‘I did indeed. You practise, my girl, or we’ll turn you into a medico and send you overseas to do good.’ Her concern, which seemed real enough, disinterested, made Sophie feel ashamed of her own duplicity, though the concern was so misplaced and even preposterous that she laughed aloud.
‘How can you think it matters, Caroline? Talent. Playing pianos. And even give it priority over doing good?’ She felt tremendously amused, full of laughter.
‘Just get on with it!’ With a minatory nod, Caroline made for her little yellow car, and Sophie waited and waved through the familiar grating and humming of gears; then Caroline was gone, and so was the hilarity that had felt so permanent.
Alone again, Sophie conversed with herself about the weather as though to distract an invalid acquaintance. But, really, the light was dazzling, like the first morning of the world. Radiance pealed across Caroline’s small valley from sky to dandelion. After staring into it for a time, Sophie continued back along the path to the uneven square of cut grass. Safely there, and gazing as if to count the blades, it seemed to her that something as mesmeric, as impersonal, and of the same dimensions as the sun was before her eyes. And this was the instruction.
*
‘The Coopers and Stephen rang to say how much they enjoyed the other night.’ Caroline looked up from the telephone directory.
‘How punctilious! They were nice.’ On her way to the kitchen with a large copper vase, Sophie paused.
‘You were a great success.’
‘I liked them, too.’
Caroline began to turn the pages distractedly. ‘I’m looking for that new garage man who took Alec’s place. The car’s due for an oil change.’ She sighed and let the book fall shut. ‘I’ll call in when I’m passing. It’s a shame you have to go tomorrow. There’s no reason to rush away.’
‘I do work,’ Sophie reminded her. ‘Someone’s going to notice I’m not there.’ While she would almost certainly be nowhere, there was no reason to burden Caroline with that information.
‘I daresay.’
‘You’ve been marvellous.’
*
With Caroline gone, chains dropping from her, Sophie sank from the platform in space where it was laid on her to make conversation and act as if she believed in the great conspiracy. It was amazing what quantities of time could be passed out there when necessary, she reflected, filling the vase with fresh water. Some people spent the whole of their lives there without even knowing it. Like Ivan Ilyich and innumerable other characters who crowded to suggest themselves. Sophie clasped her hands round the cold vase and rushed through to the sitting room, leaning slightly backwards to avoid the spreading branches of japonica. Placing the vase carefully on the low table by the windows she escaped from the house to the open air, and stood bathed in surprise.
Here was the real world you could never remember inside houses: soft rounded hills and trees that had been there before history. Sophie looked at them and breathed. Help, her eyes said to the hills. Help, to the clouds, treetops, and grass. They bore her appeal like so many gods, with silence, no change of expression. She continued to look at them.
She continued to look at them, but addressed no more petitions. Words trivialised. Thought trivialised. Her unhappiness was so extraordinary that it was literally not to be thought of.
She stood motionless. But from a distance she was being stared at. After a time, her eyes were pulled to the cat’s eyes, and she slowly roused herself and looked into them with some sense of obligation. Knowing it would come to her, Sophie drew a breath to summon the cat. Then she frowned and closed her mouth, repelled by her power over something more vulnerable than herself. She felt physically a nausea of the heart, and understood that ‘heartsick’ wasn’t, after all, poetic rhetoric, but a description of a state of being. One which it would be preferable never to know.
Animals should beware of humans. How tempting, evidently, to play God and play games with little puppets for the sake of testing your skills … Sophie shivered and shook her head. Some humans should beware of others. All should learn early the safety limits of love and trust. But what a pity! How could you? How could you? she thought. And how could I? Some other day, if there was another day, she would think about these rights and wrongs.
Glancing again at the cat, who was still awaiting command, Sophie said, ‘Be independent,’ and feeling itself without instruction the cat prowled in a circle, curled up, and slept.
Caroline had stolen a remarkable pink rock from a faraway beach, a golden-pink rock worn into a chaise longue by the Pacific. Now Sophie lay on its sea-washed curves, supported and warmed, grateful to the rock. She closed her eyes and a single line creased her forehead. Minutes passed, and she opened her eyes. In the whole sky there were only three small clouds, three of Dalí’s small, premonitory clouds, looking as unreal as his. It was possible that this time tomorrow, this time tomorrow, she would be dead.
Of whom, Sophie debated with herself coldly, might that not be said?
She made no response. It was unanswerably true that she had placed herself in the hands of death; she was in the airy halls of death now, with all formalities complete except the last one. Everywhere there was the certainty, the expectation, that she would make the final move at any moment. And it was so clear that the alternative to death was something worse.
If she lived, sooner or later this sorrow would go, and then she would change and be a different person and a worse one, dead in truth. For the sorrow was all that was left of the best she had had it in her to be, the best she had been able to offer the world, the result of the experiment that she was. So it was bound to seem of some importance, just now, while she could still understand it.
She gave a shallow sigh and shifted her position on the rock. In its frame of leaves the cat dozed. Everything altered minutely. The small painted clouds had disappeared. And, of course, it was foolish to complain. In a way, she had been quite surpassingly lucky; and there was a great deal left. The only thing that seemed to have vanished entirely, now that she had time to search among the ruins, was hope.
‘Hope …’ she said aloud, in a toneless voice. ‘It’s amazing what a difference it makes.’
*
The two women sat drinking coffee and glancing at their watches in the minutes to spare before leaving for the station and the Sydney train. For the twentieth time without success, Sophie sought to thank Caroline. ‘Rubbish! I’m only sorry you’re going so soon.’ And they both smiled and rose from their chairs, glancing about to verify that Sophie’s luggage was where she had placed it ten minutes earlier.
‘Say goodbye to Cat,’ Caroline ordered. ‘You’ve made a friend there!’ She swooped down on her pet and juggled it into Sophie’s arms, before hurrying off to bring the car round to the front door.
For seconds Sophie held it against her chest, saying nothing whatever, feeling comforted by the weight, the warmth, the dumb communion, by the something like forbearance towards her of Caroline’s cat. She let it leap down from the nest of her arms.
Lifting her bag, Sophie cast a final look at the silent room and its furnishings, and went to the door. As she turned the handle, with nothing in her mind but cars and trains and Caroline and, just beyond them all, the city looming, it occurred to her that, regardless of what was past, or what she now knew, she herself might still have the capacity to love. Need not, under some immutable compulsion, merely react. The idea presented itself in so many words. A telegram.
Like a soldier who, perhaps mortally wounded and lying in blood, hears a distant voice that means either death or survival, and unable to care, still half-lifts his head, Sophie listened.
Love … That poor debased word. Poor love. Oh, poor love, she thought. It was the core and essence of her nature, and a force in her compared with which any other was slight indeed. Still alive? Even yet? Ever again? More illusions? Good feeling? The psychic knives had finished all that. Surely? It only remained for her to follow. Surely?
Yet in the car, while she and Caroline exchanged remarks, Sophie’s mind considered her chances. Now and then it condensed its findings and threw her a monosyllabic report, like a simple computer. Her changes were exactly that – a chance. And the sorrow … Only yesterday, the other day, she had believed that if she lived the sorrow would go and that she would then know a worse death than that of her body. But as it seemed now the sorrow would never go, could never leave her; like all else in life it had become an aspect of her person. As her love had. How strange, she thought, that nothing ever goes.
Nevertheless, detailing as they did the unconditional terms of her existence, these thoughts were in themselves a death. Had she been consulted, she would have chosen none of this, none of these steely thorns, inconceivable relinquishments. But no one had asked her; she had had no choice. One or two strengths and the love were what she had, and all she had, and what she would always have. And that was that.
Caroline said, ‘Hear that clanking? I need a new car.’
Pedestrians cut through the tangle of traffic near the railway station. A dog pranced by looking for adventure. Sophie stared at shopping baskets, at boys on bikes, while debating the merits of this car over that with Caroline. ‘Small ones are easier to park.’
Suicide produced just then, like a super-salesman, a picture of the very place. She knew it! Ideal, ideal. A hidden clearing off the track where you wouldn’t be found too soon …
And the instruction resumed its endless cries of surprise, trying to save her. How could you, how could you, it said. The psychic knife went in, it said. The psychic blood came out.
Yes, yes, Sophie agreed. She had heard this many times before, and could only suppose the reiteration had once served a useful purpose. But how like a human organisation! Even at the place of instruction, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. Someone down the line had not yet been informed that times had changed; the long-expected message had been received and was under the deepest consideration.
Walking up the station ramp with Caroline, Sophie took no notice, letting the two sides battle it out. They would learn, they would learn. She had learned.
Blueglass
Ellen van Neerven
A few years ago I noticed a bright blue smear running all the way across the beach. In the weeks that followed it got bigger, and wider, and soon the sand was a surface of blue glass shards, the whole beach glittered. Tiny little pieces.
We started making music out of it. I used my guitar and sometimes clapsticks and Michael stuffed his maracas with shards of glass. We played along the waterfront above the beach every Saturday. Singing songs like ‘spat jewels of the sea’, ‘dirty sea blues’ and ‘crystal eye reflection’.
We were cross-cultural chemistry. We were brown and black. We were one half of Fleetwood Mac. People started buying our songs and soon there were other Blueglass bands starting up and playing on the same beach. There was a story in the Courier-Mail. And there was a story in USA Today. And people from other states and other countries came to see us. They talked about my ‘mournful vocals’ and how the lyrics reflected the ‘hardscrabble existence’ of living on this broken coast, this Blueglass region. They danced on the glass with their shoes on and when they walked back up after they kicked pieces of glass onto the path and grass and into the cafes and into their cars and into their homes.
*
There were festivals every month and always a new band. The first generation included the Waverly Brothers, The Liners (who also performed as Gerri and Jimmy) and Sea Dixie. Most of these guys we liked, but we always got the biggest loudest crowd.
After one gig I tried to pick up the shards that were brought up from the beach but there were too many. We stopped eating at the fish shop after we played because my battered snapper was a different sort of crunchy.
*
My Aunty’s still around sticking the pieces together with old-time glue and selling bottles at the markets. One time when I visited her house, she took lemon cake out of the oven and knocked one of her bottles over with her elbow. I said some glass just wants to smash. Thought it’d be a good lyric when I said it. She made me look her way and said my father would have wanted me to do more and when we played our next show in front of 10,000 people all packed up on the beach, their arms out, I wondered how I could do more.
*
I used to take shells and other things off the beach and Dad would tell me to put them back in their place. Everything has a place to set in this land, if we take one shell it disturbs a landscape and we don’t do that. I walked through the crowd of young people wearing Blueglass logo T-shirts and blue glass earrings. Dad said we need to keep our beaches clean otherwise we will become unclean, but he didn’t get the hopelessness of it; the glass keeps coming back. It was part of the beach and now it is part of us. That was what I said in my interviews.
*
Nobody talked about the past except for Aunty. Singing these songs was the thing. Still going to the beach even with shoes on and forgetting the floods and how I saw young children with rock-salt coughs and blue teeth and nobody talked much at all. I wrote a song about those kids but that’s not the sort of thing to sing about. Or about those pelicans I used to see and how the beach was like when Dad was around.
‘Sa matter?’ Michael said as we drank our blue glass beer in the beer garden. ‘You look like you’re dead.’
‘Yeah, tough show.’
‘Not just this show, is it?’
I looked over at Michael and admired his eyelashes, saw the times he had got me to come out of the water after a post-show swim. Wading towards me, reeling me in to the shore and pulling his jacket over my wet shirt and socks. He said he didn’t want me to turn blue too.
*
Laughter behind us from the kids. Young enough to not know where the blue glass came from. They said the Blueglass movement was dying out and the subgenre Newglass was taking over. ‘Progression’ – electric, bigger bands, more than one singer. Some progression.
I thought it would happen slowly but Gerri and Jimmy are losing out and the Newglass bands, I don’t even know their names, they’re taking over with cheap lyrics and wrong sound. Dad was right. I hadn’t learnt to keep things in their place.
‘Haps we should stop while we’re ahead,’ I said.
‘And what will we do?’
‘Something different maybe. To get out of here.’
‘Alright,’ Michael said.
It’s always been like that. Asked him for a kiss with my thick-shake, told him we would sleep and live together, even asked him for marriage that day of the flood. He’s gone on with it, especially when it’s about the music, he follows my lead and I’m glad he’s been with me all this time. We’re the original Blueglass band and the connection between music ancient and modern. Nostalgia a trap but lyric gold. It was good, it was good.
*
We packed up next morning. I went to see Aunty. ‘You know your father left some things for you.’
‘Did he?’
‘They’re yours now.’
It was his old clothes. His old denim jacket from his band years. Big musky shirts that still smelt of him, sandy sleeves.
She wanted me to take some bottles with me.
‘I’ll wrap them up good for ya.’
‘Still making those, Aunty?’
‘It is not a trend,’ she growled at me,
I think Dad thought I’d always live here. I did too. You know, it’s easy to pack up a car and go, go. There’s nothing hard about it. We put our instruments in the sensitive but not oversized baggage. We stood in the security line. We got through. No glass on us. Aunty’s bottles left at the sandbags that marked my parents’ graves. The level had come up years ago. At high tide the bottles floated into the sea.
*
Yesterday we played our last show. The old favourites, an extended version of ‘crystal eye reflection’, a new one untitled. Plenty of the Newglass scene were there. They were once our
fans and they are now our witnesses but they still sing our lyrics as if it will save them, as if it will save all of us. It rained, and it seemed as if it was showers of glass.
Standing in the Cold
Nasrin Mahoutchi
One Thursday, when Mr Razi had emerged from the subway to walk to his home he saw that the snow had descended from the mountains and covered the streets. He tucked his head into his wool overcoat and his thick silver white hair ruffled out above his collar like a Shahin’s open wings. He walked away from the main road and the sound of trains followed on the breath of the snow. He played with the corner of the metro ticket and then submerged his hands deep into his pockets and caressed his keys. On the way home he stopped at the corner shop to buy eggs and then he went to the local chemist to buy his new sleeping pills.
‘I will give you the foreign brand, the imported one, the good one, not the generic one,’ the chemist had promised.
Mr Razi watched those bony hands put the zaleplon into a plastic bag. ‘It is hypnotic; mesleh yek mordeh mekhabonatet, hichi nemifahmi.’
Although Mr Razi had lived in the Meeremad area ever since he married Mrs Razi thirty-five years ago, he didn’t have any friends in the neighbourhood. All the old neighbours moved out and the newcomers didn’t show any interest in befriending an old man who wouldn’t speak any more than a few words. Mr Razi felt he had nothing to talk about to these new neighbours. The only person Mr Razi knew in the area was Mrs Fars, an elderly woman who lived alone after all her family moved to America. Her eldest son demolished their home and made a five-storey building for his mother. Now Mrs Fars, who hardly could walk, sat in her first-floor kitchen and watched the neighbours.
*
When he turned into his street he saw the shadow of his house under the dim streetlight. He lived in a two-storey house built with cheap red-yellowish bricks. This house plus the one on the right-hand side were the only old buildings left from the ’60s. The rest of the old houses in the street were demolished and rebuilt as four- or five-storey apartment buildings.
The Best Australian Stories 2016 Page 5