The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  THE BEST

  AUSTRALIAN

  STORIES

  2010

  THE BEST

  AUSTRALIAN

  STORIES

  2010

  Edited by

  CATE KENNEDY

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia

  email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Introduction & this collection © Cate Kennedy

  & Black Inc., 2010.

  Individual stories © retained by the authors.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However, where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgement in any future edition.

  ISBN 978-1-86395-495-2

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Contents

  Cate Kennedy

  Introduction

  David Francis

  Once Removed

  Gillian Essex

  One of the Girls

  Josephine Rowe

  Brisbane

  David Kelly

  Armadillo

  Paddy O’Reilly

  The Salesman

  Robert Drewe

  Paleface and the Panther

  Michael McGirr

  The Great Philosophers

  Michael Sala

  Outside

  Fiona McFarlane

  The Movie People

  Karen Hitchcock

  Little White Slip

  Ryan O’Neill

  The Eunuch in the Harem

  Nam Le

  The Yarra

  Tim Herbert

  Goodness Gracious Hello

  Dorothy Simmons

  The Notorious Mrs K.

  David Mence

  The Cliffs

  Chris Womersley

  The Age of Terror

  Suvi Mahonen

  Bobby

  Stephanie Buckle

  Lillian and Meredith

  John Kinsella

  Bats

  Mike Ladd

  A Neighbour’s Photo

  Anna Krien

  Still Here

  Antonia Baldo

  Get Well Soon

  Joshua Lobb

  I Forgot My Programme So I Went to Get It Back or 101 Reasons

  Cory Taylor

  Wildlife

  Meg Mundell

  The Tower

  Sherryl Clark

  To the Other Side of the World

  Louise D’Arcy

  The Wife and the Child

  Joanne Riccioni

  Can’t Take the Country Out of the Boy

  A.S. Patric

  Beckett & Son

  Publication Details

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  Cate Kennedy

  When reading takes up a large part of your time and attention, it’s inevitable that its subject matter is also going to take over a large part of your consciousness. The stories I read in search of the ones that make up this collection did more than occupy that mental acreage. They re-surveyed it, subdivided it, and sometimes even built on it. Through the cold months in 2010 I collected short stories in boxes and sacks from my post-office box, lugged them home and approached those waiting stacks like a wine buff might eye a new shipment of Shiraz. Some of them I read in clichéd ‘editor’ pose: by the fire in a big armchair, a cup of tea in reach. But as more stories kept arriving and the stacks kept growing, they began to co-opt more of my life. I kept a pile by the bed and read at least five a night before going to sleep. I read dozens in trains, and in airport departure lounges waiting for delayed flights, and I knew I was onto a good story when I’d pull it out again in the plane and even in the taxi once I’d arrived back on the ground. I read them late at night as the winter really set in, so totally absorbed in their small universes that at 2 a.m., when I rose to get more wood for the fire, the freezing stillness of the outside world woke me with a cold-steel shock of reality.

  As I worked my way through individual submissions, literary quarterlies and anthologies, the stories that stayed with me found their way to a particular pile and I re-read these memorable pieces several times each. I had to – I had over a hundred in there and I knew I’d soon have to make some difficult decisions. It’s been said that a writer can’t really know how to write a story until they’ve written it, and in a way the same is true of a selection process. I did not set out looking for anything particular to reward in terms of craft or subject-matter in these stories – I didn’t know what I’d find or how it would affect me, I just approached each one hoping to be surprised and moved. Short stories, as Richard Ford said once, are daring little instruments, and they dare you to define them. But there is little to match the pleasurable exhilarating rush, for my money, when we know we are in the hands of a writer with authority. Their power is like a kind of charisma – we allow ourselves to be willingly, absolutely persuaded. They make an arcing sweep of their brush and suddenly a whole scene is painted in, a whole prior, plausible life suggested. They deliver an exchange of dialogue that we know is not really ‘lifelike,’ we know it just possesses the cadence and feel of real talk, but somehow we believe it, and we believe in those people. A writer with authority takes their story events in a direction we could never have predicted but which still feels perfectly right and satisfying, and we’re with them every step of the way.

  Part of our willing surrender to this authority is admiration for its skill, because there’s nowhere to hide in a short story – we writers only have a few thousand words with which to win your heart, and if we have no skill or nothing to say it is immediately apparent. A short story, that miracle of compression and distillation, can’t carry any dead spots, clunky machinery or hairline fractures without these flaws being thrown into cruel relief. So when an author pulls it off – manages the highwire act of conjuring up a memorable, revelatory world in just a few pages – we absorb every considered word with faith and gratitude.

  The other part of this authority, though, lies in choices which are not about craft so much as instinct. It would be a mistake to call these instincts ‘unerring,’ because the very process of writing is sometimes a dogged struggle to work out why our attention is so caught on something from life, something we feel compelled to try to make coherent. Before we can write it for someone else, we need to write it for ourselves. This intuitive, hesitant process, as an author steps out irrationally onto the wire, putting one word after another without fully understanding why or how, is the real test of intent. Writing tutors are fond of quoting Forster’s famous ‘only connect’ directive, but we forget that was only half the quote. ‘Only connect the prose and the passion,’ he said, ‘and both will be exulted.’ The stories that made my shortlist, from the longlist of excellent pieces, stayed with me not only because of their technical prowess but also this harder-to-define quality; they tempered something passionately felt into an unexpected revelation that worked its way into my own thinking and stayed there. Stories that galvanised with their energy, and left me feeling – yes – exultant.

  It was only at this point my editorial imprimatur began to emerge, such as it was: as I read and re-read stories full of admiration not just for their authors but also for the short story form itself, and the way it’s capable of containing such huge diversity and vibranc
y. From the longer, more intricate plots of Nam Le and David Francis, both dealing in their own ways with the tumultuous, helpless love of family and all it asks of us, to Josephine Rowe’s lyrical and elliptical ‘Brisbane,’ which takes only 500 or so words to cartwheel across that highwire in a bravura display of delicacy and distillation, this contrast stands testament to the form’s capaciousness. Joshua Lobb’s ambitious ‘list’ story, Ryan O’Neill’s hilarious sequence of book reviews and Gillian Essex’s ‘One of the Girls,’ which unspools a tale from one breathless, wondering sentence, all demonstrate this vibrancy of form and the unexpected ways a story can be told. Some stories I wish I hadn’t read late at night before attempting to sleep – David Mence’s ‘The Cliffs’ and Chris Womersley’s ‘The Age of Terror’ both spring to mind, and both drive a splinter under the skin with their depiction of dark and complex self-justifications. Some voices – and this is the great yardstick of a skilfully rendered character – followed me out of the room, still talking, pulling at my arm, demanding to go on being heard. Mike Ladd and Michael McGirr’s stories, both so deceptively, achingly simple, found a bruise where I didn’t know I had one. A few years ago in his introduction as editor to this anthology, Robert Drewe mentioned the ‘wow’ factor in selecting stories; for me this year it was more like the ‘ow’ factor – a tender spot revealed, which reminded me that the greatest technical ability in the world is nothing until it is leavened by compassion.

  It feels a little reductive to single out stories for praise just because they are different from each other, when their other qualities are so much richer. Suffice to say even selecting with the balance of prose and passion in mind still left me with many more excellent stories than I could include, so the final cut here is shaped to my tastes and my idea of balance and depth. There are still thirty stories in the box – enough for a whole second collection – which do not appear here and whose omission weighs heavily on my conscience. I hope those stories, too, find their way into publication and the wider audience they deserve.

  In a synchronicity you’d dismiss as too stagy and heavy-handed for a work of fiction, the day I handed in my final selection for this anthology, after being awash for months in a tide of submissions, the river in my part of the state rose three and a half metres and broke its banks. Gullies which had been dusty holes for the better part of fifteen years were suddenly billabongs full of astonished, gratified frogs; dry, bare paddocks were inundated, roads closed and the river became a deep, noisy flood. The exultant feeling of waking to that glittering world of water and selecting these stories now feels inextricably linked to me. And that river – cutting and shaping new banks, moving with momentum and unstoppable purpose, slaking a drought-stricken landscape – well, there’s a metaphor for new stories you couldn’t make up.

  My thanks to Denise O’Dea, and to everyone who submitted their stories this year. It was a pleasure and a privilege.

  Cate Kennedy

  Once Removed

  David Francis

  Way out the back where the wedding bush grows and mosquitoes breed in the gullies, there’s a weatherboard house with bay windows, the place where my English grandmother died. But it sat on her farm at Moorooduc then, among the bracken and ti-tree, pardelotes nested in the sandy cliffs, when my grandmother slept in the four-poster bed, and I dreamt there were bears in the hall, marauding. Suddenly there was no more snoring and I could sleep. She’d gone to be with her Jesus.

  The cottage was moved by my father, in slices on trucks, and patched together in the Tindervick bush, set on a rise facing north. Its bay-window eyes staring out to the Pakenham Hills, as if watching for fires. I was shipped along with it, ostensibly in one piece, back to my parents on the same stretch of land, to this big brick homestead that stands among the whining cypresses, where my mother now lives alone. Where magpies fly down the chimneys, her black and tan dog lying in wait to hunt them down, land them stunned and breathless on the hardwood floor. My mother waits too, giddied by the prospect.

  Now I stand at the door with my rolling Hartmann luggage, the rented white Prius in the lantern light behind me like something from another galaxy. I’m back for the first time in years, staring through the stained-glass kitchen door, watching her armed with a broom and a fly swatter, disappearing deep into the dining room, where the walls are four bricks thick and bees swarm in the unused chimneys. Ants invade, my mother slaughters armies of them, showing off piles of the dead to occasional visitors.

  Unseen, I open the door to the vague smell of compost, the frantic yelping of the dog. But this time it’s not a bird being hunted. A brushtail possum, terrified, scratches its way along the picture rail. It pisses with fright on the portrait of Aunt Emma Charlotte, over the pastel of me as a boy. My mother doesn’t notice me; she’s mesmerised by the leaping dog and the possum as it plummets down onto a table, smashing plates. It hurtles out past me into the Gippsland evening, the dog a dark blur behind it.

  ‘Hello,’ my mother says, the broom over her shoulder like a rifle. ‘How was your trip? Did you get yourself an upgrade?’ Her words are eclipsed by a distant barking, but my mother hears nothing, deaf as the sideboard, deaf as the night. I’d give her a hug but her body would stiffen like a bird’s, afraid I was trying to accomplish something unnatural, something American and intimate. So I nod and smile, but don’t answer – her interest is more in her questions and the noises she hears inside her head. I just wonder how she’s heard of upgrades.

  I lean my bags against the door as she returns to her kitchen, irrigating ants from a cupboard, wiping them up with an ant-speckled washcloth, as though she’s already forgotten I’ve arrived. Since her stroke, her memory of moments just passed has become more elusive. She refuses to wear her hearing aids. And I’m back in the silence with her, to the place that’s been here all along, the comfort of things unchanged. Just the faint rustle of wood ducks nesting in the chimney, cooing again now that the house is still, the house that coos as if it’s calling out. A place for the shelter of species, provided they stay hidden.

  A letter lies on the table already set for tomorrow’s breakfast. The writing, angled and childlike, addressed to Those Whom Are Concerned, signed at the top and the bottom, Sharen W. The tenant in the house out the back: Sharen Wills. My father, Remy’s, tenant. Remy as in Remington, although my mother says it’s short for Remedial. He thinks the house is still his because his little mother died in it. But he lives five miles away now, in a sad-looking cottage in a place called Blind Bight. Stuck there with his girlfriend, Kim, ever since my mother threw him off the farm.

  I pick up the letter uninvited and my mother pretends not to watch me read. She guides a trail of golden ant poison along the ledge.

  I do not know how much you know but I can only assume you are naive in the field. That is of the situasion of Remy and myself and I will not be harassed by Remy who is bulling me to leave. I pay the same for my horses being here as anyone else but I don’t get the use of the faculties.

  I glance up, my mother’s eyes upon me now. ‘She’s illiterate,’ she says, ‘poor little thing.’ Sharen Wills, whose rent provides my mother’s shopping money.

  I feel there is a stigma because of me and Remy. Also I have been attacked by those three black Clydesdales in the back paddock. None of this is safe for me here but I will not leave under these provisions. I will get my own solicitor. I will not be railroded.

  ‘Hell hath no fury.’ My mother trails off as she hands me a dustpan, a load of dead bees and ants, spoils of the sweetness she leaves on the jam jars, as lures.

  I head outside and empty the carnage of insects on a lavender bush, stand on the tiled veranda, and watch the purple remains of the evening, the glint on the windows of the distant clapboard house. The house you can see from Station Road on the way into town or from the window of the shearer’s quarters, or from here, out across the lagoon paddock.

  The phone rings shrilly and I run back inside, see my mother under her jigsaw lamp,
leaning over a Wysocki lighthouse puzzle, the phone going unanswered, a message being left on the machine.

  ‘Ruthie, it’s Sharen. I need to talk before I do something stupid.’

  My mother lifts her head. ‘She grows marijuana out there,’ she says, ‘in tubs in a horse float.’ She returns to sorting pieces of sky.

  I stand by the black rotary phone on the desk, the small jug of familiar pens and broken pencils, and I think of the letter, the situasion with Remy, how I don’t want to deal with Sharen Wills, whose number is fifth on a list on the wall, after the fire brigade and the vet, my father and Dr Hopkins. My mother, who dreads the phone and resents others using it, turns the television on so loud it sounds like a plane is landing on the roof. She goes on searching for jigsaw edges.

  I pull my rolling suitcase along the carpeted hall, let it rest outside the fancy bathroom. The original Victorian tiles, the bath with its iron-clawed feet. I brush my teeth with the toothbrush that waits for me here in a small pewter goblet, squeeze the remains of my miniature Qantas toothpaste. I look in the mirror, a jetlagged ghost of myself. I need to talk to someone before I do something stupid.

  My mother remains in her jigsaw world. On the television screen, the clever blue eyes of the new prime minister, but I’m listening again to the message on the dusty answering machine, wondering what my father’s done to Sharen Wills. Only the dog observes me, from its roost in the cushions along the back of the couch, as I dial the number, a call that rings and rings, goes unanswered. Overcome with an old desire to escape this house, and to know what’s really going on, I steal out into the night and start up the silent Prius. I glide through the shadowy paddocks, scraping along the overgrown track down towards the windmill, rabbits scurrying in the headlights. As I open the lagoon paddock gate, I shoo away dark horses approaching to sniff the soundless car, heavy part-Clydesdales I don’t recognise. The whoop of what might be an owl up above me, mosquitoes drift about my face, the cacophony of crickets. I try to remember why I don’t live here. Is it the noise or all the silence?