On the drive home I look out the window, squish as close to the passenger door as possible. The tips of my ears feel hot, as I wait for Paul to tease me. I buried a tumour in the backyard.
As soon as we pull into the driveway I stride through to the back, and unfurl the hose from its rack. I turn it on full blast and yank it over to the plectranthus. Its plump leaves wilt under the midday sun and the flowers have taken on a pulpy, brown tinge. I need to soften the soil, dig it up. The water pools on top of the tough dirt, refuses to sink in.
‘Shelly, what’re you doing?’
I stare at Paul. I can see he’s on the edge. He teeters between sarcasm and concern. But I feel as hard as the soil, as barren. ‘I’m digging up the teratoma.’
‘You don’t have to do that, honey. Just leave it.’
I shake my head. ‘No. I don’t need the reminder.’
‘The reminder of what?’
The sun’s rays sting the back of my neck. ‘Of what I’ve lost.’
‘But, baby, you never had it in the first place.’
I fall onto my knees and tear at the soil, rip my fingernails into it. The soil is damp at first, but dry dirt beneath. I rest back on my haunches. My shoulders are shaking. I’m laughing.
Numb
Myfanwy McDonald
I ride down to the shops on my father’s bicycle. A white Peugeot racer with rusty gears. He can’t balance on a bicycle anymore. He can barely balance on his own two feet.
At the counter, a woman wearing large, thick-lensed glasses flicks through a pile of envelopes packed tightly in a box. ‘Yes?’ she says, without looking up.
‘I need a passport photo,’ I say.
‘Well, you’ll have to wait.’ She sighs, nodding at a chair in the corner. I look at myself in the mirror behind her. That face is not mine.
*
A few weeks later, my father arrives home from work, puts down his briefcase, loosens his tie and hands me the passport. The gold insignia on the cover features an emu and a kangaroo holding up a shield.
‘Did you get it?’ my mother says to him, stirring a pot on the stove.
‘I just gave it to her,’ my father replies as he’s walking out the kitchen door.
Behind the cover of the passport is the photograph. ‘It doesn’t look like me,’ I say, holding it up to show my mother. Her face is hidden behind a cloud of steam as she tips the contents of the saucepan into a colander. ‘It doesn’t look like me,’ I say again quietly, to myself.
I dream sometimes that my tongue has been cut out of my mouth. Like an oyster shucked from its shell.
*
On the plane I stick the two-pronged headphone jack into the holes at the end of the armrest. Flick between the channels. Classical. Opera. Man talking. Middle of the road. Woman talking. Love songs. Country.
My father is sifting through a wad of old letters. He passes one to me and says something, pointing to the top of the page.
‘What?’ I say, pulling off the headphones.
‘People usually don’t say “what”.’ My father takes the letter back and peers at it again, frowning. ‘They say “pardon”.’
‘What is it?’ I lean over the armrest and he points again to the top of the letter, where part of the page has been ripped off. ‘They tore off the address. Someone didn’t want us to find her.’
‘Find who?’
‘My cousin. Adopted out.’ The air hostess hands my father a warm bread roll with a pair of tongs, then starts serving the people in front of us. ‘I guess you miss out,’ my father says, shrugging, splitting the roll in two and handing me half.
*
‘It was a submerged continent,’ my father says after we’ve picked up the hire car. ‘A long time ago. Then there were volcanoes and it just kind of came up, well, kind of … emerged, out of the ocean.’ He holds his hand in a fist, then opens it like a flower.
His hands are thick and square, like giant blocks of cheese. Years ago, when he first got sick, I’d rub them: his thick, square hands. He said it helped. Made them feel less numb. Keeping his hands awake. Keeping his hands alive.
‘Won’t be long now,’ my father says, reaching over and ruffling my hair.
We drive around the harbour. I watch white sails billowing in the wind.
*
It takes a few hours to get to where we’re going. We turn onto a dirt road that cuts through a forest of mangroves. Gnarled black branches grow out of the shallow emerald water like deformed limbs. We emerge at a wide, calm body of water. Overlooking the water is a scattering of single-storey houses. Boxes dropped randomly onto the slope of a smooth green hill.
As we drive past the houses, people wave at my father from their porches. Raise their walking sticks in recognition. A white horse ambles by. A girl on top of it. My father waves at the girl. She doesn’t wave back. ‘You’re probably related to her,’ my father says. ‘You’re related to almost everyone on this road.’
I have never been here before. And I don’t know any of these people.
*
‘This your boy?’ the old woman says as she shuffles around her kitchen in a pair of worn pink slippers.
‘Girl. She’s a girl. My youngest.’
We’re sitting at a wooden table covered with a lace tablecloth. From the window, I can see the water, extending out towards distant green hills.
‘Do you want something? Tea? Cordial? Milo?’
‘Milo is fine,’ my father says.
‘Cat got her tongue?’ the old woman says, placing a saucepan on the stove.
‘This is my aunt,’ my father says to me, pointing at her. He’s speaking slowly, carefully, leaning close – as if I’m much younger than I actually am. ‘Aunty Jean. Your great-aunt. My mother’s sister. We’ll be staying with her for a few days.’
The Milo is mixed with water, rather than milk. It tastes strange. ‘Drink it,’ my father hisses at me under his breath and points at the mug. ‘Just drink it.’
Underneath the lace tablecloth I see deep grooves etched into the edge of the table. As if someone has taken to it with an axe.
*
‘You’d look exactly like your father. If you were a boy,’ my mother said last summer. I was sitting in the back seat of the car, worrying about the tampon. It was the first time I’d used one. It had been in for too long, and I thought I might die of toxic shock syndrome.
The first time I saw a tampon I was shocked by how big it was. I was expecting something inconspicuous, capsule-like. But it was as big as a bullet.
*
I’m lying in my great-aunt’s bed. ‘What took you so long?’ she wails in the room next door. ‘How long has it been? Ten years?’
‘I’ve got a family,’ I hear my father say. ‘You know it’s hard to get away, Jean.’
‘Your family is here,’ my great-aunt replies. ‘Your whole family is here.’
‘It’s not his fault he’s married to an Australian,’ someone calls out. Laughter. Then a guitar, and singing. I hear my father’s voice: high-pitched, faltering, melancholy.
Later my father slips into bed beside me. It is the only bed in the house. My great-aunt is going to sleep on the couch with her grandchildren.
‘No, no,’ my father said to Aunty Jean when she suggested it. ‘We’re not going to take your bed.’
‘I’m your aunty. And you’ll do what I say.’ She poked him in the arm and he held his hands up in surrender.
My father lies so close to the edge of the bed, I worry he might fall. He’s so quiet, I wonder if he sleeps at all.
*
The next day one of my father’s cousins takes us fishing in his dinghy. The cousins have chests like barrels. Thighs like tree trunks. This one looks a bit like my father. The same high, thin forehead. The same small, shell-like ears. But my father is slighter. Paler. And he doesn’t smile quite so easily.
The water sloshes up against the side of the boat. My father’s cousin throws in his line. ‘Throw it,’ he s
ays to me, nodding towards the water.
The boat rocks gently. My father is struggling to put the bait on the hook. Numb hands. But he’s turned away, so his cousin cannot see that this task, this simple task, is too difficult for him.
A bite. I pull up the line and see a fish hanging from the end of it. ‘Warehou,’ my father says, looking over the edge of the boat. His cousin takes the hook out of its mouth and throws the fish onto a blue tarpaulin he’s laid on the bottom of the dinghy. The fish flips over a few times. Tensing and relaxing its body like a fist. I throw the line back in. Catch another fish. And another.
‘This must be in your blood.’ My father smiles. And I’m thinking about fish. Swimming in blood. Trapped beneath the skin.
‘Am I white?’ I say to him later, as we walk up to the house.
‘You’re you,’ he replies.
I walk behind my father as he climbs the stairs. I imagine that if he falls, I might be able to catch him. He clutches the wobbly wooden banister. His left foot hits the edge of each step with a dull thump. He grabs the handle of the screen door, pushes it open with his fist. A crowd of people are gathered in my great-aunt’s house. The television on. Someone strumming the guitar. Brown bottles lined up on the coffee table.
‘Here he is,’ my great-aunt shouts. ‘My favourite nephew.’
I turn around and walk back down the stairs. I don’t know any of these people.
Down at the water I squat behind a bush. See the stain on the inside of my pants. Blood starts gushing out of me like a blubbering tap. I have nothing to soak it up. And I am too ashamed to ask. I walk back to the house. Climb through the window. Lie on the bed. I’m thinking of blood. A strip of blood down the back of a white horse. There’s something about blood I don’t understand. Something about my body I don’t really want.
*
My father was looking for someone. And he found her. The cousin who was adopted out. ‘How many cousins have you actually got?’ I ask.
‘Fifty?’ he replies. ‘Officially. Fifty-one, I guess, if you include this one.’
This cousin wrote to my father’s father years ago to find out more about the family who had renounced her. My grandfather never replied. He was the one who ripped the return address off the top of the letter, so no one else from the family could contact her either.
On the way to visiting the long-lost cousin, we stop at a statue on a roundabout in a quiet country town. ‘Your great-great-great-great-grandfather,’ my father says, pointing to the stone man standing on his plinth. He’s holding a weapon in one hand – shaped like a small flat violin – and in the other he’s clutching the edge of his feathered cloak.
‘You know how they used this weapon?’ my father says.
I shake my head. I’m thinking about a girl I know at school, and the way she sometimes hugs me if she hasn’t seen me for a while. I’m thinking about how I shrug her off, pretending I am averse to affection, all the while longing for her to do it again.
‘Slice the top of the head off,’ my father says, making a sharp, swiping motion with his hand. ‘Like cutting the top off a boiled egg.’
I avoid the girl at school sometimes, for days. Just so when I see her again, she’ll put her arm around me.
*
The long-lost cousin looks nothing like my father. She has frizzy hair and freckles. Orange eyes that match the colour of her hair. Her plump hands are the colour of pork sausages. They shake as she pours tea into a flowery teacup, passes around a small jug of curdled milk. Her house smells like wet dog.
‘I don’t think my father – your uncle – knew what to say,’ my father says to her. ‘When you wrote to him.’
The woman nods. Sits down on the edge of the chair. ‘I understand.’
My father reaches for his cousin’s pale hand and clutches it tightly. ‘I’m sorry he never replied.’
‘Not your fault,’ the woman whispers. The three of us finish our tea in silence.
‘Is she white?’ I say to my father when we get back into the car.
‘She’s a cousin on my father’s side. The Scottish ones.’ He sighs and rubs his face. ‘They came over in droves, a century or so ago, to tend their sheep.’
‘She’s quiet,’ I say.
‘Mm,’ he says, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Must be lonely. Living alone in that dusty old house.’
*
‘Don’t touch it,’ my father says, pointing to the electric fence. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’ Behind the fence is a field of horses. The white horse approaches and looks at me. Its eyes are like black holes in space. It bares its teeth in a grimace and throws its head up and down a few times; its flapping gums sound like a wet tennis ball hitting a wall.
My father walks further up the hill, one hand underneath his thigh to keep his leg from dragging. He stands at the top, pointing to the mountains on the other side of the harbour. He’s shouting something, but it gets lost in the swirling wind.
I touch the electric fence with my hand. The zap is a mean flat buzz. Almost clinical.
‘Why did you do that?’ my father says later, shaking his head, holding my hand in his. ‘I told you not to touch it.’ We’re standing beneath this tree. And my father is squeezing my fingers, then my hand. The way I used to for him. When he first got sick. When he stopped riding his white Peugeot racer. The doctors couldn’t tell him what was wrong with his giant, numb hands.
I look at my hands sometimes and worry. ‘You have a slightly higher risk than the average person’, the doctor said when I asked him what I might inherit. ‘But let’s do a quick check.’ I got up on the examining bed and he told me to close my eyes. ‘Tell me when you feel it’, he said, touching the tips of my fingers with something soft, something sharp, something cold.
I was thinking of the girl. Imagining that it was her standing between my legs, paying my body such intricate attention.
‘Now, now. I can feel it now,’ I kept saying.
*
On the way back to the city, we stop to visit the long-lost cousin again. When we get there, my father reaches over and takes an envelope from the glove box. Opens it and pulls a sheet of paper out, lays it on the dashboard.
‘Family tree,’ he says, surveying the piece of paper, as if it were a map. ‘There’s you, see?’ Me. A circle. The daughter of a square. ‘And here’s my father.’ He traces the line and taps on his father’s name twice. ‘And his brother,’ running his finger along the horizontal line. ‘And this is where she should be,’ he says, tapping the empty space beneath his uncle.
‘Thought she might like a copy,’ he says, checking his reflection in the rear-vision mirror, wiping his thin hair to one side of his forehead. ‘You can stay here,’ he says. ‘Won’t be long.’
I fiddle with the car stereo. Flick through the radio stations. Then I pull out the postcards I bought. I promised the girl from school I would write to her, but I can’t think of what to say, so I draw a picture of her and me but it looks stupid, so I tear up the postcard and start to write another. But I make a mistake and when I try to cross it out, it leaves a smudge and it looks like I’ve tried too hard. So I tear that postcard up too. I peer out the window and look for my father. The front door is open. A dog trots out of the house and sniffs at the lawn.
A man and a woman walk past the house. They’re joking with each other – he’s trying to grab her and she’s pushing him away, laughing. I’m thinking of the time the girl from school got drunk at a party by the beach. She hung off my shoulder in the same way. It started to rain so we hid beneath an upturned dinghy. She ran her fingers along the inside of my arm, and at that moment I was glad to have a body. A body that could feel.
In the rear-vision mirror I see an ambulance. It’s driving down the street quietly. No sirens. It pulls in behind our car. My father emerges from the house, waves at the ambulance driver then disappears back inside.
I open the car door and walk down the path. The paramedics enter the house. My father is sta
nding in the hallway, leaning against the wall.
‘Vera?’ I hear the paramedics calling, their boots thumping heavily on the wooden floorboards. ‘Vera?’
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘Stay there!’ my father shouts. ‘Don’t come in.’
The paramedics are now crouched over at the end of the hallway, facing the dining room. I can’t see her from where I’m standing.
‘Stay there,’ my father says again.
‘What have you taken, Vera?’ the paramedics are saying. ‘Stay with us, love. What have you taken?’
*
We’ve stopped at a service station cafe. My father is cutting up a piece of fluorescent yellow cake with a fork. ‘People hurt themselves sometimes,’ my father says. ‘She’ll be okay. They’ve taken her to hospital.’
I’m thinking of the girl again. The way she pulls me in towards her, her arm wrapped around my neck. And the way I fight it, and the way she holds me even tighter. And how it feels when the game is over, and she’s gone again.
My father reaches over and clutches my hands in his. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. My father’s hands. These giant numb creatures I once brought back to life.
Polly Stepford (1932–1997)
Ryan O’Neill
Labor is not working. Labor is not working. Labor is not working.
From a speech at a Liberal Party Fundraiser in Sydney,
May 1985
Liberal Party politician Polly Stepford was born Pauline Lord in the Western Sydney suburb of Baynton on 25 August 1932. She came from an influential family; her mother Antonia was a well-known socialite and her father Otto was president of the local branch of the Liberal Party. As well as this, Otto owned over fifty properties around the city, most of them in a state of such squalor that the Daily Trumpet had named him ‘Slum’ Lord in the 1920s. Polly was educated at a private girls’ school, before commencing an economics degree at the University of Sydney in 1949. It was here that she joined the Australian Liberal Students Federation, penning articles for the organisation’s newsletter and quickly making a name for herself as a formidable debater. Polly was less successful in her academic studies, failing all of her first-year subjects. Shortly before resitting her exams, which Polly passed with flying colours, her father donated $50,000 to the university’s infrastructure development fund. Polly was never to fail another subject.
The Best Australian Stories 2017 Page 14