The Best Australian Stories 2012

by Sonya Hartnett

  ‘Hello,’ the grandmother says. They are both wet, dripping pools onto the sand.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she says and laughs, her tears gone.

  ‘I can help you,’ the girl replies and takes her hand, gently pulling her back towards the sea.

  She looks behind her, but she can’t see her brother or pick out their towels among the bright patchwork beneath the overpass. She follows the girl and the grandmother closes in behind.

  They are nearing the slippery slide. She can hear people screaming as they careen down it. Plastic blue against the plastic blue sky. A very tall Japanese man turns to her: he’s wearing Okanui shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and a large golden cross hangs on his hairless chest. He smiles.

  ‘My father,’ the girl says. As she speaks she squeezes her hand reassuringly.

  ‘Come,’ he says.

  The girl releases her hand and the father puts his arms around her shoulders.

  ‘We’re baptising people,’ the girl says, her face hiding nothing in the bright sunlight.

  ‘Really?’ She nearly says it in Japanese: honto ni.

  ‘Yeah!’ the girl says. ‘It’s so exciting.’ She does a little jump in the sand.

  The father’s hands on her shoulders are hot and heavy. She tries to shrug them off. He squeezes her. She looks up at him and he’s blocking out the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry. My English very bad. God speak all languages,’ he says, and switches to Japanese.

  *

  He is walking her to the water; she looks back, trying to catch sight of her brother. A semicircle of people holding hands surrounds her. The girl and the grandmother grip one another. They all have faces too bright with smiles. The water licks her toes. He walks her deeper until the bottom of his shorts are wet, and she is holding hands with the water. The people push in closer around them.

  His hands on her shoulders, he leans down and deftly knocks her legs out from under her. He has her like a baby now. The water is cradled around her. She smells his aftershave and rotten weed.

  ‘Come now,’ he says, and pushes her under. She tries to protest, gets a mouthful of warm water. She holds her breath, blowing out her nose. His arms are unmoving as pylons, impervious to her struggles. It’s dark. She waits for him to lift her back up out of there.

  The water is warm, and she makes little circles with her hands. She feels something: a tendril of weed, she imagines, but then it feels like scales, slippery scales.

  Breath starts to burn in her chest. Still he holds her down, cradling her body. She kicks up, tries to grab at him, to scream. She relaxes – and begins to breathe the water. Her brain buzzes with the hot hum of cicadas.

  *

  Suddenly she feels her brother’s hand wrenching her out of the water. Everything is bright. Her feet find the ocean floor and she vomits brown liquid.

  She looks around. Her brother is clutching her hand. The semicircle is broken, and the priest’s Hawaiian shirt is dark with water. No one is smiling. The priest is firing Japanese phrases at her brother, angry.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, ‘you’re hurting me.’

  Her brother loosens his grip but doesn’t let go, and she sees he is crying.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says.

  She touches him gently on the back and they walk through the group, sand gripping their feet. He follows her.

  They find themselves back at their towels, and she gathers up their belongings. They leave, the water drying crisp and salty new skins.

  Griffith Review

  A Willowy Woman

  Marion Halligan

  She is a woman who flirts with priests. I have been around churches long enough to recognise one of them when I see her. A genre, rather than a stereotype, and within that her own particular characteristics, her own individuality.

  A woman who flirts with priests is not to be confused with a priest’s housekeeper, pronounced with a certain intonation. The one flirts, the other sleeps with him. Thus helping him keep his vow of celibacy. A lot of people don’t know that being celibate is nothing to do with not having sex but with not being married. Had there been more housekeepers available perhaps there would have been less material for the husband Eric’s book on tender young men who tried but failed to become priests. That whole lost generation which is responsible for the emptiness of the priesthood these days. Housekeepers housekeep, they clean and iron and cook, they share the clean-sheeted master bed, and sometimes they produce children but then the system’s gone wrong, celibacy is designed for the non-production of children, so the priest can keep his mind and his energies on his flock. The housekeeper might be young and even pretty, or else cosy and middle-aged, possibly one and then the other. I am speaking of course of the ideal. She will often love him and he her. But priests can be boozy horse-racing creatures who smell of smoke. Not nice to be near. Of course so are some husbands. Certain priests are known to molest small boys and sometimes small girls. How much safer to have a comfortable housekeeper. Why not. Everyone deserves the comfort of skin touching skin in the soft spaces of the double bed.

  Flirting with priests is a very ancient art (well, so is the housekeeping, you’d have to say) and one which has provided many women with an artless hobby, so it has seemed. A given is purity on both sides. Physical purity, purity of deed, is one thing, and can normally be ascertained unless the protagonists are exceptionally clever and secretive. But mental or spiritual purity is another. I’ve observed these things carefully. It is possible to be pure in word, but what about intention? A cup of tea is a hostessly act, but what about the heart in the hand that passes it? What gets mixed into the cakes, what seasons the casseroles? The spoon turns, the fork stirs … passions and longings and yearnings translate from hearts to hands to the mixtures shaped with desire. The tender thoughtful priest is the vessel of God’s love. The husband is not sensitive; not a brute, perhaps, though he may be, but he is not a vessel of love to be held in delicate cradling hands; he is mundane, he is not precious. Or there is no husband, simply a space, an emptiness waiting to be filled with the overflowings of the vessel of love.

  Of course there is already an odour of antiquity about this. Lavender scented like linen in a glory box. Maybe in small towns and villages, you will say, but surely not in city parishes, priests aren’t what they were and women work, they do not arrange cucumber sandwiches on oblong plates with oblong doyleys to fit. There is something anthropological about this. The next time a young woman finds in her mother’s drawers or her grandmother’s these odd small oblongs crocheted in cream thread or embroidered on white linen that she won’t have seen even her grandmother use, she will not know they are for lining plates of cucumber sandwiches. There are still old women who know this. And there are still priests and parishes and women who yearn to make gifts of love.

  And the priest is after all a bachelor and of some long standing; he needs womanly care. Like the widower who, looked after for so long by a wife, cannot be left alone. A wife dies, look out for the women bearing casseroles. You could write a thesis about widowers’ casseroles. Like food in fairy stories and old tales, they are not what they seem. Proserpine’s pomegranate, Snow White’s apple, Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house, the casseroles brought to widowers by helpful women, they are a trap, they will drop you right in it, be warned before you take a mouthful.

  We talk about these things, over the flowers, voices soft but messages clear, as we primp the vases, quite a lot of them there are, in a church this size, and the glorious blooms from rich old gardens. The ancient rituals are by no means dead.

  Of course Vanessa was not a woman for making cakes or stewing up casseroles. Nor for arranging flowers in churches. Tea was not her thing. A cup of strong coffee in a small cup, a tidy whisky in a crystal tumbler, even a glass of good red; she was a sophisticated woman.

  Here is what she
looked like. She was tall and appeared slender; she arranged her body so you noticed this fact. In her mind (oh, I have observed her) her body is willowy. It is pliable, it bends, it twines. Willows are anthropomorphic, they shake out their green hair like mermaid’s tresses, they dance in the breeze. Willowy: we all want to be willowy. Any woman in the world, you ask her, I bet she’d say willowy.

  There are things you could say about willows. You don’t want to let them near your drains, otherwise you’ll find yourself spending a fortune on plumbers. Those delicate weaving tendrilly roots will find their way into the toughest of sewer pipes and block them solider than concrete, your lavatory will brim over, your dishwasher flood the kitchen, the washing machine waste well back. Admire willows from a distance, so beautiful, so useful, for aspirin and cricket bats and in the past for tying parcels, but keep them out of your gardens unless you live in a Capability Brown-sized park.

  Her face is long and bony; you can suppose she was handsome once in a horsy way. She never shows any skin to speak of. The willowy body is long and bony too but nobody ever sees that, it’s always enfolded in layers of fabric that cling and smooth and float, in scarves that wind and slip, in skirts cut on the bias that swirl about her black-stockinged legs in shoes with heels high enough to give her that slightly difficult vulnerable walk that is the point of high heels.

  Ethereal. I reckon that’s a word she’s embraced for herself. The slippery diaphanous fabrics. The hair. Fair hair. Not blonde or bright: pale.

  Once it had been reddish gold; now she has it done just pale. We all grow out of the reddish gold. It’s fuzzy. She pins it in a knot on the top of her head and tendrils escape, curling on her neck, floating round her face. She bends her long thin neck and the little kiss curls touch the heart. A cloud of hair, you could say. Every now and then it will slip out of its knot and then with languid impatient fingers she twists it up again and skewers it with an antique tortoiseshell comb. In her youth she went to mass in a mantilla, but nobody does that anymore.

  Willowy. Ethereal. A cloud of hair. None of these things is true of people. But some people make you believe them.

  Oh, Vanessa, the flower ladies say. They purse their lips, or narrow them. Oh, Vanessa. You can see them not speaking ill. If you haven’t something nice to say, don’t say anything.

  Her air is helpless, but this is a deception. She is cunning and clever and always gets her own way. You see I am not a good woman like the flower ladies. The flower ladies … they sound like a chorus out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

  Vanessa. Once when I was still in her good books we drank tiny cups of coffee and she told me – probably more than she wishes she had. That she didn’t care for the name Vanessa. Something of a cross to bear, she said. It was invented. Not like a saint’s name. Invented by a clergyman, indeed, but it was so he could write to his mistress Esther Vanhomrigh in a secret way, and he wasn’t a particularly religious clergyman, not a Catholic, a very secular Anglican. Dean Swift belonged to a time when preferment was political.

  Esther Vanhomrigh: you sort of invert it and you get Vanessa.

  Wasn’t he into eating babies? I asked, and Vanessa said, Oh no. But I was sure he was, he wrote an essay about it.

  It was satire, said Vanessa.

  Vanessa said she thought that at least Esther was a good Jewish name, but it turned out to be Persian, meaning a little star. Father Bede told her that. He said it’s another form of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love. Ishtar the goddess of love, said Father Bede. That cannot be of interest to me, she said. (See how she flirts with priests?) It’s idolatrous, she said. I sometimes think I could be an idolator, said Father Bede.

  It turned out Father Bede had this idea in his head for some time before he mentioned it to Vanessa. Then he called her Ishtar, and she gave little moues of distress, I saw her. And maybe it was clever of him to make this connection, for Ishtar is a fierce and terrible creature, whereas Vanessa appears all gentleness and meek eyes. Ishtar is the goddess of war as well as of love. You’ll notice this if you cross her. Vanessa, I mean. Priests never do. She never lets them.

  She has children but they are grown-up and live in another city. So does her husband. But they are not separated. They are devoted spouses. So she will tell you. His name is Eric and his surname is different from hers. He’s the headmaster of a distinguished school for boys. Not a Catholic school since he isn’t a religious. He had been for a while in his youth, had spent several years with the Jesuits, and when he retires he’s going to write that book about why so many gentle clever ardent young men of his generation had tried to become priests and failed. As I’ve remarked, a sentence would explain that, a word even. You don’t need a book.

  Being devoted to your husband but not wanting to live with him strikes me as curious. But I am no longer on good enough terms with Vanessa to ask. She purports to love the city he lives in, to find the one she lives in tedious, but still, here she is.

  She occupies a small city flat in an old warehouse. Small in floor space but considerable in volume since it is lofty. Her bed is on a mezzanine, climbed up to by a ladder. She is limber enough for this. Where the money comes from no one seems to know; she doesn’t seem to earn any. Perhaps Eric pays. Perhaps she has a private income. Nobody in this country ever supposes that a person might have a private income, but in fact they do, on occasion.

  I happen to know that at least two of the flower ladies have private wealth. They come from families who made a lot of money in ways that could well be doubtful, and have left this to be paid in pleasant regular sums to their children. This is one reason why they have the leisure to be flower ladies. Highly prosperous husbands is another.

  On the other hand, Vanessa purports to be doing something, and that is writing a history of the Irish and Catholicism. This is a highly intellectual activity; it needs a lot of talking about, a lot of planning. Especially with priests. Are any words written? Who knows? I may suspect, but I do not know. Any work of the intellect needs a lot of thinking about, beforehand. She never has written anything, but that’s not to say she won’t.

  Perhaps you will be thinking I have not given much evidence of this flirting with priests I keep mentioning. It is very delicate. She has a particular way of touching them; she stands close and puts out her hand – against their chests, on their sleeves – but doesn’t actually connect. She almost does, and a nervous person might flinch, but the contact is not made. It is a kind of hovering. Like royalty, their persons are sacrosanct. And it is quite thrilling, this possibility, this suggestion, this mirroring of touch. It is more powerful than the actual meeting of hand and body would be, because it insists that it be in the mind. It makes its own warm place, as though a kind of radiance of connection has been made. I think when I observe it that it has a kind of violence in it, and yet anyone would insist on the chastity of her gesture.

  She seems helpless, and is not, but people do not know that. She is devout and respectful, as in that not-touching. She is a handmaiden. So it is safe for them to enjoy her company. So they believe. But she is an opportunity, occasion, vessel, of temptation. She leads them astray. They believe it is her piety and her intellectual approach to it that they are responding to but it is her woman’s body in its modest but deceiving draperies and her meek eyes whose guilelessness is only a veil.

  Watch her, across the room. The occasion: the launch of Anthony Tindale’s book. The lean elderly Jesuit has finally produced the promised fat tome. He smiles his abbot-by-the-fishpond smile. Vanessa stands beside him as though refusing to take any credit for the great oeuvre. He is a very holy man and this is the distillation of his years. He reads a poem; he is famous as a poet as well. It is elegant and difficult and nobody is quite sure about it. He wears half-moon spectacles on the end of his finely chiselled nose, holds the book up and gestures with his long-fingered white hand. His voice is deep and beautiful, so you c
an listen to this and not worry about what the poem means.

  Father Bede is the master of ceremonies. He is a stocky young man, with dark curls and fine white skin with a round red spot on each cheek that burns more brightly when he is excited. You want to put out your hand and feel if it is hot. Maybe Vanessa’s not-touching would feel the radiance.

  Vanessa sits on a low chair. As is her wont she puts out an arm and snaffles a passing child and cuddles it on her lap. She sits with her back to the light so it shines through her fuzzy hair, haloing her shadowed face, and bends her long neck at that willowy angle and murmurs in its ear. Charming woman, says the bishop who is seated nearby. Charming woman.

  Vanessa’s lids veil her eyes. She glances sidelong from under them. People seem to think this is a pious look. I reckon it’s sly. Her lips form a faint tender smile. If you see a crocodile don’t forget to scream, the little children sing. I feel like screaming.

  Anthony Tindale murmurs to Father Bede: A good woman is a pattern of the Virgin Mary, regard, how she is here amongst us for a moment as fallen women reflect her glory. Something like that. How true, murmurs Father Bede back.

  The chid is less keen, and wriggles off as soon as it can. Vanessa looks around for another one. The escaped child picks up one of the books being launched and carries it back to her mother. Book, she says loudly, with terrifyingly pure vowel and consonants. As toddlers do she trips over her own feet and drops the book on the bishop’s foot and then falls on top of it. The bishop shouts and then says in a soft but penetrating voice, Fuck. The child’s mother snatches her away and Vanessa’s lids fly open, her eyes rounding. She recovers, and hovers her hand over the bishop’s knee.

  I know what’s wrong with him. A friend of mine looks after him. He has a tendency to gout but doesn’t like people to know. That’s why he wears those baggy wide shoes that look a bit like Goofy’s in Walt Disney. Mostly he’s all right but occasionally he suffers. I know about the pain of gout; it’s excruciating. The faintest touch is unbearable, but a heavy book, a heavy child – seems to me a quiet fuck is really rather restrained. Of course the bishop is used to making his soft voice heard. Father Bede brings him a glass of red wine and he drinks it down as though it would cure him.