The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 6

  He looks at the last day’s dose and wavers. Wednesday. Is that today or tomorrow? Could just as well be either, the days having long since lost their markers. Retirement has had that effect on them; they jiggled around in your pockets, rubbing against one another until the edges and markings were worn down and what was left were only seven shining nubs, roundly polished to obscurity.

  The paper! He clicks his fingers and grabs the pills. The paper will tell him whether it is Tuesday or Wednesday. He feels a rush of pride at this sudden onset of lateral thinking. It isn’t all beyond him.

  On his way back to the kitchen, he notices another sign, this one posted to the study door. ‘DO NOT ENTER.’ He frowns. Is this note for him? Surely not. He considers the room’s contents – mostly books and old photo albums, nothing top secret, certainly nothing to warrant a note of this authority. It is still his house, still his years of mechanical engineering and nimble stock shifts that allow them its shelter. The study is technically Paula’s, given over once the girls were married and Paula discovered a need for hobbies. Reading didn’t seem like much of a hobby to Sidney back then – golf or checkers were hobbies – but other women of Paula’s age seemed to disagree, and she left him bi-weekly to discuss the latest fictions. She had a lot more time back then and the books started to gather in small stacks along the shelves until there was nowhere for them to go but the floor. The towers of books unsettle Sidney now, with his higher centre of gravity and propensity to topple things. He doesn’t generally have cause to enter the room, which is a relief, though he’s noticed of late that Paula also avoids it. Perhaps he should encourage her to return to the book club? He can handle a night alone.

  An acrid smell reaches him and he is pulled back towards the kitchen, where someone has left a chicken breast to burn.

  He fans the smoke away from his face as he reaches for the gas knob. The place smells like one of those corner shops that have popped up in recent years, manned by Mediterraneans. He looks for a way to activate the exhaust fan but the damn thing is new and its switches are hidden. He opens the windows and doors instead and catches the eye of their neighbour, Mrs … He stops, panicked. Mrs … The name won’t come. She smiles through the window and waves, but he is fumbling along the sink, knocking over detergent bottles and clean cutlery. He knows her, has lived next door for years. The details of their lives laid bare by the construction of their houses – ill-conceived – which aligns their windows like primary school kids on excursion: side by side, hand in hand, buddies for the duration. He tries to relax. If he places it in a full sentence, sometimes that’s enough to unstick the cogs. ‘Her name is Mrs …’ He bangs the counter. Starts again. ‘You know, I went next door the other day and bumped into Mr and Mrs …’

  He really focuses, sends the messengers off down the eroded pathways, again and again and again, but they fall short of their goals and instead idle on the side somewhere or hit unexpected culs-de-sac. He spends so long trying to retrieve it that when he looks up at the window across the way – now empty – he realises that he’s lost sight of what he was seeking and it’s time for lunch anyway.

  After a brief search of the kitchen, Sidney decides the only option is the chicken. It’s burnt through on one side but at least it’s cooked, which he’s heard is imperative when it comes to poultry. He scrapes some of the charcoal into the sink and sits down to his meal. It sticks in his mouth it’s so dry, any moisture just a concept at this stage, not at all like Paula usually makes. He rummages through the cupboard for some tomato sauce but finds only a pot of tomato paste, which he assumes can’t be too dissimilar. He is wrong.

  ‘What on earth?’ He reaches for some water, wishes the whole lot gone from his mouth, the whole charred, desiccated, acidic lot. Paula was wrong to leave him. Where the hell is she, anyway? He walks into the hallway to see if her car is in the drive. It’s not, so he turns to the bathroom to see if he can’t rinse this atrocity from his tastebuds. He sees a sign on the study door and, confused, decides to inspect further. Paula generally looks out for him, but nothing should be off-limits in this house – everything shared, everything known – isn’t that what a marriage is?

  He opens the door and switches the light on, but instead of the literary turrets he’s come to expect, there’s a large zippered bag – gigantic, really – hanging from a coat-hook against the wall. He squints. It looks like a Christmas tree it’s so big, so A-line, but you don’t usually zip Christmas trees up in body bags, he thinks, so chances are it’s something else. Could it be a body? he thinks, for an exhilarating moment. It certainly looks like the bags he sees on those police dramas Paula watches. He checks himself. He lives with his wife of fifty-six years in a quiet suburb mostly populated by retirees. Logic dictates it’s neither a Christmas tree nor a murder victim and, as he’s exhausted his sole possibilities, the only option left for him is to unzip the thing and stand back.

  ‘Good God!’ The cream silk seems to rush at him once the zip’s undone, the ruffles and layers barely contained by the bag. He looks closer, peels back the nylon. There’s lace and a small beaded section and a neckline so reinforced it almost stands upright unaided. A wedding dress? But for whom? He hasn’t been told of a wedding, and if the dress is in his house it must be for someone close. His three daughters are already married – happily, for the most part, but either way they’re not the type to jump ship – and his grandchildren are all too young to consider it, the oldest just out of high school now, about to study medicine. And he’s not about to wear this frippery in any case. Sidney sits down on the floor.

  He has a strange taste in his mouth, which he worries might be the onset of a stroke, but the mystery of the dress keeps him from calling anyone. What if he’s not supposed to know about the wedding? What if he’s being kept at bay because he’s likely to object to it? He presses his toes into the carpet and watches the grain shift and resettle.

  He recalls, for a moment, his daughters’ wedding dresses. The first had gargantuan, bulbous sleeves that kept Sidney at an awkward distance as he walked her up the aisle. The second was sleeveless and elegant; the third dipped so low in front that Sidney was forced to deck a cousin for his comments. This was all aeons ago now, but he could still feel the clutch of their hands on his wrist, their small wobbles as he steadied their pace.

  And to think they’re now staging a wedding behind his back! Who will pay for it, for a start? He played the role of negotiator at the last three functions – chipping fortunes off car hire and catering and flowers that weren’t half as pretty when you knew what they cost you. He’d saved thousands. The girls were lost without him – a wedding without his input would send them all to the poorhouse.

  He paws his way to the back of the dress, feeling blindly past oceans of material for a receipt or tag of some description. Silk, silk, silk – paper! He grabs a hold and pulls it out to the light. As he squints to read it, he notices a patch of red on his thumb – blood? He sniffs, then licks it and is relieved to taste tomato. The relief dissipates. ‘Oh no.’

  He heaves the dress out and there it is – right at the back. Maybe he can replace it? He checks the receipt: $6700. For a dress? A name is scrawled above the figure: ‘Natalie Banks.’ He blinks hard. Little Natalie? But she’s still in school and hasn’t even mentioned a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé. How can her parents allow it? And, more importantly, why has he not been invited? He’s her grandfather – it makes no sense that she should slight him like this. Unless … Perhaps she’s in trouble? He returns to the dress and checks its girth. Tight as a drum; she’d have to be in her first trimester, if at all, to fit in this waistline. He smiles but then notices another spot of red, now on the front.

  He thinks of his granddaughter, of her small white teeth and elegant hands – hands made for music, for piano or violin. He slumps to the floor. Invited or not, he has ruined it. There is no coming back from that.

  Why didn’t
they just tell him? Why all the secrecy? If he’d known, he would have ignored the room with the dress, sat down to watch CNN and tracked fingerprints over his trousers instead. Paula would have come home, tut-tutted and given him a change of clothes, plain and simple, whereas now he’ll be strung up and quartered while they all gather round the soiled dress and cry for its potential.

  He turns away when they cry, which they seem to do more and more. You’d think that as the knee grazes and schoolyard taunts faded into history, so too would the saline, but if anything the tears have increased and from such a well that the promise of ice-cream no longer suffices. In that sense, boys might have been easier; looking at his sons-in-law, however, he thinks that maybe daughters are not half-bad. Yes, it would have been his son-in-law, Peter, who excised Sidney from the celebrations. Always so concerned about what others were thinking, whispering behind a hand that Sidney had odd socks or a piece of omelette in his stubble or shoes that, if you don’t mind me saying, Dad, could use a bit more polish. Well, he does mind and – Sidney freezes. Shoe polish!

  He rushes down the hall and flings open the wardrobe. Paula’s Special Occasion Wear, now lying fallow, takes up most of the space, but somewhere in the underbrush lie his good leather shoes. He’s half inside the cupboard, shoving aside shoeboxes and handbags, when he finds them. He hauls them out into the light for inspection. The old scuff marks are covered; the toe-tips, which have thinned and softened with the years so that there is no rebound to their give, have been polished for the army.

  He sits back on his heels. He tries to remember when he last wore them. Nothing surfaces. He closes his eyes and tries to coax back the occasion – was it a wedding? An anniversary? His birthday? He tries to situate himself in time so he can then work back to the most likely scenario, but nothing is coming to him and it takes so long – too long – that he realises nothing will be coming to him from here on out. His breaths are shallow. The veins in his calves are starting to pulse noticeably from this kneeling position. He runs a thumb over his shoe. Still, they’re polished – that has to be a good sign. He’d need them shined if he’s to go to a wedding, so perhaps it’s a surprise – an uncommon tradition, to be sure, but not outside the realm of possibility.

  He leaves the shoes to attend to the dress, which has not shifted from its ruined slump on the study floor. He stares at it for a moment. He can still save it, if he acts quickly. It’s not too late for him.

  ‘Right.’ He unsheathes the dress from its bag and hoists it over one shoulder, unbalanced momentarily. It’s heavier than he’d expected and with all the layers there’s only one viable option for him. He stumbles down to the ensuite and, blinded by the swathes of silk flying this way and that, almost catapults the thing into the bath.

  The stain looks to be settling in now, with a moat of grease surrounding the original tomato, so he grabs a round of soap – Lavender Fresh – wets it and applies it to the dress, at first tentatively but then briskly, as he’s seen Paula do with the tablecloth and his undergarments. The tomato starts to shift – a step back into the fold! – but then he notices a mauve shadow in its place.

  ‘No. Please no.’ He takes off his shoes and steps into the tub, unhooking the shower nozzle and letting loose the water. His socks are soaked and he slips a little, and he thinks he hears some beading skitter across the enamel. The water gathers in a small pond at the waist, sending little rivulets down the seams, which darken as they’re absorbed. He scrubs at the material, losing control over the nozzle briefly so that it flashes in his face and drips water down his shirtfront. Still he wipes his cheeks dry and goes back to work; he can save this, he can be of use. This new stain can be washed away with the old and he can resume his place on the head table, with his wife, his daughters, his child bride of a granddaughter, and his polished shoes.

  *

  When he is done, he steps out of the tub. He walks away from the bathroom, down the hall to the kitchen, where the compote is waiting. On his way, he hears a key in the front door and Paula’s voice, high and bright.

  He sits down and tries to remember what he was meant to have done with his day, if there was something else he might have achieved. He can hear Paula humming as she puts her things down on the sideboard. He lifts the spoon to his mouth, pushing the puree around his palate with his tongue, the fruit so tame now it meets with no resistance.

  The Big Issue

  Oxtales

  David Astle

  Howqua to Jamieson

  My name is Nelson after the Pommy sailor who lost an eye to grapeshot. Or in my case a whip. My left eye is gristle. I can’t see Yella the newblood walking beside me. I can’t see the Goulburn River. I can’t see the fucking mountains. You might say I’m blind to anything sinister, giving rise to my namby-pamby folklore (Orion’s words) that helps us pass the time tramping through the backblocks.

  Orion walks in the rearmost span closest to Cusack’s whip, gaining my stories piecemeal from bullock to bullock, yoke to yoke, Chinese whispers down the line.

  Yella is a virgin to the open road, this trip his first beyond the outskirts of Mansfield. A willing beast, the kid is riddled with questions – Why do birds sing? How far is Jamieson? What’s a barouche? – as Nigger is with heartworm. I envy the breath Yella finds to verbalise uphill. I long for the novelty he feels on fording creeks. The nonsense code of insects. No doubt Yella is braced for a long haul, most of it without me. This road to Aberfeldy shapes as my last.

  Cusack our driver has an ironclad rule when it comes to choosing yokemates. Old must accompany new, he believes, the likes of Yella by the likes of me, world-weary by world-hungry. Cusack hopes the coupling will see the new ox ‘break’ but I prefer the opposite idea. Yoking I see as the vital step on the road to completion. Twice the beast for the stories I feed him, Yella is shedding his innocence by dint of miles and campsites. As two, we merge into one. The ox, he’s learning, owns more than a walk-on role when it comes to the landscape we brave, the snaky road, the watchful bush, the kilns and mines and scratch-out farms we encounter on the road. Only this morning he mistook our species as Johnnies-come-lately to this island’s saga until my oxtale told him otherwise.

  Presnell’s Comet

  Engine of an empire, the ox has blazed this colony’s way from the outset. The original migrant herd crept from the lobes of Botany Bay, beyond the leases, the outer parishes, sneaking north of the Tweed, sheltering in the lap of the Darling Downs. There, in pioneer times, a drover named Presnell goaded a medley flock – cattle, sheep and assorted bullocks – across the loam. Early evening, a long summer twilight, when suddenly the sky turned magnesium.

  A fireball creased the air! Chased by sparks! All bar the oxen bolted for shelter. Even Presnell bunched his reins, horror-struck by what he saw. Coconut, his mare, reared – and Presnell toppled off. The scene was chaos save for the oxen, content as ever to ignore the heavens, dining on native grasses and turning our rumps to the alleged omen.

  Ancient Romans understood the sky, unlike Australians who view the blackness as a threat in itself, a derisive anagram of the English sky they’d known, a mystery more ancient than Old Rome itself. In light of Presnell’s Comet, as the fireball would come to be known, only Bos taurus was prepared to graze in the face of disaster, our broad rumps an endorsement of the colony’s longevity.

  Presnell at length passed the tidings onto outlying graziers, allowing the news and kudos to filter slowly south. The image of the steadfast steer afforded heart to a million cowed Australians. Here was a five-star investor in the new land’s future! Faced by comets in the sky a nag will baulk, the swine run, all udder milk curdle overnight, but the stable ox is a beast heaven-made for this skittish folly of a continent.

  Jamieson to Gaffneys Creek

  The clay is slippery. Stepping is a case of hoof by deliberate hoof, our task to keep the trace chain taut, the going fluid, the cargo poised, the
headstall square. Steam floats from Sergeant’s hide. Cusack curses the rain and team in turns. For every pinch and quag our load adopts a subtle ton.

  We march in a train of six, twelve steers hauling the stage that Australian life is played upon: the open dray. Yella thrives amid our company. He whiffs something epic in the going, while I confess to feeling less ennobled, servant as I am to the umpteenth leg in the colony’s odyssey, dragging Progress one inch further inland. This week Progress comprises planks and flour, oats by the hundredweight, fuses and picks, fencing wire, a barouche.

  What’s a barouche? asks Yella, not for the first time. As an answer I speak on matters pedestrian.

  Oxley’s Moccasins

  I kid you not, the explorer’s name was Oxley. (Little by little Australians are paying their bovine cohorts their overdue tithe.) A surveyor, Oxley was responsible for measuring Illawarra, the unkempt sprawl extending to Port Jackson’s south. His bullocks hauled chains, stakes, astrolabes across the brutal seaboard. We blazed Bulli Pass, waded Kembla Rip. In short, the oxen gave Oxley’s inroad the necessary legs.