The Best Australian Stories 2017 Read online

  ‘You know I lost one before,’ said Deirdre. ‘Years ago.’ Her voice was very quiet.

  ‘You never told me that,’ said Jane.

  ‘She was twelve weeks premature. Hardly took a breath.’ Deirdre took a deep one now.

  Jane sat back and put her hands against her sides. ‘I’m so sorry, Deirdre,’ she said.

  Deirdre waved at her face, dismissing its shown feelings as a weakness. ‘Years ago,’ she said.

  ‘Higher, higher,’ squealed Elsa. The muscles under Andy’s birthmark flexed.

  ‘Whichever way you look at it, they’re miracles,’ said Jane.

  ‘He always felt that way,’ said Deirdre.

  *

  The Hartley girl was gone for twenty-four hours. Never turned up at the school, didn’t come home, a search out all night, police, everything. They were lining up the bus drivers for interviews when she showed up at her house for breakfast, apparently unharmed, and nicely fitted out in a tweed skirt, cream cotton blouse and sensible shoes. Nobody knew where she had got these items. The shoes were well worn in.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her parents. ‘I feel absolutely fine.’

  She found work in the library. When anyone asked her about it, her smile was a little watered down, perhaps, but it was still there, bright enough. It was Phoebe Hartley who began to use the word ‘taken’ to describe her situation, to excuse her absence from history and her lack of paperwork. The others picked it up from her. Deirdre didn’t like it. But Phoebe Hartley was such a positive girl, it would have been cruel to test her optimistic nature with too many questions, just as it was hard to stop thinking of her as a girl, even now that she was nearly forty.

  After the Hartley girl, there was little Suzie from the Chinese restaurant who was only three before she was nineteen overnight. Suzie made a pretty waitress, and was so calm and at peace with her transformation that half the town developed unexpected cravings for gong bao chicken and the little pancakes Mrs Chu served sliced into segments and hot enough to burn your mouth. Harry, who had kept his paper route, soon started carrying flowers on his bicycle, courting her, and her parents somehow accepted this, even grew quickly fond of him, because the two of them seemed to fit together so easily; it was as though they already shared a history. He learned to say hello and ask after the health of Suzie’s grandmother in terribly accented Cantonese. Suzie’s parents had been slow to start a family, and each of them had sometimes privately regretted their delay. The business had needed a great deal of their attention. But now the prospect of early grandchildren seemed like justice.

  All the children who were affected had the same calm, the same ability to reassure. And after half-a-dozen had been returned, their blood tests and examinations revealing an unblemished wellbeing, a clean slip through time, everybody became used to them. They were well-adjusted, happy people, kind to us all, ready to make a contribution. It was very doubtful that our own hands would have moulded them into better people. Surely they could be no more readied for the world of responsibilities into which they were suddenly thrust? Indeed the results were so impressive that some new families began to move into the district, particularly those with multiple school-aged children. They didn’t announce why they’d come but if you took them aside they would often admit that a third pair of hands at home, a third income, could really make a difference.

  ‘If only you’d be taken,’ exhausted parents would tell their screaming two-year-olds, only half in jest. Deirdre overheard them in the park and found it upsetting, but she would never be the one to make a fuss.

  *

  It was her father in America who gave Elsa the bracelet for her birthday, but Andy who was there to buckle it to her wrist. It was pink and it had a little chip in it that Jane could follow along on her phone. Elsa loved it so much that Andy considered selling them out of the garage on Saturday mornings, to make a little extra money. He was putting aside a deposit for a place of his own.

  ‘I want to be grown up,’ Elsa told him, her face too close and fresh-smelling, ‘so I can come and live with you at your house.’

  Jane rolled her eyes. To Deirdre it seemed abominable to tag and track her like some animal, but she would have done the same if it had been available for Andy, if she had known. The bracelets were new inventions, still a prototype, apparently. Everyone marvelled over it at the party.

  ‘Now we’ll know where you are, even if you’re taken,’ said Andy. Deirdre still flinched at the term.

  ‘You all say you don’t remember anything,’ she said. ‘So how —’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Phoebe, the ripple in her smile like a sail catching a sweet breeze.

  Deirdre opened her mouth to speak, but Andy’s hand was raised.

  ‘I can’t have this conversation again,’ Andy said. When he was cross with her he looked just like his father.

  ‘The important thing is that you’re alive,’ she said, remembering to list her miracles.

  He was picking up his car keys. ‘I’m going to get a drink, if anyone’s interested.’ Harry sprung up, the two of them closing ranks. An arm against a shoulder on the way out the door, the solidity of men.

  Go on and leave me, Deirdre thought, but watched his car back out in silence. She felt sixty years old.

  She and Jane started packing up the princess toys and sheet music and adult outfits Elsa had been given in case she suddenly grew into them. Elsa herself was asleep. The party had been exhausting, now that there were all these strangers to get used to. Some of them played with the children and some of them drank out on the terrace with the parents and some of them stood around like people do at parties, afraid of mistaking their place, but in a good-natured and patient way. None of them remembered anything, and people kept repeating – even Deirdre said it – the important thing was that they were alive and well, the important thing was surviving. She picked up the cardboard box the wristwatch had come in, and wondered if it would make any difference.

  ‘Have you thought about having another one?’ Jane whispered.

  ‘I couldn’t take it,’ said Deirdre, crushing the small box flat.

  Jane would sometimes run across to their place on a sunny afternoon if there was a program on the television Deirdre or Andy might be interested in watching, or if she had made too many honeyjoys, so Deirdre didn’t worry until she saw her friend was waving her phone in the air. Elsa had been napping but was now not in her room. The three of them gathered around the screen to watch as a little green dot moved slowly across it, pulsing slightly, before stopping in the park.

  It was five blocks, but they got in Andy’s car and he drove them there, Jane white as a sheet in the back, Deirdre out of words. Andy leapt out first and ran. Elsa was sitting in the grass looking at the sky. She acted as though she couldn’t see them. She was still just seven years old.

  ‘I think I sleepwalked,’ said Elsa, in a muffled voice.

  ‘You’re all right, you’re all right,’ said Jane, releasing her.

  ‘Come on,’ said Andy. ‘Let’s get her home.’

  Deirdre found that she was shaking.

  This situation repeated itself several times over the following weeks, with Elsa found in different locations: a roundabout, the playground, once beneath the birdbath in a neighbour’s back yard. Andy blamed the stress.

  One day the three of them got out of the car on the corner where the dot had stopped, expecting Elsa, and found instead a pink bracelet hanging from a stumpy branch of a pine tree, rocking slightly in the wind.

  *

  Well, she always had that wonderful ear for music. And really, it was a gift, that kind of memory. It would have been, in other circumstances, something magical. But you know her mother taught her to be forward, and they say the character is formed very early in life, that even the best teachers can’t do much with them after a certain age. In her fifties, she has just the same insistent confidence she’s always had. Life, we tried to tell her, was never meant to be fair.

&n
bsp; We can’t blame Jane, but we can’t help thinking it would have been better if Elsa had learned to keep things to herself. If the children had gone on saying they were taken, if they had never been reminded of the things that were done to them, their hands would have stayed steady, their work conscientious, their voices kind and calm and reassuring. Oh, maybe there were always consequences lurking in them, unseen injuries that rippled slowly outwards and would eventually spill into the world, but maybe there were not. Maybe we could have stayed just proud, and not have had to hate ourselves for what we had allowed to happen. It was after Elsa that it all came apart, and for that we can’t forgive her.

  Trampoline

  Joe Rubbo

  When we get home from school my brother’s dad, Jerry, is out the front, leaning against a truck that has a trampoline strapped to the back of it. He’s holding a cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the burning tip disappearing into his cupped hand. As we pull into the driveway, he takes one last drag, drops the butt to the road, and crushes it with the heel of his boot. There are two guys I’ve never seen before sitting on the nature strip, one of them chugging down a carton of iced coffee.

  Mum yanks up the parking brake and we all sit there listening to the engine tick over. No one says anything. The car is starting to heat up now the air conditioning’s shut off. I can feel my thighs suctioning to the seat. Mum billows her shirt with pinched fingers and blows the hair off her face. After a while she says to my brother, ‘Do you know what your dad’s doing here?’

  Justin picks at the vinyl flaking away on the doorhandle.

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘He’s giving you a trampoline, by the looks of it,’ Mum says, taking the keys out of the ignition and holding them in her fist.

  Jerry is still standing over by the truck, his head cocked to one side like he can’t work out what the problem is. His face is scrunched up hard against the sun. I wave at him, but I don’t think he sees me because he doesn’t wave back.

  ‘You know about this?’ Mum says.

  Justin looks at her, tongue wiggling the silver stud below his lip. ‘Nup.’

  ‘Bullshit, Justin. You could’ve given me some warning.’

  ‘I didn’t know about it. I don’t even want a trampoline.’

  ‘I do,’ I say, sticking my head between their seats. ‘I want a trampoline.’

  They both ignore me.

  ‘Jesus, I’m starting to cook in here,’ Mum says, cracking the door. ‘You better go and say hello.’

  Justin gets out of the car and walks over to Jerry, his thumbs hooked underneath his backpack straps. Jerry punches him in the arm and Justin shrugs away. They both stand there looking at each other. The two men I don’t know get up off the nature strip and brush the dry grass from their jeans.

  Me and Mum go round the back of the car and she pops the boot, which lets out a fart of banana-scented heat. She gives me a couple bags of shopping and takes all the others herself.

  ‘Jerry,’ she yells, slamming the boot shut with her elbow. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

  Jerry just waves back at her, smiling.

  ‘And pick up your bloody cigarette butt.’

  I follow Mum through the front gate.

  ‘If he wants to put it in the backyard,’ I say, ‘then you should let him.’

  ‘Is that right?’ she says, kicking the gate shut behind me.

  Nintendo is crouched behind his kennel, strings of saliva hanging from his mouth. When we get close he darts out and starts running rings around Mum, his nails scraping against the brickwork. Mum pushes him away with the toe of her shoe. He comes at me next and I swing the shopping bags until one of them, heavy with tins of baked beans, hits him in his side. He yelps and scuttles off back behind his kennel.

  ‘Bloody Jerry,’ Mum says, opening the front door.

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’

  We go inside and I kick off my shoes so I can feel the slate tiles, cool against my feet.

  ‘He can do a Rubik’s Cube without looking it up on YouTube,’ I say.

  Mum laughs. ‘That’s because he doesn’t have a job.’

  ‘He brought us a trampoline. That’s good.’

  ‘Good example of him being a dickhead, more like.’

  We dump the shopping on the bench and Mum starts going through the bags, looking for the Viennetta. She pulls it out of a bag and pushes it sideways into the freezer and then starts putting away the rest of the shopping. I get myself a juice box from the fridge and punch in the straw.

  ‘That bloody game,’ she says, head in the pantry. ‘Now this.’

  She’s talking about the arcade machine, Jerry’s last present for Justin. It’s one of those real old ones – takes up nearly a quarter of Justin’s room and it only has Space Invaders on it. He still makes me pay twenty cents every time I want to play.

  ‘Jerry likes big presents.’

  ‘Jerry likes to be an inconvenience.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. Can you see if the dog’s got water?’

  ‘Yep.’

  But instead I go into my dad’s study and pull up the blinds so I can see what’s going on out in the street. They’ve untied all the ropes holding the trampoline in place. Jerry is standing up on the truck, while the other guys are down on the street. They lower it down slowly. Jerry’s face is deep red, the veins in his neck bulging blue, and I can see the sweat pouring off him from here. The other guys don’t seem all that bothered. Justin’s sitting on the kerb, both thumbs poking his mobile phone.

  Once they’ve got the trampoline on the road, Jerry stands there with his hands on his waist, breathing hard. Then, when Jerry’s ready, they hoist the trampoline up off the road and shuffle over towards the house. I can hear Jerry swearing from here.

  I go back into the kitchen and wait for them to come around the side, standing by the window and sucking at my juice box until I hit air.

  ‘Did you water the dog?’ Mum asks.

  Nintendo is cutting sick, running in circles and nipping at the men as they walk across the garden.

  ‘Robyn,’ Jerry yells, loud enough for us to hear him through the glass. ‘Do something about this dog, would you?’

  Mum doesn’t look up from chopping carrots. ‘We need to get a bigger dog,’ she says, not really to me. ‘One that bites more than just feet and ankles.’

  ‘Like a German shepherd?’

  Mum gives me the look that tells me it’s time to stop talking.

  They put the trampoline in the corner of the backyard, right next to the fat palm tree. Jerry shakes hands with one of the men and then they slouch towards the driveway. I can hear the truck grinding through the gears as they drive off. The trampoline covers most of the lawn.

  Jerry comes over and opens the kitchen door. He only sticks his head in.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘how about that?’

  Mum keeps chopping, her knife thudding harder and harder into the board.

  ‘Pretty rad,’ I say.

  ‘I guess you’re not happy about it.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jerry.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Justin comes in, drops himself onto the couch, and turns on the TV. Bear Grylls is on the screen, shirtless and shivering by a lake. His lips are bright blue and he’s talking at the camera about the importance of keeping warm.

  ‘Is that it?’ Mum says to Jerry.

  ‘Unless you’re going to invite me to stay for dinner.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Just,’ Jerry says, ‘aren’t you going to give her a bounce?’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘I will,’ I say.

  Jerry winks at me. ‘Well, I better head off.’

  ‘Bye, Jerry,’ I say.

  Mum and Justin don’t say anything.

  ‘Justin, I’m gonna get going.’

  ‘Yeah, bye, Dad.’

  Jerry hangs there a little longer,
looking at Justin. He taps the doorhandle with the heel of his palm and says, ‘Okay.’

  He closes the door and walks back around the side, all the time looking at the trampoline like he built it or something. Mum doesn’t watch him go. She gathers up most of the sticks of celery, carrot and cucumber and puts them into Tupperware containers. The rest she puts on a plate, which she slides over the kitchen bench towards me.

  ‘Eat these. Now.’

  I climb up onto the stool, pick up a celery stick, and watch Mum as she scoops up the bright curls of vegetable peel from the bench and dumps them into the bin. She stops by the sink and looks at the trampoline, its shadow sliding across the lawn.

  ‘Fucking cunt,’ she says.

  ‘I heard that,’ Justin says.

  ‘Is there any peanut butter?’ I say, holding up the finger of celery.

  *

  Me and Mum have a bet going. See how long it takes Dad to notice the trampoline. I say next week. She says never. But he surprises us both by noticing it that night over dinner. I guess it is almost the only thing you can see when you look out the glass doors next to the dining table.

  ‘Pretty big,’ he says, folding the newspaper and tucking it under his elbow.

  ‘Yep,’ Mum says.

  ‘You boys must be happy.’

  I nod. Justin doesn’t look up from his plate.

  ‘Didn’t he get you that thingo once?’ Dad says, pointing his fork at Justin.

  ‘Space Invaders machine,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Justin says.

  Dad laughs. ‘What’s Jerry doing, looting theme parks or something?’

  ‘I don’t see why he can’t just give me cash,’ Justin says.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Mum says.

  ‘Cash is the last thing you’ll ever get from Jerry,’ Dad says.

  Mum cuts him a look. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Did Jerry tell you how the dogs are going?’ Dad asks.