The Best Australian Stories 2012

by Sonya Hartnett

  Will’s mother turned away at a sudden clap of two coconuts banged together. His father started out fast and took the lead across the clearing. Will almost cheered him on but he felt the oarsman’s eyes on him and his mother staring up at Carson, whose eyes were on the sprint. His father’s little white legs covered ground so quickly they couldn’t contain him. Then he was airborne, falling face first in the dirt as the mudmen ran right over him. It even made the oarsman laugh out loud.

  His father stood and dusted himself off, but still seemed quite pleased.

  ‘Look at him,’ said Will’s mother. ‘Albert Bloody Schweitzer.’

  ‘He’s happy here,’ said Carson, not seeming to notice the betel-nut stains all over Will’s father’s jacket, or the way the chief man listened.

  *

  Will had trouble sleeping, on the floor of a small alcove next door to his parents. The faces of the mudmen and the spitter, the shadows of the chief, then the sound of his parents quietly arguing through the wall, through the buzz of the mosquitoes swarming outside the net. When he woke up with the thatched roof above him, it was morning. He went out into the sun and stood on the deck. A group of half-naked men scooped out the insides of a log with small axes, making a canoe, and then his father appeared from among the trees with a tray of fruit. Will turned to wake his mother.

  ‘Leave her,’ his father said. ‘She got into the Halcyon.’ That meant she’d sleep late. Halcyon was a bird that floated in its nest on the sea. She’d pretend the hut was a nest and go on a voyage of her own. That’s what she called it.

  His father put a tray down on a wooden bench, orange slices of pawpaw cut up on the plate. White water in a plastic jug. ‘I think the sing sing went well.’ He said it in his rah-rah voice. Will decided not to say anything, took a slice of the fruit and looked out towards the men at the canoe, others with their nets in the water.

  ‘Three thousand miles to the farm,’ his father said.

  It looked further than that. ‘What’s going to happen?’ asked Will. ‘About the money?’

  His father poured from the jug into cups. ‘Oh, they’ll sort it out.’

  Will wondered if his father really was an imbecile. He tried the drink, thought it was water, but it tasted sickly sweet and made him wince. ‘Coconut milk,’ his father said.

  If we’re relying on coconuts it doesn’t bode well, he thought, as a dark-blue Jeep bumped along the track. It wasn’t as dusty as the farm at home, but damp and more humid; everything sweated. Carson pulled up in front with the boy from the house and another dark man in a safari suit like his father’s. It was Brazen, the plantation manager. Will had seen him in photos, standing with his father in their matching outfits. One face brown and one pink. He wore a cap that said Nuguria Plantation. Carson stood and waved like a prime minister and Brazen frowned.

  ‘Can I have a hat like Brazen?’ asked Will but his father was already down the steps. ‘Can I come?’ he shouted after him.

  His father turned as he got into the back of the Jeep, put his hands on Brazen’s shoulders. ‘Sorry, son, we have our business to attend to.’ His father was all smiles. ‘Orpheus will look after you.’

  Orpheus backed away and the Jeep drove off into the undusty jungle. Will spat pawpaw pips and looked down at Orpheus’s webbed toes, his bare feet in the sand. The toenails were chalky and the soles like shoes, but the skin between the toes was so fine Will could almost see through it. Orpheus lifted Will’s foot to examine his blister. ‘No shoes. We go swim. Salty water good healing.’

  From the bench, Will climbed up Orpheus’s back and they went down to the water like that. He gripped with his arms and legs as Orpheus kneeled in the soft waves and he let out a whine as the salt hit his blister. ‘Only a pain,’ said Orpheus and then it went away and he was on Orpheus’s back being swum along like that – he felt like he was his own bird at sea. The water was warm and Orpheus paddled along the shallows. Will felt as if he were riding a long brown fish. This would be a thing of his own.

  They swam along the shore of the lagoon, Orpheus’s head up in the air and Will’s legs gripping tight around his ribs and he didn’t know how they stayed afloat with only Orpheus kicking, his arms around Will’s legs to keep him from sliding off into the thick warm water. There was a kind of market ahead in the trees on the beach. Orpheus rose up and splashed in towards it, keeping Will piggy-backed, and they walked right up the sand. ‘Why is your mother so belly hot with us?’ Orpheus asked.

  Will didn’t know what to say because it wasn’t Orpheus she was angry at. ‘She doesn’t like my father,’ he said.

  Orpheus nodded. ‘Your father,’ he repeated.

  Native men and women sold goods from tables made of slats, piles of sugar cane and cut coconuts with bright insides. Will looked out over Orpheus’s shoulders; he liked the feel of the arms around his calves. Orpheus spoke to a woman with big round earrings who handed Will a slice of coconut. He sucked on the flesh and it was sweet but crunchy, better than the milk as it dripped from his mouth onto Orpheus’s shoulder. It tasted like frosting, like Cherry Ripe without the cherry. Maybe there was hope for coconuts after all.

  Orpheus lowered him to the ground and the woman offered him a drink from a mug carved out like the canoe. She removed his hat and the sun made it hard to see, the glare in his eyes as Orpheus led him into the shade where a dog lay on an angle that made it look like part of the tree root. Orpheus took him by the hand into a small hut behind the market stalls. Dark inside with coloured sheets that hung from the ceiling and the market noisy through the wall. A row of heads in the corner gave him a fright until he realised they were masks carved in coconuts. A machete leaned against a ledge and the oarsman was there in his headdress, sitting on a kind of throne among the sheets, his face painted red as his teeth.

  ‘Manki,’ he said and it sounded like monkey. Orpheus was gone.

  The oarsman-chief stood up and gently lifted Will’s shirt. A skin a bunny up over his head even though it had buttons – did they want his clothes? His mouth was dry and the oarsman’s skin shone like oil and his possible was right there, let out of a crack in the lap lap, watching like an eye. A stale sweat smell as the chief took Will’s hand and placed it on the dark soft skin.

  ‘Do you own the island?’ asked the chief and Will nodded even though he wasn’t sure. He thought of his mother alone in the hut and how she might be waking but the chief played with his hair now, guided him down to the beginning of a secret, lips resting soft against the black wrinkled skin, the smell of it scary and strange, stale against the coconut flakes on his tongue. The possible kissing his lips, back and forth around them and it had him imagine the eyes of the spitter, the betel nut red as a ladybird’s coat, and the taste on his lips as if nothing else ever existed.

  ‘All because your father,’ said the chief and Will had a feeling he was supposed to do more but his breath sounded loud in his head and a struggle came up from inside him, made him reel away. He saw a dog lying under a table watching and wondered if the dog was for him but it was a carving from wood like the one that hung from the chief’s own ear, which was being presented to him now like a gift.

  ‘Special for you,’ said the chief. Something to show his parents or hide in the garden as a secret for home, the strong smell smeared on his lips.

  He ran through the sheets and into the light and it was even brighter than before. Orpheus crouched against a tree with the woman who wore Will’s hat with her earrings hanging down from under it. He ran past, the burn in his feet like a fire, running straight back through the trees, smearing the smell from the chief that mixed up with his tears as his hands wiped his hair and branches slapped at his arms, ferns slapped against his legs, stung by things he couldn’t see, lush and green and hot and running. He didn’t call out because there was no one to answer, no one who’d understand, all the way back on his own with the ca
rving in his fingers and the water in sight to the place on stilts where the sun sat high. But he would tell. He would tell her. They’d have to leave. They had to go home. It was all wrong here.

  He came out of the trees, the sky a deep translucent blue above him, a toad noise like the cry he kept inside his throat. The Jeep was parked outside the hut and finally he shouted ‘Mum!’ But it was Carson who came out of the hut. Had she not woken from her nest?

  Will stood there breathless at the foot of the steps, holding his tears. He could smell her cigarette and there she was beside Carson in her dressing gown; her hair was a mess. She blunted out her cigarette and walked down to him. She had bare feet. He’d never seen her outside with no shoes. She knelt and patted him lightly on the head, not seeming to notice that he’d lost his shirt. She didn’t notice anything at all, just smiled into his eyes from far away.

  ‘Carson and I were talking,’ she said. Will looked up at Carson’s legs on the deck, then back into his mother’s face. She’d been crying.

  ‘You only need to hug me,’ he said to himself, words that stayed inside his head.

  ‘How would you like to live here?’ she asked.

  He felt the carving tight in his fist. He could not show her; he could not tell her anything.

  Meanjin

  The Inconvenient Dead

  James Bradley

  A week after he killed himself, Dane Johnson came to visit Toby at the service station. It was a Friday, which wasn’t usually one of Toby’s nights, but Toby was working anyway because one of the other guys had quit unexpectedly and the manager hadn’t had time to put a replacement through the two-day unpaid customer service accreditation scheme new employees were required to complete before beginning their trial period.

  Dane appeared at the edge of the light in the service area at about ten. Toby was watching the television screen that repeated advertisements above the fridges, and though he wasn’t looking in Dane’s direction something about him caught Toby’s eye and made him turn.

  He knew straight away that whoever it was was Dead: the slow shambling motion of their walk was unmistakable. But it took a moment or two longer for him to recognise the hair and clothes, and to rise to his feet in surprise.

  For a few seconds he didn’t know what to do. He supposed he should have been frightened, but what he felt wasn’t fear, more like a sense of slippage, a queasiness, as if the world was shifting beneath him. On the screen above the fridges, the advertising montage began again, the images of people smiling photogenically at each other flickering silently across it, but Toby barely noticed. Instead he flicked the safety on the register, set down his drink and stepped out through the sliding doors.

  Dane didn’t move as Toby crossed the service area towards him, and for a moment Toby was reminded of his sister, who sleepwalked, of the way she looked when he or his parents found her in the hall or the kitchen in the small hours of the morning, the way she could appear to be awake yet somehow absent at the same time. Once people believed sleepwalkers would die if you woke them. That was a lie, Toby knew, but still he was unsure what to do when Dane did not seem to notice him, even when Toby was standing right in front of him. So he just said his name, first once and then again, until something seemed to register and Dane turned towards him, his eyes fixing on Toby briefly before moving on and away. Yet it was only when he spoke for a third time, to ask him if he was okay, that Dane finally focused on him. On the other side of the service area a car had drawn up and a man was standing by the petrol pump, watching them. Toby glanced round at him, then back at Dane.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked.

  *

  It had been happening for a while, of course, the Dead-coming-back thing. Not often, but often enough. Nobody seemed to know why it had started, nor did there seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to who came back. In the beginning people tended to assume their return must mean something, that those who came back had left things unsaid or undone that they needed to set right. But after a while it became clear this was not the case. Although a few of the Dead did want to return to the life they had known when they were alive, most did not, preferring instead to move on, leave behind wives and husbands, children and parents.

  For all the pain it caused there was no malice in this, no desire to harm or distress. Indeed for the most part the Dead seemed almost entirely uninterested in the repercussions of their presence. Instead they were just there: heavily, inconveniently there.

  *

  Once they were back inside, Toby offered Dane a seat in the corner behind the counter. He wasn’t crazy about having Dane there but it was better than leaving him out in the service area or standing near the food. His manager, Ahmed, would be pissed whatever happened but at least this way he could argue he’d put him somewhere the customers were less likely to see him.

  Not, of course, that they wouldn’t know what he was if they did. Like all the Dead, Dane’s body seemed unable to shed the rigor of the grave, meaning his every action had a jerking quality, a quality that in Dane’s case was underlined by the angry line of the ligature beneath his jaw and the unnatural angle of his head upon his neck.

  Nor was it just about his pallor or his neck. Last summer, riding home after a party, Toby had seen one of the Dead in a park, standing quietly just out of the reach of the streetlights. He hadn’t seen her face, but he knew at once from the way she stood, the passive waitingness of it, that she was Dead.

  He hadn’t been frightened that night. In fact, as he coasted past he had looked back, struck by a feeling he couldn’t name, something more like yearning, or sadness.

  He wasn’t sure Dane made him feel like that, exactly. Yet it was difficult to avoid the sense that Dane had come loose from whatever held him to his former life, that however much he tried he was no longer part of it, of this. And, as the customers came and went, he could see they felt it as well. One by one, they started, or did double takes, some going so far as to place a hand over their hearts or mouths in surprise. The living Dane probably would have relished the response; now he seemed barely to notice it.

  Yet as the night wore on Toby began to wonder if there wasn’t something more to it. Dane himself might not want anything, but his presence, the unwanting thereness of it, weighed upon him, made him uncomfortable. It was as if just by being there Dane demanded something of him, something Toby had no idea how to give. Once or twice he glanced across at him, expecting to find Dane looking his way, but he never was. Instead he sat staring off into space, his eyes fixed on some invisible point in the middle distance.

  Nor was making conversation any easier. Dane never spoke unless spoken to, and even when he did his replies were halting, distracted, meaning any exchange sputtered out almost as soon as it began.

  Of course Dane hadn’t been much of a talker when he was alive, either. But this was different. Now his silence made Toby so uncomfortable and frustrated that it was almost a relief when, just before dawn, Dane stood and, after hesitating for a moment, shuffled out from behind the counter towards the door.

  Rising, Toby hurried after him.

  ‘Dane?’ he said, first once and then again, louder this time.

  In front of him Dane stopped.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Dane didn’t answer. For a moment Toby thought about reaching out, taking hold of his arm, but he didn’t.

  ‘Will you be back?’

  This time Dane hesitated, then shrugged.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘maybe.’ Then, turning away again, he headed out across the service area and away into the soft grey of the pre-dawn light.

  *

  Toby had been at home the week before when Dane’s father rang. He heard his mother answer, then she was at his door, the phone clasped to her chest.

  Afterwards he opened his computer, pulled up Facebook.
People were already leaving messages on Dane’s profile, little notes of shock or grief saying things like ‘I’m crying for you, Dane’ and ‘Sometimes the world is just too sad,’ or just lines of hearts and little pictograms. He knew he should have written something, if only because he had known Dane the longest, but as he watched the messages appear, one after another, the things he wanted to say all seemed somehow to miss the point, to be too weak, too obvious.

  They hadn’t been friends, of course, not really, not for a while. Indeed as he sat there in his room with the computer he found he couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken properly. Now he thought about it, he wasn’t sure when he’d last seen Dane having a proper conversation with anybody. It wasn’t just that Dane was mopey or weird or angry, though he was all those things. It was that he was so obviously in pain, and that was too difficult to deal with.

  *

  When he woke up that afternoon he called Mav. When Toby told him about the night before, Mav whistled.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘For real?’

  Hearing Mav speak, Toby felt suddenly uneasy, the events of last summer reasserting themselves.

  ‘For real.’

  ‘Are you on again tonight? I have to see this.’

  Afterwards he wondered why he had called Mav instead of somebody who had known Dane a little better. Had he thought Mav would be impressed? Or was it just that he thought Mav understood the strangeness that sometimes came with night shifts at the service station, the way the gap between the fluorescent light and plastic surfaces within and the sodium-tinted dark without could combine to make the world seem both too real and oddly distant, as if one had fallen unexpectedly out of sleep into sudden wakefulness.

  Either way, the result was that at ten, when Dane appeared on the edge of the light again, Mav was seated inside with Toby. Seeing Dane shuffle into view he stood and gave a low whistle.