The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  I wonder if writing letters in longhand and sending them through the post allows the imprint of the body as well as the mind to write slowly and feel the agony of delay. These days it takes even longer to send a letter through the mail, as post offices are losing money because of emails, couriers, etc. In Los Angeles they have shut down the Central Offices of the US Postal Service.

  I wonder when you write ‘I love you’ in an email whether it means much less than it does, as it is too naked and probably disingenuous and quite certainly self-deceiving because the nature of love is usually weighted more on one side and this declaration, electronically instantaneous, is without much self-reflection or correction. Just like writing xxx for kisses, which no longer works as an oath, when x stood for Christ and people would kiss the oath which stood for their mark or signature. It certainly is not an emotional copula connecting to an erotic future, as you used to think, driving you to return the xxx, which was by then an empty sign.

  I wonder if this laptop love which necessitates its sending (since one’s outbox is automatically cleared unless you put it into the drafts folder) hides a desire to have it made public (which admittedly is one of the complexions of love – to declare it to the world even if blushingly), but also to destroy ambiguity. So there is nothing between the lines or the ears and the urge to twitter it on an iPhone is even stronger, unconsciously making love social, shared, communal, so that National Security Agencies can find out if you love your country as well.

  I wonder if Boris Pasternak was right when he said every novel is a woman. He meant the inspiration for it. You have stopped writing novels. Does that mean you have become a family man?

  Where did I read that all love letters are meant to be intercepted, not only as part of a Freudian unconscious, but part of a vanity needing to be published, such as an open postcard where the postman doesn’t even ring twice but leaves it in the rain out of disgruntlement, about to lose his job, and love sails down the gutter, perhaps redeemed by a grate or a skateboarder who cannot read but likes the picture.

  Where did I read that your ex-wife found your password written in your wallet (since you had changed it so many times you had forgotten the latest one), and got access to everything: not only those quick sweet nothings to someone else, but also your bank account.

  Where did I read that a true lover mutters, murmurs, stammers, babbles, blubbers, becomes tongue-tied, unable to narrate with patience his or her desire. That the love letter cannot play the game of writing, caught up in the heat of the moment, unlike a true boxer who knows how to fight cool.

  Where did I read that there are at least five different kinds of love which don’t exactly fit with our description: delictio, caritas, amica, amor and concupiscentia, not necessarily in that order. That charity and friendship – such as sending a cheque to UNHCR or having your dog follow at your heels without commanding him to do so – are not loves you can express in a letter.

  I remember that in your youth you continually deflected, diverted, detoured from, the object of your desire. That you paid more attention to the target’s best friend or anyone in close proximity. You are now sure that this decoy love, which duck hunters employ to lure a flock within range, is not a transference but a fear of directness, a congenital dysfunction perhaps, but probably something honed by manners and the need to write. If reality is sex, as Freud said, then arriving there can be as shabby as a Metro station populated by drunks and crazies. It is better to stay in the carriage.

  I remember that it took a long time to take a lover. There were many false starts. You wrote an acrostic poem to your first beloved. The poem began every line with a letter in her name. It was your first year in university and you were about to be conscripted for military service. Impending death put love and war in place. You were very proud of sending it, but no one acknowledged it or made mention of it until one day, just before your psychological interview by the Army, your friends said everyone knew about the poem and that her boyfriend was not pleased.

  I remember your awaiting the answer to your love letter. You sat around, moped, read Pushkin, drank a bottle of vodka. You deliberated how long this non-reply should last before you gave up hope and resorted to all kinds of clichés: there are plenty of fish in the sea; throw this one back. Go out and get a life. Love is aleatory and results from bluff, like winning at poker etc. You knocked on her door. There was no answer so you waited for fifteen minutes. Within ten, which is the length of most love-making, you heard voices; both male and female. With your next liaison, you began by discussing Heidegger.

  I remember that silence was the best communication. Your mother taught you that. Your father once confided to you that she is capable of love but cannot express it. You didn’t think this was true. Just because she didn’t speak much English. She expressed through the diving bell of her depression. She wrote shopping lists in asemic writing. When your father died she said, ‘What a relief.’ She can now speak. Yet she never spoke the word ‘love’.

  I’m not the sort to put down love letters. Some of the world’s greatest writers fell victim to them. I mean, when you read them, they are actually the least interesting in the plethora of their other letters – like those about people whom they hated, or ironic vignettes about extremely odd encounters. It may have been Freud who said the best cure for love is an unanswered love letter. The interesting thing is how few replies to these great writers are ever published.

  I’m not the sort to perform love in public. You know that you feel a terrible embarrassment when you see lovers openly displaying their lust or their intimacies. It can be like squatting in a communal toilet outside Shanghai, ten holes in the ground without partitions. Some people use their cheap umbrellas to pretend to privacy and modesty. This is very moving.

  I’m not the sort to say ‘I’ too often. It is best to be brief. Leave oneself out of it. The pen can be a penis. When Peter Abelard fell in love with his student Héloïse nine hundred years ago, her uncle’s henchmen crept into the philosopher’s room and cut off his private parts. He retired to a monastery and she to a convent. Then she wrote letters to him which were unanswered. She accused him of being inspired by ‘the flame of lust rather than love’. Abelard wisely, though perhaps through his disability, devoted his writing to the philosophy of love. This did not stop monkish transcribers from dolling up his early letters, from which an early pornography developed and turned viral, culminating in the Marquis de Sade’s prison notebooks.

  I’m not the sort to deride pornography. Of course it has a distinguished history. Yet most of it becomes boring after a few pages. Epistolary pornography is a little more interesting. The early communist and foot-fetishist Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) very cleverly wrote epistolary novels in which readers replied to the author and to each other, commenting upon Rétif’s books and their own lusts, thus not only inventing a communication between writer and reader, but an illusion of word of mouth in publicising his own works. Fan fiction avant la lettre.

  I know that Kafka’s last lover looked like a raven-haired Ingrid Bergman or a plump Hannah Arendt. It was 1924 and he was dying of TB. The great writer, an insurance clerk so oppressed by his father he wanted to become a cockroach, knew of the cockroach’s survivalist qualities. Perhaps the insect wasn’t a species of Blattella germanica, but a dung beetle, because Kafka is anything but literal. Then again, maybe he was. In any case, The Metamorphosis can be read as prophetic of the exterminations to come.

  I know that Kafka wrote thirty-nine love letters to Dora Diamant and that thirty-five of these were stolen by the Gestapo in 1933.

  I know that Kafka wrote for the last time to Milena Jesenská, the love he had lost, saying he wanted to go to Palestine. He would never get there. This letter mirrors one of Kafka’s shortest stories, in which a dying Emperor of China sends a message to an unknown subject. Perhaps it is an amorous message. But the imperial herald is caught in the crowds, trying to make progress through labyrinthine courtyards packed
with people (nowadays he would be pushing his way along with what is known as The People’s Elbow) and he can never make it out of the Forbidden City, which is the centre of the world. This non-arrival of a message might indicate how words are swallowed up by ghosts. They echo from beyond the grave, but the intended recipient is always absent.

  I know that after the war, Dora Diamant ran a restaurant in London’s Brick Lane area, catering to the beret and borscht brigade, London’s cockney Jews. On her gravestone in East Ham Jewish Cemetery is an inscription: ‘Who knows Dora knows what love means.’ That, too, is a love letter.

  I’m sorry that I promised the world when I wrote to you about Coimbra: I have been there and have visited the spa at Buçaco. It is beyond beautiful, with a maze of gardens and pink-and-yellow-wash buildings like cream cakes. And in the grand hotel there are wonderful rooms. But I think you need more. You need the beaches in Oporto, the Granja, the Espinho. It is even more beautiful down south. I have a friend with a house in Algarve in a small fishing village called Ferragudo where there is a castle overlooking the cliffs; an old Moorish-style house with a patio, almond and fig trees and a courtyard. She offered it to me when she was busy teaching in Lisbon. And here you can write. The weight of time is sand. And the measure of sand is writing. So when you suggested we meet in Coimbra I was feeling as if something had connected and was disturbed. I can try to catch what was lost, but having only met you twice, good sense suggests I be shy for once.

  I’m sorry that perhaps I was really Fernando Pessoa for a time, the dead poet whose ghost negotiated the steep and rainy streets of Lisbon in deep disquiet. I, in fact, had never been to Coimbra.

  I’m sorry that I was a tiger in camouflage, that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was right when he said to beware of the other. Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind for a large part of his life, wrote that though he could not recall the eyes or smile of a woman, he never forgot the colour and splendour of tigers.

  I’m sorry that I missed closing time, you said to the head keeper of the Dubbo Plains Zoo who came looking for you; that you had been mesmerised by two tigers, who had suddenly come alive at dusk; by the size of them, by the way they urinated so powerfully while standing in the stream, pissing against the walls of their enclosure while you were composing a love letter in your notebook, knowing that years hence you would be sorry how quaint all your promises were, how you knew well the passions of others and decided you were not the sort to treat them lightly, how you remembered the past incorrectly, conflating it with what you had read, in wonderment and ultimately, in forgetting.

  Far From Home

  Georgia Blain

  High in the hills it was still too hot, although from the back of an air-conditioned car you could almost pretend that it was a European winter, the clouds were so grey and low.

  In the front seat, her mother asked the driver the same questions over and over again, mostly innocuous variations of where he was born, or some harmless query about what they were passing. Then, whenever there was a pause, she would lean over to ask whether they had bushfires in these hills.

  This last one never made sense to him.

  ‘Yeees,’ he said, drawing the word out, like a wide uncertain smile, although it was clear he didn’t understand her.

  ‘This ees your lunch hotel,’ he said with some relief, as he turned down a narrow drive, bamboo pressing close on either side.

  Sione had expected something a little grander, but then the ridiculously expensive was often strangely ordinary, she thought – how lavish could you go before you just trod water and fiddled with the finer details?

  The driver gave her a card.

  ‘When you finish lunch, they will call me,’ he told her.

  In the driveway, an old man swept up dried husks from the palms, long dead leaves from the frangipanis and brown, bruised blossoms. The slow steady brush of straw was a soothing and familiar rhythm underneath the rapid trickle of water from the fountain.

  Each morning, in their own hotel by the coast, Sione had woken to this sound; the detritus of the night swept up, the gentle rush of the brooms along the pathways that bordered the gardens around their bungalows. It was always old men sweeping; dressed in dark green trousers and shirts, they would stop in their task and smile at her as she walked down to the seaside promenade before breakfast.

  Here, the man was also dressed in the same green, but he did not look up, his eyes remained focused on the ground as they were shown in the direction of the restaurant. She took her mother’s hand, the frailness of her wrist and the bruisings on her skin always disarming.

  ‘Slowly,’ she said as they approached the stairs, smooth, shiny tiles that were bound to be slippery. ‘Take the railing.’

  ‘I’d like to go to the bathroom,’ her mother said, insisting that she could manage on her own.

  And so Sione let her, partly because it was always a matter of flip-flopping around on the line that divided holding on to some semblance of independence for her mother, and recognising that this was foolish. But the truth was, she was also eager to have any chance to get away from her.

  ‘I wish you were here,’ she’d told Louis last night. ‘I get so fed up and then I feel so guilty and I know I’m meant to just agree with everything she says, no matter how wrong it is – yes it’s breakfast time, even though it’s clearly night, sure a backless halterneck would look good on a ninety year old – but I just can’t do it.’

  ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘If she wants to flash her back let her.’

  ‘When I said I didn’t think the dress would work on her, that backless was a little inappropriate, she said no one saw her back anymore. Which I suppose was her thinking that because she didn’t see it, no one else did.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a spectacular back,’ he offered.

  She was drunk when she called him. She was often drunk soon after her mother went to sleep. Not that it took much. Two Bintangs by the pool and she veered rapidly from alcohol-induced elation to guilt, sorrow and missing him and home.

  Now, as she hovered outside the toilet and peered into the window of the hotel gift shop, she was becoming anxious. After ten minutes, Sione decided she needed to check.

  ‘Are you alright?’ she called as she pushed the door open.

  ‘No,’ her mother replied.

  She was looking up at her from the floor, her face white, another bruise already swelling, and Sione, being hopeless in any kind of crisis, just screamed.

  *

  The hotel didn’t have a doctor, but her mother insisted she was fine. It was just a shock, she hadn’t cut herself or broken anything, she just needed to lie down for a little while. Sione should have lunch and then they would return to the coast, where she could go to the hospital if she didn’t feel better.

  Out on the verandah, Sione sat under a fan, the slow tick-ticking overhead bringing with it the faintest puff of breeze. She could see rice paddies, terraces of fragile green under an oppressive sky, and below that the hotel pool, an aquamarine that spilt over the horizon, glassy in the sharp light of the building storm.

  The table behind her was full of Americans. She hadn’t really taken them in when she was shown her seat. Two men and a woman, all dressed in white and either pale pink or lemon, speaking loudly of someone in the movies, someone whose career was imploding because of her unfortunate move to Texas. They seemed to be about sixty, although one, a man, was younger, olive-skinned and handsome, his accent not as pronounced.

  Next to her was a French family, a mother, grandmother, and two sons fighting over an iPad. The boys ordered burgers and fries. The women, both of whom seemed fresh from botox treatments, had tea only.

  And then there was the Chinese honeymoon couple.

  Sione glanced across at them as she ordered a soto ayam – not quite sure why she wanted soup in this heat, but perhaps it was the comfort factor. The young woman kept taking photos of her meal on a phone that was so overburdened with gold accessories it was a wonder she c
ould hold it up.

  Standing at the edge of the balcony, Sione looked down at the pool. Its smooth surface was disturbed by one old man slowly doing breaststroke in a diagonal, the gentle plod of his strokes discernible in the hushed stillness. By the edge, his two tanned daughters (she presumed and then hoped that’s what they were) stretched out on sun lounges.

  When she sat down again, the Americans were leaving.

  Glancing across at the more handsome of the party, she blushed as she caught his eye, and then realised that he seemed to think he knew her.

  ‘Sione?’

  She nodded, desperately trying to place his face.

  ‘Michael. Michael Pavlou.’

  And as he uttered his name, she really blushed, hating herself for doing so.

  She’d been fifteen, staying overnight at her friend Marina’s. Marina was a new friend – smart, funny, pretty, one of those sporty, clever, popular girls – a trifecta that invariably led to physiotherapy. Michael was her older brother. He was studying law, she remembered. And he had a girlfriend, a slightly pimply Greek girl, who was also a law student and whose clothes weren’t quite in fashion. The four of them had been watching television and then Karla, the girlfriend had gone home.

  Lying in the dark, she and Marina had talked as teenage girls did – about schoolwork, friends, movies, and perhaps even a little about Michael and Karla. Sione had thought he was handsome. She didn’t quite understand why he was with Karla.

  Later, as she hovered on the edge of sleep, Marina’s breathing steady and slow in the bed next to her, the whole house still, there was a tap on the door.

  ‘Shh,’ Michael told her, beckoning for her to follow him.

  His room was at the end of the corridor, his bed unmade, the smell of him, sweet and musty, the sheets still warm from where he’d been lying, the curtains slightly open to the frosty spill of the moon.