The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  The day inches along. Now the girl grows impatient, wishing that the man would hurry up in the taking of his last breath. And what a rotten breath it has become. If God is breath as the man has said, then God is surely rotten. The girl feels the familiar revulsion. A wasp flies down towards them and then out of the flap to the outside. Then another.

  ‘The bible’s hatching!’ The girl in one leap is at the book, sealed up last visit to town by a pottery wasp building her nest along the pages. The man had taken it as a sign. That not until the wasplings had hatched and flown safely away would it be time to resume his readings.

  Two perfect holes now pierce the mud and from within comes the humming noise. The girl goes back and leans down to the man’s ear to convey her excitement. The hair of the man’s ear shimmers as if traced in late evening water seen from a track, but he doesn’t appear able to hear. The girl feels bitter. Her shoulders slump down in the most downcast of ways. After all their waiting, for the book to be released but for the reader to be dying.

  Throughout the day, more wasps hatch and many memories come and go. Then the man grows suddenly much older when the sun’s right overhead and just like that, like that little bay filly that got lockjaw, is dead before dusk. The girl spits at the man’s feet because not once during the entire length of the day has the man so much as acknowledged her presence or joined in the excitement over the wasps.

  ‘What do you do anyway, with such an old man?’ the rodeo boy had wanted to know.

  ‘We’re waiting for a book to hatch,’ she’d replied, completely sick of the boy and his fingers.

  *

  When she cries it’s because she always knew much more than the man. She, not the man, has lain on the earth and felt the strong lines moving through her like God and the waterbird with wings as outspread as the big altar, flying through darkness to enter through her hands.

  Now it’s too late. She can never tell the man about this or look directly into the man’s eyes. Cautiously, the girl pushes her thumbs over the lids and pulls them down. As soon as she lifts her fingers, though, the eyes come open again.

  Remembering how the man once seeled the eyes of a brown hawk, she thinks that this is what’ll have to be done. He’d found the book on French hunting birds in that green bedroom above the pub and for weeks had been determined to get a brown hawk to catch rabbits for them. The baby hawk he got out of a nest never did any hunting. ‘It died didn’t hit,’ utters the girl sadly, not bothering to correct her pronunciation the way he’d liked. She searches around in the saddlebag for the mosquito-net mending needle and thread, hoping that the man has thrown it away, but it is more or less in the place where it always was. Grave now, she threads the needle. There’s not much light left. Old man skin must be tougher than hawk lids. She cries. For the man. For that poor hawk and how its eyes got full of pus.

  Another wasp finds its freedom and hangs low beside them. The girl wishes that she could read something from the book for the man. ‘Well, you were quite a nice man,’ she says instead but the words come out sounding like an accusation.

  The bird the stockman used to call The Cup Overfloweth Bird begins to call and there comes the feeling of bright uncontained liquid running in every direction. It calls and calls like liquid and seems to belong to no specific time at all. It could be two thousand years ago or two thousand years ahead. The bird leaps out of the purple tree and its wings look to her like the rodeo boy’s dark red shirt when he’s in the shute for the last ride of the day.

  She drinks all the rum in the big bottle and feels so sick she thinks she too will lie down and die for a while.

  Later, gulping down water at the tent’s opening, trying to dissolve her uncertainty, she claps her hands and clicks her tongue.

  ‘By and by,’ she tells the man, ‘we’ll come back for you,’ knowing that no such thing will happen and that after this night she’ll never see the stockman again. ‘I know,’ she says, and finds his stash of black jellybeans. ‘We’ll leave you these.’ But then one by one she eats them.

  ‘I’ll ride your horse,’ she says, ‘and you’ll see how smoothly she travels for me.’ She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘I was always a better rider than you.’ In the town she can sense it’s that time when the dust is hanging in the air and the mandarins the man likes to eat from the tree by the travelling stock route would probably still be too green.

  In the last light left she takes the bible into her hands and examines how perfect and round are the leave-taking holes of the insects. Nothing has ever looked so simultaneously complete but empty, so full of potential but so spent. One chamber was never filled and sealed and she pokes her finger into it before tapping the whole nest off the book. On the underneath of the nest she can see where the mud the wasp collected was dark and where it gleams with silvery river sand. She has covered the man in the blue blanket. When she looks underneath she jumps backwards, for the man’s feet have taken a different position. Even when dead the man tries to keep his feet in the stirrups, thinks the girl and feels a grudging kind of admiration. The man’s face looks like a rock now, blank but vast and excessively salty. She drops the bible which, as much as it brought them violently together, helped shamefully to hold them apart.

  In the light of the fire she builds, the horses look like they’re preparing for an end-of-show parade, dancing at the end of their ropes. Below his forelock, Boney the white gelding’s face looks rosy, as if his cheekbones have been rouged. Big horse-yawns seize the girl. She hopes the fire will last until morning.

  The mosquito when it comes towards the skin of the girl’s arm comes tentatively at first, then more surely. I can feel the wings, she marvels. Like a small mouth blowing. Like a little breeze.

  She watches the mosquito’s beak tapping, then experiences a small sting. Gradually the abdomen of the insect fills with blood. When the girl sneezes in response, she feels every particle of moisture as it lands on her body and the mosquito flies off, only half full. If the stockman was alive the girl would have to hide that she’s no longer the extraordinary black girl from the coast that mosquitoes won’t touch. Now, like any other girl, the mosquitoes form in a spiral above her head. Now she just watches.

  The unknown animal hops across the night without moving, formed of stars. The girl waits for morning, which seems longer away than ever before. On the caps of her elbows, on the edges of her ears and toes, the welts of the mosquitoes are already rising and beginning to itch. More mosquitoes arrive. When she chucks the bible into the fire she is sad all over again. One day, she’d thought, like a perfect leap on old Boney over a fallen tree, their separation would be severed. Now all the possible moments have passed. Now the bible burns like a grey fan; the colour plate of Jesus in the Lily of the Fields going into ashes; red coals taking away all those little words in the way of ants taking eggs.

  Dry Land

  Steven Amsterdam

  A rain horse is a horse that’s been sensitised to travel in downpours without complaint. It can carry packs and people through rising water at a trot. I’ve never asked who trains them or how, but I’m grateful. This mare never checks me, as long as she’s got her hood and body cover on. She’ll step through rotten logs in the forest, cross rushing water down main streets to get where we need to get. She’s also absolutely bomb-proof when it comes to thunder or avoiding the deer when they run, and that you can’t teach. She was born sound and knows it. I keep the contact secure but easy. She follows, keeping pace as we slop through what’s left of the few paths along the hillsides and through miles of flooded farmland.

  On the other hand, I was never trained to travel in these long downpours and I’m tired of the damp. But I’ve got a lot of autonomy. I’m supposed to cover the low areas, look for the shaky light of candles burning in dark houses and evacuate whoever’s still thinking the sky’s about to clear. Land Management sends me in to protect them from starvation and flooding. Also, my job is to make sure no one gets hurt when the animal
s on the land nearby finally get so desperate that they stampede through. There’s water-logged cattle trapped by a forest one county away, and they’re probably getting close to busting out. They’ll either die or find the strength to cross the highway and come through here. I’m clearing people so the animals can push through the empty suburbs and muddy farms, to find higher ground.

  Truth is, the people part of the job isn’t so great. I give them the government warning and the pitiable vouchers for relocation, I give them all the good reasons to abandon their homes. I do the social work. The men all tell me I shouldn’t be doing this job, the women are mostly polite. The children look at me like I’m the bogeyman. Some guys who come out on these gigs are full of compassion for the human suffering and want to help the families come to terms, deal with their loss, adjust. They stay a night to help pack, they get involved. It’s a noble call, if you see it like that, but all I see is people being washed away by life and I think the respectful thing to do is treat them efficiently, not ask them how it feels. I like to go in, say what I’ve got to say, hand out extra meds against rheumatism, and ride on to an empty house to camp for the night. A good third of the time they take it out on me anyway. They curse me, call me everything they’d like to call the rain. They act like they’re going to shoot me, but they’re just broken and no one makes good on those threats, at least not against a government employee.

  Let’s face it: nobody takes this job for the salary. You’re on your own all day long with just the sound of rain. I’ve come to find it almost peaceful. When it gets too much I make the time pass by conjuring sunny days, warm meals, people being happy to see me. That works all right till it’s time for dinner and bed. The real reward is having the pick of abandoned property, and then hauling away whatever the horse can carry. There are some nice houses out here and making yourself comfortable in a mansion for a night isn’t so bad either, even in the rain. Land Management keeps looking the other way as long as we clear out the stragglers. They keep us on horses to keep us from carrying away too much of the take. They say it saves on fuel, but this way they’ve got to provide the mare as well as me with enough meds to stay functional. A jeep would be cheaper and faster.

  The government trucks are a few days behind us, harvesting the bigger prizes – basically all the construction material that isn’t soaked through. Of course, the farmers in the lowlands don’t leave much I’m interested in. Weekend people, their houses high up with the views, do. My haul is better if I scour the high roads and pretend not to notice all those little worried lights in the valley.

  So I’ve been out for a week now, criss-crossing the county, checking off empty properties, avoiding the occupied ones as long as I can. Most people know who I am, understand I’m there for their own good. I haven’t had to take my pistol out once. They just go quietly. Usually, if they notice me riding around the area, they pack up and leave before I have to even knock on their door.

  It’s the end of the day, the rain is pissing down, and we’re in an even jog across what was once a pasture. The grass or whatever was here before has been stripped by a thousand new rivers coming down from the top of the mountain, but the mare’s solid on the ground, zigzagging up to a property that spreads all across a flat near the top. No candlelight visible. I’m thinking I should see about sleeping here, when her bridle suddenly gives. The chinstrap and headstall have gotten so rotten they’ve torn in three places. She comes to a full stop to try and shake it all free. I dismount, figure we’ll just walk the rest of the way to the house and I’ll fix the straps tonight. Suddenly she bucks. Nothing going on around us besides the rain, only her and me, but she bucks. Next, she looks at me like I’d just beat her for the last hour. Then she shoots off in a heat. I’ve never had this before, never even heard of it with a rain horse. It happens so fast I don’t even think of calling for her to stop. She doesn’t look spooked, she looks purposeful, like she’s forgotten she’s late for some hook-up with a stallion across the state. In ten seconds she’s disappeared into the woods and it’s quiet. She’ll keep running in a straight shot till she comes to the ocean or drops. That’s the end of her. She’s got my food and pills, plus the jewellery and batteries I’ve picked up along the way. All I’ve got on me, which is about all I’ve got period, is my sidebag and my water container, and that’s empty. Given the forecast for the next month, that last fact doesn’t exactly scare me.

  So then it’s me and the rain and the house on the top of this hill. A huge A-frame with solar sheets on each side, collecting nothing but water now. There’s an enormous round room in front of the A, with its own cone roof and bay windows looking out to the valley. Even in the grey afternoon downpour, I can see how endless these views could be if it were sunny. There’s the remains of a tennis court. Definitely not built for farmers. Plus, the back door’s unlocked. People are so blessedly reliable.

  Inside, the place is all fake-rustic, with a family of black skillets hanging over the kitchen counter, patchwork quilts on the walls everywhere, and the thousand-dollar appliances you can’t use since the grid went down. Nice people, tidy. There’ll be a pleasant take here once I get dry. Food? God, I would kill for a can of soup. First I take a pot outside, hold it up to the sky, and in half a minute it’s filled for the night. Now I can take off my gear and search for scraps.

  The cupboards are bare, nothing, zip. Summer people, they were probably scared to leave anything because of the bugs.

  From the living room, I can only see half a field away before it all blurs out to water. There’s no wind, so I just hear the rain crashing and crashing onto the roof like pebbles. I take one of the fancy knives, slice into a cushion and eat a few bits of golden foam, just to have something in my stomach so I can sleep.

  *

  ‘Get off my couch!’

  I open my eyes to a stick of a woman, standing by my head. She’s waving the fancy knife over me. She’s wild, all cheekbones, wearing some sort of slept-in party dress and too much make-up. She’s standing weirdly, continually shifting to get her bones comfortable, the way people get after a few weeks in this climate without meds. I reach for the blade on instinct and she flicks it, cutting my fingers. Now I’m holding my hand to my chest and a thin line of blood’s coming up. I’m mad, but I calculate that I could still take her, if I needed to.

  ‘See what he’s carrying.’

  Suddenly, a softer version of her, about seventeen, is on me and she also looks like she wandered away from a dance party two weeks ago and has been in the same dress ever since. They’ve both got that pulled look in their cheeks, like food is a memory. Again, on stupid instinct, I struggle, which throws the girl off and the mother slashes the air in front of my face and tells me to stay the hell still. Her breath is sour from alcohol. Most of the people out here were proper churchgoers at one time, but most of the churches shut down a while back.

  The daughter goes through my pockets and gets my identity card and my pistol, which she throws onto the coffee table, knocking over a glass which falls to the floor and breaks in two. Mother and daughter don’t even regard the glass and I realise it’s not their house. The mother walks around me, picks up the gun and puts the knife on the counter.

  ‘Have you got food?’

  ‘No. I’m stuck here, lost my horse. I camped out, I thought this place was empty.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘If we can figure out an easy way for you to return my gun, I’ll happily move on.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Mum.’

  ‘I’m only trying to make this calm for everyone. It’s my gun, my last bit of personal property. And honestly, it’s no danger because there’s no bullets in there. In fact, I’d suggest, if you want to keep tabs on me, you’re more convincing with the knife. But do what you like, I’m not here to hurt anybody.’

  With the daughter watching me (a string bean, also rheumatic, I could toss her across the room), the mother looks into the gun. Without any recognition of the comedy of the situation,
she confidently picks the knife back up, while putting the gun on the table.

  ‘Where are the bullets?’

  ‘In my pack, which is on my horse. I wish I had it, I could give you some meds. Is there cat’s claw still growing around here? A tea of that would make some difference.’ There’s a blank look and enough of a pause for them to get that I’m not trying to kill them. The mother’s shaky hand, the daughter looking back and forth at each of us. I say, ‘OK, now that you woke me up, let’s figure out a meal,’ and everyone calms down now. The knife is lowered.

  The mother is Liz, the daughter is Jenna. I ask Liz what she’s drunk on and can I have a taste. She’s relaxed now that she doesn’t have to kill me so she leads the way downstairs through a hall filled with Mexican tapestries that would get me a decent amount if I could figure out how to keep them dry and get them to a city. Liz takes my hand to bring me downstairs to a dank clay basement. I see two mattresses that have been dragged down to the foot of the stairs and covered with quilts.

  ‘Why’re you sleeping here? It’s got to be the dampest place in the house.’

  ‘Listen.’ She’s quiet for a second. ‘No rain. I don’t mind the water anymore, it’s the noise it makes that gets me raving.’

  Funny, the sound’s never bothered me much. Always made it seem like the weather and people and all of us were more connected. It’s the silence, during the few dry months, that seems much meaner to me.