The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  “I know how you feel, mate, I do, but if you come back here again, we will hurt you.”

  The buggy door closed, and the cab jerked off with a hum.

  “So, where you from?” said the driver.

  Eyes with Asiatic folds regarded Jimbo from the rear-view mirror.

  Jimbo didn’t answer, instead wiping his damp cheeks with the back of his hand. Nosey fucken chink.

  * * * *

  * * *

  Part IV: Pronouncement of Marriage

  The tracks rumbled beneath the Marriage Carriage. They passed a tumble of roo corpses festering in the sun, the hot fetid air reaching in through the windows. Jimbo shoved the window shut. He wondered if the bushrangers were watching.

  Dave cracked open another beer from the chiller, laughing and offering it the four Cartel men who sat guarding the carriage. Froth had spilt on Dave’s suit.

  “There’s champers in here, if she wants some,” said Dave.

  Jimbo nursed his warm beer, too nervous to drink, struggling to find things to say to the woman who sat opposite him. High cheekbones, firm jaw. Kylie. That was her name. Same as Wazza’s truck. Her wedding dress curved around full breasts down the slight of her waist. The veil had been pushed back over her long brown hair. She wouldn’t need to wear it until they disembarked in Shepp.

  “You want one, Kylie?”

  “Sure,” she said, her voice light. Her brown eyes seemed glazed. Red lipstick had smeared one of her front teeth, otherwise her teeth were white and straight, and Jimbo was happy about that.

  “You’ll need to limit her alcohol,” said one of the Cartel.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t want any mishaps on the journey home, Mr White.” The Cartel man smiled. “Then she can have as much as she likes.”

  “That’s okay,” said Kylie.

  Jimbo nodded and studied his beer, sneaking glimpses of her calves, the way the dress stretched tight over her thighs. He wished Dave wasn’t here with him, that the Cartel men were elsewhere. Just him and this stranger, the new Kylie White, so he could tell her about himself, reassure her that he would treat her right, that they would love each other, raise kids and grow old together. And she would tell him about herself and how she was looking forward to being with him, looking forward to living in Shepp, giving him sons. But he couldn’t say these things with the others here in the carriage.

  “You look beautiful,” he said instead.

  “Thanks.” She smiled too much. “It’s so warm.”

  “Is it?” The red lipstick smear cheapened her. Jimbo reminded himself to wipe it off before they stepped out into the crowd.

  Awkward silence enveloped the carriage again. The clacking of tracks. Dave slurping on his beer.

  Why doesn’t she fucken talk? Jimbo looked out the window, watching the cracked earth and burnt eucalypts roll by. “You’ll like ma mum, she’s real nice.”

  Kylie’s glazed brown eyes stared through him. Her head rocked with the rhythm of the train. Smiling to herself.

  “Sure,” her voice distant, lost in syrup. “That’s okay.”

  Jimbo looked to Dave for support. Dave raised his eyebrows, shrugged then raised his beer. Jimbo returned the salute and took a swig of warm flat lager. He stole a glance at her hands folded in her lap. A little too big, those hands. She’s no Niki. Still, she’ll do.

  ~ * ~

  As the train pulled into Shepp Station, one of the Cartel men placed his finger on Kylie’s forearm. She flinched. A droplet of blood oozed to the surface of her skin. The Cartel man wiped it away, leaving a shiny patch.

  “Blood levels are okay,” he said to the other Cartel. He produced a vial and sprayed something into her nostrils.

  Kylie sat up straight. Her lips parted in a huge smile. The Cartel man wiped the lipstick from her teeth. She stood. The Cartel man adjusted her dress and pulled the veil down over her face. Another Cartel man offered her a bouquet of flowers. Dave grabbed the champagne from the chiller and gave it a shake before he unwound the stopper, keeping pressure on the cork as he did so.

  The steel doors ground open. Hot air swarmed into the carriage. Sweat dripped from Jimbo’s armpits, trickling down his sides. His neck felt damp, sticky, the suit too tight, suddenly constricting.

  Kylie held out her arm, and he took it. Dave stepped into the light and the crowd roared. The cork popped and champagne spurted into the air and Dave strode out, laughing, spraying the bottle over the people lining the edge of the red carpet.

  Jimbo stretched a smile across his face, his gut churning, and stepped out with his new wife on his arm.

  ~ * ~

  The band belted out the old classic ‘What About Me?’ and the dance floor heaved. Sweat had already formed on the ceiling of The Aussie and it wouldn’t be long before it started to rain.

  “I thought the old man would have at least made it down to the do, Mum.”

  Mel hugged her son and kissed him on the cheek, her own flushed with cheap red wine. “He’s not well, James, and today, well, today is your day, not his.”

  “Still -”

  “He’ll be up waiting when we get home.” Mel squeezed his arm. “Look, Kylie’s back from the ladies. Now I’ll get a chance to have a real chat with her.”

  Jimbo took another slug of bourbon, watching his mother limp over to the bridal table as Kylie sat next to Aunty Lana, her face pale.

  Keats sauntered up, jabbing his fist playfully into Jimbo’s ribs. His head was shaved clean and shiny, the scar bulging like a dead vein across the scalp. “Hey, Jimbo! Good party, mate.”

  “Hey, Keats.”

  “Tidy, mate. Thumbs up from the boys.” Keats tipped his bottle towards the bridal table. “She having a bit of cry like Brian’s missus did?”

  “Yeah, I think so. She’s just a bit overwhelmed is all.”

  “Probably coming down.”

  “Eh?”

  “Yeah.” Keats nodded. “She’s been on a high all day. Hey, have you heard?”

  “What, you scored a job with the Cartel now?”

  Keats laughed, and drained his stubbie. “Soon, Jimbo, soon. But yeah nah, Brian’s missus is up the duff.”

  Jimbo followed Keats’ unsteady arm. Against the far wall sat Belle with a couple of the other ladies. She wasn’t saying much, but the other two’s mouths were flapping like flags in a storm.

  “She don’t look it.”

  “Early days, mate, she’ll start to show. Who’d have thought, eh?”

  On the dance floor, Brian jumped and jostled with the other guys, throwing his head back and forth to the beat. Keats laughed again. “She won’t be doing any a that anymore either.”

  Jimbo stared at Keats, then Brian. He turned towards Belle, sitting on the chair. “No! He did her?”

  “Yep. Day after ya left. Knew he’d fucken have to. Right lively bitch, that Belle.”

  Jimbo drained the bourbon and Keats went to get him another. Brian, grinning like a madman, throwing himself around, covered in sweat. He fucken told me he’d never do that. Well, fuck me, things have changed.

  The long dress Belle wore had hitched a little too high as she sat. Jimbo thought he could make out a bandage around Belle’s ankle. And pregnant too. That was fucken quick work.

  The dance floor heaved again as the band hit the chorus, everyone screaming: “I’ve had enough, now I want my share!”

  ~ * ~

  Uncle Frank drove the horses as they pulled the Ford Commodore back to the house. The old man had polished it up good, and the seats had been reupholstered, leaving the car with a healthy clean leather smell. Jimbo sat in the back with one arm around Kylie and the other around his mother. Kylie hadn’t spoken for the last hour but at least she’d stopped crying.

  “Have a good night, Mum?”

  Mel hugged him tight. “Lovely evening, James.”

  They climbed from the carriage and Jimbo swept Kylie off her feet. She clung to his neck, deadweight and trembling.

  “Co
me by when you can, Jimmy.” Uncle Frank detached the horses from the car.

  Jimbo nodded, trying not to think of Niki, as he adjusted Kylie’s weight in his arms. “I didn’t get to see her, Uncle Frank.”

  “Yeah, well.” Frank swung himself up onto one of the horses. “Ya can still come by. Say gidday to your old man.”

  He reined away on a clatter of hooves, before he’d barely finished speaking.

  Mel held the door open as Jimbo manoeuvred himself and Kylie through. One too many bourbons to be doing this. He bumped her arm on the doorframe but she didn’t say anything. “Oops.”

  The light emanating from the old man’s room was soft, like he’d fallen asleep in front of the screen again. The air, as usual, was hot and musty.

  “Hey, Dad, got someone I want you to meet!” Jimbo staggered through the kitchen towards the light, with Kylie in his arms. “You better smile for him,” he whispered in her ear.

  The Old Man, wearing his best suit, sprawled in his chair, a half-empty bottle of beer on the table next to him. On the screen shone an old photo of Niki in her school uniform, knee-high white socks with a blue skirt and matching button-up shirt. The first day of school.

  “Dad, this is Kylie, ma wife.” Then in a harsh whisper, “You better be fucken smiling.”

  His mother turned on the light.

  “Dad?” Christ, I’m too pissed and she’s too fucken heavy. “Stop snoring and wake up, ya old bastard.”

  But his old man wasn’t snoring. The glass he’d been drinking from lay upturned in his lap, the spilled beer already dry on his good trousers. He wasn’t even breathing.

  Next to the bottle on the table, rested a long wooden box. Jimbo knew what lay in that box. His father’s heirloom knife, honed sharp and thin, passed to him from his father and his father before him. His wedding gift.

  “We’ll deal with this tomorrow,” said his mother. “There’s room in the deep freeze for now.”

  ~ * ~

  Jimbo closed the lid of the deep freeze then put the wheelbarrow back in the shed. A storm of confusion wound through his insides, beating against his heart, threatening to break inside his head.

  Inside, his mother sat in the lounge sipping a glass of sherry. She looked calm. “I didn’t hate him all the time.”

  Jimbo felt numb, all emotion drained when his mother smiled. He didn’t know what to feel, or if he should feel anything at all.

  “Neither did I,” he managed to croak in a broken, small boy’s voice. His eyes welled and he swallowed hard, trying to control himself.

  “I’ve made up our bed with fresh sheets. It’s your room now. Kylie’s asleep.” Mel patted her knees. “Come here, James.”

  He huddled on the floor and hugged her knees. She wound her fingers through his hair, massaging gently.

  “You be kind to her, James. She’s been through a lot, more than you’ll ever know.”

  “I will, Mum.”

  “Men say that with every good intention. Your father said it to me before ...”

  Her fingers tensed in his hair, briefly, ever so briefly, then resumed their massaging.

  “Before what, Mum?”

  “Before he ... consummated our wedding night.”

  “Aw, Mum, I don’t wanna hear about you and Dad doing it.”

  “Doing what, James? What is it that you think we were doing?”

  “Ya know, sex.” But deep down, buried in that pit he called a heart, Jimbo knew that wasn’t exactly true. His father’s wooden box sat on the table next to his father’s empty chair.

  “Sex.” His mother gave a bitter laugh. “At first I hated him for that. Men are easily controlled by sex, James. Women learn to use it as a weapon against them to survive. There are worse things than that.”

  Jimbo tensed. He’d never heard his mother talk like this before, but she’d never been out of his father’s oppressive shadow either.

  “Losing the life you knew, the ones you love. I haven’t seen my mother for almost forty years. Did you know that? These things are far worse.” She leant forward and kissed the top of his head. “You’re my son, James, I raised you. Not him. I taught you. Not him.” She leant back, taking another sip of sherry. “Don’t you turn out like him. Don’t you break my heart.”

  Jimbo felt his mother sobbing quietly as he hugged her knees. He realized, then, that he knew very little about her past and who she was, who she had been. And with his new wife asleep in his parents’ bed, his mother’s bed where his father had fucked her incessantly for years, he pushed that realization into the recesses of that raw bottomless pit. That dark place where such realizations were never dwelled upon. And never faced.

  His mother had stopped crying. “Go to bed, James. Be kind to that girl. Don’t... don’t do anything to hurt her. Treat her with love as I love you.”

  He left his mother in the chair, staring at the blank screen, and went into his parents’ room. In the shadows, Kylie lay curled and tight against the far edge of his mother’s side of the bed. Her perfume lingered in the room, though it did little to conceal the last years of his father’s decaying sweat.

  They’d ask him tomorrow how it went. Keat’s leering face. Dave grinning and clutching his crotch. Brian eager to compare notes. Jimbo sat in his mother’s rocking chair, the same chair she had sat in all those month’s ago when he’d come into the room with the pillow, intent on putting them all out of their misery. The same chair she would have nursed him in as a babe.

  Kylie’s breath rose and fell, sometimes fluttering, sometimes ragged. Occasionally she’d cry out in her sleep, limbs flailing, before curling tight again into her protective ball.

  How had it come to this? This is ma fucken wedding night! I’m supposed to be fu ... supposed to ...

  But he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing, so Jimbo rocked away the dark in his mother’s chair, as the numbness consumed him. Eventually, he succumbed to a dead sleep before the sun lurched from the horizon and burned another dawn.

  ~ * ~

  They held the funeral three days later out at the cemetery on Old Dookie Hill.

  Jimbo was surprised to see the turn out; maybe two hundred people had made the half-hour ride out in the morning heat. Horses had been tethered near the cemetery gates, next to the bicycle racks, and some of the younger boys were filling the troughs from the bore.

  The old Ford Commodore had been used as the hearse, again with Frank at the reins. Grandpa White was complaining about the heat and the ride and the lack of bourbon in his glass. He sat with Nan, comfy in their wheelchairs in the shade of the eucalypts, Mel and Kylie at their side. Jimbo wasn’t sure Grandpa knew they were burying his eldest son, or maybe he did, but just didn’t give a fuck.

  Aunty Joan came back from Cranky McNabb’s stall with more bourbon for Grandpa and a gin for Nan. Jimbo’s cousin Rhys had told him that Cam didn’t pay for Joan, that they had chosen each other. The Old Man had said it was because Cam had gotten himself a half a chink, and that back then no-one in their right mind would pay for one. Cam put his arm around his wife, and she slipped her arm around his waist and hugged him. Joan didn’t limp, like the others. But that don’t mean nothing. Chinks are more obedient, everyone knows that.

  Still, watching them arm in arm, something Jimbo couldn’t remember his folks doing in public for years, they sure looked happy in each other’s company. Aunty Lana stood with her gangly sons.

  “Thought Niki might a turned up,” said Jimbo to Rhys.

  “Don’t hardly hear from her these days,” said Rhys. “Selfish bitch didn’t even reply to the message Dad sent about Uncle Phil passing n that. Stopped sending money home too. She can go n get fucked.”

  “Yeah, fuck her.” Something rose from that dark pit buried in Jimbo’s heart, that maybe she wasn’t in the City anymore, that maybe ... like the month-tripper Keira on the train, that ... but he squashed it down again before it surfaced. Then nailed it fucken closed.

  Frank, Cam, Rhys and Jimbo, t
he eldest men in the family not counting Grandpa, lowered the coffin into the dry earth. The rope burned Jimbo’s sweaty palms, but he held on, releasing the rope one hand at a time, until the coffin rested on the grave floor.

  Cranky said a few words before they filled the hole with dirt. What those words were, Jimbo didn’t have a clue. He was lost in Aunty Lana’s soft crying, lost that his mother wasn’t. By the time they’d finished, Jimbo had managed to smear dirt across his forehead and over his sweat-soaked shirt. Galahs squawked noisily from the trees, ready to pounce on any food left unguarded.