The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  Silence. I changed the subject.

  ‘Where’s your little boy?’

  I expected to hear her say the words day care.

  ‘Sleeping in his room.’ And then she looked at the closed and tied door.

  All of a sudden, over the hot stink of milk and rubbish, I could smell myself.

  Mum, help me.

  ‘Why do you have rope tied?’ I asked carefully, without alarm.

  ‘To stop him getting out.’

  My sister pressed her ear against the door like it was a game.

  ‘Why?’ I wanted to add, but my sister, she closes down like a nuclear power station in meltdown mode if she senses criticism, and I won’t be allowed in. It got worse after Mum died.

  ‘Is he awake?’ I asked.

  ‘I can hear him now.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  My sister suddenly acted like a sulky guard at a border crossing.

  ‘Oh, go on, darling,’ I said, remembering how sweet-talk sometimes worked with her. Or it used to. ‘He’s your gorgeous son, and my lovely nephew, and I’ve never met him before.’

  She loosened the knot and peered in through the slight gap. It worked.

  ‘Yup, he’s just lying there with his eyes open. You do that for hours some days, don’t you sweetie?’

  I looked in over her head, expecting to see a tangle of coloured mobile strings and hanging felt animals, but saw only empty shelves and bare walls. My sister unravelled the rope and pushed the door open. The stale sweet smell, even more concentrated, flumped out.

  A little boy, naked except for a disposable nappy, sat on a foam mattress under the window. No curtains, sheets, picture books or toys. Nothing. His blond hair looked clean enough and he seemed unharmed: until I looked closer. There were small, grey curls all over the mattress and carpet. Not shit, but until I lifted my eyes to the window, unidentifiable. The window ledge was scalloped, where he’d been sucking, biting and spitting. The curls about him were wood and paint, like something a dog would do, but the dog was dead, bitten by a snake. The little boy turned his face up in our direction, and with eyes closed, sucked air noisily in and out of his nose as if to get our scent. My shirt stuck to my sides as if I was being vacuum-sealed.

  *

  I must relax. I should sit down. I return to the spot beside my sister.

  ‘Can you smell me?’ I whisper.

  She is wearing a blue satin dress which could’ve been worn to a graduation ball. The fabric clenched in her armpit, the one closest, shows a gunmetal-coloured half-moon, where she’s also shed water. There’s something vaginal about underarms. As kids together in the backyard, I remember placing two fingers over the junction of a cocked elbow, pressing down, raising up a fleshy mound with a crease down the middle.

  ‘Pussy,’ we’d giggle, with that knowing unknowing.

  She takes her time to turn and face me. She rarely meets my eyes anymore.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ I say.

  Feigning tiredness and careful not to spill my remaining coffee, I stretch out my arms and erase any false vaginas lurking beneath my long sleeves.

  ‘Where did your husband fly in from?’

  ‘It’s top secret.’

  ‘Come on, sissy,’ I say. ‘East Timor, Afghanistan or Iraq?’

  ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ She almost spits it.

  ‘I thought he was air force,’ I say, scrambling away.

  *

  A lawyer, weighed down with files, walks into the lobby, talking on a mobile phone about his house renovations. How much guilt do lawyers have? Why isn’t he dripping? He must have his own version of Armadillo. I wonder what it is, and whether it’s better than mine. But of course he can afford the operation to remove his sweat glands. That must be it.

  He stops, introduces himself. He is their solicitor. When I say my name he looks at me as if he can smell me. He’s read the file and knows it wasn’t any neighbour peering through the curtainless window who dobbed. He knows I’m the one, and wants to know why I didn’t do more to help my sister before they took her child away. I want to tell him I tried, but it did no good. She’s in denial, I imagine saying, and not the river in Egypt. Crack a stupid joke, as if it’s not so bad, or that I never promised my mother.

  He says the hearing won’t be until after lunch and that we may as well go and get something to eat. We go to McDonald’s drive-through and then along Parkway Avenue to Bar Beach. On the promenade, in our nice clothes and with bewildered expressions, we must look like guests who’ve just discovered the wedding has been postponed. The horizon is partially obscured by ships waiting to access the port: I count twenty-three, and try to get a handle on myself.

  My underwater arms, stimulated by cheap coffee, break through the last of Armadillo’s barricades. It’s like I’m bleeding. Liquid snakes down my sides and under my belt, finds its stride and runs down my legs. My shoes fill up. It pours over the leather edges and worms towards the shower drain where small kids hop from foot to foot, washing off sand and ocean water. My sister and her husband are oblivious, heads down, chewing their burgers like cud. I am diminishing, emptying out from within. The bloom spreads out into the ocean, turning the waves yellow: golden traitor yellow. It’s a toxic spill and the ships on the horizon jostle in an effort to contain it to just this part of the coast.

  The Salesman

  Paddy O’Reilly

  Marly sat on the front veranda, waiting. Shaun and Azza had been working on Azza’s car all day, driving Shaun’s ute to the wrecker’s for parts, taking Azza’s black V8 for spins around the streets, steering the big car back through the hole in the fence to lean in and bury their heads under the bonnet like stupid long-legged emus. It was past six o’clock, though you wouldn’t know from the heat. The house was cooked. Even the fridge was moaning. Marly was desperate for a beer.

  She leaned back in the veranda armchair and wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her hand. Chances were that the boys had stopped in at the pub on their way home from SuperCheap. They’d be standing at the bar, promising each other just one beer before they headed back. And that meant she was stuck. Shaun had insisted they rent this crappy house, miles from anything except other crappy houses, because it had a ready-made hoist and pit in the yard and he’d be able to make a few extra dollars fixing mates’ cars. Six months later and all anyone had ever paid was a slab. A half-empty slab by the time the guy had driven off.

  She pulled her phone from her pocket and played with the buttons. No credit. No one had texted or called. Out in the front yard the dog yawned and stretched out in the patch of dust he had claimed as his own when Shaun brought him back from the swap meet a couple of months ago. Marly didn’t get the idea of a dog. They didn’t do anything for you. They didn’t do anything at all except eat and sleep and shit. Cable had chosen one corner of the yard for shitting, and it happened to be on the route to the letterbox. The rest of the yard was littered with things Shaun had been going to fix but had never got around to. They’d all ended up in front of the house, waiting for the big day when he’d load up the ute and head off to the tip. Except that Marly knew from experience a trip to the tip meant a trip to the tip shop. The actual amount of rubbish around the house stayed the same – it only changed shape and degree of uselessness.

  ‘Excuse me, madam, am I speaking to the mistress of the house?’

  Marly shaded her eyes and squinted at the dark man standing beyond the fence. ‘Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want it.’

  The man was short and slender, with small hands holding a blue clipboard and feet encased in shiny black shoes. He shook his head.

  ‘I am not a salesman, madam. I am not here to sell you a single thing.’ His face was perfectly proportioned, like a doll’s face. His skin was a rich burnt-toffee colour. He had eyes like a girl, runny dark brown with thick lashes and an upward tilt on the outside. He was as beautiful as a girl. Maybe he was a girl. Marly had seen plenty of sex-change people on
TV shows. He might once have been a girl and now he had turned into a beautiful man pumped full of hormones with a prick made of sewn-up bits of skin and flesh.

  ‘Madam, I wonder if I might have a glass of water. I’m very tired, and thankfully this is my last street for the day, but I still have to walk through the reserve to get back to my car. It’s very hot. Very hot indeed.’

  She could see the glisten of moisture on his upper lip. His white business shirt was stuck to his dark chest. What would be the harm?

  ‘You can come and wait on the veranda in the shade and I’ll get you some water. But don’t you come near me,’ Marly said, certain that this honey-dark man with his girl eyes would bewitch her somehow into kissing him. ‘You sit on the steps there. My husband will be home any minute.’

  As if he had heard her, Shaun’s tune rang out from the mobile.

  ‘Azza’s shouting us pizza for tea. You want capricciosa?’

  He was slack in plenty of ways, but no other boyfriend had been as attentive as Shaun. She would never do better than this – a man who thought about what she might want, who asked, who had not once in eleven months raised a hand to her.

  ‘With double cheese and, hon, don’t hang up – I’ve got no credit. There’s a guy here, he wants to sell us …’ She paused. What did the Paki want to sell them? He was sitting on the veranda steps in the shade, elbows on his knees, shirt sleeves rolled up and hands hanging to his ankles. The blue clipboard and a canvas shoulder bag she hadn’t noticed before lay behind him on the peeling floorboards. ‘Yeah, anyway, bring home some beer, will you? And don’t take long.’

  The dirt from the veranda would ruin Pran’s grey cotton pants but he was too exhausted to stay on his feet. The streets in this neighbourhood were desolate and confusing in their sameness. On his map the courts and crescents wound around each other like snakes. Spindly wilted gum trees stuck out from burnt-brown nature strips, and house after house had nothing but broken toys and rubbish in the yard. No shade anywhere. In some yards the carcasses of dry weeds stood higher than Pran’s head.

  About every third house his footsteps would detonate an explosion of barking. Mongrels, most of them, but occasionally a Rottweiler or a pit bull would push its brutish head through a hole in the fence and stare at Pran as he passed. Three streets ago he had seen a weatherboard Church of Christ, surrounded by gravel and beaten-up cars. The windows of the church were boarded up.

  Yet despite the dusty quiet of the hot streets and the empty yards, everyone was home. That morning in the office the team leader had told Pran and James that the area rated eighty per cent unemployment, so not to turn up their noses like that. ‘This is where the sales are. You won’t do any good in Toorak. They’ve got everything they need. This is where you’ll make some money.’

  The team leader had been right. Pran had overtaken his personal-best daily sales figure by eleven o’clock, and doubled it in the afternoon. He’d been about to take a short cut through this street and cross the reserve to his car when he saw the blonde on the veranda. She wore a faded yellow singlet and blue satin boxing shorts, and sat on an old stuffed armchair. Strapped to the stub of her leg under the left knee was a metal prosthesis with a running shoe fitted over a rubber foot. Her right foot was bare.

  Pran knew he’d make a sale here.

  It took a while for the cold tap to run cold water. Marly used to catch the warm water in a basin, let it cool, then pour it on the two-dollar punnet of pansies she’d planted in the square of dirt outside the back door, but they died so she didn’t bother anymore. She waited with her hand in the stream of water, enjoying the sensation of the water cooling down. She thought about the pipes running underground that kept the water cool, and she wished there was some way they could use that to cool the whole house. On days like this, when the mercury rose above thirty, the flat roof sucked in the heat and it was five degrees hotter inside than outside according to the thermometer Shaun kept on the kitchen wall.

  ‘It’s only out of the tap.’ She handed the glass to the dark man, who was mopping his brow with a white handkerchief.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re not here about God, are you? Or Jesus? I’m not religious.’

  ‘No, madam. I am Hindu. Our gods are many and we do not proselytise.’

  In rehab, when she was learning to use her new metal leg after the accident, the man working with the other physio in the room had said he thought his disability was a message from the Lord Jesus. ‘He made me this way and I don’t dispute it,’ he’d proclaimed, waving around his stumpy arm with its fused fingers. ‘I see it as extra rungs on the ladder to heaven, given to me free and clear as compensation for this damn flipper and the bits that I haven’t got.’ The physio strapped a harness to the man’s torso and helped him to ease into the contraption that took the place of his missing legs. ‘I just hope,’ the man said, ‘that this fancy new equipment doesn’t deduct from my extra allocation of grace.’

  The Paki man drained the last of the water and placed the glass carefully beside the veranda post. Cable had finally stood up and shaken the loose dirt from his bristly brown coat. He wandered across the yard to sniff the feet of the new visitor.

  ‘What kind of dog is this?’ The man leaned backward, away from Cable who, she had to admit, stank.

  ‘It’s a bitser. You know, bitser this and bitser that.’

  The man tilted his head to the side for a moment as he thought. From this angle he was even more beautiful. Marly thought he should be a model or a TV star, not some loser walking around the suburbs trying to sell stuff.

  ‘What is it you want to sell, anyway?’

  ‘I tell you, madam, I am not here to sell you anything. I am here to give you something for nothing. I know it sounds unbelievable, but it is true.’

  ‘Yeah, sure it is. And will you stop calling me madam? My name is Marly.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Marly. My name is Pran.’

  He held out his hand and she reached over and brushed her fingers against it, expecting to find the skin moist with sweat, but the hand was dry and cool.

  He nodded at her leg. ‘I am very sorry to see you have a disability. It must be hard to get out and about.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. When I put on jeans you hardly know it’s there.’ She thought again about the man whose flipper and missing limbs pushed him up the rungs of heaven. Her leg would hardly count for a single rung. When it first happened, she thought the men would run when they saw it, but she’d found the opposite. She used to say to her girlfriends that having half a leg had ended up being a bloke magnet, in a weird way. All of them falling over themselves to prove they were cool about it. ‘Because it’s discreet,’ one of them had said. ‘If you’ve got to have something wrong with you, it’s good that it’s discreet.’ Marly knew what he meant, but it was more than that. Hep C was discreet. Having a bra stuffed with padding because of cancer was discreet. This was something else. And at that point it was better to stop thinking about it because it started to feel creepy.

  ‘How long have you been in Australia?’

  ‘Strange that you should ask. In fact, today is the anniversary of my arrival, seven years ago. I came as an undergraduate student at Monash University, then completed an MBA. Now I am looking for employment in my field.’

  ‘You must be pretty smart, then.’ Marly’s sister always talked about wanting to do an MBA. Marly was going to heap shit on her now. Get an MBA and you can walk the streets selling door-to-door.

  ‘So Pran, let’s cut the crap. What are you selling?’ Marly collapsed back into the soft lounge chair at the other end of the veranda from the man. It had been two years since the accident but she still leaned to her good side when she stood too long, and the aching would start in her hip and shoulder. ‘I told you my husband was coming home soon, right? He’s got a mate with him too.’

  Sometimes she thought she and Shaun had a psychic bond. Like before, when she was playing with her phone wi
shing she had credit and he’d called. Now he and Azza turned the corner into the street, the ute so bright and gleaming that its red shine reflected off the fibro walls of the houses either side.

  ‘See? Here he is.’ In a movie she would leap off the veranda and run in slow motion toward the ute, her hair streaming behind, white dress fluttering in the breeze. But these days all she could do was stump around. The rubber foot connected with the ground at an odd angle, and she could feel it jar through her body with every step.

  The boys pulled into the yard, eased themselves up out of the low car and stood staring at Pran for a moment. Azza snickered. He turned his head so Shaun and Marly could see his face but Pran couldn’t. Paki. Azza made the word shape with his mouth and Shaun smiled and looked away.

  ‘Good evening.’ Pran stood and extended his hand, grateful that this would be his last sticky, grimy handshake of the day. The first thing he did when got home each night was to take a long cool shower with antibacterial soap. Too bad if there was a water shortage. He needed to get clean after walking streets like these.

  Neither of the men offered a hand in return. The tall one with the shaved head turned to the woman on the veranda.

  ‘What’s he selling?’

  She shrugged. ‘Did you bring the beer?’

  ‘Here, gimme the slab, Azza. I’ll put it in the fridge.’

  Pran watched the bald man heft the slab into his muscular arms and cradle it like a baby as he leaped onto the veranda and opened the screen door with his foot. It slammed behind him. The other man lifted two large pizza boxes from the cab of the ute and walked up the steps past Pran, the thick smell of the pizza following him and the dog drifting along behind, nose held high as if it was riding the aroma. At the door, the man paused. He balanced the pizza boxes on one bulky arm and brushed his thick black hair back from his forehead with his free hand.

  ‘Why is it always Pakis knocking on the door? Don’t they hire Australians anymore?’

  Pran laughed. ‘Please, take my job. I earn seven dollars an hour.’ It was a lie. He was a natural salesman. He made a good living from these people. ‘But actually, I am not Pakistani. I am from Delhi, a large city in India.’