The Best Australian Stories 2010 (8 page)

‘Great, 'cause it's not doing her much fucking good in this one.' Shaun laughed as he positioned his big hand on the back of Pran's neck and guided him out of the kitchen.

*

Marly was waiting in the chair on the front veranda when the boys walked back through the hole in the fence. Neither of them looked at her. As she followed them into the house, a creased sheet of paper eased out of Shaun's back pocket and fluttered to the floor. He didn't notice until Marly had stooped to pick it up, then he turned and tried to snatch it from her. She stared at the printed sheet with Shaun's scrawled signature at the bottom.

‘What's this?'

Shaun tried again to nab the paper from her fingers but Marly held on.

‘A minimum of two thousand dollars over twenty-four months? Are you fucking kidding? As if you don't watch enough TV already. How did he get you to sign this?' She threw the paper onto the kitchen table and as she did she noticed Azza thrust his hands in his pockets, but not before she had caught sight of the rusty brown stain on his palm.

‘Oh, no. What did you do to him?' She pictured Pran's melty eyes swimming with tears of pain, his soft mouth squeezed into a grimace. ‘Where is he?' If they'd hurt that beautiful man she was going to kill them.

‘He's all right, okay? I lost it for a minute, tapped him on the nose.' Azza pulled his hand from his pocket, spat on it and rubbed it against his jeans until the reddish stain was off his skin.

‘That's blood.'

‘He's all right. We said we were sorry. He drove away in his fucking Honda coupe. Now shut up.' Shaun slammed his fist on the table. The dog bolted out through the back door.

Marly stood uncertainly in the doorway. Shaun was glaring at her, daring her to say a single word. She'd never find out how the Indian had got him to sign the contract.

‘I'm going out front.' She took a beer from the fridge and stumped down the hallway to the veranda on her graceless steel leg. The streetlights were on. She could see the shadows of trees in the reserve. On the other side, somewhere, was Pran, flying along the freeway in his Honda coupe with two thousand dollars of their money. Money they didn't even have yet. Two years of their lives signed away. Everything had turned upside down. She tried to remember what he had said about the essence. Something about hands and feet. Or skulls and ears. Or something.

Griffith Review

Paleface and the Panther

Robert Drewe

Anthony's skin was so white, almost translucent, you could see the veins fanning out from his temples into his rusty curls. The vulnerability of those electric-blue wires shocked me; sometimes his skull looked like a physiology poster. At the same time, the eggshell frailty of an orphanage or illness seemed to cling to his body. When he had his shirt off for the bath or beach there were those eerie neon veins again, beaming out from inside his chest.

I tried to paint him a few times but I find children difficult. They come out either too sentimentally cherubic or Hollywood demonic. In oils Anthony looked like a changeling, with a wily old face. And I couldn't resist the veins – maybe I overdid the cobalt. Anyway, the paintings met with strong disapproval from the Miller sisters, pale redheads too, who maybe had Renoir and innocence and velvet suits in mind, and they were destroyed before I could reuse the canvases.

Even in real life he didn't appear a normal West Australian boy, neither tanned nor sunburnt, not freckled or peeling, more like a vitamin-D-and-protein-deprived European waif from yesteryear. Just off the boat, as they used to say. Dickensian poorhouse. But he wasn't sick or poor, just pallid and thin. And he was actually a fourth-generation Sandgroper, and only half orphaned, and now that a temperamental flush masked his veins, and his curls were unravelling in the summer humidity, he was the image of my father.

It was Anthony's birthday party, and in the cricket game taking place in a municipal park of buffalo grass sloping down to the river, a match he had insisted on, he'd just been clean bowled for the third time in a row.

It was torture to watch. He was trying out his new Slazenger cricket set, my present to him: a cricket bat, ball, pads, gloves, stumps and bails which came in a nifty PVC bag with the Slazenger panther emblem leaping in full horizontal stretch the length of the bag. It was expensive but I'd wanted to give him something sporty and manly, something we could do together and maybe shift the gender balance a little. Make him not so milky-pale and veiny. He was always surrounded by women and I felt guilty for not paying more attention to him in the past couple of years when I was living it up. Painting hard, yes, but also playing hard. The usual recreational activities.

Anyway, if his flushed cheeks and boisterous eagerness to test the cricket set this afternoon were anything to go by, he loved the gift.

But now he was clean bowled again, and he refused to leave the crease. Even as he flailed around, his glowering, determined face – my father again – seemed to say, Are you all mad? Why should he go out? What idiot would swap batting for bowling or, even more ludicrously, fielding? Batting was the whole point, wasn't it? It was his birthday and his new cricket set and he was the most important person here, especially today of all days.

Not surprisingly, the fifteen party guests fielding in the park this January afternoon were losing concentration and patience. Of course the birthday boy had been allowed to bat first. Uncle Brian was bowling underarm, and had substituted a tennis ball for the hard cricket ball – and, what's more, had bowled him out three times already.

All over the park, young fielders were flopping down on the ground and sucking twigs and peering longingly towards the river or the party table that Anthony's mother and aunts were setting up under the peppermint trees. The kids had given up on having a turn with the bat and now they wanted to swim or eat; at this rate there'd soon be an uprising. Oblivious to the general restiveness the three Miller sisters were drinking their customary spritzers and laughing while they blew up balloons and tied them to the trees' branches, special balloons that said Happy 8th Birthday Anthony!

I was wicket-keeping. Because I wanted him to succeed, and I wanted the cricket set to be an appreciated gift, I was torn. But eventually I said, ‘You're really out, my man. Give someone else a turn.'

He swung at another slow underarm ball from Brian, and missed again. I trudged uphill after the ball while he thumped the grass in frustration. But he still didn't give up the bat.

Unusually for a Perth summer afternoon the sea breeze hadn't arrived and the day gave off a sullen chalky glare that stung the eyes. In the river below us, other shrieking children were bombing and diving off the jetty – non-party guests having a better time than us – and becalmed yachts lolled in a deepwater bay as smooth as oily glass. Ageless impressionist subject matter. You've also spotted the scene in a hundred atmospheric summer photographs: skinny show-off boys caught mid-air, spread-eagled between jetty and water. Even at my age I envied them. Already my shirt was sticking to me from all that trudging after the missed balls. The buffalo runners had an annoying way of gripping the ball and stopping it from rolling back down to me.

‘Don't be a bad sport,' I told him. I was feeling disheartened as well as hot. Anthony was ruining the party mood. As I threw the ball back to Brian, I said, ‘Don't bowl any more until the spoilsport walks.'

Brian looked for direction to the women with the spritzers and balloons. In the shade of the peppermint trees the Miller sisters had taken off their sunhats, revealing three different hues of red hair in gradations from vivid orange-peel to mercuric-sulphide pigment to dark rust. They had cigarettes going, too, which interfered with their balloon-blowing efforts, and every now and then one of the women would gasp and giggle and her half-inflated balloon would escape, spinning, blurting and farting crazily over their heads.

The dark-rusty one, Liz, Anthony's mother and my stepmother, glanced at us. ‘I hope you've got sunscreen on, Ant,' she said.

Brian looked back at me uncertainly. ‘Show him again how to hold the bat.'

Jesus, Brian was being avuncular. He was twenty-eight, married to the youngest Miller sister, Jeanette, and in our occasional dealings the seven years he had over me seemed to give him the advantage. But in the matter of Anthony, I felt I had the upper hand. Brian was only Anthony's uncle by marriage, and even less related to me, not my family at all. Anyway, I had deaths on my side. Two deaths gave me the edge.

‘Here we go again,' I said. I gripped Anthony's narrow shoulders and spun him side-on to the bowler. The panther emblem was stamped on the bat as well. I twisted the bat handle around in his hands. ‘This is your last ball,' I said. ‘Keep a straight bat. See that panther on the bat? It should face your right leg. Defend your wicket. Take it easy. Don't swing like a dunny door.'

He squirmed free of my hands and shuffled back to his incorrect stance. If he swung the bat from there he'd not only miss the ball again but knock his wicket over. His eyes had an oddly familiar shine. My father's old Dewar's glint, his Johnnie Walker midnight-aggressive glint.

‘Go shit-fuck-shit away!' Anthony growled. ‘I don't have to take any notice of you!'

My God, he needed a smack. ‘That's not even proper swearing, Paleface,' I said as I walked off.

*

When I arrived at the restaurant, an outdoor seafood place in the Fremantle fishing harbour, he was already seated. An unusual choice for Anthony, I thought; not fashionable, overly marine-themed, with a table of bluff Yorkshire accents and porky pink skins on one side of us, a tidy arrangement of Japanese on the other. There was the usual network of wires strung above the tables to discourage seagulls, and several pleading Please Don't Feed the Birds signs. The tourists were ignoring these deterrents and hurling their chips into the harbour, where diving and wheeling gulls enjoyed uninterrupted and raucous access.

I'd suggested the lunch at my stepmother's behest. ‘What's he doing with his life?' Liz moaned. ‘Can you find out and give him some advice, put him right?' According to her, Anthony had abruptly left Angela and their two children, tossed in his partnership with Fairhall Burns Corrie, turned vegetarian, and was ‘living with some hippie witch in a mud hut up in the hills.'

I think she thought I was more in tune with low-life ways. Painting and bohemia and all that. It sounded like an early midlife crisis to me, a middle-class cliché, but at this stage Liz was phoning me in tears every night with news of Anthony's latest New Age transgression.

‘He's killing me. I don't understand him any more. He's acting all superior to everyone, angry and touchy-feely at the same time. The hippie witch must have some eerie power over him.'

I heard deep raspy breaths; she was drawing heavily on a cigarette and even over the phone she sounded old and needy. I pictured the almost-empty bottle of white wine close by.

‘What's all this guru stuff anyway?' she went on. ‘Numerology, astrology, holistic blah-blah, tantric mumbo-jumbo. A thirty-seven-year-old lawyer doesn't need all this hoo-ha. I certainly don't need all this hoo-ha! Bruce would be rolling in his grave. What are we going to do?'

We? I didn't need any hoo-ha either. But I felt sorry for Liz. She was no storybook evil stepmother. Sally and I had hardly begrudged her marrying our father. She hadn't pinched him from Monica, our mother; Bruce had been a widower, after all. And for a few years we were still sort of numb, and kept to ourselves while Dad grieved alone and left us to our own devices. Then, as a widowed parent herself – after his death five years later – she'd always been amiably haphazard and not the least bit maternal. I think that's why we didn't overly resent her when we were younger: she wasn't vying for our love. Sally and I had each other and it suited us that she was affectionately distant, not in competition with our mother over anything, and allowed our sad reverence for her to remain undisturbed.

Her focus was completely on Bruce, her husband whether living or dead. As soon as Anthony was seven, she'd sent him off to boarding school, to far-off Guildford Grammar. She'd married late, at forty, the eldest Miller sister and the last to go, and for the fact of being married at all she was grateful to Bruce every day. If he was no longer there, she wanted to be alone with his memory; his memory and the remains of his wine cellar.

But we? What could I do? Anthony was a grown man and, by Perth's standards, already a successful one: a commercial lawyer, yachtsman, weekend tennis player (of minimum ability), and the owner of two storeys of heritage sandstone, a pool, a tennis court behind a disciplined plumbago hedge and, from the second-floor bedrooms at least, three river glimpses and a misty view of the Darling Ranges. He was responsible for his own actions.

Anyway, maybe he was doing the right thing. I was sorry for his kids, but Angela was a provincial Anglophile snob with a cleanliness obsession. The sort who washed your beer glass the minute you set it down, who made you feel unkempt and grubby in her company.

Maybe Anthony had seen the light.

How would I describe our half-brotherly relationship? We were like long-time acquaintances. Beyond our father we had little in common. Our political views collided. Anthony was conservative and well-off, and I was neither. He was a law graduate and I was basically self-educated. There was a thirteen-year age difference and no physical resemblance. Whenever we met up, at Christmas or other family gatherings, we didn't converse so much as banter and nod agreeably and earnestly top up each other's drinks.