The Best Australian Stories 2012

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The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 18

by Sonya Hartnett


  Jennifer walks calmly through the next two carriages, both empty. The train is slowing, she realises, and will soon arrive at the next station. She stops at the end of the next carriage, holding the column of handrails for support. Arthur stops beside her, feeling a sort of team spirit with this fearless girl. She looks at him, looks at him properly for the first time. ‘You okay?’ she asks. He is the colour of snow on a mountainside.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ he stammers. He looks down. ‘I wanted to help, but you had finished it before I was even on my feet.’

  Jennifer isn’t sure what to say. ‘It sort of all happened in a flash,’ she tells him. ‘I didn’t have time to think.’

  They stand silently as the train enters the lighted station, slowing as the brakes are applied noisily, their bodies brushing each other as the deceleration drags their hips sideways. The big doors open with a hiss of compressed air and they step off together, turning right along the platform. They are the only ones leaving the train. What will they do if the two thugs get off too? Arthur doesn’t know, but he is glad she is with him. He decides he will join a kickboxing class.

  As the train starts to move they stop, turning to watch the carriages moving away. They can see Jimmy still lying on the seat, but there is no sign of Peter. They each assume that he is still on the ground. Jennifer turns to Arthur. He is taller than she is by fifteen centimetres or so, and he looks down on her face. As Peter thought, she really is stunning. ‘Do you think we should call someone? D’you think they’re badly hurt?’

  Arthur is surprised that she is asking his opinion. ‘They must be,’ he says. ‘You didn’t half wallop them.’

  Her air of self-confidence is dropping away from her. Tears start in her eyes, glinting in the uncertain light of the station. ‘I was just defending myself,’ she says, and she leans towards Arthur, resting the side of her face against his jacket. He can feel her shaking and, hardly believing that this is happening, puts his left arm around her. She sobs for a while, her shoulders moving, leaning more and more heavily against him. He brings his other hand up to touch her hair, to hold her head against him. ‘I’d better call someone,’ he says eventually.

  He feels her nod, but the sobbing increases. He doesn’t want her to stop. This is like a wonderful dream. They stand together on the platform for several minutes until her sobs decrease and he feels it is no longer the decent thing to do. He leads her to a bench, and takes out his mobile. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

  Without thinking, she tells him. ‘Jennifer,’ she says. He starts dialling, but at the second zero she puts her hand over his mobile. ‘Don’t tell them my name,’ she says. ‘Tell them you just saw it at a distance, then saw them hurt when the train pulled away.’ He nods, and presses the final zero.

  ‘Police,’ he says to the operator, and when he is put through explains that he has witnessed a fight on the train, and that there might be two badly injured men who need help. No, he says, he didn’t see who did it, just the injured people as the train passed him. They might have been fighting each other, he suggests.

  Jennifer squeezes him in silent thanks as he rings off, but she starts to cry again as he stands. He has more confidence now, and he leans down and helps her to her feet. He is hoping for another long hug. ‘Come on,’ he tells her, ‘this is no time for tears. You’d better get a move on if you don’t want the police to talk to you.’

  Jennifer nods. ‘I’m not sure how to get home now.’

  ‘Can you call someone to come and pick you up?’

  She nods, and pulls out her mobile.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ he asks her quickly.

  ‘What?’ Jennifer thinks she has misheard him, this spotty boy.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ he repeats. He knows she won’t let him, but he has to try.

  Jennifer pauses, obviously giving it serious consideration. ‘Why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll call you in a while?’

  He nods, and fishes out a scrap of paper from his satchel, hastily scribbling his name and number before handing it to her self-consciously. ‘Only, you know, I’d like to see you again, when it’s not like, you know, like this.’

  Jennifer flashes him a smile. ‘Of course,’ she says, and tries the name on the paper. ‘I’ll give you a call, Arthur.’

  ‘You’d better go,’ he says as they hear a police siren drawing closer. She nods, reaches up to kiss his cheek and turns away. He is shocked, his hand rising without conscious effort to the cheek she has kissed, watching her as she walks out of the station.

  She sees she is in a well-lit street with shops and a bus stop only a few metres away. She waits there as a police car, lights flashing, pulls in to the kerb in a no-stopping zone outside the station. A bus arrives, and it is going in the right direction. As she climbs aboard she drops the scrap of paper to the floor. ‘Silly sod,’ she mutters to herself. The bus is half full. She finds a seat and sits looking at her reflection in the window and smiles.

  She knows how to look after herself.

  fourW

  The Other Room

  Liam Davison

  The day the girl came to visit, we were going to feed stones to Neary’s horse. It had taken clayballs and clods of dirt from us before, but Lonan wanted it to choke. I remember it, because we’d planned to walk the long way past the new cutting where Brendan had said you could walk right into the storm drain and be gone, underground, before anyone knew where you were. But when the day came, it was Lonan who was gone. I waited for him at the gate and when he didn’t come, I pushed it and stepped into the Crielys’ backyard.

  The gate was Lonan’s gate really. Brendan could remember Mr Criely cutting the railings and our father worrying at the damage to a good fence. Lonan was the only one who ever used it. Sometimes, he’d be on the back step before anyone had woken.

  Mr Criely kept birds. There was an aviary pushed to the fence and when I stepped through the gate, there was a flurry of wings and a pardalote stuck hard against the wire as though it saw only open space.

  ‘He’s not here,’ Mrs Criely said. ‘He’s gone for the day.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  Lonan never went anywhere but with us. There was nowhere for him to go.

  ‘If he’d wanted you to know, he would have said,’ she said. ‘And mind you shut the gate on your way through.’

  She wore slippers like my father wore and yellow rubber gloves.

  Later that day, I noticed my father had placed the wooden plinth back across the bottom of the gate and looped the top with wire so the fence was a straight, unbroken line again.

  ‘We’ll be having a visitor,’ my mother said. ‘A girl from the country.’

  We didn’t have visitors unless they were people we already knew. The bottle men came once a month and Mrs Marriott from the other side borrowed tea or sugar and sat too long at the kitchen table. Mrs Pereira tried unsuccessfully to sell perfume and cosmetics to my mother but rarely gained entry to the house. She left her order book stuck behind the flywire door where it stayed till she collected it the following week.

  And there were the nuns. Apart from Mrs Pereira, they were the only ones to come to the front door.

  ‘You can sweep the front porch,’ my mother said, ‘and bang the mat before you disappear.’

  ‘Is she a nun?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The girl who’s coming. Is she a nun?’

  ‘Of course she’s not a nun. What would make you say that? Don’t even think for a minute … Don’t even.’

  *

  Brendan said Neary would cut your balls if he caught you tormenting his horse. You don’t mess with men like Neary, he said.

  Brendan spoke of Neary with the authority of experience I’d never questioned. Neary was a grown man. But then, so was Brendan. He’d finishe
d school before I’d started. Brendan knowing Neary went with him knowing the Criely boy, Colin, who’d died before I was born, and with him knowing why Mr Criely cut the gate, but not being able to explain it because there were things I didn’t understand.

  ‘You just don’t do it, right?’ he said. ‘You think it’s the same as messing with Criely’s birds. It’s not.’

  I’d never messed with Mr Criely’s birds, and Lonan showed no interest in them. They seemed off-limits in their sad walk-in aviary, which was really just a glorified cage. It was like Lonan knew the birds had some other significance for his dad beyond their frantic bursts of interrupted flight each time he lifted the latch.

  Brendan worked nights at the club and drove during the day. The back door was always open and he came and went as though he owned the place. When he spoke about Colin Criely and about his sister, Susan, who was married now and moved away, it was like he was talking about another place altogether that shared a common boundary with the place I knew.

  ‘That bedroom you’re in,’ he said. ‘That’s my room.’

  The top shelf of the wardrobe was stacked with schoolbooks and trophies he’d won for sport and a wireless set he’d built himself but never got to work. In the bathroom there were creams and razors, and a badger-hair brush in a ceramic pot with his name printed on the side. It was like my world was something borrowed, and each time I opened a cupboard door I caught a glimpse of something more real and substantial that occupied the space behind it. Some nights I felt, if I opened the bedroom door and stepped out to the lounge room, they’d be there: Mum and Dad and Brendan, only Brendan would be my age in his pyjamas sitting between them, and they’d look right through me.

  ‘So what was the other room?’ I asked.

  ‘The other room,’ he said. ‘That’s what it was: the other room.’

  ‘Then it was yours?’

  ‘Not really. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘What was it like?’ I asked.

  ‘Like nothing. You just don’t mess with Neary’s horse, hear?’ he said. ‘You leave it or you’ll end up the same,’ and he pulled his fist up between his legs like a stab.

  *

  I thought maybe Lonan would be there when I arrived. But there was no sign, and the horse stood with its back to the wind, staring out across the paddock to what remained of Neary’s land. I’d brought a stone with me in case. It banged against my thigh all the way through the estate and out past the cutting to where the last of the fences stopped short against open sky, then further out to where the horse stood at an indeterminate point that seemed as far removed from home as it was from the flat horizon in the distance. The only feature of the place was the horse itself.

  I laid my bike on the grass and stepped towards the horse. All the way out, from the moment I’d turned onto Boundary Road, thinking about Lonan and where he might have gone, the horse had been a fixed mark in the middle distance that I’d steadily made my way towards. It seemed it had always been there. It was like a hill or the set foundations of a house that had long since vanished but still staked its claim without asking anything of anyone. It simply was.

  As I pedalled, the low fences and skeleton-frames of half-finished houses slipped away on either side and the smells of cut wood and turned clay gradually opened to the expansive smell of grassland. The wind carried me through it. When I passed the cutting and the open mouth of the drain, I might not have been pedalling at all had it not been for the weight of the stone against my leg. The grass billowed in the wind like a living pelt beside me and I seemed to float above it, moving yet strangely still with the horse always the same distance ahead.

  And now, with the horse beside me, I looked out across the same flat expanse of featureless paddock that the horse saw with no fixed point to give it depth or focus. The sky was immense above it. There was no horizon now. No distance. I don’t know how long I stood there with the horse breathing beside me, and the relentless sound of the wind. The grass and open sky might have extended behind me as far as it did in front.

  There was no sign of Lonan. Other times he’d disappeared, it was with his father, birding. It was the saddest thing, he’d said. They’d drive out to the country, just the two of them, and barely speak. Then they’d watch great flocks of birds, starlings or sparrows, wheeling above them in the sky. And when they were done, they would drive to a friend of his father’s who bred birds and his father would buy one or two brown quail for his aviary and place them on the back seat in a cage the size of a shoebox. When they got home, his father would introduce them into the aviary and stand there watching to see what they would do. It was like he was looking for something, Lonan said. Like he wanted something he couldn’t have.

  When the horse shifted its weight I gripped the stone in my pocket. I was surprised at how hard and cold it still was. I had no real idea how big a stone would have to be to choke a horse but I’d taken a piece of basalt from my box, half the size of my fist. It should do, I thought.

  The horse had done nothing to acknowledge my arrival. It didn’t care whether I was there or not. I could see its sheath between its haunches and the puckered scar where Neary had cut its balls.

  Lonan would do it. I knew he would. Without thinking. He’d feed it to him just for being there.

  *

  Lonan was a year ahead of me at school. We’d pass each other in the yard and not acknowledge that we knew each other. Each afternoon, though, he was there, through the fence as quick as a wink. He ate with us. He dropped his clothes in the TV room. He was more a brother than Brendan was. My mother picked up after him and set his place at the table, with his own serviette from the kitchen drawer. Christmas and Easter, he came with us to Mass, and took communion and stood and knelt and crossed himself.

  Brendan said it only made sense. Mr Criely wasn’t Catholic. Mrs Criely only went when she felt the need.

  ‘Colin never went at all,’ he said. ‘First of church Colin ever saw, he was already dead.’

  Colin Criely had been the same age as Brendan. He belonged to that otherworld that Lonan and I had never been a part of, and each time Brendan spoke of him, it was like a window opened.

  ‘I was with him the day he died,’ Brendan said.

  He’d come into my room late one night and I could smell the cigarettes and beer from the club.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Colin. Who else?’

  He was pulling things from the wardrobe and laying them out on the floor.

  ‘We were both working for Neary, planting carnations for the markets.’

  There was a leather case filled with books and bits of folded paper.

  ‘Not Neary, Neary. Old Mr Neary. All of it was his then. Everywhere you looked it was market gardens.’

  He flicked through each of the books and unfolded the papers, then put them back the way they were.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just nothing. You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, I left him to it ’cause Colin Criely never knew when to stop. He’d work into the night if you let him. One more row. One more row. He was a good worker; I’ll give him that. So I left him.’

  He opened each of the drawers as he spoke and jammed it shut, then went back to the wardrobe.

  ‘His dad knew something was wrong when he hadn’t fed his birds. The covers were still up and the birds were restless for their food. And he went out to the paddocks on dark and found him underneath the tractor.’

  I didn’t know what to say to him. What could I say?

  ‘He never said it was my fault. For leaving him, I mean. He never said.’

  *

  I didn’t know what time the girl was coming, but I was expected to be there.

  It would only take a minute to choke the horse. So far, it had taken what was offered. I thought about
where to stand to do it. Would it keel over, or go down on its knees? Would it kick? It seemed so resolute and indifferent to my presence, I found it hard to imagine it doing anything but standing there and accepting its lot. Would it even know?

  That same night, when Brendan had come into my room, he spoke about Lonan and how trouble seemed to follow him.

  ‘He’s not like us,’ he said. ‘He’s not like you, I mean. He thinks he is, but he’s not.’

  I wondered what he meant about not like me. What was I like, then? What did Lonan want? At school, he ran with the boys who played rough and made their own rules. If anything, I thought it was them he wanted to be like.

  They had a boy down once, in the dirt at the back of the oval. I don’t know what he’d done. He was on his knees and they were standing over him. Lonan was there too, on the edge at first, but then not. Each time the boy tried to get up, they pushed him down. That’s all it was. He’d get up and they’d push him down. Over and over. It went on longer than it should have, and the boy never made a sound. Then Lonan was in there. I thought he was going to stop it. But he bent down and picked up a handful of dirt from the ground and when the boy was on his knees again he pushed it into his mouth and leant his knee against his back till the boy gave up and howled. It was over then. Just the howling and the boy lying in the dirt.

 

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