The Best Australian Stories 2017

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  ‘It’s called the startle reflex. It’s more pronounced in babies who had prenatal substance exposure,’ Kirsty told him the other day. She had been blowing on a cup of herbal tea in the canteen while he lined up for coffee.

  His nephew’s dark hair is plastered to his purple, waxy forehead, his fists clenched. Kirsty swaddles him till he is tightly cocooned in a bolt of muslin. He has watched her re-swaddle him about twenty times already; the moment she puts him down he thrashes about violently. Luke worries that one day he will buck himself out of the crib, flipping over the plastic barrier and landing flat on his little purple face.

  Don’t put him down, he wants to call through the glass. But there were four other babies doing the exact same thing. Kirsty wraps each of them in turn, holding them upright against her chest, pacing the length of the room, patting their bottoms, shushing. They shriek the whole time but she never cocks her ear away, just keeps on pacing with small, even steps, her ponytail swishing back and forth.

  ‘He’s got a good pair of lungs,’ his mum says, sidling up to him at the window. She has finished work so he is officially off duty. He can go home and hit the books; he has essays to write and has missed a load of lectures.

  ‘He’ll be a sprinter like our Trace. Stawell Gift for that one, I reckon,’ his mum adds, nodding at her reflection in the glass as if to reinforce her statement.

  He stays silent, wanting no part of this, pretending what this kid’s future might be like. He wonders how long he has to stick around for.

  *

  His sister had been a runner. A good one. She was always the fastest girl in her age group. She had muscular, spindly legs that ran as well across long distances as they did short. She often beat much older kids, even boys. One year in high school at cross-country she challenged the seniors as they gathered at the start line.

  ‘I’m going to beat youse all and I’m going to do it with no shoes,’ she said as she pulled off her Dunlop Volleys and hurled them into the bush. There was much whooping and laughing, and some of the boys wolf-whistled. ‘On ya, Trace,’ they called. Girls twittered and jeered. Mr Woodley, the PE teacher, kept quiet but had a smug look on his face before he blew the whistle. They took off in a pack until the fastest few broke forward into single file. Luke dawdled behind with the other asthmatics, a boy with cerebral palsy and the teacher assigned to the back of the pack to check for cheaters or those stopping to smoke.

  Tracey won, of course. She even beat the fastest guy in Year 12. Her feet were coated in fine, orange dirt. Her soles were bleeding, skin flayed, toenails torn asunder. She was a legend that day. Everyone thought they knew what future path awaited her.

  *

  His days have a new rhythm to them. He walks every morning in the bush, listening to birds calling and the drilling sound of cicadas. The same battered cross-country route they used at school. He never does this in Sydney. There is no bush at Sydney Uni. He doesn’t exercise at all there; he stays indoors – lecture halls, tuition rooms, the library, his flat, bars. Since he’s been back, even though he sets out early, his skin has become tinged with pink. He’s got more vitamin D in a few days than during the whole semester. After his walk, he heads to the hospital. He watches reruns of Wheel of Fortune with Trace in her room. The TV is bolted to the ceiling and costs seven dollars per day to rent. His mum complains it’s highway robbery, every time she walks in the room.

  ‘I always wanted to go on this show,’ Trace says.

  ‘As a contestant?’ he asks, wondering if she meant as Adriana, the hostess, gliding back and forth in ’80s couture as she turned the white tiles to reveal the missing letters.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, before suddenly screaming, ‘MICROWAVE!’ at the TV, guessing the word from only one letter. A nurse checking the blood pressure of another patient glares at them.

  He prefers to spend time outside the special care nursery. If Kirsty is on duty she pops her head out and talks to him. He likes that. She told him PJ looks like him. They still have no idea who the father is. Whoever he is, he hasn’t come to the hospital. Neither have any of Trace’s friends who hang out at the Boomerang Hotel. This surprises Trace. ‘Bitches,’ she called them. ‘Don’t even want to meet my new baby,’ she complained to Luke. He isn’t surprised; her friends were off their faces, leading the life that Tracey is supposed to be trying to avoid. He suspects as soon as she gets out she will fall in with them again.

  ‘I want the baby taken away from her and given to social services,’ he tells Kirsty one afternoon.

  Kirsty, her expression warm and open without judgement, places a hand on his arm.

  ‘We can’t forcibly remove him from his mother when he’s not in any danger. Tracey is undergoing treatment, she is cooperative. She would have to sign forms. I don’t think she’d want to do that,’ she says.

  ‘No, she wants the parenting allowance,’ he replies.

  Kirsty tells him the best place for PJ is with his mother with the support of his grandparents and a doting uncle.

  Sometimes when he can’t sleep, he gets up and rummages through the boxes in his room. He finds Tracey’s old medals and the plastic ornamental jewellery tree his mother used to hang them on. ‘Chalk and cheese, those two,’ his mother told the neighbours when they were young, or anyone else who would listen. ‘That one,’ she’d point to Luke, ‘been reading since he came out of the womb.’

  But it was Trace she liked to talk about. As he puts the medals back in the box, he thinks of his mum getting up early all those Saturday mornings for Little Athletics. Sitting on the sidelines with a clunky old stopwatch, while he read a book in the grandstand. He places the cheap jewellery tree back on top of the medals. It had always looked tacky.

  *

  Tracey lost a race once. It was one of those novelty races they have at kids’ sports carnivals, the fun part of the day where parents race the teachers and get all hot and bothered. Overweight dads keel over at the finish line, panting like they have blown a gasket. Kids line up for sack races and the egg and spoon. Normally Luke never competed because of his asthma, but a teacher, Miss O’Keefe, pushed him to join in. She partnered him with Tracey for the three-legged race because they were the same height. She stood them side by side and bound their legs with a rainbow ribbon above the knees. He looped his arm around Tracey’s skinny waist.

  ‘We’re going to lose,’ Luke whispered, imagining what Tracey’s fist would feel like when it connected with his rib cage.

  ‘It’s okay. Just keep walking so we don’t trip,’ she whispered back. ‘Just keep walking.’

  He nodded and as other kids tumbled over, or got disqualified when their ribbons broke apart, he and Tracey walked in a straight line to the finish. Their sides were pressed together like when they were in the womb. They came third. It was the nicest thing his sister had ever done for him.

  *

  The semester will be over soon and PJ and Trace are still in the hospital. Luke emailed essays to his lecturers and skimmed a bunch of lecture videos online. He transferred rent money to his flatmates with specific instructions not to sublet his room. It’s nearly summer and he’s been waking earlier for his walks to beat the heat. He often now passes his mum in the hallway as she gets ready for work, or sees his dad peeing with the bathroom door open.

  This morning the sky is dark violet, the sun not fully up. There is enough light to see the trails but the nocturnal animals are still awake. Fruit bats peer at him, upside down in the trees. He can hear a rooster crowing from someone’s backyard in the distance. A wallaby skitters in the scrub, startled by the crunch of his boots. He stops suddenly when he spots the amber eyes of a large owl. It’s resting on a low branch. As he walks closer, he sees a sugar glider in its talons. Its head ripped off, the owl’s powerful beak tearing at flesh, the wing-like flaps hanging in tatters.

  As Luke walks away, queasy, he remembers something, another time he was up early, nearly colliding with his mum in the hallway. He was a teenager, he’d wo
ken up to go to the bathroom, and his mum was bustling into Tracey’s room with an arm full of toiletries. Tracey was on her bed in a tracksuit, looking glum, knees tucked up under her chin. His mum was packing a bag. He spoke to them for a few minutes, yawning in his boxer shorts. He’d thought maybe Trace was going to the track but normally she was up like a bolt for training. His mum was talking quietly; she didn’t want to wake their father. She told him Tracey was going to hospital for the day, she was having trouble with her periods, needed a curette. Luke headed back to bed.

  That night, their mum charred the chops as usual. They ate them with withered beans and mash potato the colour of margarine. The TV was propped on the kitchen counter, facing the dining table. His parents’ eyes would flick to the local news, commenting if they saw someone they knew, tut-tutting about local crime and waiting with bated breath for the weather report. Normally, Luke would look at Trace and roll his eyes, but that day she wasn’t looking back. That day had been like any other except it wasn’t. Something was erased. The spark went out of Trace’s eyes and then she lost interest in running altogether.

  *

  In the afternoon, Luke wheels a pram all the way from Main Street to the hospital. In a few days, Tracey and PJ can leave. Trace agreed to move back in with their mum and dad. Kirsty had given his parents a list of stuff babies need but there seemed to be confusion about who was getting what. His parents were getting a car seat fitted at the RTA, but he knew no one had thought to buy a pram. When he saw it in the window of St Vincent De Paul, he thought it charming, sturdy, vintage. He imagined his little nephew reclining, relaxed, nestled in muslin, shielded from the sun by the PVC concertina cover.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Trace says when he wheels the pram into her room. She is sitting in bed, fully dressed. She no longer wears the hospital gowns and is back to her normal attire, gym pants and a cropped singlet showing her midriff, which she never stopped wearing even when she was no longer sporty.

  ‘PJ needs a pram so you can take him out and stuff, wheel him around,’ Luke says.

  ‘He’s going to be a laughing stock in that thing. Looks like it’s from the olden days!’ She laughs. ‘How do you even fold it?’ She gets up and walks around it, tapping the wheels with her toe.

  That’s a good point, he thinks, realising he doesn’t know. Tracey tells him new prams collapse to about the size of a carry-on suitcase, so they fit in the boot of your car with your shopping. This pram is tall and boxy, more like a cot on wheels with a sunroof. He begins looking around for a button or lever that would make the whole thing fall in a heap. The wheels are as large as those on a toddler’s bike. He had been taken in by the shiny spokes buffed with Brasso by some volunteer at Vinnies, by the thick rubber wheels and their all-terrain tread.

  ‘Fucking useless,’ Trace says, shaking her head. He doesn’t know if she means him or the pram. He feels his neck flush red, his pulse throbbing at his temples.

  ‘Well, you can give me a hand,’ he says, inspecting a lever, possibly a brake pedal that looks rusted into place.

  Tracey walks around slowly, hands on her hips, staring at the pram. He squats by the wheels, level with her navel. Despite giving birth her stomach is practically concave and all of a sudden he wants to punch that smooth, hollow space.

  ‘Where are the instructions?’ she asks.

  ‘There are none, it’s second-hand. Vintage,’ he snaps.

  She scoffs, running her hand along the handles. She opens and closes the sun cover four times – just to annoy him, he thinks – each stiff, dividing panel needs a tug and a push to fold and unfold it. The lever by the wheel is surely part of the mechanism that collapses the pram, but he needs WD-40 to shift it. He begins to regret buying it.

  ‘What if we can’t close it? Or we close it and we can’t open it again?’ he asks, his chest tightening. If the pram can’t fit in their parents’ car, it won’t be going anywhere. He looks at it with a new sense of distrust. Tracey shrugs and pulls out the interior mattress, goodness knows why.

  ‘Tracey, I’m serious.’ He looks up at her. He shouldn’t have bought the bloody thing. If we can’t even open and close a pram, what kind of future will PJ have? he thinks. He lets his fingers rest on the rusted pedal. Sitting on the pine-fresh floor beside Tracey’s bed, he feels he could just crawl under there and take a rest. It was so hot walking all the way from Main Street uphill to the hospital.

  Tracey is standing above him, one hand on the handle, when she raises her leg. Her bare, cool foot slams down on her brother’s hand with force. The ancient pram folds forward in three slow movements and he scrambles to get his hand out of the way. His fingers throb. Tracey is grinning, resting one foot on top of the collapsed hood like it’s a podium she’s about to mount.

  *

  Kirsty is waiting for him outside the nursery, a smile on her face. This might be the last time he sees her. He is heading back to Sydney for his exams and a summer job.

  ‘It’s time for PJ to go outside,’ she says, grabbing his hand and pulling him into the nursery.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

  ‘I mean fresh air. He’s strong enough. Let’s take him for a lap of the hospital garden.’ She walks over to PJ’s crib and picks him up, nodding to another nurse on duty.

  ‘Great. I’ll go get Trace and the pram,’ he says. Kirsty pauses and lowers her gaze, playing with the muslin around his nephew in her arms.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ There is a small frown on her brow and she seems embarrassed. He realises then what this is: a moment alone, a chance for the three of them to say goodbye. He has spent so many hours on the other side of the glass, watching Kirsty and PJ. He didn’t think PJ would ever know he was there but Kirsty knew; every day he’d spoken to her a little. He decides to change tack before it’s too late and reaches for her arm as she lowers PJ back into the crib.

  ‘Actually, I think Trace has NA now anyway. I’d love to. Let’s go,’ he says.

  They ride the elevator together to the ground floor. PJ is cradled against Kirsty, his arms and legs scrunched up in swaddling. Luke glances in the elevator mirrors at Kirsty’s long ponytail from three different angles. She is a bit older than him, maybe three or four years. He wonders what would happen if she lived in Sydney, or if he lived here. Every now and then PJ sighs, chirps, hiccups, makes the noises of a normal baby.

  The hospital’s automatic doors swing open and they are outside. PJ blinks in the bright light. Sparrows flit about on the grass and two magpies splash in a birdbath. There is a warm breeze and PJ’s lips pucker at the wind. Kirsty passes the baby to Luke. He’s as light as a loaf of bread, Luke thinks. He looks down at this creature that shares his DNA and hopes PJ gets his hair and brains. Kirsty loops her arm through his as they walk in small, even steps in the sunlight. The picture of a normal family. As they near the hospital gates he feels an overwhelming urge to pass through them – that at this moment anything is possible, that everything will be perfect if he just keeps walking.

  One’s Company

  Elizabeth Flux

  As they stepped off the plane, Zhen’s mother turned to hold his hand and was met with two different versions of her son. She tsk’d impatiently. There were bags to collect and paperwork to fill out – she didn’t have time for magical realism.

  Grabbing each one of them by the hand as they made their way down the rickety stairs she sighed in the language of what used to be home.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. Sheepishly, the New One disappeared, and Zhen was one person again.

  He waited patiently as the customs man dug through his mother’s suitcase, taking things out one by one and peering at them intently. Looking in one plastic bag, the man’s eyes briefly lit up before disappointment settled in; he’d discovered air-travel-approved packets of tea, and not the dried fruit or meat he was expecting. A fair-haired man casually tossed down his bag at the next table, and the woman barely unzipped the top before waving him along.
The customs man moved on to their rice cooker. With his blue uniform and gold badge he looked like the policeman from the comics about famous Australians they’d handed out to the children on the plane. Zhen saw his mother flinch but say nothing as the rice cooker was roughly reassembled before they were let on their way with a small grunt and a hollow ‘Enjoy your visit’.

  ‘Oh we are here to stay,’ laughed his mother, locking eyes with the customs man.

  ‘Right,’ he said dismissively, signalling to the next in line.

  She shooed Zhen forwards and they hurriedly made their way out of the airport, past the smiling posters of blonde families having beach picnics. He carried a stuffed black bear, which was almost as big as he was, and as he held it, paw to hand, scurrying after his mother, he tried to imagine himself and Bear in the place of the posed couple, trapped forever clinking wine glasses against an ocean backdrop.

  *

  On his first day at the new school his shoes were wrong. Lined up outside the classroom, Zhen’s sneakers stood out immediately against the sea of white. ‘Too colourful,’ said the note sent home from his teachers. ‘And uniform policy prefers laces over Velcro.’ At roll call they’d gingerly announced his last name, getting confused by the unfamiliar order and mixture of letters.

  ‘John,’ he corrected, giving the name he’d picked from the small list his parents had come up with. It was in this extra time that his teacher noticed the shoes.

  ‘Right,’ she said dubiously.

  His parents debated whether or not it was worth buying him a second pair, and decided not to. It was impractical.