The Best Australian Stories (10 page)

I was halfway across the bridge when I saw him. I stopped. He was on the riverbank. I couldn't make out the face but it was he, short and small-headed in my bloated jacket. He stood with the tramp, both of them staring into the blazing gasoline drum. The smoke was thick, particulate. For a second I stopped breathing. I knew with sick certainty what he had done. The ashes, given body by the wind, floated away from me down the river. He patted the man on the shoulder, reached into his back pocket, and slipped some money into those large, newly mittened hands. He started up the bank then, and saw me. I was so full of wanting I thought it would flood my heart. His hands were empty.

If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn't have said the things I did. I wouldn't have told him he didn't understand; for clearly, he did. I wouldn't have told him that what he had done was unforgivable. That I wished he had never come, or that he was no father to me. But I hadn't known, and, as I waited, feeling the wind change, all I saw was a man coming toward me in a ridiculously oversized jacket, rubbing his black-sooted hands, stepping through the smoke with its flecks and flametinged eddies, who had destroyed himself, yet again, in my name. The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over – to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world – and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.

The Lap Pool

Robert Drewe

Naked and forty-seven, Leon K. backstroked steadily up and down his lap pool, an eddy of drowned insects in his wake. Of course he knew his rhythm by now; he automatically counted strokes as well as laps. Each of the forty laps that added up to one kilometre took him fifteen strokes. On each fifteenth backward reach he trusted that the finger-tips of his right hand rather than the back of his skull would strike the wall first. Stroking, breathing, stroking, breathing, he swam almost in a trance.

Despite the pool's cool temperature (it was a windy autumn and the connection to the solar panels on the farmhouse roof was broken) he needed to swim in order to relax, to cope, to live the current version of his life. He swam as early dawn rays struck the surface and again as the shadows of the palms criss-crossed the pool in the late afternoon. Nowadays he preferred backstroke, and swimming naked made him feel momentarily free of his current restraints. (It wasn't as if anyone was likely to drop by.) Swimming on his back was also therapeutic; there were the clouds to observe through the palm fronds, and swifts scooting and flicking after insects, and kestrels hovering like hang-gliders over the orchard. In its constancy this silent aerial activity was immensely soothing. There was always at least one bird somewhere in the sky.

A Google search attested to the state swimming successes of his youth. Thirty years later he was a tall, keg-chested man with arms and legs less disproportionately long than they'd seemed back then. A more bowed and slope-shouldered specimen, too, he'd noticed lately, more weighed down by the gravity of anxious time and snowballing events than even a year ago.

His sixth month alone and the farm was so quiet these afternoons just before the cockatoo clamour of sunset that from the pool Leon K. could hear his daughters' downcast ponies tearing grumpily at the grass in the home paddock. Awaiting his trial, which had been adjourned for yet another four months while the authorities strengthened their case against him, he swam his two lap sessions and paced his overgrown boundaries, scrutinising nature. The rest of the time, or during the region's frequent electrical storms, he restlessly roamed his veranda, by day with a pot of green tea and a sudoku puzzle, by night with a bottle of his cellar's dwindling supply of merlot or pinot noir.

By now all the official delays, court adjournments and tax investigations were jumbled together in his mind. The future appeared increasingly hazy and he felt the same fatalistic confusion he knew on that dip in the coast highway near Sugar Cane Road, when night sea-fogs suddenly swept over the cane fields. What should he anticipate around the next murky bend? A riskily unlit hippy cyclist, an invisible hitchhiker, a petrol tanker thundering across the imperceptible lane markings? Would he ever see his way clear?

Against his own best interests he'd come to dread the weekly visit of the one person who might at least clarify matters for him, his solicitor, Gareth Wyntuhl. As the legal process dragged on, he increasingly resented spending every Thursday afternoon and Friday on the lawyer's highly expensive devil's advocacy and narrow legalistic interpretation of the prosecution case. He also resented him for eating into his swimming time. This wasn't strictly true. He still swam his usual laps, though less calmly with Wyntuhl hovering enigmatically at the pool edge, whistling tunelessly through his teeth and forever looking at his watch. With the lawyer present, he felt bound to don his Speedos – and resented not swimming naked, too.

Unavoidably these days, after an hour or so in the lawyer's presence he lapsed into a mild fugue. On a bad day Wyntuhl's monotone could make his brain shut down completely. At the start of his troubles he'd tried to fight the unusual effect it had on him: the gradual fainting sensation and cloudy vision, leading to a total mental fade-out, a sort of grey noise where only background sounds had any relevance. The tap-tapping of the pool's filter box, magpies calling on the lawn, brush turkeys scratching in the shrubbery. Now he went with it. It wasn't unpleasant, it was almost a reverie, and he wondered whether it felt like this to be hypnotised. Maybe Wyntuhl should grow a goatee and get himself a stage act. When he fell deeper into this particular stupor – a sort of painless, aura-free migraine – every thing about Wyntuhl, from his endomorphic physical outline to the veranda table he'd heaped with files (the lawyer's attempt to claim his attention with a crisp conference ambience), faded into the rural hum and buzz and became as abstract and misty as dreams.

After the past year of examinations and committal proceedings it wasn't surprising his mind needed a rest. Tired of raking through the ashes of disgrace, his brain had called a halt. Maybe he was having a mental breakdown. How easy it was to forget the minutiae of the case – the dates, the amounts, the stock transfers and telescoping bank loans, all that paper-shuffling – and sink back into the vibrations of trees, livestock and wildlife, of cattle lowing, water dragons scuttling under the veranda, and palms rattling in the wind. Pulling this blanket of nature around his shoulders, he felt safely hidden, a snug wombat in its hole. Somehow less ignoble, he could even fantasise about the puzzling uniqueness of his position. Instead of a former company director under indictment for alleged ‘corporate misconduct' and ‘breaches of directors' duties', he could be a beleaguered sovereign awaiting news from the front. Maybe a Caribbean president anticipating a peasant uprising from the sugarcane fields below.

If only the calm didn't end at the last lap, at the moment his finger-tips tipped the wall behind him and he stood, removed his goggles and allowed the dusk's pink-grey shadows to settle on his body for a few seconds. But, inevitably, reality returned. He stepped heavily out of the pool, shivering now and streaming water, and stamped bare-arsed across the terrace to the house.

*

Lushly green, thanks to their prime position between the coast and the Nightcap Ranges, his thirty-two acres lay along a north-south valley of carved-up dairy farms, formerly dense rainforest known as the Big Scrub. Cleared of its native red cedars a century ago, the rich volcanic soil now nurtured in their place a thriving feral tree, the camphor laurel, imported from China during a nineteenth-century preoccupation with arboreal neatness. Long escaped from its municipal parks and government schoolyards, the camphor laurel now ran as wild and free as the thistle and dandelion throughout the Northern Rivers. And, disgracefully, at scenically unrestrained intervals, over Leon K.'s acres.

Of course his neighbours, real farmers, many of whose ancestors had razed the original rainforest to plant grass for their cattle, detested the camphor laurel as an alien weed, a timber version of the Asian Hordes. If he might harbour some guilt deep in his heart for his alleged misdemeanours (
uncharacteristic errors of judgment through
overwork, a misplaced trust in subordinates, unforeseen vagaries in the market
were the forms of words Wyntuhl suggested to explain them) he hadn't a leaf, a twig, of environmental guilt. How could those farmers understand the quiet pleasure those camphor laurels gave him, their gentle tiers sloping and rolling away towards the cane fields and the sea? He found the trees' leafy density and undulating outlines attractively foreign. At dusk their voluptuous silhouettes filled him with nostalgia for something ordered yet indefinable: contentment, even romance.

There was a cosy childish component, too, in the trees' rounded, European appearance. His daughters used to call them ‘broccoli trees', the camphor laurels reminding them of that unwelcome clumpy vegetable on their dinner plates. For him they recalled the trees in the picture books of his youth;
The Magic Faraway Tree
was a favourite. Even the word ‘camphor' brought back aromatic childhood memories: his grandmother's wardrobes and linen chest in Budapest. His own camphor laurels, meanwhile, were forever striking new shoots, which he made no attempt to cut out. It was another count against him, this city gent's whimsy, a hobby-farmer's un-Australian and neglectful misuse of the land.

His property was L-shaped, with the farmhouse and his sixteen highest acres forming the vertical part of the L. On the horizontal bottom sixteen, beyond the red-clay dam and the orchard, with its rotting and desiccated fruit, his twenty-three beef cattle – a token herd to fatten and sell – grazed behind a multicoloured foreign tangle of blackberry, lantana and bougainvillea, the subject of monthly noxious-weed action warnings from the local council. Lately, a couple of headstrong yearlings had begun squeezing through the electric fence and barbed wire into the neighbouring property. Their dopey discontent – they were happy to be zapped and lacerated every day just to sample the identical grass on the other side – astounded him at first, but no longer. That was the country for you.

He had never claimed to be any sort of farmer himself. In the first enthusiastic flush of ownership he'd keenly planted a wide sample of regional produce: mangoes, guavas, macadamia and pecan nuts, a few coffee bushes for novelty's sake, some custard apples, imaginative hybrid citrus like lemonade trees and tangelos, also papayas, bananas, lychees and avocados. He'd imagined satisfying strolls through his orchard after Sunday lunch parties, and healthy family breakfasts of his own exotic fruits: icy glasses of guava and citrus juice; mangoes sliced into clever cubes. But once the troubles began, the Sunday parties quickly fell away, and breakfast somehow never progressed beyond toast and coffee. Soon he was eating, and living, alone, and those few trees still bearing fruit were taken over by fungus and fruit fly, birds and flying foxes.

Since the sale of the yacht and the ski lodge, the farm was his only nominal asset. The house, a century-old hardwood Queenslander, badly needed renovating, but under such close financial scrutiny he couldn't carry out the necessary repairs. The authorities were monitoring his accounts. He imagined teams of investigative accountants trawling over his petrol and grocery bills, frowning at the cheques for swimming-pool chlorine and pony feed. But frankly it wasn't just the financial block preventing him from acting on anything. It was a deep lack of will. Even a phone call to a local tradesman was a daunting prospect, requiring more mental effort than he could muster. Meanwhile, unless a southerly was blowing, the septic tank reeked intrusively, the house's timbers were peeling and cracking, and the electrical wiring was questionable; increasingly, light bulbs popped after a few days. The tennis-court lights were failing, too; the last bulb was flickering and ready to blow. But to change them would also be expensive; he'd have to call an electrician and hire a cherry picker. It hardly seemed worth the effort now that he had no tennis companions, night or day.

More importantly for his daily wellbeing, the pool – built ninety years after the house, the first, vital change he'd made when he'd bought the property ten years before – already required extensive doctoring. Electrical fade-outs affected its pump, the tiles were loosening and blue-green algae always threatened. He swore he could see algae spores borne on the breeze and grey fungal scales clinging to the trunks of the poolside palms, awaiting their chance to poison his water. This was one problem he knew he must act on. If the structure of his life was crumbling, the pool was the only thing keeping him sane.

*

His old city friends shunned him as if he were contagious. And except to complain in terse phone calls about his trespassing cattle and noxious weeds, his farmer neighbours didn't communicate with him, although most days their vehicles passed him at high speed. The shared lane to his farm was a winding tunnel of blind turns, ferny overgrowth and furry roadkill through, and over, which every other driver drove murderously fast. Whenever he went to town, purposely observing the speed limit, his car was tailgated by furious motorists, and sometimes also by mysterious white vehicles. Several times he'd noticed a white car parked in his lane while someone photographed the house and property from the front gate. When he stepped outside to question the photographer, the man (he couldn't tell if it was the same man) nonchalantly sauntered to his car and accelerated away. Some authority keeping tabs on him, he supposed. One of the many gung-ho state and federal acronyms fighting corporate crime nowadays, all competing to capture the big-business scalps. Perhaps the prosecution or the tax office, working in cahoots. Maybe a private investigator acting for a major creditor. He'd felt paranoid the first time he spotted this overt surveillance and for several nights was unable to sleep. More fatalistic these days, he expected nothing less – and still slept badly.