The Best Australian Stories 2010 (32 page)

81. It's statements like that which make people say That'll be £3.50, thank you.

82. We were sitting in the dark and Blazey was singing songs from
The Muppet Show
and I was talking about Gonzo's great song from
The Muppet Movie
.

83. And not just the awful play. My father being an arsehole and my mother being dead and 1994 being the world's most horrible year and that fight with Amy and not knowing where that anger came from. The air ripping that whole year.

84. What a great song. Better than the ordinary play tonight and the awful play fifteen years ago. Better than dead mothers and heavy Fortnum & Mason's bags. Better than polite awkward exchanges between the house manager of the Almeida Theatre and a tourist from Australia.

85. And the room was still and quiet and the air did not rip. And Blazey singing Miss Piggy singing ‘What Now, My Love?'

86. Me going on and on about Gonzo's song from
The Muppet
Movie.

87. And me almost not wanting to kill myself.

88. Me half-up off the floor and him – Blazey's boyfriend, who I never knew before that night and never saw again – saying Don't go, sing that song you like.

89. Him saying Here's a replacement programme. And then going back through the swinging doors into the auditorium.

90. It's silly. Maybe it was Blazey who said Don't go, sing that song. Maybe he couldn't even care less about Gonzo's song. Maybe he was thinking Dear God, you idiot, I'm with Blazey, get out of this darkened room and leave us alone. But that's not how I remember it.

91. The cast party and my arsehole father almost not mattering any more.

92. The ordinary play and the heavy bag and the almost-rain not figuring at all.

93. I'd be happy to pay the £3.50. I can claim it on tax if you give me a receipt.

94. You choosing to ignore the Oh I know you. Or perhaps not hearing it at all. Perhaps not seeing the flash of recognition in my face or perhaps thinking God it's late, can't I please just go home?

95. Of course I remembered that moment before I saw you again tonight. I remember it often. You let me sing that song in the dark and because of that I didn't go home and kill myself. Yes, I probably wasn't actually going to kill myself – I was a student after all – but you stopped me anyway. You said Don't go, sing that song you like. Blazey lay on the bed in the darkened bedroom, her head (I think) in your lap and you let me sing.

96. Gonzo's song from
The Muppet Movie
:

There's not a word yet for old friends who've just met
Part heaven, part space – or have I found my place?
You can just visit, but I plan to stay
I'm going to go back there some day
I'm going to go back there some day.

97. And it made me feel better. And I didn't go home and kill myself.

98. The usher's gone home.

99. And when I do want to kill myself I remember that moment: four o'clock in the morning during the worst, most horrible year of my life in the dark singing Gonzo's song for Blazey and Blazey's boyfriend who I never saw again until tonight. That moment has saved me many times and I want to thank you for that. I'm sorry it's late and you had to come down through the swinging doors and unlock the programme cupboard and squat down and get out another programme for a now-fat beardie weirdie but I thank you. I wish it were possible for me to thank you.

100. You left the theatre half an hour ago. You're now on the street, further down from where you turned, suddenly, after rootling through your silly Fortnum & Mason's carry bag, shoved with your water bottle and your umbrella and a nostalgically half-eaten Double Decker bar and a book and some liquorice all-sorts and a stash of postcards from the National Portrait Gallery, and noticed that you must have left your programme behind. But that was ages ago now. Fifteen years and an infinitely paused moment of a grown man giving another grown man a programme to replace the one he left in the auditorium. Keep walking and put all that behind you.

Reasons to say something:

1. You saved my life once. And I thank you for that.

The Bridport Prize

Wildlife

Cory Taylor

‘Hippy theatrics,' said Samuel.

He and Mr Jurss next door stood at the fence watching, while Steph held the hose on the garden beds up behind them. All week the protesters had been down the back, some on the ground in tents, others up in the tall trees flying pirate flags, shouting the police down with loud hailers, calling them fascists and Nazis, which made Mr Jurss laugh, since in his youth he had known real fascists and Nazis.

From here Steph could see right into the tree branches where a young man was staked out. He had built himself a platform so that he could lie flat to sleep and his friends had been ferrying in food and water, hoisting it up to him in a bucket. Twice Steph had left a bag of fresh fruit at the base of the tree hoping they would find it. She didn't agree with her husband. She didn't think it was just hippies. And even if it was she thought they had a point. The neighbourhood was losing its scrappy, untamed heart. But there was no point arguing with Samuel. He had made up his mind.

‘The cops could be out there fighting real crime,' he said.

‘What I'm always afraid for,' said Mr Jurss, ‘is a fire. One strike of lightning and
whoosh
.'

Samuel cupped his hands around his face and yelled. ‘Go home and have a bath!'

Stephanie looked at him then and felt a wave of sadness. She didn't know when it was that he had turned into this defender of developers and the rule of law. As a much younger man he would have been less sure of who was right and who was wrong, of what was real and what was just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

‘They're never going to win,' he pronounced later, while they watched the news footage of the day's events. ‘It's private property. End of story.'

‘Spoken like a true government lackey,' Steph replied, and was immediately sorry, because Samuel chuckled then, in the sour way he did whenever she brought up the subject of his job.

‘Yeah well some of us don't have the luxury of choosing whether or not to work,' he said. ‘Some of us actually like money.'

It wasn't true that she had chosen not to work. She'd been
let
go
, making her sound like a dog on a leash. But Samuel seemed to blame her anyway, for that, and for a whole lot of other things, including what happened to the boy.

*

He broke his nose falling off the jungle bars at school. Actually he was pushed, he said, by a boy called Byron whom nobody liked. Steph knew him by sight, a brawny blond kid too big for his age, who had no father and two mothers. A typical son of West End, Samuel said, destined to develop a dope habit in grade seven and take up housebreaking as his vocation. Samuel wanted the boy to go to Churchie.

‘At least book him for grade five,' he told Steph.

‘You do it,' she said. ‘If you're so keen.'

She thought the boy was fine at the state school. She also believed that it was better to learn how to stand up to bullies as early in life as possible.

‘The world is full of Byrons,' she told her son. ‘You can't give in to them.'

And then they had all stood by and watched while the police cleared the sitters out of the trees and dismantled the tents and arrested anyone who talked back. Since then the bushland out the back had gone quiet, like it was waiting for the next big thing.

‘It's valuable land,' said Samuel.

‘So you keep saying,' said Steph. It was as if he was trying to comfort her somehow with the thought that everything was about its cost. She couldn't even begin to explain to him how mournful it made her feel to listen to him.

*

The boy was asleep upstairs when it happened. Steph was sitting with him, trying to memorise his eight-year-old face. He was slipping out of childhood so fast it was like a tide going out. Only when he slept did it stop long enough for her to truly see him, and even then she was mystified by how foreign he was. In the deep part of him he was still untamed, an animal, some solitary and quick-witted thing.

*

Steph headed downstairs as soon as she heard Lily barking. Lily was Mr Jurss's dog, a lightweight little Jack Russell terrier he'd inherited from a nephew who stayed in his downstairs flat when he wasn't at Charters Towers working in the mines.

‘She gives me the company,' Mr Jurss would say, while Lily stared up at him with her heartbroken eyes.

She was not a yappy dog unless she had reasonable grounds. Birds were a constant provocation, especially the owls that flew in on dark and ogled her from the low branches of Mr Jurss's jacaranda. But this was a full-throated alarm, coming from the back landing where Lily was confined whenever Mr Jurss was out.

Steph put the laundry basket down on the dining table and went outside onto the back deck. From here she could see the frantic dog, all its attention on a spot in the corner of the fence where Mr Jurss's yard bordered Steph's. Steph moved down onto the steps so she could see what was there.

A man stood in the garden bed, naked except for his shorts and ragged sandshoes. When Steph stared at them he started to knead the dirt under his feet like it was burning his soles. Sweat ran down his chest as though some private downpour had drenched him and left everyone else dry. She thought it strange that his skin was so pale except where a florid tattoo covered his narrow chest and spilled down his arms to the wrists. He wasn't a hippy. Steph thought of the real crime that Samuel had talked about to Mr Jurss. This must be what he meant. The fear came off the man like a sound only she and the dog could hear, making Steph tremble.

It was like this whenever snakes came up into the garden, which they did once in a while, fully grown carpet pythons with silken skin. All she could do was stare while her heart hammered against the walls of its cage, flailing wildly for as long as she had the snake in her sights, whipping up in her a kind of loathing that was also worship, because the snakes were so unreasonably beautiful.

‘What are you doing in my yard?' she called out. Her voice sounded unnatural in her head, like it was someone else asking, not her.

That was when he slid his hand into the front of his shorts and kept it there. It occurred to Steph that he might have a weapon, except that then he had started to scratch himself almost pleasurably. As if he had fleas, she told the policeman later.

She shouted the question again, shaking with anger. How dare he come here, where he didn't belong. If Lily kept this noise up, she wanted to say, the boy would wake up.

‘I'm trying to get out the back there,' he said, which was when she saw how green his eyes were, so lit up they were electric.

‘What for?' she said.

He didn't answer. Instead he looked up at her with a kind of condescension, while at the same time his eyes seemed to burn brighter. She yelled at the dog to shut up but Lily, in her frenzy, was unreachable.

‘The gate's behind the water tank,' said Steph, pointing to the opposite corner of the garden to where the man stood. He stepped out of the garden bed, crossed the lawn towards the water tank and disappeared. The gate opened then slammed shut on its hinge. He didn't bother to slip the latch. She would have to go down later and shut it properly or it would bang all night in the wind. There was a storm coming. Steph could already feel it building. The clouds at the back of Mt Cootha were gathering steam and starting to darken. In a few hours they would explode overhead like some huge blister had burst, and all the streets would turn to rivers and be washed clean.

*

‘You did the right thing.' The policeman was dressed like a stormtrooper, in body-hugging blue fatigues. Steph could hear the rest of the squad down the back directing the dogs, two big German shepherds they'd brought with them in their van. It was parked out the front of Steph's place where the neighbours could all see it. A few of them were gathered on the street now trying to find out what was going on.

‘The lunatic fringe,' the policeman said.

*

When Mr Jurss came home she told him the whole story. How Lily had raised the alarm and how, twenty minutes after the police dogs went down into the scrub, they'd cornered the man and he'd screamed and carried on and called them every name under the sun, all of which she could hear because the gully was like that. It amplified everything.

‘When they build houses down there we're going to hear the neighbours breathing,' she said.

‘It won't be so bad,' said Mr Jurss.

‘It'll be terrible,' said Steph.

The boy said someone should come and find all the animals before they cut the trees down.

‘It's not possible,' said Mr Jurss.

‘Why not?' said the boy. He was stroking Lily's back with all the tenderness of a lover.

‘It's a jungle,' said the old man.

Steph could see the boy swoon at the idea. He had just read a book on jungles and jungle animals and his head was full of green tangles and heat.