Australian Love Stories (2 page)

Or tread in the bus on my toes?

Will it come like a change in the weather?

Will its greeting be courteous or rough?

Will it alter my life altogether?

O tell me the truth about love.

I think this stanza, ending with a plea, stuck with me because it mirrored my own slow, and often torn, task of selecting the final stories for this collection. As I picked up each new submission, I had no idea where it was going to take me or what unexpected facet of love it was going to reveal to me, but I knew I wanted every author, in some way, to tell me the truth. There's no room for hypocrisy, subterfuge or self-aggrandisement in a short story written to win someone's heart. That doesn't make the selection process like
speed-dating, it's more a kind of jolt of recognition and connection. Admiration at someone's boldness.

But it also makes it, perversely, a heartache—because writers did entrust me with their truths, across the entire gamut of lived experience. I had to reject plenty of stories which were wise, funny, insightful and thought-provoking. Many took breathtakingly honest risks and revealed honest vulnerabilities. I could have collated whole collections which just explored love through the experience of death, or battling cancer, or Alzheimer's disease, or coming out. There were stories full of the ache of love lost through war, or betrayal, or the sheer drudgery of everyday life once the magic has worn off and there's still dishes to be done. Many recounted the miraculous set of coincidences that brought soul mates together, and more which celebrated how love survives in spite of all manner of setbacks. If Shakespeare is right and all tragedies are ended by a death and all comedies by a marriage, then love has all the bases covered, however it bursts onto the scene.

I wanted to find a spectrum of stories which would enlighten and surprise, which touched on some of the many guises in which love enters our lives and alters it altogether. Short stories, by their very nature, tend to pivot on something singular for impact. They work to suggest that this alteration, if not articulated in the story itself, is on the cards sometime in the future, in the airy space you, the reader, enter as the story gently finishes. That's the silence we're left to ponder, and Donna Ward and I arranged the stories into a kind of narrative arc of the way love comes, creates its own disorders, then transforms itself, and us the process.

When it comes, though, whether on a bus or in the weather, who could ever guess at love's limitless guises? Who, when they
gaze at a newborn baby, foresees how much tumult will be caused, how much joy and heartache generated, how much confusion, exhilaration, disorientation, soul-searching, misunderstanding and fierce ecstasy will be spun forth into the world powered with the scary momentum of love?

Suffice to say, I couldn't include them all, but I want to thank all those who submitted stories and hope many more pieces which do not appear here find the wider audience they deserve. The ones waiting for you in this collection are just a handful of the great stories I have had the honour of reading during this process, and I want to tip them into your open hand now, like shells and fragments of coral and small weathered pieces of sea glass, testaments of growth and time and some hard, patient tides. They're not all pretty, any more than love is always pretty, but look, here they are, miraculous, tumbled and shining, from a stranger's cupped hand to yours. I hope you love them.

THAT SENSUOUS WEIGHT

Dawn

BRUCE PASCOE

You are perfect for this story. I will never meet you.

When I wake at night I am almost always turned to the right, turned to the night, a great field of stars before me. At this time of the year there is Corona Australis and another constellation arranged in a deep vee. I don't know its name. I could look up what the Greeks or British decided to call it but I am neither Greek nor British, so I am happy to watch it rise away from me until, on my last observation, just before dawn, it has gone.

A dog, Yambulla, rests his jaw on the bed and begs me to acknowledge that it is almost a new day and he is here. I rub the skin and fur of his eyebrows, jaw and ears so that I can feel the bone beneath. This tells us that we are both alive and he can return to his bed until the sun has truly risen.

I turn away from the sky to watch her. She is just a nest of hair, a gorgeous silver scramble. The cover is drawn up so far as to hide her almost completely. I sneak the cover down so I can see her brow and sleeping eyes. She murmurs so I stop and watch. Her hair never went grey but sedately transmuted into a silver gold. I lift a strand away from her eyes and she murmurs again, so again I watch and wait like a thief.

She moves, curving in closer to my chest. I feel her breast slip against me. Do you see why I am telling you this? It would be impossible to tell anyone else. Something deep within me caves
as if a vacuum has been created every time I feel the slip of that sensuous weight. This is my depravity.

When she makes the small animal alignments to bring her flesh more roundly to mine I restrain the doona so that it slips from her shoulder. She murmurs an objection. Always. But as always I put my hand there to cup the round of her shoulder and she is satisfied that the warmth has returned and sighs. Her breath is warm and bodily.

I can see her throat now, and her lips and if I am careful I can pass a hand across her brow and she will allow it, turning her face to the plane of my hand. This is illicit, salacious. I might look at her lips in the beige light of creeping dawn but I cannot touch. One finger there and she will squirm and bring an irritated hand to her mouth, rubbing fractiously. I must not touch if my sin is to advance. I can look and linger but that is all.

Her cheekbone is high and beautiful, my finger can ride that blade and a smile might crimp the edge of her lips. That is permitted as long as I return to the shoulder frequently enough to keep it warm. Otherwise she will draw the covers over herself and it will be over. Carefully, slowly, indecently is the rule.

The wattlebirds have heard the kookaburra and so it is deemed to be dawn. The nightjar might be allowed one or two more freakish ululations but the night heron leaves after one final
kwok
. The frog in the ferns has more loosely defined rules and will continue at his leisure or pleasure. It's hard to know about frogs, especially those so ludicrously named as the pobblebonk.

But in this light, a pinkish yellow like a new peach where it is caught by the sun, I can clearly see the skin of her face and I don't know when I first noticed the new splashes of colour. They are uneven blurs the colour of spilt tea on a napkin. She is tawny
now beneath my fingers. I press with the ball of muscle beneath my thumb and she mumbles, reassured. I may continue to stroke and smooth and stare.

I might slide a curved hand over her shoulder and down the gorgeous rise of her arm muscle and this action can cause the cover to slip a fraction and reveal the wonderful bulb of her breast. She would allow me to slip my fingers beneath her bosom and cup the full glory but then it would be over. The grey eyes would flick open and smile, but it would be over. Too soon.

I bring the doona higher on her shoulder and she turns into its warmth, murmuring again, but I wait until the breath puffs evenly from her lips in this sleep that is so girlishly simple, so deliciously ample.

It is allowed that I may let a finger slide into the cup below the shoulder blade and smooth the skin as it rises to her throat. I am allowed many liberties but I must not touch the piece of bone which now lies across the rest of the blade where Mrs Whitlam broke it. Mrs Whitlam is a horse. Big and brave and beautiful but scared of sudden wallabies and suspicious fence posts. Makes her shy.

So I don't touch that bone. It would be over. She presses in closer to me and her breasts slide heavily against me and a thigh rises over mine and she squirms again, adjusting, moulding herself to me, fidgeting this limb and that, this foot against that, settling. It is not yet over.

Her breath puffs evenly and I can see her lips pout at each slight eruption of air that forces between them. This is something only a wanton boy would admit to watching.

But the lyrebird thinks it is time to sing. Other people's songs. The silver blond woman is responsive to the lyrebird and
she opens her eyes, as grey and warm as the breast of a shrike thrush, and asks me for the time. Not to know the time at all, but to know if she has another half an hour. I tell her whatever time it is that would assure her that she has another half hour, to sleep, to merge. Her arm circles my waist and she grips, presses her face to my neck. It is scandalous the liberties I take with the truth to ensure that this happens.

Now I can stroke her more boldly, rub the skin of her forehead, smoothing the wrinkles there. This is a beautifully moulded bone and tawny with the new dabs of fawn.

I do not cry at my good fortune. I am used to it. Resigned to the glory of her. I draw a finger across the rise of her cheek and at this late hour may smooth a line to the corner of her mouth. She might murmur dissent but it is too late now, my hand slips down her neck and cups her breast. The brow creases but I am out of control and caress the curve of her waist and the sweep where it careens across the smooth arch of her hip.

I almost gasp at the memory of last night as we watched a film on
TV
. About birds as fate would have it. It is summer and she was wearing shorts and she swung her legs imperiously into my lap. No words. It was expected I would stroke her feet. Some buckled toes, a craggy nail or two, but smooth, curved feet, strokeable feet. Yambulla grunted and moved to the end of the couch resigned to the fact that all the stroking for the time being would be for her. The mistress.

And I found myself holding the long loose muscle of her calf and then releasing it to let it fall back into the curve of my palm. I couldn't remember doing this before but it was delicious. Another illicit activity to savour.

In this new golden light my hand rested on the outside of her thigh remembering the gentle slap of that calf muscle but unable to reach it now without terminal ruction of the dawn ceremony. The hand mused there, thrall to memory, resolving to seize that flagrant delight at the next opportunity.

Now that the wattle bird is catcher catcher catchering and the wonga pigeons are ratcheting around on the veranda like clockwork toys it is truly a day and she flings the doona from her and rises on one elbow to inspect that day. And I am finally, corruptly, allowed her full survey.

She will permit me to press my face into her breasts, but not take the nipple between my lips. Too early. Too licentious. So I don't but I do allow my hand the full liberty of swimming across her flanks, all her curves, and finally let that hand off the leash to joggle that calf muscle, feel the full loose slap of it.

So there you are, stranger, it is dawn and you are the only person on earth who will hear this story. For it is forbidden.

Meltemi

SUSAN PYKE

Always I liked Spiros Metropolis, but Mana hated him for all his life. You know why? Because his family were on the other side of politics to us. You think that doesn't matter? It did. It was all about politics then. Mana lifted her chin to his mother and father but she never did big talking, not like with the people at our church, or in our part of the village up on the hill. The Metropolis family lived down at Megalokima, near the tanneries where they made the leather. Mana told me—told all of us kids—never to go there. She hated Megalokima beach. Too much hurt for her family, too much stink from the animal skins, too much gypsies there every summer. She said gypsies took everything but they never looked at us. We were nothing to them.