The Best Australian Stories 2010 (12 page)

You push past him and he is a stranger.

—Freak.

He mouths the words to you from the front of the class, then whispers something to the boy sitting next to him. You realise that you hate him.

*

The word has gotten around that you had something to do with your father's death. You know where it came from. Some of the kids follow as you seek out Jerome. And more are coming, as if there is a whisper, an electric current passing through the school, that only other children can sense.

—Take it back, you tell Jerome.

He gets up from his seat and doesn't look at you directly. His chest sags between his shoulders. He straightens and steps closer, the freckles on his pale face livid, his arms limp banners dangling either side of his waist, the fingers curled and rigid. You know that this is all wrong, that he will never take anything back before an audience.

—You always lie, you say in a voice that doesn't sound like you at all. You're a liar.

Jerome shows his teeth.

—So, when is it your turn?

A groan erupts around you, and the other children back off. But Jerome stares at you with his flat, cruel eyes and says it again. You push him, feel the bony lightness of his chest. Someone shouts, Hit him! Go on.

Jerome grabs your shirt at the shoulder, twists the cloth, and you jab your fist at his face, and keep jabbing as he swings you around in a blind, quiet circle as if the two of you are dancing, the other children cheering and cheering and wildly cheering a song they cannot know.

*

The principal runs his eyes across the two of you and asks who started it. Neither of you answers. He slides a finger down his tie, and flattens the tip over his belly. He turns away.

—This won't be taken further, he declares. But even so, he goes on, even so. When matters get difficult, you have to rise to the challenge. You have to move through the hardship and focus on the positives. His gaze never leaves the window, as if he's reading words in the clouds. On the way out, Jerome tells you that he's sorry. You tell him that it's nothing.

There is a huge old fig tree at one end of the schoolyard, past one of the demountables. Two branches come together at one spot that you like. You climb up, hold on, lean back, and stare at the rippled sky, cut through with branches and twigs. You have heard that when you fall asleep with a hand curled around a branch, you'll wake up still holding it.

You always wonder about that idea but never trust it, though you close your eyes sometimes and pretend. The heat of the fight has turned to stiffness. Sweat pools at your armpits. There is a tremor in your lungs, a quietness that makes you feel the blood in your fingertips and the grinding labour of your heart. The bark feels good. Your grip tightens. Eyes shut. The wood creaks around you. Wind stirs at your ankles. You imagine falling.

*

When you get home, you go to the bin. You rummage until, under the stinking weight of a split garbage bag, your fingers touch the thing that you were looking for. You pull out the book and wipe away the moisture.
Adventures for Young Boys!

Under the covers of your bed, you run the torch over each page, and breathe in the warm, dusty smell. The book doesn't make any sense, but you like it. The stories make you feel as if you are overhearing conversations, as if you are looking in on something that exists outside your own world. Somehow, the ridiculousness of the stories makes your eyes water.

It's not that you believe any of it. And if another boy had given you the book, you would have laughed at him. But it came from Rodney, and Rodney was a boy once, and in the simple words on the yellowed pages, you can imagine him before he knew what it was like to be in a waiting room.

*

That night, you dream that the ocean is washing up over your back fence, waves spearing through the carefully tended features of your mother's garden. You lie in bed, hear the breakers tear at the walls of the house, feel the walls bend and shudder, and then come the footsteps, one after the other, a sodden beat up the stairs, to your door, and your door opens, and you smell something like dead fish and smoke and your father's aftershave.

*

You wake into a cloud-filtered light that binds everything together, like threads left by some monstrous spider. Shivering, you throw on clothes and step outside. A snarl of untended bushes gathers around you. You cannot see the sun, but you know it will be there soon, rising over the fence, unfurling across the rooftops, spilling against dark windows.

The door creaks at your back. Your brother steps out, fishing rod in one hand, bucket in the other.

—Ready? he says. You push your feet into boots and drink a cup of the watery tea he has left on the kitchen bench. You will keep the door unlocked. The next time your father comes, you will try not to be afraid, you will think of how he could make you laugh, and the warm, smoky burr of his songs and you will tell yourself that the dead cannot touch the living. But you can never be sure, you can never be sure. You can never be sure.

Harvest

The Movie People

Fiona McFarlane

When the movie people left, the town grew sad. An air of disaster lingered in the stunned streets – of cuckoldry, or grief. There was something shameful to it, like defeated virtue, and also something confidential, because people were so in need of consolation they turned to each other with all their private burdens of ecstasy and despair. There was at that time a run of extraordinary weather – as if the blank blue sky, the unshaded sun and the minor, pleasurable breeze had all been arranged by the movie people. The weather lasted for the duration of the filming and then began to turn, so that within a few weeks of the close of production, a stiff, mineral wind had swept television aerials from roofs and disorganised the fragile root systems of more recently imported shrubbery.

My main sense of this time is as a period of collective mourning in which the townspeople began to wear the clothes they had adopted as film extras and meet disconsolately on street corners to re-enact their past happiness. I didn't participate. I was happy the movie people had left. I was overjoyed, in fact, to see no more trucks in the streets, no more catering vans in the supermarket parking lot, no more microphones and boom lights standing in frail forests on corners or outside the town hall. The main street of town had been closed to traffic for the filming, and now the townspeople were reluctant to open it again. It's a broad street, lined with trees and old-fashioned gas lights (subtly electrified) and those slim, prudish, Victorian storefronts that huddle graciously together like people in church, and as I rode down the street on my scooter on those windy days after the movie people left, it struck me as looking more than ever like the picturesque period town, frozen in the nineteenth century, that brought the movie to us in the first place.

I rode my scooter to the disgust of women in crinolines with their hair braided and looped; men in waistcoats and top hats: citizens of some elderly republic that had been given an unexpected opportunity to sun itself in the wan light of the twenty-first century. I knew these people as butchers, plumbers, city commuters, waterers of thirsty lawns, walkers of imbecile dogs, washers of cars, postmen, and all the women who had ever taught me in school. They were so bereft that they stayed in the street all day. They eddied and flocked. Up the street, and then down again, as if they were following the same deep and certain instinct that drives herring through the North Sea. They consulted fob watches and pressed handkerchiefs to their sorrowful breasts. The wind blew out their hooped skirts and rolled the last of the plastic recycling bins down the street and out into the countryside, where they nestled lifelessly together in the scrub.

I rode my scooter to the home of my wife's parents. She was sheltering there, my wife – Alice – because the movie people had left. She loved them, see. Not her parents – that tranquil couple of bleached invertebrates – but the director, the key grip, the costume ladies, the hairdressers, the boom operators, most particularly the star. The whole town loved the star. Even I succumbed to it, just a little – to the risky and unpredictable feeling we all had in the weeks he was among us, that he might at any moment emerge from a dimly bulbed doorway or unfold his long legs from a rooftop. We'd never seen anyone so beautiful. He shone with a strange, interior, asexual light; and his head seemed to hang in mid-air, as if there was no body to attach it to – nothing so substantial. Looking at him was like entering a familiar room in which you see everything all at once; and at the same time, nothing.

I rode to my wife and said, ‘Alice, darling, he's left now, they've all left, so can you please come home and love me forever; entangle your limbs in mine on the couch while watching television; comb your eyebrows in the bathroom mirror when I'm trying to shave; go running with me in the gorgeous mornings; and dance guiltily, ecstatically with me to bad disco music in the kitchen?'

But Alice, who now wore the costume of a sexy, spinsterly librarian, trim with repressed desire and lit, at her throat, by Edwardian lace, only sat on her parents' chaise longue embroidering silken roses with inconsolable fingers. Her parents sat nearby; her father, that placid old sinner, was now dressed as a country parson with a monocle in his crooked eye, and her mother peered out at me from the battered piano, which until recently had been nothing but a prop for picture frames. Now my mother-in-law played it with a watchful plink and plunk, with maternal suspicion tinkling over the expanse of her oatmeal-coloured face, and a frill of veil in her ornamental hair.

Other times I visited, the door was opened by a sour maid who informed me that my wife was not at home.

‘Is she not at home?' I asked, ‘Or is she not
at home
?'

The maid, with a grim, polite smile, shut the door in my face.

The mood of the town improved with the success of the movie. A special preview was held just for us, in the town hall; we sat in the municipal pews and called out the names of everyone as they appeared on screen in a long and lustful litany. Each name we invoked brought laughter and teasing, but really we were all overcome with a kind of bashful pride, as if finally the world had reached a solicitous hand into our innermost beings and, liking what it found there, held us up for emulation and respect. We were so distracted that, afterwards, nobody was sure what had actually happened in the movie. A forbidden love, generally – something greenish and unrequited – one of those glacial
fin-de-siècle
stories in which the tiniest gestures provoke terrible consequences about which no one in polite company speaks.

At the premiere party, the townspeople danced the gavotte and the quadrille; they waltzed among potted palms with a slow, bucolic concentration; and they feasted on tremulous dishes of jellies and aspic. All throughout that strange, orchidaceous, combustible room, women fainted into arms and onto sofas, and a tiny orchestra of men with Civil War whiskers played endlessly into the night as Alice – my Alice – danced time and double time and time and again with the star, who appeared to have flown in especially for the occasion. Her parents nodded and smiled and accepted the nods and smiles of other doting gentry, and Alice flew over the carpets, her face alight.

I demanded of everyone I met: ‘Who does he think he is? Just because he's famous, he can dance all night with another man's wife?'

Unlike that decorous crowd, I was insensible of my own dignity. Finally, the man who used to service my scooter (dressed now in the handsome uniform of an English corporal, which made of his red belly a regimental drum) drew me aside and told me that the man Alice was dancing with wasn't famous at all; he was, in fact, Edward Smith-Jones, a man of the law, and selected from among the population as the star's stand-in. Apparently it was obvious to everyone that the entire scene in the stables featured this man and not the star, who was nervous around horses, especially during thunderstorms. So there he danced, lordly Eddy, with another man's wife and another man's haircut, and I watched his hand rest on her supple back and my heart was filled with hatred for the movie people.

When I asked Alice for a waltz she told me, with a demure shake of her head, that her card was full.

I lost my job when my graphic-design firm was asked to move elsewhere. Certain other sectors of the citizenry, too, were politely dissuaded; the Greek fruit shop became a dapper greengrocer's, manned by a portly ex-IT consultant with Irish cheeks and a handlebar moustache. He stood jovially among his gleaming bronze scales, measuring out damsons and quinces. Unless they were willing to wear their hair in long ropes, the town's Chinese population was encouraged to stay off the main street between the hours of eight-thirty and six, and preferably to remain invisible on weekends. The gym was forced to close for lack of customers, and the Video Ezy. The tourists came in excitable herds, transported from the nearest town in traps and buggies. They mistook me for another tourist, and I was comfortable walking in amongst them, watching as my wife strolled in the botanical gardens, her face in parasol twilight; a brass band playing in the rotunda; a British flag afloat above the trumpets; nannies sitting with their neat ankles crossed on benches as children toddled close to duck ponds. Alice walked with her Edward, and her parents followed close behind. She tilted her head this way and that. In the movie she had been one of those extras who almost has a speaking part; the kind they focus on to gauge the reaction of a comely crowd.