The Best Australian Stories 2012

by Sonya Hartnett

  Under the terms of the schedule I was obliged to follow Jezza’s directions and to stick beside him.

  In the town proper we were joined by a few local men who carried on conversations with Omar. Each time someone approached, the translator spoke into Omar’s ear, and the blind man nodded once, as if keeping score in this way of who had shown proper deference and who had not.

  A little further along a group of women passed by and Jezza leaned over to me.

  ‘You ever think about what it’d be like to fuck one of them?’ he said. ‘Tell me the truth.’

  I made to answer him, but hesitated. I stopped. He wasn’t really waiting for an answer. He had moved on already. In any case it was a private truth, immaterial, inconsequential. I thought about the schedule. What did it matter if I really had thought about fucking one of the local women when it was a thought I would never act on? I didn’t have to tell him.

  Our group and its growing entourage of children and men came to a stop near another group of women who were standing outside a house. Its open front window doubled as the storefront for a bakery. I watched as Omar spoke to the women. He moved his hands freely and they all laughed together. There was, I noticed then, an unguarded softness in his face and it swallowed my doubts about him the way the ocean swallows an oar. I was certain in that moment that I had misread him.

  It was just then that I saw a boy who was maybe seven or eight years old come forward to us from the bakery door. He swept into the robes of the women and disappeared from view. Seconds later he appeared again. Now he was holding a loaf of bread out to us. In English he said, ‘Take, take.’

  Jezza was the one who stepped forward and gave out his hand to take the loaf.

  In the same moment the boy raised his free hand. In it was a shiny black pistol, which he gripped now into his two fists. He fired once, solidly, into the soldier’s face. The man fell. The boy turned then and pointed the gun at me. We faced off for a bare second and I saw white. I heard a scream and there was something in that scream that allowed me to see again. The boy let off another shot and then another. I let myself fall to the ground and I wriggled like a child, feeling for blood. But there was none. And no pain came. It was only when I looked up towards the second soldier, who was running in my direction, screaming something, trying to take control over the uncontrollable, that I saw Rasheed Omar’s dark, dusty robe bunched on the ground beside Jezza and beside him the blue sneakers of the translator, his leg still twitching.

  Where the women had been standing I now saw maybe four or five men standing in their places, all of them dumb with shock. One of the younger children had stood his ground with his finger in his mouth.

  The boy with the gun was gone.

  The South African soldier knelt beside Jezza and spoke into his radio. His voice was panicked, urgent. He spoke in codes that I could not understand.

  The dead soldier’s face was a ruin. I knew it only from its clean white lashes. His fingers were blunted and heavy and I unfolded them from the bread.

  *

  In the evening I was sitting alone at a long table in the mess hall when the soldier named Smalls came to hand back to me the memory card the lieutenant had given to Mil Intel. Smalls sat beside me and I offered him a piece of the bread that I had been cutting into morsels and chewing on all afternoon. He took it and swallowed it down. I plugged the card into the camera and scrolled through the four or five images that remained on it. I took some comfort in knowing that the original pictures were still with the Brazilian and that when he finally uploaded them he would use them to tell the story he had lived through. It would give the dignity back to his eyes. Smalls did not know that and neither did he probably care. He was just the delivery boy. But clearly I was expected to accept that the fate of the photographs had been determined for all time by someone like Howard Sherlock.

  ‘Lieutenant says you have to give a statement,’ Smalls said. ‘No one else is talking. No one saw nothing.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

  One of the images still on the card was of a boy who looked to me to be remarkably similar to the one who had shot the three men in the town. Of course it couldn’t have been him; the Brazilian had been far to the north of the country when he had taken these pictures. But it looked so like the boy that I couldn’t turn my eyes away.

  ‘So, did you see who did it?’ said Smalls.

  The image of the boy was a colour portrait taken indoors. It showed his clear laughing smile and upper body as it relaxed against a wall. He was lifting a cigarette to his mouth and was flanked by two sources of light. Over his left shoulder was the even orange glow of a kitchen stove and behind the other was a television that showed what looked like a cartoon. Marvin the Martian, I thought.

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘I saw it. I saw it all.’

  What would happen was this. It would take maybe an hour for a contingent from the Australian force to track the boy down. I imagined a wide-footed soldier kicking in the front door of his mother’s house, which stood more or less in the middle of a dirt track a kilometre or so out of the town. The Australians would take the boy into custody and after a week they would hand him over to the police in the regional capital. And that would be the end of him; the cartoons would leave his smile. And for what? What admission could he make except to repeat the local saying, that in the footsteps of every hero a thousand assassins follow?

  ‘So?’ said Smalls. ‘Who was it?’

  *

  In the interview room Sherlock had given up trying to keep his poker face together. He was fidgety and impatient and would not look at me. This had fallen out of his control. Either he no longer knew where the truth was, or he suspected there was another world of it that had eluded him the entire time, that all he’d been able to put together from his strings of data and information was a false approximation of what was really going on. The lieutenant stared right through me. I no longer existed for her. And I felt myself dissolving.

  There was a third person in the room. He was a local police recruit whose uniform hung loose from his shoulders, as if it had once belonged to someone else, a much larger man, or would one day be inherited by another body. He was smiling. He got it. He had made it this far. He waved his hand and invited me to sit down. I sat, and for a moment they left me in silence. I waited for a sign, for a gesture that said that they wanted me to begin. To tell them the truth. And when the sign came – what was it? A nod? A smile? – I looked down at the local man’s shiny black shoes and felt for the words at my throat.

  Harvard Review

  Human Beans

  Eric Yoshiaki Dando

  We have a problem – Laurel from the Community Centre is not sure if I have actually written a proper curriculum for my Certificate 1 Horticulture course. She wants to look at my syllabus, she wants to have a coffee with me so that we can look over it together and get it up to scratch. ‘Look,’ says Laurel, ‘I know you are a good teacher. I don’t want to tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I suppose I am a bit wounded. ‘My grandmother is dead,’ I say. ‘Why does she need to suck eggs?’

  Laurel is shocked. She takes a step back to regroup. All she wants to do is talk about how we can work together, she says. All she wants to do is move forward, she says.

  ‘Well, I think I am doing a bang-up job,’ I say.

  ‘What does that mean,’ she asks, ‘a bang-up job?’

  ‘A good job,’ I say. ‘It means I am doing a good job.’

  I’m not even sure I know what a syllabus is; I thought a syllabus was a curriculum. Either way I haven’t written one.

  Pedagogy

  We are going to plant some small citrus trees in the vegetable garden of the Lutheran Church after morning tea. I offer the students oranges and mandarins and lemons from my trees at home.
I dissect a mandarin and an orange on a plate and offer the segments around but they are all smoking cigarettes. Nobody will even taste one. I have to eat most of the plate myself just to save face.

  I try to get everybody to Learn by Doing with a hidden curriculum of sensory experiences – you know, a synthesis. To promote dissonance. To ignite interest and provoke life-long learning.

  ‘I can’t eat fruit during the day,’ says H, clutching his stomach. ‘It gives me gas.’

  ‘Well do you want to just take some for tonight then?’

  ‘Nah, thanks. I don’t eat fruit during the night either.’

  ‘Come on, H,’ I say. ‘Well, why don’t you take a few home for your kids?’

  ‘My kids won’t eat fruit either. If we buy it, it just goes brown.’

  ‘You have to eat fruit,’ I say. ‘Your children have to eat fruit – it’s part of the course. You have to enjoy fruit. I am going to check on this and grade you before I can give you any sort of certificate.’

  ‘Well,’ says H, stuffing a lemon and a couple of mandarins into his overalls, ‘if it’s part of the course I s’pose we’ll have to.’

  Hot Showers

  H tells us not to have hot showers because it makes you hairy. Unless you are going bald, then hot showers are good if you can handle them. He tells us about this woman he had a shower with once. The water was very hot and her nipples had all this hair growing out of them. She told him she always had hot showers like this and H put two and two together.

  ‘See,’ says H, ruffling up his hair so that we can see the roots, ‘I got a good head of hair, that’s ’cos I don’t have my showers too hot. I don’t have cold showers, though,’ he is quick to add, ‘just in-between.’

  A Type of Horse

  All the women who run the Community Centre are losing their hair – Jasmine says that the condition is called alopecia. They try to cover it up with comb-overs and pomade and hats, but it is no good. It just makes it worse. I can’t stop looking. I try not to look, I really do – but it just makes me want to look even more.

  Every three months my supervisor becomes overstressed from overwork and is replaced, but each replacement has been a woman with this condition – this alopecia. I don’t hate bald women; I don’t usually even think about bald women. I didn’t even know what alopecia meant before I started working here. I thought it was a type of horse.

  A Baby Horse

  Jasmine always teases me about the day we met and I pretended I knew everything. I told her that a pony was a baby horse.

  ‘Um, that’s a foal,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah it is,’ she said.

  ‘It could have been a deal breaker,’ she says now. ‘I thought you were a fucking idiot,’ she says. I do feel like an idiot now – back then, I just did not understand or appreciate Jasmine’s experience and expertise with animals.

  Yellow Mitsubishi L300

  Jasmine is worried about how conspicuous I am. My students seem to know a lot about me. I drive a bright yellow Mitsubishi L300 Express, and they know my full name, and suburb. They know that I live in a sharehouse in Richmond and that I have a girlfriend and that her name is Jasmine.

  ‘They don’t know your last name, though,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, well, they know your middle name. One of them sent you an email. They know your mobile phone number, for fuck’s sake,’ says Jasmine. ‘What sort of people are you working for down there? They should have just given you a phone and a car. To make it harder for the criminals to find you. Why don’t you just tell them where we live? Why don’t you just tell them we’ve got a spare room?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘It will be okay,’ I say. ‘That’s why they are paying me so much money.’

  I try to show her all the new blisters I have on my hands but she will not be distracted.

  ‘It’s danger money,’ I say.

  The Code

  Laurel says that my privacy problems can be solved with misinformation.

  ‘Jesus,’ I say to myself, ‘she’s balding like a man.’

  Laurel is very proud of her new car because it has a keypad lock on the door and the ignition. The key is in her head.

  ‘Go on,’ she says to Jay and Dee and H in the car park. ‘Have a go. I bet you can’t figure out the PIN. It’s a five-digit number, I’ll tell you that much.’

  Later in the kitchen, Laurel confides to me that this was a lie, that the PIN is actually a seven-digit number. Though I do not know if this is more misinformation to confuse and confound me further.

  It’s probably a six-digit number.

  Self Assessment

  I write an email to Laurel at the Community Centre with an outline of the assessment criteria for my Certificate 1 Horticulture course. These students have extremely low self-esteem and extremely low literacy, I write. All students will make their own garden with plants that they will make at work. If the students have no garden at home then a space in the Community Centre garden will be allocated to them. They will take ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of their garden, and talk to the group about them. There will be many opportunities to improve our reading and writing.

  Let’s celebrate what the students can do, I write. Let’s celebrate what they already know. A picture tells a thousand words – two pictures equals two thousand words. Let us read them and weep, I write.

  I talk about the photos that will be taken and the words they represent. I wax lyrical like Jerry Maguire, or some hippy do-gooder who is crying out to be manipulated. What a complete wanker I am, I tell myself as I drive over the Westgate, what a complete fucking lunatic I am. They are going to eat me alive.

  A Breath of Fresh Air

  Laurel is here to take more photos. She says that everyone seems to be enjoying the Certificate 1 Horticulture Program, everybody seems to be really getting into it.

  She takes more photos of us hammering in stakes for the snow peas. ‘What are those other plants?’ she asks, not wanting to walk any further because it is muddy.

  ‘Well, don’t ask me,’ I say, ‘ask them.’ I want my students to demonstrate what we have learned, to increase their self-esteem, to reinforce what we already know.

  ‘H can tell you about it,’ I say. ‘What are those, H?’

  ‘Broad beans,’ says H. ‘They put fertiliser back into the soil.’ And I am pretty impressed that H is playing his part and has learnt his lines and is saying what I had hoped he would say.

  Laurel says they are entering our program into the National Innovation Awards. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘an award. Do we get some kind of trophy?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s a certificate.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I say to the students, ‘we will have to get it laminated.’

  ‘I can do that for you,’ says H. ‘I’ve got a laminating machine at home.’

  ‘I bet you do, H,’ says Laurel, raising her eyeballs. H is actually very sweet to her, but perhaps that’s so he can cultivate some sort of advantage for himself sometime in the future. I am very nice to Laurel, too, so I must be just like H in that respect, although it is unlikely that I will take out my cock to impress her, as H has suggested doing.

  ‘You don’t think that thing I wrote was too hippy?’ I say.

  ‘No, no, no. Positive is good,’ says Laurel. ‘It was a breath of fresh air, actually.’

  Broken

  Laurel calls my mobile and says Corrective Services is keen for us to take a lot more photos of all the fantastic things we are doing. Someone from the local paper will also be along to take pictures. ‘A picture tells a thousand words,’ she says, and I am pleased because she seems to be quoting from the crazy manifesto I emailed her.

  She says they are going to use us as the new face of Corrective Services, although our faces are not
allowed to be in the actual photos. They are certain we will win the National Innovation Award. ‘It’s a shoo-in,’ she says.

  ‘A shoe-in?’ I say. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we are doing fine,’ says Laurel.

  Laurel says that what I have written for the assessment criteria sounds fine, but she has changed the official submission for the award a bit.

  ‘Fixed it,’ I think she said.

  Assessment

  Jay is very worried and anxious about the homework assignment for the Horticulture assessment. I did not anticipate it being so tricky for everybody when I wrote the curriculum or the syllabus or the rationale. I thought my students would appreciate not having to write anything.

  ‘Me mother-in-law’s not gonna like me messing with her garden,’ says Jay. ‘She wasn’t too happy the last time.’

  ‘Tell her you can’t finish the course unless you grow a little garden at home,’ I say. ‘If she still says no, tell her I will ring her. Or she can come and see me when she picks you up.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell her. She doesn’t like me in the garden because I ripped out all her plants and grew dope plants and the police came and ripped them all out.’

  I call Laurel and explain that we need to organise a space at the back of the Community Centre for the students who can’t make a garden at home.

  Enough Coloured Pencils for Everyone

  It’s raining pretty hard so I get my clients to sit around the heater in the lunch-room and draw cognitive ‘mind maps’ of a garden or barbecue area they would like to have at home. I thought the barbecue area would appeal to H because, although I am sure he does not like gardening, he does like sausages.