The Best Australian Stories (14 page)

Torchlight was panning the gum trees; the trunks were like white spindly ghosts. Men in black wetsuits slipped in and out of the river, their headlights glowing under the water. Police wearing rubber gloves were picking things up with tongs and putting them into plastic bags, clothes I recognised as Stuart's. ‘I'm sorry, we can't say who …' the policewoman started – but then I saw Marie Strand kneeling on the muddy banks, her mouth gulping silently. Two policemen were hovering around her, their hands splayed out as if spotting her.

‘Jason? Is it Jason?'

Marie's head jerked up and stared at us. The policewoman noticed and tried to pull me away. ‘Like I said, I can't say anything at this point.'

‘But maybe he's at the pub? Has anyone checked the pub?' I was getting panicky. ‘Didn't they all go to the pub?'

A slow howl rose up out of Marie, a guttural sound as she sprung from her haunches towards me. The police grabbed her, held her down. I stared at them. She was screaming. Quiet, meek Marie, who worked everyday at the canning factory, was screaming and swearing at me. The policewoman took my elbow and pulled me away. ‘A police car will drop him home,' she was saying. ‘Go home – get some rest. Things will be clearer in the morning.'

She left me at my car, satisfied after I pulled the car keys out of my handbag and put them in the door. It was then that I saw Stuart. He was in the back of the ambulance, the doors wide open – he was wrapped in a brown blanket. He looked up and caught my eye. Without thinking my arm shot up and I waved. He stared at me and then looked away. I stood there for a long time, hand in the air.

Two weeks later Marie Strand went through Jason's English essays and photocopied Stuart's comments. Phrases like
You have such a
beautiful way with words
and
This is penetrating stuff, Jason
and
Jason, I think you have real talent – I think if we work together we can get some of your
writing published
. It all sounded so predatory. She ran off about fifty copies of his comments and did a letter drop around town. In thick black Texta she wrote at the top of each page,
Stuart Cedar hunted my
son. He is a Killer
.

Things got worse when Jason's VCE external examination results came in. He just scraped a pass in the English exam. Mr Robbs wrote a piece for the local paper after Marie asked him to read Jason's short stories and essays. ‘Nothing within these stories indicated to me that Jason had been an exceptional student, let alone a talented writer,' he stated. ‘How Stuart Cedar had become so enthused over Jason's writing is a mystery to me. It would seem, to me, that he held no
genuine
literary aspirations for this young man, on the cusp of his adult life.'

The evening that was published a rock came through our window. The article was wrapped around the rock. It knocked over a clay vase Beth made in primary school when she was learning how to join coils. Stuart was furious. He went outside onto the veranda and yelled that everything this town did was a cliché, that throwing a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché and no one in this town could think of anything original and a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché. I collected the broken pieces of Beth's vase and carried them to her bedroom as he paced and yelled. I lay on her bed and cried. The next night someone threw a garden gnome through the kitchen window. Miraculously, nothing broke except the window, sending shattered glass all over my clean dishes. The gnome lay on the cork floor, nose chipped, staring at us. Stuart laughed. ‘Well, at least they worked out what a cliché is,' he said proudly, as if he had educated the rock thrower. After that I slept in Beth's old room and Stuart in the boys' bunk bed. Neither of us wanted to sleep in our bed.

On the fifth night of the flooding I tied the boogie board to our stairs. I tested how many steps were underwater, counting four before clambering back up, my legs dripping and muddy. I'd paddled to the edge of town this time, looked up at the green highway sign pointing towards Adelaide. The roadhouse was ruined; through the windows I could see the tables and bar stools covered in mould, the fridges and food counter ankle-deep. This was where we used to sit, us girls, and watch people leave town. Especially at graduation time, the place would be feverish with plans of escape, dreams of getting a job and a flat in the city. I'd met Stuart there. He was just a boy then. A writer, he said. Hitching his way around Australia. He stayed for a week, camping by the river at a spot I showed him. I went home only once, to pack a bag and leave a note. It was the wildest thing I'd ever done. I honestly thought I was never coming back.

I missed him then, under the highway sign and drowned roadhouse. I turned the board homewards and paddled. I crawled into the bottom bunk and saw his eyes were woven shut with salt. He'd been crying. He looked so young. I saw our two sons in his face. I put my face in his neck and kissed his skin. ‘I'm sorry. I'm sorry,' I said, over and over, prying my arms around him. I lifted him off the mattress and held him. Tears, his and mine, ran down my neck and onto my breasts. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I kept saying. ‘I love you.' And it's true. I still love him. We sank into each other like we had been starved by the silence. Butting our heads hard. Like horses. For a moment I thought I felt the bunk beds lift, bobbing in the flood, until I cried out, a spasm going through me and into the empty town.

We lay together, on the bottom bunk, for the rest of the wet. Our bodies shifted into their habitual curve around one another, as if in sleep we knew no grudge.

Things will be different when the water recedes, as though sucked away with a straw. The crows will be the first to return. Picking at the bloated flesh of drowned dogs and sheep stuck in the mud, river shrimp and crabs coming out of their mouths. Pecking at the eyes of stranded fish, the silver gills fanned open. The hovering powerlines will return to the ground, and puddles will remain, like a great big mirror has been broken over the town, each reflecting pieces of the sky. They'll find him. Jason Strand. Blue like a swimming pool. Toes and fingers nibbled. Stuart's thumbprints all over him. The streets will fill up with new cars, tyres spinning in the bog. And our house will probably collapse, its knees rotten.

Dust

Patrick Cullen

The rain broke early. The sun pitched into the narrow courtyard behind the terrace and Pam went out, put the basket down beneath the clothesline and ran her hand along the length of each of the dripping wires. A fine black dust gathered on her fingers. She rubbed her hands together and the dust worked its way into the creases of her palm.

The dust came from the steelworks across the harbour, drifting across the water, day and night, to settle over the city. Pam had been living with it from the day she and Ray had moved in from the suburbs but it still got to her and, though she wouldn't admit it to Ray, she'd even started to hope that there was some truth in the talk of closure. It was years since Ray first told her that there'd been talk of closing the steelworks, that there was no kind of certainty to their jobs, and back then Pam asked Ray if he should think about moving on, if he would consider picking up something on the waterfront or in the shipyards, if he'd ever head out into the mines if he had to. But Ray had just said that he was going to stay at the steelworks and stick it out for as long as he could. She'd only once complained to Ray about the dust and he'd told her that it would always be there and that she'd just have to put up with it. ‘That's what we do over there,' he'd said. ‘We make steel and we make dust.'

Pam went to the tap beside the steps, found the end of the hose and held it between her knees while she washed her hands. Water pooled at her feet and a plane passed through the reflected sky. Pam turned off the tap, looked up and searched for the plane but it was already gone. She went back to the clothesline and the water seeped away between the pavers.

She spent the rest of the morning cleaning – vacuuming, and wiping dust from the sills and architraves – and she was back out in the courtyard folding the clothes down into the basket when she heard the water pipes hammering away under the house. She glanced at her watch and looked up towards the kitchen window. ‘Ray,' she called out. ‘Is that you already?' The hammering stopped. She called out again but there was no answer. She dropped the last of the clothes into the basket, pulled it up onto her hip and headed into the house.

Pam stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Ray was sitting at the table. His hands were flat on the table and there was an empty water glass in front of him. He looked up at her. His face was smeared with black dust. There were patches of clean skin under his eyes.

‘Have you been crying?'

Ray shrugged and then nodded like he couldn't make up his mind.

‘What is it?' Pam said, dropping the basket. It turned onto its side and clothes spilled out onto the floor between them.

Ray kneaded a thumb into his palm.

‘Is it the kids?'

He shook his head. Pam pulled a chair out from the table and sat across from him. ‘Then what?' she said. ‘What is it, Ray? Please tell me. What's wrong?'

‘It's Geoff.' Ray worked his thumb harder into his palm.

Pam leaned forward in her chair. ‘Did something happen in the mill? What happened? I had the radio on,' she said. ‘Why didn't I hear anything, Ray?'

He got up from the table and went and leaned over the sink. ‘No,' he said. ‘He's done it himself.'

‘What, Ray? What's he done?'

Ray turned around and leaned back against the bench. ‘Geoff didn't make it in to work today,' he said. ‘Judy called looking for him. She said she had something she needed to tell him. I said he wasn't in – that I thought he must have been home sick but she said she was sure he'd gone to work.' Ray put his hand to his face. ‘Then she asked me to wait because she could see his car in the driveway. I heard her call out to him and then a moment later – it was only a couple of seconds at most – I heard her,' Ray said, biting down on the corner of his thumbnail. ‘I've never heard anything like it before,' he said, looking across at Pam. ‘She was all the way out in the garage and I could still hear her. She just made this awful sound and I knew it, I did. I knew that he'd done it.'

‘What's he done, Ray?'

Ray came back to the table. ‘He's killed himself,' he said. ‘Out in his garage. He hung himself. He got up and dressed for work, backed his car out into the driveway and then went back into the garage and hung himself. As soon as I heard her,' he said, shaking his head. ‘It was awful, it was, the sound she made. It was like some kind of wild animal all hurt and angry at the same time – and I knew it, I knew what he'd done.'

Pam pushed the glass aside and reached for Ray's hand but he pulled it away and started chewing on his nail again. ‘I drove straight over,' he said. ‘There was an ambulance in the driveway and Judy was in the garage with Chris and they had Geoff down on the ground between them and Judy was there in her dressing gown kneeling down beside him with his head in her hands and Chris was just standing beside her. He was dressed for school – it was awful, it was. No kid should have to see something like that.'

Pam went around the table and leaned down over his shoulder. She pulled his hand away from his mouth and held his arm against his chest. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, holding him. ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

They stayed at the table until Ray got up and looked at Pam as though he was about to say something. She held out her hands to him and waited for him to say whatever it was that he needed to say but he just looked down at the floor and said that he was going to bed. Pam mentioned dinner and Ray, saying that he couldn't stomach it, headed upstairs. Pam looked out into the courtyard. It was still light out.

*

It was almost twenty years since Ray and Pam had lived out in the suburbs a couple of streets away from Geoff and Judy. Ray and Geoff had started in the steelworks on the same day and soon worked out where each other lived and settled into sharing a ride to and from work.

Geoff would sometimes drop by to borrow a tool or something for the yard and there were other times when he would come round for no good reason at all and he and Ray would sit out in the backyard, drinking and talking about what they'd do different if they had their time over again.

‘You should hear yourselves,' Pam said one afternoon when Ray came back in to the kitchen.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You're like two old men out there. Counting down the days.'

Ray just laughed and took more beer from the refrigerator and went back out into the yard. Pam went through to the lounge room and called Judy. They talked for a while and Judy asked Pam over. Pam went out and told Ray where she was headed and Geoff sipped his drink and said, ‘Tell her that I'm not sure when I'll be home. She might be on her own tonight.'

‘Maybe she'd like that,' Pam said and started walking. Ray and Geoff laughed behind her.

Judy made tea and she and Pam went through to the sunroom at the back of the house where a low window stretched across the width of the room. They sat in low cane chairs and looked out over the freshly mown lawn. ‘Guess what?' Pam said as Judy started pouring the tea.

‘What?' Judy said, then looked up at Pam smiling. ‘You're not?'

Pam nodded. ‘I am,' she said. ‘I'm pregnant.'

Judy put the teapot down. Tea ran down the underside of the spout and pooled on the table. ‘That's great,' Judy said, leaning over and grabbing Pam's hand. ‘That's so great for you two.'

‘But please don't say anything,' Pam said. ‘I haven't even told Ray yet.'

‘I won't,' Judy said. ‘I won't say anything. That's great,' she said again.