σ ‘Come on, you either did it with him or you didn’t,’ I hear you say to me. ‘I won’t tell,’ you mock whisper and nudge me in the ribs.
ϕ Sometimes just the sensation is enough to let you know you are still alive. Without the act.
Distance runners
We have been given tickets to an athletics competition. World stars have come to Japan and we sit in plastic moulded seats attached to a long steel bar watching as the competitors run and throw and leap on the field below us. The sun is strong and we are very high in the stand. Below us, the field lies in the bottom of the bowl created by the stands. The surface of the field is dull red, painted with white lines. Circles within circles, long tracks of lines, tiny triangles. Like writing we can’t understand.
Tom hands me the binoculars. I know I am supposed to be looking at the other end of the field, but I focus the binoculars on the faces of the competitors nearest us. There is a long jump below where we sit. Competitors are sitting and stretching on the red surface. They are frowning with concentration, moving their lips in some mantra, focusing all their thought and mind on this one task. One girl has bandages taped tightly around her left calf. A cheer goes up and the girl in my sights lifts her head like a wolf sniffing the wind.
‘Did you see that jump?’ Tom laughs. ‘Amazing.’ He puts his hand on my thigh and squeezes, then looks down and frowns, just like the competitors on the field.
‘You’re getting thin,’ he says as though he is talking to himself.
‘I’m going to get a lot thinner,’ I answer.
Tom swings his head away from me and breathes in deeply through his nose. I go back to watching the field. Around the outside of the field is the running track with its white lines to designate running lanes. In the sprints, the runners run inside their defined lane. But the long distance runners are different. The distance runners start in separate lanes, then race for the inside lane of the track. Later on, when they leave the stadium, they scatter across the road, then bunch up, then scatter again like a flock of birds wheeling around the sky.
‘Where are the marathon runners? Aren’t they supposed to be finishing now?’ I ask Tom.
He shrugs. He glances down at my thigh occasionally as if he is still shocked by what he has seen. My thin thighs. My bony knees. My wrists like swollen wooden joints. Sometimes I can hear my heart beating against my ribs, knocking up against the cage like an unhinged door in the wind. Tom puts his arm around me and cups my left shoulder with his hand. I sense him exploring bone structure, gently tracing the knobby bones through my fragile skin and flesh.
‘I see them,’ I tell him.
The runners have appeared on the big screen at the other end of the stadium. They’re turning off the road and heading into the tunnel that leads to the stadium. Soon they appear at the mouth of the tunnel. Their thin bodies are strained and the sinews and muscles flex and tremble with each step. Their faces are haggard. Three men stagger along the track, heading for the finish line. Two are close together and the third man is making a heroic effort so that by the time they reach the hundred-metre mark they are three abreast.
Tom gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, then lets go of my shoulder and stands up to watch the distance runners through the binoculars. His armpits are soaked with sweat, even though he is only a spectator. I look around, take in the scene, mark this point in time as another moment that I will be sure to remember.ο
ο I once heard a marathon runner talking about how he stayed the distance. He said he studied the route and made marker points for himself. This place or statue or checkpoint meant he had got so far, had so far left to go. He buoyed himself up with checks on his own physical state. Legs aching but no cramps. Not dehydrated. I can imagine you asking me about that. ‘Have you made preparations?’ you would ask me. I might feel like crying then. I might tell you I want to talk it all out. My whole life.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Arts Victoria for a grant giving me time and space to edit these stories, and to the Vermont Studio Center, USA, for a residency where I rediscovered the value of solitude.
My thanks also to Jane Watson, Janet Hutchinson and Jan O’Reilly for their belief and support, and to the friends who read my story drafts–your own writing was as inspiring as your comments.
And to Anna Crago and Rob Cullinan at UQP, thank you for appreciating the short story form and helping to make these stories better.
Many of these stories were first published in a different form in literary magazines. Publishers and editors of literary magazines, big and small, are the champions of new Australian writing. They have my admiration and respect.
‘Inheritance’ was published in Westerly; ‘Save Our School’ (as ‘Like the World’s an Armchair’) in Sleepers’ Almanac 2006 (Sleepers Publishing) and Best Australian Stories 2006 (Black Inc); ‘My Mother-in-law in the Family Tree’ (winner Glen Eira My Brother Jack National Short Story Competition) in Meanjin and Behind the Front Fence (Five Mile Press); ‘The End of the World’ (as ‘The Roadtrain of Love’) in Ulitarra and On the Edge (Five Mile Press); ‘Armadillo’ (winner Society of Women Writers NSW National Short Story Award) in Southerly; ‘FutureGirl®’ (winner Greater Dandenong Short Story Competition) in Del Sol Review (USA); ‘The Rules of Fishing’ in Picador New Writing 3 (Pan Macmillan); ‘Snapshots of Strangers’ (winner The Age Short Story Competition) in The Age and Secret Lives (Five Mile Press); ‘The Wrestlers’ (as ‘Second Skin’) in Imago; ‘Women’s Trouble’ in Meanjin; ‘Inches Apart’ in Southerly; ‘Glass Heart’ in Redoubt; ‘Fluid’ in Canberra University Monitor; ‘Distance Runner’ (winner, Judah Waten National Short Story Competition) in Space: New Writing (Whitmore Press) and Best Australian Stories 2004 (Black Inc).
Other short-story collections from UQP
COLLECTED STORIES
Olga Masters
In the brief four years between the publication of her first volume of short stories and her death in 1986, Olga Masters was celebrated as one of Australia’s most powerful and original writers. She won a National Book Council award and was shortlisted for another, and was published in the United States, France and Italy. She wrote two novels and three collections of short stories, the third published posthumously.
Gathered now in one volume are all the stories from The Home Girls and A Long Time Dying and those she had completed for The Rose Fancier; tough, honest stories that portray rural and suburban life with compassion and unsparing observation.
‘Masters can be both tender and funny, and always there is absolute authenticity of detail, a strong sense of time and place, an effortless depiction of personality.’
Judges’ Report, NBC Awards
‘She had a wonderful, unsentimental eye for the little ironies, tensions and even cruelties of household, and a beautifully spare, concise way of expressing them.’
Sun Herald
‘One of the best writers of fiction in Australia.’
The Bulletin
ISBN 978 0 7022 2883 4
COLLECTED STORIES
Thea Astley
Thea Astley’s stories capture the lushness and cruelty of the Queensland landscape with its rich wet smells and weird cast of characters. She exposes pretension and exploitation with an acid wit and comic flair, and has won worldwide acclaim for her writing. This selection of stories spans more than thirty years and includes many not previously collected, along with well-known pieces from Hunting the Wild Pineapple and It’s Raining in Mango, which won the inaugural Steele Rudd Award for the best short-story collection.
‘Luxuriant, prolific of implications, shifting abruptly from benign or whimsical to malignant, a prose to match the gorgeously treacherous background against which the tales are set.’
World Literature Today
‘The verdant landscape of Queensland and
Astley’s own quirky vision link and inform the diverse stories in Hunting the Wild Pineapple...Flannery O’Connor would have liked them, with their skewed language, oddball characters and deadly humour.’
The New York Times Book Review
‘The writing is intensely vivid...It’s the level of invention, of sheer story-telling, that’s thrilling...There’s a savage wit here; an amused, acerbic cynicism, but also an engaged humanity.’
Sydney Morning Herald
ISBN 978 0 7022 2951 0
COLLECTED STORIES
Janette Turner Hospital
This collection brings together in one distinguished volume a range of stories written over twenty-five years by this internationally acclaimed author.
Janette Turner Hospital’s sensuous prose reveals the inner lives of a fascinating gallery of characters caught between cultures. Some cross borders of class, gender and race, dislocated in unfamiliar and unpredictable physical worlds; others cross borders between the past and the present, blurring memory and perception in moments of crisis and illumination.
‘Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength – ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story.’
Fay Weldon
‘The best of her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected centre of calm.’
Los Angeles Times Book Review
‘One of the most elegant prose styles in the business.’
The Times
‘Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation
...stories develop like poems or meditations.’
New York Times Book Review
ISBN 978 0 7022 3240 4
VINCENZO’S GARDEN
John Clanchy
Winner of the Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award for
Short Stories
From the celebrated Australian short-story writer and novelist John Clanchy comes a brilliant collection of prize-winning short stories. The diverse and captivating tales are testimony to Clanchy’s mastery of voices and talent for story telling.
His characters are often at a crossroads in their lives. A husband in the midst of a terrifying, yet occasionally comic, wrestle for his sanity fights a losing battle to save his marriage. A girl steps out of her own portrait to recount the death of the famous artist who painted her. A doctor, driving late on a country road, runs down a woman and is forced to devise his own punishment. And, in the title story, a fragile woman and her beautiful daughter struggle to find love and understanding after decades of conflict.
With reversals and surprises around every corner, these stories are often humorous, frequently challenging, and always entertaining.
‘Its seven stories are all written in the laconic, reticent style that Clanchy has made his own...they are accomplished stories by a skilful and experienced writer.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘One of those rare, outstanding pieces of writing that will stay with me for many years to come.’
Good Reading
ISBN 978 0 7022 3515 3
The End of the World Page 15