The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

*

  Karen resolved to hand in her resignation before she told Paul. She wanted to be out of that madhouse before the media descended. Now, all the statements and allusions that went rocketing over her head came back to haunt her. Kids who’d been spoken of as being IC before the end of the year. What the school saw as integration, or defending personal integrity, was the ultimate in disintegration, a new benchmark for moral depravity.

  Karen used exactly that phrase in her letter to Dr Best. She’d believed in the miracle that was Prospect Secondary College, and she’d trusted her principal as a great and selfless educator. But so far as Karen was concerned, this was a scandal, a police matter, and she intended to take these concerns as far as they could be taken.

  Dr Best read Karen’s letter without comment, then looked the art teacher in the eye.

  ‘You’re a fine teacher. These kids respond to you, the IC kids especially. But if you really can’t abide what we’re trying to achieve here, the school will respect your decision.’

  Karen couldn’t imagine any sane person abiding what the school was doing. She’d instantly lost all respect for her colleagues. Reading her mind, Dr Best pounced. ‘You’re not the only one who’s ever had misgivings. I wouldn’t trust my staff if they didn’t have serious qualms. These are the most radical interventions imaginable. But you wouldn’t be doing your colleagues justice if you left, or tried to raise a scandal, without letting them explain why they chose to support our great adventure.’

  Karen had hoped to hand in her resignation and get away from that place as soon as she could. Talking it over with erstwhile friends and senior teachers had never figured in her game plan.

  ‘There’s a general staff meeting in ten minutes,’ Dr Best told her.

  *

  The sixty-seven staff of Prospect Secondary College gathered in the small common room. Those who couldn’t find seats stood, or leaned against a wall, the more relaxed among them drinking coffee and tea. Several chose this moment to challenge the absent principal’s smoking ban.

  Having chosen not to attend, Dr Best asked Ralph Horsberg to chair the meeting, and he made it immediately clear what he felt about Karen’s resignation. It was one thing to feel disquiet about the school’s methods, quite another to threaten the school’s future. If Prospect Secondary College went under, a lot of these kids would be left for dead.

  When Karen tried to address the group, Gavin McGibbon spoke over her. Gavin felt personally betrayed. Karen could have come to him and discussed this at any time. Now she was impugning his integrity, along with that of all the staff at the school, and the brave parents who’d been forward-thinking enough to permit these integrations.

  Gavin had qualms at first – everyone had qualms about using amputation to solve behavioural problems – but he’d never once thought about going to the authorities, or ratting on his mates. In the final analysis, the figures spoke for themselves. The hopefulness of the integrated kids spread to students who had no reason to consider such radical measures. Ordinarily, Gavin was much disliked, but even declared enemies rode with him on this one. And that made Karen still more determined to let them know just how much they’d disappointed her.

  ‘This is a sickness. You should be trying to cure these kids and set them straight, not encouraging them. Tell me, what could be more fucked up than finding a handsome limb or organ so loathsome that you’d beg for it to be removed?’

  Helga Goonesarrawa was a mouse at meetings, but now she rose to inform her young colleague that she was reducing kids to some kind of metaphor for the national malaise. Sure, you had to do more for troubled students than keep them alive till the tertiary education sector or social welfare could take over, but keeping them alive was still the most important thing. The school had succeeded in stopping kids from trying to kill themselves. Prospect’s efforts deserved to be recognised internationally.

  Furious that the group could cheer this self-serving nonsense, Karen leapt to her feet, determined to speak the great taboo: maybe all the kids who’d committed suicide hadn’t been wasters or insane, maybe they were political martyrs whose deaths spoke the truth in a way that couldn’t be contradicted.

  But emotion saw Karen’s words emerge in an incoherent blurt. What she wanted to question was why all these kids had been topping themselves in the first place. They were doing it because they saw this society for what it is. Even thick kids knew enough to see that the world where conspicuous consumption defines success would be denied to them. And the smart, sensitive kids recognised that product bingeing is utterly vacuous. They were mutilating and killing themselves to express contempt for the way this society had distorted human experience.

  ‘But this isn’t mutilation,’ Sophie interjected. ‘It’s correction. They’re making themselves comfortable with the person they are.’

  Several teachers were then moved to say how much they preferred amputations to tattoos or piercings. Amputations were more honest. Sure, kids liked to claim that they were getting a tongue or eye removed to improve their sex lives, but in truth they didn’t know what that meant. These kids were just doing whatever they had to do to stave off the peril of insignificance.

  Karen tried one last time to explain that an educator’s true duty was to promote the creation of a better society, not to facilitate more articulate statements of desperation. ‘This is barbaric,’ she said, searching the room for just one face that might show agreement. ‘If we don’t fight against what consumption culture’s been doing to these kids, we’re standing by while humanity disintegrates.’

  ‘So what would you have us do,’ Ralph asked Karen direct ly, ‘Tell Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch “Wrong Way, Go Back”? … Most schools can’t even produce a functional timetable, and you want us to reverse the tide of history. By cutting a little slack, we’re actually saving these kids’ lives.’

  ‘What for? What are you saving them for ?’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical … Life’s life. It’s a fair starting point for everything that follows.’

  *

  Disregarding advice that she take time to reconsider, Karen ran out of the schoolgrounds to find a park where she could gather her thoughts before speaking to Paul.

  The teacher felt the pale-blue sky reaching down to fix her head in an Indian death lock. Not one of her colleagues supported her stand. Many said that they’d started out thinking just as she had, but had been forced to alter their thinking when they’d seen the change in the school. They asked what she’d prefer: drugs and suicide, or happy, purposeful students working hard to realise their potential?

  Detlef Fir had told the assembly that he’d just that morning made an appointment to have his ears amputated. He wanted to show the kids in his IC classes how much they’d inspired him. Ears had always given him the shits. He’d be able to pleasure his wife much better without ear flaps getting in the way. When Noni Poussis said that her husband was giving her massive breast implants for her thirtieth birthday, Karen could stand no more.

  Maybe it was her. Maybe she’d got out of sync with reality. If she could just accept that any behaviour that short-circuits the self-destructive impulse was reasonable, she’d be able to release the sky’s vice-like hold on her forehead.

  *

  While listening to Karen’s story, Paul scribbled meticulous notes. His few questions concerned verification of detail: when something happened, or whether she was certain someone spoke exactly the words she reported. He showed no powerful emotions, but answered ‘Yes’ when Karen asked if he believed her.

  It took four hours for Paul to take down everything Karen felt needed to be said for the story to be told accurately. After a long silence, he looked up from more than thirty pages of handwritten notes. They were both exhausted.

  ‘This is really something,’ he told Karen. ‘Schools weren’t doing stuff like this when we were there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do realise the paper won’t print this story?’

  Karen�
��s eyes fought against their sockets. She’d just given an intimate account of a secondary school’s complicity with madness. She asked again whether Paul believed her account of Prospect Secondary’s attempts to redefine integration.

  He did. Every word. No one could doubt that Karen was taking a principled stand. The thing was, his newspaper never published stories about teen suicide, or anything that might be seen to romanticise suicidal behaviours. There was no way his editor would run a critique of a school that had won out over suicide.

  So, this was the brick wall. You’d never be permitted to critique the underlying socioeconomic sources of youth discontent. You were only allowed to fudge the truth by blaming dodgy song lyrics and claiming to be outraged by carelessly written movies.

  ‘Have you ever felt that having a full set of limbs made you inadequate?’ Karen asked.

  ‘I don’t like my nose, but I’ve never thought of having it amputated.’

  ‘We’ve got to stop this,’ Karen insisted.

  ‘Suicide’s a virus. You really should commend these people for doing everything they can.’

  Paul had missed her point entirely, and just then Karen realised that he had always managed to miss her point. But she knew that he was also sad about the state of the world. He might have been thick and imperceptive, but she’d been that too.

  The sub-editor then told a story that he’d never mentioned in their three years together.

  ‘My first girlfriend, Donna, committed suicide when she was eighteen. She’d drink till she was nearly paralytic, and slash up. I know that makes her sound mad, or wild, but Donna was quiet. Smart, with a good family … Pretty. Too pretty really. She had big breasts. I never saw that as a bad thing, but she hated the way men looked at her. Always saying she wished someone would hack them off. Donna hated them. She was nothing more than her breasts. Even if she’d had them reduced, or had a leg cut off, I reckon I still could have loved her … Most girls, most girls who think like her, they stop eating, or they do something to stop being women. But Donna threw herself under the Sandringham train … A school like Prospect … I reckon a school like Prospect might have saved Donna’s life.’

  ‘It might have,’ Karen said.

  Escargot Postel

  Chloe Walker

  The first letter is a surprise. Ellie is reading through her mail over breakfast when a handwritten envelope interrupts the flow of bills and invoices. A blue par avion sticker and a French stamp make Ellie’s heart skip a beat. It is from Luc.

  It’s been more than a month since she ate with Luc, but the thought of him is still delicious. Trust the only proper French chef on her books to have such a dishy younger brother. Trust the tasty one to have an early morning flight back to Europe the next day. Ellie had accepted his dinner invitation anyway, making the most of the few hours of drinking in his features and imagining what his hair would feel like between her fingers. After one of Henri’s superlative dessert soufflés Ellie gave Luc her business card, took advantage of the European custom of cheek to cheek kisses, as close to his mouth as decorum would allow, and made the hour-long drive back to the farm much later than usual. She cursed the stars the whole way for teasing her yet again. And that was that, she had thought. But now there’s a letter.

  She slides a fingernail underneath the flap of the envelope and pulls out a cream-coloured note card. Its edges are like nibbled lettuce leaves.

  ‘Lovely Ellie,’ it reads. ‘It was such a pleasure to share my last meal in Australia with you. Once again, my compliments on your excellent produce. What a shame we met just as I was about to depart – I would have liked the chance to visit your farm, and to show you what I can do with escargot in my own kitchen. Luc.’

  Ellie screws up her nose. She doesn’t eat snails; she just breeds them for restaurateurs like Henri. She is, however, quite partial to red wine, cheese and soufflés. Perhaps she could win a trip to Europe. She reads over the letter a few more times, soaking up the arcs and sweeps of Luc’s pen. Then she puts it back in the envelope, tucks it behind the wooden chessboard on the side table, and pulls on her gumboots at the door.

  On the way to the pens a Cibo Matto song lyric tumbles around inside Ellie’s head: ‘He looked me up and down, as if I was a restaurant menu.’ The ground is soft from last night’s rain but overhead the sky is empty of clouds. Her charges are always happiest in this type of weather, moist but warm. She pulls open the gate to the enclosure and walks over to the first row of densely planted vegetables. Time to begin the day’s work.

  The snails are in good spirits today, happily sliding over silverbeet leaves and each other. Ellie gently picks one off a leaf and watches as it recoils back into its shell. Despite her job, Ellie is still fascinated by snails. As a kid she would keep them as pets, closing them into margarine containers in her bedroom and feeding them lettuce. Sometimes she would forget about them for weeks on end and their poor tiny bodies would shrivel back into their shells. The stench of decaying mucus and bacteria, when she finally remembered, to her smelt like guilt. An echo of that smell lingered in the tanks she used in the farm’s first incarnation. Now her flock of thousands of single-footed farm animals roams in free-range enclosures, surrounded by foliage. Both the snails and her customers seem happier this way.

  Ellie reaches over the black netting and pulls out yesterday’s uneaten food, lest bacteria grow and her herd fall ill. She drops the food into a bucket for composting, slowly filling it with nibbled slices of cucumber covered with silvery trails. She leaves fresh cucumber and some oats, and eggshells for calcium. She finds new babies in the reproduction area and transfers some teenagers out of it for fattening up.

  In the afternoon Ellie works in the greenhouses, cleaning old food from the purging bins and replacing it with fresh oats. The snails that are in for purging are fed a strict fibre diet to cleanse their gullets of dirt. At the end of the week, Ellie will end their slithery journeys through life with an enormous pot of boiling water, a task that still elicits a small pang of guilt. At least her snails are allowed a last meal, unlike their Italian cousins, who are piled into cages and left to starve for a week, or worse, covered live with sea salt and flour.

  That evening, Ellie reads Luc’s letter again and scribbles a reply. ‘I’m pleased that you enjoyed my snails. Thanks again for a lovely evening. If I ever visit France I would love to let you make me dinner. Perhaps I could bring dessert – a nice chocolate tart? Or maybe a good old Aussie pavlova? (Look it up. It’s like a giant meringue.) Yours truly, Ellie.’

  The second letter is even shorter than the first. Ellie reads it straight from the letterbox. She wants it fresh.

  ‘I hope after our pavlova that you will stay long enough for coffee. Because what I really want is to kiss you. Luc.’

  Ellie returns to the house and plucks the first letter from behind the chessboard. The pieces have been halted mid-game, their positions etched into her memory. She met her English grandfather only once as a child, but they kept up a healthy exchange of mail and played many games of chess by correspondence. Some games took years to finish, and her grandfather only lost once. Then he passed away before he’d had the chance to make his next move.

  Ellie carefully removes the chessboard lid and puts the two envelopes in the cavity that would ordinarily house the pieces. She knows this game. One move at a time. She goes to her desk and writes a reply.

  Slowly, over weeks and months, the little pile of letters in the chessboard box gets bigger. Each one contains a kiss, a touch, a glance. ‘I am running my thumb along your eyebrow and down your cheek.’ With each note they explore another inch of each other. ‘The skin of your neck tastes like honey.’ Sometimes Luc’s response is too quick, a mere eight or nine days, and Ellie leaves it on the side table for a while to catch her breath and slow things down. She invests in a pack of airmail envelopes and an expensive pen, trying to train her handwriting from beetle tracks into something more resemblant of Luc’s calligraphy. She writes slowly, car
efully, crafting the shape of her alphabet. Luc’s hand slips from the small of her back to caress her buttocks. Ellie undoes the top button of his shirt.

  One morning, by the letterbox, Luc slips off Ellie’s dress. ‘Slowly, I slide the zip of your dress down your back,’ his letter reads. ‘As I brush the fabric from your shoulders it falls to the floor.’ Ellie’s skin tingles from her neck and down her sides as she stands there, nearly naked, in her gumboots, old jeans and work shirt.

  At the farm the snails are feeling sensual, lustfully sliding over each other’s shells, touching mouths and rubbing wrinkly skin. Ellie goes through the routine, removing old food, replacing it with fresh stuff, all the while imagining her zip unzipping and her dress being removed by a French man.

  That night she dashes off a reply. ‘One by one I unfasten the buttons of your shirt. My hands follow as it slips off your shoulders and down your back.’ Overeager, Ellie checks the letterbox daily after sending her mail, half believing that lust and romance will somehow transcend the realities of the postal system. But nothing comes.

  A week goes past, then two. At three the snails become restless, and Ellie agitated. Her agonising wait is punctuated by the ghastly task of preparing her produce for sale. She removes the greenhouse snails from their bins and takes them to the second kitchen, the one designed to meet food-safety standards. Surrounded by stainless steel, Ellie tips batch after batch of her babies into a giant saucepan, which she then brings to the boil, slowly, so as not to crack the shells. At first the snails make languid attempts at escape, crawling underwater up the sides of the pot, only to lose footing at the top and plop back into the soup. As the temperature rises their efforts become more frantic, until their protesting bodies give in and come free of their protective shells. Ellie drains the foamy water and boils the now-lifeless coils of meat a second time to remove any remaining slimy residue. Despite years of practice she still finds the process disturbing; this time, her mood is made darker as she remembers the shapes on her French date’s plate.