The Best Australian Stories (41 page)

Tonight she and Dan were having a dinner for nine friends. She'd made a new outfit. She'd collected eleven stones from the beach for the table setting. She had tiny sprigs of flame-tree flower to place under the rocks and over the folded white napkins. She'd been obsessing about these details for weeks: the white, the red, the black. She'd bought the salmon that morning, had made the bechamel sauce last night. She would make a salad of cress, cherry tomatoes, walnuts and Parmesan, maybe. She still had to stew the plums and rhubarb for the ice-creams: chocolate and vanilla. The white, the red and the black. Aesthetically perfect. Aesthetically perfect excited her the way cricket excited some people. Or chocolate. Aesthetically perfect did not mean expensive; it mean poetical.

There was her new red sundress with white trim, her black laced sandals that criss-crossed in leather lines over her feet. Her strong, arched, brown feet. Already, she was starting to find blue spider veins on her legs, but her feet, her feet were still broad and strong, capable of holding her up. Capable of holding her up all day at work, and then pedalling her home. Capable of getting her through the kitchen chores, the rest of the cleaning, the shower, the dressing, the party itself. She'd be exhausted by the time the guests arrived, but she could manage. A couple of vodkas and she could manage.

Her eleven salmon steaks were plump and pink in plastic in the library's fridge and she was getting light-headed. She was already hungry. Somehow she'd missed lunch. She had to drop a box of letters to photography, run back up and finish shelving, and reply to eight emails with exclamation points attached to them from scholars requesting access to the collections. She needed to eat something first. Later, Ada was going to give her her third tutorial on the many issues and responsibilities of a Rare Book and Special Collections Librarian.

Ella glided down the dark corridor, scribbling lists on her hand. Already her hands were smeared blue with the weight of to do; already blue ink crept up her wrist, her forearm, spreading into the pores. When she got to photography, she'd sit down for a minute. Just a minute. More than a minute and she'd be late, late for everything; her entire day, her whole life. She passed a flickering fluorescent light, on and off, on and off, passed one high, barred window. Outside, the dark, churning sky. Damn, it was raining. She should have known, the way strands of grey cloud had settled in the corners of the building like old webs and dampened the morning's biscuits so that they crumbled into the tea before even being dipped. She'd have to take the train home. Cycling would take ages in this weather and she'd be gritty and sticky and grumpy when she got there. Would need double the vodka just to get through the evening.

Classical music drifted out from a vent somewhere, and as the music grew louder, she was suddenly overwhelmed by a high-pitched, flashing
whoosh
as if two shots in a film were overlapping and Ella was standing on the splice.

She came to on her back in the dim light of the photographic studio. Len Noll was leaning over her as if she were a print he was examining for blemishes.

‘What happened?' she asked.

‘Sudden, brief loss of consciousness due to diminished oxygen in the brain, otherwise known as a faint.'

‘I didn't think people fainted anymore,' Ella said. ‘I thought that was a relic of the past, you know, women with the vapours.' Did anybody faint as well as a woman, she wondered. Did anybody have such a long and sprawling precedent in falling over?

‘Well, if you wanted vapours, you've come to the right place,' Len grinned.

There was some talk about taking her to hospital to get an X-ray for her head. She knew that even on a Monday, it would be full of the day's casualties. Even if it wasn't full, she'd have to sit for an hour through paperwork, wait for the intern to finish her magazine. Ella would change into a paper gown in a tiny bathroom and wait her turn next to a young man whose casual afternoon drop-in had resulted in immediate surgery. He would be alone. He would be freaked out. Perhaps he wouldn't live. There was no time to get his mother or his girlfriend down there. There would be nobody by his side but Ella. She'd glance between the television and him, as he returned from the bathroom, his clothes folded in his lap. She would see he'd been crying in there, though he'd be quick to hide the evidence. Back of hand brushing eyes, he'd stare at the TV, determined. She would wonder if she should get up and give him a hug, or if her paper gown would come undone as she leaned forward to hug him and reveal her butt, destroying the moment, her pure, compassionate intentions. He might think she was hitting on him. He would be crying and she would be naked and those two things often went well together in other situations. Perhaps instead, she would hold his hand. It would seem the decent thing to do. He was a young man on his way to his death perhaps. All alone, in that plastic chair. Her mother always said it was important to speak of death to those who were dying. Ella was sure there were moments in which that would only make things worse.

‘No,' Ella shook off the hospital idea. ‘I'm just over-stressed. And I'm late, now, actually, probably, for my meeting. With Ada.'

‘Ada's left for the day. Rare Books is closed. Sorry Ella, but you've been out for hours.'

‘What do you mean by out?'

‘Zonked. Asleep.'

‘What do you mean by hours? What time is it?!' She sat up, flicked her eyes around desperately for a clock. Five-thirty. It couldn't be five-thirty. ‘Why didn't you wake me up?'

‘We thought you needed sleep. You're still very pale.'

Ella jumped off the table. She was looking around for her bag. Realised it was still at her desk upstairs. Her computer still on. No phone calls returned. Who'd been minding the desk? Who'd been cranking the stacks? Len glanced at his assistant. ‘She's pale, isn't she?'

‘Len, thank you, but of course I'm pale. It's my birthday and I've got to serve dinner to nine people in two hours.'

By the time Ella extracted herself from the building – helmeted, bicycle in hand – the streets were flooded. Across the street, the steeples wore dark cloaks of stone, but the square's bright fountains kept singing.

She punched her head and arms through a black plastic garbage bag and bumped her bike towards the train station. Flashing lights of an ambulance smeared past, charging up the middle of the street. On every corner, pod-people in black suits, under black umbrellas, waited for the stalled lights to change and then, when they didn't change, they crashed through the puddles, knee-deep, across the streets, ties flapping, eyeliner running, hurried to the pub to sit in wet huddles, drank scotch by the gulp.

She bumped her bicycle down the slippery steps. The station entrances were gated. She overheard somebody saying an electric cable had come down; one train had shuddered to a stop, its lights blinking out. A conductor had had to fetch all the passengers with a hurricane lamp, guiding them out the front of the train and through the dark tunnel to the next station. Ella stopped at the pay phone, dropped forty cents, dialled home. The phone rang three times before it was picked up.

‘Hello?'

‘It's me,' she called into the receiver as the phone cut out.

All day she'd had an image in her head. Now, she held onto it tightly; she was not yet ready for it to be shattered. The moment she would walk into that room, her party, and carry with her a cloud of lightness. A spontaneous laughter, the bright, blushed glow of a girl who knew who she was and liked it. It wasn't so much that she'd be beautiful, but that the way she'd appear would tell something about how she was feeling in that moment and it would be fresh. That flush in her cheeks had disappeared lately but it was nothing a bit of blush couldn't fix. It wasn't that she doubted whether she could look nice – she made sure of it (wax legs, do toes, wash hair, pluck brows) – but she knew that all of the lotions and potions were poised somehow to stand in for something that, lately, was essentially missing.

Back up on the street, she churned her pedals through water, grit, engine oil. Plastic bags flew like low-swooping birds; bag drawn to bag, they plastered themselves over her plastic form like lovers at airports. She was drenched after a block, her knapsack and her clothes beneath the plastic like cold bandages wrapped around her skin. Soon so wet, she couldn't feel the rain falling anymore.

She passed cars stranded in sudden puddles, empty of people, headlights still burning, stretching their wavering arms of light through the rising water to clutch at the damp bark of trees, the birds on sodden branches, praying. She passed a shop whose doorway was flooded. A dozen stranded customers stood, arms laden with shopping, looking out in shock. As she pulled away she saw a woman shrug, kick off her shoes, start rolling up her pants. The others watched, then nodded, following suit. Soon they'd all be barefoot and splashing to their cars.

As she neared the edge of the continent, the wind turned fierce. The sea was churning, enraged, frothing against the rocks. The seagulls dipped over stormy cliff. With minimum effort they flapped high enough to soar, to be taken up in a pocket of air. They let the wind guide them, holding still, before suddenly being drawn away.

Ella lived in apartment thirty-eight in a high-rise above the beach, on the side of the building without a view. Dan had his own place but spent so much time at hers they might as well be living together.

She pushed her bike into the hallway of her flat, dropped her keys. Dan came out of the bathroom, scrubbing brush in hand, and laughed at Ella's mat of wet helmet hair, at her plastic-bagged self, her grime-streaked and therefore rain-resistant face.

‘Ella Bird, deep-sea diver.'

‘It's not funny. We've got an hour and a half to get ready.'

He kept laughing and took her into his arms. ‘Babe, babe, look around.'

She did; the flat was flickering yellow, tea-light candles on windowsills, every table luminous with the kind of light she liked. Candlelight, rain, photographs out of focus, they matched the way she saw without her glasses or contacts in, the way she was born to see. She thought how they should use candles more often. It was always too easy just to click on the light switch.

‘It's lovely. I'm going to try to scrub this pen off my arm, it seems to have spiralled up into my armpit … Make me a drink?'

Dan stopped her as she headed for the bathroom, eyed her seriously.

‘Electricity's out … How did you not notice? Anyway … everybody's rung to cancel. They think it's too dangerous to be going out. Though the mailman managed.' He handed her a single letter in a gummy, blue-and-white-checked envelope, three smears of rain across the blue-inked address.

Once, a while ago now, close to ten years ago, Ella, self-imposed outcast from another land, had received eleven personal letters in one extraordinary mailbox haul. Now she was lucky to receive one in six months. In fact, she counted herself extremely lucky for she had her own personal correspondent. She and her correspondent had been mutually employed for ten years, ten years that had coincided with the take-over of the internet and electronic mail. It was a misnomer, email, which rhymed with mail but was not really mail at all. Its hype was speed, all flash, prepackaged correspondence. Hit and click. And people did still keep in touch – people wrote, but it always seemed that they wrote out of guilt more than interest. Emails of six lines. Did one respond with six also? Or seven?

Over time, as her other letters dwindled, she and her correspondent remained fiercely dedicated to this project of theirs. But it was like fighting a rising tide, and each was being dragged further out to sea. Once a week the letters had come, then once a month, then once every couple of months until finally six months had passed without a letter in response to Ella's last. Just yesterday, Ella had lifted the lid on the cold (empty) box and thought for the first time how a mailbox was like a coffin. Now her correspondent's letter blinked at her with its painted eye. Inside, a quick scrawl, a short note.

I don't write letters like I used to, which is not to say I never will again … You'll cringe, I know.
I don't want to explain explain explain. love X

Ella turned the page over. It was blank.

Previously, Ella had been contained and controlled, life unspooled as it should, days into nights, and she had lists and things to do, she had blue pen scribbled up her arm, she had goals, she inched towards their execution, she had friends, attended live music and drank just enough vodka to keep her well lubed so that she laughed in the right places and functioned this side of well enough the next day.

Now she was wondering if in fact what she called contained was in fact pinched, cinched and misaligned, because all she knew was that something inside was seriously slipping.

Ella lay in the bath, let water from the showerhead drip, drip, drip onto her foot. When it rained, wet birds gathered on the windowsill. Tonight two small birds: a mother and baby bird, hiding under her roof-ledge, their faces pressed to the glass, wanting in. She imagined inviting them into the bath, how they would bob and duck their heads under the water and their eyes would say
thank you.
She imagined having a boat moored outside her door, one that would rise to the third floor in a flood, or in the case of a microscopic rise of sea level. Ella could climb onto the bathroom sink, open the window, throw herself into her boat and float away.

She pulled the plug from the drain, felt the water slurp and suck around her. She didn't know where she would go if she could go; what she knew was this: despite her job that she loved and the man that she loved in a house that she loved by the sea—

‘Boo.'

Ella looked up. Dan was poking his head through the door, glass of wine in hand. He laughed. ‘Shall we just sit here then, birthday girl, and get drunk?'