The Best Australian Stories 2012

by Sonya Hartnett

Mick, I will say as I disgust myself by eventually humouring you, Mick that is a FUCKING MAILBOX.

  Understand that if you mention how low your cholesterol is in spite of eighty years of treating your body like a hospital-grade bag of infected rubbish, understand that if Lady Life renews her lease on you, and you develop a penchant for ‘walks,’ understand that in bitterness, in unbridled bitterness, I shall have a segment of my lower bowel removed.

  If my name is Koula and your name is Mick and one day having served you lunch I shall ask for a sip of your beer. If I shall ask for but one sip of your beer and you shall look me in the eyes, you shall look me in the eyes with sixty-five years of hatred, you shall look me in the eyes and I shall meet your eyes, and without taking your eyes off me you shall pick up the beer in your pig hand and take it to your pink and crusty discarded-by-the-butcher-and-left-in-the-sun poisoned ham lips. And you shall swig from it. If you shall swig from it and then exhale beer, particles of lunch, and air all at once. If then, after this brothel performance you shall offer unto me your beer, I will put a curse on you.

  If after I put a curse on you, you shall summon, from within your gingivitis cavernous death-pot mouth, a phlegmatic viscous. If you shall spit this phlegmatic viscous and chart it on a course toward my face. If you shall do this Mick, then understand you shall have regrets.

  If my name is Koula and your name is Mick and one day you spit in my face. Understand that with all my will I will reach behind me for a knife. Understand that if all I can place my hands upon without looking, without unlocking our hating eyes, understand that if I cannot reach a knife, if all I can reach is a colander, understand that I shall use the colander like a sort of knife-hat. And I shall drive it onto your head.

  And there you shall be, drunk and vague with nothing but your colander-hat and what remains of your beer and the dishrag of your soul.

  Mick, if you understand these things, if you understand them, then you shall begin to understand me and my eternal contempt.

  Going Down Swinging

  Cold Patch

  Jon Bauer

  She lay there listening to the rain and thinking about her washing. It’d been on the line since that sunny Thursday. Now it was Friday night and she was in bed, the downpour dirtying her sheets and her husband blowing his nose in the sink.

  She pulled the doona more tightly around her, sausage-rolling herself in some warmth. His footfalls stopped halfway along the corridor.

  ‘Did you turn the heating up again?’ he said. She was facing the wall, a grimy area on it where he rubbed against it during sleep – coming to bed filthy. She looked at that smudge, the shape of it.

  ‘Did you?’ he said, arriving in the bedroom.

  ‘You’re obsessed.’

  ‘Can’t you put some warm clothes on rather than heating the whole house?’

  He was undressing with his back to her, knick-knacks wobbling on the chest of drawers as he balanced on one leg to get a sock off. Then again for the other.

  ‘I put the machine on,’ he said, his voice still showing the strain of balancing.

  ‘Mm.’

  He crawled up from the foot of the bed to slide in between her and the wall. She sat straight up and swung her legs round, put her feet in her slippers and went off down the corridor.

  ‘Forgot to floss.’

  The wind gusted rain hard against the window, as if it were suddenly falling more heavily. The downpour drumming on the roof.

  She was coming back, her footsteps pausing.

  ‘Love?’

  ‘Coming,’ she said.

  She sat on the bed, deposited her slippers, then lay down and flung the covers over herself, banging her heels up and down on the mattress and blowing out her cheeks.

  ‘Cold one tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘When I said we needed rain, I didn’t mean this much.’

  ‘This bed’s freezing!’

  ‘It’ll get there.’

  They listened to the rain.

  ‘Lights out?’ he said.

  She leaned over and turned out the lamp but the security light blinked on outside – light coming in through the curtains. Over and over she had begged him to adjust the sensor. ‘It’s your sensor that needs adjusting,’ he had replied. Which she took to mean he didn’t know how to fix it.

  The security light blinked off, the rain beat down. They lay in the dark, looking up at the sound.

  ‘There’s a cold patch,’ she said, her hand on the space between them. He turned over to face his grimy wall. ‘It’ll warm,’ he said, his voice already softening in sleep’s shadow.

  She plonked her body over the cold like a broody hen. She hated it when he fell asleep before her; the sense of abandonment you could feel lying right beside someone. People were never further away than when they were sleeping right beside you. Like her father laid out in state. The smell of rosewater.

  ‘It’s still there,’ she said in a loud whisper, as if not to wake him.

  ‘What?’ he said, his voice coming long distance.

  ‘The cold patch. I’ve been on it and it’s still there.’ She had to speak over the rain intensifying on the roof. It sounded like cattle feed landing in a metal trough, her father holding the weight of the sack but her steering it – feeling like she was pouring. The feed powder coming up. She had adored that smell.

  ‘Love!’

  He snorted. ‘What?’ He sat up, turned the wrong way to face her in the dark. ‘It’s really raining,’ he said, his voice a little singsong with sleep. The security light blinked on again, etching the room with light and shadow.

  ‘Feel it.’

  He reached out and she found his hand, directing it.

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘I’ve been lying on it and it’s still like that.’

  ‘P’raps it’s wet. Is it wet? Maybe the roof’s leaking again.’

  She turned the lamp on and they squinted, staring down at the spot on the bed where their hands had been, then up at the dry ceiling.

  He shuffled down the bed and got out.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Water bottle’ll fix that,’ he said. ‘Cuppa?’

  ‘No thanks,’ she said, looking from him – naked from the waist down – to the spot on the bed. ‘Don’t be long.’

  When he’d gone she positioned herself on the cold again, looking up at the architrave to help her sense the temperature better.

  ‘You did turn it up, godammit!’

  He huffed on down the corridor to the kitchen. Eventually she heard the faint growl of the kettle.

  They were both in bed now, the hot-water bottle in place, the lamp too bright. She reached over and snatched up his dressing gown from the floor. The lamp giving off a tainted green light after she’d flung his prized garment over it as an extra shade.

  ‘Careful with that,’ he said.

  ‘This is ridiculous. It’s you and that bloody thermostat.’

  ‘Wear more round the house.’

  ‘Some husbands would appreciate their wife uncovered.’

  ‘Maybe husbands that like to look at a dish they can’t eat.’ He turned over in bed.

  ‘You’re going to sleep?’

  ‘It’s night time. People traditionally sleep then.’

  She got up and peeked between the bedroom curtains, the water pooling on the flowerbeds, his dressing gown starting to smell warm on the light bulb. She had begged him to throw it away for years, the polyester polished grotesquely smooth. She glanced across to see if he could smell it but he’d put a pillow over his face.

  ‘Lights out, please,’ he said through the old feathers and drool clouds.

  ‘Your roses are getting a drowning.’

  ‘Lights, love.’

/>   ‘What about the cold patch?’

  He growled a sigh. ‘You’re imagining it. Besides, the hotty’s on it. It’s a hot patch.’ The faintest smoke rising from the dressing gown.

  She lifted the hot-water bottle and felt the bed. She thought about how her dad had touched her with two spoons at once, one from his tea, one from his ice-cream, and she’d not been able to tell the difference. She thought about how not knowing the difference had been exciting back then. She thought about all this rain pooling on his grave. They said she wouldn’t be allowed to put in the stone for weeks, until the ground had settled. Her reflection looked at her from the wet window glass, a drear picture of the passing of life – time’s teeth marks all over her face, and her father in an unmarked grave in the rain.

  She stared down at the dressing gown, the room smelling of sweat and singed fabric, a slight burn forming. She lifted the gown, all the time checking for the pillow still over his face, his breathing evening out. The gown was stuck. She lifted harder, panicking a little, trying to tease it from the hot bulb without tearing it. When he fidgeted she dropped it – turned the light off, opening the door a little to let the smell out.

  She got into bed, her face turned to the lamp, worrying about fire. The rain had almost stopped, his breathing starting towards the first gurgle of snores. The light from the bulb now a remnant splodge in her eyes, floating between her and the darkness, her brain trying to make meaning out of it.

  ‘What if we can’t tell anymore?’ she whispered to him in the darkness. ‘What if we can’t tell how cold it’s got?’

  She reached for his hand and he gave her a little squeeze, even in his sleep – a sign of cold habit, or of warmth beautifully engrained. She worried which.

  While he drifted off she lay there looking at the darkness, his dressing gown still stuck, smelling, to the cooling bulb. Her hand too nervous to check the cold patch now. The hair-trigger security light coming on again.

  Rosewater, she thought, picturing her washing sagging in the Friday night weather, and thinking about that sunny day when she’d hung it all out there, clean and fresh and bright.

  She sighed and got up, unplugged the lamp, crept with it out into the corridor and closed the bedroom door to, the security light shining in through the window over the front door – the corridor freezing.

  The light went out, her body rigid in the cold and the black, the house especially sombre with the downpour gone, the eaves dripping water, his snoring percolating through their bedroom door. She wrapped her arms round herself, wondering why it was that women had to feel more than their fair share of the cold. And yet she remained in the corridor, stuck between not wanting to stay up alone, and not wanting to slide in next to somebody who wasn’t there.

  She waved at the sensor, hoping it would take pity on her through the window, but it was the thermostat that clicked.

  Kill Your Darlings

  Your Voice Is Lead

  David Sornig

  The lieutenant, to give her the credit she’s due, did not ever say don’t tell the truth. What she did say, and what I signed up to in the schedule of field operations about which I was forbidden to report, was item number twenty-five: The embedded journalist is precluded from communicating the contents of this schedule to any individual or organisation not duly authorised to have knowledge of its contents. So the terms of the agreement don’t require me to tell the truth. It can’t reach that deep. Not even now. What it says is that the truth isn’t what you say, it’s who you say it to.

  *

  It was on the seventh morning of my captivity that I was again blindfolded and seated in the back of the small car. We drove for some hours and when the car finally stopped and the driver had killed the engine I was taken out and held by the arm before my blindfold was removed. The three men, with their faces, as always, covered in my presence, stood around me in a circle. Two of them held pistols and the third an automatic rifle. They bore their weapons as if they were items of jewellery or toys that they had somehow forgotten to put down. I searched for any sign of a building or some other mark of human life. But there was only the car, the road, and away down towards a river, which ran wide and slow around the curve of a hill, a poppy field. With a nudge, the man carrying the automatic rifle, the one with the blue sneakers, directed me to walk with him down into the poppies. We traced a line roughly perpendicular to the road some way towards the river, and once we were well out of earshot of the other men, perhaps five or six hundred meters away, he tied the blindfold on me again. He gripped me by the back of the neck and pushed me a little further along. Then, with his hand pressing down on my shoulder, he sat me down on what felt like a large flat stone that was still cold from the night. When he lifted his hand off my shoulder I listened for any sound, a snap or a click, that might have been the loading action of his rifle as he prepared to fire it.

  *

  The roadhouse I had been taken from was the last stop for those truckers who had decided to chance it and cut through the valley rather than negotiate the safer but much longer and more expensive route to the south. Between getting themselves greasy and black under the axles of their half-broken machines, the drivers who hung around the place ate watermelon, drank tea and seemed to take final measure of how the lead of their fear weighed in the emptiness of their purses.

  One of these drivers, whose face and name I have now forgotten, sat with me on a mat on the floor and in English told me that his childhood friend, who was also a driver and the son of his father’s cousin, had been held up and shot to small pieces (this is how he put it) by a gang just the day before. The driver was scared now to drive but had little choice. He had a large family and no other income. I gave him my card and said that if he ever needed to tell his story, I would be the one to tell it to. I don’t know why I thought at the time that this would be a good idea, but it seemed compassionate and the driver took the card gratefully. ‘Yes. I will telephone you,’ he said. The way he used the word ‘telephone’ sounded as if he had learnt his English in a time when placing a call was still an activity that required some commitment of time and energy. So when he said it I did not doubt that he would call me.

  The only detail of him I remember now with any clarity is the smile he gave me as he stood to leave. He showed his full set of shining teeth and I imagined he was using them to bite into the future that was now bearing down on him.

  I noticed as the driver’s shadow passed out into the light that I was being openly watched by the three men who remained. They were staring at me with expressions that I could not identify as either curious or hostile and that seemed to me at the time the only attitude available for them to take towards me. While their stares did not in themselves unnerve me, I began to wonder why it was that none of them, not even the driver who had been so friendly to me, had thought to ask what I was doing there. I did not know what answer I would have given in any case, and so that it did not seem to them that I was anything but purposeful I left some money on the table, a US ten-dollar note on which someone had written the word ‘shit’ in fat black letters, and walked out to the veranda. Outside there was a group of barefooted boys kicking a ball around a dusty paddock on the far side of a potholed track, and I passed some time in the pleasant abandon of watching their perpetual motion. It was only when the ball had been inadvertently kicked across the road and it somehow hopped up from a stone or a step and fell to a stop at my feet that I came to myself. The boy who had kicked it came running towards me as the others stood with their hands on their hips and behind their heads. I took up the ball and made to hand it over the wooden rail that drew the boundary between the road and the roadhouse. The boy had pulled up short, just out of reach, so that I could not simply hand over the ball, and when he looked up at me I saw he was not a boy at all but a girl, with her hair cropped close to her scalp. She said something that I took to mean that I should throw the ball
to her and I did. I let the ball drop to the ground and the girl picked it up and ran back to her friends, who, I now realised, were all girls.

  It seemed by then that no one would ever come to claim me and I began to worry a little about how I would get back to the base before dark. It was only when the pressure in my bladder had begun to grow uncomfortable, owing to the volume of tea and watermelon I had consumed, that I once again entered the roadhouse. Inside nothing seemed to have shifted, the men had not moved, nor did they seem to have drunk any more from their glasses of tea. I called out into a small niche behind a curtain, and in moments the owner of the place emerged. He was a tidy man in all aspects of his appearance, apart from the small pieces of food stuck to his beard. I asked in English for the way to the lavatory and when he did not understand, I tried out the few words I could remember in the local language. When he still did not understand I made a gesture that I hoped he would not take as lewd. He laughed to show that he had understood and he pointed me to the back of the building. The other men, I saw, were now laughing as well. Out back there was a lime tree that had had a narrow moat dug about it. I went to it and I pissed into the moat and it was when I had finished that they took me.

  *

  My captors, in the week that they held me, made many threats to my life. They held guns to my head and brandished knives at me, and in that way I suppose they more or less abused my mind and my emotions. Otherwise they treated me well enough. The only physical injury I suffered was inflicted by the force they used to drag me to the car from the lime tree; the hessian sack that was roped over my head had burned a wedge of skin from just under my earlobe across to the peak of my Adam’s apple and by the time I was in the poppy field sitting on the cold stone the wound had grown septic and was suppurating. Now, all these months later, the scar looks as though it spells out a word in an alphabet no one has yet invented. A curse probably.

  It was as much punishment as I deserved I guess for looking too closely at the life of Rasheed Omar.