The Best Australian Stories 2010 (27 page)

‘Mum! Where are you going?' She stops me, blocks me rather. Her hand is on my arm. ‘You've got everything you need, we don't need to go back to your room.' She scratches at the pumpkin-soup stain on my jacket with her fingernail.

In the absence of words and reason, I find my will, and it strengthens my body as nothing ever has before.

‘Come on, Mum!' Suzie says, taking my hand. ‘I don't have all afternoon.' Then she puts her arms around my resisting body. ‘I didn't mean it to sound like that,' she says.

‘Meredith,' I manage.

‘Mum, for goodness sake, forget Meredith. Can't you just come for a walk with me for half an hour?' But she follows me down the corridor, rummaging in her bag for her phone and pressing the keys rapidly with her thumb. She always hated to walk slowly.

Meredith is sitting up in her wheelchair. She brightens when we come in, and invites Suzie to pull up a chair. Her good manners transform room 17 into a gracious lounge. When we go back to her farmhouse, this is what it will be like. She will preside over the arrangements, courteous and hospitable; she will make everything comfortable.

After Suzie has gone, with a promise to be back on Sunday, the room settles again. Meredith pulls the curtains shut and closes the door.

‘I'm going to have a rest,' she says, ‘but you are welcome to stay.'

I watch her manoeuvre herself onto the bed, and pull the bedcover over herself. She faces away from me, the shape of her body like rolling dunes under the cover. I go to the bed and touch her shoulder.

‘It's alright,' she says, ‘I'm still here.'

Gently, I climb onto the bed beside her, and lie down with my chest against her back. I reach my arm around her and feel for her hand. We breathe together, still and warm. There is no other place that I would wish death to take me from but here.

*

Meredith has had some money go missing from her room.

‘You don't know anything about it?' she asks me.

‘I would never ... I would never ...' The urgency of my denial sticks in my throat like rising dough, thick and claggy. Tears wet my cheeks. She reaches for my hand.

‘I'm sorry,' she says, ‘I had to ask.'

She says she is going to inform the authorities.

Anxiety billows down the corridors and into every room, like an epidemic. No one is spared. There are whisperings; there are agitated flutterings of hands. Those who normally pace have sat down in unlikely spots; those who normally sit have stood up with shaky purpose. Mr Chesterton, accompanied by Nina and the little Thai nurse, advance methodically. They shut each door behind them, there is a dark silence for about five minutes, then they emerge again. Poor old Mr Evans is brought from his nook in the garden, his mouth a shining purple hole in his head. They take him into his room and it's the same routine – five minutes' silence, then they emerge again.

I have been sat on the couch in the courtyard window, the ancient Greek crone with the hooked nose on one side of me, weaving her fingers together and moaning, and creamy fat Nora on the other side, sighing, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!'

Then it is my turn.

‘It won't take long,' Nina says. ‘We just need to check your room to make sure there is nothing there that shouldn't be there.'

I sit on the edge of my armchair and watch them. Mr Chesterton stands in the middle of the room, nodding, ‘Just a formality, just a formality.' They open my drawers, they look through my handbag, they open my wardrobe and check the pockets of my jacket and slacks. Then Nina lifts the pillow on my bed and finds Meredith's horse.

She hands it to Mr Chesterton, who looks bemused. ‘It belongs to Meredith,' she says to him. ‘I knew it! We could have come straight here and saved ourselves the trouble.'

All three face me; the Thai nurse has her arms folded.

‘Have you been taking things from Meredith's room?' says Mr Chesterton unhappily.

‘Have you taken any money?' Nina asks, very loudly. ‘Come on, Lillian, where have you put it? We know you've taken it.'

‘Well,' says Mr Chesterton.

I am speechless, of course.

‘We're going to find it,' says Nina, and pushes the mattress right off the bed. There, of course, is the brown envelope with the five hundred dollars, selotaped to the bed, where it always is.

I watch them counting the money, my hands fluttering up and back again like foolish little flags. They talk softly to each other, but then Mr Chesterton turns to me and says, ‘Lillian, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to stay in your room now while we decide what we're going to do about this. You're not to go into Meredith's room again, do you understand?'

‘We could just lock her door,' says Nina.

‘We can't do that,' says Mr Chesterton. ‘We will just have to keep a watch.'

‘We haven't got the staff,' says Nina. ‘Anyway, this is just the icing on the cake. She's very inappropriate and disinhibited around Meredith, it's a really unhealthy relationship, and it's upsetting the other residents.'

They leave at last. ‘Don't come out until I say you can!' is Nina's parting shot.

*

Suzie has brought boxes, and squats on the floor, packing my things.

‘They can't look after you properly here, Mum,' she says. ‘I've had to find another place for you.' She is holding back her tears.

I don't even try to stop her. My will has dwindled to a memory, and my belly seems full of stones.

‘Can't you just say one thing, Mum?' she pleads. ‘Anything?'

If I could, I'd tell Meredith I'd have given her all my money. I'd tell her that if ever I'd known that she was in the world, I'd have taken the road west and found her. I'd tell her I can't bear to lose the sight of her.

Bats

John Kinsella

I don't believe you, she said to him, as the sun sat on the edge of the hill.

It's true, he said emphatically.

And you said this was a mountain and it's really a big hill.

It
is
a mountain, he said. It's over a thousand feet above sea level and that makes it a mountain.

She stared hard and suspiciously at him, not sure what to say, and finally out of instinct said, I don't think
that
can be right.

What would you know? he said, annoyed. You live in the city right near the beach. You live at sea level. What do
you
know about elevation?

She wasn't entirely sure what he was getting at, but she wasn't going to say so. Instead, she shook her gleaming blonde hair just because it was there to shake, and she thought it'd look special against the sunset.

He noticed. Your hair makes black lines against the sun.

It's not black. There's no black in it. It's a hundred percent blonde. She thought she should be as precise as possible with the boy. What's more, she continued, Mother says it's ‘translucent.' She thought she had him with that word.

That may be true, he said, but with the sun like that your hair blocks the harsh rays and makes it look like a squiggle of black lines.

She was offended now, and no longer wanted to wait for the purple he claimed would fill the sky around the mountain, going into the mountain itself, when the sun dipped below the horizon. She'd asked him why he'd called that
hill
a ‘purple mountain' and he'd said, I'll show you before dinner. It turns purple most days, especially in summer.

Aware that he'd pushed things too far, he pulled back. He was delighted this girl was visiting from the city, and he tried to regain lost ground by distracting her, rekindling her interest.

At dusk there'll be bats in the sky, he enthused.

Bats? she cried. No!

Yes, bats, he said, pleased with her reaction.

Vampire bats? she asked, incredulous.

He wanted to say yes, to frighten her, but that wouldn't achieve anything. Well, it might in time – over days and weeks – if he had time, but she was there only for the afternoon and evening, so he didn't want to take the risk.

No, no, just plain ol' bats. Dad says they're called Western Freetailed Bats, he said. He respected facts.

They were both silent, and fell to watching the sunset with their own thoughts, their own intensities.

We watch sunsets at the beach all the time, she said. There are so many reds and oranges and purples in so many patterns, especially when it's cloudy. I didn't know the colours reached this far away from the sea.

Yes, it's wonderful, he said, and shortly the mountain will go purple. And then it will be grey and black like the sky. The bats will come in the grey, at dusk. If you throw a rock or a stick high up into the air they will go for it, thinking it's alive, something they might want to eat. And you can hear them the whole time. You can hear their wings flapping flapping flapping ...

Soon the two of them would be called into the house for dinner, and there were mosquitoes about, but they stood transfixed, caught in the stretching and contracting of time as the mountain went purple and loomed massive before them, loomed much greater than any hill could loom, then blackened as the sky went grey.

I think I can hear a squeaking sound, she said, though she thought she might be imagining it. She wanted there to be bats.

Bats echolocate, he said seriously, and moved ever so slightly closer to her. It's how they see in the dark, he confided. They see with their ears, because they are ...

Blind as a bat, she said, and they both laughed quietly.

They hear their own sounds come back, he added, after a moment. They send sounds out of their throats that bounce off things and come back and tell them the precise shape and movements. The boy felt his description was getting lost in the words, so he added, They can
see
an insect flying at night through their ears.

She believed him. It was truth, she was sure.

Throw a stone up in the air, she said suddenly.

And he did, immediately. In the half-light they saw a small black entity swoop out of the grey and twist about the stone as it reached its apogee, before flashing darkly away.

I think there are a lot of bats out this evening, he said proudly. There'll be heaps later tonight. It's all the Bogong moths about. They love eating Bogong moths.

This confirmed her growing belief in the boy. On arriving at the strange house she'd felt revolted to see the veranda lampshade filled with hundreds of dead moths. It's the Bogong moths, the boy's mother had said, when the boy was still down at the machine shed with his father.

Now the girl was really quite happy to be inland. It was warm and dry-smelling, and the mountain had been purple. The boy
had
told the truth and she trusted him in the thickening dark. He was bigger than her, and seemed someone she could lean on if she had to, though she'd never have to, she was sure. And there were bats. Best of all, there were bats. She wondered what they looked like, really looked like, up close. And then she shook her hair in the dark-light with excitement, thinking she'd light up the night with her blondeness. She did this for herself, but also for the boy, the mountain and the bats.

And at least one bat heard her. There was a pulling and a tangling and a clawing in her hair and she screamed a short, stifled scream.

There was a bat tangled in her hair. The boy knew straight away and took her arm and directed her towards the lights of the house. Keep calm, he said, bats often get caught in people's hair. Keep calm or it will tangle worse.

She was sobbing but his steady matter-of-fact voice kept her calm. She knew the bat must be confused and in terror – this knowledge overrode everything.

The boy was amazed at her ‘self-control,' as his father would have said.
Get some self-control, son!
And here she was, terrified and in pain and in control. It was as if a spell had been cast. She wanted to tell him that she didn't normally swish her hair about, it's just that it was a special day. That it was because of him.

They reached the front door and he called inside for help. The adults rushed out, her mother instantly upset, her father looking sheepish. Somebody said, Calm, calm ... scissors, we need scissors. And the scissors were found. Leave plenty of hair around the bat or it will get hurt, the boy said. And the girl, gritting her teeth and fighting the ultimate hair fight, said the same.

Nasty bat, said one of the mothers. And such beautiful hair.

It looks repulsive. Looks like a dead hand. Watch its little claws. And those teeth!

I am sorry, darling, but you're going to be a sight by the time we've got this beastie out, said the boy's mother, all practicality and dexterity.

I don't care! I don't care! exclaimed the girl. I ... and then she paused to feel the bat clawing and making a distressed sound, maybe echolocating the scissors and her hair and her skin and the blood pumping warm beneath. I want to see it, she said.