The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  I’m sitting on a train wearing my hessian sack. I look at all the petite yellow women around me in a tableau determined by seating preferences and station order. Each little woman takes up just half of her blue seat. Overweight can look Obese when you’re comparing yourself to delicate yellow peonies who blow gracefully in the wind.

  I sit there and think about how they’re all so tiny that I could squash them.

  I also think about all the white guys I’ve met lately who have yellow fever. Even they reject me now. I’m not petite and Asian enough. I reject them and they reject me, and we are all filled with horrible feelings of rejection.

  At a friend’s wedding I’ll be attending in the near future, I will avoid the dance floor and instead accost a friend’s mother and complain to her about my dating woes – in particular, the phenomenon of yellow fever.

  ‘Maybe,’ she will say, ‘the overwhelming attraction of some white men to exclusively Asian women is biologically the unconscious subjugation of one race by another.’

  I like this theory. I like the idea that I am fighting a civilisational battle using my vagina.

  I think that my heavy bones must be an indication that we have had a robust Russian somewhere in the family line, or maybe a Viking.

  I order a DNA ancestry test kit online. When it comes in the mail, all I need to do is spit into a tube and post it back.

  The lab sends the results by courier. I sign for the box. Inside the box is a pretty snow globe that fits in the palm of my hand. I stare into it.

  In the background of the snow globe is the double helix logo of the DNA testing company. In the foreground is a tiny figurine of a big man in traditional Cossack gear. He’s standing in the snow shielding a little Chinese woman from the weather by wrapping her in the folds of the coat he’s wearing. Her shoes are at least six sizes too small. In fluent Mandarin, he’s telling her that she will bear him gigantic, beautiful semi-Slav babies. She smiles and blinks. Snowflakes cling to her eyelashes.

  ‘Of course,’ I say out loud. ‘My blood’s part-Russian, not Viking.’

  This should already have been clear to me, given that I’ve never had any upper body strength. I’m unable to lift a finger, let alone row a boat from Scandinavia to China.

  ‘Can a lab be this specific about my ethnicity?’ I ask myself. I revisit the website of the DNA testing company. I realise that the company specialises not only in DNA Testing but also in DNA Wish Fulfilment, and that I’ve unwittingly ticked the optional Wish Fulfilment box at the end of my test kit request.

  I don’t care. Because the lab has confirmed my wish that we’ve had a Russian in the family, I start to drink vodka. I try all the brands.

  I am connecting with my roots.

  Despite plying myself with alcohol, I have niggling doubts. If the reason for my fatness cannot squarely be laid at the feet of a giant Russian, then I have to conclude that it’s probably my own fault.

  One evening when I’m not drunk, I go to Fitness Second for an introductory session with a personal trainer.

  I distract him from training me by asking him in-depth questions about his personal life. He’s happy to talk. He has a girlfriend who was once a client. His father is Greek, and keeps tarantulas.

  Despite my conversational manoeuvres, my personal trainer still manages to prepare worksheets for me that set out the different exercises I need to do every day.

  When I come back to the gym the next evening, he takes me through the circuit he has designed for me, so that my technique is correct.

  We do a lot of work with exercise balls. We also box. I put gloves on and punch the pads he’s holding up. After five minutes, I get tired and bored.

  ‘I’m puffed,’ I say.

  We go to Gloria Jean’s instead for iced coffees topped with cream.

  This is how I gain fat by going to the gym.

  While I’m shedding kilos unsuccessfully, everything turns out well for my mother.

  The front door is open when I arrive home after my iced coffee. The porch light is off; the house is dark.

  ‘Is that you, Julie?’ my mother calls out.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Come into the lounge room.’

  The lounge room is set up like a photography studio, with a cyclorama where our altar for the Goddess of Mercy used to be. In the near darkness, a woman is standing side on, turning her face to smile enigmatically at a clicking camera.

  ‘Work it, work it, work it,’ the photographer is saying.

  The woman is slim and beautiful, with fine alabaster skin. She’s wearing a black backless gown. A diamond-encrusted pendant on a long silver chain hangs down her back.

  ‘It happened,’ she says to me in my mother’s voice. ‘It’s a miracle! I’m young again! And I’m the new face of Chanel.’

  My friend Jiao comes back from Hollywood to get rid of the last of his Sydney belongings.

  We go to Obelisk Beach on New Year’s Day. We aren’t really beach people, but lately I’ve given up hope that one day I’ll live in a place that snows at the turn of each year. By going to the beach, I feel that I am embracing my Australianness. I’ve picked Obelisk Beach because I want to avoid the crowds. Obelisk is apparently one of the most secluded beaches in Sydney. It’s also a nudist beach for gay men.

  On the way there, I ask Jiao what the rules are at a gay nudist beach. Is it okay to be a woman? Is it rude to wear my swimming costume?

  Jiao says it’s fine for us both to keep our clothes on.

  To access the beach from the road, we have to climb down a huge rock staircase. There are a lot of bushes around. I’ve read on the internet that men ‘cruise’ here. As we move down the stairs, I wonder why anyone would want to have sex among rocks and bushes. These are gay men, after all. Don’t they want fluffy pillows and thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets? Who will maintain the world’s standards for classy living, if not gay men?

  The beach is small and quite crowded. Not all the beachgoers are men, but most are. Three-quarters of the people here are nude.

  It’s definitely rude to look at all the penises, but I sneak glances anyway. They look so small, and this surprises me because so many of their kind have gone to war and conquered cities and engineered financial collapses and been models for very tall buildings.

  Jiao and I lay out our towels, sit down and talk.

  ‘Should we go into the water?’ Jiao asks after a while.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, nonchalant. I start undressing, down to my swimming costume.

  I’m really worried about my big thighs and belly. I try to keep them covered for as long as possible, then I get up and wobble with them across the few metres of sand between our towels and the water. I wade in as quickly as possible.

  Two boats are moored just off the beach. One is full of people: men in shorts and a woman in a black dress. They’re flying a rainbow flag and playing old-time jazz.

  I’m very comfortable here. No one’s ogling me, and no one seems bothered that I’m the wrong gender and sexual orientation. No one here is even really swimming. Like Jiao and me, most people are just standing around in the water or floating on their backs. The sand is smooth, except for some occasional rocks. There aren’t any violent waves, so I don’t feel like I’m going to be pulled under suddenly and delivered to the Kraken. The water just laps in and out.

  I’m still curious about the penises of everyone on the beach. The more I consider them, the more it becomes apparent that the penises only tend to look small because a lot of men here have big bellies, which dwarf their other body parts.

  I compare the size of each paunch to its corresponding penis. I decide to call it the Paunch to Penis Ratio.

  A man with what I am sure is a very high Paunch to Penis Ratio wades over and begins to talk to me. It’s not clear to me if he’s gay or not. I get more of a paedophilic vibe from him. I remain calm, reminding myself that although I’m emotionally still a child, I am currently the size of an adult.


  The man tells me a bit about the history of the area but I don’t retain any of it. Something about there being a golf course here in years gone by.

  ‘You look a bit out of place here,’ he says.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You look very white.’

  ‘I’ve been sitting indoors writing,’ I say. ‘I haven’t seen any sun.’

  ‘I guess you and your boyfriend are here having a cultural experience?’ he says.

  I look back at the beach, at all the other beachgoers. I realise that, in their eyes, Jiao and I must look like we’re tourists from China who got waylaid on our way to Bondi and are unsure what to do about it.

  ‘It’s a gay beach,’ says the Paunch. He says the gay under his breath as if it’s a secret.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I say. ‘I guess I qualify because I brought my gay friend?’

  ‘It’s nice you’re here,’ says the Paunch. ‘It’s nice to have some eye candy once in a while.’

  The water is at chest level for both of us. I realise that, underneath, the Paunch’s junk is just floating there, cradled by salt water. I’m not only meeting the Paunch for the first time, I am also meeting his junk.

  The Paunch is now standing between Jiao and me, and gradually edging forward. He asks me what country I’m from, and talks about how he spends six months of the year in Thailand.

  Jiao keeps looking over, then leaves the water to go lie on the beach.

  ‘What do you write?’ the Paunch asks.

  I tell him I write fiction but am having a crisis of confidence. A review of my work has just been published in The Australian Morning Age.

  ‘The reviewer said my fiction is bland,’ I tell him. ‘I think it’s a typo. I think he meant to type “wild”.’

  I tell the Paunch that I wonder if my yellow skin and vagina are limiting my chances at being the next big Australian author. I tell him that I stand in the shower sometimes and try to scrub the yellow off but, huh, it turns out it doesn’t work like fake tan. I ask him if I can borrow his body and perhaps his mind.

  ‘Ha ha,’ he says nervously, paddling backwards.

  *

  Judy Garland appears on the deck of the boat that is flying the rainbow flag. She gazes down at me. She’s in her younger years and is holding a small dog and looking wistful, as if she is feeling very stuck and can’t leave.

  ‘I tell you who’s funny, Judy,’ I say to her from the water, ‘your daughter Liza. Is really very funny.’

  Judy begins to sing. She sings about a rainbow somewhere. She sings away all the layers of anxiety I didn’t even know I had.

  I tell her I’m a writer.

  ‘What have you written recently?’ she says.

  I tell her I’ve just finished a short story about a young woman who has depression. I finished it on New Year’s Eve and went to sleep at nine o’clock, like the woman in the story.

  ‘How much of the story is true?’ Judy asks.

  ‘Well, it’s about androids in the future, so …’

  ‘Uh huh,’ says Judy. ‘Okay.’

  She feeds her little dog a biscuit treat.

  ‘Is your work popular?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think I’m behind the times. Everyone’s writing about celebrities now. Like, inserting famous people into their fiction.’

  ‘Interesting device,’ says Judy. ‘A bit gimmicky.’

  Back on the beach, Jiao is burning. The skin on his back is all red.

  We agree that it’s time to go, and begin to climb back up the rock staircase.

  ‘That guy in the water,’ I say. ‘I think he was coming on to me. I also felt like he might be a paedophile.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Jiao, ‘I thought he was just making conversation. He seemed like a nice guy.’

  I am dying, climbing up these stairs. At the top, I try to control my panting so it seems that I’m breathing regularly, like a fit person. I almost keel over.

  On the way back to the car, Jiao gives me life advice.

  ‘If I were you, I’d write genre fiction to fund your literary fiction. Vampires or something. And get back on OkCupid. You can’t find a partner if you’re locked away writing every day. How is anyone going to marry you if they don’t know you exist? I don’t want to come back and see you when you’re forty years old, bitter because all the good guys are married off and you’ve missed out on finding the right one for you.’

  ‘I hate OkCupid. It’s so unromantic.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘You’re not still in love with the Kerouac guy, are you?’

  I’ve had a multi-year crush on a dark-haired guy who’s a fan of Jack Kerouac.

  He’s three years younger than me. I barely know him. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to woo him with clever variations on the metaphysical love poetry of Andrew Marvell. Unfortunately, the romantic success I pictured when writing those poetic variations far exceeded their real-world reception.

  I ask my crush what he likes to read.

  ‘I like On the Road,’ he says. ‘I like that the style was based on jazz.’

  I neglect to tell him that I didn’t enjoy On the Road, and that I like actual jazz – not jazz fiction.

  My crush mostly ignores me, most of the time. I wonder if he’ll start liking me if I become more like Jack Kerouac. I send him love letters filled with sharp fives and flat nines.

  All he says is, ‘Thanks.’

  Eventually, I realise that he won’t start liking me if I become more like Jack. He wants to be Jack. He doesn’t want me to be Jack.

  In a surprising and upsetting turn of events, he ends up falling madly in love with my mother, the Chanel model.

  He can’t stop texting her. He develops RSI in his thumbs from texting her so much. He texts her even while I’m talking to him about the beauty of On the Road, and how my fiction could one day be as cool and famous as Jack’s.

  In practically no time, my mother asks him to move in with her. This means that I have to move out.

  ‘Aren’t you troubled by the age difference?’ I ask her.

  ‘You’re thirty-two,’ says my mother. ‘You’ve always had a hard time dealing with reality. Wallowing in dreams is not going to improve your circumstances. It’s time for you to wake up and learn to support yourself financially. I am having my second wind. Go and have your first.’

  My mother and my crush, a glamorous item, have a big booze-up at their place to celebrate Australia Day. All their smug couple friends are there.

  They party all night, but they push everyone out by sunrise. It turns out that, despite my crush’s baby-face, he’s a four-hundred-year-old vampire. The age difference between him and my mother is no longer an issue.

  On my way out the front door, he shakes a long, bony finger at me.

  ‘If you dare write about me in your genre fiction,’ he says, ‘I will suck you dry and chuck your body in a Woolworths dumpster.’

  I tell Jack Kerouac about my woes when he turns up in the front yard of the apartment block where I’m living.

  He has reincarnated, and is currently a forty-five-year-old who owns a one-person company that mows lawns in our neighbourhood.

  The landlord hates listening to Jack blather on, so I’ve volunteered to go out into the yard on a fortnightly basis to give Jack the envelope with his thirty-dollar mowing fee.

  The beauty of Jack is that he knows all the gossip about all the people on the street. He just offers it without me asking as I’m giving him the cash – as if it’s part of the trade. He tells me who’s moving in and out, how much all the apartments have sold for, who is having an affair with whom, and who has gone on holiday and killed themselves.

  I tell Jack about my struggles as a writer. I remind him of the paper scroll he typed on to produce On the Road, and how the scroll sold at auction for more than two million dollars.

  ‘That’s about right,’ he says. ‘But that was literally a lifetime ago. Get with the program.’

  Jack isn’t
interested in Genius or Literature anymore, only Gossip.

  I complain to Jack about being a woman and a writer.

  I tell him that men are brought up to be bold. That they become the sorts of people who’ll put on a pair of boxing gloves, dip the gloves in paint, and then punch art across a canvas. They blaze through and fall down and pick themselves up.

  I tell him that women are born bold but then people chip away at them. ‘ “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” everyone says, “or you’ll make mistakes. And if you ever get important enough to sit on a stage in front of an audience, for God’s sake, close your legs.” ’

  ‘Stop bitching,’ says Jack. ‘Start producing.’

  I suddenly decide that Jack is handsome, and ask if he’d like to go out on a date.

  ‘I’m in love with Joan slash Laura,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You didn’t read my book properly, did you? Should’ve known. Even the way you make me talk isn’t natural. If you think On the Road’s a mess, this story’s even worse. Where’s the cohesive narrative? Where’s the structure? It’s just a bunch of anecdotes about being fat. It’s a fucking mélange.’

  ‘Like a mélange à trois?’

  ‘What are you even saying?’

  I think Jack is being unfair. I don’t know much about him but I know a lot about other writers. Salinger, for instance. I watched a documentary about Salinger once. If Jack were Salinger, this conversation would have been a lot more historically and linguistically accurate.

  ‘Well, this is my advice,’ says Jack. ‘If you want to succeed, you first have to identify which writers you are having a dialogue with in this country.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m having a dialogue with anyone.’

  ‘You think you’re hollering into the darkness but you’re not. You’re having a conversation with someone but you just don’t know who it is yet.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Peter Carey,’ I say. ‘People say I remind them of Peter Carey.’