The Best Australian Stories 2016
Page 11
‘He must be after my time.’
‘I haven’t read any Peter Carey.’
Jack walks back to his lawnmower and starts it up. ‘If you sound like Peter Carey but you haven’t read any Peter Carey,’ he shouts over the roar of the machine, ‘maybe you’re reinventing a perfectly good wheel.’
I stand there thinking about what he’s said. I decide that the writer I must be having a dialogue with is actually a guy called Tom, basically because I stalk him and we literally exchange words as a result. I also talk to another writer called Eric, who sends me creepy stories about terrariums, and tells me that if I want to be a proper writer, all I need to do is stand on a desk and declare that I am one.
I conclude that making note of actual conversations I’ve had is probably the best way to keep tabs on who I’m talking to.
Over breakfast, I’m reading an article about current trends in fiction. The author contends that society is now in the throes of autofiction. Everyone is writing it; everyone is reading it. Everyone wants to read about real alcoholic fathers, and real divorces, and real stay-at-home dads. No one wants anyone to make shit up anymore.
The author also claims that the days of postmodernism and pastiche are over.
I don’t even know what pastiche is. It sounds like a type of pastie filled with Clag.
I skim the rest of the article and finish my porridge. I decide that I’m going to write an autofictional essay called ‘The Fat Girl in History’.
I’m following the hip literary crowd. I’m deliberately in vogue.
I’m selling myself out but at least I’m selling myself to you.
I’m invited to the wedding of one of my best friends.
Everyone is shaking hands in the foyer, waiting to proceed into the ballroom. The women around me are wearing stacks of bangles and beautiful make-up. I can’t understand a word they’re saying. I used to go to school with them. We used to speak the same language.
‘Umf umf umf,’ they say, kissing me on both cheeks. The bangles rattle around me.
‘Fug fug fug,’ one of their husbands says, putting an arm around my shoulder.
‘Ik ik?’ I ask, trying to blend in. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
They look at me like I’m not making any sense.
I try a different tack.
‘Audi?’ I say. ‘Lexus gucci prada tiffany?’
They smile and nod, and I smile and nod.
I look at them and my brain is a blank field below a blank sky. No thoughts appear; no ideas for conversation occur to me.
They proffer a camera, and I take a photo of them and their husbands and babies. Their arms are very toned, and their teeth are very white.
The bride puts her arm through mine and leads me to the bathroom. We stand at the mirrors as she fixes her hair.
‘Am I losing my mind?’ I ask. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Og og quog og,’ she says, adjusting her sari and refreshing her lipstick.
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘My life is over.’
She smiles at me in the mirror. ‘Kidding.’
I smile back. She has the most beautiful face in the world.
‘But,’ she adds, ‘you should stop telling people about Jack and Judy.’
‘What?’
‘At least Jiao’s real, right?’
‘You’re all real.’
In bed, I watch a documentary on my laptop about women who are extremely fat, and deliberately continue to make themselves bigger. Many have skinny romantic partners who become their ‘feeders’. The feeders enjoy feeding their women to fatten them up.
Men make appointments to spend time with these women, just so the women will sit on them.
It’s a smart idea. There are a few people out there whom I’d be happy to crush, especially if they paid for it.
When the documentary is over, I lie down and look into the very core of my nature. I discover that I am simultaneously extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. It becomes apparent to me that an ambition appropriate to this core nature is to be the fattest person that ever lived, and to achieve this by being too lazy to exercise.
So I eat. I fatten myself up like a Wagyu cow.
Each roll of fat gets bigger and bigger until it rolls over the previous roll, grows downwards, and puts down roots.
My rolls spread out over the front yard and the whole apartment block.
I work harder at eating and soon the rolls extend across the country. Kangaroos hop across my knees. Black cockatoos make their nests in the crooks of my elbows. Koalas climb up and hug themselves around my pinkie fingers.
I can see how big I’m getting relative to the people who come around to visit. They lift up my arm fat and pop under it and say hello.
They’re all so small that I have to squint to see them. Although they start out chatting to me in an upbeat mood, every one of them ends up lamenting my weight. It’s like someone’s died. Their tears form puddles around my ankles. Platypuses paddle in the salt water.
I continue to expand in ever-multiplying concentric rings of fat, which move outwards across the world. Soon there is no more room for oceans, let alone tears. I am one big beach.
I begin to grow extra limbs and heads and breasts. Nevertheless, my Paunch to Penis Ratio remains nil.
I have so many fingers and arms and legs and necks now that I am able to wear truckloads of statement jewellery. I adorn myself with malachite and onyx, moss agate and lapis lazuli, citrine and smoky quartz. My jewellery becomes beautiful armour.
I become the face of Fat Chanel, and they send a team of photographers to shoot me from every angle. They do so even though they’re in the middle of a stressful trade mark dispute over the unauthorised use of the Chanel name.
I wear a backless dress for the key promo shot. The dress is also frontless, shoulderless and arseless.
They build a white temple to contain me. The walls are made of square panels that interlock in an ingenious way, so that new sections of wall can be added easily as I expand.
I grow faster than the little people can build the walls.
Around the temple, under an orange sky, a field of yellow peonies springs up.
Millions of ant-sized people pick the peonies and bring them to me as offerings. They lay them at my feet. They are here to get my blessing – for their newborns and marriages and assorted happy occasions – because I have become a goddess who doesn’t care about shit, and people really respond to that.
I gather up all the tiny worshippers and their fragile peonies. I pick up all the people I love and the people I hate – Jack and Judy, and Jiao and the Paunch, and Tom and Eric, and my mother and her vampire, and my friend with the beautiful face, and all the little women with their rattling bangles and words I don’t understand.
I wrap my fat arms around all of these little people, and hug them to my breast. I drug them with a lullaby, and nurse them all to sleep.
Snow begins to fall.
In their dreams, the little people call out to me. They call me the Goddess of Mercy.
Because I can nurse them or I can crush them, and the power is all mine.
A Step, a Stumble
Trevor Shearston
The phone rang at breakfast, and again when they were dressing for service. Each time he let it ring out. So early it could only be another reporter.
It was ringing again as they turned in the front gate, they could hear it through the open kitchen window. He sprinted to the porch and was almost to the door with the key aimed at the lock when the ringing stopped.
‘Blast!’
Now was different, there’d been time for a second search party to have gone down. He opened the door and, without waiting for her, strode to the kitchen and stood at the phone. People often tried again a minute later. She came in and placed her purse on the table and took off her hat. ‘Do you want a cuppa?’
‘No, too hot, I’ll just have water. Can you wait here while I change.’
As he re-entered the kitchen the phone rang. Both had their hands full, she at the sink shelling boiled eggs. She pointed with her chin to the colander standing on the draining board. He dumped into it the lettuce, carrots, radishes, swiped his right hand down his shorts.
‘Mr Newstead – Morey. I tried you earlier.’
‘We were at church.’
‘I thought you’d want to know, we found him.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘He arrived down there a lot quicker than we took getting him up. It was quite a slog, especially in this heat. Only blessing, we couldn’t find all of him. I’m actually in Katoomba, the hospital – the morgue. I was wondering, seeing you were the last person … you’d know the clothes he was wearing – I was wondering if you’d be willing to, ah, identify him for us. Officially.’
‘Oh – no – I don’t think I want to do that.’
‘It wouldn’t need long, just a quick look, as I say, more at the clothes. They tell me there’s no Mrs Childe or a companion, and that he hasn’t lived back here in over thirty years. Means I’m chasing next of kin and I’ve no idea where they are or if he’s even got any.’
‘I’m sorry, Constable Morey, I think that’s somebody else’s job. Maybe somebody at the Carrington. Reception, the barmen – any of them would know him.’
He knew what Morey was doing, calling in a favour, confirmed when the policeman let a silence grow.
‘Not your job, Mr Newstead, I agree. I was simply asking. I’ll follow up your suggestion. You’ll be required at a coroner’s inquest, though, as you’d probably know.’
‘Yes. I was called to one once before.’
‘You know the drill, then. So, sad result, but at least now we’re sure he didn’t plant his stuff and waltz off down the track.’
‘What … that’s happened?’
‘My word it has.’
She had finished shelling the eggs and was breaking lettuce into the smaller of the wooden salad bowls. She’d guessed they’d found the body and wanted to know what it was he’d refused to do. When told she was outraged. He’d been absolutely right to refuse, what an awful thing to ask! As if he hadn’t been through enough! She glittered with anger, clashing plates and slapping cutlery onto the counter until he took her by the arms and said into her face that he’d told the man no and that was an end to it.
He ate fast and went out to the laundry. He got the fork and the cardboard cylinder of derris dust and came out and picked up the brass nozzle from the lawn and walked again to the vegetable beds, the warm hose snaking bonelessly behind him. It wasn’t an end to it. But there was a disproportion between what the policeman had done for him and what he’d just been asked in return, grateful though he’d been at the time for the man’s help. Well, ‘help’, it was the man’s job!
Back in July, a night cold enough to have him working in overcoat and scarf, a man in his fifties, no coat or hat, had come to the rank, got in and asked to be taken to Blackheath. The few words were enough to fill the cabin with beer fumes. He took the bends out of town slowly, ready to pull over at the first warning the man gave of wanting to puke. Instead the man slumped against the pillar and fell into a muttering doze that lasted to the descent into the village, when he sat up and stared about, then told him to cross the railway and take the second left, Kubya Street. He then asked if he was married. When told yes, he said that was all right, that could be accommodated, then announced that he didn’t have the fare but his sister would take care of him, she wasn’t all there in the head but she was in the body, but seeing he was married he mightn’t like to do the other but that was all right, she was good with her mouth, he used her that way himself. Newstead drove to the police station. Fearing the man might attempt a runner, he parked on the kerb and pumped the horn. The cop who came was Morey, then also a stranger to him. He got out to explain but the policeman was already at the passenger door. ‘Save your breath, I know what he’s told you.’ He opened the door and said, ‘Hello, George,’ and hauled the man out and spun him and pushed him hard against the trunk of the tree growing on the footpath and held him while he went through his trouser pockets, extracting change and signing to Newstead that he come closer and cup his hand. ‘What’s he owe you?’
‘Three quid.’
‘That’d be half anyway. That do you? He don’t carry a wallet.’
‘Not worth court for the rest. Thank you.’
Still holding the man pinned, the policeman extended his other hand. ‘I run the shop – Jim Morey.’
‘Henry Newstead. Harry.’
‘Katoomba, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nice bastard isn’t he. You’ll know his face next time he ventures down your way.’ He gave the man a light cuff to the back of the head. ‘Won’t he, George.’
At the lookout yesterday Morey had done almost the identical thing, taken the worn leather pocketbook from the inside vest pocket of the professor’s coat and asked what he was owed, for the ride and the wait. When he demurred, Morey kept the pocketbook open. ‘You’re not going to get your money otherwise. Once I take this to the station you’re buggered.’
Newstead had named the amount. Morey drew out the notes and gave him.
‘Whack it in your pocket before we get company.’ He’d then removed and counted the rest of the notes. ‘Fifteen pound ten?’ Newstead nodded. The policeman tapped the notes straight and slid them back into their compartment, then drew from another a folded single page, which he opened and read, before holding it out to Newstead.
‘Witness if you would, Mr Newstead. Letter of credit on the Commonwealth Trading Bank for three hundred pound in the name Vere Gordon Childe.’ He lowered and refolded the letter. ‘That the name you knew him by, the man you brought here?’
‘The surname. At the rank we just called him Professor. My partner in the taxi, Fred Benham, he knew him better. Today was the first time he rode with me, he mostly rode with Fred. They’re closer in age. But Fred’s told me a fair bit about him. He liked the black Wolseley. He told Fred it reminded him of the taxis in London.’
‘What was he professor of? He tell Mr Benham?’
‘Yes, archaeology. But he told Fred he’d got interested in geology. Why he was coming to places like Govetts.’
‘And why the compass.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘He normally a good pay? Apart from today?’
‘He paid above the rate, yes.’
‘He certainly has today, Mr Newstead. If the signs are correct.’
He swung the nozzle to the rows of newly emerged beans and as he watched the soil blacken and drink wondered whether Morey had even then been thinking ahead to the request he’d be putting. His own mind didn’t work that way. But he wasn’t a copper.
‘Well, don’t forget he needs you, too,’ he said at the beans. To not say anything that complicates matters. And you managed that with Toohey. So he’s had his return there.
What was eating him, though, wasn’t the veiled demand, it was his own failure. If going over the edge had been intentional, why had he not sensed anything of the man’s intent? Because he hadn’t, not a hint. They’d shared the cab of the Wolseley for long enough, twenty minutes. The year before last he’d become a minor celebrity when he’d saved a woman, a Mrs Barry. She got in at the rank, told him she’d come that morning from Sydney in the train, and asked to be taken to Echo Point. They were words he heard, on good days, nine or ten times in a shift. She’d seemed outwardly calm when she settled herself and spoke, but when she loo
ked up and found herself in the mirror’s eyeline she’d slid across to the opposite window. Then as they’d descended Katoomba Street what he could describe later to the cops and to Toohey’s predecessor and to Joyce only as a sort of electric charge like the static before a storm had started in the taxi and grown until the air between the front and back seats seemed to him alive and humming. He’d dropped her at the Point rank, then gone straight to the kiosk and rung the police, telling them what he believed she intended and waiting till they got there so as to describe her. They’d found her on the clifftop near Spooner’s Lookout and stopped her. Her husband had written him, care of the police station, an emotional letter of gratitude and included a cheque for a hundred pounds. Joyce had bought them a new bedroom suite.
He’d picked up no such static from the professor. After stating where he wanted to go, the man had busied himself with filling his pipe and getting it to draw, then with riffling through the sheaf of papers he’d brought. He’d kept his Australian accent, but half-swallowed words as if having to speak was a nuisance. Newstead prided himself on not being like Fred, who couldn’t sit in a silent cab. He let his passengers choose whether and how much they wished to converse. In this he believed himself more professional than his older partner. You were not driving a person as a friend and equal, you were providing a service. The professor spoke only twice again in the twenty-minute run to Govetts Leap. When passing along Bathurst Road he’d asked whether Newstead thought the taller of the houses would have a view of Mount Banks. He’d answered that he’d never been in one, but that it was more than likely, if they weren’t blocked by the trees on the other side of the railway line. At Medlow the man had taken the pipe from his mouth to comment that he’d never had any interest in staying at the Hydro Majestic, it had the famous view but was in the middle of nowhere. Newstead replied that he’d had other people say the same, that they much preferred the Carrington, where the Professor was, in town where you had the cafes and the pictures and a bit of life on the streets.
‘Harry?’
He jumped, spraying the path. The hot concrete drank the water as greedily as the soil. She asked if he wanted a cuppa or something cold. Something cold, he said. When she went back in he drank from the nozzle, then ran water into his hand and slooshed his face.