The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  I can make out a wine cellar half the size of the living room, six racks deep, maybe a hundred and twenty bottles on each rack. This I could make a killing on. There hasn’t been a proper season for grapes in years. And me without my horse. Five cases of empty wine bottles are stacked in the corner. I take it in, this mother-daughter team alone with all this booze and no food. If I can get them out to some assistance, maybe I can hook up with one of the other guys to retrieve this stuff. Liz uncorks a half-empty bottle of white, hands it to me and says, a little too loud, ‘Sorry, it’s not chilled,’ like it’s hilarious.

  Jenna stays halfway up the steps, watching us.

  ‘It’s just me doing the drinking,’ Liz tells me, keeping an eye on her daughter. ‘Precious gets her sustenance from rainwater.’ This makes Jenna give up on us and head back upstairs. ‘It’s for the best that she does. One of us should stay sober.’ She laughs, rubbing her elbows, ‘Sad thing is it ought to be me.’

  The wine is spectacular for all I know, but I’m so happy for any flavour at all that I knock a swig back fast. She takes the bottle and guzzles.

  ‘You know what this bottle could be worth?’

  She looks at me like I’ve asked a stupid question. ‘I guess it’d be worth something. Money, maybe?’

  Even in the mustiness of the cellar, I can see that before her hair got this dead look to it, and her skin got these new lines, she had a comfortable life. The dress doesn’t look that bad. This surviving thing is a recent development for her.

  I suggest a trip outside to find something edible before I get drunk. If I can scare up a meal for all of us, she says she’ll let me stay. I point out that it’s not her house. She doesn’t bother responding. I’ll stay as long as it takes to get them out. It’s my job.

  There’s a load of flashy raingear, so whoever the owners are, they were definitely here for at least one season of rain. Jenna zips and snaps her mother in until she’s just a smear of lipstick breathing heavily into the protective flap of treated nylon.

  Then Liz starts belting out ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.

  As Jenna climbs into her suit, she looks over at her mother and says, ‘You know what? Let’s leave you. You’re too high.’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  Liz relaxes fully against the wall as Jenna directs me with a glance to the front door. Good, I can start suggesting options to her.

  Liz calls out as we go, ‘Don’t screw her unless she wants!’

  Jenna wastes no time in assuring me, ‘I don’t want.’ She smells hungry mutt, when she’s holding out for a well-fed Labrador. The guys born out here want to build a big ark to save everyone, while I keep one clear eye on my escape route and the other eye on what I’ll need to grab before I go. She doesn’t seem to get that I’m her only choice, but I suppose that that right there is what’s wrong with my way of thinking, as far as she’s concerned. Once or twice in these last few years there’s been a girl whose mind has come all the way around to seeing things the way I do, that you’ve got to look out for yourself, but it isn’t that often and when it has happened we’ve each been so bent on survival that we both walked away empty-handed.

  Outside, we survey the property for remnants of plantings, but water has already stripped the ground brown, with only a few rotten roots visible. We pick through what might have been edible a month ago and then I lead her into the woods. I don’t find any cat’s claw and it’s clear that already makes me a fraud in her book.

  She’s got to shout to make herself heard over the rain. ‘It’s all right. I’ve had enough tea. I’ll take whatever you find that’s edible, but I’ve got to chew it or I’ll go out of my mind.’

  There’s a small grove of ash pines at the edge of what was the lawn and they’re pretty good. I tear off a piece of inner bark for her to try. She nibbles it and gives me a minor nod, sourly accepting that this is what she asked for. She snags her party dress on a branch and rips it getting free. Hopeless.

  I turn so I can get into my body belt, where the bullets are, and find a plastic string bag for her to use for collecting. She looks at it and I have to explain that her job is to fill it with bark. She looks like she’s about to snarl at me, but then goes to work, pulling strips off in quick tugs. She’s no good at this work – any work, I’d bet – and two times I have to show her how to tear off bigger pieces. She doesn’t say thank you.

  ‘Has she been lit since you got here?’

  ‘She’s a drinker.’

  ‘You can’t survive with her.’

  ‘You’re showing me how. I watch what people do. I’m learning, and I’ll write it down later.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I write it all down, everything that’s gone on with the farms, too. Families being scattered, friends making enemies just so as to stay alive. I’ve kept dry paper and each night I write down what happened during the day. I’ll write about you tonight, what you taught me but also what you are, making money on other people’s losses. People won’t take notice of it now, but I’m keeping the pages safe till that time they become ready for the truth. There’s no way I’d ever burn my writing or allow it to get wet, regardless of what comes.’

  She’s exactly the kind of romantic that’s got no instinct to make it. She’s fighting the tree, fighting the rain, fighting me, and her whole purpose in life is to record every indignity. If she hadn’t put me down so fast before, I’d tell her how smart she is and then try for a kiss, but if I did it now she’d like it too much (the trying, not the kissing).

  I break off a forked stick from a decent-sized branch and poke into some of the promising-looking holes around stumps that aren’t already flooded. Most of the time I pull out a tangled sludge of leaves.

  She comes over after three minutes, looking miserable, hunched over the string bag, now half-filled with bark. Water is dripping off her as she stands still watching while I twist the stick into something soft. There isn’t a lot of room in those holes, so once I’ve actually speared some sort of being, I’m able to drag it out. I keep a hand ready to grab it if it comes off, and I pull a wet, squirming, good-sized rat, pretty well impaled. I stomp on its neck so it stops moving, and tell her to relax. She turns away, gagging. We walk back to the house, me holding the animal out on the end of the stick so the rain can wash it clean, her staying a step ahead so she doesn’t have to see.

  ‘You’ll be surprised how much you like it.’

  She starts really talking then, and crying, though she doesn’t think I can see. ‘When my family used to eat at the table, no matter who had done the cooking, there were always three foods on the plate every night – a meat, a vegetable, a starch. Then one by one they disappeared. We complained a lot about the lack of variety when it went down to two foods every night. Then there was just one, whatever was left, that’s when no one bothered mentioning it. We had to eat all the spinach for a week before it went brown, and then we had only potatoes because that’s all we had saved. Soon it was whatever we could find growing in the wild.’

  ‘You’d do better in the higher towns, you know. You could go there, for the winter. There’s a lot of nice people, country people too. A few days’ walk from here. You just have to pull yourself together to do some work.’

  She holds out the limp bag of bark as evidence she can work. ‘We’ll get by. Besides, they don’t want women her age while they’re building. She’s forty-six, over the cut-off.’

  And she’s a drunk who’ll bring you all the way down with her. ‘You don’t understand. This whole area is getting cleared because of the rain. This area is for wildlife, not people.’

  ‘I guess we’ll have something to eat then.’

  ‘The other animals might not see it that way.’

  If Jenna leaves, Liz will wander outside and be dead of exposure within two days, guaranteed. Then I can come back for the wine. It’s not a heartless plan; it saves one of them, at least. I continue, ‘There’ll be lots of animals using this land, all of them desperate. They’ll
come inside.’

  I see her picturing it, the comfortable weekend house filled with hungry animals.

  She stops. She knows what I’m talking about.

  ‘My father walked off,’ she says. ‘I can’t leave.’

  ‘But she’s leaving you with every drink,’ I say, realising how practised I’ve gotten at talking people out of everything they care about.

  Jenna now stays three steps ahead of me the rest of the way to the house.

  Inside, Liz, still in her raingear, has found her way into another bottle. I’d really like to cut her off from what I’m already thinking of as mine. She’s broken a stool into pieces and jammed it into the fireplace, and tucked some bedsheets underneath it as her idea of kindling. When we come in, she is rifling through my sidebag, looking for something to light the sheets. Out on her own and she doesn’t even know how to make a fire. Liz giggles as I yank the bag away from her, then she sees the rat and goes quiet.

  I tell her, ‘Find a better starter than those sheets.’ She falls back into the couch with a crack of a laugh. I look at Jenna, to underline my earlier point. She gets out of her gear and tries to energise her mother into hunting for paper. When she gets nowhere she asks me to start the fire. She says please.

  Liz pipes up, ‘Let’s shave our hair. I’m serious. Hair burns, it smells like popcorn, and then it’s another thing we don’t have to keep clean.’

  Jenna looks down at her mother the way a ship looks down at its anchor. She gets her to try some of the bark, but that effort doesn’t go far. Liz spits it out and yells, ‘I want meat!’

  I skin the rat in the kitchen and look around for kindling. The problem with these weekend houses is, aside from old books – and there are none left here – no one keeps any paper lying around. In the back of a closet, though, I find a metal file filled with printed photographs. The file is dry and it’s packed tight and that’s all I need to know. I stopped studying other people’s pictures a long while back. Photo paper doesn’t burn well but it burns.

  With the photos crumpled and some sticks from an old deck chair, I start a real fire. Liz watches me the whole time, like I’m there to entertain her. ‘You’re from Land Management, am I right?’ I don’t say anything. ‘Says so on the bag. Why’re you helping us? Shouldn’t you be busy pushing us out the door?’ I continue not saying anything, which means yes.

  Jenna shoots me a look. I’ve lost her.

  ‘What’s wrong with a little bit of caring?’ I ask, putting the meat on a skillet and moving it onto the fire. ‘Everybody needs to eat.’ They fall apart if you try and fillet them. I find salt and pepper in the kitchen. There’s not enough rat for three here but I’m counting on the gross-out factor working in my favour.

  Jenna pours a big glass of water, which Liz waves away as she leans against her bottle. I take the glass, thank her. Jenna says she’ll go look for more paper and Liz calls after her, but probably more for my benefit, ‘Good girl.’

  I flip the pan to turn the meat on its side. Liz calls me over to the couch for help getting out of her raingear. ‘I love my daughter, but she’s useless.’ I pull the top part over her head. Underneath she’s still got some control in her looks. She stands and fixes her hair more out of habit than for effect. She tells me, ‘If I had balls, I’d save myself.’

  I look at her like she’s hallucinating. She holds onto my waist as I loosen her rain pants and pull them down.

  ‘I understand Jenna’s young, but, once, a long time ago, I was a nurse. Top that. You know what I’m worth out there? Even with my bones feeling like they do, the authorities would provide every comfort. I’d get fixed up and sent out in a heartbeat to one of the cities or care centres. You know what I’d see? A million dying people with no chance. Not for me. Plus, they’d split the two of us up in a second because – Jenna’s a pretty girl, but I’d hope the world found a better use for her than her looks. Without me she’d end up on one of the youth gangs in a week. So, mister, I get that we can’t stay here like this. But we’re just as defenceless if we walk out into the forest. Couldn’t protect ourselves from a rat, let alone any larger mammals. If we stay here and stay drunk, I don’t know what comes to us, but at least I don’t have to say goodbye to my daughter.’

  I’m on my knees now, thinking how sweet and twisted their relationship is. I hold the pants part around her feet as she steadies herself on my head. Her dress brushes against my face as she steps out of them. She gives me a pat on the head, but leaves her fingers in my hair, twirls them against my scalp, like she’s dialing one of those old phones. Jenna comes back with a pile of ancient magazines. Liz quickly moves her hand from my head as the fat on the rat starts to sizzle. I stand up in a shot and happily take the magazines, keeping an eye on Liz. I realise her face looks different now, calmer, like she wiped off her makeup when I was kneeling at her feet. She’s twice my age.

  We eat dinner in more or less silence. I show them how to get the most out of the rat and the bark and the spices in the house. I keep looking at them, each thinking they’re giving their life for the other, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to get them out of here. Jenna is giving me dirty looks I don’t like and Liz is giving me dirty ones I do.

  Every now and then one of the nicer-looking female survivors may have a temporary short circuit in my direction. She’ll think that sleeping with me could save her house, might lower the waters somehow. You take hospitality where you can. I don’t dissemble in that situation, but I don’t overemphasise the truth either. I once had to clear a two-storey housing complex and there was this woman in a first-f loor apartment who wouldn’t go. Everyone else had left and I’d given her a double dose of funds for relocation – put the papers in her hands – and still she said she couldn’t leave. Said she was waiting for her husband to get back, that he was away working for the state, he wouldn’t know where to find her. I told her to write a note, use me as a contact if she got relocated. She just sat there with her head in her hands and her elbows on a little mahogany table that three days later would be floating in three feet of water. She said she couldn’t. She asked me to stay the night, though, and said she’d see where the water was at in the morning and decide then. Thirties, spiritual, with candles and shrines all over the place, cushions instead of chairs. No sign that anyone ever lived there but her. The rain makes people imagine all sorts of things.

  I stayed. She did it like she hadn’t been with anyone in some time, as did I. When I woke up it was still dark. She was asleep, but grabbing onto me like I was a life preserver. I let her. There’ve been a lot of times with this job when I’ve seen people holding onto things that didn’t make sense, thinking that if they just kept a photo album, their grandmother’s wedding ring, a lucky stone, that it would keep them safe when the water reached the door. That night, in this woman’s apartment filled with crystals and little shrines to nothing, the only foolish thing this woman had to hold onto was me. From what I’ve seen, people usually come to reality and save themselves. Despite all the feelings we think we’ve got for our loved ones and our attachments, when push comes to shove most people figure out how to travel light. In the morning she let go of me, got dressed and left, without taking any mementos, without leaving messages. With barely a goodbye for me. Just closed the door and got on the bus.

  So I’m thinking that once I get them out, if I make my way back to the main station and explain myself or, better, find my mare, I could be back here in a week. They’d be gone or dead or one of each.

  Liz has her own plan and doesn’t waste time. After dinner, she says she wants to shower out back under the gutter of the house to get the smell of the animal off of her. I should shower too. Doesn’t mention Jenna. The last thing I want to do is get wet, but the laster thing I want to do is not get laid. Liz tells Jenna, who’s looking sick to her stomach from dinner, to keep watch on the fire. Liz seems almost sober, grabs the driest sheets for us as she marches out the side door. I don’t need more encouragement than tha
t. I turn my back, strip down in two breaths, and turn again to present myself. She’s smiling, which makes me feel better than I’ve felt in weeks. She has me unzip her and lets the dress drop straight down. I pull on her shivering shoulders, attempt to straighten her. She tries to hold still for me to just look at her, to stop massaging her joints. It’s not so much that she’s appetising, but she needs me. She looks over my body and tells me I’m not as scrawny as most city boys.

  Then she says, ‘Listen to it. That rain. Isn’t it spectacular?’ Spectacular now? Fortunately, I’m not in my question-asking mode. We’re standing there like Adam and Eve, or Abel and Eve, if you count the age difference, which only makes it sexier tonight. She hands me a slab of soap and walks into the waterfall, pretending to keep a respectful distance from me. She drinks a great load of water and coyly wipes her teeth with her fingers. Rat is stringy. She gargles and spits, with an inviting smile. I get under, yelling from the cold, and then rinse my mouth. We can only be under for two seconds before our bodies have to come together for the warmth. Hers is nice, but it feels kind of soft, deflated, like life’s gone from it. Still.

  We both start laughing at what’s obviously about to happen. Just then about fifty deer run up the hill past us. I hold her tight, like I could possibly protect us if they got scared and rumbled toward us. One after another, for about thirty seconds, they leap as best they can off the wet ground. It’s one of the few times in this job where I do nothing but watch. We can’t really see more than their shapes, like shadow cut-outs bounding across the black horizon, the rain white in front of them. You can feel their weight as they pound across the mud. Then they’re gone and I’m not cold anymore because I’ve got a naked someone in my arms. She’s buzzed and I’m buzzed.

  ‘There’ll be more coming through,’ I tell her. ‘Then Land Management, and if you don’t have title to this house, they won’t be nearly as nice as I’m being about asking you to leave.’