The Best Australian Stories 2012

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The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 33

by Sonya Hartnett


  Mama gripped Papa’s arm; I got ludicrously misty-eyed. Wayde had obviously spent insufficient time in our textbook family home, but, sentimentally, as he spoke I recalled marathon backyard totem tennis rallies, my first make-up kit, long lunches for ridiculously extended family. And when Mickey was plain Michael, a ten-year-old hypnotised by PlayStation, whose greatest grief to his parents had been his childish, lewd versions of TV jingles.

  A great silence wafted through the lounge-room window, Wayde’s audience evidently overcome with the emotional charge of our familial bonds.

  ‘I see we’ve gone shy,’ said Wayde, and smiled.

  It was a tough gig, I have to admit.

  Wayde said he knew there were buyers among the many gathered, and he extolled again the virtues of location and the stunning renovation. After another silence he offered a vendor bid of 850, and said he’d take ten.

  Following talk of a million plus, this seemed inordinately low. But Wayde had met with Mama and Papa the day before, and after much subtle arm-twisting convinced them that the reserve they had wanted all along was 950 – a shrewd decision on their part, he said, one that would ignite bidding once the property was on the market.

  ‘Hands tend to come out of pockets and start being raised. Like little ducks lifting their heads from a golden pond.’ Wayde was a closet poet.

  HBT had, I sensed, told my parents one figure, would-be buyers another. In a tough market you had to get that first nibble, Wayde advised. The million mark remained a ‘possibility.’

  Wayde Tinkel’s voice continued floating through the open window, but except for when we lowered our heads briefly into the frame, we saw neither him nor his gaggle of ducklings gathered in strange, mute observance at the front of the house. Rita shook her head and cursed the silence. I motioned her to keep her own. The neighbour’s Pomeranian barked.

  ‘Did I hear 860?’ asked Wayde, and won a laugh.

  When he threatened to pass the property in, a man with a broad Australian accent, whom I imagined to be a tradie but was probably an office manager or local politician, gave him 860. Another bidder took it to 870, and it rose in tens to 890, in fives to 905, in ones to 910. Then it stopped. I peeked through the window. The underbidder, a woman in her late fifties, was shaking her head.

  ‘What’s happening?’ said Papa. ‘I can’t hear.’

  ‘It’s against you, madam,’ said Wayde. If people had been holding fire, now was the time to join the bidding for this exceptional property, otherwise the gentleman to his right, this astute bidder who could see tremendous value in this wonderfully presented home, would have first and exclusive negotiating rights with the vendors. But with no other takers, Wayde called a halt to ‘consult the vendors.’

  Offstage, Wayde’s voice was hushed. People were keeping their hands in their pockets, he said, their cards close to their chests. How they could do both these things at the same time was beyond me. But according to Wayde, if we could declare the property on the market we might get new bidders involved.

  I saw Papa hesitate.

  ‘And if no one gets involved?’ I asked. ‘It sells for forty grand under an already low reserve?’

  ‘It’s a difficult market,’ nodded Wayde.

  ‘No. No way Papa and Mama are selling for that.’

  ‘No pressure. It’s entirely up to you.’

  Wayde Tinkel returned to the lonely stage that the front of our house had become. I looked out and saw Mickey. Dancing. Dancing with the woman who lived opposite with her stitched-up husband, two kids and labradoodle. Holding her closely, spinning her in a kind of energetic waltz. He seemed to be singing while guiding her, and she was smiling, broadly but nervously, as if this were the kind of fun she’d like to end soon.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘Dancing in the streets!’ Wayde said. ‘If only all my auctions had that effect.’

  The reluctant dancer tapped Mickey, who continued to rock her energetically about the footpath, on the arm, and gestured towards Wayde. Mickey stopped, raised his hands in a comic gesture of apology. He gave an extravagant bow to his dancing partner, and resumed his position by the picket fence. A few people clapped. I let out a deep breath.

  Wayde spoke again of the exceptional advantages of our property. He was met with another great silence, almost as excruciating as Mickey’s dance. With no further bids, Wayde passed the property in. He thanked all for their participation, and made a beeline for the highest bidder, a corporate type in shades and camel cargo pants with too many pockets.

  After a brief exchange, he ushered the man and his linen-clad wife through the front door for further discussion. They went to the living room out the back, white linen ghosting Mr Cargo Pants down the hallway.

  Mickey stepped through the door. Mouse-like, looked in at us.

  ‘No cigar? Think I might take a kip.’

  In another part of the house, hushed negotiations commenced. Something like Camp David for Planet Real Estate. Wayde walked up the hallway to give us a figure. Suffice to say it was not within a bovine roar of a million. We sent him back down the hallway. Five minutes later he returned with a figure slightly above the last. Then he went back.

  After twenty minutes, Wayde travelled the hallway for the last time.

  ‘I’ve got them up to 935. Sixty-day settlement. I don’t think they’ll come further. It’s entirely your call, but under the circumstances it’s not a bad offer.’

  Papa was silent, Mama dismayed.

  ‘Bruno, this is not what we agreed to!’

  Papa put his hand to his head.

  ‘This is less than what that useless boy could have got for us,’ Mama continued.

  ‘No pressure, of course,’ said Wayde. ‘But it’s a tough market, so have a good think before you let them walk away. Sometimes it’s best to take an offer while it’s on the table. They walk and we might not see them again.’

  He spoke softly but deliberately, his head lowered confidentially to Mama and Papa’s height, his hands framing small, invisible pictures of demand and supply.

  Papa opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  ‘Bruno!’ said Mama. The gold bracelet on her wrist was going crazy.

  ‘I’m in your hands,’ said Wayde.

  I took Papa’s hand, soft and sweaty. ‘Take your time, Papa.’

  He looked out to the hallway, to the polished floorboards and freshly painted walls. As if the house itself might have the answer.

  From along the hallway, a few muffled strains of song drifted to us. A voice, unaccompanied, from Mickey’s bedroom. Humming, sometimes singing, a tune eerily familiar from an ancient past. A waltz. And then I knew. It was ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year.’ A version of which, recorded long ago by Maria Lanza, Mama and Papa had played on cassette and later CD on the ill-fated Bose. As he’d danced briefly with the mother of two across the street, ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’ must have been the half-remembered song Mickey heard in his head.

  I stood with Papa and Mama, holding Papa’s hand. Mickey’s voice dropped in and out of earshot. Lilting and strangely soulful. A little bit beautiful.

  The Swan

  David Brooks

  There is at least one man who has seen it, covering the figure of the tall, pale woman who lives on the attic floor of the grey house on Cathedral Street near the wooden footbridge, on the eastern side of the river. A large, white bird, moving slowly, with a kind of concentrated violence. Intense. Erotic. Frightening. A glimpse of it, nothing more, as if through a light mist, although there can’t have been mist in the room. Nor can he, this man, ever have been there to see. Not mist then but the veil of dream. It is not, after all, as if he knows her, or could in any way have been prepared to find himself stumbling upon them in this way, with shock – awe – in some dark corridor of one of the almost-nigh
tmares that have been assailing him, like the sounds of people beating on a wall. A woman he has only seen four or five times, in the market or on Poets Square, near the entrance to the alley of the booksellers. And noticed, of course, every time: he could not deny that. A single man alone in the city, too intent on his project to contemplate a relationship, yet longing for one. And now he was both desperate to glimpse her again and almost afraid of doing so. To him, after so vivid a dream, it would be as if he knew her intimately. To her it would mean nothing at all.

  But there seems to be a law to such things. The more you want a glimpse of this kind, the less likely it is that a glimpse will occur. As if the very intensity of a desire serves to distance its object.

  His book proceeds slowly. The chapter he has been working on he has been months in compiling. Each day a few paragraphs, if he is lucky, and twice already, with the process considerably advanced, a tearing up of the draft, a beginning again, the tone, the point of view off-target, bringing him to an impasse. Writing each morning from eight until noon, then showering, dressing, going to one of the restaurants on the other side of the river, coming back through the market, shopping for his evening meal. A piece of fish sometimes at first – supposedly it was good for thought – but increasingly just cheese, bread, vegetables, the idea of dead flesh locked up and rotting inside him more and more repulsive. And now as he shops – buying vegetables, purchasing stationery, searching out a rare volume – he is looking for her, every moment, through the market, in the squares, in the alley of the booksellers, along River Street, along the St Michael passage, along Cathedral Street. But nothing. She is nowhere. Nothing.

  She becomes an obsession; swans become an obsession. As if they betoken her, might be a means of summoning. One day he is coming back by a different route, along the old stone galleries cut into the riverbank, where the fishmongers have traditionally set up their stalls to keep their wares fresh in the warm summer months, and they are there, as he turns to mount the street-level stair. Four of them, gleaming white on the black water, gliding majestically with the slow current, crimson-beaked, astonishing in their brightness. So that now he looks for them too, each day, and extends his riverside walks to improve his chances.

  On his way to interview an elderly woman in his grandfather’s native village, he drives to the river marshes on the edge of the city in the vain hope that he might find them nesting there. Another day he travels by bus across the city to the Royal Gardens and feeds the swans on the lake with pieces from a large pretzel he has bought at the cart by the entrance. They have a strange, spongy knob between and below their eyes, and some of them have raw-looking, puce-coloured bills, as opposed to the predominant orange. A gardener who comes over to talk to him, a short, muscular woman with bright-blue, spiky hair, tells him that they are called mute swans. They shouldn’t be eating pretzel, she says: their diet is water weed. They live on the small island in the middle of the lake. None of them are breeding pairs, she tells him. There are breeding pairs on more isolated lakes elsewhere in the country, but these are largely un-mated swans. They wander. When he tells her that he has seen them on the river near the markets, she nods and says that those are probably from this group. She asks him if he has heard the rumour – that is all it is, she says, an urban myth – of the swan that wanders the streets around the market at night. It isn’t true, she says, though people keep thinking they have seen it.

  One night, after a long day’s work, he watches a program about Trumpeter swans, huge birds on a vast lake in Alaska, then dreams of them taking off, lumbering into the air where they form a great V as they fly southward across the pink Arctic sunset. There is something about them that seems deeply familiar, as if he might be one of them. Or perhaps it is just his loneliness, without the woman.

  He is writing a biography of his grandfather, who came to live with him and his mother after the death of his father, and who therefore, from when he, this writer, was seven, was almost a father to him, teaching him about the forest, teaching him to fish, teaching him to garden, and so much more. His grandfather the war hero, the leader of partisans. Some of his earliest memories are of following him about their small plot on the edge of the city, helping him with his various chores. His grandfather’s shadow, his mother used to call him, though this has come to mean something else after recent discoveries. Twenty-seven years dead now, his grandfather can no longer be asked anything, and nor can his mother, who died ten years after him. If he is to find out anything it must be from the village itself, but no one there is talking.

  He has a photograph on his desk of his grandfather, wearing a beret, rifle slung over his shoulder. A man in his early forties, virile, strong, only a few years older than the writer is now. Beside it is a photograph of his mother, taken at what must have been nearly the same time, a beautiful girl with long blonde hair, dressed in white for a church festival, her arms around her younger sisters. One of them, he knows, died before the war ended. The other one her mother and her grandfather lost trace of soon afterward, and presumed dead also. A shadow, all through his childhood, like a dark lake in the background. And beside these photographs are now photographs of swans. He wishes implausibly that he could have a photograph of the woman from the house on Cathedral Street, but knows that this is absurd. For all he knows, she has moved away; indeed she may never have existed.

  And then suddenly she is there. He has just arrived at his usual restaurant, the Ifel, on the other side of the river, near the university. It is a warm late-summer day – no hint yet of autumn, though in most years the season would have already shown signs of its coming – and he has taken a seat outside. Having carried a thought with him for the last hundred metres or so, he has taken out his notebook and started to write, and, looking up, the note finished, has seen her, being seated at the table opposite. She is wearing a soft-yellow blouse and light summer skirt, of an intricate Indian pattern. Her long, pale legs are bare, and she is wearing light, elegant sandals. He tries to keep his eyes off her, perhaps unnecessarily since she seems quite unaware of him, but while she reads the menu he surreptitiously studies her face. She has a long, slim nose, high cheekbones, eyes set so deeply that they would probably convey the impression of a tired sadness no matter what her mood. Wan, he thinks: a wanness.

  When his meal arrives – he has taken the daily special so consistently that the waitress has felt no need to ask him – he eats slowly, turned slightly so that she is just at the edge of his vision. At one point he hears a shifting of her metal table and glances up at her more directly. She is adjusting it – one of the legs must need bracing – and for a moment, oblivious to his watching, she parts her legs slightly as she tries to steady the table with her knee. For a few seconds – it is no more than that – he sees her inner thigh, white, secret, forbidden, and has to wrench his eyes away, in fear that she might glance up at him.

  Kept at bay for months, his dream now flushes through him, like a drug suddenly released into a vein. It is all that he can do to continue his meal, for the burning consciousness of her proximity. Her own meal, meanwhile, arrives, is eaten, paid for. When she leaves he watches her walk westward along the riverbank and then rises, pays for his own meal, and walks off quickly in the opposite direction. Forsaking his daily market visit – he can do that later – he goes directly to his apartment and into its tiny bathroom. Closing the door, not turning on the light, he braces himself against the wall, in total darkness, and masturbates, more rapidly and violently than he has done in years.

  *

  It is weeks later. He has not seen her. Again she seems to have disappeared. The weather is closing in. People are now wearing overcoats, scarves, heavy sweaters. Although a few of the cafés and restaurants still have outdoor tables, they are for the braver clients who want either to be seen or to take advantage of the occasional outbreaks of sun. Evening comes earlier. He is in the local delicatessen for bread and wine and olives when he hears two el
derly ladies by the cheese counter talking quietly about a swan. He pretends to be looking for cheese himself, in order to listen more closely. They are speaking of a third, a friend, Vladka, who has seen something in the Bishop’s Lane, hard by the cathedral. ‘The one with the mushroom sellers?’ asks one. ‘No,’ says the other, ‘that little lane that runs off it, near the bible shop, then runs down to the river.’ Nor is it clear whether what Vladka saw was the swan at all – the word ‘swan’ that initially caught his attention was merely the first reaction of the smaller of these two women, when the other mentioned it – but it was large, and feathered, or appeared to be, in a very dark part of the alley, an alcove, near some rubbish bins. She only glimpsed it, Vladka, when someone opened a door to let out a cat; it might just have been a bundle of rags, but she could have sworn. ‘Did she try to touch it, poke it with her stick?’ the smaller woman asks. ‘No! Of course not,’ says the other. ‘Imagine if it had moved! hissed at her! She would probably have fallen and broken something.’ ‘And it might have been a person after all, a man, trying to sleep.’ ‘Yes, a man, and he wouldn’t have taken kindly to being poked by a stick!’

  Back in the apartment, hours later, his dinner over and his wine half finished, he washes the dishes and, turning out the kitchen light, about to go back to his desk, looks out the window at the moon rising above the hill behind the house. It is a clear night. He can even see a few stars. And, hearing one of his neighbours coming slowly up the ancient stairs from the street below, resolves something. Rummaging in the cupboard beneath the kitchen bench, he locates his torch, checks it, changes its batteries, and sets out for the Bishop’s Lane. He is there within minutes, at first walking its length, trying to accustom himself to the pitch dark, then retracing his steps, using the torch carefully, keeping its beam on the ground close by him, aware that whoever lives in these houses – priests, most of them – may not take kindly to someone searching their alleyway. But, although he finds three or four likely alcoves, a couple of them containing bins, there is nothing untoward. No pile of rags, no homeless person trying to sleep, no swan.

 

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