The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  But Tania did suggest it. Just as autumn began to hold and the ground began to cool. We were lying on our backs and she just said, ‘Do you think you’ll want to fuck me one day?’

  To which I said, ‘Fuck you?’

  To which she said, softer, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said; ‘me,’ she half-smiled.

  That’s as far as that conversation went, and for the next few months it didn’t go out of my head but neither did it fester. The weather turned colder and wetter and lying on the oval fell away. So that the after-school norm through winter consisted of me riding my little blue bike about ten minutes to her house. She lived in a house – there was a name we used for houses like hers, the name Railway House. This meant it looked identical to hundreds in the area built for workers at the nearby railway yard. We lived in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and although I never thought of it then, these suburbs were work suburbs, suburbs where trains and tracks were fixed and forged, where refineries took in crude oil and pumped out thick black smoke, where the city’s meat stocks were slaughtered and their skins dried, where manufacturing took place. Tania’s family lived in a Railway House, which was green weatherboard and small and rudimentary, except that hers was smaller than most; it was divided in two. It was opposite a rail track, and sometimes we’d play over at the track together, grabbing heavy railway stones and lobbing them like they were grenades at passenger trains and locomotives passing through. This was unusual though. Most of the time she’d come out carrying a chunk of bread and a long, thin stick of spicy meat. She’d straddle the bar of my bike, and sit on the edge of the pointy seat, facing me, pressed up against me; she’d feed me, and feed herself. She loved me then, as I loved her, and while Tania was a brazen girl, I also thought then as I think now that she was just an eleven-year-old who was committed to what was happening between us. I made her happy, and she made me happy, and although fucking her wasn’t what it was about, I knew that I wanted to be as close to her as possible as much as possible, and that sitting on my bike with legs touching, eating sausages and bread and talking, kissing occasionally, was as fine as my life then or after would ever feel.

  Spring came. The ground warmed up, and pretty soon we were back lying out beneath that scoreboard on the onion grass. Tania’s mum worked in a bakery and her German-speaking dad at the railway, my mum as a valuer’s clerk and my dad in the office down at the wool-store. Between 3.30 p.m. when school finished and 5.30 when the first of our parents arrived home, we kept up our regime of kissing, though we talked more than we kissed, and as the weather turned warmer again and shorts and T-shirts returned, we talked more of puberty and what it was doing, and it was only then – as Tania started bringing salami sandwiches and the season’s first ripe tomatoes, which we munched whole, like apples – that we both actually took our shorts off and showed the other what so many of our classmates had seen of us earlier in the year. Tania had distinct little breasts and a fine but distinct mat of soft pubic hair – mostly laid flat but just starting to curl. My penis was nothing impressive, but on the occasions when I now touched myself at night, instead of the touching ending with a slight zinging in my penis that made touching it further uncomfortable, a tiny amount of fluid now crept out.

  On the first of December, the first day of summer in our grade six year, with the school day over and the end of the school year approaching, Tania and I walked from class and across the netball courts, past the canteen with the burst of sticky cola splattered beneath the windows, and out onto the cricket oval. The whole school was dispersing and other kids were around – Rocco was there, the kid who’d helped start it all with the French kissing earlier in the year. I remember looking over at him and making to wave, my other arm moving around the tiny waist of Tania, and seeing him absent-mindedly bend and pick up a stone, step forward, and with an intense flick of the wrist fling the stone at a flock of seagulls who’d come in on the afternoon breeze, the same gulls that sat on the scoreboard. That the stone hit one of the gulls was a fluke. A piece of sheer, brutal speed. Power. It’s remarkable what an eleven-year-old can do, if he or she has a flare for it.

  The gull flapped to the ground. There was blood. There was flapping and squawking. There were gulls circling overhead.

  Tania and I ran to the gull. Picked it up. One of its wings torn so badly, we could easily have pried it free. Blood spreading out across the white-grey feathers. The frightening speed of it. Here. Then gone. Dead. It died. As we held it.

  That this was the event that immediately preceded Tania and me fucking – we were shaken, we were crying – means that we would never have fucked that day without it, and probably never would have.

  We walked to the scoreboard at the rear of the oval. We said nothing. We lay on the onion grass. Slight sunburn on my forehead, picked out by the afternoon sun. Blood of the gull still on my hands. Tania moving close to me. Our arms moving together. Hugging. Pressing. Crying. For an hour. More. A boy and a girl. Eleven years old.

  I remember my cock going hard against her, and my reaction to pull my hips back, so that she wouldn’t notice – and Tania’s to grab me tighter, back towards her.

  I remember Tania opening her eyes and looking at me. Brilliant green. Looking into her eyes and seeing the reflection of a sole seagull still circling overhead, squawking.

  I remember Tania’s hand reaching down and pushing my shorts down. Her crying, as a sob escaped, as she grabbed me. Me knowing then that I wanted it. Whatever it was. Tania and me. On.

  Happy people are ignorant people, or can seem that way, because they don’t plough the same fields that discontent people do. I was a happy child. My fields were free, gently breezed, sunny. I knew nothing of sex. Not the mechanics of it. If it wasn’t for Tania, who was happy with me but was not happy at home, I’d have kissed her too hard and pressed into her too much, too fast, and everything would’ve been different, and worse, and ultimately unsuccessful.

  But it wasn’t. It was Tania. It was me. There was the onion grass and the frame of an unfinished scoreboard, and through the scoreboard there was sky. In a couple of weeks primary school would be over, we’d be little again in a big school, our plans suddenly smaller and the expectations higher. We’d lose friends. We’d lose touch. We’d lose the freedom of people believing we couldn’t think for ourselves, when all the while we could – and for a lot of the day, were magically allowed to. In a little over a week, Tania and I would try to make love again, and it would not feel right even before we realised we were being watched. Being watched, that destruction that we all long for, would be our tragedy. People would be informed. I’d be blamed, and counselled, and Tania would be pulled from school, robbed of her last sentimental days of primary school and later sent along the railway line to a secondary school far away from me. We would fight for each other for a few months, then lose contact for years. At nineteen years of age, Tania – I’d hear – would become a policewoman, and on my rounds as a mediocre local journalist I’d make it so that I’d drive past her parents’ railway house – there’d be no sign of her, and I’m not sure what kind of sign I was seeking anyway.

  But that day beneath the scoreboard with the smell of a dead bird on our hands and of salami sandwiches somewhere nearby, we knew none of this. We were upset. Crying. Tania wriggling her shorts off as she lay on top of me. Her mouth on mine. Our eyes open, fixed at one another – staring so hard. As much as anything, it was then a matter of vibrating together, into one another, a conveyor belt of trembling desire. Forward. So that truly, I did not know that I was fully inside her until she eventually moved back a little, lifting a little, so that my cock slid out then pushed back into her – I then realised that I’d been inside her for some time, that we’d just kept pushing on, that pushing was penetration but it was the sliding that was sex – the slipping, the motion, the falling – that we were fully together as we reached into the depths of this great, and inconspicuous, pleasure.


  And while to a significant extent I regret that we did this – of course I do, not the least because the wrenching of Tania away from me leaves a hole that has been built around, but will always remain – I also think this: so young, so secret, inside Tania, doing something I’d not yet even lusted for, I never had, and never have again, felt so unleashed.

  The Book of Howard H

  Luke Davies

  Jean Had the Knowledge

  For a while they gave me Ritalin tablets and for a while I felt really good. This was around ’61, when I was having big problems trying to hold TWA together. On certain days my stress levels would rise. The nervous anxiety embodied itself in the feeling that I was about to be overwhelmed. That I would, quite simply, quite spontaneously, collapse. The doctors were worried I might implode and thought Ritalin would help me focus on all the memos and deal permutations sure to emerge as the whole TWA buyback unfolded. It had been a long time since I’d had the thought I might lose everything. My consciousness was made heavy by exhaustion. By now Codeine and Morphine and Valium and Seconal and Librium were like trusted friends. You have to be careful when a new friend is introduced into the mix. It can upset the balance. But I thought we all got along just famously.

  It is all just a glory. There is no sense of cause and effect. Ritalin doesn’t rush right through you in that ecstasy of urgency the way an injection does. But some hours later you find yourself beatifically propelled into the Onrush of Life and the Clarity of Things and the Purpose of Purposes. And there is just no stopping you. And the fact that not only is life sublimely good but that you can, methodically, efficiently, with speed but not haste, get all your tasks done, is a strong thick smell before it’s anything else, anything felt, heard, thought, abstracted, processed.

  And it all streams out of me, like light. Memo after memo, I rule my world.

  And for a while you don’t know it’s the drugs, the new friends working things out among themselves.

  The last time I’d had speed this good, I was making Hell’s Angels, running a million over budget (this was 1928) and it shouldered some of the weight for me. It was the solution to problems of budget and focus and overload and it helped me maintain control over a bucking project since control, ultimately, is all there is. The problem was this damned stuff is so good you take more (why wouldn’t you if it works so well?) and nobody tells you that eventually it’ll tilt your axis. There were portals opening from my brain to the universe, there was such clarity in the light and the shape of clouds, my breathing was magnificent. There was a crispness to existence. You feel that all engines will run forever.

  We had to shoot the big dogfight scene with forty-five airplanes. Nothing like this had ever been done before. There were many contingencies bubbling. There were weather delays, mechanical difficulties. But the amphetamines helped me to understand that all would unfold correctly and in sequence and that indeed correctness was the deep state of the world.

  Even when I realised, three months later, that the talkies really were here to stay and that for Hell’s Angels to survive and compete we would need to completely reshoot and rebuild it (another two million), my decisions emerged from my throat with the ease and authority of a god, and I marvelled at their majesty. Do this, do that. Cancel this, buy that. Greta Nissen was wonderful to look at but her English was terrible and she had a voice like a hacksaw. We’d wasted a year of shooting but there was nothing we could do about that: we had to find a replacement who spoke English.

  In the cattle calls I discovered Carole Lombard. It is unbelievable just how long you can fuck for, blood, head and body that hallucinatory trilogy, amphetamine coursing through you like a river in flood. By this time I was getting better. Sex with Ella had never been great, but Billie Dove had taught me a lot, though I was still something of a skittish colt, all bones and angles and too much self-consciousness. And now with Carole we’d fuck all night. I don’t mean many different fucks; I mean the one fuck seemed to go on forever. Of course I was off my noggin, but that’s more the power of hindsight. In any case it was all a tremendous boost to my confidence. More to the point it was something of a test run in relation to Jean Harlow. I didn’t think much of poor Jean the day she first walked into a casting session. I thought she looked too cheap. I didn’t think she had the sophistication to portray the girl in love with my two flying aces. But her agent, Art Landau, convinced me that in fact she was just the right kind of girl who would put out for airmen, selflessly, knowing they might soon die, whereas in fact Carole Lombard might come across a little too virginal and clean in this regard. There was something to what he said. Besides, the more I thought about her and the more I watched her in the test rushes, the more I saw there was something about her. A golden slut of sorts. The girl who said, If you would like to fuck me I have absolutely no problem with that, I don’t need to know your motives, I don’t need to know the future or the past. Whatever happens, I don’t mind. I am completely open, completely pliant, to all your wishes, Mr Hughes. Jean Harlow was the night of shooting stars, of roaring winds and waterfalls, and a clinging, a desperation soft and sweet beyond imagining.

  If stamina was good with Carole Lombard, there was something incredible with my blonde, my blow-queen, my first great star creation.Jean gave that extra something. Jean went that extra mile. Like the best kind of witch – and witches know their sex above all else – Jean literally elasticised one’s sense of time until the bed was nothing but the expansion of space in the compression of a heartbeat; nothing but swirling. Because Jean had the Knowledge. Knew what to do with every finger-tip, every stroke of the palm of her hand on the nape of your neck or the small of your back; every hot-breathed kiss. She was only nineteen. But I gathered she’d been spreading wide for a good long time by now.

  And I was sailing. I was soaring. I was well and truly pumping little Jean.

  There wasn’t a call sheet invented yet I couldn’t deal with. Sleep was for the other people. I could shoot all day from six, I could eat at Saltieri’s or Maxim’s or the Oasis, go out to all the clubs, the Montmartre or the Cocoanut Grove, till dawn. And somewhere in there fuck little Jean all night.

  Of course I was still ‘officially’ with Billie Dove at this point. And I was most in love with her. I helped her through her divorce with Irwin Willat. She helped me through mine with Ella. I really did intend to spend my life with her. All those other girls: spur-of-the-moment things, with a sprinkling of momentum thrown in. Also clearly for a man it is quite difficult to have sex just the once. First you have to get the awkwardness and newness out of the way. Twice is much better. Three times is better than twice. I am talking about ‘occasions’, full nights, nights bleeding into days, sequences of events, rather than single fucks. A couple of weeks’ worth is best of all. You just get on a roll. You owe it to yourself to explore all the way to the end of the river, as long as the river stays interesting enough. Jean was never really my type. It was never going to be more than a quick and dirty fling. Sometimes that’s exactly what makes it so damned good: the fact of the necessity of imminent cessation. ‘We really shouldn’t be doing this.’ It’s like a chorus down through the ages, like bells pealing out the secret history of infidelity. Jean was never really my type but how I loved, so truly loved, to lie with her. And I swear, bewitched in the midst of that frantic tussle with Jean, I never felt a moment’s guilt, not a second, not a microsecond, about Billie. The guilt always came later and usually, though surely this is no surprise, in the day.

  But where was I? Ah, the Ritalin. Back in ’61. I tried to live with Jean (Peters, not Harlow) for a while, as man and wife, in the house at Cardiff-by-the-Sea. It almost worked, for several weeks the signs were good. Oh she was a breath of fresh air, that little sparrow. That annoying tweetie bird. Flinging open the blinds, plumping up the bed. My own airline was suing me for mismanagement! For five hundred million in damages! I needed the Ritalin to work out my strategies. There were forces out to get me! The other stuff, the Codeine,
all that was just the underlay, the fabric of existence. I had to keep the wolves at bay. And Jean was so irredeemably up. And I was sinking and sinking, after the initial rush of the first few weeks, after the energy and excitement of new perspectives had worn off. She thought the salt air was so great. Wasn’t the view of the rolling hills so great? Wasn’t the green so intense? Wasn’t the air so wonderfully crisp? Wasn’t it marvellous, Howard? Didn’t she realise how contagion was all around us, how cleverly it travelled through the air? So I ordered the blinds taped shut again, and banished her to another bedroom. The problem was not the dust, which is inevitable, it was the disturbing of dust. So I had to ban the cleaners too.

  If I Tell You I Had Sucked on Jane Greer’s Delicate Nipple

  On certain nights when endlessly the ticker tape,

  Chk-chk, tat-a-tat, chk-chk, defines the shape

  Of memory descending

  And every bend unbending:

  I’d give it all away for the sheer

  Pleasure of revisiting Jane Greer.

  This is the great problem with the passage of time, which is supposedly, or on the surface at least, merely the measure of motion with respect to before and after. Our central tragedy lies therefore in the logical outcome of that fact: to wit, that every sexual act (I include here of course the truly marvellous and indeed the transcendent) happens separately and sequentially. When I would want it all at once, eternally. And someone once said, Time is merely Nature’s way of making sure Everything doesn’t Happen At Once. Yet if you had taken Jane Greer to Pacific Ocean Park, the fairgrounds that ran along the Santa Monica Pier, on a summer night pungent with sea-salt some time in the mid-forties, and played the carny games, and shot the ducks, and taken her home and made love, you would want it all to happen, again and again, all the time, forever. After I first contracted her to RKO there was a hiccup, a frosty false start, when I heard she’d started seeing Rudee Vallee. (Later she married him but it didn’t last long.) What right had she to see other men? I made her, I owned her, for now. I found her in Life. I housed her. I would call her when ready. So I was not happy to learn she was impatient, had hit the nightspots without my knowledge, albeit with her mother in tow. I was not happy with her insubordination. I think she married Vallee just to get at me.