The Best Australian Stories 2014 (2 page)

The acronym didn't work, actually, but Wil let it stand. She knew Artemis's husband. He was a handsome, intelligent man. A pilot for a charter flight company that did well out of the mining industry, he was often away for days at a time. When he was home he was the picture of a devoted father. He put the children to bed at night. He helped Artemis with the cleaning. He tended the garden. Wil wasn't surprised that someone else should find him attractive. She felt terrible for her friend, Artemis, and understood her sense of her betrayal. But at the same time, she couldn't stop thinking about the cheating husband. She recognised his illicit desire, so completely overwhelming. She understood the mad pain of it. She thought about this even as Artemis confided in her. Wil's identification with the traitor shocked her.

Her son bowled into her with force then plonked to the ground with laughter.

‘Bleuggh,' he said, pulling a silly face, then: ‘Dong!'

The boy was performing for his friends. She took his hand in hers and helped to pull him up. She moved towards her car and nodded and smiled her goodbyes at Artemis, for whom she felt truly awful, and for whom it seemed nothing at all could be done. The boy was complaining. As she helped him into the car she found herself gripping him with the strongest hold.

‘Stop it, Mum!' he said. ‘Let go!'

*

The hanged man lived alone. She knew which suburb. She knew precisely which street. She pictured him opening his front door to greet her. She was standing there on the threshold. It was raining. She had her car with her. It was night. But she could not read the hanged man's face as he looked at her. She could not read: was it mutual recognition or horror? Had she gone too far? Wilhelmina Blomme was mid-descent. No, she was caught somewhere. She wasn't even moving.

Outside the vortex of the accident, she suspected that continuity still reigned. Her husband would be sitting in the study at home, making slow progress on a working drawing for a yet-to-be-built dream home. For as long as they had lived in the City of Light, her husband had seemed incapable of doing anything with speed. He earned less than half her income, running his own business at home. But what could be said against him? He picked up the children from school and day care four afternoons a week. He cooked four nights out of seven. He fell asleep, nightly, in front of the television, and didn't answer her when she called for him to come to bed. It was a relationship in which she had been feeling, for some years, a terrible sense of loneliness.

At work, the progress meeting on the North-West Project would soon be underway without her. She would not be able to deliver her background work on the Iraqi subcontractor. It occurred to her, apropos of nothing, that she may never set foot in the boardroom at Corp C again. A part of her felt good about this. The narrative would continue without her. She would miss the painting on the boardroom wall: the bold grey storm front by David Giles. There was, amidst the grey cloudscape, a beautiful yellow light. It was the sun, she supposed, refracted. It hadn't occurred to her before just how important that painting had been to her. She always sat on the left-hand side of the Chair, so as to face it. Giles was painting about people, she realised, even though the human form, in a figurative sense, was completely absent from his work. He was painting about perception, she thought, and how it shifts. His storm painting granted time, in a funny way. It granted time to contemplate that shift.

The hanged man's PA would probably be phoning her mobile about now. There would be some mystification about her absence, some impatience. They would postpone the meeting, once, then twice, until it became apparent she was not capable of returning to work. Or they would continue, today, with what they had in front of them. One always imagines oneself more indispensable than is actually the case.

*

She was mid-descent. No, she was airborne.

*

Blindness, too, comes in unexpected ways. We cannot know the blindness, only its effect. We cannot always be conscious of how blind we've become. We do not know what we're missing.

*

In her dream, he swam back to her, beneath the surface of the water, and took her hand, pulling her in his direction. They were diving towards some kind of wreckage. Something metal glistened on the bottom of the river. Was it her bike? She remembered, so many years ago, before the children were born, in the early years of her marriage, how she had stood in a broad wide riverbed up north with an Indigenous woman and talked about the unexpected. The local woman told her how water could descend from a rainstorm so many hundreds of kilometres away, in the desert, then come barrelling down the dry riverbed, taking everything in its wake. They spoke of how it could do this, even on a hot, still day. ‘A day like today,' she said. You just never knew. And so the advice was not to stand in the riverbed, which was what they were doing, of course, even as the woman relayed her sensible advice.

In the dream, the same one, her department was restructured. She dove beneath the surface again, but the hanged man, whom she had taken to calling by his real name, Leigh, was nowhere in sight. The treasure had dislodged. A dolphin was playing in her slipstream. Wil was carrying knowledge, but it was not buoyant, and she found that despite her fitness, despite the placid current of the tired river, despite everything, she could no longer swim.

‘I know you,' she reassured the river. ‘You can help me.'

But the river was silent, and the two of them dwelled, one body in another, and the sun looked down and the breeze ruffled the leaves of the peppermint trees, and the day went on with no regard for Wilhelmina Blomme at all.

*

Sirens call.
The sudden shot of loss.
Sometimes it seems the sirens are in the distance and receding, at other times they are so close they hurt her ears. She remembered studying a poem by Philip Larkin at high school. It was about an ambulance siren. She could not remember the lines, exactly, only the sentiment. Was the poet disturbed by the siren, but quietly happy that it did not call for him? Yes, she thought, sirens are always calling for somebody else. You listen, as you grow older, then the noise goes away. Until, one day, it doesn't go away. One day it deafens. And you can no longer hear anything at all.

*

I am here,
she told the children.
Mummy's here. Can't you see me?

The boys could hear her, she was sure, but somehow they could not reach her. They needed her and she had lost them. She had lost them on the descent.

*

Only last week, flying to the north of the state on business, and looking down at the arid interior, she had noticed how it was water that shaped the country. Everywhere retained the mark of its aggressive flow, its relentless pursuit of the lowest point. It had shaped and shifted every grain of sand, every plant, hill and gully.

‘I love your work,' he'd said to her at the end of a particularly difficult meeting one afternoon and the smile she gave back was a kind of grimace because the line was so stupid, so facile. He was not living up to her expectations.

On Wednesday, climbing the stairs to the lobby, she saw him a little way ahead of her. He was wearing grey suit pants and a pink collared shirt and she watched the way he walked and desire sparked in her so fast and so quick it was almost painful to keep walking, knowing what she knew, and what he seemed to fail to acknowledge: how she needed him. Then she climbed the stairs to the top level and as she was discussing something with his PA, the hanged man came out of his office. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. So, it could not have been him on the stairs.

‘How are you?' he said.

Was she really so ill?

‘I'm okay,' she replied, ‘under the circumstances.'

And he nodded and smiled and gave the PA some instruction and left again, and Wilhelmina breathed out.

*

Never do that. I just don't recommend falling away at such speed. Whole planets pass you by, galaxies, aeons, the trip itself a kind of hallucination. But in free falling, look how the sun dapples the surface of the river, almost as if life itself was born of its reflection. If one wore skirts, they would be billowing now. There is a rushing of blood through arteries, a honey-warmth, and you feel like a child who can see rainbows where nobody else can.

Look at the beauty of the river, here, where the boats pass. It only takes one pleasure boat to destroy the stillness, just one. People who pass nod at us and assume us a couple, the sun on our backs, my tongue in your mouth.

And the river says nothing, only moving her bulk to accommodate boats, birds, small marine mammals. There is nothing to say. It is true that it had seemed impossible, because for so long he was not real. The apparition, a symptom of stress, perhaps, her head not right, the aching tug of desire leaching away reason, and the Buddhist monk at the temple tells her not to cling. Nothing, he says, is worth clinging to. Nothing.

Except for this.

Remember how that single morning expanded and spilled into the night, though perhaps he had left again by then, just like that, as if a great bird had dived to earth and lifted him away, and the city was without him. And so was she.

But you remember, don't you, that morning, and how it changed things? The city knew them and nodded as they passed. They were without papers. Their phones buzzed and vibrated in their pockets and they watched a child (was it Toby?) stop to kick a ball on the wet green grass of the winter parkland.

‘I didn't know this city until now,' he said.

‘Nor me.'

‘I wasn't born here.'

‘Me either.'

‘I've never felt at home.'

‘No.'

Never do that. Never do that. Not hope, and investment, and the dreaming and trading on futures. If only we had not fallen this way. If only the river hadn't kept us guessing like that. If there hadn't been so many corners to turn.

‘No.'

There is nothing to fear from love.

*

It's different on a deliberate descent. You have already changed down gears. You have leant forward, low. You have pedalled hard, eyes on the road. Leaning. Correcting. Leaning, again.

*

At one point she resurfaces in the kindergarten classroom. Toby and his friends are there. The teacher and her assistant are hurling a large circle of fabric in the air and the children are rushing underneath it, singing, ‘Shake, shake the apple tree. Some for you and some for me.' The room smells like freshly baked bread and there are vases of flowers all along the little desks in rows. Her firstborn seems angelic in this setting, like a doll, like a child in a storybook. All his aggression, dissolved.

*

This is change. Your bearings lost. You are fumbling now. Stability has turned into a cage, the space too small to turn in. Your wings can't unfold. As if in a dream, when you wake up but for some reason cannot open your eyes, you have to step out the open door, but you are fumbling. Knowledge is nothing now, if it ever was something useful. Can you see yet? Have you perspective?

Watch out for larger birds, creatures of prey. Flying machines. Refine your senses. Sometimes I fear you are not a bird at all, just a fresh feather of cotton floating away along the edge of a quiet country road, escaping harvest. There are air currents here. You cannot have known about that before. No matter. Drift.

*

And then what happened?

*

The narrative is yet to arrive in hell. It's fallen sideways into heaven. At first it didn't know how to progress. It kept looping, back, forward, back, endless circles. And because she was cycling up a steep incline backwards and that was never possible for long, if it was possible at all, something had to change. In heaven, she found she could perform acrobatics. The body grew flexible. There was the idea of a child in her womb but in the middle of the second trimester it changed its mind and flew away. She didn't mind. She was lighter without it. She cycled upside down. She grew wings on her back. There was some kind of tightrope stretched taut across the river, beneath the railway bridge. As she cycled across it, a train went by, and the people on the carriages turned to face her and grew white, and she smiled at them as they went by, lifting one hand to wave.

One day, to her surprise, the hanged man gave her his address. So she found herself there on the threshold. It was not night. It was mid-afternoon. Nor was it raining. A removal van was parked on the verge outside, its back door open. Inside, a man in an orange high-visibility vest was shifting boxes. She could hear the traffic from the expressway several blocks away and the garrulous calling of a crow as she stood there at the door. It was not morning. It was mid-afternoon. The hanged man was talking into his mobile phone, but he was also expecting her, and so, before she could knock, the door was already opening, and she ducked under his arm and through into the small townhouse and stood in his kitchen. When the phone call was finished, he kissed her. And when the kiss was finished, it was no longer mid-afternoon. And the hanged man was no longer the Deputy CEO at Corp C.

The place was different without him. Its account of itself faltered.

‘He was ambitious,' people said.

‘He was single-minded.'

*

‘You are my people, and you have loved me well,' said the river, and Wilhelmina Blomme thought it finally and completely deluded.

*

The speeches she wrote for the new Deputy were nonsense, but they were also considered an asset and the company continued to pay her salary.

It's possible that all of the staff knew, and that they knew even before she knew, and it's also possible that they could not and would not ever know, and that all of these things could be simultaneously true.

When she had cause to meet with others in the boardroom she found herself turning her back on the David Giles painting. It was as if she could no longer afford to look at it.

*