The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  ‘Still a bit rattled. You probably saw they found him – not yesterday, this morning.’

  ‘Yes. The compass and stuff hasn’t stopped the idiots though saying he jumped. Tom for one. I said to him, where’d you bloody hear that nonsense –’ he glanced towards Joyce – ‘pardon the French. A fare from Medlow. And where’d this fare hear it? He didn’t say. And he’s telling this to me who carried the man five times in the last fortnight! I told him to his face he was an idiot. He didn’t like it much. I said to him, you’d be jumping off a cliff, would you, if you were the top in the world at your game? You could afford umpteen weeks at the Carrington! He was a bit stuck for an answer you won’t be surprised to hear.’

  Joyce flashed him a look, get rid of him Harry if you know what’s good for you, and disappeared into the hallway.

  Newstead rose and fetched the ledger from the dresser, which diverted the man. They counted up and Newstead entered the amount and the petrol dockets while Fred did the split. He spoke as he opened his wallet on the table and began ferrying the notes and coins into it.

  ‘If I thought it’d be anywhere close, I’d go to the funeral. Like I said on the phone, I’ll miss him – and I’m not talking about the splash he made in the kick. But it’ll be in Sydney I’d say, where his professor mates can get to it.’

  ‘No reason for it to be up here.’ He stood. Fred called goodbye towards the hallway and followed him outside, his limp more pronounced at the end of a day.

  She fried the rissoles in the oil she saved from sardine tins, served them with white sauce containing diced carrots and parsley. He found himself ravenous and ate six. Afterwards he made tea while she spooned pears and ice cream into bowls and they took their bowls and cups outside to the chairs on the concrete. The sun was setting. White cockatoos were making earsplitting screeches from the pines along Ada Street. Next door the three Craig kids were still out in the yard chasing one another with the hose, their screams nearly as shrill as the cockies’. The cold of the ice cream on his teeth and the imagined cold of the hose jet suddenly brought into his mind the hospital morgue. He was seeing, he knew, a crime photograph from the Post. The floor and walls were tiled white. The professor’s body was on a steel table, covered with a sheet. Through it he could see they’d arranged the recovered pieces into a semblance of him. But where the face should have been the sheet was nearly flat, just small bumps and hollows. His heart began to race. He needed to set down his bowl and walk but she’d straightaway be asking what was wrong. He turned his head as if he was studying the peeling paint on the laundry eaves and breathed through his mouth. She was speaking to him. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I said, Fred would do tomorrow if you ask him.’

  He’d had the thought several times already and each time dismissed it. Not for the reason he was about to give. ‘I can’t. He’s got pennants Saturday, he’ll be wanting to put in time on the green.’

  ‘Darling, it’s only Sunday – he’s got two other whole days.’

  ‘Yes, but right now he’s probably arranging with the other blokes. I’m not sick.’

  ‘I’m not saying you are. But you could give yourself another day. Couldn’t you.’

  ‘I still have to front up to the rank some time. It might as well be tomorrow.’

  There – he’d more or less stated the reason. She stared at him, then looked away at the darkening pines. ‘Where do you think this other story’s come from?’

  He waited for her to turn. When she didn’t he spoke to the back of her head, the flash coming to him of being forced to speak the same way to Morey at the lookout. ‘Hard to say. Maybe the Carrington staff making guesses from the coppers searching his room and the questions they asked, and then the story’s moved down to the rank.’

  She turned now.

  ‘When you first got there, Harry – what did you believe had happened? What did you honestly think?’

  ‘I couldn’t think! I had a dozen things in my head at once. I suppose I was hoping he’d left his stuff and gone off to do business with a gum leaf.’

  ‘Don’t, please. I’m serious. You sensed something had happened. That’s you, I know you.’

  He leaned back, exhaled at the eaves.

  ‘When I saw the specs I thought he’d gone over. Either missed where the edge was, or stood up too fast and got dizzy.’

  ‘And that’s what any sensible person would have thought. I don’t care what this Morey believes! You don’t know that he isn’t full of himself, Harry – that he wasn’t just puffing himself up at your expense.’ She rocked her head knowingly. ‘Of course you all see the obvious –’ she’d deepened her voice to a man’s – ‘you have to be me to see what really happened here.’

  That shook him, sat him up. It hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘You’ve been a worrier as long as I’ve known you, right back to school. You’ll be telling yourself soon the other story is right and you should have guessed what the man intended and stopped him. Well that’s nonsense. It’s nonsense, darling. And even allowing for a moment it might be right, the man must have been a better actor than anyone up here has met before, and that includes you.’

  He washed up while she had a shower. Then he had his. When he came out again into the kitchen in his pyjamas and dressing gown she’d turned on the small wireless. They had cocoa and listened to The Pied Piper, even he hooting with laughter at the scandalous answers Keith Smith extracted from the kids about members of their families. Beneath the laughter, though, he was dreading bed.

  The cool smell of mist was drifting through the window when they got in, a change come. She kissed him and gripped his hand and was quickly asleep. He remained lying on his back. The Craigs’ dog was yapping but he’d fallen asleep to its noise before. He’d needed something stronger than sugar in his cocoa. The blokes at the rank would be straight onto him, wanting his take on what had really happened. No, he had to get off that! He made himself begin mentally going over the Wolseley. They’d have to think seriously soon about getting the rear springs done. And the clutch. Even in second she was beginning to slip going up Katoomba Street. A new plate and assembly would set them back. Fred could try his mate in Penrith for a recon. They had enough in kitty for that.

  He woke believing he’d been awake. He was crying. He clapped a hand over his mouth and lay his sleeved arm across his eyes. It lasted some minutes, easing off then he’d be blubbering again. When he’d properly stopped he lowered his arm to his chest and looked at Joyce. She had the covers pulled up to her ear, all he could see was her hair. She’d spoken from love but she was wrong. The man had known how far above them all he was, that he was dealing with children. Morey was the only adult among them, not the blowhard she’d painted him. The short film returned of the man when he’d stepped out at Govetts and walked his few paces towards the fence and stared out over the Grose. His eyes welled again. The only comparison in his own life to what must have been going through the man’s mind was the first time he climbed the tower at Catalina pool and shuffled to the edge and looked down. He’d known he was going to hit water and swim to the side but he’d still felt like spewing. What had the man felt, looking at where he was going? The only clue he’d given was how long he stood. That was when he should have spoken, asked if everything was all right. But the man had been perfectly businesslike when he turned and came back for his papers and the compass. The only concession he’d made to fear was when he was alone, standing on the ledge. He’d taken off his specs.

  The alarm clock was on the floor. He groped with his hand and found his watch on the bedside table. It was twenty to twelve. He drew his legs from under the covers and swung them so he was sitting on the edge of the bed and looked over his shoulder. She didn’t stir. He stood and moved in bare feet to the door and took his dressing gown from the hook and walked out into the hallway.

  He closed the kitchen door and turned on the light, then took a glass from the dresser shelf and walked to the sink. He drank looking at
himself floating in the dark pane. Then he came round the table to the bench and lifted the phone and slid the book from under it. Katoomba police station was on the wall but not Blackheath. The phone rang five times before a man’s voice answered, croaky from sleep. ‘Blackheath Police, Constable Hollis.’

  ‘Hello constable, sorry to wake you up, my name’s Harry Newstead, from Katoomba.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Newstead, I know who you are. How can I help you?’

  ‘I’m wondering if Constable Morey’s there.’

  ‘Senior Constable Morey will be in at eight tomorrow morning. Is it something I can help you with?’

  ‘Not really, no. He asked if I’d do him a favour. You can tell him if you would please that I’ve reconsidered. That’s if he still needs me. I’ll ring him a bit after eight.’

  He lifted the phone and placed it back on the book. Then he pulled out a chair and sat. Morey had asked that he look just at the clothes but a proper identification required looking at a face. If, for whatever his reasons, the man had had the courage to step off, then he, Harry Newstead, should have the courage to confront what was left and put a name to it. They’d have cleaned him up he supposed. His hair would have survived, and probably part or all of the ginger moustache. That would be enough. He’d just have to try not to take in too much else. He’d need a whisky before he went in. He’d have to find his father’s hip flask. He could get it filled at the Carrington. They sold mints over the bar, too, he thought.

  Good News for Modern Man

  Fiona McFarlane

  When I began my study of the colossal squid, I still believed in God. The squid seemed to me then, in those God days, to be the secretly swimming proof of a vast maker who had bestowed intelligence – surprisingly, here and there – on both man and mollusc. I’ve discussed this with Charles Darwin, who visits me daily at sundown, always punctual and a little out of breath. His cheeks are red, his hair white. He looks nothing like a ghost. He puts his feet up on the rocks and look out over this small corner of the Pacific, calm at sundown and partially obscured by a mosquito haze. We sit above the tree line and consider the movements of the colossal squid in her bay below. She moves this way and that; she floats and billows in the tide. She reminds me of my mother’s underwear soaking in a holiday basin. Her official name, her name in polite company, is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. We’ve named her Mabel and together we plan to free her.

  It’s no easy thing, this freeing of a colossal squid. It was difficult enough to imprison her in the first place. There is the issue of her size.

  ‘A colossal squid,’ I tell Darwin, ‘makes a giant squid look like a bath toy.’

  He agrees with me, although as far as I know he has never seen either a bath toy or a giant squid. He remains surprisingly unexcited by my account of Mabel’s capture: the months-long hunt with smaller squid for bait, the boredom and fussy seasickness, Mabel emerging from the sea with her hood pink in the sudden sun. She flailed at the surface, she swam and sounded, smelling as much like the sea as anything I have ever smelled. But we hooked her, and we panicked her, and she raced ahead of us, right into this bay, through a narrow channel that we were able to block. And now she spends her days here, rotating among her many arms, and I spend my days watching her. They’re going to build her a facility, so there’s money to raise and laws to change. For now it’s just the two of us – and Darwin.

  Darwin first appeared on my 402nd day on the island. We often disagree, but in a neutral, brotherly sort of way, and I appreciate his company. The sun sinks into the sea, but we also see it rise from the sea. This makes the world seem very small, even though we’re two hours from any town. There’s a Catholic school higher up the mountain and we see the girls walk down to the water and back up again. I hear their singing in the early morning and it surprises me; at sundown it makes me sad. Late in the afternoons they swim in the white sea – far out into the lagoon, where I often see bullet-shaped sharks. Darwin and I take turns peering through my binoculars. It’s an innocent and companionable lechery. Although he’s a ghost, he leaves sweat around the eyepieces.

  I’ve been thinking for some time of taking one of the monthly supply boats back to New Zealand, then a plane home. At home the rain will be cold, pigeons will grow fat, there will be supermarkets. I’ve refused replacements and talked up the malarial solitude, and now they won’t come, not even over-eager graduate students with an itching for the Pacific. But this is my 498th day on the island, and lately I’m troubled by headaches and abrupt changes in temperature. There’s something feverish about this air. It’s not only the headaches, although they’re bad enough; my major symptom is a kind of vertigo, a frequent and sudden awareness that the universe is expanding out from me. This feeling begins with my feet, as if the ground – the planet – the galaxy – has suddenly dropped away from them and I’m floating untethered in space, only space doesn’t exist, and neither does my body. I can only describe the sensation as the suspension of nothing in nothing. But I look down and there are my feet, dirt-brown, and there are Darwin’s, sensibly shod. Below our feet swims Mabel. It’s only while watching Mabel that I feel tied to the earth once more, and a sense of order is restored. Still, that moment of vertigo is briefly and terrifyingly glorious. It reminds me of the way, when I was younger, I used to feel my body respond to the singing of hymns: an interior fire, a constriction of the heart that I took for a visitation of the Holy Spirit. I never mentioned this sensation to anyone. Maybe other people feel it. Perhaps the schoolgirls on the mountain feel it, singing in their concrete church: the large feeling of singing toward something that sings back. I often wondered if sex felt that way, undernourished adolescent that I was. And now – the quiet sky, the patient waiting, the tick of time in the bones, until the world rushes out and the vanishing of the cosmos presents itself again, magnificent.

  I’ve told Darwin of my troubles. He suspects malaria, which is possible; I stopped taking my meds on day 300, partly because of the dreams they gave me, bright crystal dreams of exhausting flight. Sitting here, atop our hot rock, we might be the last two survivors of the flood, chosen by Noah: a pair of scientists, two by two. But the Ark broke up somewhere along the Line and left us stranded with a squid for company. Darwin regards me sadly when I say this, stroking his diluvian chin.

  ‘Geology,’ he says, ‘disproves you.’

  ‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a joke.’

  *

  I live in a small astronomical observation station owned and, until recently, forgotten by the New Zealand government. It’s partway up the mountain, and I can walk down to the sea in thirteen minutes. Paths have been cut into the rock, as if this were a holiday beach frequented by sure-footed children, but it’s still a relief to step out onto the sand from the mountain path, to see the sea spread wide and to my left the smaller inlet that is Mabel’s temporary home. The clear water is deeper than it looks from above. When I say the water in Mabel’s bay is clear, I don’t mean it’s transparent, but that it’s see-throughable, and Mabel is see-able there at the bottom. I feed her fish thawed from a deep freeze, or freshly caught if I’m in the mood, and these she grasps at the end of her tentacles and rolls up toward her beaked mouth. The coral sand is sharp and clean and my feet never feel dirty. When Darwin accompanies me (which he usually does on those days I’m feeling my worst) he only removes his shoes to wade into the shallows, and then his feet are the delicate brown and blue and yellow of Galápagos finches.

  The view of Mabel from the shore is more intimate than the bird’s eye view from my station fifteen metres above. It’s impossible to take in her vastness or the pattern of her tentacles and arms, so it’s her eyes that fascinate me. They interest Darwin as well. They’re hard to avoid. Mabel has the largest eye in creation, and it looks like ours, although its structure is entirely different. This humanoid appearance far out on the lone branch of invertebrate evolution gave scientists pause, at one time; they paused over Darwin and his theory of natural selection.
The eye of the squid once gave Darwin a great deal of trouble. Now Darwin and I stand on the shore and consider the vertebrate appearance of Mabel’s canny eye. It looks so very God-given. Impossible to assume that such an eye doesn’t think, or ponder, or dream.

  I think about squid too much. Darwin cautions me.

  ‘A squid is not a human,’ he says.

  ‘A human is just another animal,’ I say.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Darwin. ‘The highest of the animals.’

  ‘Careful,’ I tell him.

  We argue about this – the concept of progress, the tricky politics of supposing one thing higher than another. He’s impatient with the twentieth century on this point. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the twenty-first has begun, and I don’t tell him. I do tell him that whenever I spend an extended length of time with Mabel, peering into her large eye from the rocks on the shore, I find myself shaking off the feeling that there’s a person inside her, watching me. Darwin mocks this as sentimental. He says this sensation is so typical as to be ‘fatally unfresh.’ I suppose my desire to free Mabel is similarly unfresh. But there are no fresh desires.

  Today I feel very well. I feel an immense good health. Today I feel with great certainty my precise location upon the earth, the latitude and longitude, the position of the sun. This is good, because today we free Mabel. The date is September 23rd, but that’s elsewhere. Here on this island we’ve dropped out of time, although once, I believe, the island was within time: when it was first created, it was a definite volcanic event. Then the rock subsided, the sea settled, the coral multiplied, and the powerful boats of the islanders came. Whalers and traders, adventurers, missionaries, and gentleman naturalists endlessly agog at the taxonomic world. Mabel’s arrival might qualify as an occasion, a specific point on a timeline, except that the strangest of sea creatures must come butting up against this place in secret, yesterday and today and tomorrow, and usually there’s no one here to care or notice. No, the real things of the world take place elsewhere. And yet today will be an eventful day, and yesterday was too. So these are the end times.