The Best Australian Stories 2012 Read online

  Everywhere he is surrounded by the rustling of banana leaves. The boy has lost him. Then from the corner of his eye he catches a glimpse of white. It is the boy’s sleeve. The boy is hiding, crouched down beside a tree with the rifle in his hands. He feels a bolt of excitement slide through his gut. His steps are silent and deliberate. The ground holds beneath his feet. He makes it to within arm’s length of the boy before the boy turns, and by the time the boy stands up, he is there, with his hand bunched in the boy’s shirt, his fist moving like a sledgehammer into the boy’s face. Even he is surprised by the violence of it. He feels the boy’s nose mash under his knuckles.

  The boy holds one hand up to his nose. Blood is rivering down his face.

  Hey, the boy says thickly. Hey. What I done.

  What the fuck are you doing here, he says.

  The boy stares at him defiantly. You fucken crazy. He spits and it is bloody. I done nothing.

  When he lifts his arm to hit the boy again, the boy is ready and smashes the butt of the rifle down on his head. The pain is huge, as though his skull has split. He drops to his knees.

  Crazy old fucker, you, the boy says, softly this time. Crazy old fuck.

  *

  When he opens his eyes again, leaves are swinging sickeningly overhead. It is still light. He gets his arm around a tree trunk and hauls himself up. White starbursts scatter like buckshot across his temples. His head is throbbing, great stabbing pains that come in a dizzying rhythm.

  He lurches through the corridors of leaves. Everything is keeling and pitching around him.

  Bully, he yells. His voice comes out muffled, like a piano on soft pedal. Bully.

  When he staggers back to the house he finds her lying by the back stairs in the grass. She is breathing.

  He collapses beside her and concentrates on his own breathing. He lifts one hand up and feels a wet patch on the crown of his head. The blood is sticky and dark as motor oil. Bully makes a faint whimpering noise when he touches her flank, and he sees his blood drying as brown ridges in her coat.

  A few years ago he would have driven Bully to the vet in town and had her leg looked at, but that is no longer possible. He cannot imagine what would happen if he walked into the vet’s now with his head split open and Bully in pain. He has come to accept that he is a pariah, that no one will help him or his dog.

  He uses the railing to pull himself to his feet and carries Bully into the house. She is heavy, much heavier than he expected. Her body is unbearably soft. He lays her down into the bathtub, then goes to the kitchen. He takes three aspirin for his own head, which is thundering, and brings back scissors, an old rag, and the bottle of whisky.

  Once he has undone the boy’s shabby tourniquet and shaved her leg, the two entry points are there, clear as day. Snake bite. He washes the bite and dried blood off with soap and rewraps her leg tightly with the rag, just above the joint. Her breathing is shallow but quiet enough.

  At times like these he feels as if he is impossibly far from the place he grew up, so far away that he is clinging to the edge of things. That is why people come this far north. To disappear, to be swallowed up. And he is being wiped out, he is being swallowed up. He is vanishing day by day in this place.

  He carries her to the sofa and sits beside her. Bully is old, he does not know how old exactly, but even if the bite is not badly venomous it may still finish her off. He strokes her head. He cannot do anything to bring Jean back or undo what he did to the girl by the creek. He cannot even take care of Bully. His life has come to this.

  *

  In the middle of the night he wakes in sweat and kicks off the blanket. There is a disorienting sound all around him, a patter like a car engine ticking over. Rain. He reaches over. Bully is breathing.

  He lies in the dark and watches the shadows on the walls. Follows the shape of the chair, the lamp, the open wardrobe door, the whole negative world. It is a trick his mother taught him as a child. On his back, he would first hold his hand in front of his face until he could make out its edges, then his arm, then the rest of the room would materialise from the itching velvet.

  The rain is bucketing down now on the iron roof. He imagines the boy down in the shed, holed up in the darkness like a rabbit. He shouldn’t have hit the boy, but he cannot change that now. Whatever the boy has done, whatever brought him here, the boy still did the right thing for Bully. He has managed to make the boy hate him in spite of that.

  He sinks down further into the dark and closes his eyes. All he can remember of the girl is the faint smell of cold cream on her neck, the way pain changed her face, pulled it sideways. There is no point in going over it. He took what he took and would take it again. This is the one true thing he knows. If he could go back it would all still end here, this room, this bed with its wool blanket, the small house leafed in by plantation, this seedless fringe of green that could be left wild for a thousand years and still would not multiply.

  Perhaps he will wake up in the morning to find the boy gone. But if the boy is not gone, tomorrow he will get up early and take some canned fruit and potted meat down to the shed.

  There can be no fixing what he has done to the girl, to Jean. But he will keep an eye out for the boy. It strikes him that he is the only one who knows where the boy is, who knows that the boy is alive at all. And in return, the boy is evidence that he himself exists. They will watch each other. It is the right thing.

  Ringroad

  Alex Miller

  Now that the time for such a visit is already in the past, it seems that I really am going to visit Vienna at last and will be able to walk around the Ringroad as my hero, Sigmund Freud, once did every morning for his constitutional. Richard talked me into the trip. He was so pressing and insistent that despite my reluctance to commit myself to such a journey I had no alternative in the end but to tell him I would go. I was afraid he would be ill if I resisted him any longer. ‘Be sure you do go,’ he said as he turned to leave my office. ‘I want to see the ticket.’ I have been putting off a visit to Vienna for thirteen years and I had no substantial reasons left to offer him for not going. In three years I shall retire. I shall go alone of course. I have lived alone since Annabelle left me nearly seven years ago. After my wife left me I made several unsuccessful attempts to form new relationships with women. But there were too many difficulties. So to settle the problem of sex once and for all, last year I decided I would remain celibate. It has not been as difficult as I had thought it was going to be. Indeed it has been easier than giving up smoking, which is something I managed to do more than twenty years ago. In getting rid of my beloved Dunhill pipe and throwing out my last packet of fragrant Erinmore I suffered greatly and still consider giving up smoking to have been the one truly heroic renunciation of my life. And I’m not a young man. I’m in my fifty-seventh year and have had time and opportunity for heroism. It was Annabelle, my wife, who made me give it up. She disliked the smell of it so much that she began to find me repulsive. It was either my wife or my pipe. I struggled for quite a while to resolve this dilemma, but in the end I had to decide for Annabelle and against the Dunhill. No more sitting alone in my study reading and puffing away on my pipe. The brief affair I indulged in with one of my honours students following this act of self-deprivation, the event indeed that triggered my wife’s abrupt departure from our home, ended by causing me a great deal of grief and unpleasantness in addition to the long-term suffering associated with the loss of my wife, Annabelle, whom I loved and whom I still love and believe I shall always love.

  After Annabelle disappeared into the hinterland of North Queensland with an Aboriginal stockman – an unlikely story but true nevertheless – I decided my life would be easier if I dispensed entirely with the problem of women and sex. Beginning new relationships is complicated and difficult for a man of my age. I know that Simone de Beauvoir has assured us that men’s bodies don’t
matter and that women don’t make love to men for their physique. But I’m not sure that I’m convinced by Beauvoir. I am, to be perfectly frank, rather overweight and am sensitive about my appearance. I know I do not repel women and from time to time one of them will even demonstrate an eagerness to get to know me. I have never made the first move in any relationship, whether with a man or a woman. In fact I find it difficult to respond even when a friendly overture is made towards me. The desire to have friends and lovers is not lacking. It is just that the reality is always so much more complicated and difficult than one had ever imagined it might be as one lay in one’s bed alone in the middle of the night dreaming of a companionable companion. The truth is, I would never have married Annabelle or had the affair that ended my marriage if both women had not been as insistent as they were.

  It is difficult for me to imagine anyone finding me attractive. I’m six foot three in the old measure. I don’t know what that is in centimetres. I have narrow and rather rounded shoulders. Some might say that this is from all the years of poring over books, but the truth is I’ve always had narrow rounded shoulders. I had them in primary school. I think I was born with them. From the outside looking on, that was me. I also have very thin legs and a rather distinctive manner of walking. My distinctive manner of walking began when I was thirteen and was in my first year at a new secondary school. During that year I grew almost twelve inches and became a stranger to myself. I ceased, during that year, to be the person I had always been. In order to compensate for my immense height and in an attempt to return to my old familiar self, I began to effect a crouch and to develop an extra long stride. I’m sure that ergonomic engineers have tabulated the optimum stride length for a given height or length of leg and that this optimum is usually arrived at unconsciously by the normal walker. I set out to override the unconscious optimum and to exceed it in order to bring myself down a little. The unforeseen result of the combined crouch and longer stride was that as I walked I bobbed up and down, as if I were running on the spot in neck-deep water, or was imitating an English comedian whose name I can’t at this moment recall. I also developed a fixed stare, which was no doubt due to the concentration required from me to override the natural and unconscious rhythm of my body. My parents were already sensitive to the fact that I had suddenly become six inches taller than they, and were so alarmed by my new way of walking, the purpose of which I had not thought to explain to them, that I abandoned the slight crouch almost at once. I have, however, retained the lengthened stride to this day and it would probably require many probing sessions of psychoanalytic therapy for me to recover my repressed optimum stride length. But would it be worth it at my age? I do wonder, however, if this determined repression of my own normal walking style may not have had other effects on my personality of which I have remained unaware. But the intention in writing this autobiographical account is to tell the strange story of my visit to Vienna, and is not to assemble ideas about my attractiveness or lack of it for the opposite sex, or indeed for my own sex, or how it is that I walk in a way that draws upon me the curious stares of complete strangers and the ridicule of young students, who imitate me, some with such virtuosity that I have once or twice over the years imagined I saw my companion-self bobbing along ahead of me through the cloisters.

  I didn’t play sports when I was a boy and have always felt this to have been the cause of a certain weakness in my character. I have a considerable stomach. I struggle to control it. It varies in size as the struggle varies in intensity, larger as my morale sinks and I abandon the attack and smaller as I gather my resolve and assert the firm discipline of a new campaign. I believe my stomach is with me, however, for good now and will be buried with me when I go. Although I would never admit as much even to my closest acquaintance, since Annabelle’s departure, my stomach has become a substitute for the friend and companion of my bed. I caress it when I am lying alone at night under the sheets and I often find myself confiding little confidences to it as one would to an intimate. My standing silhouette resembles rather the silhouette of that great Frenchman, General de Gaulle. I don’t believe I need be ashamed of this.

  When I decided on celibacy, as a precaution I told my students it was a principle of mine never to make friends with students. So as to preserve my objectivity in the matter of marks, I said, for how could one bring oneself to give a poor mark, no matter how deserved, to a dear friend? Or, and I did not add this, a lover. But of course when you are faced with a group of ten or twelve fresh new honours students at the beginning of the year, some of whom are young women with golden skin and who gaze at you as if they are already in love with you, to renounce the possibility, the dream and illusion even, of friendship is by no means an easy thing to do with conviction. I will say however that I managed it for seven years. As I said, giving up sex has not been as difficult as giving up smoking. As the reasons for this are not obvious I shall go into them in some detail later. For now I must cut to the chase, as Richard always says.

  Richard is the dean of our faculty. He is a decent, honourable man and not at all like deans usually are. He likes to read and even to write and was much happier as a professor, but he allowed himself to be talked into the promotion. So now he has become an administrator and no longer has time for reading or writing and this has made him sad. He is one of the new managers and it does not suit him. He is deeply alone and unhappy among the accountants and marketing people and pro-vice-chancellors and the other deans. Richard has become spiritually isolated at the prime of his life. I feel sorry for him. But there is nothing I can do to help him. Our situations are so very different that we have lost our old intimacy and we can no longer share a joke without a certain sadness coming over us, a nostalgia for the old days when he was at liberty to laugh at himself.

  It was Richard who convinced me to make the trip to Vienna. Which is, after all, what this story is about; the extraordinary events that unfolded once I reached that distant city. I applied for outside study leave, which with Richard’s support I was certain to be granted, and decided to go. The vehemence of Richard’s argument in persuading me sprang in part at least from his sense that since his promotion he has become a man under sentence of death. He sees nothing good now between himself and the abyss of nothingness that awaits us all and he does not want his old friend to share such a sad fate. Richard is a man without illusions. And without illusions to comfort him in his lonely hours he is naked and alone. Our illusions, after all, are our most precious possessions and make the sense of happiness a possibility for us. Illusions, indeed, are surely half the meaning of human existence. I’m not sure what the other half is. But whenever I hear a fundamentalist anti-religious person speaking with contempt of those who hold to the illusion of faith it is the fundamentalist for whom I feel some compassion. To have reached maturity in life and to have not understood that our illusions are the treasure house of the imagination is a sad fate. For many years when I was a student of English literature and a devout reader of the volumes of The Cambridge History of English Literature I thought Caroline Divines was a woman author and I looked for her work in vain.

  I should explain that I’ve been writing a biography for a number of years. Far too long. I hardly dare commit the number of years to paper, but it is in fact almost thirteen years since I began to research the life of John Robinson of Norwich and there is still no sign of a book. The old contract I had with the university press is years out of date, the publisher at the press has changed due to the death of the dear fellow who signed me up, and the research grants I once had are used up and accounted for long ago. Ten years ago at our university my discipline was subsumed into something called Cultural Studies. Now Cultural Studies is itself about to be subsumed into something else that does not even have a name yet. It’s rather like the old American folk song in which an old woman swallows a spider to catch a fly which she has already swallowed, and so on, until at last she swallows a horse, and ends with the line, She’s d
ead – of course!

  From an unfinished fragment of memoir found among the effects of the writer after his death.

  Sidney

  Emma Schwarcz

  He stares at the fruit compote. A small mound of apples and pears and sultanas, or at least that’s what he assumes – the fruit is so far gone it could be anything now, boiled down to nothing specific. A little note sits beside it on the kitchen bench: ‘Sidney, this is for after your lunch.’

  He flips the note over, but there is nothing further. And lunch itself? He looks around the cupboards, peering past mugs and bowls and special silverware. A puddle of Ant-Rid has crystallised beside the food processor; the wine glasses have been moved to higher ground. He considers the refrigerator. Inside, a raw chicken breast sits next to a head of broccoli. Sidney presses a finger to the cling film: perhaps he’s meant to cook the chicken himself? Paula usually leaves him a sandwich, when she leaves him at all – for the hairdresser or to pick up groceries, never for longer than an hour. It’s always something vegetative on rye: lettuce or cucumber, or tomato, which she keeps separate so the bread doesn’t soak, or that green muck he swears he’s told her he doesn’t appreciate, what’s it called again? Japanese-sounding. Starts with ‘o.’ He strains for a moment and then returns to the fridge. He’ll have to cook the chicken then, if he can just find the frypan.

  The pan is on the heat when it comes to him – avocado! – a sudden flare in the dark. Fetid stuff, though his daughters all goad him to try it; health-obsessed, their generation. It’s a ‘superfood,’ they say, full of antioxidants and good fat (whatever that is): just like a vitamin, but tasty. Personally, he’d rather take vitamins, which he does, each morning, along with some other medication the doctors have prescribed. He stops short. Has he taken them today? He walks back to the bedroom and finds the blister pack from the pharmacist – so clever these days, the way they allocate the pills to the right date, like an advent calendar for the aged. Except instead of small chocolates there are about eight pills of varying shapes and sizes, one of which lodges in his throat each morning and seems to leave an imprint that scratches for the rest of the day. Tablets shouldn’t come so large and unwieldy, he thinks, not when there are electric windows in cars.