The Best Australian Stories 2016

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The Best Australian Stories 2016 Page 9

by Charlotte Wood


  Sione had never even kissed a boy.

  But she got into bed with him, and she followed each and every one of his instructions to the letter – a rapid sex education, which would have been more enjoyable if he’d been a little less insistent about what he wanted and how.

  Perhaps he would have moved beyond the urgency of his own needs if his mother hadn’t almost caught them. Sione would never know. Mrs Pavlou had opened the door to his room and he’d pushed her down under the doona with such force that she’d wondered whether she was going to be able to breathe. About five minutes after she left, Marina came in and told her she had to get back to their room – ‘now’.

  ‘Mum’s wondering where you are.’

  And she had pulled her nightie back down and run, as quietly as she could, sliding back into the trundle bed moments before Mrs Pavlou looked in.

  She’d been obsessed with Michael, but at least had the sense not to talk about it too much to Marina.

  ‘He has a girlfriend, you know.’ It was Marina’s only comment to her on the matter.

  And then she had embarrassingly got very drunk at a party and cried, telling Marina she loved him and he’d used her, and she hadn’t had her period (the last bit was a lie).

  Marina was a good girl. She became school captain the following year and was only four marks off being dux. She must have told Michael to ring her, which he did – his words kind but firm as soon as he realised she wasn’t pregnant.

  ‘You’re too young for me,’ he’d said. ‘I’m with Karla,’ he’d told her. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’

  She hadn’t cried. But her voice had squeaked a little when she’d said she was fine, she hadn’t even given him a thought, there was no need for him to worry and she hoped he and Karla would be very happy together.

  Now as she looked at him, she wondered whether she would have recognised him if he hadn’t told her who he was. He wasn’t as handsome as she’d first thought – strange how that flickering impression of Mediterranean good looks worked. In his case, it was really no more than a mass of features she thought of as appealing – dark skin, white teeth, dark eyes – but there was something of the ferret to him, she realised. There probably always had been.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  The waiter placed her chicken soup in front of her as she explained she was just here for lunch with her mother, who’d had a fall and was resting, which was why she was eating alone.

  He’d come on a holiday.

  ‘Not the one I’d expected,’ he told her, as he pulled out a seat, stretching his tanned legs out in front of him.

  She had a slice of bread left and he helped himself, dipping it in the last of the oil. For a moment she wondered whether she’d tell him she’d actually been saving that for her soup but then decided it would be simpler (and more mature) to call the waiter and ask for more.

  ‘Divorce,’ Michael told her. ‘Or at least staring down the barrel of it. She left me a week before we were due to come here. I came anyway.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ she replied, wondering why he’d chosen to sit with her when she hadn’t requested his company.

  The dark clouds were pressing low and the deep boom of thunder promised a heavy downpour. Overhead, the fan continued to tick, pushing thick sluggish air around with little effect.

  She asked him what he did now, where he was living, looking across at him as she spoke.

  He was a sports agent in LA. He’d been there for close to twenty years. He leant back in his chair and waved a napkin in front of his face.

  If she’d held any illusion that he was going to ask her about herself, she didn’t hold it for long. He was simply sitting there, no doubt willing to answer her next question if she had one, but other than that, his contribution to the conversation wasn’t going to amount to much.

  ‘So what are the rooms like here?’ She regretted the words as soon as she uttered them, dismayed by the thought that he might think she was coming on to him, and she shook her head slightly, grinning as she did so.

  ‘Sorry,’ she told him, aware that the heat and her embarrassment were only going to make her blunder further. ‘I’m not cracking on to you for old time’s sake. I was just curious as to what you’d get for such a large sum of money.’ Now she was commenting on his wealth, she thought, but fuck it – she’d seen the small suburban house he’d come from, the room with the Kmart doona cover and faded brown striped curtains.

  His laughter was a relief. ‘I haven’t heard that expression for years.’ And then he stood. ‘I’ll show you,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not cracking on to you either. Or at least I’m not planning on it right at this minute.’

  The bungalow opened onto a garden, each wall seeming to slide back to let in the cool green. The room itself was relatively simple: the floors stone, the furniture teak, a palatial bed in the centre, a throne beneath the wafting white mosquito netting. He took her through to a sitting area that also opened onto a stretch of impossible emerald lawn, and beyond that a pool, which he told her he shared with three other garden suites.

  ‘Top of the range have their own pools,’ he said. ‘My friends at lunch have one of those. He’s a very successful producer.’

  ‘And she’s?’

  He shrugged. ‘His wife.’

  She told him it was beautiful.

  She should probably get back to her mother, and as she spoke he stepped a little closer, the slight sweetness to his sweat familiar, a glint in his eyes as he smiled.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked. ‘Someone will come and get you if she wakes or needs you.’

  ‘But no one knows I’m here.’

  He shook his head. ‘They know, believe me,’ he said. ‘This is a place where they know – everything you could ever want or need. Before you even know it.’

  The heat and the absurdity of the situation made her laugh, the sound more nervous than her usual throaty laughter, more of an uncomfortable squawk as she began to fend him off, putting one arm on his shoulder and stepping back.

  ‘You are trying to crack on to me,’ she protested. ‘God knows why.’ She told him she was in a relationship. She was faithful. She wasn’t here for this, she was just on a terrible holiday with her mother who had dementia, and coming here had been a way of trying to pass another day because it was hell sitting by the pool in an endless circle of the same conversation with a woman who’d once been so alive and intelligent and was disappearing before her eyes.

  ‘And maybe a quick fuck with the man that I lost my virginity to would pass a little more time and be part of this entire absurd package, but I’m not up for it,’ she said.

  He stopped then.

  All the swagger in his posture seemed to sag. He sat, legs crossed in front of him and put his head in his hands.

  It took her a moment before she realised his shoulders were shaking, and she knelt on the floor next to him, one arm on his and told him it was okay, although she had no idea what ‘it’ was, other than a single word in an empty attempt at consolation.

  He lifted his head and looked at her.

  Later, she wondered why she leant forward and kissed him, but it was only a brief moment of wondering because she knew it for what it was, both at the time and afterwards. Neither of them spoke and she felt him hesitantly following her lead, a drowning man holding on to a drowning woman as they both tried to swim back up towards the surface.

  When the rain fell it was torrential, so loud that even if either of them had chosen to speak it would have been difficult to hear the other. She was glad of it, all of her intensely focused on his body and her own. She would forget this, as soon as it was over. She would say nothing of it to Louis, to anyone. It was just right here, now, and when they finally shifted away from each other, the heat unbearable, she allowed herself to look at him again.

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked her.

  She nodded.

  ‘Children?’

  She shook her
head.

  ‘Did you want them?’

  The question disarmed her. She had wanted them. Terribly. But Louis hadn’t. And so eventually she had come to convince herself that she hadn’t really. And now here she was, just beyond the possibility of it ever happening, even by accident, both feet firmly in a future that did not hold any chance of her stepping over into that other land, the one where she had always assumed she would live.

  ‘And you?’

  He told her he had twins, boys, eight years old.

  ‘They’ll live with you both?’ she asked.

  He was sitting up in the bed, looking out at the garden. The rain had stopped, but each of the leaves, the grass, the heavy clusters of frangipani, the tall stems of ginger, the moss that grew in the stone wall, all of it was shining, the weight of that downpour still heavy on every leaf and petal.

  The knock on the door was soft, the voice only just loud enough to be heard. ‘Excuse me, madam. Madam.’

  She stood up, quickly dressing herself as she said she would be right out.

  He was waiting for her, the man who had met her and her mother at reception, and behind him another man, both with parasols protecting them from the last of the rain, both looking at her, solicitous, apprehensive.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

  She could sense Michael behind her, his arm holding her up, as they told her it was her mother.

  ‘I am very sorry, madam. We do not know what happened …’

  She must have held on to him because he stopped her from falling, the rush of green coming up towards her as he scooped her up, holding her steady as they hurried back across that garden, past the smooth surface of that pool, empty now, along the white tiled walkway, the old man still sweeping, and towards the room where they had put her mother to rest, and where she had died, alone.

  *

  The manager of the hotel took charge.

  Sitting opposite him in his office, she tried to take in his words, but all she could hear was the trickle of the fountain outside and the slow brush of the broom; the old man still clearing up the debris from the afternoon storm.

  A doctor would arrange for her mother’s body to be taken to the morgue in Denpasar. She would need to speak to the insurance company about getting her flown back to Australia.

  ‘Should I go with her?’ she asked the manager, wanting someone to tell her what to do.

  If she liked, it could be arranged. They would call her driver.

  It was Michael who stopped her.

  ‘Stay,’ he insisted. ‘You don’t want to be alone. You can head down there tomorrow.’

  Sitting out in the garden, she called Louis, leaving a message for him to get back to her – ‘something terrible has happened’ – because she felt she couldn’t say that her mother had died over the phone, she couldn’t leave those words disembodied in a mailbox. And then she called straight back, not wanting to alarm him, but to say that it wasn’t to her, the terrible thing hadn’t happened to her, even though it had. And so of course she ended up phoning again, her words bald this time. ‘It’s Dora. She’s died.’

  ‘Can I have a drink?’ she asked Michael.

  He picked up the phone and ordered gin and tonic.

  She was relieved to see it was a whole bottle, and a bucket of ice.

  He poured them each a glass. ‘I haven’t drunk since my first year in LA.’ He closed his eyes as he swallowed.

  She downed hers quickly, pouring another immediately.

  They would have been fucking as her mother had died. She could barely bring herself to glance across at him, but after her third glass the gap between being in bed with him and sitting here now began to disappear. She knew him, she thought. She really knew him. And he really knew her.

  She was pissed.

  ‘I’m sorry about when I was fifteen. Pretending to be pregnant.’ She shook her head as she uttered the words. ‘It was a very bad thing to do.’

  His swagger had returned. He sat back, legs slightly apart and paid her apology little heed.

  ‘And it was bad to Marina. She must have felt strange knowing I’d run off into your room and had sex with you and that your mother almost caught us. Let alone telling her I thought I was pregnant. No wonder she didn’t want to be my friend afterwards.’

  The sky had cleared again. The late afternoon heat was unbearable and she stood now, unsteady on her feet and looked at the pool. She didn’t say anything to him as she walked towards it, stepping in to her knees at first and then thinking why not? Why not go all the way in? What does it matter? What does anything matter today?

  And so she submerged herself, the cool glassy turquoise enveloping her as she cried momentarily, her clothes clinging to her body and floating upwards as she tried to sit on the bottom.

  He gave her a towel when she emerged.

  She was about to pour herself another drink when she realised she could be sick. ‘I think I may need to eat,’ she told him.

  Again, he picked up the phone and ordered for her.

  ‘It’s so sad.’ Her voice was softer now. ‘For the last year, I have willed her to die. It’s been unbearable. Everything was scrambled. Sometimes she would ring me eight, ten times in the morning, wanting to know what day it was, what time, when would I come and see her? Always insisting that of course her memory was still alright. And if I questioned her on how she managed anything – her medication, her money, turning off heaters, any of it, she would get so angry with me. And then there would be days when I would glimpse her again, and I would feel confused. I would think that maybe she was right and I’d just imagined it. And I hated the way I was forgetting all the other versions of her. I’d loved her as a child. She was gentle to me, kind, and she smelt so good. I used to love borrowing her clothes, putting on her sweater and smelling her as I pulled it over my head. It was like sunshine on a tree trunk – warm, solid, real. And she made mistakes, but who doesn’t? Oh, Jesus. Look at me here now. I should get home. I should get back to Louis.’

  The sun was in her eyes when she looked over to him. She wanted to see him as she had when she was fifteen, when they’d sat in Marina’s lounge room watching television and she’d been so aware of him sitting that little bit closer than he should.

  She’d known he’d come and get her later. Or at least she’d hoped for it so fervently that it hadn’t been a surprise when she’d heard his knock on the door.

  She reached out and touched the side of his face.

  ‘Are you going to kiss me again?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Too drunk.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  She realised then that he was on his third glass. His eyes had softened, the darkness of the iris covered by a slight haze of gin and heat.

  She looked at the hairs on the back of his wrist and then down to his calves, his feet bare in the lush green grass.

  ‘I was just a boy. We don’t think like women.’ His grin was rueful. ‘Marina had the shits with me. Karla knew too. Or at least she guessed and I denied, convincingly enough to make her forgive me until I did it again with someone else.’

  Sione’s phone rang and she silenced it. It would be Louis. She didn’t want to speak to him, not right then.

  She looked across at Michael and smiled as she held her glass up, the condensation glittering in the sunshine.

  ‘Here’s to Dora,’ she said.

  He clinked.

  ‘And to me.’

  He raised his glass again, eyes still on her. ‘To what we once were and will become.’

  She lay down on the grass, the low clouds spinning. ‘And to what we are now.’ She looked through the glass at him, each feature distorted, before she closed her eyes. ‘Fucked, and far from home.’

  The Fat Girl in History

  Julie Koh

  My mother and I are sitting in front of the TV. We’re talking about going on the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet.

  I’ve filled in a preliminary form on th
e official Diet website. Based on my responses, it tells me that I’m Overweight, and that if I do the Diet, I could lose up to 8.3 kilograms in twelve weeks.

  I feel relieved that I am Overweight and not Obese, because there’s less work to do and I’m lazy like that. This sort of thinking is more or less how I became Overweight in the first place.

  ‘If you lose weight, Julie,’ my mother says, ‘when we walk down the street everyone will turn and say, “What a beautiful girl that lady is walking with!”’

  ‘I’m already beautiful,’ I tell my mother. ‘All mothers should think their daughters are beautiful, all of the time.’

  My mother is becoming upset about her sagging chin and arms, and her sagging everything in general. She’s in her mid-sixties but looks like she’s in her early fifties.

  ‘You should be grateful,’ I say. ‘Other women your age don’t look as young as you do. Imagine if you actually looked your age. You would absolutely die.’

  I remind her that I’ve never had skin as nice and clear and white as hers used to be when she was young. Everyone ages, I tell her. She should be glad she even got to be pretty in the first place. Some people go through their lives ugly, from start to finish.

  She doesn’t look convinced. She touches the slackening skin under her jawline, as if to see if it has miraculously tightened.

  The problem everyone has with my body is not really that I am heavy-boned for a woman in general, but that I am heavy-boned for an Asian woman.

  My university boyfriend, the one I thought I would marry, used to squeeze my arms and legs and call me Chunky Monkey. I was over 8.3 kilograms lighter in those days. He’d probably call me a Fail Whale now.

  I once told him I wanted to buy a backless dress. It’d make me look chic, like I was from Paris or something.

  ‘Don’t you need a nice back to wear a backless dress?’ he’d said.

  In that moment, I suddenly became aware that not only did I have thunder thighs and a belly and adult acne and a fat head, but I also had a back that didn’t look good from the back.

  So I didn’t buy a backless dress. I bought a hessian sack that covered my body from my neck to my knees, so that no one could tell if there was a woman underneath or a glutinous green blob with an unsightly green behind.

 

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