The Best Australian Stories 2017 Read online

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Mum says, forking some salad into her mouth and looking at Justin.

  But Dad has to retell the story about Jerry and his venture into greyhound racing, even though we’ve all heard it a million times. There’s no stopping him now that he’s gotten started. It’s his favourite Jerry story at the moment.

  A few months ago, Jerry showed up with a racing dog he called Mixed Harmony. He used to keep her at a kennel near Kinglake. On Black Saturday, Jerry and his friends drove out to see how Mixed Harmony was coming along, somehow clueless to the fact there was a pretty serious bushfire shaping up. By the time they got to the kennels it was starting to get scary and the trainer had already started herding all the dogs onto a truck.

  He was furious when he saw Jerry and his mates pull up, told them to get lost. They’d driven over two hours in the scorching heat just to see her. But Jerry didn’t mind. In that short time, he’d already gotten all he wanted out of the trip. As the dogs were moving across the yard, something seemed to startle them and they started running towards the truck, their long bodies low to the ground as they picked up speed. Jerry had stood by the car a moment, hills burning around him, and watched Mixed Harmony kick out wide of the pack. She’d started near the back, but made up ground quick. The way Jerry described it, the whole world seemed to slow down except for Mixed Harmony. ‘First up the ramp,’ he told us, excited. ‘And that’s against some real champions.’

  But Mixed Harmony never even made it onto the track. She was too skittish. Jerry felt obliged to take her on as a pet. He calls her Harm for short.

  ‘You couldn’t invent it,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mum says. ‘Laugh it up.’

  ‘He told me he’s met someone,’ Justin says, squashing peas with the back of his fork. ‘Reckons he’s in love.’

  Mum snorts. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘He’s moving to Broome to be with her, says she’s going to get him a job on a pearl farm.’

  Mum puts down her knife and fork. The sounds of cicadas fill up the silence.

  ‘Well,’ Dad says after a while, ‘good for Jerry. I’m sure Harm will appreciate the warmer weather. Always cold, greyhounds.’

  After the plates are cleared, Mum brings out the Viennetta and puts it in front of Justin. There are fourteen candles sticking out of it.

  ‘You forgot one,’ I say.

  Mum crosses her arms. ‘They come in packs of seven.’

  ‘Don’t you dare sing,’ Justin says.

  Dad looks at Justin. ‘Is it your birthday, mate?’

  *

  After dinner I go out to the trampoline. It isn’t like my friend Ben Keenan’s – those ones with the tightly woven black material that don’t give up much bounce. This one is bigger by half. The bed is blue and there’s a faded red cross in the middle. The springs are fatter than my forearms. I clamber up and the cross-hatched material pinches at my bare feet.

  The trampoline sends me up high and straight. In the air, it’s like I’ve got a couple of minutes to do whatever the hell I want. I run through all the tricks I know. Bum, back and belly drops. Front flips. Backflips. Three-eighties, arms helicoptering around me.

  At my highest I can see all the tennis balls stuck on our roof, my head almost touching the palm fronds. Nintendo watches me the whole time from behind the paperbark tree, ears flat, tongue hanging out.

  After a while the Viennetta feels like it might come out of me so I stop bouncing and sit down. The trampoline cradles my bum. The sun drops behind the next-door neighbour’s prickly pears and the garden turns a dark green.

  I lie back and look up. The blue in the sky is giving way to black. Stars are starting to punch through. It’s then, running my hand over the trampoline, that I feel it. A rough patch.

  I kneel close to inspect it. One of the threads has come loose. There’s a hole in the very centre of the cross. But then, the hole isn’t very big at all. I can just wiggle two fingers through to the other side.

  Dreamers

  Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘Gimme an axe.’

  The woman blurted this order across the formica counter. When the shopkeeper turned and saw her brimming eyes he took a hasty step backward. His rancid half-smile, insincere to begin with, vanished into the gloomy corners of the store. It was still very early. Outside, tucked beneath a ragged hibiscus bush, a hen cawed a single doubtful note. Inside was nothing but this black girl and her highly irregular demand.

  The woman’s voice rose an octave.

  ‘Give us a Kelly, Mister, quick. I got the fiver.’

  She rubbed a grubby brown forearm across her wet eyes. Dollars right there in her hand, and still the man stood, steepling his fingers in front of his chest.

  It was 1969. Two years earlier there had been a referendum. Vote Yes for Aborigines. Now nobody could stop blacks going where they liked. But this just waltzing in like she owned the place, mind you. No please, no could I. And an axe was a man’s business. Nothing good could come of any Abo girl holding an axe.

  The woman ignored the wetness rolling down her cheeks. She laid her notes on the counter, smoothed them out. Nothing wrong with them dollars. Nothin at all. She pressed her palms hard onto the bench.

  ‘Are. You. Deaf?’

  ‘Ah. Thing is. Can’t put my hand to one just at the ah. But why not ah come back later, ah. Once you’ve had a chance to ah.’

  The woman snorted. She had had fifty-one years of coming back later. She pointed through an open doorway to the dozen shining axes tilted against the back wall. On its way to illuminate these gleaming weapons, her index finger silently cursed the man, his formica counter, his cawing hen, his come back later, his ah, his doorway, and every Dugai who had ever stood where she stood, ignorant of the jostling bones beneath their feet.

  Her infuriated hiss sent him reeling.

  ‘Sell me one of them good Kellys, or truesgod Mister I dunno what I’ll do.’

  *

  As twenty-year-old Jean got off the bus, she rehearsed her lines.

  ‘I’m strong as strong. Do a man’s eight hours in the paddock if need be. Giss a chance, missus.’

  When Jean reached the dusty front yard of the farm on Crabbes Creek Road, and saw the swell of May’s stomach, hard and round as a melon beneath her faded cotton dress, she knew that she couldn’t work here. When May straightened, smiling, from the wash basket, though, and mumbled through the wooden pegs held in her teeth Jean? Oh thank God you’re here, she thought that perhaps she could.

  Ted inched up the driveway that afternoon in a heaving Holden sedan. Shy and gaunt, he was as reluctant to meet Jean’s eye as she was to meet his. This white man would not be turning her doorhandle at midnight. She decided to stay for a bit. If the baby came out a girl she would just keep going, and anyway, maybe it would be a boy.

  The wireless in the kitchen said the Japanese were on the back foot in New Guinea but from Crabbes Creek the war seemed unlikely and very far away. What was real was endless green paddocks stretching to where the scrub began, and after that the ridge of the Border Range, soaring to cleave the Western sky. The hundred-year-old ghost gums along the creek; the lowing of the cows at dawn: these things were real. A tame grey lizard came to breakfast on the verandah, and occasionally Jean would glimpse the wedgetails wheeling far above the mountain, tiny smudges halfway to the sun. May had seen both eagles on the road once, after a loose heifer had got itself killed by the milk truck. You couldn’t fathom the hugeness of them, and the magnificent curve of their talons, lancing into the unfortunate Hereford’s flank.

  Jean fell into a routine of cleaning, cooking, helping May in the garden, and sitting by the wireless at night until Ted began to snore or May said ah well. Of a morning, as she stoked the fire and then went out with an icy steel bucket to milk the bellowing Queenie, Jean would hear May retching and spewing in the thunderbox. One day, two months after she first arrived, there was blood on the marital sheets. Jean stripped the bed, and ordered
May to lie back down on clean linen. Then she took Ted’s gun off the wall and shot a young roo from the mob which considered the golden creek flats their own particular kingdom. A life to save another life. Jean made broth from the roo tail. And you can just lie there till it’s your time, she said crisply. It’s not like I can’t manage that little patch of weedy nothing you like to call a garden.

  The life inside May fought hard to hang on. Her vomiting eased, and as the weeks passed the terror slowly left her face. When her time drew very near, an obvious question occurred to May. Didn’t Jean want children of her own? A husband?

  Not really, said Jean, and who would I marry anyway, and is that Ted home already.

  May ignored the possibility of Ted. The war will be over soon, there’ll be lots of blokes running about the place. You said you like babies.

  Yes, Jean said, expressionless. Other people’s babies. Now lie flat, or I’ll never hear the end of it from Himself.

  You mean from you, laughed May, for the doctor had said the danger was past. Baby kicked happily now whenever it heard Ted’s voice coming up the stairs.

  The next week, Ted drove his wife into Murwillumbah at speed, churning dust and scaring fowl all the way to the hospital. They returned three days later with a squalling bundle on the back seat. Jean held her breath, waiting to discover if she could stay.

  We called him Eric, Ted told the water tank proudly. After me old dad.

  Eric, repeated Jean, reaching down to stroke a tiny pink cheek.

  Later May reported the doctor’s verdict: make the most of this one, because there would be no more babies for her.

  *

  Eric was a plump laughing baby, and then an adored toddler, always wandering, always in the pots and pans.

  Come to Jean-Jean, she would cry, and Eric would ball his little fists and hurtle joyfully into her, clutching at her shins. She lifted him high in the air, both of them squealing with delight, until May came out laughing too, and demanded her turn. If the child cried in the night, it didn’t matter to him who arrived to comfort him. Eric was at home in the world, because the world had shown him only love and tenderness.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I feed him,’ May said casually, tucking herself back into her blouse one day, ‘I don’t think he’d know that I’m his mother, and not you.’

  ‘Oh, he does!’ protested Jean, feeling a sudden thread of fear unspooling in her gut. ‘And he’s the spit of you, anyway. What would he want with a mother like me?’ May glanced at Jean’s brown face, her black eyes and matchstick limbs.

  ‘You’re not all that dark. You’re more like Gina Lollobrigida,’ she said generously. ‘Exotic. Plenty of men would want you for a wife.’

  ‘But would I want them?’ Jean retorted, a question that had never occurred to May.

  After that, Jean held the boy a little less when his mother was around. She let May go to him at night, and was careful to be outside more often helping Ted in the paddock when Eric needed his afternoon bath. May thought they were pals, but Jean knew she could be flung away from the farm with one brief word, catapulted back to the Mission, even, if she couldn’t scrape a better life up out of her own effort and wits.

  *

  May confessed tearfully one day that she had briefly allowed Eric – now struggling on her lap to regain his lost freedom – to stray into the Big Paddock. ‘I actually felt my heart stop. I never knew you could love anyone so much.’

  But I did, thought Jean, with a pang so fierce it made her gasp.

  ‘He’s a terror for wandering, all right. Pity we can’t bell him like Queenie,’ was what she finally managed.

  May caught the bus to town and returned with a tinkling ribbon that had had six tiny silver bells sewn onto it by kind Mrs O’Connell. With the ribbon pinned between his shoulderblades, Eric could be heard all over the house and yard, a blue cattle bitch lurking by his side as constant as a shadow.

  The second time Eric got himself lost, he was gone half an hour. They finally found him playing in the mud on the far side of the duck house, three strides from the dam, the ribbon torn off by the wire around the vegie patch. The women, who had each thought that the other was watching Eric, quietly resolved to say nothing to Ted. That night Jean woke the household screaming that a black snake had got in and bitten the baby – but it was only a bad dream.

  It was the barking that alerted them to Eric’s third disappearance, a few weeks later. Peeling spuds on the verandah, Jean became aware of the dog’s frenzied yelps, and realised that she hadn’t heard Eric’s bell for a minute or more. She rocketed to her feet, sending spuds all over the silky-oak floorboards, and ran blindly to the yard where the dog was circling in agitation.

  Jean and May circumnavigated the house, then the paddocks, with no result. Eric would not be found. A search party fanned out, desperate for clues. Here the boy had scratched at the damp creek bank with a twig from the largest gum. Here he had uprooted one of Queenie’s dry pats, to discover what crawling treasures lay beneath. But the signs petered out where the pasture of the Big Paddock turned into scrubby foothills, and nothing was revealed – not that day, nor the next, nor in the awful weeks that followed – that could bring Eric back to them. The boy had quite simply vanished.

  *

  Nobody could fathom why Ted and May kept the dark girl on. But who else would understand why Ted could never go straight to the Big Paddock in the mornings anymore, and took the long way past the dam instead? Who else shared May’s memory of Eric tilting his head to eat his porridge? The high tinkling bell-note of a king parrot’s call made Jean catch May’s eye, and neither of them had to say a word. And so the terrible thing which would have driven any other three people far apart instead bound them together.

  In spring, Ted planted a silky oak sapling between the house and the gate. At its foot lay an engraved granite boulder. May took to sitting beside Eric’s rock at odd hours of the day and night, gazing past the ghost gums, searching the distant hills. When the wet season arrived they sat, waiting to see what would wash down to them from the forested gullies. But the foaming brown floodwaters of the creek revealed as little as the search parties had. Their vigil, like all of Ted’s endless Sunday tramping, scouring the hills, was in vain.

  Queenie still lowed at dawn, demanding to be milked. The eagles still wheeled over the ridge. The tame grey lizard still came for crumbs in the morning. Jean ventured out from the house more than before; she learned from Ted how to rope and brand calves, and then to jerkily drive the cattle truck into town. Good as any man with stock, he told her boots. Nobody blamed her; nobody asked her to leave.

  Perhaps, Jean reflected wryly, after three more summers had passed, perhaps May was a friend, after all.

  *

  It was two decades, and a new war in Korea come and gone, before the government letter arrived. It has been determined by our engineering division. Ted looked up from the Big Paddock at the hills to be sliced in half by the new highway. May began slamming doors. Soon bulldozers arrived, and men with dynamite. Ted scratched at his scalp. The jungled ridge belonged to the memory of Eric, not to the government. But then what if they turned something up. Hard to know what to think, really.

  When the first young protesters came to the door, Ted walked away, but May dried her hands on a tea towel and listened. Don’t bother the stock, she told them, and shut them bloody gates. A village of yurts and Kombis sprang up near the creek. Jean and Ted shook their heads. Girls in muslin dresses staggered up to the house, sunburnt, dehydrated, bitten by spiders. The trees are our brothers, Jean was informed by a boy who needed a lift to hospital the next day, concussed by a falling limb. A jolly fellow with an earring fell into the campfire and burned half his face off. At month’s end, the remnant kernel of protesters tried, and failed, to scale the largest of the gum trees to stage a sit-in in its canopy.

  It wasn’t ultimately clear to the district who should bear the blame for the inferno. Most said the protesters, obvi
ously, for lighting campfires in the first place, or May for allowing the citybred fools on the property. Some blamed the cop who had deliberately kicked coals towards nylon tents, determined that the hippies be driven out. A few even blamed Ted for failing to maintain his rutted driveway better, so that the fire truck couldn’t get to the paddock in time.

  After the sirens had faded, and the night was at an end – the firefighters had picked up all their tools and taken them home, and the Kombis had all pulled away from the charred ground in disgrace – Ted, May and Jean slumped on the verandah, filthy and almost too tired for sleep. A profound silence fell upon the farm. No stock remained alive to bellow. The only sound was the faint shushing of a light breeze through the few pathetic trunks still standing in the blackened smear that was the Big Paddock. That, and a strange high tinkling from beyond the creek.

  Bone-weary, Jean and May stared at each other. Then they ran, flinging great black clouds of ash in their wake. They forded the creek and ploughed their way through the fire-thinned scrub, until at last they stood below an enormous tallowwood, halfway up the mountain. It was a tree Ted knew; he had eaten a sandwich beneath it more than once on his Sunday treks. The fire had reached it, licked its trunk, caused it to shudder and tremble, but not to fall.

  ‘There.’

  Jean pointed up. Ted and May craned their necks, squinting in the first faint streak of dawn light. What tinkled above them was a narrow thread, dislodged from its resting place by the force of the fire, and spinning now in the breeze which blew across the empty paddock. The merest ghost of a belled ribbon, it had been wedged fast in the eagle’s nest for thirty years.

  Get me an axe, thought Jean.

  Perry Feral

  Allee Richards

  This suburb has not that many trees. A few blocks away I can see the orange neon sign – a petrol station. I pull the car over on the side of a road. We sit in silence for almost a minute.

  ‘So should I go then?’ asks Corey.

  ‘Whatever,’ I say. I stare out the front windscreen and after a while Corey leaves.