The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Free

dark horses approaching to sniff the soundless car, heavy part-Clydesdales I don’t recognise. The whoop of what might be an owl up above me, mosquitoes drift about my face, the cacophony of crickets. I try to remember why I don’t live here. Is it the noise or all the silence?
    I notice the lights from the house out the back, bay windows appearing as beacons through the trees, the house of my first night terrors, where my mother discovered my father in bed with Kim and ordered them both away. The house where my parents’ marriage ended.
    A dark hump appears in the headlights, a car abandoned in the field. It hunkers low in the grass on bare axles. An old Mitsubishi sedan with its tyres removed, brimming with trash and what looks like a chair leaned up against the door. Beyond the car, the garden fence, and the yard that was once tidy emerges as a carnival of corrugated iron, engine parts and overgrowth, a rusted clothesline whining. There were once hibiscus, black-eyed peas and black-eyed Susan, a twelve-foot passion-fruit vine.
    I park the hybrid under a eucalyptus near the fence and wend my way among rusted fenders and a sunken laundry trough to the sagging carport, and knock on the brown waterlogged door of my childhood. A shout from inside and then footsteps; the door opens a crack. Then the face of a woman with creased smoker’s cheeks and turquoise eyes, her hair in a tangled nest. Nipples pressed through a long Cold Chisel T-shirt stretched down to bare, slender legs.
    â€˜You must be Daniel!’ she says, suspiciously. ‘A chip off the block.’ She is nervous, speaking more with the urgency of speed than the drawl of a stoner. ‘Excuse this dreadful mess,’ she adds. She clasps her shoulders, blames ‘the boys’ for the maze of laundry on the floor, but there are no signs of boys just the smell of cannabis. In a kitchen I barely recognise she offers me coffee. She’s probably only my age but looks like she’s done it harder. I glance away from her angry but curious stare, down at a floor now bereft of linoleum, to a sink where leaning plates and angled saucepans tower precipitously. The kitchen where my grandmother once stood with the sun beaming in on her delicate English face, pouring tea and placing scones on a silver tray, baking her special rice pudding.
    Sharen Wills’ arms are tanned and her hands are shaking as she plugs in a kettle. She announces, ‘The Landlord and Tenant Act of Victoria requires twenty-four hours prior notice for a visit from the landlord.’
    â€˜I’m not your landlord,’ I say. ‘Just making sure things are okay.’
    She puts the kettle down. ‘I’m having trouble with your father,’ she says. No mention of the letter.
    â€˜We’ve had trouble with him ourselves.’
    â€˜He appears on a horse at the window at all hours and I rarely wear clothes in the house.’ She looks down at herself, the cotton clinging to her narrow body and I wonder if I’m supposed to find it appealing. She offers me a cigarette.
    â€˜He hasn’t ridden for years,’ I say. ‘He can barely walk.’
    â€˜He’d crawl if he had to,’ she says. ‘He’s at the door at midnight … and when I don’t answer he pulls out my marijuana by the roots.’
    I imagine her in tight-fitting, camel-toe jeans. ‘It’s his mother’s house,’ I say. I don’t tell her the whole five hundred acres, houses and all, are now in my mother’s name, after he was sentenced to life with Kim. Now I’ve got two bitches in my soup , he once told me on the sly. I look over at this woman pouring me coffee and wonder if there aren’t now three. A rat gets caught in its own trap , my mother says of him. ‘He wants me out of here,’ says Sharen, hugging a cup of coffee between her breasts. ‘He wants to move back in here; he wants to die in his mother’s