The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  By this time Tom and the other children were crowding onto the deck. Some of the boys had leapt onto the embankment for a better view and stood shivering in their pyjamas. Tom, meanwhile, was kneeling on the deck, preparing to grab hold of Joel as Kirsten manoeuvred him alongside the barge. Assisted by Terry, he managed to drag the dripping Joel onto the deck and by the time Kirsten had climbed aboard they had wrapped Joel in a blanket. ‘Hold onto him,’ Tom said to Terry, and a look of grim understanding passed between them. Then, turning in consternation to Kirsten: ‘Are you OK?’

  It was a feeble question and she resented it. If it hadn’t been for him and his bloody excursion she would not now be standing here in a state almost of shock. ‘Go to the cabin,’ he began, ‘use my towel to dry off. I’ll deal with Joel and I’ll be along in a minute. I’ll get Ruth to make you a hot drink.’

  ‘You can’t just leave him there unsupervised.’ She was shaking violently.

  ‘True.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ll probably have to sleep in there for the rest of the night. On the floor. But I’ll come back to the cabin first.’

  Without a word Kirsten returned to the bat cave. Her eyes felt as if they were coated in icy grit and she had a headache from the chill of the water. From the neck down she was numb. Standing, dripping, outside the door, she stripped off and bundled her sodden clothes into a nearby bucket. Inside she towelled herself down as briskly as she could and put on her warmest gear. The torch had disappeared. Too shaky and exhausted to zip the doona up into a sleeping pouch, she wrapped it tight around her and then, almost falling onto the air mattress, she lay there bent in a foetal arc and could not control her trembling.

  After a while Ruth appeared with a tin mug and set it down beside Kirsten’s head. ‘Here you are, Miss,’ she said. ‘They put Joel to bed in one of the bunks and Sir is lying with him so’s he can’t move.’

  ‘You’d better go back,’ Kirsten whispered. ‘I’ll be OK.’ But when she sat up and took a sip from the mug it was full of a tepid and sickly cocoa that made her gag.

  Tom did not return.

  In the morning the kids were mute as they packed up their kits and went about cleaning the interior of the main cabin. Joel had been placed under Terry’s watchful eye but for the moment he appeared OK; he had eaten some toast for breakfast and would nod when spoken to by Tom. Mostly the kids ignored him, deep in their own reluctance to leave the boat. They had the air of mourners in the wake of a funeral procession. As the barge glided and bumped into the mooring dock they gazed with blank, resigned faces at the big green bus that awaited them. Then, hoisting their packs over their shoulders, they lined up by the cabin door and awaited Tom’s command to walk the plank.

  Kirsten felt like death. Her head throbbed, her throat was raw, her limbs ached in every muscle and joint and she knew that some bug or virus had ambushed her in the night. All she wanted was to crawl under a blanket but she knew she must stand and say goodbye to the kids. She waved from the open door of the bat cave as Tom stood at the end of the plank and shook hands with each boy and girl as they trooped off, and she saw a gruff male courtliness in her lover that she hadn’t seen before … but was too sick to hold this thought for long.

  After they had waved the kids off on the bus she fell into Tom’s car, aching in every bone. It was clear that Joel must travel back with them and Terry was delegated to the back seat to sit beside him and keep an eye out for sudden moves. Tom was afraid that the boy might open the door and attempt to leap out, but for most of the drive home he seemed almost normal, as if that nocturnal parabola of watery f light had purged him of his demon. At least for now. Kirsten was beyond caring. All the way back to London she drifted in and out of a painful sleep in which it felt as if her body were encased in a rotating drum of fire. Tom, exhausted, drove like a maniac.

  *

  She spent the next three days in bed.

  It was the sickest she had ever been in her life. All day and all night she lay in her track pants and polar-fleece jacket under the thick doona and still she was cold. Her head felt as if it were being compressed by an iron weight while a current of raking pain tormented her back and joints. Her fever it seemed came and went, and came again, and with it a series of dreams so torrid that at times it was hard to tell whether she was dreaming or hallucinating. One late afternoon she dreamed that she was kneeling on top of the main cabin of the narrow boat and banging with her fist on the door, and the door was stuck so that she had to break in through the hatch. And there they all were, the children lying on their bunks like angels, their eyes closed beatifically while through the open hatch poured a torrent of milk so that in their sleep they were force-fed, their skin bathed in rivulets of cream, their eyelids glazed with a thick white coating. Not long after, Tom came home from school and sat by her bed, muttering about Joel who had gone berserk in the playground. Joel? Who was Joel? Then the doctor arrived; a shadowy figure, like an apparition in a cloud of warm pink fog.

  On the third day, the fever broke. In the early morning she woke, feeling better. Instinctively she fumbled for the torch, but of course it wasn’t there. The book was there, Madame Bovary, looking much the worse for wear, mottled and wavy from where hot tea had been spilled on the cover. Poor Emma, she thought, poor Emma. Too young to be the wife and mother of a plain man in a small village; too constrained too early. Thank God that she, Kirsten, wasn’t married. She wouldn’t marry Tom, and perhaps not anyone. And with that thought, suddenly into her head came the image of a narrow boat, not the boat they had just returned from, which had no name, but the photograph in the book; that strange picture of the Gort. There in the gloom she could see the young bargemaster’s wife at the door of her dark hollow; could see the tightly wound ringlets that framed her head, the prim white collar, the neat cuffs and the wide serge skirt of dull grey, so wide it skimmed the sides of the doorway. How on earth had she borne it? And how solemnly she gazed back at her onlooker, though the seriousness in her eyes was an enigma. How steadily she held herself before the camera, because it took so long to make an exposure then, and it was impossible to hold a smile for long without feeling foolish. And perhaps, after all, she was not inclined. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a child. Day after day, on the drab water, so flat and oily in its manmade channels; so dense with the sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke. And in her arms, still, the white swaddled baby, its blank face all but erased save for those eyes like two sepia smudges, staring out in hope.

  Kirsten sighed, and turned over onto her flank. Time to let the long night of water-sleep draw in on her, and burying her face she snuggled down deep into her padded cocoon. Now, once again, she could feel the buoyant curve of the narrow boat beneath her, rocking gently to the familiar slop, slop of water against the stern, while outside there hummed the deep stillness of the countryside. And all the while she was moving inwards, floating on a slow tide of surrender, floating towards the turning wheel of the lock. Sleep, she thought, savouring the word … sleep. And drifting off into the limp repose of the convalescent, she wondered if that baby had ever learned to swim.

  The New Dark Age

  Joan London

  Now that the long winter was over, and all the clues to his convalescence, the little table by the couch for his books and remote controls, the earthenware pot for Chinese herbs, the meditation tapes, had been packed away, now that he’d resumed his place in the world, George was conscious more and more of a twinge of misgiving, like guilt or nostalgia, as if for something or someone he missed.

  In the shop, old customers and friends congratulated him on his recovery, with eyes that followed his to avoid looking at the thinness of his body. He said cancer whenever necessary, not ‘sick’ or ‘unwell’, in the same way that he’d said die, refusing ‘pass away’. Back from the brink, he discovered that he had an urge to bear testimony. What was his message? What did he have to tell them?

 
Every time he tried to collect his thoughts, someone interrupted him. Of course he was tired. The lunchtime rush made him dizzy. There was also the Rip Van Winkle effect: he had just installed the computer when he left for hospital, leaving Ulla to wage a single-handed battle with its teething problems, and she was now very much the expert. She’d even fed a ‘Welcome Back George’ logo onto their receipts, though he soon put a stop to that. In a return to their old sparring form, she accused George of being a Luddite. Not at all, he told her gravely, modern pharmacology had saved his life.

  It was his tenth day back, but still the shop did not look like his. There was a subtle change of direction in the stock. Ulla, not having strong musical tastes herself, always responded to the market. They now sold a lot of pop and rock, Alanis Morissette and Nirvana, and compilations of World Music, and more well-known classical pieces, especially if they’d become a movie theme. Meanwhile Country and Western, contemporary jazz, the avant-garde, had dwindled, gone ragged, lost their edge. Some of these he found in a newly labelled bin, ‘Discount Discs’. Ulla had the print-outs to justify her decisions, but he noted that some of his favourite customers, the ones for whom he put aside new recordings if he thought they’d like them, had trickled away.

  All this of course he could turn around in a few weeks. The thought made him weary. Although he’d always said that George’s was just a way of making money to support his music habit, there was a time when he’d been happy to feed it all his energy and creativity, and taken pride in its success, but that seemed long ago. Now he wondered if he was really suited to being a businessman. Out the window the newly renovated arcade with its little trickling fountain looked like a film set. People ambled past, licking icecreams, bathed in a kind of cathedral twilight. It all looked false to him, temporary, unreal. He’d preferred the old premises, between Perretti Tailors and the Wing Lo Deli. Perhaps the rot had started to set in a couple of years ago, when they moved into the smarter end of town.

  But what would he rather be doing?

  Late in the afternoon, on impulse, he put on the little Brahms intermezzo which he had listened to all through the winter. At once he was taken back, so intensely that he felt exposed, and went to listen in the office. What an austere, intense winter it had been, his season of reckoning. Day after day he lay on the couch as the leaves fell in the courtyard and his life unravelled before him. He was like a monk, in loose clothes, his bald head covered by the dark red Tibetan beanie Kristina had found for him. There seemed to be a ring of silence around him. Chaste, isolated, engrossed, he was cut off from everyone except Kristina. His daughter Grace sent him loving postcards from South America where she was travelling with her boyfriend. He had Kristina to himself. He waited all day for the sound of her key in the door and the sight of her tired, pale face with its new anxiety and kindness. He couldn’t have survived without her.

  In the cruel, colourless twilights he saw that all his time had been spent in accommodating people, keeping the show on the road, in compromise and self-deception. So here you are, the little melody seemed to say, this after all is how it is. He felt as if the most innocent part of him had sat down and wouldn’t go on.

  *

  Before the piece had ended he realised that the shop was empty; no browser could bear too much of Brahms’s penetrating sadness. Ulla had turned to look at him through the glass partition of the office. Their eyes met as she peered over the top of her tortoiseshell glasses and he saw the sharp, watchful query in them.

  He watched her moving on along the shelves, with her cropped grey hair and her habitual white shirt and black slacks, her diligence like a reproach to him. She felt his distance, sensed that everything had changed. He knew her ethics, her sense of fitness. She had not received her due. Not that there hadn’t been lavish thanks, and a generous bonus. But she deserved to share, however symbolically, in his recovery. She had contributed to it. She expected a gesture of acknowledgment.

  Still affected by the spirit of the music, he walked out of the office and asked her home to dinner.

  As soon as he issued the invitation, he regretted it. Ulla pulled out a bus timetable from her bag and pushing on her glasses, consulted it. She announced she would have to catch two buses. He’d forgotten the whole painful ritual. Ulla, for reasons of her own, did not drive, but utilised very ingeniously the scanty public transport system. She tackled travelling arrangements with an air of moral challenge. She was skilled at arranging lifts from neighbours, friends, even customers. Also she walked great distances. She was solid and fit with tanned san-dalled feet and a healthy flush on her cheeks.

  Years ago, when he first opened George’s, she often used to come to dinner with Grace and him. She always arrived early, sometimes hours early, so that she ended up chopping parsley, walking the dog, reading bedtime stories to Grace.

  He’d just come from a bad divorce and knew nothing of business. In that first year there was no detail of his new life, from invoices to child-rearing, that he did not discuss with Ulla. That was twelve years ago, long before Kristina. When he was about Kristina’s age.

  He went back in to the office to stop himself offering her a lift. Because he wanted to go home by himself. He wanted to shower, put on some music, cook slowly, without talking. Spend a little time alone with Kristina.

  *

  Kristina said: ‘Why tonight?’ George was ringing her from the car on his way home.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Jerzy is coming, don’t you remember?’

  ‘They might like each other.’ At least he wouldn’t be alone with Ulla and Kristina.

  ‘They might not.’

  ‘Ulla really held the fort, you know. For all those months.’

  ‘Well, you’re the cook,’ Kristina said. ‘You can ask who you want.’

  He’d noticed that Kristina was very sensitive to any reference to last winter. It always softened her, she immediately gave way. He tried not to take advantage of this. He should have rung earlier, but he didn’t want Ulla to hear him deal with Kristina’s prevarications. She would consider that he was asking Kristina’s permission. Even if he shut the office door Ulla had the knack of barging in at the wrong moment. She doesn’t even knock, Kristina said. Sometimes he caught himself believing that Ulla read his thoughts.

  He turned off the highway onto the ocean road. The black shore was crusted with swimmers, the sky above the horizon was watermelon red. He was playing Theodorakis’s Canto General and ought to have been uplifted – the summer night, the sensual people, the heroic landscape … The triumph of survival. What had he thought he’d learnt from his ordeal? Life was becoming the same old dutiful, half-hearted scramble. Already he’d forgotten what he’d been so certain about. And with it the old question resurfaced: Why? Why me? Medical opinion shrugged its shoulders, but he couldn’t help recalling his old suspicion that in his life there was some chronic underlying lie.

  *

  Kristina said that she would only come to live with him and Grace if she had a space of her own. The house was very small, a two-bedroomed worker’s cottage, one of eight identical houses all joined up in a row. So he converted the old shed at the back fence into a studio for her. It would be a place where she could draw – she liked botanical drawing – or study or simply be by herself. She made it clear that she wasn’t going to make any concessions to family life. She had a horror of doing what she didn’t want to. But when she started her research at the hospital, she worked so hard that most nights she fell asleep in front of the television and on the weekends she napped and read the newspapers. She lived like the daughter of the house, while Grace had always acted like a little wife.

  In the end Kristina never used the studio. They started to dump broken chairs there, old bike helmets, collections of Gramophone going back ten years, things they no longer needed but were too lazy to throw out. Last winter George cleared himself a path from the door to the desk. It became the place where he went to focus, to attempt to still his mind. H
e’d been trying to practise this every evening after work.

  Something in the room’s damp smell and shadowy light seemed to be waiting for him when he opened the door. He sat down, positioned himself. He closed his eyes and saw himself straight-backed at the desk under the window. Beyond the window was the courtyard, the last in the row of courtyards that ran up the street to Monument Hill. He breathed in deeply, and out. He soared above the palm trees and the War Memorial, circled the rising sun of the giant AIF badge …

  The kitchen flywire door slammed. He opened his eyes. Kristina came into the courtyard. She stood with one hand cradling the elbow of the other, which held a cigarette. Two crows were sitting among the sticky leaves of the fig tree. Normally she would have paid them a little scientific attention, but tonight she just kept staring into the twilight. If she were happy she wouldn’t be smoking. She kept a packet of Drum for emergencies in a tin on the kitchen shelf.

  He might as well give up now. His meditation sessions became shorter every day. Although she refused to look at the studio, something about the way she stood seemed like an appeal. Besides he couldn’t stop watching her. He loved the look of her standing in the greenish light, her shoulders high with tension, her hair pinned up for the heat, her vulnerable collarbones, her shining narrow arms. Whenever he saw her he had a feeling of wellbeing.

  *

  She wasn’t going to tell him about it. In the kitchen he poured a small glass of white wine for them both and put on Ella Fitzgerald. As he prepared to cook he discovered they were nearly out of olive oil. At once Kristina snatched up the car keys and said she felt like a drive. Surely it wasn’t the prospect of Ulla that was upsetting her so much? He looked into her face. He’d noticed recently that she looked older. Her long eyes had become more deep-set, as if she’d gone further inside her own head. There were frown lines in the fine weave of her forehead. These past six months had been as hard on her as on him. He thought these signs of care ennobled her. Besides, he liked to think that she was catching up with him, that their age difference wouldn’t be so marked. He heard the car roar off up the street. She was in the grip of something. He knew how easily she became obsessed. She might park by the ocean for a while, or at the Monument and look down over the city.