The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  As they moved in, people planted buffalo grass and roses and put in rubber trees which brought havoc to the septics a decade later. From high on the ridge the city could be seen forming itself into a spearhead. It was coming our way and it travelled inexorably but honestly in straight lines. The bush rolled and twisted like an unmade bed. It was, in the beginning, only a fence away.

  The men of our street went to work and left the driveways empty. They came home from the city tired, often silent. They scattered blood and bone on their garden beds and retired to their sheds. All day the women of the street cleaned and cooked and moved sprinklers around the garden to keep things alive. Late in the morning the baker arrived in his van, red-cheeked from civilisation, and after him the man with the veggie truck. At the sound of their bells kids spilled out into the dusty street and their mothers emerged in housecoats and pedal pushers with rollers in their hair. Everyone was working class, even the Aborigines around the corner whose name was Jones, though it seemed that these were Joneses who didn’t need much keeping up with. We were new. It was all new.

  At night when I was a baby my parents went walking to get me to sleep and while they were out they foraged for building materials in the streets beyond where raw sandy lots lay pegged out between brickies’ sheds and piles of rough-sawn jarrah.

  The old man built a retaining wall from bricks he loaded into the pram that first summer. A lot of sheds went up quickly in our street. All those jarrah planks, all that asbestos sheeting, those bags of Portland cement. It was all taxpayers’ property anyway. Great evening strollers, the locals.

  I grew up in a boxy double-brick house with roses and a letter box, like anyone else. My parents were always struggling to get me inside something, into shirts and shoes, inside the fence, the neighbourhood, the house, out of the sun or the rain, out of the world itself it often seemed to me. I climbed the jacaranda and played with the kids across the street and came in ghosted with limestone dust. I sat on the fence and stared at the noisy blue bush and in time I was allowed to roam there.

  When the road crew arrived and the lumpy limestone was tarred the street seemed subdued. The easterly wind was no longer chalky. In July and August when it finally rained the water ran down the hill towards the reedy recess of the swamp. Down the way a little from our place, outside the Dutchies’ house with its window full of ornaments, a broad puddle formed and drew small children to its ochre sheen. The swamp was where we wanted to be, down there where the melaleucas seemed to stumble and the ducks skated, but our parents forbade it; they talked of quicksand and tiger snakes, wild roots and submerged logs and we made do with the winter puddle outside the van Gelders’. I remember my mother standing exasperated in the rain with the brolly over her head at dusk while I frog-kicked around in my speedos.

  Eventually the road crew returned to put a drain in and my puddle became less impressive. Then a red telephone box appeared beside it. I suppose I was five or six when I learned to go in and stand on tiptoe to reach up and dial 1194 to hear a man with a BBC voice announce the exact time. I did that for years, alone and in company, listening to the authority in the man’s voice. He sounded like he knew what he was on about, that at the stroke it would indeed be the time he said it was. It was a delicious thing to know, that at any time of the day, when adults weren’t about, you could dial yourself something worth knowing, something irrefutable, and not need to pay.

  When I was old enough I walked to school with the ragged column that worked its way up the hill for the mile or so it took. From high ground you could see the city and the real suburbs in the distance. You could even smell the sea. In the afternoons the blue bush plain was hazy with smoke and the dust churned up by bulldozers. On winter nights great bonfires of trees scraped into windrows flickered in the sky above the yard. Beyond the splintery fence cicadas and birds whirred. Now and then the hard laughter of ducks washed up the street; they sounded like mechanical clowns in a sideshow. When summer came and the windows lay open all night a noise of frogs and crickets and mosquitoes pressed in as though the swamp had swelled in the dark.

  The smallest of us talked about the swamp. Down at the turnaround where the lupins took over, we climbed the peppermint to look out across that wild expanse, but for the longest time we didn’t dare go further.

  Bruno the Yugo went to the swamp. He had a flat head and he was twelve. He ranged down through the reeds until dark, even though his oldies flogged him for it. Across from Bruno lived the Mannerings. They were Poms with moany Midlands accents. I could never tell when they were happy. Their house smelt of fag smoke and kero and they didn’t like open windows. George the father had very long feet. He wore socks and plastic sandals. His son Alan waited for me after school some days to walk behind me and nudge me wordlessly with a knuckle for the full mile. He was twelve and scared of Bruno the Yugo. I never knew why he picked me from all the kids in our street. He never said a thing, just poked and prodded and shoved until we came down the hill to within sight of our homes. He was tall and fair, Alan Mannering, and though I dreaded him I don’t think I ever hated him. When he spoke to someone else beyond me his voice was soft and full of menace, his accent broadly local as my own. Some days he threw his schoolbag up on to the veranda of his place and headed on down to the swamp without even stopping in and I watched him go in relief and envy. Mostly I played with the Box kids across the road. There were seven or eight of them. They were Catholics and most of them wet the bed though it was hard to say which ones because they all had the same ammonia and milk smell. I liked them, though they fought and cried a lot. We slipped through the bush together where there were no straight lines. Beyond the fence there were snarls and matted tangles. We hid behind grass trees and twisted logs and gathered burrs in our shirts and seeds in our hair. Eventually the Boxes began to slip off to the swamp. I always pulled up short, though, and went back to dial 1194 for reassurance.

  Another Pom moved in next door. I saw him digging and stood to watch, my shadow the only greeting. I watched him dig until only his balding head showed. He winked and pointed down until I shuffled over to the lip and saw the damp earth beneath my sandals.

  ‘The water table,’ he said in a chirpy accent, ‘it’s high here, see. Half these fence posts are in it, you know.’

  The rank, dark stink of blood and bone rose up from his side of the fence. I climbed back over the fence doubtfully.

  ‘Looks dry this country, it does, but underground there’s water. Caves of it. Drilling, that’s what this country needs.’

  I went indoors.

  Someone hung a snake from our jacaranda out front. It was a dugite, headless and oozing. My mother went spare.

  Across the road one night, Mr Box left his kids asleep in the Holden and went indoors with his wife. It was for a moment’s peace, my oldies said, but a moment was all they had. The station wagon rolled across the road, bulldozed the letter box and mowed down our roses.

  George Mannering with the long feet mowed his buffalo grass every week with a push mower. He liked grass; it was the one thing he’d not had in England though he reminded us that English grass was finer. My mother rolled her eyes. George Mannering bought a Victa power mower and I stood out front to watch his first cut. I was there when two-year-old Charlie lurched up between his father’s legs and lost some toes in a bright pink blue. All the way back inside to my room I heard his voice above the whine of the two-stroke which sputtered alone out there until the ambulance came.

  I forget how old I was when I gave in and went to the swamp. It felt bad to be cheating on my parents but the wild beyond the fences and the lawns and sprinklers was too much for me. By this time I was beginning to have second thoughts about the 1194 man. My parents bought a kitchen clock which seemed to cheat with time. A minute was longer some days than others. An hour beyond the fence travelled differently across our skin compared with an hour of television. I felt time turn off. Time wasn’t straight and neither was the man with the BBC voice. I discovered th
at you could say anything you liked to him, shocking things you’d only say to prove a point, and the man never said a thing except declare the plodding time. I surrendered to the swamp without warning. Every wrinkle, every hollow in the landscape led to the hissing maze down there. It was December, I remember. I got off my bike and stepped down into dried lupin like a man striding through a crowd. Seed pods rattled behind me. A black swan rose from the water. I went on until the ground hardened with moisture and then went spongy with saturation. Scaly paperbarks keeled away in trains of black shadow. Reeds bristled like Venetian blinds in the breeze. Black water bled from the ground with a linoleum gleam.

  From the water’s edge you couldn’t even see our street. The crowns of tuart trees were all I saw those early years before jacarandas, flame trees and cape lilacs found their way to water and rose from yards like flags. I found eggs in the reeds, skinks in a fallen log, a bluetongue lizard jawing at me with its hard scales shining amidst the sighing wild oats. I sat in the hot shade of a melaleuca in a daze.

  After that I went back alone or in the company of the Box kids or even Bruno. We dug hideouts and lit fires, came upon snakes real and imagined. I trekked to the swamp’s farthest limits where the market gardens began. Italian men in ragged hats worked on sprinklers, lifted melons, turned the black earth. Water rose in rainbows across their land. I went home before dark amazed that my parents still believed me when I swore solemnly that I hadn’t been down the swamp.

  At school I learned about the wide brown land, the dry country. Summer after summer we recited the imperatives of water conservation. Sprinklers were banned in daylight hours and our parents watered glumly by hand.

  One summer my mother announced that she’d come upon some Cape Coloureds at the nearest market garden. I thought she meant poultry of some kind. I met them on my own one day and was confused by their accents. We threw a ball for a while, two girls and me. Their skin had a mildness about it. They didn’t seem as angry as the Joneses. The Joneses were dark and loud. Even their laughter seemed angry. I never had much to do with any of them. I rode past their house careful not to provoke them. They gave my little brother a hiding once. I never knew why. His nose swelled like a turnip and he nursed this grievance for the rest of his life. It made his mind up about them, he said. I kept clear. I already had Alan Mannering to worry about.

  The Joneses never went near the swamp. I heard they were frightened of the dark. Their dad worked in a mine. Bruno said vile things to them and bolted into the swamp for sanctuary. It was his favourite game the year the Americans went to the moon.

  One sunny winter day I sat in a hummock of soft weeds to stare at the tadpoles I had in my coffee jar. Billy Box said we all begin as tadpoles, that the Pope didn’t want us to waste even one of them. I fell asleep pondering this queer assertion and when I woke Alan Mannering stood over me, his face without expression. I said nothing. He looked around for a moment before pulling his dick out of his shorts and pissing over me. He didn’t wet me; he pissed around me in a huge circle. I saw sunlight in his pale stream and lay still lest I disturb his aim. When he was finished he reeled himself back into his shorts and walked off. I emptied my tadpoles back into the lake.

  What did he want? What did he ever want from me?

  I was ten when people started dumping cars down the swamp. Wrecks would just appear, driven in the back way from behind the market gardens, stripped or burned, left near the water on soft ground where the dirt tracks gave out.

  Alan Mannering was the first to hack the roof off a car and use it upturned as a canoe. That’s what kids said, though Bruno claimed it was his own idea.

  I was with half a dozen Box kids when I saw Alan and Bruno out on the lake a hundred yards apart, sculling along with fence pickets. Those Box kids crowded against me, straining, big and small, to see. I can still remember the smell of them pressed in like that, their scent of warm milk and wet sheets. The two bigger boys drifted in silhouette out on the ruffled water. One of the Boxes went back for their old man’s axe and we went to work on the scorched remains of an old F.J. Holden with nasty green upholstery. One of them came upon a used condom. The entire Box posse was horrified. I had no idea what it was and figured (correctly as it turned out) that you needed to be a Catholic to understand. Before dark we had our roof on the water. We kept close to shore and quickly discovered that two passengers was all it took. Some Boxes went home wet. I suppose nobody noticed.

  Next day was Saturday. I got down to the swamp early in order to have the raft to myself for a while and had only pulled it from its nest of reeds when Alan Mannering appeared beside me. He never said a word. I actually cannot remember that boy ever uttering a word meant for me, but I don’t trust myself on this. He lived over the road for ten years. He all but walked me home from school for five of those, poking me from behind, sometimes peppering my calves with gravel. I was in his house once, I remember the airless indoor smell. But he never spoke to me at any time.

  Alan Mannering lifted the jarrah picket he’d ripped from someone’s fence and pressed the point of it into my chest. I tried to bat it away but he managed to twist it into my shirt and catch the flesh beneath so that I yielded a few steps. He stepped toward me casually, his downy legs graceful.

  ‘You’re shit,’ I said, surprising myself.

  Alan Mannering smiled. I saw cavities in his teeth and a hot rush of gratitude burned my cheeks, my fingertips. Somehow the glimpse of his teeth made it bearable to see him drag our F.J. Holden roof to the water and pole out into the shimmering distance without even a growl of triumph, let alone a word. I lifted my T-shirt to inspect the little graze on my chest and when I looked up again he was in trouble.

  When he went down, sliding sideways like a banking aircraft out there in the ruffled shimmer of the swamp’s eye, I really didn’t think that my smug feeling, my satisfied pity about his English teeth had caused the capsize. He didn’t come up. I never even hated him, though I’d never called anyone shit before or since. After the water settled and shook itself smooth again like hung washing, there wasn’t a movement. No sign.

  I went home and said nothing.

  Police dragged the swamp, found the car roof but no body. Across the road the Mannerings’ lawn grew long and cries louder than any mower drifted over day and night.

  That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullabor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia. The old man sealed the doors with masking tape and the four of us sat for days breathing white dust. The limestone road was marked only with blown tyres and blown roos. Near the border we stopped at the great blowhole that runs all the way to the distant sea. Its rising gorge made me queasy. I thought of things sucked in, of all that surging, sucking water beneath the crust of the wide brown land.

  Back home, though they did not find his body, I knew that Alan Mannering was in the swamp. I thought of him silent, fair, awful, encased in the black cakemix of sediment down there.

  The next year, come winter, the night air was musky with smoke and sparks hung in the sky like eyes. Bulldozers towing great chains and steel balls mowed down tuart trees and banksias.

  I learned to spell aquifer.

  Three doors up, Wally Burniston came home drunk night after night. His wife Beryl locked him out and if he couldn’t smash his way in he lay bawling on the veranda until he passed out. Some school mornings I passed his place and saw him lying there beside the delivered milk, his greasy rocker’s haircut awry, his mouth open, shoes gone.

  New streets appeared even while the bush burned. I listened to the man from 1194 in the phone box that stank of cigarettes and knew that he was making the time up as he went along.

  I saw the rainbow mist of the market-garden sprinklers and felt uneasy. I thought of Alan Mannering in that mist. He’d have been liquid long ago. I was eleven now, I knew this sort of thing.

  As our neighbourhood became a suburb, and the bush was heaved back even further on itself, th
ere was talk of using the swamp for landfill, making it a dump so that in time it could be reclaimed. But the market gardeners were furious. Their water came from the swamp, after all. Water was no longer cheap.

  The van Gelders divorced. Wally Burniston was taken somewhere, I never found out where. One Sunday afternoon I found myself in the van Gelders’ backyard scrounging for a companion when I came upon Mrs van Gelder on the back step. She had kohl around her eyes and a haircut that made her look like Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor and her short dress showed legs all the way up to her dark panties. She raised her chin at me, tapped ash from her cigarette, narrowed her eyes against the smoke that rose from her lips. I coasted near her on my bike preparing half-heartedly to ask where her son might be but she smiled and stopped me asking. From where I sat on my old chopper I saw the alarming shadow between her breasts and her smile broadened. Half her buttons were undone. She seemed sleepy. I stood against the pedals, preparing to take off, when she reached down and pulled out a breast. Its nipple was startling brown and it wore a green vein down its fuselage like a fuel line. I popped an involuntary wheel-stand as I hurtled back out into the street. The slipstream of a car tugged at my shirt and tyres bawled on the fresh bitumen as someone braked and stalled. A woman began to cry. People came into the street. I swooped through them and coasted down our driveway, trembling, and hid in the shed. Months later I woke from a dream in which Mrs van Gelder leaned before me so that her cleavage showed and I stared but did not touch as dark water slurped against the plump banks of her flesh. I sat up in bed wet as a Catholic.

  From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighbourhood began to sink bores to get free unlimited groundwater. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street, I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing mosquito larvae – even being in mosquito larvae. I thought of him in frogs’ blood, and of tadpoles toiling through the muddy depths of Alan Mannering. On autumn evenings I sat outside for barbecues and felt the dew settle unsettlingly. At night I woke in a sweat and turned on the bedside light to examine the moisture on my palm where I wiped my brow. My neighbour had gotten into everything; he was artesian.