They broke up because that’s what couples do when they’re not in movies. I watched them talking in the backyard from the porch. They spoke quietly, like two people speaking in a waiting room. Even the clothesline that was being pushed by the breeze was louder. Squeak, as it went in a circle.
Nobody yelled. Nobody said they didn’t understand. Nobody said someone did something that somebody hadn’t done. Nobody said much but a few quiet words as Dad’s paint-stained overalls rotated on the line behind them.
When Mum and Dad broke up there was screaming. I remember I crawled out of bed to the hallway that was full of the sound. I remember taking slow steps, one at a time, like that dopey walk people do down the aisle at weddings. I remember I opened their door and I remember Mum on the bedroom floor, knees and thighs together, feet angled outward behind her. Hunched shoulders, her hair over her face, like a broken mermaid. I remember Dad staring at me standing in the doorway of his room.
Maybe that wasn’t exactly the time Mum and Dad broke up, but just another one of their arguments. Sometimes I’d hear the screams travelling down the hall, like a protest coming at me. I remember Mum walking into my room and Dad standing in my doorway, pleading with her to go back to their room. He used her name – Louise. That happened a few times and then one time Dad stood there in my bedroom door and served her one in front of me and after that Mum never walked into my room again.
She left not long after. Forever, that is. It’s a better way to go, I think. Wait till things are so fucked up that when you do breakup everyone is like, fuck yes!
Corey and Claire were together and then they weren’t. It just ended. Claire was around and then she wasn’t anymore. No fuss. Like someone deciding they would die and just walking out to the backyard and gradually disappearing. No funeral.
I left the porch and I sat in the lounge room. I didn’t turn on the TV, but sat alone on the couch staring at the blank screen. I thought about crying. I thought, fuck that. Before Claire left the house for the last time she said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll still see you.’
That was months ago. Fucking bitch.
‘Dude, I told you, nobody comes out here,’ says Corey.
There is no one out, which means that if someone comes out now they’ll be perfect. Only petrol head when nobody else can see you.
‘There was a guy before,’ I say.
‘That was ages ago and nobody has come out since then, he must be the only one that works there,’ says Corey. ‘Let’s just get high.’
‘We are high.’
‘But let’s do it somewhere else.’
‘Let’s wait for the cop to come by.’
Eventually three guys walk out of the shop’s back door. Corey shuffles onto his stomach like he’s trying to hide in the grass even though it’s freshly mown. The guys talk and light cigarettes next to the dumpster and then they split. Two walk one way and one goes in another direction. I go for the pair.
‘Dude, what are you doing?’ Corey asks.
I’d told him we should only ever go for a loner. Corey is following me anyway.
I reach the two dudes and they turn and look at me and I look at them. I shake the jerry can, thrusting it forward in the air. They start running and I try to run after them, but it’s too hard when both hands are holding something above your head. I throw the can at one of their retreating backs and I yell to them, ‘I have a match. I have a lighter. I’m gunna fucking light you on fire!’ I’ve never said that to anybody. It was never in the script before.
The guys just run. And Corey is running far the other way. The sounds of the guys’ steps and of Corey’s are retreating, becoming fainter in different directions. And then I run.
I think – I’m going to run as long as I can feel the cold bitumen smacking my feet. Forever I’m gunna hear it thud, thud, thud, thud.
One of the guys looks back and sees me following and he shits himself a bit and then the other guy shits himself a bit too, as in they’re both running faster. So I run faster because they’re running faster and because I bet they’ve fucked off on someone before in their lives and it’s like what goes around comes around or some bullshit and I’m coming for you pussies.
Corey pulls up in the car beside me.
‘Easy,’ Corey says. ‘Easy, mate.’
Thud, thud, thud, becomes scuff, scuff, scuff.
The Wall
Julie Koh
On morning TV, a politician is promising to build a wall. The wall will divide Australia across the middle.
‘It’s a wall to keep the Chinese out,’ the politician explains. ‘Every night the tiny Chinese people come in and stroke my hair as I sleep. It’s illegal. They expect to get paid well for all the stroking – discount prices, they say. I tell them this isn’t a free country. We don’t just hand out jobs. If you disagree, you’re on the wrong side of the wall.’
As the politician takes more questions, a wrecking ball swings through our bedroom. It takes out the TV with a crash.
The dust settles. I peer out from the wreckage into the front yard. Men in short shorts and boots are already dismantling the letterbox and driving stakes into the ground. From the way the stakes are arranged, I can see that the wall is going to be built right down the middle of our marital bed.
‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘You can’t build that wall through my house.’
‘You should have told the inquiry that,’ says one of the men. ‘You should have put in a submission.’
‘My husband will have something to say about this,’ I tell them, but he is nowhere to be found.
It is afternoon before I hear from him.
‘Darling, can you hear me?’ he shouts from the other side of the wall.
‘Thank God you’re okay!’ I shout back.
‘Which button do I press to start the washing machine?’
I look around me. I realise that in the division, I didn’t get the laundry or the bathroom or the kitchen, or even the garden taps.
By sunset, I can’t hold my pee in any longer. I squat in the backyard under the lemon tree, contemplating the wall.
It has left my side in total shade.
In time, my clothes start to stink. I don’t have money for the laundromat. I toss clothes over the wall to my husband. I can hear them land, but they never come back.
I shout to ask him if he’s washed them.
‘What clothes?’ he yells.
‘The pink coat with the white birds? The blue skirt with the yellow tulips?’
The guard on our section of the wall looks over at my husband’s side.
‘I don’t see any laundry,’ he says, adjusting the sling on his rifle. ‘We don’t see any laundry.’
I try to write a complaint to the government. I sit down with a pen and paper but can’t get the words right. There is too much noise on the other side of the wall. Construction work during the day, but other noises too.
Thump, thump, thump.
My husband must have bought a treadmill. I call out to him but he doesn’t answer.
I wonder where he is running.
The next day, as I prune the wilting bushes in the front yard, the local newspaper lands in a roll at my feet.
The front page says: ‘All in Thrall of Great Wall’. Men in hard hats and ties grin out at me.
As the days progress, wall-related articles retreat further back into the paper.
One morning, buried on page thirty-seven, I read the headline ‘Local Couple Having a Wall of a Time’. The article features a photo of my husband with his arm around a woman who has the skin of a baby.
She is wearing a pink coat with white birds, and a blue skirt with yellow tulips.
Behind them is their half of the house, newly renovated. The grass in the photo is green and lush, and has grown into a vast front meadow filled with blue flowers.
The wall is covered in a thick layer of cork. I decide that it will work well as a vision board.
I cut out the picture from the newspaper a
nd pin it to my board: an achievement unachieved.
I think about the wall every waking hour.
I hover near it, watching it.
I fall asleep next to it with my right hand splayed against its surface.
My husband on the other side doesn’t do the same back. He pounds eternally against a body that isn’t mine, in the midst of a glorious meadow.
Slut Trouble
Beejay Silcox
The first girl is taken on the second weekend of the school holidays. Her name is Julie-Anne Marks; she is nineteen, she is beautiful, and she is gone. Everywhere we look Julie-Anne Marks is looking back at us. Just the one photo at first – the one her parents gave the police the night she didn’t come home. Julie-Anne Marks is stuffed into our letterboxes, pinned to every bulletin board, taped to every telephone pole. She takes up the whole front page of The Messenger – a full page in colour, block-capital headline. WHERE IS OUR JULIE-ANNE?
‘Don’t you just love her hair?’ Megan asks me. And I do, I do. People are always mistaking Megan and me for sisters because of our hair. We wear it the same way now, and from the back you can’t tell us apart. Every morning before school I call Megan on the kitchen phone and she tells me what I need to do to match her – French braid, fishtail, high pony. If I listen closely, I can hear the phone ringing in her house next door, the drum-roll clatter of her running down the stairs to answer.
We are cursed with boring hair, straight and house-mouse brown. It won’t hold a curl or a crimp for longer than an hour, and neither of us has been allowed to dye it: my mum says I’m too young; Megan’s dad – Mr Henderson – says it looks cheap and nasty. The only thing it does is grow, so Megan and I are having a competition to see whose will be the longest by the end of the year. Six months ago we had it cut the same length. Megan made the hairdresser measure it exactly, and neither of us has touched it since. Megan is winning, which is how she likes it.
Julie-Anne’s hair is wild and thick, near-black with a wink of red where the sun hits it. It’s the colour of blackberry jam or red wine. Mr Henderson lets each of us have a half tumbler of red wine when I sleep over, so long as we promise not to tell anyone. He joined a wine club last year after Mrs Henderson left and has been trying to teach us how to taste all of the different flavours – wet leather, smoke, dried leaves. We never can, but we don’t want to hurt his feelings, so we just sip and nod, until he gives up and waves us away. Later, after he falls asleep on the couch, we slink out of Megan’s bedroom and finish whatever we can find that’s left open – he can never keep track. We pour it into the good glasses her Mum forgot to take, and make up our own language for the bitterness.
‘Can you taste the … halitosis in this, Laura?’
‘I can, Megan, I can. And is that an undertone of armpit?’
‘I don’t know if it’s armpit, but close, perhaps a touch of gangrene?’
‘Of course, it’s gangrene! Silly me. And with an aftershock of fingernail clippings.’
‘You are so right, Laura – that’s the flavour that catches in the back of your throat.’
Julie-Anne’s parents and not-a-suspect boyfriend hold a press conference where they cling to each other and weep and beg for her safe return. The people they interview on the news – her university lecturers, the boss of the café where she works – say the most wonderful things about her: so kind, so caring, so gentle. Such a good girl, an honest-to-god angel. We have no trouble believing them. Just look at that wide-open face. Beautiful. There’s no better word for it. Julie-Anne Marks is beautiful, and everyone is looking for her.
Megan unpins a poster from the jacaranda that stands watch between her house and mine. Do you know something? Another appears. The flier is printed on expensive paper with a colour photo of Julie-Anne sitting cross-legged on a picnic blanket. She’s wearing cut-off denim shorts and an oversized flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Did you see something? The blanket is mustard yellow with a print of blue flowers. Her shirt is checked grey and black, with a wide rust-orange diagonal stripe. You can tell it’s a man’s shirt, because the buttons are on the wrong side. Can you help? Her feet are bare, toenails unpainted. She’s pointing at something off to the right, but you can’t see what it is. What you can see is that Julie-Anne wasn’t expecting the camera: her eyes are too wide, her mouth too open. You can’t fake that look, no matter how hard you try.
We iron the poster flat and slip Julie-Anne Marks inside the stiff cover of Megan’s old copy of Possum Magic. We get into trouble for hacking the legs from last winter’s jeans to make shorts. We wear them every day.
The Mackenzies across the road are the only family on our block who get the thick city paper delivered every morning, but they don’t pick it up until they get home from work. Megan dares me to steal it.
‘Can’t we just ask if we can have it after they’re finished?’
‘When did you get so fucking boring?’ Megan drags the F word out. She’s only just started to say it, and is still enjoying the new taste of it. I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, but at night I mouth it in the dark before I go to sleep. Fuck. Fucking. Fuck you. Fuck off.
Megan keeps watch while I run across the road and onto the Mackenzies’ lawn. I can feel her watching me.
‘You run like a spaz,’ she says as I hand her the paper.
I hold it still while Megan slides the Julie-Anne pages out slowly so they don’t rip. We stuff the rest of the paper in Dr Barker’s bin next door while Titus the terrible terrier scolds us through the fence. There’s a whole section devoted to Julie-Anne, even a page of photos set out like a yearbook spread. Here is Julie-Anne holding her sister’s baby; at the beach in her surf lifesaving uniform; high-school graduation with her cap and gown. Here is Julie-Anne kissing the cheek of her adorable boyfriend, and don’t they look so happy?
‘I would absolutely fuck him,’ Megan says, though neither of us has had a boyfriend yet, or any idea what it would be like to have one. Mum hasn’t had one since Dad died, so I couldn’t ask her, even if I wanted to. Mrs Henderson does have one, but Megan’s never met him – though she did see him once, a year ago, lifting her mum’s cheetah-print suitcase into the back of his car. Mrs Henderson has only visited twice since, and always on her own. Last time she told me to call her Lisa, but I couldn’t. Megan does.
Megan is bored. Her room is boring. Her house is boring. TV is boring. I am boring. We build a tent in the far corner of my yard out of an old wool blanket and an ocky strap strung between the lemon tree and the back fence. We drag the guest bedroom mattress out across the grass and fill the tent with Megan’s mum’s fancy throw pillows – all velvet and tassel. Mr Henderson says he’s glad to see them gone, that they made him feel like he was living in a house of ill repute.
We spend the day out in the tent sucking on ice cubes of frozen cordial, reading about Julie-Anne and listening to the Grease soundtrack on my Walkman. When school starts up next year, they’ll be casting for the musical. Megan is going to try out for Sandra Dee, or maybe Rizzo. She can’t decide. We have to be careful to keep the cassette out of the sun; if it gets too hot, the tape inside will warp and snap. In the afternoon heat we slip into a thick syrupy sleep. Filtered through our blanket roof, the sun fills the tent with an underwater blue. I wake before Megan and watch her in the glow, her hair mermaid-loose across the pillows, lips green from the Cottee’s. She looks so cold.
Megan dreams of Julie-Anne Marks. In these dreams Julie-Anne is sitting on the picnic blanket, and Megan is taking her picture. Julie-Anne points off to the right, but when Megan tries to look, she wakes up.
‘She’s trying to tell me something, Laura.’
‘Do you think she’s pointing at him?’
‘I don’t know, but she’s definitely still alive, I can feel it. He’s keeping her prisoner somewhere because he’s fallen in love with her.’
‘Like in Beauty and the Beast?’
‘Exactly!’
I know she’s lying,
and she knows I know. When Megan is lying she straightens her back and tilts her chin up like she’s the queen. She dictates these dreams to me, and it is my job to write them down in case she is secretly psychic and some tiny detail is a clue that will lead the police to Julie-Anne. We take turns practising what we would say to the TV people if we found her.
‘I’m so glad she’s alive,’ I say.
‘Is that the best you can do? Glad? That’s a nothing word. You wouldn’t be glad.’
‘Happy?’
‘Honestly, Laura, try harder.’ Megan puts her hand over her heart like she’s about to sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’. ‘Me? A hero? You’re so kind to say, but I’m just so grateful that I was able to play even a small part in bringing Julie-Anne home safe.’
Megan and I go shopping. I have birthday money from Grandma Bailey and Megan has ‘Lisa’s Lousy Guilt Cash’. Her mum has sent her a card with five dollars in it every month since she left. We buy flannel shirts from Men’s World – not the same as Julie-Anne’s, but as close as we can find. We change into them in the shopping centre bathroom and stare into the mirror too long, hoping to catch just the smallest hint of Julie-Anne in our own faces. We compare the length of our hair.
‘I’ve caught up!’ I say, and it is true, mine is longest. I realise too late how stupid I have been to say it.
‘Who cares?’
‘There’s still time left, you could still …’
‘I don’t give a shit, Laura.’
‘It was your idea.’
‘Did you really think I was serious? Are you really that fucking dumb?’
‘I guess not.’
‘That shirt doesn’t even suit you.’
‘But what about you?’ I ask. ‘We look the same. We look like sisters.’
‘But we’re not.’ Megan yells over her shoulder as she walks out.
Megan doesn’t speak to me again until lunch. We are sitting at a table in the food court, silently eating our chips, when I see a woman who looks like a Julie-Anne impersonator. She isn’t quite as beautiful, but she has the same red darkness in her hair, the same generous smile. I point her out and Megan and I are friends again.
The Best Australian Stories 2017 Page 7