The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  So the fog is like spun air, like wool too, wool unravelling. Unravelling from the giant loom at the end of the sea. It unrolls in. Unrolls in. Like a memory, a freshly remembered thing. And yes, we go seeking through it, through the clammy wet stench of the seaweed beneath the marbled cliffs. Seeking to reassemble the broken parts of the loom, dear moth. The loom that wove your wings, the turning wheel releasing the fog-skeins, the sound of your whirring. In this deep and secret shroud the truth of seeking is made real. Aren’t we always pushing through a fog we can’t see? Except here, in the veiling unveiling coves, we can see it. Feel it. Our seeking made real. The feeling we have that the world hides and reveals, that the loom spun those patterns on your wings.

  So this then, in this season, is our moth country. Not so much car country or road country or radio country or traffic-light country but mothy-foggy country. An ephemeral routine. And in the fog, as I say to the moth, we sense the truth of the deeper season. Season of invisible things. Things not so easily grasped and held. Season of a billion atoms, season of risk, of our disappearing. Our coming and going. Le temps. Your season, dear moth. Season of swimming in the fog. Season of driving with the moths.

  I’m here to record, as a father must, that the younger one eventually loosened. We rounded the next point all smiles. We looked back. The cliff was not a prop. Nor were the gods. They had almost disappeared, like the past. Into the future.

  A Few Days in the Country

  Elizabeth Harrower

  ‘Heavens!’ Sophie put her suitcase down on the concrete path and watched the cat flatten itself under a daphne bush and disappear.

  ‘I don’t know why she does that,’ Caroline said, looking after it abstractedly.

  ‘I don’t usually terrify cats.’

  ‘No, it isn’t you.’ Caroline led the way up the broad steps to her house. ‘She always acts as if she thinks someone’s going to murder her.’

  Knocking Sophie’s bag against the wall as she went ahead in a nervous rush, Caroline stopped at the entrance to a bedroom with two big windows and a view of eucalypt-covered hillside. She looked anxiously about. ‘Is this all right? Perhaps I should have given you the other room?’

  ‘Caroline, no. This is lovely. It was so kind of you to let me come.’ And Sophie, who thought she never blushed, blushed from waist to forehead, and turned to give the oblongs of countryside her polite attention.

  ‘I asked you.’

  Drawing a dubious breath, Sophie saw imposed on the wooded slope another landscape of such complexity that she could think of no one thing to say.

  Caroline straightened the Indian rug, then eyed her guest, and went on laboriously, ‘How are you, anyway? Now that we’re established.’

  ‘Oh, extremely healthy, as always.’ Sophie heard the sudden liveliness in her own voice, felt herself brim, for Caroline’s benefit, with something resembling animation and high spirits. Apart from the fact that none of this was true, she could see it must seem a little odd that someone as fine as all that should have taken up in so urgent a fashion – involving trunk calls and telegrams – an invitation given warmly, but on the spur of the moment, months before in Sydney. They had friends in common. Caroline was a widow, a doctor, and lived alone in this small country town. She was grey-haired, sturdy and, Sophie felt, mildly fantastic. Sophie herself was a pianist. This was almost all they knew about each other.

  By way of explanation, Sophie now repeated, as she blindly snapped open the locks of her case, what she had said in yesterday’s calls. ‘Suddenly the city just – got me down. A few free days turned up and I thought, if you don’t mind …’

  This was so far from being a characteristic impulse that she hardly knew how to account for herself. The universe was hostile. The sun rose in the west. She was in danger. Only strangers might not be malevolent. Something like all this was wrong.

  ‘Mind!’ Caroline clapped her hands to her head, then fixed her springy hair behind her ears. ‘If you knew how we like to be visited! Now, come and have lunch. Then we’ll produce some of this famous country air for you. Scoot around in the car. There were mushrooms out the other day.’

  ‘Really?’

  They both smiled and relaxed slightly.

  *

  Sophie was not surprised to find that the mushrooms had been claimed by hungrier souls since Caroline first noticed them, but there was a wonderful cloud-streaked sky, a river, and waves of little hills to the horizon. Completing Caroline’s circular tour, they returned to the house, took rugs onto the grass, and lay in the shade of a pear tree drinking iced coffee and losing control of the Sunday papers.

  ‘You won’t see much of me. I’m missing all day and sometimes half the night, so you’ll have the place to yourself. Mrs Barratt comes in to tidy up. Oh, and I forgot to show you the piano. Mr Crump tuned it yesterday as a special favour. Came out of retirement!’

  ‘Caroline.’ Sophie looked at her in dismay. ‘All this trouble you’ve gone to. So kind. It makes me feel—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Terrible. False colours, false pretences.’

  ‘I’ll expect to hear of hours of practice when I get back every night,’ Caroline continued firmly.

  ‘But I wasn’t going to practise. I don’t practise much any more. I’m – getting lazy,’ she improvised.

  Caroline glanced at her quickly, then thumped at a party of scavenging ants with a folded newspaper. ‘Of course you’ll practise.’

  Sophie shook her head. ‘Truly. It doesn’t matter. Music’s not the most important thing in the world.’ She gazed down the grassy slope and up to the hills in the distance.

  ‘The most important thing in the world!’ Scornful, roused, Caroline asked, ‘What is?’

  ‘Ah, well …’ Sophie’s voice had no expression. She did know.

  But such a statement struck Caroline as merely silly. Quite apart from medicine, the world was full of causes, calls to effort. The list in her mind was endless. Even the imminent perfecting of man through education was not a thing she had doubts about.

  The women eyed each other with goodwill and an awareness that they were natural strangers. The views of persons like that could not be taken seriously. It was almost a relief. They talked about politics and local controversies, and it scarcely mattered at all what anyone said.

  ‘You see!’ Caroline stopped herself in mid-flight. ‘There’s no one here to argue with except a few old cronies. So I rush back to Sydney every month, go round the galleries, and see some plays. Try to keep up …’

  Sophie realised that she was at least partly in earnest, and felt a pang of appalled compassion as she habitually did now at what interested people, at the trouble they took to act in the world, move. If only they knew!

  ‘I’m going to leave you in peace now while I do some weeding. It’s the Sunday ritual.’ Caroline stood up, looking resolutely about the big garden.

  How courageous! What fortitude! Pity moved in Sophie and she got to her knees, ready to stand. ‘Let me help. I can weed, or anything.’ There was so much Caroline and everyone must never know.

  ‘Stay there. You’re on holiday. You can do some watering later.’ Preoccupied already, Caroline disappeared round the corner of the house, and Sophie sank back horizontal on the rug, and the light went out of her. Tears came to her eyes and she wiped them away and sat up again.

  *

  Her instruction resumed at full volume. Phrases that were by now only symbols indicating the devastation caused by grief transfixed her attention. The instruction had been going on for several months now. When she was in company or asleep, the volume was reduced, but the question and answer, the statements below the level of thought, never really stopped. A massive shock. A surprise of great magnitude. ‘A great surprise,’ she repeated obediently.

  In its way, the instruction was trying to save her, Sophie supposed. It wanted her to live. She humoured this innocent desire, attending to its words as though it were a kind, stupid teacher.

/>   To be or not to be. Her lips half-smiled. Out in the world, when she lived out in the world, she had been stringently trained: nothing about herself, her life, her death, was worth taking seriously. Sophie smiled again. No wonder humankind could not bear much reality. The things that happened.

  Caroline crossed the lawn, purposeful and silent, grasping secateurs. A long interval followed, during which only bees and shadows and leaves moved in the garden. The green tranquillity wavered and shifted in the currents of air. Sophie’s heart jumped about in disorder as it often did now as the cat suddenly fled past her, out of a shady ambush. Patches of her forehead and head froze with fright. She took a deep breath and tried to stifle the bumping in her chest. Only the cat. Only Caroline’s poor cat.

  ‘Puss? Puss?’ Her tone compelled the cat to acknowledge her presence. ‘Don’t be frightened. How nervous you are. Everything’s all right.’

  The stricken animal thawed and fled, leaving only a haunted path. Sophie mourned for it, mourned for its view of her as an object potentially powerful and evil, hardened. How wise are you, cat, to resist my blandishments, my tender voice, my endless – I would have you think – capacity for kindness. It is almost endless, too. I would never hurt you, except by accident, and hardly even then. But, oh, how sad I am, cat.

  Her mouth smiled at ‘sad’.

  ‘You look very contented and peaceful there,’ Caroline said, wandering over to her. ‘That’s good. Means you’re settling in. Who volunteered to water the garden while I make some dinner?’

  Syringa, woodbine, japonica, tangled cascades of roses hanging from old fences. Sophie wandered, trailing the hose, its silver spray hissing gently. Daylight was fading from moment to moment, the air cooling. Magpies held a dialogue as they flew, swooping low. Hearing them, Sophie told herself: I’m in the bush.

  Then suicide thought of her. Unlike the instruction, which was of a labyrinthine complexity, suicide used simple words and images and, when it overcame the instruction and claimed her in a tug of war, it used them ceaselessly. Suicide was easy provided the balance of your mind was not disturbed. The essential point, neglected by faint hearts, was to commit the deed in a place where you would not soon be discovered. You would leave the city, taking with you a quantity of painkilling drugs or sleeping pills. You would post one or two letters before catching the train, because it would be cruel never to let yourself be found. And there were the reasons, the reasons you were dying for … Which no one wanted to know and would prefer never to understand, anyway … Then you would board a train going in a direction previously chosen, climb out at the selected station, walk to a secluded spot, lie down, and swallow the tablets. Having taken care, of course, to bring water.

  Sophie sighed. A crude, peculiar, material way of dealing with extreme unhappiness. Like wars. Beside the point.

  ‘What will you have to drink? Whisky? There’s everything.’ Caroline stood at the front door looking out remotely at the sky and the darkening garden.

  ‘Thank you. Yes. I was watching the light on the hills there.’

  ‘Lovely. You’ve brought good weather. Whisky, then. Don’t stay out in the cold.’

  ‘I’ll just put the hose away.’

  Light came on in the house. As Sophie went along the side path, she felt the consoling silence all about. Silence lay enormous behind the sound of her footsteps on grass, the dragging hose, late bird cries, insect scrapings.

  Because, the argument resumed, being dead was not what she wanted most. It was the only alternative. Just as, presumably, generals did not want, first and foremost, dead bodies and buildings fallen down.

  *

  Over dinner Caroline, who had emerged as funny, generous, and Christian, asked about their Sydney friends and showed an inclination to dissect them as though they were interesting cadavers. Dismay ground Sophie to an almost total stop when this disloyalty displayed itself. Any betrayal, of whatever order, instantly related itself to the great calamities of the world. Which of these had not originated in one person? Her knife and fork grew heavy in her fingers, and it was an effort to breathe. Her dear friends! Unfitted to judge though she might be – no Christian – she knew she would judge Caroline later. Though even dear friends were now like faded frescoes. That response in their defence was only an outdated reflex. It was of no consequence that they would never meet again, so how should Caroline’s mild malice disturb?

  While Sophie drooped over her dinner, Caroline grew more and more inclined to ramble, and finally rambled right out of the field of friendship into small-town scandal – unfrocked ministers and cows that ate free-growing marijuana.

  ‘Everyone drinks their milk. Can you wonder at the things that go on here?’

  Sophie laughed with relief, a little too long.

  *

  In the morning Caroline left for the hospital at seven. Sophie showered, dressed, and brushed her hair, advancing jerkily from one operation to the next. No one and nothing could be relied on now. Nothing was automatic. The simplest habits had deserted. Everything took thought, yet thought was what she had nothing to spare of. Because she had so much to think about and it was so important. And nobody realised.

  Wandering through to the kitchen, she made some toast and coffee and set it out on the back verandah in the sun. The grey cat appeared at the door and saw her, coffee cup raised to lips, and after a moment’s paralysis slunk off like a hunted thing. Sophie called after it in a beseeching voice, then rose and went to stand in the doorway. She spoke to the breathing garden, hoping the cat could hear, but there was no sign of it. When the dishes were washed, she trundled out the lawnmower and mowed some square yards of Caroline’s dewy grass. The day was beautiful.

  It was rather feeble to attempt suicide and fail. It definitely placed a person’s good faith in doubt. It was worse to make an attempt with the conscious intention of not succeeding. Anyway. Anyway, she felt contempt for suicide. Butcher yourself ? Why should you? Fall into a decline because nothing was what it seemed? Some had ambitions perhaps to enter the higher reaches of blackmail. But Sophie had never thought of suicide. It was just that lately she could not stop thinking about it.

  Little ridges of grass that had escaped her stood conspicuous. She pushed the mower to and fro, stopping once to throw off her sweater. Only a psychosis could make the deed anything but (Sophie pushed the mower so hard that it was airborne) pusillanimous. Pusillanimous. And had she any desire to be that?

  Worn out by the violence of her repudiation, she stopped for an indignant breath. Then nervously ran the four fingers of her left hand across her forehead. It was just a fact that she wasn’t safe, wasn’t safe yet. And all you had to do was not be found too soon …

  Small black ants were swarming over her bare feet and ankles. She stamped about, brushing the tenacious ones away, dropping the handle of the mower. Bent right over, hair hanging, her glance slanted suddenly sideways: the cat sat under a bush some yards away, watching with round yellow eyes.

  Cautiously, Sophie lowered herself to the ground, sat motionless on the grass, exchanging eyes with the cat. Then she began very gently to talk to it, and the cat listened, for the first time showing no fear.

  Sophie looked vaguely into its green retreat, and rested her cheek on her knee. She closed her eyes. It was the tone of voice, she told herself. Cats must be susceptible to voices. And there was a slight, but temporary, amelioration of her suffering.

  It was not a thing you could do, not in an immediate, noticeable way. It was not considerate to wreck other people’s lives for no better reason than that you would prefer to be dead. Wreck? Well, perhaps that did overstate the case. Inconvenience, she amended.

  ‘What a pity!’ Sophie muttered. ‘What a pity!’ It was hard to understand, something she could never be reconciled to. Real love was not so common even in so large a place as the world.

  Mortal wounds, the instruction said. The psychic knife went in; the psychic blood came out …

  My own doing, Sophie
reflected, while the instruction rattled on in the background monotonously. It was she who had done the empowering, delivered herself over. Nothing she had previously understood or learned had prepared her. Yet her life had never been sheltered. Again now, the magnitude of her surprise, of her mistake, bore down on her. Public violence, bombs, wars were this private passion to destroy made manifest on a large scale.

  *

  ‘That grass is wet, Sophie. I have to call on old Mr Crisp out past the church, so I came in to see if you were all right.’

  As Caroline emerged from the tunnel of honeysuckle and may, Sophie scrambled up uncertainly, rubbing damp hands and cut grass on her damp slacks. ‘Oh, Caroline … I was mowing the grass … I was talking to the cat.’

  ‘Did she let you?’

  ‘In a way. Almost.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s time, or we could have a cup of tea together. Walk back up to the car with me, anyway. I only looked in. She was operated on once, poor Cat, and I’m convinced the vet was led astray by curiosity. He’d just qualified. She lost faith in the human race.’

  Leaf mould lay thick beneath the trees.

  ‘How awful,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Mmm.’ Caroline frowned at the path for a few steps, then looked up briskly, glancing at her watch. ‘You could try feeding her if you want to be friends. There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s hungry.’

  Her right hand on the gate, Caroline paused. Sophie looked at this small tough hand and waited obediently. She had the impression that she was expecting a message, and that perhaps Caroline was the person who was going to deliver it to her.

  But Caroline just said absently, ‘No, it isn’t that. It’s a bit demoralising to have her flitting about like the victim of a vivisectionist. Which she is. I really wondered if I’d find you practising. I was going to creep off. It isn’t right, Sophie, that you should throw away your talents.’

  Though once upon a time she herself had said this sort of thing to encourage other people, Sophie smiled with a sort of heartless gaiety. ‘Did you really come back for that?’