The Best Australian Stories 2010

by Cate Kennedy

  71. How can you remind someone you don’t know of a moment that will never be important to them?

  72. The usher’s locked up. They all want to go home.

  73. Four o’clock in the morning after the cast party for that awful student play that Blazey and I were in and me wanting to kill myself.

  74. A darkened bedroom in the cast-party house. The noise of the rest of the cast ripping through from the lounge room.

  75. Me getting up to go home and thinking I’m going to go home and kill myself.

  76. Me having planned to kill myself throughout that whole horrible year.

  77. Me mentally running the bath and laying out the pills and wanting so much to have that horrible year over and done with.

  78. I was a student after all. Melodrama comes easily.

  79. We’d escaped from the ripping-air cast party of an awful play. The world’s stupidest director and the world’s most irritating lead actor and the world’s most embarrassing stage fighting you have ever seen.

  80. I’ve never been satisfied with theatre. If he was to say to me tonight Here’s your programme, I hope you enjoyed your night, I’d end up saying The staging was great but I didn’t like the representation of women.

  81. It’s statements like that which make people say That’ll be £3.50, thank you.

  82. We were sitting in the dark and Blazey was singing songs from The Muppet Show and I was talking about Gonzo’s great song from The Muppet Movie.

  83. And not just the awful play. My father being an arsehole and my mother being dead and 1994 being the world’s most horrible year and that fight with Amy and not knowing where that anger came from. The air ripping that whole year.

  84. What a great song. Better than the ordinary play tonight and the awful play fifteen years ago. Better than dead mothers and heavy Fortnum & Mason’s bags. Better than polite awkward exchanges between the house manager of the Almeida Theatre and a tourist from Australia.

  85. And the room was still and quiet and the air did not rip. And Blazey singing Miss Piggy singing ‘What Now, My Love?’

  86. Me going on and on about Gonzo’s song from The Muppet Movie.

  87. And me almost not wanting to kill myself.

  88. Me half-up off the floor and him – Blazey’s boyfriend, who I never knew before that night and never saw again – saying Don’t go, sing that song you like.

  89. Him saying Here’s a replacement programme. And then going back through the swinging doors into the auditorium.

  90. It’s silly. Maybe it was Blazey who said Don’t go, sing that song. Maybe he couldn’t even care less about Gonzo’s song. Maybe he was thinking Dear God, you idiot, I’m with Blazey, get out of this darkened room and leave us alone. But that’s not how I remember it.

  91. The cast party and my arsehole father almost not mattering any more.

  92. The ordinary play and the heavy bag and the almost-rain not figuring at all.

  93. I’d be happy to pay the £3.50. I can claim it on tax if you give me a receipt.

  94. You choosing to ignore the Oh I know you. Or perhaps not hearing it at all. Perhaps not seeing the flash of recognition in my face or perhaps thinking God it’s late, can’t I please just go home?

  95. Of course I remembered that moment before I saw you again tonight. I remember it often. You let me sing that song in the dark and because of that I didn’t go home and kill myself. Yes, I probably wasn’t actually going to kill myself – I was a student after all – but you stopped me anyway. You said Don’t go, sing that song you like. Blazey lay on the bed in the darkened bedroom, her head (I think) in your lap and you let me sing.

  96. Gonzo’s song from The Muppet Movie:

  There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met

  Part heaven, part space – or have I found my place?

  You can just visit, but I plan to stay

  I’m going to go back there some day

  I’m going to go back there some day.

  97. And it made me feel better. And I didn’t go home and kill myself.

  98. The usher’s gone home.

  99. And when I do want to kill myself I remember that moment: four o’clock in the morning during the worst, most horrible year of my life in the dark singing Gonzo’s song for Blazey and Blazey’s boyfriend who I never saw again until tonight. That moment has saved me many times and I want to thank you for that. I’m sorry it’s late and you had to come down through the swinging doors and unlock the programme cupboard and squat down and get out another programme for a now-fat beardie weirdie but I thank you. I wish it were possible for me to thank you.

  100. You left the theatre half an hour ago. You’re now on the street, further down from where you turned, suddenly, after rootling through your silly Fortnum & Mason’s carry bag, shoved with your water bottle and your umbrella and a nostalgically half-eaten Double Decker bar and a book and some liquorice all-sorts and a stash of postcards from the National Portrait Gallery, and noticed that you must have left your programme behind. But that was ages ago now. Fifteen years and an infinitely paused moment of a grown man giving another grown man a programme to replace the one he left in the auditorium. Keep walking and put all that behind you.

  Reasons to say something:

  1. You saved my life once. And I thank you for that.

  The Bridport Prize

  Wildlife

  Cory Taylor

  ‘Hippy theatrics,’ said Samuel.

  He and Mr Jurss next door stood at the fence watching, while Steph held the hose on the garden beds up behind them. All week the protesters had been down the back, some on the ground in tents, others up in the tall trees flying pirate flags, shouting the police down with loud hailers, calling them fascists and Nazis, which made Mr Jurss laugh, since in his youth he had known real fascists and Nazis.

  From here Steph could see right into the tree branches where a young man was staked out. He had built himself a platform so that he could lie flat to sleep and his friends had been ferrying in food and water, hoisting it up to him in a bucket. Twice Steph had left a bag of fresh fruit at the base of the tree hoping they would find it. She didn’t agree with her husband. She didn’t think it was just hippies. And even if it was she thought they had a point. The neighbourhood was losing its scrappy, untamed heart. But there was no point arguing with Samuel. He had made up his mind.

  ‘The cops could be out there fighting real crime,’ he said.

  ‘What I’m always afraid for,’ said Mr Jurss, ‘is a fire. One strike of lightning and whoosh.’

  Samuel cupped his hands around his face and yelled. ‘Go home and have a bath!’

  Stephanie looked at him then and felt a wave of sadness. She didn’t know when it was that he had turned into this defender of developers and the rule of law. As a much younger man he would have been less sure of who was right and who was wrong, of what was real and what was just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

  ‘They’re never going to win,’ he pronounced later, while they watched the news footage of the day’s events. ‘It’s private property. End of story.’

  ‘Spoken like a true government lackey,’ Steph replied, and was immediately sorry, because Samuel chuckled then, in the sour way he did whenever she brought up the subject of his job.

  ‘Yeah well some of us don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not to work,’ he said. ‘Some of us actually like money.’

  It wasn’t true that she had chosen not to work. She’d been let go, making her sound like a dog on a leash. But Samuel seemed to blame her anyway, for that, and for a whole lot of other things, including what happened to the boy.

  *

  He broke his nose falling off the jungle bars at school. Actually he was pushed, he said, by a boy called Byron whom nobody liked. Steph knew him by sight, a brawny blond kid too big for his age, who had no father and two mothers. A typical son of West End, Samuel said, destined to develop a dope habit in grade seven and take up housebreakin
g as his vocation. Samuel wanted the boy to go to Churchie.

  ‘At least book him for grade five,’ he told Steph.

  ‘You do it,’ she said. ‘If you’re so keen.’

  She thought the boy was fine at the state school. She also believed that it was better to learn how to stand up to bullies as early in life as possible.

  ‘The world is full of Byrons,’ she told her son. ‘You can’t give in to them.’

  And then they had all stood by and watched while the police cleared the sitters out of the trees and dismantled the tents and arrested anyone who talked back. Since then the bushland out the back had gone quiet, like it was waiting for the next big thing.

  ‘It’s valuable land,’ said Samuel.

  ‘So you keep saying,’ said Steph. It was as if he was trying to comfort her somehow with the thought that everything was about its cost. She couldn’t even begin to explain to him how mournful it made her feel to listen to him.

  *

  The boy was asleep upstairs when it happened. Steph was sitting with him, trying to memorise his eight-year-old face. He was slipping out of childhood so fast it was like a tide going out. Only when he slept did it stop long enough for her to truly see him, and even then she was mystified by how foreign he was. In the deep part of him he was still untamed, an animal, some solitary and quick-witted thing.

  *

  Steph headed downstairs as soon as she heard Lily barking. Lily was Mr Jurss’s dog, a lightweight little Jack Russell terrier he’d inherited from a nephew who stayed in his downstairs flat when he wasn’t at Charters Towers working in the mines.

  ‘She gives me the company,’ Mr Jurss would say, while Lily stared up at him with her heartbroken eyes.

  She was not a yappy dog unless she had reasonable grounds. Birds were a constant provocation, especially the owls that flew in on dark and ogled her from the low branches of Mr Jurss’s jacaranda. But this was a full-throated alarm, coming from the back landing where Lily was confined whenever Mr Jurss was out.

  Steph put the laundry basket down on the dining table and went outside onto the back deck. From here she could see the frantic dog, all its attention on a spot in the corner of the fence where Mr Jurss’s yard bordered Steph’s. Steph moved down onto the steps so she could see what was there.

  A man stood in the garden bed, naked except for his shorts and ragged sandshoes. When Steph stared at them he started to knead the dirt under his feet like it was burning his soles. Sweat ran down his chest as though some private downpour had drenched him and left everyone else dry. She thought it strange that his skin was so pale except where a florid tattoo covered his narrow chest and spilled down his arms to the wrists. He wasn’t a hippy. Steph thought of the real crime that Samuel had talked about to Mr Jurss. This must be what he meant. The fear came off the man like a sound only she and the dog could hear, making Steph tremble.

  It was like this whenever snakes came up into the garden, which they did once in a while, fully grown carpet pythons with silken skin. All she could do was stare while her heart hammered against the walls of its cage, flailing wildly for as long as she had the snake in her sights, whipping up in her a kind of loathing that was also worship, because the snakes were so unreasonably beautiful.

  ‘What are you doing in my yard?’ she called out. Her voice sounded unnatural in her head, like it was someone else asking, not her.

  That was when he slid his hand into the front of his shorts and kept it there. It occurred to Steph that he might have a weapon, except that then he had started to scratch himself almost pleasurably. As if he had fleas, she told the policeman later.

  She shouted the question again, shaking with anger. How dare he come here, where he didn’t belong. If Lily kept this noise up, she wanted to say, the boy would wake up.

  ‘I’m trying to get out the back there,’ he said, which was when she saw how green his eyes were, so lit up they were electric.

  ‘What for?’ she said.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he looked up at her with a kind of condescension, while at the same time his eyes seemed to burn brighter. She yelled at the dog to shut up but Lily, in her frenzy, was unreachable.

  ‘The gate’s behind the water tank,’ said Steph, pointing to the opposite corner of the garden to where the man stood. He stepped out of the garden bed, crossed the lawn towards the water tank and disappeared. The gate opened then slammed shut on its hinge. He didn’t bother to slip the latch. She would have to go down later and shut it properly or it would bang all night in the wind. There was a storm coming. Steph could already feel it building. The clouds at the back of Mt Cootha were gathering steam and starting to darken. In a few hours they would explode overhead like some huge blister had burst, and all the streets would turn to rivers and be washed clean.

  *

  ‘You did the right thing.’ The policeman was dressed like a stormtrooper, in body-hugging blue fatigues. Steph could hear the rest of the squad down the back directing the dogs, two big German shepherds they’d brought with them in their van. It was parked out the front of Steph’s place where the neighbours could all see it. A few of them were gathered on the street now trying to find out what was going on.

  ‘The lunatic fringe,’ the policeman said.

  *

  When Mr Jurss came home she told him the whole story. How Lily had raised the alarm and how, twenty minutes after the police dogs went down into the scrub, they’d cornered the man and he’d screamed and carried on and called them every name under the sun, all of which she could hear because the gully was like that. It amplified everything.

  ‘When they build houses down there we’re going to hear the neighbours breathing,’ she said.

  ‘It won’t be so bad,’ said Mr Jurss.

  ‘It’ll be terrible,’ said Steph.

  The boy said someone should come and find all the animals before they cut the trees down.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ said Mr Jurss.

  ‘Why not?’ said the boy. He was stroking Lily’s back with all the tenderness of a lover.

  ‘It’s a jungle,’ said the old man.

  Steph could see the boy swoon at the idea. He had just read a book on jungles and jungle animals and his head was full of green tangles and heat.

  *

  The storm came through at ten, after the boy had gone back to sleep again. He had been well enough to sit up for a couple of hours and watch some television. He had even managed to eat an egg mashed up with some buttered bread. Samuel wasn’t home yet. He was doing a course two nights a week, something to do with wealth management and investments. He had asked Steph to do it with him but she had told him it wasn’t her thing.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean,’ he said. ‘Not your thing?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay home and babysit.’

  Which is what she did. For two nights a week she and the boy had the house to themselves. It was like they were on a holiday from Samuel. They ate together after he’d gone, and she never forced the boy to finish what was on his plate because that only seemed to confuse pleasure with suffering.

  ‘You don’t discipline him enough,’ Samuel told her. ‘You let him run wild.’

  ‘How is he going to grow up if we’re constantly on his case?’ said Steph. ‘He’ll be too scared to risk anything.’

  Samuel didn’t agree. She could tell from the way he looked at the boy sometimes as if he wanted to tie him up and whip him, break him like a horse with too much pride.

  *

  At three in the morning Steph woke out of a dream about a man with Clive Owen looks whom she’d tailed down into the scrubland as far as his hide-out, at which point he’d spotted her and demanded a kiss. In exchange he offered her a coin-sized emerald-green stone. She knew it wasn’t a thing of any value but she was willing anyway and let him unbutton her blouse and put his hands all over her, while the trees all around them whispered and the animals made their little scuffling noises in the dark.
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br />   She opened her eyes and struggled to climb out of the dream, checking that it was Samuel beside her in the bed and not Clive Owen. The sound from the dream was still there. Not a snake because snakes were soundless. Not a cat, because cats were stealthy. This was a lumbering, more awkward thing. It was in the garden outside their bedroom window. Steph was certain she knew it from the time before. She slid out of bed and padded out of the bedroom, making sure not to wake Samuel since he had never understood her excitement about anything at all unexpected.

  After the violent beating the storm had given it the garden seemed abnormally still, like something that has stopped breathing. Once her eyes had adjusted to the dark Steph could see the way quite clearly in the starlight. She came round the corner of the bedroom and there was the echidna, probably the same one she and the boy had found the other time, when he’d been camping out the back in a tent.

  ‘Hello there,’ she whispered. The animal had already sensed her coming. Its spines were up and its head wedged between two boulders so that all it presented to her was its prickly back. As a defence system it was impenetrable. There was no part of the creature that was unprotected. Steph thought of what the boy had told her after he’d done his investigations. Echidnas, he said, roamed huge territories and navigated by some system that was barely understood but was probably tuned to magnetic lines in the earth.

  It occurred to Steph to wake Samuel to ask him whether they should try to rescue the animal and take it to the RSPCA before it was run over by a bulldozer or buried alive under a ton of fill, but she was afraid of what he might do. The first time the echidna had come into the garden she had sent the boy into the bedroom to wake up his father but Samuel had refused to come.

  ‘He said to let him sleep,’ said the boy.

  ‘He doesn’t have a soul,’ said Steph.

  When she thought of that now, of what she had said, and of how she and the boy had sat together on the grass in the dark, the boy so wide awake and still so young, she wanted to howl out loud like a wolf or a bear protecting its cub from all the harm that would ever come to it.