The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Right. That makes all the difference.’ The man laughed and passed through the door, dog following, leaving the screen door jammed open against a buckled floorboard.

  ‘Shut the frigging door, Azza! The flies get in.’ The woman hauled herself out of the armchair and thumped along the veranda.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said to Pran, stepping into the house and pulling the screen door shut behind her.

  He listened to the uneven thud of her walking down the hallway. He would have liked one more glass of water, although when he looked again at the glass it was smeary. Still, he lifted it, tilted it high and waited for the single drop from the bottom to roll the length of the glass and fall onto his parched tongue. He put the glass back on the boards and gazed down the street to where the reserve began. Only a ten-minute walk to his car. The reserve was a patch of bushland that seemed to have been forgotten by the council or whoever created it. Even from here, Pran could see that the wooden barrier at the entrance had been torn out and cars driven in. A mattress was propped against the fence of a house adjoining the reserve and further inside, under the trees, was the glint of broken glass.

  ‘Thirsty, mate?’ The bald man’s voice came from behind the darkness of the screen door.

  ‘Shaun, don’t, please.’ The woman’s voice echoed down the hallway. ‘Leave the guy alone.’

  ‘Come on, mate, don’t be shy. We’ll shout you a beer.’

  ‘You’re very kind.’ Pran used the veranda post to pull himself up. He was stiff from the long day of walking. ‘I’m not a beer drinker, but another glass of water …’

  ‘I think we can rustle that up for you.’

  Pran gathered his clipboard and bag and walked into the house past the bald man who held the door wide with his arm.

  When the Indian stepped into the room and smiled at her, Marly’s stomach flipped. He had been so serious before, an unsmiling manikin, but now that he had opened his face she wanted to touch his soft brown lips with her fingertips, run her tongue along his perfect white teeth. She felt the heat in her face and pushed herself up from the table.

  ‘I’ll find some ice,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a tray in the fridge in the shed.’

  By the time she got back with the ice cubes melting in the tray, Shaun and Azza were sitting at one end of the laminex table with the half-empty pizza boxes in front of them, while Pran perched on a chair in the opposite corner of the room near the stove.

  ‘He doesn’t eat meat,’ Shaun said through a mouthful of pizza.

  ‘But I am most grateful for you offering it to me.’ Pran was holding his glass at chest height. He raised it in a salute to the men at the other end of the room. Shaun had filled it halfway with whisky. The Indian was so slim Marly thought that much whisky would probably knock him out.

  ‘Here, let me fix that up for you.’ She took his glass and emptied half the whisky into another glass, then filled the Indian’s glass to the brim with water and ice before handing it back. ‘This should cool you down a bit.’

  ‘You are very kind.’ He lifted the glass to his lips and sipped at it.

  Marly watched closely. The whisky was the cheapest you could buy. She couldn’t drink it without drowning it in Coke. But the man’s angelic face didn’t flinch. He lowered the glass to his lap.

  ‘I see you have a plasma television.’ Pran nodded at a screen visible through the doorway into the lounge. It was a fifty-inch model Shaun had bought when they got the government bonus last year.

  ‘Brilliant for watching the footy.’ Azza spoke to Marly, as if he couldn’t bear to speak directly to the Indian. ‘Right, mate?’ He said this to Shaun.

  ‘That’s why I bought it.’ Shaun reached for the pizza box and passed the second-last piece to Marly before taking the last piece, rolling it into a tube and stuffing it whole into his mouth.

  Marly took a bite and chewed on the salty, meaty, oily slice. She loved pizza. Sometimes eating was almost as good as sex, like now, with the capricciosa sitting warm in her belly and a mouthful of fizzy sweet beer to wash it down. That Indian guy didn’t know what he was missing.

  ‘They say that next year all the football will be on pay television.’ Pran took another delicate sip of the whisky and water. This time Marly thought she saw his jaw clench as he swallowed.

  ‘Got it.’ Shaun reached behind and pulled a roll of paper towelling from the bench. He tore off four sheets and passed the roll to Azza before wiping his mouth and hands and tossing the used towelling at the bin in the corner. ‘You’re here to sell us Foxtel, right?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That other one, then. Optus, or Star, or whatever it is.’

  ‘Sir, I am not here to sell you a single thing.’

  ‘Fuck, he’s really starting to piss me off now.’ Azza spoke to the ceiling.

  ‘Your name is Azza, I believe you said? Where are you from, sir?’ Pran seemed unperturbed. He swivelled a little on his seat to face Azza.

  ‘I’m from Thomastown, mate.’ Azza had gone quite still.

  ‘And your family? They are from Thomastown too?’

  ‘They’re from Lebanon. Not that it’s any of your fucking business.’

  Pran nodded and took another sip of the whisky.

  ‘So come on, give us your spiel.’ Shaun rocked back on his chair and rested his thonged feet on the edge of the kitchen table like he was getting ready to hear a story.

  ‘I have no spiel. All I have for you is a free offer. No obligations, no payments, no commitments.’

  ‘Go on.’ Shaun was enjoying himself. Marly remembered the time he got the Mormons in and toyed with them for an hour and a half. She’d been drinking that night and so had he, and the evening was blurry – but the Mormons had never pressed charges, even though she’d found a piece of tooth in the glass on the floor the next morning, and it wasn’t Shaun’s and it wasn’t hers.

  ‘Do Hindus believe in God?’ Marly interrupted. If she could break the chain, tonight might end differently.

  ‘We have many gods, which are manifestations of a single reality. We believe in reincarnation, and in karma. What you choose to do in your life determines your destiny in this life and the next.’

  ‘Sounds like that chick in the crystal shop.’ Azza tipped back on his chair like Shaun and took a swig of his beer.

  ‘Take your feet off the table, boys. It’s not nice.’ Marly tapped her nails on the tabletop. The Indian’s clean white shirt and his polished shoes were flickering like soft candles in the corner of the room.

  Shaun and Azza were so surprised that they lifted their feet and dropped their chairs back to the floor.

  ‘Jesus, Marl, where’d the manners suddenly come from?’ Shaun reached across the table. He picked up a tube of toothpicks from the bench. He offered them around the table, but Azza and Marly shook their heads. The room was quiet as he rooted around the back of his mouth and brought out the toothpick to examine it.

  The tip was bright with blood, like a thin match.

  ‘So.’ Shaun rubbed the toothpick between his thumb and forefinger, twirling it up and down the length of his thumb pad. ‘So, Pran, mate.’

  ‘Yes, Shaun?’

  Marly couldn’t believe how relaxed the little dark man was. Either he was stupid or he had some secret weapon.

  ‘Pran, I don’t think we’ll be taking your offer of a free set of steak knives.’

  ‘I am not trying to offer you steak knives, Shaun.’ Pran lifted his canvas bag and brought out a pamphlet. ‘I am giving you free of charge six months of—’

  ‘I said we don’t want it, mate. The thing is—’

  ‘Mr Pran, what did you mean by manifestations of a single reality?’ Marly knew Shaun and Azza would be cursing her for interrupting their entertainment, but she wanted to know. Maybe this calm little man had the secret. The secret of being happy, or of not always wanting to be someone else, somewhere else.

  ‘You see, the Baghavad Gita says that there is a single essence t
hat underlies all existence. You might call it the soul. “The soul dwells in every living being, and in every part of every living being; it dwells in the hand and the foot, the skull and the mouth, the eye and the ear.”’ Pran watched Marly move her lips as he spoke, as if she was trying to make his words fit into ones she might understand. ‘But for us in this world, it is only necessary to do one’s duty.’

  ‘You’re giving me a headache, Pran.’ Shaun finished his beer and lowered the bottle to the table. ‘I think we’re done here.’

  ‘But I want to hear more. This is interesting.’ Marly nodded at Pran and he saw the tension in her tight forehead. ‘Come on, Shauny. Let him tell us a bit more.’

  ‘Yeah, Shauny,’ Azza whined in a mock falsetto, ‘let’s hear what the Paki has to say.’ His voice dropped to its normal register. ‘But you’ve gotta ask, if they’ve got it all worked out where he comes from, what’s he doing here?’

  ‘Come on.’ Shaun leaped up from the table, his big body causing the room to tremble. ‘We’ll walk you to your car, mate.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. It is very near.’ Pran thought about the reserve and its bits of glass and discarded car parts. Outside it was getting dark. The bush in the reserve would be dry and still and shadowy. He wasn’t sure whether a path led straight through to the street where his car was sitting. Perhaps it would be wiser to take the long way around.

  ‘Nope, I insist. Where is it?’

  ‘Really, I don’t want you to bother.’ Perhaps these men thought they could attack him, take money from him. As if he would be stupid enough to carry money around a suburb like this. Pran eased his clipboard into his canvas bag and shook it until the clipboard had dropped completely inside. ‘Unless you feel like a walk. Company is always pleasant.’

  ‘That’s us, pleasant company. Right, Azza?’

  ‘Right.’ Azza stood and hitched up his jeans. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Before he headed for the door, Pran turned and dipped his head to Marly. She was looking at him as if she felt sorry for him.

  ‘What you are suffering in this world’ – he waved his hand at Marly’s prosthetic foot, but his eyes were trained on her face – ‘will serve you in the next life.’

  ‘Great, ’cause it’s not doing her much fucking good in this one.’ Shaun laughed as he positioned his big hand on the back of Pran’s neck and guided him out of the kitchen.

  *

  Marly was waiting in the chair on the front veranda when the boys walked back through the hole in the fence. Neither of them looked at her. As she followed them into the house, a creased sheet of paper eased out of Shaun’s back pocket and fluttered to the floor. He didn’t notice until Marly had stooped to pick it up, then he turned and tried to snatch it from her. She stared at the printed sheet with Shaun’s scrawled signature at the bottom.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Shaun tried again to nab the paper from her fingers but Marly held on.

  ‘A minimum of two thousand dollars over twenty-four months? Are you fucking kidding? As if you don’t watch enough TV already. How did he get you to sign this?’ She threw the paper onto the kitchen table and as she did she noticed Azza thrust his hands in his pockets, but not before she had caught sight of the rusty brown stain on his palm.

  ‘Oh, no. What did you do to him?’ She pictured Pran’s melty eyes swimming with tears of pain, his soft mouth squeezed into a grimace. ‘Where is he?’ If they’d hurt that beautiful man she was going to kill them.

  ‘He’s all right, okay? I lost it for a minute, tapped him on the nose.’ Azza pulled his hand from his pocket, spat on it and rubbed it against his jeans until the reddish stain was off his skin.

  ‘That’s blood.’

  ‘He’s all right. We said we were sorry. He drove away in his fucking Honda coupe. Now shut up.’ Shaun slammed his fist on the table. The dog bolted out through the back door.

  Marly stood uncertainly in the doorway. Shaun was glaring at her, daring her to say a single word. She’d never find out how the Indian had got him to sign the contract.

  ‘I’m going out front.’ She took a beer from the fridge and stumped down the hallway to the veranda on her graceless steel leg. The streetlights were on. She could see the shadows of trees in the reserve. On the other side, somewhere, was Pran, flying along the freeway in his Honda coupe with two thousand dollars of their money. Money they didn’t even have yet. Two years of their lives signed away. Everything had turned upside down. She tried to remember what he had said about the essence. Something about hands and feet. Or skulls and ears. Or something.

  Griffith Review

  Paleface and the Panther

  Robert Drewe

  Anthony’s skin was so white, almost translucent, you could see the veins fanning out from his temples into his rusty curls. The vulnerability of those electric-blue wires shocked me; sometimes his skull looked like a physiology poster. At the same time, the eggshell frailty of an orphanage or illness seemed to cling to his body. When he had his shirt off for the bath or beach there were those eerie neon veins again, beaming out from inside his chest.

  I tried to paint him a few times but I find children difficult. They come out either too sentimentally cherubic or Hollywood demonic. In oils Anthony looked like a changeling, with a wily old face. And I couldn’t resist the veins – maybe I overdid the cobalt. Anyway, the paintings met with strong disapproval from the Miller sisters, pale redheads too, who maybe had Renoir and innocence and velvet suits in mind, and they were destroyed before I could reuse the canvases.

  Even in real life he didn’t appear a normal West Australian boy, neither tanned nor sunburnt, not freckled or peeling, more like a vitamin-D-and-protein-deprived European waif from yesteryear. Just off the boat, as they used to say. Dickensian poorhouse. But he wasn’t sick or poor, just pallid and thin. And he was actually a fourth-generation Sandgroper, and only half orphaned, and now that a temperamental flush masked his veins, and his curls were unravelling in the summer humidity, he was the image of my father.

  It was Anthony’s birthday party, and in the cricket game taking place in a municipal park of buffalo grass sloping down to the river, a match he had insisted on, he’d just been clean bowled for the third time in a row.

  It was torture to watch. He was trying out his new Slazenger cricket set, my present to him: a cricket bat, ball, pads, gloves, stumps and bails which came in a nifty PVC bag with the Slazenger panther emblem leaping in full horizontal stretch the length of the bag. It was expensive but I’d wanted to give him something sporty and manly, something we could do together and maybe shift the gender balance a little. Make him not so milky-pale and veiny. He was always surrounded by women and I felt guilty for not paying more attention to him in the past couple of years when I was living it up. Painting hard, yes, but also playing hard. The usual recreational activities.

  Anyway, if his flushed cheeks and boisterous eagerness to test the cricket set this afternoon were anything to go by, he loved the gift.

  But now he was clean bowled again, and he refused to leave the crease. Even as he flailed around, his glowering, determined face – my father again – seemed to say, Are you all mad? Why should he go out? What idiot would swap batting for bowling or, even more ludicrously, fielding? Batting was the whole point, wasn’t it? It was his birthday and his new cricket set and he was the most important person here, especially today of all days.

  Not surprisingly, the fifteen party guests fielding in the park this January afternoon were losing concentration and patience. Of course the birthday boy had been allowed to bat first. Uncle Brian was bowling underarm, and had substituted a tennis ball for the hard cricket ball – and, what’s more, had bowled him out three times already.

  All over the park, young fielders were flopping down on the ground and sucking twigs and peering longingly towards the river or the party table that Anthony’s mother and aunts were setting up under the peppermint trees. The kids had given up on having a turn with th
e bat and now they wanted to swim or eat; at this rate there’d soon be an uprising. Oblivious to the general restiveness the three Miller sisters were drinking their customary spritzers and laughing while they blew up balloons and tied them to the trees’ branches, special balloons that said Happy 8th Birthday Anthony!

  I was wicket-keeping. Because I wanted him to succeed, and I wanted the cricket set to be an appreciated gift, I was torn. But eventually I said, ‘You’re really out, my man. Give someone else a turn.’

  He swung at another slow underarm ball from Brian, and missed again. I trudged uphill after the ball while he thumped the grass in frustration. But he still didn’t give up the bat.

  Unusually for a Perth summer afternoon the sea breeze hadn’t arrived and the day gave off a sullen chalky glare that stung the eyes. In the river below us, other shrieking children were bombing and diving off the jetty – non-party guests having a better time than us – and becalmed yachts lolled in a deepwater bay as smooth as oily glass. Ageless impressionist subject matter. You’ve also spotted the scene in a hundred atmospheric summer photographs: skinny show-off boys caught mid-air, spread-eagled between jetty and water. Even at my age I envied them. Already my shirt was sticking to me from all that trudging after the missed balls. The buffalo runners had an annoying way of gripping the ball and stopping it from rolling back down to me.

  ‘Don’t be a bad sport,’ I told him. I was feeling disheartened as well as hot. Anthony was ruining the party mood. As I threw the ball back to Brian, I said, ‘Don’t bowl any more until the spoilsport walks.’

  Brian looked for direction to the women with the spritzers and balloons. In the shade of the peppermint trees the Miller sisters had taken off their sunhats, revealing three different hues of red hair in gradations from vivid orange-peel to mercuric-sulphide pigment to dark rust. They had cigarettes going, too, which interfered with their balloon-blowing efforts, and every now and then one of the women would gasp and giggle and her half-inflated balloon would escape, spinning, blurting and farting crazily over their heads.