The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Free Page B

his guise of playfulness. I watch her and pretend to drink her tepid coffee, thoughts of my buckled-up father before the Tenancy Tribunal, fending off assertions, an old man accused of shuffling around his own mother’s furniture, brandishing his cheeky smile in some fumbling pursuit, then yanking out her marijuana as his only vengeance. A man possessed by lust. It’s not his reputation I care about; that’s long lost and gone. It’s him on the dock of some petty assembly, collapsing, carted away without a chance to limp down the end of this short, dark hallway and climb alone between the sheets of his mother’s four-poster bed.
    â€˜You’ll kill him,’ I tell Sharen Wills.
    She stares past me, out into the bay-windowed night, as if the pleasure would be all hers.
    *
    I drive back past the dark, abandoned car, through the milling horses then along the grass track to the big house. The night is clear, the garden lantern turned on for my benefit. When I open the door to the kitchen, my mother doesn’t ask where I’ve been – she’s used to her men disappearing at night. She stands like a twig in pyjamas, heating her wheat bags in the ancient microwave with her mottled sun-spotted hands. ‘Hello, Foozle,’ she says with curious enthusiasm, a nickname I’ve not heard in thirty years. The dog still in its perch among the pillows.
    â€˜Do you have everything you want?’ my mother asks, her blotchy terracotta cheeks, her small bird face with small bird eyes. Eyes that could pierce holes in steel. But she doesn’t wait for an answer. Wheat bags in one hand, she slinks up into the dark hallway with a goodnight wave over her shoulder, heading for her narrow bed. She says the bed spins when she lies down in it. She forgets she suffers from vertigo and what the doctor called left-side neglect , a skewed awareness of one side of her body, the effects of a stroke.
    I roll my luggage further up the hall, glimpse Aunt Emma Charlotte’s portrait in the shadowed dining room, her face streaked with possum piss, which gives her a thin damp smile. From behind my mother’s bedroom door, I can already hear her wireless blaring – 3AW talk and oldies, the throaty roll of Burl Ives from her rickety bedside table.
    I no longer sleep in the meatsafe, with its hooks in the tongue and groove ceiling and the freezing bluestone floor, or in my old room in the shearer’s quarters, festooned with dusty horse-show ribbons; I sleep in the Senator’s Room, named in honour of a television show once filmed here. The light unveils the familiar ornate moulded roses on the fifteen-foot cobwebbed ceiling, a fresh rent where chunks of plaster have fallen, a dark hole up into the cold slate roof. The room is still decked out as the master suite of the television senator’s house. The familiar blue floral wallpaper, the only wide bed in the place. My parents once had their two single beds parallel parked in here, separate and unequal. In a house where men find it hard to survive.
    I heft my bag up onto the re-covered chaise and wonder which came first – was my mother unwilling to share her bed with him because she realised what she’d married, or was it that she didn’t share herself and he went elsewhere, to sleep in the campervan or his mother’s house out in the bush? I imagine my conception here, forty years ago, my mother looking up into the cobwebs, a vague disgust in her eyes, or maybe just wondering what all the fuss was about. The irony of them still strangely in love even now, a love so fraught with disappointment it manifests as acrimony.
    On the mantel, a sepia photo of my mother swinging wide at a polo ball, her body clinging like a monkey to the side of a horse at a flat-strap gallop. Her childhood clock on a small, varnished table beside the bed. Its hands dead parallel at 9.15 p.m. Branches scratch the corrugated roof, up where possums gnaw the