The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  Ingrid

  So Ingrid rings her out of the blue. Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve called. I’ve been so busy. And Louise says she’ll make them lunch. Yes, says Ingrid, it must be easier for you to stay at home.

  Ingrid: assistant curator at some regional gallery, never progressing in her career as she was (Louise thought) not that good at curating. They had been friends since university. They strutted round town, shopped, watched movies and ate and drank together until about the time Louise really started to show. Then her pregnancy unmasked something. Ingrid morphed into the beautiful, thin, sexy one of the two; she snatched the role and bloomed within it. So that when they shopped, Ingrid would parade around in her still-tiny underwear and tell Louise not to worry, that she knew other women whose bodies didn’t change that much after birth. Just some cellulite, she said, staring at Lou’s hips with carefully blanked eyes. Even though it had been Ingrid who – in reality – had the thick waist and the coarse facial features and the short neck and the dry hair. Everyone knew it except Ingrid. (Don’t you think my hair has a celebrity kink to it today?) Even though it was Ingrid who could never get a date. (Will Tom be home soon? I want to see what he thinks of my new dress.) So Louise got fat and pregnant and the world-according-to-Ingrid took precedence; between them it became The World, and bit by bit tiny parts of Louise were crushed, little black ants squashed one by one, leaving unmentionable black smudges of fury – until she’d stopped answering Ingrid’s text messages. Thank God, Tom said, I never did like that catty woman. Then of course he apologised, took her out for dinner, told her repeatedly that she deserved far nicer friends than Ingrid. For months he listened to the endless list of Wrongs Perpetrated Against Her By Ingrid.

  Ingrid stood at the threshold in a floral dress that accentuated her thick waist, and she looked Louise up and down, eyes like fat-seeking missiles firing at the pillows above her armpits, the loose lines of her slip.

  ‘Lou! Long time no see!’ That fresco smile.

  More

  She pushes the pram to the café. It’s Tuesday. Again. She wades through the heat, sweat dribbling between her thighs, down her legs. She could always not go. But she collects these habits – wading and dragging – until they form currents that carry her. And here she is, wearing dark glasses, rubbing salty water between her ankles, washed up again onto Café Beach. Her child lulled to sleep by the waddle. Everyone orders banana bread and decaf cappuccino. Louise fights the urge to scream: Just because they call it bread doesn’t mean it isn’t cake, you fat fucking cows. It doesn’t mean it won’t keep your cow-arses fat fat fat.

  She nods periodically, watches deflating milk, peers into the Bugaboo at appropriate intervals. She whispers to the waiter, ‘One banana ars … I mean bread, please.’

  And Then …

  Tom calling from the front door: ‘How was your day, honey? ... Honey? ... You here? ... Hon?’

  She rolls over, trying to lift her heavy head, trying to get up and out, so Tom doesn’t burst in and wake it.

  Third Date, In Bed

  ‘So, Tom. Are you by any chance the piper’s son?’

  ‘Why, yes, wench, as a matter of fact I am.’

  ‘Why, Tom, that almost makes you an artist!’

  ‘Okay.’ He straddles her, pins her arms back into the pillow behind her head. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’

  With Tom

  ‘Once, in third-year uni, I was with this lecturer in his office and we were discussing cyberpunk fiction and we started talking about mutant animals and then phosphorescence and then he made a slip of the tongue. Instead of saying I could really use a glow-in-the-dark fly, he said, I could really use a blow-in-the-dark fly.’

  ‘Understandable.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it! He didn’t even hear what he’d said ... So, what about you?’

  ‘Sure! I’d love one.’

  ‘No! I mean what about you have you ever heard anyone make outrageously revealing slips of the tongue that you can remember?’

  ‘Oh … mmm … no, not that I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Well do you think we should hold someone responsible for their slips of the tongue?’

  ‘Hold someone responsible?’

  ‘Yeah. ’Cause isn’t it the case that the slips reveal true feelings?’

  ‘True feelings?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Aren’t they just mistakes?’

  ‘A blow in the dark? Come on.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘I’ve enough trouble accounting for people’s actions.’

  ‘My grandmother always said it was the thought that counted.’

  ‘How traumatising.’

  From Ingrid

  ‘You look pretty much the same as you always did. You’ve just got a bit of a stomach now.’

  To Tom

  ‘Can you believe that fucking bitch said I look pretty much the same as I always did? Even though I’m nineteen kilograms heavier than I used to be? Even though I look like a goddamn cow? I was never this fucking fat. I was far better looking than her. She is such a bitch. She thinks she’s so fucking gorgeous and someone should tell her to wear foundation over those liverspots, and she actually said she thinks she looks like Angelina Jolie? She pulled a picture she’d cut from a magazine out of her bag to illustrate the resemblance? I mean that is just psychotic. Oh gosh, I never noticed Angelina’s appalling acne scars and lack of a neck before! And you know, she actually asked me when you were due home because she wanted to say hi? As if you would be disappointed if she didn’t hang around to say hi? Hi Tom. Hi TommyTomTom. Wanna feel my smaller arse Tom-Tom? My boobs don’t leak. My bra doesn’t have wires. I’m a size ten, you know. Oh you didn’t know? Well here, let me rip my top off and show you the fucking tag.’

  And More

  She used to read things other than The Baby Whisperer, Kid Wrangling, Baby Love, Baby Born. She used to eat things other than cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. She used to read, ah, who the fuck did she read? Don DeLillo at uni. She remembers that, vaguely. And she must have read Carey, surely, something about a man with no lips in a mouse suit? What has happened to her memory? She worries. Is it prolactin that has her suspended in this fuzzy, fleshy ever-present? Throughout her pregnancy they watched a DVD on the old MacBook almost every night, in bed, their shoulders rubbing, and she can’t recall a single plot.

  She dresses the baby and sings, We’re goin’ to the café and I’m gonna go cra-a-a-zy, we’re goin’ to the café and I’m gonna go me-me-mental.

  She dresses herself. Maternity bra. New black cotton underpants. How the fuck, she thinks, can something be full and brief? White slip with black trousers. Ballet shoes. A relapse. She just feels false wearing anything else.

  At the café, rocking The Ambulator with one foot. ‘Aha. Aha. Really? Fillet steak for only sixteen ninety-nine? Gosh you’re cheap, I mean, that’s cheap.’ Behind her glasses Louise crosses her eyes. Shoot me now, no one can see. She holds them that way until the little muscles beside her nose, and the ones inside her temples start to scream. Muscles she didn’t know she had, screaming at her. Like childbirth on minimum volume. Like childbirth shushed with a massive morphine OD. It stops her throat from screaming, Anyone here do with a Blow-In-The-Dark? Her foot rocks The Ambulator harder, faster. Sunglasses take aim at her ballet slipper. She uncrosses her eyes. She stops rocking. Who exactly the fuck are these women? These old fucking ugly hags sitting on chairs-de-bistro as if they have massive PVC pipes rammed up their barge-arses. Women – mothers – discussing all kinds of inane bullshit. What happened to her old friends? What happened to her? Surely this cannot be better than an afternoon in her own home? Louise imagines her desk and then her fridge full of condiments, the drawn curtains, the vomit stain on the living-room carpet, Jane and Michael pashing on her TV. She thinks of Ingrid in her size tens and orders the banana bread.

  She’s next to Pam – Pam who lives five houses down and was probably a perfectly nice and perfectly c
ompetent PA in her previous life, exactly the kind of person Louise would never have had to deal with except on the rare occasion that she had to deal with Pam’s boss – and Pam discusses all the different kinds, and all the different forms, and all the different colours of the shit that litters her miserable excuse for a life. And Louise shovels banana bread down her throat, imagining all the rotting, black, rancid bananas they must have smashed together to make this cake that smells like a fucking monkey’s sweaty arse, and she thinks she might choke.

  Home

  Eyes closed, it sucks on one breast, and milk flows from both nipples. Her gigantic milk let-down: this engorgement of her breasts feels like a huge inflation, followed by a powerful squeeze. It cries and then – nipple in mouth – it rears back from the fierce rush of milk, gagging. Ever hopeful – in this just like its father – it gives the breast another chance. It drinks easily now, burps, sleeps. Louise lays it in its crib and stands by, making sure it keeps breathing. It does keep breathing, for a long time it keeps breathing. Breathing, and mouthing phantom breasts. And then it cries. Without opening its eyes, it screams for more let-downs. But she leaves it and walks to the toilet. If it’s crying it’s not dead. She sits. Looks with disgust at her thighs flowing over the edge of the seat and then looks down, at the green tiles and at the empty toilet roll lying like a carcass about thirty centimetres from the bin. Right, she says into the empty room. I mean why would you, Tom, put the empty roll in the bin when you can just chuck it on the floor? How idiotic of me not to realise that the entire bathroom is your personal rubbish bin. A bin for me to fucking well empty, day after day after day. The thought of Tom dropping the empty roll on the floor – brutally, carelessly – is unbearable. She wants to cause him pain. She rips off a handful of paper from the full roll on the holder, wipes herself, stands, viciously pulls up her underwear and, refusing to flush, she goes to feed the kid.

  Still More

  Louise looks down at her outfit. More uniform than outfit. She looks up and around the table, at the circle of dark glasses. She points to her white slip and says nervously, ‘I actually have four of these, you know.’ She giggles. She looks from lens to lens. No one responds. They are waiting for the waiter. Louise clears her throat. She is flushing madly and would like to fan her face with the menu, ‘Well. You know sweetbreads?’ she says, clearly a propos of nothing, voice cracking up. ‘I didn’t know, but I read that it’s an animal’s pancreas. But only if you plan to eat it. Because if you’re not thinking it’s food then it’s still called a pancreas. Isn’t that weird?’ Pam – feeling obliged as she’s sitting right next to Louise – says, ‘Hmm, yes.’ And then quickly launches into a defence of disposable over cloth. That really gets them going.

  Tom

  He touches her the way he used to; all of her, as if she’s his. There are goose bumps on her skin, a ferocious squeeze inside each breast, then the let-down of her milk. They stop and watch it stream down Tom’s chest: thin, white rivulets, the sound of their breathing in the background. The baby starts to cry. Louise whispers, ‘It can smell me.’

  The Page

  Bound to her desk again, trying to produce something for her sole client. The commission: a web page for a cutting-edge Asian-fusion women’s-wear label called High Tea With Mrs Woo. The site has had the word Brewing on it for two months now. That single word – tea-coloured and generously surrounded by undulating fleur-de-lis and promiscuous curlicues – is the only thing that separates her from rank housewife. Louise opens her computer and the nausea blooms again, infusing her like a foul tisane. It happens every time: open computer, nausea blooms. She thinks she’s Pavlov’s dog, the computer her bell, the nausea her saliva. She thinks everything she feels is just habituated reaction.

  Brewing. Brewing. Brewing. Luckily, thinks Louise, the High Tea girls are Asian. Patient. Respectful. They knew this project would take time. They understood. Some of their dresses take an experienced seamstress twenty-eight full days to construct. Intricate wearable origami. The garments are phenomenally comfortable. Within them you are as insect in flower, nestling and hidden. Louise flips through look-cards from the current season and wonders again which piece she should buy, if she had money, if it would fit. She narrows it down to two. An orange silk floor-length halterneck gown or a black wraparound nouveau-kimono jacket. Brewing. Brewing. Brewing. The jacket might hide her gut? She draws a squat Chinese teapot and, in the steam from its spout, imagines a link to the photographs of the collection. The steaming teapot sits on a laden table. There are fortune cookies and bean cakes and tiny teacups with koi. And then she is cut with the frenzied, rasping scream of a baby being tortured in its flannelette swaddle, abandoned, dying. Louise gently closes the computer. Milk. Milk. Milk. One litre of milk is enough for forty cups of tea, or one hungry baby. She pushes her palms together.

  Dough

  ‘Honey! I’m home! I bought you that breadmaker you’ve been wanting for ages!’

  Louise walks to the front door, frowning.

  ‘That what I’ve been wanting?’

  ‘The breadmaker! I researched them and I’ve bought the super deluxe model that bips so you can add sultanas and nuts, or herbs, or whatever you want mid-cycle? So they don’t get crushed by the kneading?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The breadmaker! You said they were great and you had to get one, when we went to that kid’s ridiculous one-month-old birthday party that time? Remember?’

  Louise turns and walks back to the kitchen.

  ‘Louise?’

  ‘The dinner’s burning.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted one.’

  ‘Tom,’ she says and spins around, blinking at him like she’s trying to clear oil from her eyes, ‘I was lying?’

  All This Came from Their One Little Slip

  It is tiny and blind and squints when it looks up at her. Squints through opaque blue eyes that are always searching for her, waiting for her. And Tom’s body is so hard and always ready, always waiting for her too. Muscular, masculine, gorgeous, terrifying in its ready waiting. And Louise’s body – she peeks down at the flabby contours as she steps out of the shower – is this white dough, risen and soft and waiting also, waiting to be punched down or something. And it seems to her that she is separate from all of them that make up this nice little family.

  Among Surgeons, a Fat Gut Is Called an Apron

  Jewel from High Tea With Mrs Woo calls. Louise imagines Jewel holding her iPhone against the shiny hair that bobs above her origami clothes. Black on black on black. Luckily Louise has changed, and is sitting at her desk in ballet slippers and red lipstick, so she can pose with fingers draped over her forehead, other hand cradling her Bakelite phone. Sure, sure. The cascading style sheets are the struggle. She is sweating. Yeah, look. It’s almost there. I should have the mock-up to you by Friday latest. The tone is important. There’s only High Tea between herself and obliteration. Only this single-thread page. She shakes her hair like a wet dog, trying to clear the fog, and looks down at what she has. Sepiatoned curlicues are not very Asian, but still. She closes her eyes and pushes hard against her eyelids. She once read this could make you faint. She is, in truth, so tired she could splinter, and fainting sounds like bliss. She walks to the bedroom and stands in front of the wardrobe mirror just to check there’s something that sort-of-looks-pretty-much-like-her-with-a-stomach really there. Mother fucker. She steps closer. She barely fits inside. Breath from her hot lips fogs the mirror and her face disappears.

  Check-up

  Louise straps the baby’s bassinet into the car and drives to her doctor. She’s cancelled the appointment three times and is too embarrassed not to turn up. Although she does not need a doctor. What she needs is a new body and a new wardrobe. A new car would be nice – a two-seater convertible. Tom’s okay for now, as is the house, but everything else she needs renewed. A doctor cannot help her with this. She skulks inside the surgery, hands her Medicare card to the receptionis
t, places the bassinet on the floor, baby lulled to sleep by the drive, and takes a seat. She has the first appointment after lunch and is the only patient waiting. She looks at the clock on the pastel blue wall. What does a doctor eat for lunch? Probably lettuce. Mesclun. Radicchio. Mache. Dr Taylor, mid-forties, looking like every other female GP Louise has ever known – sort of mouse-brown and inoffensive – calls her in. Louise hauls the bassinet into the room and sets it down again with a sigh. The child is still asleep.

  ‘So,’ says Dr Taylor, hands on her knees, and then smiles in that way they do.

  Louise raises her eyebrows and tries to smile back.

  ‘How old is the little one now?’

  ‘Three months.’

  ‘And how’s it all going?’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine.’ Dr Taylor has a large, bright-red tomato-sauce stain on her cream cardigan, just above her right breast. Louise can’t help but stare.

  The doctor looks down, touches the sauce stain. ‘I shouldn’t wear cream, I do this every time. I’m absolutely hopeless.’