The Best Australian Stories 2014 (24 page)

‘What! Don't leave me with this lot,' he'd said, using a light tone. She
was
a bit hopeless, actually. She'd told him she was a literature student. He wanted to joke with her that he could tell she wasn't a maths student, but thought better of it.

‘Okay – if you really need me,' she'd responded, almost dropping a hot pizza as she jammed it awkwardly into a box. The customer smirked.

‘Omigod,' she'd said then, under her breath. ‘I didn't think
pizza-making
would be this hard!'

Sometime, thought Jimmy, he'd tell Bethany about the Chinese poem. He'd say something about how lanterns must have been so comforting in the dark countryside of the olden days, and how it was hard to imagine real darkness when you lived on Chapel Street, where every inch of surface seemed to either be or reflect electric light.

*

‘I've got my book club coming over tonight,' said Paula, when Jimmy handed her a yellow envelope full of rent money. ‘Will you be at work?'

‘Till ten. Marko's coming over after but we can go into my room,' offered Jimmy.

‘And play Xbox?' she asked, sarcastically.

For the hundredth time he wondered how much longer he could live with Paula. There were good things. She cleaned the bathroom even when it was his turn. He liked a clean bathroom. Living with blokes wasn't the same.

‘I heard you stomping around last night,' she said. ‘It's all that Coke.'

‘No. I was cold.'

*

On Friday, Jimmy purchased a down-filled doona from
Habby & Craft
on the way to work. He enjoyed the busy night, the three of them working in that close space. When Bethany got hot her cheeks turned such a cute pink.

‘Dough machine or toilets upstairs, I'll toss you for it,' said Jimmy, when the last customer left and it was time to clean up.

‘Heads. For the dough machine.'

‘Heads it is.'

Jimmy dragged the bucket upstairs while Bethany peeled dough from the inside of the dough maker. Ten minutes later, he heard Fahd coming up the stairs:

‘Come on,' he was saying. ‘I just want to show you how pretty the restaurant is up here.'

Through the crack in the door, Jimmy saw Fahd was holding Bethany's wrist.
Don't get involved,
he thought.

‘You make me so hot for you,' Fahd said. ‘Just touch me. Feel how hard I am.'

He patted Bethany's hand over his crotch. Her lips had parted slightly. In shock? Or was she interested? Nah, she wouldn't be. Surely. Fahd touched her breast.

‘So beautiful,' he whispered. ‘Can I see?'

Jimmy's face flamed as he realised he was getting turned on, watching. He swallowed. Fahd was pulling her t-shirt down, exposing her skin. Bethany made a muffled noise and pulled away.

Jimmy stepped out of the bathroom.

‘Oh – sorry,' he said. ‘Um. Is everything alright?'

Bethany shook her head, yanked her hand out of Fahd's and ran down the stairs.

‘Whatcha do that for?' whined Fahd. ‘I was gonna see her tits.'

‘She didn't want you to, mate,' snapped Jimmy.

‘A little peek doesn't hurt anyone.'

Jimmy raced down the stairs after Bethany and caught up to her on the street. Her face was wet.

‘You alright?'

‘You took your time,' she croaked. ‘You were there, I knew you were.'

‘But – I wasn't sure if you wanted …'

‘That's crazy.'

Bethany's chin quivered uncontrollably.

‘Let me take you home,' he said, taking her by the arm.

‘Get off. Don't touch me. I'll get the tram, thanks.'

*

Jimmy took the wrapping off his new doona, and arranged it over his bed. He crawled in, and reached over to the box of lukewarm pizza. Goat's cheese, spinach, smoked salmon, capers. He ate the entire pizza and washed it down with Diet Coke. He lay down, knowing he should get up to brush his teeth, and knowing he wouldn't. The doona was snug. He'd provided himself with basic comfort. Warmth. That was his achievement for the week.

Bethany. Fahd's hand. That almost nude curve. He sat up, feeling suddenly horrible. His innards sluiced in Diet Coke.
A deadly neurotoxin.
He was aroused and guilty. The pizza, gassy, fatty, fleshy, churned in his gut. He put his hand to his mouth and burped, loudly.

‘Gross, Jimmy,' shouted Paula, from the next bedroom.

No, he couldn't stay here much longer.

*

Jimmy didn't see Bethany again till summer, when he got a call from a shop called Velvet, to install light fittings. He was living on his own by then, in a tiny apartment on Greville Street. His business – Jimmy's Electrics – was building up slowly.

Velvet was a vintage clothing store. Behind the counter was a beautiful girl in a dark dress and high heels, wearing red lipstick. It took him a minute to recognise Bethany.

‘Hello,' she said, shyly. ‘So it
was
you. I mean – you are the Jimmy of Jimmy's Electrics. I thought you might be.'

‘Yeah, well, I didn't want to work at the pizza place anymore.'

‘I walk past sometimes. I saw you'd left.'

Bethany showed him which lights to replace. It was easy, clean work. It seemed odd to replace good quality brass fittings with paper lanterns, but it wasn't the first time he'd done it. Something to do with fashion, he supposed. When he was finished Bethany paid him from the till.

‘I'm better at adding up now,' she said, with her dimpled, crooked smile. ‘Practice.'

‘That's good,' he said, packing up his tools.

‘Let's see how they look,' she said.

Bethany pulled the blinds down and they stood together in the darkness. When she flicked the switch Jimmy saw the point of the new fittings: he was stunned by the softness of the champagne light pouring over the clothes racks, the shoes, the counter, and Bethany herself.

‘Looks good, huh?'

‘Yep.'

That was all he managed. He wanted to say something about the emerald lantern in the poem. He wanted to tell her his thoughts about the light that didn't get tired; a light that wasn't powered with a lethal force. Now wasn't the time. It would just be silly. He closed the latch on his toolbox regretfully, said goodbye, and walked out onto Chapel Street.

Review of Australian Fiction

Pet Name

Kirsten Tranter

‘Here's the money. Look, it's the exact change.'

By the time I tuned in, the argument had already been going on for a while. It wasn't unusual to hear cross exchanges with the driver: frustrated tourists or people who wanted to pay with a fifty-dollar note, or whose automatic ticket wouldn't work in the machine.

Everyone on the bus had their head down, looking at a paper or book or phone. I was checking my email, hoping I wouldn't find a message from my boss asking me to redo the work I'd sent her the day before, and reading over the shoulder of the woman next to me. The book's cover showed a woman wearing a red dress, arms outstretched towards a shirtless man who was clutching at her waist, either struggling or preparing to embrace.

‘I'm not giving you a ticket.'

‘I don't want you to give me a ticket, I want you to sell me a ticket. Two tickets to Central. Please.'

I looked to the front, trying to see past the standing passengers.

‘Pathetic,' said the woman next to me, and turned a page, but she lifted her gaze straight back to the scene at the driver's window. We were sitting halfway down the bus, and I had to lean forward and crane my neck to see.

The man arguing with the driver was tall and almost unnaturally thin, and dressed differently than I'd expected from his voice, which was all posh, moneyed arrogance. He wore tight-fitting black leather, pants and a jacket zipped all the way to his neck, and his sandy, wet-looking hair was combed back from his face. But it was the girl who drew everyone's attention. Even in high heels, shiny patent wedges that forced her feet into a contorted shape, she didn't come up to his shoulder. She stood perfectly still beside him, a slight pout on her lipsticked mouth.

With one hand the man kept trying to push the coins towards the driver. In his other hand he held a leash, a supple leather grip on a chain that reached up to a collar around the girl's neck. Her skin was white and soft-looking against the collar, which was decorated with little spikes, and closed at the back of her neck with a massive buckle. She was in black too, all black and white with her dark hair and white skin, her lips dark purple. Against her monochromatic stillness the morning commuters seemed bleached of colour in their grey suits and pastel outfits, school uniforms or jeans or tracksuits.

He kept arguing. The passengers around me grew restless, checking watches, shaking their heads and sighing, either looking at the girl or conspicuously averting their eyes, minding their own business, or showing their indifference.

The girl's hands stayed by her side, relaxed. Her nails were painted a glossy black. She seemed to take no interest in the dispute with the driver; she kept her eyes down. The man started to talk about making a formal complaint. He took the coins back and made a fist around them; it looked as though he was about to throw the coins at the driver, but then he lowered his hand.

‘Get off!' someone called out. There were giggles and hissing whispers from the back corner where the private schoolgirls sat.

She still didn't react. But I saw her take a deeper breath – her chest rose and fell, exposed in a corset-style bodice – and her face seemed to go even more blank.

‘Fascist,' the man said. ‘Come along, Tamara.' He made a show of putting the coins back into his pocket. ‘This bus is too crowded. We'll get the next one.' She turned, his arm on her elbow as she negotiated the step down to the kerb.

The bus pulled out into traffic with a rumbling shift of gear and they were gone.

‘Unbelievable,' said the woman with the novel. She pulled at her blouse, smoothing the fabric around her shoulders. ‘In public, like an animal.'

I shifted in my seat, trying to avoid contact, suddenly claustrophobic. I tried opening the window, with no luck. A man standing in the aisle nearby leaned over and pushed it; after a second or two it shuddered open a couple of centimetres.

‘Thanks,' I said. He looked at me and nodded, and I looked quickly away, self-conscious. We'd all been staring at the girl with the collar and leash but something about the way he looked at me made me think that he'd also been watching me while they were standing there, and had witnessed something of my fascination. He squared his shoulders and straightened his jacket, and when he moved his briefcase from one hand to the other I wondered whether he was hiding an erection. The air coming through the window was cool and laced with smog. I thought about the girl with the collar, and how cold she must be in her short dress and fishnet tights, with only the thin cardigan she had been wearing over her bodice.

*

She had seemed so unembarrassed. It was hard to tell what she felt; I'd only been able to glimpse her face through gaps between the people standing in the way. I thought about the blankness that came over her after that breath, and what had seemed to come before it, so quickly wiped away – the beginnings of a smile, perhaps, something triumphant about her mouth.

The woman beside me gave a little cough and lowered her book. ‘Do you mind?' she asked, and reached across to shut the window.

‘No,' I said. She shook her head again. I kept my eyes on my phone, and found the email I'd been waiting for. Cheryl wanted a new draft of the same idea, by this afternoon.

They were a distinctive couple, the man and the girl with the leash, and not the sort of people I saw a lot of in the city where I worked, or where I lived in Ashfield. But after that morning I saw them everywhere, or thought I did. On the way home that evening I glanced out the window and saw them in the line of people waiting at the bus stop, her face pale, with that dark mouth. I felt a shock of recognition and pleasure, and something like vindication. When I'd looked back on it over the course of the day the whole episode had started to feel like a dream, in all its surreal drama. There they were, in the flesh – but then I looked more closely and saw that she was older than the girl on the bus, a more traditional goth with longer hair, and the collar she wore wasn't joined to any leash. The man she was with turned away, but it clearly wasn't him.

The next morning I had a few minutes to spare on the way to the office and took a detour to a cafe I liked where the lines for coffee were always long. She was there ahead of me in the crowd, her black glossy head, her fishnet-covered legs and absurdly tall heels. People swarmed all around and she disappeared. Two days later I stopped at the corner shop on the way home and saw her reflection in the mirror behind the counter, just a glimpse of her profile, with her dark bob, her low, wide fringe, and the distinctive angle of her jaw, submissive and proud all at once. I paid and went to the door, and looked up and down the street to see which direction she had taken. Maybe she lived close by, since they had tried to get on the bus just a couple of stops on from mine. But there was no sign of her.

What would I have done, in any case, I wondered? I hadn't thought about following her, or speaking to her. I just wanted to see them again.

A day or so later I thought I heard his voice when I was using the ATM, that argumentative, superior tone, but when I turned around the men walking by were fair-haired and broad-shouldered, in suits and ties.

*

I was late to brunch with Max that Sunday. It happened every time I arranged to meet him, as though the clock sped up and tricked me, magicking away time so that I rarely managed to leave the house before the hour I was meant to have already arrived. Max once said it was a sign of immaturity. He barely looked up from his paper until I sat down.

‘What have you done to your hair?'

I shrugged. My hairdresser had refused to give me a fringe when I'd visited the previous day. He was stern and uncompromising that way, insisting I could go somewhere else if I asked for a style he believed wouldn't suit me. But he'd agreed to cut the whole thing shorter, in a blunt bob that ended just above my shoulders.

‘It suits you,' Max said, returning to the paper. ‘You look so much older. I mean, more grown-up.' The waiter arrived. ‘Do you know what you want?' Max asked.

I felt the toe of his shoe against my calf, the tender place just below the knee. That was how it had started, one morning at an early meeting with Cheryl and one of the other directors, and some lawyers from another publishing house, including Max. I wound up sitting next to him at the crowded table. At first I thought it was an accidental brush, his foot against my ankle, but a few seconds after I shifted away I felt his fingers on my thigh. He was listening intently to the report from one of the sales team, arguing with them, and his hand stayed there on my leg for a while. I could have moved away but I didn't want to; I followed the rest of meeting carefully and had no trouble recalling it when I talked it over with Cheryl later, but for the whole conversation could think only of how my skin had felt hot where he touched it.

He called me later that day and invited me to the theatre with him on the weekend. Did I like Chekhov? Yes, I did. He needed to find someone to use the spare ticket he had now that his wife wasn't coming, now that they were separated. He managed to make it sound like an onerous work duty, so I wasn't sure whether it was a date or not until the lights went down in the theatre and he whispered in my ear, a compliment about the dress I'd chosen, and put his hand back where it had rested during those minutes in the meeting.

He liked to meet me on weekend mornings, always somewhere far from where he expected to see anyone he knew. I'd threatened to break it off once or twice, in a half-hearted sort of way, after conversations with friends of mine who despised him. They all hated him, even if they'd never met him, which most of them hadn't. These arguments with him always ended with his telling me simplified stories about my own feelings for him, so elegant that I wanted to believe them, although they suggested he had no idea how fiercely I did in fact love him. I found myself almost relieved to think that he didn't suspect the true intensity of my feelings, from the helpless, feral desire to sink my teeth into his flesh when we made love, to my shameful sense of abasement if a day went by without a call or message.

‘Did you see this?' Max pushed a section of the paper towards me. ‘She says she's a human pet. On a bus. Or, not on a bus – the driver wouldn't let them on.'

There was a picture of them, smiling, arm in arm, on the street outside the bungalow where they lived in the south-western suburbs of the city. What had they been doing so far from home, I wondered, on the bus in Ashfield on a weekday morning? The story gave their names as Tony Drysdale, architect, and Tamara Logan, with no occupation listed. She looked chubbier than I remembered, her face round and dimpled.

Max chuckled. ‘He's saying it was discrimination.'

I glanced over the article. ‘I have an easy life,' Tamara was quoted as saying. I felt a small thrill at knowing her name already. I'd heard him say it, when they got off the bus. But it was mixed with an obscure feeling of resentment. I hated that the story was in the paper, reduced to a sort of joke, stripped of its weirdness. The featureless pale brick of their house, with its aluminium windows and boxy hedge in front, was hard to match with the luxurious, severely styled apartment I'd imagined when I thought about where and how they lived.

‘She talks about how happy she is,' Max said. ‘Look at her, she's a child. Completely fucked up.'

She was nineteen, ten years younger than me, and just a couple of years older than Max's own children. The waiter arrived with my coffee. I refolded the paper and placed it on the empty chair beside me.

Max dropped his foot from where it had been resting against my leg. ‘What do you reckon? Shall I put you on a leash for a couple of hours?' He put his hand on my neck and stroked it, his thumb firm against my spine. He was teasing me, but I couldn't tell how badly he expected or wanted me to snap at him.

‘I saw them, you know,' I told him. ‘Those people, the ones on the bus, the girl who's like a dog, or a pet or whatever. It was my bus.'

He smiled, incredulous.

‘He was arguing with the driver for ages. She didn't say anything.'

‘Really?'

I could tell he didn't believe me, but he was pleased that I was telling him the story, as though I were making it up for the purpose of arousing him.

‘Maggie's taking the kids this weekend after all,' he said. ‘Come over around eight. You can tell me all about it.' He raised one eyebrow, a gesture that still made me smile, and looked back at his crossword. ‘Here's one you'll get,' he said. ‘It's in the theme of our conversation, about our mistreated lovers here.
Love handle.
Seven letters. Third letter T.'

I shook my head.

‘Last letter E. Come on, Bee.' He waited a few seconds. ‘No?' He filled in the clue and passed me the paper.
Pet name,
he'd written.

‘Cute.' I could see that he was about to explain it to me. ‘I get it,' I told him. Half the crossword was still undone. ‘Let me finish this.' I took the paper from him, and held my hand out for the pen. He gave me a quick look of surprise (I'd never joined in with his crossword performance before) and handed it over.

*

It had been months since I'd stopped telling myself that I'd never do this again. The stairs up to Max's place had the same smell of seawater and laundry detergent as always, sharpened by a dampness that came with the rain. He'd come to my flat only once; it had been a surprise visit, the third time we'd slept together. The whole time he was there I could see him working hard not to absorb any detail about the environment, as though by not seeing all my furniture and belongings and the rooms I lived in, we could keep up the pretence that what we did together took place in some imaginary zone outside our ordinary lives.

As I waited for him to open the door I wondered whether he would bring up the leash idea again; he'd seemed so turned on at the cafe, not so much by the story in the paper, which he'd treated as ridiculous, as by my story of witnessing it.