run down the driveway. Frances and Keith both kissed my mother – so wonderful to see you, what a long time it’s been – and ushered us in.

  I wondered if Frances knew about Keith and Mrs Schultz. They had not seemed especially careful with their secret. I had not said anything to my mother about what I had seen at the Goldsworthys’, because I couldn’t think of a way to introduce the subject without being asked questions myself. When my mother was interested in something she would ask forensic questions that reduced every story to a pointless heap of facts. She would want to know why I had been at the Goldsworthys’ and why I had let myself be talked into taking Jonathan to the formal with me. She would think that I had been bullied, and would have to bully me herself in order to feel better. Explaining about Andrew would only have made things worse.

  When I had understood that my father had maintained two marriages, two families, I’d wondered why his secret wife was not blonder, more buxom, sexier than my mother. In fact, Anne was small and thin with a nose like a Stone Age flint and slightly bulging eyes. Hyperthyroid, said my mother once, which also explained the dry skin and crackling hair. Anne was mean and tight and conservative, not the sort of woman you run away to, or that was what I thought. My mother looked a little older than she should have, because of the drinking, and her cheeks, if you looked closely, were filigreed with tiny broken capillaries. But she looked interesting: Spanish or Irish with her black hair and blue eyes. She was bosomy, like me, and wore her blouses with a button undone so you could see the freckled bags of her breasts. Tonight she was dressed like Linda Ronstadt: the bosom, and the drawstring top.

 

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