The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Free Page A

house. But I want to die in his mother’s house too,’ she says.
    I’m not sure what to say. My father, almost eighty, thinks he’s my age, despite the fact his hips are fusing. I look at the squalor of plates and piles of paper, a place I wouldn’t want to live or die in. My grandmother’s quaint English furniture left in this woman’s hands, and the last time I visited, my father on his death bed in the Dandenong Hospital, pale in one of those paper gowns, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, a shriveling man in a narrow metal cot. But he still thought he was virile, working the nurses, wheezing, flirting, something to live for. Bright young nurses in robin’s egg blue attending, the glint in his wrinkled farmer’s eyes. He offered them trips down here, said he’d take them out riding, as if he could still get on a horse. Half-dead and still handsome.
    â€˜I’ll take him to the tribunal,’ says Sharen. ‘How dare he try to evict me after all I’ve been through?’ She looks over at me, gauging loyalties, more defiant than tearful, angry at these unexpected visits, the skulking, or maybe angry that he skulks no more, that I’m not moving to comfort her. I don’t need to tell her he’s always been a hands-on husband, women pressed against the fridge, my unsuspecting girlfriends bailed up on the hallstand, that Lipman woman emerging with him from the haystack in the middle of the night while my mother slept alone up in the big house, the lantern standing dim above the roses.
    Nervously, Sharen lights a second Marlboro. ‘I’ve had him up to here,’ she says, the cigarette in her nail-bitten fingers cutting across her throat.
    I wonder where she’s really had him up to. I lean on the ledge and try to summon my lawyerly training – her claim could only be against my mother, since she’s the one who now owns all this, but Sharen Wills has no cause against my mother, except perhaps a bifurcated empathy. Still, I recognise a stake laid out on the grease-stained living room floor. A black oil patch where someone dismantled an engine, take-away food containers adorning my grandmother’s inlaid mosaic table. Furniture from some ancestral home in Norfolk.
    â€˜Are your horses still here?’ I ask. The pair of plump Anglo-Arabs out in the couch grass. Last year one of them foaled unexpectedly and my father went ballistic, ordered them off the place, but they kept reappearing, mare and foal and other stray horses, munching on his precious grass that really belongs to my mother, grown for the cattle he thinks are still his.
    Sharen has a hand on her hip, reminding me she pays her rent. I’ve heard how she visits the big house, speaks loud enough so my mother can hear, charms her in front of the Aga stove, brings treats for the dog and drinks Earl Grey tea and partakes of stale Teddy Bear biscuits, laughing. Sharen Wills isn’t stupid. She probably helps with the crossword, places difficult pieces into the blue miasma of a jigsaw sky.
    â€˜I’m working as a psych nurse at Dalkeith.’ She’s trying to impress me. She has an income; she specialises in old people. She will not be railroded .
    â€˜Why didn’t you just tell Dad to piss off?’ I say.
    â€˜How could I?’ she asks. ‘He’s the landlord.’
    â€˜But you tell him to piss off now.’ I’ve heard how she has my father agitated, taunting him in her T-shirts, shouting epithets out these curved bay windows. I’ll have your balls for breakfast .
    Nodding, feigning tears, ‘I have no choice here,’ she says.
    â€˜Did he ever touch you?’
    â€˜Not really.’ She’s suddenly defensive, almost shocked. ‘He just chased me around.’ But I’m not sure I believe her. He can barely walk. Maybe he’s touched her in ways she’s not even sure of. Despite the charm he’s predatory, under