The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  Where her sisters live, the streetlights pick out the peeling terraces and the crabbed dry gardens, a few geraniums in a pot or a half-dead rose marooned on concrete. Emma looks out as if from a ship, a capsule – the figures at the fish-and-chip shop counters, the souvlaki joints, the pubs spilling out laughing boys – here and there caught in the light. She hears music and sirens, sees cars leaking black exhaust, endless traffic lights, petrol stations fluorescent-lit and ghostly. Where her sisters live, the Tip Top factory casts its yeasty smell and at night only the bitumen breathes.

  Emma’s sisters wear overalls with tight, colourful T-shirts underneath or flowery, floppy dresses and Dunlop runners. Their arms are long and brown and they fling them around and laugh. The rooms in their shared houses have pinboards covered in Liberty material with postcards stuck all over them – of women, naked and very white or dressed in old-fashioned dresses with high collars and brooches at the throat, tight waists, long hair in buns on top of their heads. There are blue and white flowery plates and candlesticks with blackened melted wax. Bicycles have scraped the walls and the halls smell of damp, of old curries and coffee brewing.

  Every Sunday, just before lunch, Emma’s sisters come with their baskets of washing, their haircuts, long and short, their smell of adult girl and hot cotton, their eye-rolling opinions and irritations, their stubble of underarm hair and Spray Fresh deodorant. They sit at the big oak table and scoff the hot roast, the nubbly potatoes, the corned beef, pink and moist. Emma jiggles her feet along the bar that runs underneath the table and looks down at her thigh. She imagines the insides like corned beef; if she sliced it open perhaps it would be just like that.

  Her father argues with her sisters endlessly, pointlessly, about Student Fees and Immigration and Women and America. His mouth gets tight and his face bright and their mother says, ‘Darling, why do you always come down so hard?’ after one of them has stormed off – usually Lizzie – and Emma presses her cold potato into the plate’s cherry pattern with her fork and looks up at her mum. Her mum says, ‘Okay, darling,’ and Emma slides off the chair as quick and smooth as melted butter just as her dad is launching into another rant and Imogen has pulled her chair back from the table abruptly saying, ‘Fuck it, Dad, why don’t you ever listen?’

  By the time Emma hears the screen door clack behind her and grabs her bike she can hear Lizzie somewhere upstairs crying and her father shouting.

  *

  When she gets back from her ride, though, she knows the house will smell of her sisters’ hot clean sheets swirling in the dryer, they will be drinking tea, pushing their stomachs against the bench, her mother placing each dish carefully on the drying rack, their father shut in the study with a copy of Surgery Today.

  Emma is twelve. She can do things. Roam the streets with her friend Caroline. She can lie smoothly to her mother, though her sisters usually guess. She can throw a ball so it hits the back wall hard and bounces back at her. When she catches it, it claps hard into her left hand; she knows it will.

  Emma’s arms and legs are wiry and they seem to connect with the other parts of her body strongly, like Meccano. There is no hair anywhere weird yet, no bumps. Not yet.

  Her sisters. She watches them. She hears them. She knows from them that life cannot be explained by the snap of a catch in her hand, the scrape of her ankles against the pedals. What will come she does not know.

  *

  It has been in the paper every day and Emma is scared. A teenage girl was dragged into one of the houses at the back of the school. It is one Emma likes to look at as she walks home. The garden is lush and almost tropical, its looping foliage creates a mini-rainforest that almost obscures the house from the street. The house itself is picture-postcard perfect, a cream Victorian with a tiled verandah on three sides. This is where she ended up, the girl, bleeding, lost, raped at four o’clock in the afternoon. She is only fourteen.

  Then it happens again in the next suburb, another private schoolgirl, fifteen this time, an attempted abduction. Emma sees it on the news – the policeman nodding, his face sombre, the mother tearful, warning people. Emma’s mother tells her to walk home along the main road, a couple of days in a row even picking her up after school in the Holden.

  All the girls at school talk about it and go into horrible graphic detail. One girl, Stacy, whose mother is president of the tennis club and who seems to know everything, tells Emma that a man has been circling the school in his car. He beckoned to Stacy and when she went over, the man had only a black stocking over his dick. Emma feels sick when she hears this but Stacy just laughs. ‘That’s what my mum says to do,’ she says. ‘Just laugh and run away. They hate it when you laugh.’

  *

  Emma’s sisters come again the next Sunday and Emma listens to them talk to her mother when they stand in the kitchen after lunch.

  They say:

  ‘Mum, you need to talk to her about this sort of thing. She’s so naive.’

  ‘Mum, you know there are creeps everywhere.’

  ‘Mum, you need to teach her to be more self-protective.’

  ‘Mum, this is the real world.’

  *

  They have caught the man. Emma breathes out slowly when she sees him on the news. Her father snaps off the TV – ‘Bloody pervert,’ he says – as Emma slips off her chair and out of the room.

  *

  As they drive to the inner city, her sisters talk at her mother about their dad.

  They say:

  ‘He needs a hobby. He’s probably depressed. He’s impossible.’

  They say: ‘Mum, you need to get a life.’

  *

  Emma thinks of the man. He looked small and ordinary, a pathetic gingery moustache, like the man who fills the Holden with petrol every week. For a second, seeing him on the news, Emma had been afraid it was him. But it wasn’t.

  But who are they, she wonders, these different men?

  *

  The Holden glides off the freeway and Emma half closes her eyes as she sees the letters so they are faint, less like letters than currents, lines moving inside her brain:

  ‘RAPE IS POWER’.

  *

  She wonders about the words, each one, and about her sisters, how they know about such things and yet they go forward into the world again and again. She winds down her window to feel the hot bitumen breeze.

  Martian Triptych

  James Bradley

  I

  It comes with a sound like a river, the noise so loud in the silence of the observatory he turns for a moment to see if Clyde has heard it too, only to realise Clyde is not there, that he left hours ago. Through the door he can see the trees outside, dark against the fading sky, hear the wind in the trees. And then the sound is gone, as quickly as it began.

  It is more than twenty years since he first came here, led up the narrow path to the butte by the agent. He knew the agent – what was his name? Tompkinson? Thomas? Thompson? – thought he was a fool but he didn’t care: even then he knew what he was doing, knew this empty hill high in the cold air of the mountains was the place he needed, the place that would bring him closer to the stars.

  That night, back in his room in the hotel, he took out Schiaparelli’s maps, traced out the pattern of lines that bisected them. And as he did he understood something he had not before, understood what it was that had made him want this so badly. It was not simply the same restlessness that had taken him halfway round the world to Japan and Korea, it was something deeper and more profound than that. It was that same feeling he had when he stood under the desert sky and saw the massing light of the Milky Way move overhead, that sense that this is not all there is, that to look beyond the Earth is to glimpse the possibility of other lives, as yet unknown.

  As the building grew he took to working on the site at night, his telescope mounted on the floor, the half-built dome of the observatory rising about him. Overhead the stars so clear in the desert air he sometimes thought he might lose his purchase on
the Earth, fall upwards into the emptiness of space. It was cold, of course, but he forgot the cold as the Martian surface flickered into life in the lens, the lines on its surface resolving one by one.

  Schiaparelli had called them canali, meaning channels, but the more he studied them the more certain he became they were not a natural phenomenon but the canals the Italian word suggested, things carved into the landscape of the planet to bear water like the aqueducts of the Romans or the irrigation ditches of the Egyptians. Why else, after all, would they be so straight, why else would they darken and fade with the turning of the seasons?

  Yet who were these people, what did they look like? Why build such things? Why were there no other signs of civilisation, no cities, no roads, no lights on the darkened surface? The canals spoke of a people who tilled the soil, who had transformed the low Martian lands into fields and paddies surely such a people would not live underground. So where had they gone? What calamity had befallen them?

  Then there was the night he understood. It began with the fact the canals did not stop when they reached the seas, their lines extending on, into the basins. It made no sense to him. Why do that unless the seas themselves were retreating? But then he saw it, saw it all almost at once. The seas were receding, drying up, and the canals were not the work of a civilisation in full flower, but the creation of a people fighting a losing battle against their dying planet, a people desperate to water the spreading deserts. A people noble, and wise, yet doomed.

  There were those who complained his results could not be replicated, that his ideas were little more than fantasy, the lines he saw merely illusions created by flaws in his telescope or the ghostly networks of capillaries branching out across his retina. Yet, as the years passed and he watched and wrote, he only grew more certain he had stumbled upon something that mattered, something that spoke of the impermanence of life, of its fragility. Faced with the evidence of this ancient race’s labours, their long fight against the inevitable, how could humanity fail to be reminded of the grace and wisdom of peace and the brotherhood of civilisation?

  More than a few mocked him for it, but he did not care. Once some wit called him the Martian Ambassador, the name designed to sting, yet instead it pleased him so much he took it for his own, referring to himself as the Envoy of Mars or the Martian Envoy. They could not see it, that was all.

  He could though. Sometimes alone in the quiet of his study he felt almost as if it might be possible to close his eyes and be there, his body translated across time and space as quick as thought, as if the familiar things of his study, the books and papers and furniture, had no more solidity than the resisting tension of water. He imagined cities carved of stone, old as time and more beautiful, pyramids, patchworks of dusty fields stretching out towards the horizon. And the steady whisper of the breeze, the sound of a windmill turning in the quiet.

  He is falling now, or perhaps has already fallen, is lying on the ground. Time no longer seems true to him, a thing that spools and flows like water spilling out along the channels of a delta, flowing fast and slow and then away. He is not afraid, which surprises him, he has so much still to do. Perhaps there is something else he has not understood. Perhaps they needed him to see, to understand. Perhaps they were simply waiting for all of us.

  And then he realises they are already there. Silhouetted against the night they are so strange, so shy, their tall bodies and thin limbs both graceful and awkward, like those of a child or a giraffe, designed for life on a world older and lighter than this one, their skin green, like chlorophyll. Their noseless faces too, he sees now, like those of an African mask, impossibly long and yet elegant, their black eyes featureless beneath heavy brows. As they draw near they seem to hesitate, then with a new confidence step closer, the tallest extending one three-fingered hand as if asking him to come with them, to join them, their voices like no sound he has heard, like the whispering of the wind, like the knocking of sticks. Like the sound of approaching water.

  II

  Sunset is still a quarter of an hour off as she reaches the top of the ridge, but overhead the sky is already fading, the bleached light of day giving way to blue and violet, the flat plain of the crater below marked with shadows. Wary of the loose rock underfoot she skids to a halt, Wu’s anxiety about an injury in their last days on the planet coming back to her as she steadies herself in the low gravity.

  Soon the wind will begin to rise, howling down from the highlands to the south, but for now it is quiet, the only sounds her breathing, the slow whirr and hiss of her suit. Glancing at her visor display she checks the feed from the habitat, then, with a flick of her eyes dismisses it, lifting her gaze to the darkening sky.

  The stars come sooner here, their shapes and colours sharper through the thinner atmosphere. Yet it is still several minutes before the first begin to appear, their arrival heralded by the appearance of Phobos, its pale potato shape silvery in the last daylight. The first time she saw the tiny moon the speed of its passage across the sky seemed so alien; seeing it now she is struck by how familiar its swift orbit has become, the way this place has come to seem if not like home, then something close to it.

  In her helmet the alert chimes, reminding her it is time to be heading back; she ignores it, unwilling to leave just yet. And then she sees it, a tiny disc of blue just cresting the hills to the east, the moment so sudden she feels her breath catch. Only just past full, she is pleased to see.

  For a minute or two she stands, unmoving. This is the last time she will see this, the last time she will be here, and although she knows she should be happy the mission is over and they are returning home, the closer their departure has come the harder the thought of leaving has become. It is not that the thought of the launch makes her nervous, although it does; it is the knowledge that once they leave this place will be empty again, bereft of life, their presence here forgotten.

  The alert chimes again, louder this time, more insistent; taking a final look out across the darkening plain, she turns away and begins to lope back down the hillside. Although she weighs less here than on Earth, she is still careful: even in low gravity a fall from here could break bones. At the bottom of the ridge she slows her pace, turns northward towards the habitat, its lights already bright against the dark, her helmet lamp picking out the ground ahead of her. Once, millions of years ago, this was a delta, these barren rocks submerged by warm water that flowed from the north to pool in the lowlands beyond. There was life as well: single-celled organisms feeding on the sunlight and the nutrients around them, beds of algae and pools filled with sulphurous water and stromatolites. Where they went nobody knows. All that is certain is that as the planet cooled the water disappeared, some leached back into the rocks and locked away as ice, some sublimed into space as the solar wind scoured the last vestiges of life and atmosphere from the rocks and dust.

  As she reaches the perimeter, she sees Hartnett appear from behind one of the rovers.

  ‘There you are,’ he says, his voice clear in her helmet. ‘We were just getting worried.’

  She smiles, amused by his pretence they did not know where she was. Their training emphasised interpersonal strategies to allow them to live together out here. What it didn’t mention was what they should do if they liked it here, if they wanted to stay.

  ‘Still getting the site ready?’ she asks and Hartnett chuckles.

  ‘Triple-checking. You’re going in?’

  She nods.

  ‘I’ll see you in there,’ he says.

  Back inside she removes her helmet and strips off her suit, hanging them by the airlock. She can hear the others speaking in the command unit, discussing the launch, but rather than join them she turns left, into the passageway to the living quarters, not yet ready for company.

  In her cubicle she crawls into the tube that has served as her bed for the past two years and activates her screen. Pushing aside the newsfeed she calls up her messages and begins flicking through them one by one. Most are routine – comm
unications from colleagues back on Earth, notes from Mission Control – but near the end she comes across a message from Liwei. Tapping the screen she opens it, and a moment later her son’s face appears.

  As always her throat tightens at the sight of him. Because of the time lag, normal conversation is impossible. With her husband this has posed few problems, the two of them communicating by email in conversations that bounce carelessly back and forth. But with Liwei it has been more difficult: although his writing has improved in the last year or so, he still struggles to express himself effectively, meaning the only real way to communicate is like this, with recorded video messages.

  This message was recorded several hours ago, early evening Beijing-time. Liwei is seated at his desk, the door behind him open to the living room. Although he must have been home for several hours, he is still dressed in his school uniform, his yellow neckerchief hanging loose. As the recording begins he hesitates, perhaps waiting to be sure the video is running. Then, with a grin, he begins to tell her about his day at school, about his lessons and what he has learned.

  This is a ritual, of course, one they developed early on so he would find it easier to speak to her like this, but it is a good one because it reminds him of the value of education. When she was a girl in Tianjin her father made her do the same.

  Today Liwei has won a ribbon in a maths competition, and as he holds it up she feels the old tenderness well up at the sight of his happiness and pride. Yet a moment later when he sets the ribbon aside and begins to tell her how proud he is of her now she is coming home, how proud all of China is, she feels her happiness slip away.