The Best Australian Stories 2010 (13 page)

When I heard they were engaged, Alice and Mr Smith-Jones, I retired my scooter. I took a job at a printing press, and the tedious hours of setting type gave me finicky time to think things over. On the day of their wedding, I dressed in costume. In the movie I play the role of a man about town; you can see me in the lower right at 20:16, loafing with friends on a street corner while gauzy women flutter behind us, in and out of seedy cottages. Yes, right there – I'm the one watching the dog.

I walked to the church among apple carts and small sooty boys, and there was a yellow quality to the air, a kind of residual loveliness, as if the sun had gone down hours before but stayed for some time just below the horizon. The church doors swung open before me, revealing soft pale heads among bridal flowers. The parson – my father-in-law – trembled on the moment when I should speak or forever hold my peace. I spoke. Eddy and I met in the aisle; he swung and I dodged and I swung. Alice shook in her slim white dress, and roses fell from her hands. I floored Eddy; he pulled me down. We rolled on that ecclesiastical carpet, up and over and around and down, while flustered ushers danced around the edges of our combat. Ed would be on the verge of springing up, a lawyerly Lazarus, but I clawed him back down; I, on my knees, would be making my way altar-ward, only to find him wedded to my foot. The organ began to play. The congregation piped in alarm. An elderly woman keened among her millinery. Finally we exhausted ourselves, and it was me – me! – Alice came to comfort. I knew she would recognise my supplicant heart. Edward was banished, and loped away into the high noon of heartbreak. Her counterfeit father was ready to join them in mock matrimony, and so with a merry shake of his worldly head, he re-joined us instead. The sun set, and the moon rose. We ate ices at the reception, and great silver fish surrounded by lemons, and that night, as she withdrew her slender foot from a slender slipper, my wife shuddered with a virginal blush and laid her head upon the pillow.

There followed a happy time of croquet and boating expeditions; then Alice went through her suffragette period, which I pretended to disapprove of. Things are more settled now. We read Darwin together, without telling her parents, and she's discovered Marx. We take walks in the country, where my naturalist wife sends me scrambling into trees for birds' nests. Things aren't what they used to be, but there are consolations: a certain elegance to the way she stands at open windows, and longer, darker nights now that the town has switched from electricity to gas. But I've noticed in her lately a strange inability to see the resemblances between things: a tennis ball (she plays modestly, in white dresses) is nothing like the sun; a glass of water, she says, has no relation to the ocean; if I comment on the similarity between her neck and a swan's, she turns away. In fact she dislikes the similarity of things even without recognising their likeness, and can't bear, for example, to see a brown short-haired dog on brown short-haired grass.

The rest of the town is like this too. They have a horror of seeing photographs of themselves, even the hoary daguerreotypes they love so much. They've removed all the mirrors from their houses, and the paintings of jaded horses on hillsides, and the china that depicts, in blue and white, the far-flung tale of luckless lovers. It's as if they're allergic to the very idea of reproduction; or at the very least, don't wish to be reminded of it. What a singular world they all live in, in which no thing has any relation to another!

They no longer mention the movie. They no longer watch movies. They expect to live forever. They've taken up laudanum. They seem happy, however – timeless and happy. I watch them all, a little wistfully, in my fraudulent frock coat. Meanwhile, the trees shake out their leaves in the wind, and in the evening my wife walks through the spent garden. Her face is like a flag that says –
surrender.

Little White Slip

Karen Hitchcock

One litre of milk is enough for 40 cups of tea.
                                                     
—Presbyterian Women's Cookbook
, 1955

Black and White

She wears this nightie. A crisp, white cotton slip, plain as paper. It has thin white ribbons for shoulder straps. She wears it with trousers and ballet slippers during the day. (Telling herself it looks French.) And she wears it – without trousers or slippers, or that maternity bra – to bed. She has four, all identical, all filing through the wash one after the other. With the powder, brightener, softener, bleach. For the Whitest Brightest Whites!

She used to be a little-black-dress kind of girl. Short black hemlines, short black espressos, short black nails, short sharp black bob. Elbows on the bar, one knee on the barstool, nightlife ballet. A real G-string kind of girl. Little black sambuca shots screaming down her throat, while she waits for Frederik of Denmark, William of England, the French PM, to see her, to find her, to see her: shiny beanpole in the haystack. Tall amongst all that short.

Cheesecake

Her husband – an industrial chemist – flies to Melbourne for a weekend conference. Something to do with tempered precipitants and powdered solutions of some lethal substance or other. She hides her terror at being left alone with the baby overnight, and asks that he bring her back a slice of cheesecake from Acland Street.

You sure you'll be okay?

Just bring me the cake.

The really special Jewish one, baked from a 400-year-old recipe. She had it for breakfast once, eons ago, not so long ago, tumbling out of a club into dawn, sambuca still cavorting with her tongue. The night is long. She lies awake on their bed watching the baby twitch and dream. All the pillows are on the floor so it doesn't suffocate should she accidentally sleep, and to break its landing should it fall. When it wakes she pulls at a ribbon and guides her breast into its mouth. And it closes its eyes and it sucks and drinks, sucks and drinks, milk wetting its lips.

Her husband arrives home at midday, holding two white boxes wrapped in clear cellophane. He stands in the doorway. ‘Ta-dah!' he says

She blinks at the bright sun, and at her husband who blocks it inadequately, despite the two, vast boxes.

‘What're those?'

‘Your cakes!'

‘Cakes?'

‘The 400-year-old cheesecakes! From that Polish Street! You know … Acland Street!'

‘Tom.'

‘Yes, honey?'

‘I asked for a piece of cake. A
piece
?
One piece
of cake
?
You do realise I'm going to eat all of that.'

‘Sure!'

‘But Tom. Don't you see how fat I am?' She runs a hand down her slip, outlining her round belly.

‘LouLou' – he balances the boxes in one hand, puts the free one around his wife – ‘you're not fat at all.'

‘Sure, Tom.'

‘You're not! You're beautiful! And you've just had a baby, for God's sake.' He turns around to grasp the handle of his suitcase.

‘Sure sure sure sure sure. That's what they all say. And then you wake up and see the words
Barge Arse
listed on the divorce papers.'

He chuckles. His wife is so funny, such a great sense of humour. Ha ha ha ha ha.

She takes the butter-stained boxes – they're heavy, there must be six kilos of cheese in the fuckers – and stands aside to let him in.

‘The baby's in the crib.'

Sambuca Dawn

‘Well' – she brings the shot glass up close to her eye – ‘what exactly is sambuca, then, Doctor Smarty-Pants Chemist?'

So he wasn't heir-to-some-throne, oh no no he wasn't, but his eyes drew lines from the dark points of her nails and her lips and her sambuca and her hem. Dot to dot he traced her out, then coloured her in, buying her drink after drink.

‘It's distilled Illicium verum.'

‘Illicit whatum?'

‘Illicium verum: star anise.'

‘Oh,' she said, for some reason disappointed. ‘I thought it was made out of liquorice.'

He apologised, as if it were his fault, which for all she knew it may well have been. Who the hell knew what industrial chemists were responsible for? And to compensate – for he was always compensating, bearing responsibility for some flaw in the world: ants in the rubbish, their combined carbon footprint, the inclement weather, a missed opportunity – he set about describing star anise, and the manner in which it was distilled, trying his best to make it sound beautiful, mysterious. Meanwhile, she half-listened, drank her liquor with its floating beans of coffee, and weighed him up as best she could. Tall, clever, appreciative. Nice shoes, wide shoulders, appreciative. His eyes carved her out of the background. She drank drinks he paid for, and watched him carve her.

‘It's eighty-four proof,' he was saying, ‘so it's rather easily set alight.'

Clean shirt, white teeth, appreciative.

The Club

Laced around the café table, like round and fat beads of prayer: mother, pram, mother, pram, mother, pram. Everyone sweating into synthetic-lace maternity bras. Sweat and milk swelling Hidden Absorbent Pads! Everyone's eyes behind oversized sunglasses. She's not sure who's being talked at. She's not sure who's listening. A particular way of pouting. She blames all this on Posh. The baby is asleep in its Bugaboo pram. Known in Louise's mind as The Ambulator
.
As in The Great Ambulator. As in The Really Fucking Expensive Ambulator. Lips peel open and relate brands of dummy, bowel habits and crying habits and sleep habits, and Louise stares into her orange juice, reluctant anthropologist, trying not to make nasty slips-of-the-tongue.

Screens 1

She sits at her desk when it sleeps again in its little fits and starts.

Yes, I am back at work … Part-time, of course. From home. Hmm? Yes,
still Designing.
Capital D
. Still Web-page Designing
. In front of her shiny new Mac (white, seventeen inches). Another present from Tom. Another noose. Another dare. She's catalogued all their photos. Backed up the address book. Bought lollies from all over the planet (Duchy Mints, Hershey's Kisses, Iranian toffee). She's written letters with too many exclamation marks that she'll never send to people she'll never see.

Today – making an effort, all her slips in the wash – she wears a black chiffon dress (huge, loose) with pearl-button detail and an emerald silk scarf. Shiny black ballet shoes. She loosens the belt again, crosses her legs, remembers varicose veins and uncrosses them. Hair up. Down. She adjusts her scarf and evaluates the weight of her breasts, estimates millilitres, translates into kilograms, or at least milligrams, takes that sum from her outrageous weight. She chews her pen, tightens her belt, too tight. She likes to look good for her desk. The house is silent. She moves her cup of water to the other side of the dictionary, straightens the stack of sticky notes, colour-orders her pens. And her desk likes to look good for her.

It screams and she feels a fleeting relief, then, in its place, quiet panic. What could it be? Hunger, fear, pain, fear, hunger, pain, fear? They say,
It's just wind, dear.
Such a fierce wind; what the fuck is it doing in there?

She sits at her desk when it sleeps again, staring at someone on the screen.

Second Date

‘So,' Louise said and smiled, ‘is your degree a BS? Or are you just full of BS?' Her laughter tinkled between them.

He smiled, took a sip of Shiraz. ‘It was a
BSc
, actually.'

She rolled her eyes. ‘BS, BSc, it's all the same to me.' She flicked open her napkin and draped it across her thighs.

‘I'm sure it is,' he said. ‘And what was your degree again? A BA did you say? A “Bugger All”?'

She looked up, shocked at the sarcasm.

He went on, ‘What did the arts student say to the science student after graduation?'

‘See ya round?'

‘She said,
And would you like fries with that?
' He looked at her, blood behind his cheeks, eyelids lowered, for distance. ‘So. Do you have the whole world categorised and reduced or just me? What am I? A character from
Revenge of the Nerds
?'

‘I kind of liked that movie.' A man who blushed had always made her melt.

‘I'm no philistine.'

‘And I have a real job.'

Tom gulped his wine. She looked away and fiddled with her cutlery.

Her fingertips bouncing on fork tines, she said, ‘I thought it was really funny when they set up that camera in the girl's change-rooms and the nerds are sitting in their dorm impatiently watching them undress, and finally a girl takes off her underpants and the boys scream,
We have bush!
'

Tom smiled, faintly.

Louise said, ‘Come to think of it, these days the line wouldn't be
We have bush
, it would be more like
We have Brazilian!
Don't you think? Or even
We have post-labial-reduction!
Or
We have pre-op-
male-to-female!
' She reached for her wine glass, knocked it over into her dinner, her lap, the entire tablecloth. ‘Oh God, oh crap, where's the waiter, oh God, oh fuck, I
always
do this.'