The Best Australian Stories 2015 Read online

  ‘Stand up!’ she calls. She tries to run but slips onto one knee, the water curling up over her back and drenching her head. ‘Hendel?’

  A clap of thunder, almost directly overhead, drowns out any answer he might have given. ‘Hendel!’ she calls again, running now, slipping and sliding, once completely under the water. The sandals are gone. Her feet are cut. Hendel is a good swimmer, better than her, but he’s smaller too. More likely to be clobbered by a branch. She rounds a bend and trips over something, a root or a stone, and sprawls forward, hitting her head against what can only be Hendel’s own head, and then she pushes upwards into the air, dragging, with all her puny strength, her brother. Her arm, now, is around his waist. He is retching. She is crying. Her legs have disappeared in all this water and Hendel’s whole body shakes once before his eyes roll back in his head and he slumps in a wave against the wall.

  Grunie knows she has to stay calm. She’s been to Girl Scout camp and can tie fourteen knots. She believes this might be her chance to save a life, but she also believes she might die trying. She thinks she is too young to die; she’s never been kissed, not even by Massimiliano, who would, if he got the chance. She’s never had a child, written a book, been to Timbuktu. Death seems like something much too small, too simple, on the Pilgrim’s Way in the Apuan Alps. She thinks if they die it will be her fault, but if they live she will still be blamed. Grunie clutches Hendel to her and Hendel’s pointed little chin digs into her shoulder. His hair smells of wet feathers. Grunie’s stomach fills with tears as cold as the rain that is still falling. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, patting him awkwardly, not sure if he is breathing. ‘I’ve got you now.’

  When their family is reunited and eating macaroni and cheese by the tiny wood-burning stove, everyone seems to have forgotten Perel’s role in the accident. Hendel has had a near-death experience and is going on about cosmic whales, winged otters radiating light and the harmony of all living things. This is all he can talk about now that he has stopped coughing up muddy water. It’s all he’ll talk about for years to come. People will get sick of hearing about it before he turns thirty.

  Everyone has a chance to pat the old Italian man on the back. He, not Grunie, is the hero. Just as she suspected, all the blame has been laid on her, despite the fact that she hauled her brother out of the water. Just because the Italian was the one who reached down from the top of the wall and lifted first Hendel and then Grunie to safety, and then carried Hendel in his arms the three kilometres to their villa, he gets all the recognition. And Grunie gets the complaints. How could you let him walk in the forest alone? Why did you leave when it was getting dark? Why didn’t you ask permission? Grunie knows she could point the finger at Perel but decides to shoulder the blame and keep Perel’s secret. The water has changed her, too.

  She knows that Perel did not get any colour from her hour of sunshine, but is still smiling. Perel’s face, Grunie notices, is glowing, and despite the near-tragedy, her stepmother hums ‘La vie en rose’ to herself. None of today’s drama has touched the place where Perel has gone to in her mind and, for the first time in her adult life, Grunie feels a mature suspicion forming.

  The two elderly owners have appeared, bearing elderberry wine and a small panna cotta, ‘for the martyr’, they say. And other neighbours have arrived too, including a girl from the village below theirs, and twins from the village below that one. None of them speak English and they are unwanted, so they lay their gifts silently on the table and go outside, to the covered porch, to mutter among themselves. Hendel, shrouded in a down quilt, leaves Grunie and floats outside, into the dark.

  ‘Mi chiamo Harold,’ he lies. ‘Michela.’ ‘Donatella,’ say the twins. ‘Jack,’ says the other boy, and the twins frown at him. Grunie comes outside to protect Hendel. She’s hoping the other children have heard her part in the rescue and think well of her, but instead they move away from her and make a gesture with their hands that looks like it might be sign language for I love you except their faces do not say I love you. She guesses, correctly, it really means they are afraid of her, of her bad luck. Hendel is still trying out his basic Italian vocabulary, trying earnestly to connect, and she is beginning to hate him for it.

  ‘Come inside,’ she says. ‘You’ll get sick.’

  ‘You’re not my mother,’ he says, turning his back on her. He doesn’t remember that she pulled him from the water. He only remembers the way she was screaming when the Italian was carrying him, how annoyingly shrill her voice was, how it distracted him from the glowing otters and cosmic whales.

  ‘I’m Mum’s representative,’ Grunie says. ‘Here.’

  ‘No,’ Hendel says. ‘You’re not. Perel is.’

  The other children sit still. They don’t know what the conversation is about, but they follow the gestures. Grunie has her hand on Hendel’s shoulder. He shakes her off. She pushes him. He pulls her hair and screams something in her face.

  ‘Dad!’ Grunie yells, because, despite the two new wives, despite Avner’s preference for the child that isn’t even his, despite his frequent absences and distorted stories and see-through lies, he is still her father, and right now she needs her own rescue.

  ‘It must have been hard, lifting your brother from the water,’ a shaky voice comes from the darkest corner of the porch. Julia and her companion, Rachel, lean into the faint light. ‘You were very brave, my dear,’ Julia says, placing her frail hand on Grunie’s. ‘We heard all about it.’

  ‘People can lift Volkswagens off their loved ones when they need to,’ says Rachel. ‘But it’s still wonderful. A miracle.’

  ‘Your mother should have been watching you,’ says Julia.

  ‘Stepmother,’ says Grunie. ‘She was resting. On the porch.’

  ‘No,’ says Rachel. ‘She wasn’t. I came up here looking for Rupert. I couldn’t find him. I rested for a minute on your porch before going back down the hill and your mother wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Grunie, and again, inside her, the new Grunie shakes, and droplets of her innocence spray out from her body. ‘Where could she have been?’

  Hendel is still muttering about the things he saw floating under the water. ‘They had cream-coloured wings,’ he says. ‘In tatters.’

  The rain, still falling, trickles into a rain barrel at the edge of the porch. There are goldfish in the barrel and a flowering iris and a fat yellow snail. Grunie thinks that in New Haven small children would drown in these barrels, trying to catch the goldfish, so it wouldn’t be allowed. Here, everything is allowed. Even giving her and Hendel small glasses of wine to put them to sleep, which is what their father does now, coming out onto the porch with two jam jars full of ruby liquid.

  ‘Drink,’ Avner says. ‘It’ll put hair on your chest.’ He didn’t hear Grunie call for him when Hendel pulled her hair, but even if he did, he wouldn’t have come out to help her. He believes in the survival of the fittest.

  ‘I don’t want hair on my chest,’ says Grunie. She saw him through the window, canoodling with Perel. She saw her father ignore her call. She believes that divorce shouldn’t exist.

  ‘Your mother has hair on her chest,’ Avner says, but even he knows it’s because his ex-wife has gone through an early menopause and besides having hair on her chest, has a small reddish moustache too.

  ‘Dad,’ says Hendel. ‘Will you put me to bed tonight? Not Perel?’

  For once, Avner is pleased to be asked. Pleased for the chance to be the most desired parent, even if it’s only a choice between him and the lacklustre Perel. Hendel waves a shy goodbye to the other children who think his name is Harold. Avner says goodnight to Julia and Rachel. The old women haven’t said a word since he came out onto the porch. Julia’s hand still covers Grunie’s. Grunie is glad for the warmth, for the notice. But she is worried about her brother, about his fixation on wings. She doesn’t know how long he was underwater, or even if he had decided it was easier to swim downstream and she, by falling over him, was the one to nearly drown
him. ‘Shut up,’ Hendel said, when she tried to talk to him about it. ‘That’s not the important part.’ But it was. It was important to her.

  Avner doesn’t know what to say to Hendel. He doesn’t feel guilty, exactly, since he is never the one who is in charge of his children, but he feels something, and he is having a hard time finding a name for it. ‘Want me to hold your hand?’ he asks, hoping to fill the silence between them. Inside, the house smells faintly of salt, as if the stones are sweating even though they are icy cold. Avner waits for Hendel to take his hand and then, when his son doesn’t touch him, he tells himself that Hendel is too old for hand-holding. The strange feeling in him, however, swells. He can taste it, just at the back of his throat, and he tries, again and again, to swallow it down.

  ‘It’s lucky that old man was out there,’ Avner says, swallowing.

  ‘Yes,’ says Hendel, sensing that his father wants something from him. He is curious about the skittering sounds coming from above them, on the roof, but far more concerned with pleasing his father. It’s not often he has Avner to himself and today it’s happened twice.

  ‘The word for chestnut in Italian is castagna,’ Hendel says.

  ‘Is it?’ says Avner. He is opening cupboards, looking for an extra blanket.

  ‘Thank you for bringing us to Italy,’ says Hendel, trying to re-engage his father.

  Avner is angry at his son. All along, during the walk up the stairs from the kitchen, he has been angry, he decides. The strange slippery emotion at the back of his throat must be anger.

  ‘What the hell possessed you to go on that walk?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you have a sore foot? Or is that pretend?’

  In answer, Hendel sits on the topmost step and peels off his sock. He lifts his foot up for his father to see the hole, now the size of a dime and as deep as the head of a match. It is filled with pus and crusted blood.

  ‘Beautiful,’ says Avner, but he sits down next to Hendel and pulls the little boy into his lap. There is a feeling then, which neither has experienced in a long time and barely recognise. They both want the feeling, whatever it is, to last.

  Hendel, leaning against his father’s hard chest, thinks that it is Perel who drains this feeling from between Avner and him, and so he says, ‘Perel told me I could go.’ He still hopes his father will divorce the Evil Stepmother and get back together with his quiet, moustachioed mother.

  ‘You could have died,’ says Avner. ‘Perel would never have let you go. Don’t make excuses for your own bad behaviour!’ Avner’s breath is fast and high. Hendel recognises the signs of his father’s impending temper, the tight white lips, the stare jumping out at him like heated razors, and he slips from Avner’s lap.

  ‘You don’t have to say Shema with me,’ he says. ‘I can put myself to bed.’ He had hoped his father would sing the prayer with him and turn on the electric blanket and draw the sheets up to his chin and rub his back until he fell asleep but he knows it all went down the tube the moment he mentioned Perel. Hendel doesn’t understand, quite, that in the competition between Perel and him for Avner’s love and attention, he is losing. He doesn’t yet know that Perel – beautiful, sexy, damaged Perel – is a trophy his father feels he has won, just like this trip to Italy.

  Hendel happened as a result of sex, not even particularly satisfying sex, with Avner’s first wife (it was an arranged marriage), who is fat now, and manly. Perel was won away from a dozen other suitors because he, Avner, with all his money and his muscles, was a catch. To keep Perel from the kind of men who find her so desirable that they beg her to have their babies, or haul her down among the flower pots, Avner always has to put her first, before his children, before even himself. Hendel won’t know this for another six painful years.

  Avner feels both rage at Hendel’s attempt to blame Perel and some other sensation, more nebulous. He wonders, briefly, why Perel didn’t go with the children, and then rejects the thought as being unfaithful. He wants, more than anything, to return to the moment on the stairs when he felt the way he thinks real fathers feel, with their cheeks in their children’s hair at bedtime, but he too knows the moment is lost.

  The morning after the accident, Grunie opens the shutters before Hendel wakes up from his dreams of spangled humpback whales sliding through the night sky. Grunie puts her hand on his forehead and discovers he has a slight fever. The swallow returns, but only when Grunie leaves the room to tell Avner that Hendel is sick. The swallow looks in at the boy several times as Hendel lies resting after his ordeal. His foot is propped up on the Italian dictionary he’d begged his mother to buy. Hendel doesn’t wonder about the bird any more, about its potential for symbolism. He knows there is something wrong with a bird that keeps flying into human space.

  In the afternoon he wakes to a sense that someone is in the room with him and he hopes it is his father. He hopes that Avner will try to connect with him again, but when Hendel opens his eyes, he sees the swallow, perched on the open windowsill, tilting its head this way and that. It leaps into the air, makes several tours of the room, and then swoops out of the window. Wow, thinks Hendel. Wow. It likes me. He reaches down to pick at the scab that is forming over the hole in his foot. It stings, but it’s a good kind of sting.

  When he rolls over to turn on the electric blanket, the swallow returns, and this time it lands on his headboard, right above Hendel’s face. As it turns, he gets an elegant view of the bird’s anus. One well-aimed squirt would hit him in the eye. But this is a well-behaved swallow. No-one is crapping on Hendel today.

  Meanjin

  Picasso: A Shorter Life

  John A. Scott

  1 Smoke

  1881 Don Salvador blows cigar smoke into the nostrils of his stillborn nephew, making of him a living soul. Thus, a marvellous being comes into the world – a magus, with the moral inclinations of a corpse. Looking back at his life, everything seems to have happened swiftly – a tumble of betrayals, marriages; infidelities of every kind. Perhaps biography’s unforgiving distillation lends to these liaisons the sense of lasting no more than a matter of months. Not so. These attachments are stretched over years. It is crucial here you understand the time scale. The distortions, the inherent cruelty of slowness.

  2 Olga

  1917 For a man with no interest in music outside of flamenco, who judges dancing as immoral and depraved, it might seem ill-considered to take a ballerina for a wife. Olga Khokhlova comes to Paris with Diaghilev’s troupe: one of those dancers he likes to include from a higher social class. The newlyweds take rooms in rue La Boétie, amidst the antique shops and galleries. Pso dresses now from Savile Row, in double-breasted tweeds. He slides a gold watch from his pocket. Paints his wife as would a Realist. ‘I want to recognise my face,’ she insists in cow-accented French, intolerable as his own. She screams, drinks coffee. Both, it seems, obsessively. She bears him a child, Paulo, in whom Pso has no interest beyond the age of four. The artist describes his son as ‘ordinary’ – that most dismissive of character traits – at one stage employing him as his chauffeur. But he drinks. Dying at fifty-four from cirrhosis of the liver, a legacy of drug and alcohol abuse.

  3 Marie-Thérèse

  1927 Pso (as Andalusian flâneur, out this early afternoon, freeing himself of Olga’s screech and clattering), saunters near the Metro OPÉRA to find, among ‘the apparition of these faces’ labouring upwards to a bitter January air, a seventeen-year-old girl, Greek-nosed, with eyes of blue-grey. He grabs her arm, pulls her from the flow. I’m Picasso! he announces, We are going to do great things together. Her name is Marie-Thérèse. She has never heard of Picasso; knows nothing of Modern Art, preferring BICYCLING, GYMNASTICS and MOUNTAINEERING. He takes her virginity at a children’s camp in Dinard and, finding her sufficiently submissive, installs her in an apartment in rue La Boétie across the road from Olga. His sexual demands are bizarre. Some make her laugh at the thought of them – but he hates her laughter. He prefers to keep her tearful. ‘Most of it was sadism,’ Marie-Thérèse
confirms. ‘First rape, then work. Nearly always like that.’

  4 Minotaur

  1930 Ambroise Vollard, collector, art dealer, commissions from Pso 100 etchings in the neoclassical style. Before too long the Minotaur appears. First, sharing a saucer of champagne with a bearded sculptor, then joining him in bed with his model. Six weeks later Marie-Thérèse tells Pso she is pregnant. The artist is terrified. Is it possible that by the sheer force of his genius one of his creations has impregnated his current lover? Needless to say, the unthinkable comes to pass. A male child, covered with blood-red oils, is born to the young girl and the Spanish artist. Vollard feels in some way responsible for what has happened and mother and child are quickly secreted in his house in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, ten miles from Versailles. For several months the creature remains hairless; what will be horns are barely knuckle-like lumps. The genitals, an inheritance from Pso, are fully formed and would be of prodigious size even for an adult. From the first, Marie-Thérèse deems it satanic. She quickly learns how it shies away from candlelight, rears, swivelling aside with astonishing dexterity. Mercifully, the horned boy dies, par hazard, glimpsing its own grotesqueness in a glass – death by self-sight – a condition previously noted in creatures half-bull, half-human. Later, as a consequence, Marie-Thérèse always ensures a candle burns when Pso demonstrates an urge for rutting. The candle is an addition which the artist finds exciting – this fragile token of romance to complement buggery.

  5 Dora Maar

  1936 Then there is the matter of the Jugoslavian photographer. Henriette Theodora Markovich. Pso is introduced to her by Éluard. He has seen her just a few days back at the café Deux-Magots. Seen her, black-haired, dark-eyed. Born in Tours, she tells him, the same year as his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He takes her hand. She is wearing long black gloves embroidered with roses. Stained dark, the lace, at the webbing. He has seen the gloves as well, on that earlier occasion, folded, laid aside. Away from her splayed hand pressed palm-down on the wooden table top. She had been playing a familiar Jugoslavian game. Stabbing rapidly with a knife between her fingers. Blood already flowing from a wound close to the second finger’s knuckle. She seemed fascinated by the risk, the sudden pain. He recalls her now a sometime mistress of Bataille. Pso enquires as to whether she might present him with a gift of her gloves? That night, that week, sleeplessly, he dreams of her, at her forbidden games. He, peering out from beneath a table, sees her – spectacled, black-ribboned at her neck. Sees her in that bourgeois drawing room with its rugs and its striped wallpaper. Sees her riding on the back of Bataille. What mightn’t she do. He falls abandonedly into imaginings – thrusting in the air, his penis wrapped in the silk of that black glove. Pso, priapic, rapacious, sees it all from where he sits cross-legged beneath the table. The little Andalusian boy.