The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ Pam said. ‘The dust, I mean. I have to live with it too and we’re right in the thick of it where we are in town.’

  The kettle began to whistle and Judy switched it off and made a pot of tea. They went out to the sunroom and sat in cane chairs. ‘Are they really going to shut it down, Ray?’

  Ray shrugged. ‘There’s always been talk of it but I don’t think it’ll happen for a while yet.’

  ‘Geoff never said much about it,’ Judy said, pouring the tea. ‘He did say once that it could happen but he said he couldn’t see it happening in his lifetime.’

  They fell silent and Ray and Judy picked up their cups and sipped at the tea. ‘How’s Chris?’ Pam asked.

  ‘As well as you might expect. He stayed at his girlfriend’s place last night but I’ll have him back here this afternoon.’

  ‘Will he still sit his exams?’ Pam asked.

  Judy nodded. ‘It’s probably the last thing he needs at a time like this. But – as they say – life goes on,’ she said, then laughed and asked, ‘Who the hell are they? What the hell would they know about life, anyway?’

  ‘Sorry we didn’t bring flowers,’ Pam said, finishing her tea. ‘But we figured you’d probably end up with more than enough of those. We would like to do something for you, though. Something to help you out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Judy said. ‘I’m OK for now.’

  ‘But do let us know if you need anything, though,’ Ray said.

  Pam and Ray said that they had to go and they got up from the table. Judy got up too and put her hand on Ray’s arm. ‘I have some things for you,’ she said. ‘It’s not much – Geoff’s shirts – but you might get some use out of them.’

  Ray followed Judy back through the kitchen. Pam sat back down and looked out over the empty backyard. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, then got up and took their cups through to the kitchen and left them on the sink. She went into the lounge room to wait for Ray. She heard Ray and Judy talking in the next room, and she went down the hallway and stopped in the bedroom doorway. Ray was sitting on the bed beside Judy and she was running her finger over the collar of one of the shirts on her lap. Ray and Judy looked up at Pam and nobody said anything. Pam left them alone and waited across the street in the car.

  *

  Months after the boys were born, Ray came home in the afternoon and took Luke for a walk so that Pam could sleep for a while. He pushed the pram as far as the beach and looked out at the bank of dark cloud that sat off the coast. The breeze picked up, unsettling Luke, and he began to cry so Ray turned back. Within a couple of blocks Luke was asleep again.

  ‘Thanks,’ Pam said when she came back down from the bedroom and saw Ray peeling vegetables into the sink. ‘I’m ready to go again now. I’ll give you a hand.’ Pam got a saucepan out of a cupboard and put it on the bench beside Ray. ‘How was work?’

  ‘Same old, same old.’

  ‘Has Geoff said anything about how he and Judy are getting on?’

  ‘Chris isn’t giving them much sleep.’

  ‘Still?’

  Ray nodded. ‘Geoff said it’s wearing them down, most days they’ve been at each other’s throats.’

  ‘Well I’m glad we’ve got such a good little sleeper,’ Pam said, looking at Luke in his pram. ‘I don’t know how people survive without a decent night’s sleep. I think I’d die.’

  ‘You’d get by,’ Ray said, putting the vegetables into the saucepan. ‘We’d cope.’

  The telephone rang and Pam went through to the lounge room to answer it. It was Judy. ‘You haven’t told him, have you?’ she said.

  ‘Told who?’

  ‘Ray,’ Judy said. ‘You haven’t told Ray, have you?’

  ‘Told him what?’

  ‘The affair,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told Ray about my affair, have you?’

  Pam looked towards the kitchen and lowered her voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I’d almost forgotten that you’d ever told me about it. Why are you calling, Judy? I haven’t seen you for … for I don’t know how long and now you’re calling me to ask me about this.’

  Judy was silent.

  ‘We should catch up again,’ Pam said. ‘We could talk.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Judy said and hung up.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ray asked when Pam went back in to the kitchen.

  Pam looked out at the clothes on the line in the courtyard. ‘Just somebody trying to sell me something I don’t want,’ she said. ‘We should have them over, don’t you think? It’s been a long time since we were all together.’

  Ray shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I already talked to Geoff about it but he said that he and Judy aren’t doing so well and probably wouldn’t make great company.’

  *

  On the morning of the funeral Pam went out into the courtyard and sat on the bench against the fence to drink her coffee in the sun. Ray came to the top of the steps and said that he was going for a walk.

  ‘Wait,’ Pam said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ Ray said. ‘I wouldn’t mind a little time to myself this morning.’

  Pam stretched her feet out in front of her. ‘I won’t go far, then,’ she said, leaning back against the fence. She closed her eyes and listened to Ray go back through the house. She heard him shut the front door behind him. The sun was on her face and she was thinking about Judy when she felt something moving over her foot. She looked down and saw a procession of small black ants moving between a dead cicada and the small funnel of sand that marked the entrance to their nest between the pavers. She watched the ants dismantle the cicada and ferry its limbs across the pavers, over her foot and to the mouth of their nest, where they fed the broken pieces down into the ground. Pam watched the cicada gradually disappear. She was still out on the bench when Ray came home.

  He came down the steps and sat on the bench beside her. He’d had his hair cut and he pulled his collar away from his neck and tugged at it. He leaned forward onto his elbows and brushed his fingers through his hair, dislodging clipped lengths of hair. Pam ran her hand over Ray’s back and onto the back of his neck. She felt the muscles tense. She worked her fingers into the back of his neck, felt the soft prickle where the hair had been shaved and she ran her fingers up into the hairline. She felt something smooth between her fingertips and saw that it was dust. Pam held her hand up to her face and looked closely at the dust and she saw that the black particles reflected the sunlight; they shimmered, and when she looked at the dust a certain way the particles were more light than dark.

  *

  After the funeral, Ray and Pam went and parked above the beach and watched the swell roll in. Surfers drifted about and rode what waves they could.

  Ray started tapping his fingers on the dashboard. ‘She had an affair,’ he said, looking across at Pam. ‘Did you know?’

  Pam looked down at her hands in her lap and nodded.

  ‘Chris is his son, though,’ Ray said. ‘But I guess you know that, too? That Chris is Geoff’s son?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Geoff said that he’d forgiven her for the affair but a couple of months ago he started saying something about not being able to forgive himself.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For asking her to stay.’

  ‘Did you know that he was going to do this? Did he say anything?’

  Ray shook his head. They sat without speaking. The sky was cloudless and, behind Ray and Pam, the sun was sinking over the city and the suburbs beyond.

  ‘Would you forgive me if I had an affair?’ Pam asked.

  Ray shifted in his seat to face her.

  ‘I’m not saying I did—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking that we can never really know everything about each other.’

  ‘Do you think you’d ever really want to? What if you found out something that you didn’t want to know? What would you do then?’

 
‘I don’t know,’ Ray shrugged. ‘That would be the hardest thing, working out if it was something you could live with.’

  The Meaning of Life

  Mandy Sayer

  Each week, in Darlinghurst, there are more people dying than being born. They die from drive-by shootings and accidental overdoses, bar brawls and binges, bikie contracts and suicidal leaps from art deco buildings. Occasionally, they’re the victims of more common causes: bowel cancer, heart attack, but rarely old age. By the time she was twelve, Ginger knew this – and more – because her father was the undertaker at the local funeral home.

  An only child, she’d grown up in the four-storey Victorian terrace amidst the smells of cosmetic powders and embalming fluid. The family residence was on the top two floors, filled with furniture and carpets from the century before, when her grand parents had run the business. From the time she could remember, Ginger had witnessed an average two or three funerals a week in the large candlelit parlour, just to the right of the entry foyer. She’d seen extravagant ceremonies involving string quartets and flocks of doves, floral wreaths the size of doors, digital slideshows on wide plasma screens. More often than not, however, the services were small and modest: a closed cardboard coffin, a clutch of weeping friends, maybe two or three relatives arguing in a corner about who was going to pay for the cremation.

  The funeral of her mother had been an entirely different affair. Filling up the first rows of seating were the wives of members of the Australian Association of Funeral Directors – mostly stiff-backed women with serious faces who considered themselves modern because they no longer felt obliged to wear black at a funeral. Instead, they paraded their progressiveness with grey twin-sets, brown tweed – one even had the temerity to don a yellow hat. There were also women from the Parents and Teachers Association at Ginger’s school, all dressed in various shades of charcoal, and her mother’s two younger brothers and surviving uncles.

  Ginger had been seven at the time of her mother’s death. Her father had explained to her that she’d been transformed into an angel by God and now lived on the gabled roof of their house, between the two chimneys. For a short time afterwards, when she was walking home from school, she would gaze up at the roof, squinting through the afternoon glare, trying to catch a glimpse of her mother’s long fair hair, and her fluffy white angel wings silhouetted against the sky.

  At the time, Ginger didn’t fully understand the concept of death and assumed her mother would one day return to their home after God no longer required her services. She’d been told her mother had passed away from a stroke, which hardly seemed serious, let alone terminal. Some afternoons, she’d creep into her parents’ bedroom and try on the silk dresses and high-waisted skirts left hanging in the closet. She’d dab on musky perfume and parade around the room in high heels, impersonating her mother at the butcher’s shop, pointing at imaginary cuts of steak and ordering legs of lamb.

  After her mother’s funeral, her father had been so grief-stricken he’d stayed down in the basement for weeks, unable to work and eating very little. Ginger had always been forbidden to enter the basement and, following the loss of her mother, the strict rule continued to be enforced. During that time it felt as if she’d lost both her parents and the rooms of her home seemed larger and more ominous.

  A housekeeper was engaged by a concerned relative to look after Ginger, and to monitor the funeral home’s telephones and email. Most of the time Mrs Kite simply told prospective clients that Mr Moss was on an overseas holiday and operations at the home had been temporarily suspended. Each afternoon before dinner, Ginger would stand at the top of the basement steps and call down to her father, telling him the details of her day at school. As usual, he would not allow her any closer than the top landing of the staircase – and sometimes, when he didn’t respond to her daily reports, she wondered if he was still down there at all.

  When he did finally emerge from the basement, after a month or so, he was so thin and pale he looked positively cadaverous. Ginger had always been conscious of the fact that her father and mother (when she’d been alive) seemed to be so much older than the parents of her friends. At the school gate she’d noticed women with glossy hair and apple-smooth skin picking up their kids and chasing them towards parked four-wheel drives, while her own mother, her ash-blonde hair flecked with grey, her face deeply lined, leaned on the fence to ease her arthritis. Her father was tall and thin, with pewter-coloured hair, and a long solemn face that suggested he was in constant pain, though she had never once heard him complain of an ailment. Strangers meeting the family for the first time had often assumed that her mother and father were, in fact, her grandparents, which was a frequent source of social embarrassment. After having lived in the basement for weeks, her father was sporting a white beard, and thick strands of tobacco-coloured hair were sprouting from his nose.

  Not previously a man of many words, the bearded father before her now babbled incessantly, about his childhood, his first love, the toxicity of formaldehyde, as if he’d suddenly forgotten she was merely a little girl who’d recently lost her mother and was too young to fully understand his ramblings. Gulping down mouthfuls of absinthe, he talked of his travels through Western Europe, his English parents, the first time he’d seen a sunset and a full moon on opposite horizons of the same sky. At night, by the open fire in the sitting room, he began to tell her wild tales of exploding crypts, stolen corpses and premature burials.

  The story that haunted her the most was the one about a heavily pregnant woman in the nineteenth century who, after having suffered a bout of scarlet fever, was pronounced dead by the local priest. Following the woman’s burial, the attending nurse voiced her doubts about the possibility of the woman’s death, and the shocked and panicking husband promptly had the body exhumed. Not only did they discover the corpse lying on her stomach, clutching a fistful of hair, they also found that, after she’d been buried, the woman had given birth to a baby girl, who was lying between her legs in a pool of dried blood and still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord.

  Ginger was so rattled by the tale she began to suspect her own mother might have suffered a similar fate, that she was not in fact a winged angel hovering above their home, but a living woman trapped in a wooden box two metres beneath the earth. Why, at her funeral, only weeks before, she’d lain in her open coffin, smiling serenely, her cheeks aglow, as if she were only asleep and having a pleasant dream. And could her father have accidentally buried other people alive, without anyone realising his fatal mistakes? If a priest – a man of God – could make such a serious error, surely so could the old man before her.

  One night, sitting at his feet, she grew teary and breathless and pressed her face into his lap. He rested his hand on her head and stroked her hair, asking over and over what was wrong with his little girl. She trembled and hiccupped and wiped her eyes, trying to find the words to describe her despair.

  Finally, she voiced her fears: the premature burials, her visions of babies being born in deep graves, the possibility that her mother might still be alive beneath the buffalo grass in Waverly Cemetery.

  It was then that she heard him swallow hard. He took her face in his hands and lifted it from his lap, so they faced one another directly and she could smell the chemical whiff of alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve got something important to share with you. You must promise not to tell anyone. It will be our secret.’

  *

  The calls usually came at night, from hospitals, hostels and private homes. If the telephone didn’t wake her, the creak of her bedroom door would, and by the time her father had bundled her up in her flannel dressing gown, she’d be rubbing crust from the corners of her eyes. It generally took two adults to lift and transport a corpse, but since her mother had died, her father preferred to work alone or, rather, he preferred to work in the sole company of his daughter.

  The inside of the hearse always smelled of leather and wilting f l
owers. On hot evenings, a faint stench would rise, like stagnant water left sitting too long in a vase. She found it strangely alluring to be out so late, without anyone else knowing – not even Mrs Kite, who always slept soundly each night until dawn.

  She never accompanied her father into the mortuaries and hospitals, but remained in the front seat of the hearse, breathing on the windscreen and writing her name over and over with her index finger. Eventually, he would appear, pushing a gurney, with a corpse inside a canvas bag, which he loaded into the back. On the way home, she would listen for any signs of life from the body that lay behind her – a cough, a cry, a timid sigh – so that her father wouldn’t be like that man in the story who’d mistakenly buried a person alive.

  The purpose of these trips, her father explained, was to help her to understand the difference between the living and the dead, between a human being and a corpse. Unlike the nineteenth century, he continued, today a body had to be examined by a raft of experts – a medical examiner, a coroner, a mortician like himself – before being declared officially dead.

  The problem, Ginger soon realised, was that even a genuine corpse often refused to remain silent. Once, on their way home from a pickup, she was startled to hear a sound, like a distant, faulty vacuum cleaner, whistling from the rear of the hearse. Another time, she heard a moan, as if the body was having a nightmare. Yet another time, she heard what sounded like a brief explosion, and her father explained to her that the dead are full of stale air and wind desperate to escape back into the atmosphere of the living.

  One morning, when she admitted to him that she was still confused, that she still feared her mother had been buried alive, her father began chewing on the inside of his cheeks. He glanced around the room for what seemed like a long time, as if someone might appear to give him some advice on what to do.

  Eventually, he cleared his throat, as if preparing to make a speech.