The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  At first she thinks that it is simply because the words are so clearly not Liwei’s but those of another: a teacher perhaps or someone on the newsfeeds. Her husband says having a mother who is so famous has been strange for Liwei. Yet it is not just about her being famous. Instead, it is the fact that every time she hears Liwei speak like this she finds herself wondering how well he actually remembers her, how much she is a person, a presence in his life rather than an idea, a disembodied face he watches each night. He was three when she left; he will be almost seven when she returns: years she will never regain, years in which he stopped being her child and became his father’s, her absence severing some bond she knows will never be repaired.

  None of this is unexpected: she understood the cost when she volunteered for the mission. Still, many had been surprised when she was selected and agreed to go, surprised that a mother would willingly choose to be separated from her child in this way.

  At the time this had irritated her. After all, nobody asked the same questions about Reyes and Wu, both of who are fathers. Yet as she watches Liwei speak, she wonders whether those who questioned her decision weren’t right in the end, whether it really is different for a mother.

  There are options, of course. Before they left the crew all had eggs and sperm harvested as a precaution against radiation. At the time she had been reluctant, but her husband – perhaps anticipating a time when they might want another child to bring their family back together – had insisted, going so far as to accompany her to the clinic, sit beside her as she was strapped into the chair.

  Whether he would do the same now she does not know; although his messages are as wry and friendly as ever, she sometimes detects a distance in them as well: a sense he has changed in their time apart, that he and Liwei have become a unit of their own, one she is no longer part of. There is no question he will be there waiting for her, but whether the bond they had will remain is less certain. Sometimes she imagines him next to her, trying to conjure his presence back into being, to remember his weight, his smell, the shape of his nape and back, but with each passing month it grows more difficult. Even her body feels different, less needy, more separate, as if she has grown away from her own biology.

  Perhaps it is better this way anyway. All of them understand the world they are returning to has passed some kind of tipping point. In the time they have been away the changes have come with terrifying, brutal rapidity: heat waves and freezing winters arriving hard on the heels of each other, hurricanes and fires, floods and tornadoes destroying cities and towns. In the Arctic the last ice has finally disappeared and great gouts of methane have begun to burst upward from the warming seabed, in Malaysia and Brazil the forests are burning, in the oceans algal blooms spread like great green and red stains against the blue. Governments and the UN have programs in place to try and combat the changes but it is clear most believe it is already too late, that something irreversible has begun.

  For the most part they try not to discuss it. Even when Reyes’ sister went missing in Hurricane Foster, they did their best to avoid talking about it. It is not that it is too far away, or not quite. Instead, it is the knowledge that whatever it is they are doing here has become somehow irrelevant, a symbol of something already lost.

  On her screen Liwei is saying goodbye, his words hurried and distracted, his attention already elsewhere. Watching him, she is struck again by how different he is from the child she remembers, how change marks us all.

  This thought lingers as she directs her screen to begin recording, and in her brightest voice begins to tell Liwei about her trip to the ridge, about that last glimpse of Earth in the Martian sky, about the preparations for the launch, about how much she is looking forward to seeing him, about her hopes for his education. Reminding him of his promise to do better in English she tells him his father says he has been working hard. But nowhere does she say what she thinks, which is that leaving here saddens her, that she will miss this place, the work, that she knows in her heart this is the end of something, that their presence here will not be repeated, that they will be the last of their species to travel so far or see so much. That his life will be less than hers, and the future holds only loss.

  And when she is done she says goodbye, tells him she loves him and she will speak to him soon, and then lying back she stares up at the ceiling, trying to imprint on her mind all she has seen, to remember this place, this time, so she will have it again once it is gone. Outside the wind is growing stronger, howling faster across the plain, the metal frame of the habitat shifting and moving against it with a sound like a ship at sea, moving on the tide.

  III

  As the shallows of the sea give way to the marshes, the shoal begins to divide, their bodies coiling and twisting away through the streams and channels and on, into the pools and spawning beds beyond. Only an hour ago they played together as they swam, their bodies coursing through the sun-dappled water of the weed fields; now they move restlessly, agitated, avoiding each other’s sight as they give way to the call of the beds.

  As always, it is the young who go first, their bodies filled with the speed and careless beauty of youth. For some it will be their first time, a thing desired and feared since they were old enough to understand the way their lifecycle circles back to this moment, the way they are bound not just to each other but to this place; for others, the shivering call will be more familiar.

  Yet it is only as the last of them dart away that she realises this is her last time, that once she has spawned her exhausted body will die. How she knows she is not sure – they say it is a signal in the brain, a protein triggered by the scent of the beds themselves – all she knows is that as she sees the others disappear she feels a sudden stab of yearning, the feeling so strong she only just resists the impulse to sing to them not to go, not to leave her here.

  This is grief, she thinks, or something like it. Yet almost as soon as the thought is there it is gone again, the feeling too, both receding as if on the edge of sleep, as if she is slipping outside herself. For a moment she tries to resist, not yet willing to let go, to lose herself, but then it is there, the scent, and she is moving in it, her body fluid, fast, moving in the stream as if in the quickening of mating as the call washes over her, the years falling away as she leaps and dives on, into the pool where she was born, the pool to which she has returned so many times, the pool where soon she shall die, her body finally depleted.

  Between now and then, though, there is the spawning itself, that wildness and urgency, the spumes of eggs spilling out of her and clouding the shallow water of her natal pool. Impossible to describe, this yielding of the self to the body, to the hot quick pulse of the moment; impossible to forget as well. There are those who say this is when they are their truest selves, that it is in the ancestral streams that they remember what they once were, and although she has spent too long in the world to believe that she knows it is partly true, that there is something of themselves they have left behind as they have strived to shape the world to their ends.

  When it is done she rises to the surface, her body weak, spent. Like all her kind she has contemplated this moment, wondered about its secrets, about whether she would fight. Yet now she is here she feels no fear, only sadness, as if all she was is already slipping away.

  Where her body breaks the surface the air is hot, hotter even than the water. Overhead the Sun looms, huge and red, its light shimmering on the surface of the pool. Turning herself, she tries to take in its immensity, the way its heat surrounds her, envelops her.

  Once her people called it Lifebringer, imagining it had birthed them, contrasting it to the moon swimming as quick and tiny as a hatchlet in the night-time sky, whose shape they believed guided their souls to the hatching grounds in the deeps of the sky. And in a way it was true, for it is the Sun that brought life to this planet, its heat awakening the seas from the rocks, triggering the chemical reactions that gave rise to life, to the schooling beauty of the seas and the lakes.
<
br />   Yet what the Sun gave, so it will take. For it is old now, dying, and with each year it grows larger as it consumes itself.

  Once they believed they might survive: that as it burned its fuel the Sun’s hold on their red planet might lessen, allowing its orbit to expand. Yet already it is clear this was wrong, that the planet is growing hotter, that the oceans that give them life are drying up.

  None of them know how long they have. A few years, a decade, maybe two. All they know is that one day soon the water will be gone, and one day after that the planet itself will be engulfed as well, consumed by the sun that once gave it life. It is something they all mourn, every day, the knowledge that this precious spark of life should be burned away, that everything they have built, everything they have made should die.

  Yet as she feels her life ebbing away she finds herself wondering whether they are right to grieve. It is not the first time this has happened, after all. Once, billions of years ago, the planet bore life, microbial creatures that swam in lakes and rivers. In time they perished, dying as the planet grew colder so that for billions of years it was nothing but airless, icy desert. Back then there was life on the planet that lies sunward from them, the place some believe to have been their sister planet. Intelligence too, it seems, beings who built and dreamed and strived like them. Yet they too are gone, wiped away by the immensity of time.

  There are other worlds, of course, other seas. The moons of the gas giants, or further out, where the planetoids and comets swing on their lifetimes-long orbits through distant space. And further away again, around distant stars there are other worlds as well, places so distant and strange as to be unimaginable. Some have spoken of sending ships to them, of adapting to life in different seas, yet she is not sure any of them truly believe it. After all, what would a life so diminished be worth? This world, these seas, they are what they are, these are the places they spawn and grow, these stars overhead are their own. What would they mean somewhere else? Could they return to the beds to spawn? What would their young be? No, she thinks now, better to pass on, to see the way time will cover them all. Below her the others are singing, the spawning done, the sound coming as if from far away, like a word or a name half-remembered on the edge of sleep.

  Blur

  Michelle Wright

  Saminda’s uncle regrets waiting for the morning light. He’s sorry now and should have woken him earlier. And they should have got going sooner. But he’d heard the roads wouldn’t be safe in the dark. And his wife thought they should let the boy try to get some rest. Saminda pulls his T-shirt down over his stomach and looks up at his uncle.

  ‘I didn’t sleep,’ he says.

  The Galle road is already crammed with traffic in both directions. Buses, ambulances and tuktuks lined up and patiently advancing, no horns, no weaving, as if in a funeral procession. His hands gripped tight on his uncle’s shirt, his eyes blur and slip shut. The noise of the motorcycle is familiar but distant. It sounds just like his dad’s.

  Saminda pictures the four of them on it, coming back from the fish market with plastic bags snapping in the wind. His dad with his knotty hands clasping the handlebars, his little sister in front, her skinny thighs held tight in place, her ribs bouncing against the inside of his sinewy forearms, black eyes peering left and right. Saminda is wedged between his father and mother, his chest compressed against his father’s curved spine, his mother behind him, her breasts soft and damp against his bony back. The wind snatches thin wisps of hair out of her long plait and whips them forward about his cheeks.

  Once past Moratuwa, where the road turns back down towards the coast, his uncle’s motorbike slows and stops. He opens his eyes and it’s like sleepwalking off an edge. Debris covers the road. Tall piles of it. Sections of roofs, splintered wooden planks, windows and doors popped out of their frames, looking stunned, asking, ‘How did I get here?’

  The air is still and humid, coating everything in a sticky gleam. And perched atop the piles: buses, cars, tuktuks, fishing boats. The boy and his uncle sit on the motorcycle and pick through the landscape in silence. Little by little, fragments of the recognisable emerge from the mass of charcoal grey and muddy brown. A whole coast of soil and sand churned up and thrown down.

  He makes a note in his mind of what is still there: a red plastic bowl, a pink doll’s head with pale orange hair, a silver framed wedding photograph, an unopened green and yellow packet of biscuits.

  *

  ‘Just two,’ his auntie decreed as she handed him the green and yellow packet of Hawaiian Cookies and closed the pantry door.

  ‘Thank you, Auntie,’ called Saminda, already back in front of the television screen.

  ‘And that’s another six. Two sixes in the one over.’ The commentator paused, as the camera jumped from the umpire’s raised arms to the batsman’s raised bat, to the defeated bowler. ‘And Warne is not happy.’

  ‘Warne is not happy. Warne is not happy,’ he imitated, slapping his bony knees and bouncing on the plastic-covered seat of the sofa.

  He scanned the Pakistani players cards laid out on the coffee table in front of him, snatched up the image of Youhana, the new captain, and danced it around the edge of the table till it was face to face with Shane Warne’s, taunting the bowler’s ruddy, zinc-smeared cheeks. ‘Murali is the King of Spin.’

  ‘Saminda, what are you doing?’ his aunt called from the kitchen.

  ‘Watching the cricket, Auntie,’ he replied, replacing the cards and sitting back down on the sofa.

  ‘Who’s winning?’

  ‘It’s a Test match, Auntie. Can’t say who is winning.’

  ‘Stupid game,’ he heard her mumble from the kitchen, as she put away the breakfast dishes.

  *

  Soon after the tea break at the MCG, a news flash interrupted play. The reporter spoke of an earthquake near Indonesia. Early reports of a large wave hitting the coast of Sri Lanka. They called it a tsunami. He’d never heard this word. He called out to his auntie and she came and sat lightly beside him on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘Are Mummy and Daddy safe?’

  ‘Shhh! Listen, child!’

  ‘Could it have hit our house?’

  His aunt didn’t respond. She just sat stiff and still, leaning towards the television screen, her mouth open, her lips pushed forward, as if inhaling the reporter’s words. Her nephew turned and raised himself up on his knees, his head twisted towards her, watching her face for a sign. The plastic sofa cover squeaked and sighed as he shifted his weight from one knee to the other. Then, as if someone had yelled ‘Action!’, she closed her mouth, turned her head towards the hallway and screamed out. ‘Raja! Come quickly!’

  His uncle joined them and they all watched in silence. They sat and listened as reports started to come in from Trinco, then Batticaloa. There was news of a train overturned. On its way from Colombo to Galle. The same train they’d been going to take together the next morning. His uncle tried to call Saminda’s parents. The phone system wasn’t working. For an hour they waited for the newsreader to speak of Galle. Nothing. His uncle dialled his parents’ number again, then again five minutes later, then again two minutes later, then over and over, until suddenly he stopped and put the phone down on the coffee table. He looked at it, then stared at Saminda, before slowly turning his face back to the television, his eyes suddenly deep in their sockets.

  The television reporters talked of massive destruction all along the coast. Thousands dead. People washed kilometres inland. Sucked out to sea. And each time the reporter said the word dead, Saminda saw his auntie’s left eyelid twitch.

  By mid-afternoon his uncle had spoken to friends and neighbours. No trains or buses were getting through south along the coast. He called Saminda into the entrance hall and told him that they’d try to get back on his motorcycle. It’d be slow, but it should be possible on the inland roads. It was too late to leave that afternoon. It would be dark before they got very far. The roads wouldn’t be safe. And his headlight
wasn’t working. Best to wait till the next morning. Saminda nodded. His auntie called him to come have something to eat in the kitchen. Walking through the lounge room, he glanced at the television screen.

  ‘Stumps,’ the commentator said. ‘Stumps at the MCG.’

  *

  When they reach the coast road, the rain begins. A constant light drizzle and before long pools in every hollow. His uncle tells him to close his eyes, but he sees them all the same. Bodies. Men and women, old and young – arms and legs splayed as though they’re exclaiming, What was that? Eyes looking skyward asking, What has happened here?

  And those who are still alive standing amid the debris – looking down. No one talking, or just in three- or four-word phrases, and to themselves, to the air.

  ‘Look at that. All dead. No one left.’

  Their skin is lighter, greyer than normal, overcast like the sky. Their eyes, when he sees them, are emptier, like they’ve pricked them with pins and let the water run out.

  Concrete telephone poles lean into the wind like palm trees. Railway tracks twisted and continuing on their way above emptiness, the earth swept away from under them. The sounds of traffic, motorbikes, bicycles are dampened in the sodden soil. The birds are silent too. And all the dogs are gone.

  Men sitting on debris, standing with their hands behind their backs, or arms crossed in front. Women with hands on hips, not in defiance, but to keep their shoulders up. To stop the sinking of their chests, holding off the gasping.

  Small slivers of walls, right-angled corners with serrated edges. Already, on the remains of a wall, someone has put out an offering of food for the dogs and crows – the first handful of rice on a banana leaf.

  The sea is what he notices most. So calm, hardly moving, watching. As if it had absentmindedly done its job, like it didn’t have a choice. Had just come and then retreated, without even looking back. ‘What do you want me to say?’ it shrugged, like it had just tossed and rolled a piece of driftwood that was the town.