The Best Australian Stories 2015 Read online

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Introduction and selection © Amanda Lohrey and Black Inc. 2015 Amanda Lohrey asserts her moral rights in the collection. Individual stories © retained by authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.

  ISBN 9781863957786 (pbk)

  ISBN 9781925203646 (ebook)

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Typesetting by Tristan Main

  Contents

  Introduction

  * * *

  Goldie Goldbloom

  The Pilgrim’s Way

  John A. Scott

  Picasso: A Shorter Life

  Claire Corbett

  2 or 3 Things I Know About You

  Cate Kennedy

  Puppet Show

  Melissa Beit

  The Three Treasures

  Colin Oehring

  Little Toki

  Gay Lynch

  The Abduction of Ganymede

  Eleanor Limprecht

  On Ice

  Julie Koh

  The Level Playing Field

  Jo Lennan

  How Is Your Great Life?

  Omar Musa

  Supernova

  Ryan O’Neill

  Alphabet

  Sarah Klenbort

  Into the Woods

  Jo Case

  Something Wild

  Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Better Things

  Jennifer Down

  Aokigahara

  Nick Couldwell

  The Same Weight as a Human Heart

  Nicola Redhouse

  Vital Signs

  Annette Trevitt

  Twenty Dollars

  Mark Smith

  Manyuk

  * * *

  Publication Details

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  Amanda Lohrey

  Since 1999 Black Inc. Has published an annual anthology of the best short fiction to be found among Australian writing in a given year, or at least the best to have surfaced into visibility. In doing so it has provided an ongoing revelation of the richness and variety that Australian writers bring to the genre of the short story, a form so loose and so generous that almost anything can be attempted within its porous borders. Few rules apply, but if I had to cite one it would be this: by the last line of the story it must have opened out into something larger, and possibly – though not necessarily – more complex than anything we might have imagined or foreseen at the beginning.

  When I was a child, my mother would take me to an Easter magic show staged by one of the leading department stores of the day, and my favourite trick was the one where the magician poured seemingly random ingredients into his top hat: flour, milk, eggs in their shells, lolly wrappers, sawdust and talcum powder. Then he would utter the magic formula to produce – a perfectly baked cake. This remains for me analogous to how writers work; they throw a whole lot of items into a melting pot and hope to achieve some kind of alchemy whereby the disparate elements combine into a satisfying form. It’s hit or miss and even the best writers sometimes fail.

  Whatever the eventual outcome, writers must begin by engaging the reader’s interest, and they do this by striving to establish a certain conviction of tone: ‘Listen to me, I know things, I have revelations to offer and I will deliver.’ Some writers aim at generating a sense of urgency, others for an effect of calm, measured authority. A writer’s style may be hectic or leisurely but, either way, conviction of tone is often an initial bluff; in the early drafts of a story writers are rarely in control of the process, and it’s as much a journey of discovery for them as it is for the reader. Writer and reader, both, are explorers in the realm of consciousness, with the writer as forward scout, riding back from the frontiers of meaning to offer clues as to the lie of the land.

  No two stories in this collection are alike, but in all of them the writer is bringing news. We think we know about Picasso, but John A. Scott revolves the idea of ‘Picasso’ like a mirror ball, to reveal new facets. We hear the phrase ‘globalised citizen’ tossed around, but Jo Lennan (‘How Is Your Great Life?’) creates a detailed portrait of the deracinated state and the ungrounded cultural fluidity of the newly globalised young that is more affecting in its pathos than any official case study. Eleanor Limprecht (‘On Ice’) suggests another dimension to the ‘forgetting’ of dementia. Cate Kennedy (‘Puppet Show’) reinvents Bali. Gay Lynch (‘The Abduction of Ganymede’) complexifies the notion of the good angel and asks: can there ever be such a thing as a pure motive? Omar Musa writes the subtlest of portraits of political corruption (‘Supernova’).

  While the stories in this collection vary greatly, what they do have in common is an element of danger. At the heart of all stories is a concealed threat, a latent danger that tests our perception of the world, along with our nerve. If there is nothing to fear then there is no reason to read on, but while fear is generative of story it is not enough in itself to create a satisfying reading experience. A story that is wholly paranoid in character cannot render truth, because experience is complex, shot through with light as well as burdened by darkness. The paranoid narrative seeks to exploit our fears for cheap effects (like so much crime-based television), but it leaves a hollow feeling, as nourishing as a cake made of sawdust and ashes. The writers in this collection appealed to me because, in so many different ways, they demonstrate that they have mastered the art of confronting darkness without becoming its captive. Their artistry is a form of enlightenment. Magicians all, they have arrived at their own version of the magic formula, and I like to think the reader will find no sawdust here.

  Amanda Lohrey

  The Pilgrim’s Way

  Goldie Goldbloom

  1.

  Hendel remembers the way his father used to take his hand, before the arrival of the other, fake, son, and he tugs his older sister Grunie’s skirt.

  ‘I want to go inside,’ Hendel says. ‘I’m freezing.’

  The Apuan Alps in Tuscany are cold at night, even in May, but Grunie ignores Hendel, who can be demanding and can hog their father’s limited attention.

  ‘Stop it,’ she says, shaking off his hand. ‘I’m listening to Dad’s story.’

  ‘Settle down, Hendel,’ their father, Avner, says sharply, and then, smiling around at the Italian guests as if nothing has happened, he continues his tale. ‘So when the police pulled me over, I told them the kids had chickenpox.’

  ‘Varicella,’ translates the elderly owner of their villa, Rachel.

  The Italians, charmed by this wealthy, charismatic man, laugh. Under cover of darkness, Avner elbows his son, Hendel.

  ‘I’m going to pee my pants,’ Hendel whispers to his sister. ‘I want my otter.’

  But his sister, Grunie, is preoccupied with the way Perel, Avner’s newest wife, is massaging her father’s beard. She thought Jewish law strictly forbade such displays of eroticism. More than the chill Tuscan air, this gives her goosebumps.

  Soon Avner and Perel will say they are tired and have to hit the hay, though her father never tires and the mattresses in the medieval villa they have rented aren’t made of hay but are the ordinary kind that squeak and tinkle and make all kinds of noises, all night lo
ng. Grunie knows the mattresses talk because Avner and Perel are making love. The first night they were in Italy, Hendel woke up from Perel’s screams and Grunie told him that Perel was having a nightmare, the kind Perel sometimes has because of Afghanistan, because of what happened to her there, even though it wasn’t that kind of screaming. Hendel had wanted to go and offer his stepmother his stuffed otter but Grunie convinced him it was a terrible idea. She knows fucking is what married people do, and she knows the sounds that go along with it, but she’s not really sure of the details. She’s simultaneously curious and horrified by her curiosity. Her mother, back in the collapsing Victorian house in New Haven, does not make any noises at night, but then she’s lived alone since Avner left to marry wife number two. Perel is wife number three.

  ‘We didn’t really have chickenpox,’ Grunie says to the group around the table. ‘It was just the scars. Left over from a few weeks before.’

  She wants the Italians to know her father is a liar. She wants them not to trust him so much, not to laugh at his jokes. She doesn’t know why she wants to hurt her father.

  Avner, at forty-seven, has ropey runner’s legs from marathoning around the streets of New York on weekends. His weedy beard is entirely grey, but he is still capable of enthralling women of any age, including his own daughter. He is far less successful with men, who suspect him, correctly, of having uncontrollable desires.

  Avner ruffles Grunie’s hair. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘It worked. I didn’t get a speeding ticket. I still have a perfect driving record.’

  Hendel huddles against Grunie. ‘Please,’ he begs. ‘I have to go in. Come with me.’ He doesn’t want to have to remind her; he’s scared of the dark, of the steep, narrow stone staircases between the houses, of the black spotted mastiff that lurks on the upper verandah of their villa, looking, in the dim light, as if it has three heads and six legs.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ says Perel, who is only too aware of the role expected of stepmothers, even young ones with freshly lacquered nails. She had thought that she would be rescuing these children from a state of divorce-induced quasi-orphan-ness, but it turned out that they didn’t need her or even like her most of the time.

  ‘Please, Grunie?’ Hendel doesn’t even look at Perel’s hand with its terrifying purple nails.

  ‘Fine,’ Grunie says, wishing Hendel’s pyjamas didn’t smell of pee, wishing he wasn’t touching her at all and wanting to push him off. ‘In a minute.’

  Across the chestnut farm table lit by flickering candles is an Italian, barely twenty, who is studying architecture in Rome. He’s dressed all in tight black, and his long black hair is pulled smoothly back into a ponytail. Grunie met him earlier, when Avner and Perel were having one of their lengthy ‘conversations’ behind the locked door of their bedroom. She and Hendel had picked their way down to the olive terraces to hunt for Roman coins. That’s when she saw him, sitting propped up against one of those stone shrines to a dead saint, drawing in a little book. ‘What are you doing?’ she’d asked, coming up behind him quietly. He was startled. Grunie’s real mother pays for ballet lessons so she can move like this, silently, sensually, but her father disapproves of girls dancing in front of mixed-gender crowds, and each year he attempts, in court, to put a stop to her lessons. At night, however, each of the nights they’ve been in Italy, Avner and Perel go dancing, and this hypocrisy, more than any of the others, enrages Grunie.

  She is a tall, skinny girl and is wearing a floor-length cotton dress left over from the 1960s that she found in her mother’s closet, and she bites her nails so badly that there’s only a wink of nail left on each finger. She already knows that if she bends, flat-backed, from the waist, to pluck the red poppy growing near the Italian’s foot, he will watch her. She has learnt, in this one week with her stepmother, how to swing her body from her hips in a way that, instead of avoiding the attention of men, invites it. Her stepmother Perel has three failed marriages, juicy hips and, no matter what, doesn’t want to lose this husband.

  It tickles Grunie to think of her father’s discomfort when she and Hendel returned from their walk and Hendel blurted, ‘Grunie met a boy-oy.’ Here, this high in the mountains, the air itself invites her to be someone different to the girl who plays dress-ups with Hendel at home. She is not averse, either, to the attention this elicits from her father, who does not know what to make of this older person who hangs her training bras on the washing lines at the edge of the village and steals her stepmother’s lipstick to paint both her and Hendel’s faces. Grunie no longer cares if he disapproves of her, because she has discovered that this, too, grants her a dribble of fatherly attention. She has no idea why her mother’s steady beam of love is far less fascinating to her than her father’s erratic and flickering flame, but she feels for moths, for their craziness, for their obsession with something that could hurt them.

  Now she glances across the table and catches the Italian, Massimiliano, looking at her again, and she arches her back in a yawn designed to show off her budding breasts.

  Avner wants to slap her, or at the very least send her to her room. What he loves in every other woman, he hates in his daughter. He doesn’t, of course, slap her, because he is afraid the Italians will think less of him. He wants Grunie to know she has displeased him with this display, and he waits for her apology. As usual, he is disappointed when she says nothing.

  The Italian smiles frankly at Grunie, though he knows she’s only a child. He is a citizen of the Vatican City, which has the youngest age of consent – twelve – of any province anywhere in the world. Grunie, he knows, is thirteen. He will dream about Grunie for a week, maybe two, until he returns to the Vatican City and his protector, where he will, once again, become immersed in a life among men. He, however, is no fag. For money, for schooling, he will do anything, but after he graduates he will leave his padrone and marry a young woman, a virgin from Stazzema, who will bear him three children before being hit by a Vespa as she tries to cross a street in the Oltrarno, where he will have his architecture firm. He will hear the ambulance but not know it is his wife who has died, ten metres from his office. One of his sons will convert to Judaism and, forty years from now, will counsel Grunie’s only son, a patient struggling with being both gay and Orthodox. ‘My father,’ the therapist will say, ‘slept with men, but he was straight. Maybe you are too.’ This will be of small comfort when Grunie’s son loses his position as the rabbi of a small congregation in Chicago, his house, his wife and his six children as a result of sleeping with this therapist.

  ‘Come on,’ Grunie says, taking Hendel’s hand. ‘I’ll go with you now.’

  She looks over her shoulder at the Italian man. ‘It’s so dark,’ she says, but Massimiliano does not get the chance to offer to escort them. Avner rises first and says to Hendel, ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Grunie says. ‘I’ll stay here then.’

  ‘With your mother,’ says Avner, staring straight at Massimiliano.

  ‘Stepmother,’ replies Grunie. ‘My real mother is home in New Haven.’

  ‘I want my otter,’ says Hendel as Avner’s hand tightens around his wrist.

  They walk along a path made from broken clay roofing tiles and climb up a narrow staircase between the houses. None of the houses have windows that overlook this pathway. A statue of a woman holding a dead infant, her free hand over her face, looms from the shadows and Hendel leans his body against his father’s. Avner experiences the child’s shivers as a weakness. He pushes Hendel’s shoulder away from him and feels fatherly doing so. Above them there is a crack and a hiss and the last light bulb in the lane blows out and they are left in darkness. Bats, just barely visible in the purple night, whistle by their heads. Hendel is aware that he is waiting for something to happen. Nearby, a donkey brays and sets off a volley of dog barks.

  ‘She’s turning into a shiksa,’ says Avner, hurriedly hauling Hendel up the last stone stairs where anything could be hiding. Avner, it turns out, is also
afraid of the dark.

  ‘Who?’ Hendel asks. He suspects his father means Perel, who harbours not-so-secret yearnings for the fast-food cheeseburgers and shellfish of her youth, but Avner surprises him by saying, ‘Grunie.’

  Hendel is oblivious to everyone’s levels of religiosity. The thing he truly cares about is the Latin name for every living thing within a two-kilometre radius. Judaism is, for him, a given, the blackboard on which his life is drawn. He passes, without a pang, the most exquisite Italian restaurants, and runs to devour a vegetable soup prepared by Perel from stock cubes and frozen spinach.

  ‘Grunie’s good, Dad,’ he says, even though he spends hours every day undermining his sister. He understands, just for a moment, that his father will eventually lose his connection with all of his children because he refuses to see them as individuals, and Hendel wants, with his whole heart, to delay this rejection for Grunie.

  ‘Yes,’ Avner says thoughtfully. ‘But she has your mother’s stubborn streak.’

  They can no longer hear the laughter or the crackling of the fire at the party, and now, between the stone walls, the air feels dense and full of the strong, sharp scent of lemons.

  ‘What about you? Don’t you have a stubborn streak?’ Hendel remembers his father telling him that in order to sell bibles successfully you have to knock on a hundred doors to get a single yes. Avner has, for the past fourteen years, won the national competition for bible salesmen and this trip to Italy is part of a salary package.

  ‘Mine is the good kind of stubborn,’ says Avner. ‘Your mother’s is just the irritating kind.’

  ‘What about Perel?’ asks Hendel. ‘What kind is hers?’

  Avner stops walking to think. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What do you think?

  ‘Hers is the pan-throwing kind,’ says Hendel.

  ‘Yes,’ says Avner.

  ‘She can’t help herself,’ Hendel says. ‘She’s had a bad life. Afghanistan messed with her. She has pressures.’

  Avner leans against the cold wall and sighs. After he divorced his first wife, his eldest son, who no longer talks to Avner, said, ‘The Talmud says the first time you get married, you get what you pray for. The second time, you get what you deserve.’ After a pause, this son added, ‘I hope you get what you deserve.’