The Best Australian Stories 2014 (15 page)

‘Mum, you're not a frigging
star.
You're not
in demand.'

‘I'll get roles. Small roles, night-time shows. On films they can shoot around me. I'm sure I'm not the first actor to have
kidney disease
. Besides, I'll get a transplant soon.'

She sure as hell is not going to dialyse at a spacious, too-bright hospice with a library full of Dan Brown cast-offs and a view of a few trees beyond a car park.

Laura slams down her fork and gets up from the table so as not to cry in front of her mother.

Jason's expression is wobbly. Laura goes into the baby's room.

Laura is Brenda's only child. Surely she would offer to give her mother a kidney.

‘You know, Laura and I want to have another baby,' Jason says, not quite looking at her.

What has that to do with anything?

‘She … A healthy pregnant woman needs both her kidneys. But she feels very conflicted now, obviously. We wanted to wait a year or two.'

Oh.

Brenda chews the tasteless food. She suddenly wonders if she has pesto on her lip. She experiences a flashback: lifting toddler Laura over rock pools during a perfect sunset. Her giggling little girl. Her swimsuit was teal, her belly round, and her hair soft and white with tiny ringlets around her ears.

But she had never wanted another one.

‘I'm going to go.'

‘Okay,' Jason says, standing like an old-fashioned gentleman when she rises from the table. She calls out ‘Goodbye, darling.'

Laura leans her head out of the room, eyes red. She waves.

‘See you tomorrow?'

Laura nods. Brenda thinks that what Laura really wants to say is: ‘You always run away when it gets hard.' She's said it before. But Brenda doesn't run
away.
She runs
toward.

*

The dialysis training had been at an old estate in Concord West, Sydney, with large gardens and several nineteenth-century buildings ghosted by past illnesses, past lives. In a room that was taller than it was wide, Brenda had slept uneasily, nightmares jolting her awake and making her see blurry, ominous shapes on the walls. She thought she heard the angry snort of a horse in the stables next door, stables that had been empty for years. She shone her phone on her bag and popped two diazepam out of their packet, and waited.

A man came to speak to the training patients sitting around on a perfect 21-degree day, their kidneys flickering out like neon Broadway signs. The man had been on dialysis for eight years. He was thin, his skin too white. He pointed at various scars, a thyroid operation, a skin cancer, and the prominent, raggedy artery on his left arm. He told them how sometimes people scowled at him, especially when he was with his children. They thought him a junkie.

‘My bones have begun to deteriorate,' he said. ‘But think of it this way, I'm alive because of that machine.'

Brenda heard a woman behind her sigh deeply. She closed her eyes for a minute and a quick feeling of terror – a sense memory from her nightmares – made her shiver. She studied the man, who was now telling them about all the TV he watched on those five-hour stretches. She thought about the roles she could play when she looked like that. She could play a junkie, a cancer patient. Maybe Hollywood would finally open its arms to her. The weather in LA would be better for someone who wasn't entirely well, surely. On Oscars night, they'd give her a standing ovation. Someone young – one of those comic-book movie actors, someone handsome like Michael Fassbender – would offer her his kidney. It'd be on the cover of
New Idea.
No,
Vanity Fair.

The next person to talk to them was a woman who'd had a transplant. She was bright and solid, wearing orange. Her face was slightly puffed, almost cherubic, from the anti-rejection drugs. She talked about the hard years, the depression she developed, the restless legs and anger that came with one of the drugs she'd taken while dialysing. But, like the man, she said: ‘If this were fifty years ago I would have been dead. I wouldn't have seen my son get a doctorate, I wouldn't have met my granddaughter, I wouldn't have met my new husband.' Someone had died – she didn't know who they were – to give her life. She was able to write to the family of the deceased and the system passed her letter on.

Someone alive could give you a kidney, too. Brenda had already gone through everyone in her mind: too vain, too religious, too faraway, too hurt, too alcoholic. And then there was Laura. The woman spoke and smiled and blushed like the roses on the quiet grounds of the old estate. A breeze rustled the leaves of gnarled trees and tickled the hairs on Brenda's arm.

*

Brenda has paid the exorbitant fee to use the hotel's internet and she is searching for an earlier flight home. She has a headache from the small screen and her hands are swollen from water retention, which she tries to ignore. She can't remember going to the toilet since morning.

Robert had been with her in London before he died, and then she had self-exiled to Scotland. She was always better alone, but was that because of the assurance that Robert would come again? That last visit they acted like they had when they were twenty-three; she let something go and cradled in his arms, tickled him and kissed his nose, told him she loved him. They went to the cinema – wasting rare, ridiculously sunny days – to see foreign films. His hand grasped hers, forgivingly. And then he didn't come again.

There's a knock at her hotel door. She hasn't ordered room service so she ignores it for a moment, scrolling through the flights, deciding whether the fee to swap will be worth it. The knock comes again and she peers in the mirror, quickly smoothing her hair and rubbing a finger over her teeth. She opens the door and is confused for a moment by the apparition of her dead husband, but her eyes refocus and it is another spectre from the past: Frank from
Play School.
They are the same age, the same height.

‘Oh, Frank, what are you—'

‘I ran into your daughter today. She told me where to find you. I should have called the hotel.'

‘No, no. Come in.' But she does feel a stab of annoyance, as she always does at intrusions.

‘You look great.'

‘No, I don't,' she says, turning away. She knows the illness is beginning to take its toll. But perhaps he means ‘great' in the actor way, meaning ‘thin', and in that case, he is being honest.

What the hell is he doing here?
She sits awkwardly in the chair at the desk and he sits on the corner of the bed. Hotel rooms are intimate.

‘Do you live here?' she asks.

He shrugs. ‘Early retirement. My partner's a teacher and he has a great gig here. I learnt to surf and I read a lot.'

‘Your lover is male?' she blurts out.

‘You don't remember? I always liked both.'

‘Sorry, of course! I just remembered—'

‘Us.'

‘Yes,' she smiles, gets up and opens the minibar. ‘Scotch? Gin?'

‘Whatever you're having.'

They talk about the past in that way where one talks over the other, laughing and gulping down drink as each memory tumbles forth. But the whole time she can't get over how he lives here now and has given up acting to be a wife. And then she's telling him about the illness without meaning to, and how no matter what happens she'll keep on acting. He says he admires her for that, with a glint of envy in his eyes, which is what she expected. She says it's nothing and touches his shoulder. She could go to bed with him right now, just the skin touching skin and the shape of him, but she suspects he's committed to this teacher, the way his eyes shine with limerence when he speaks of him. She suspects he's younger.

When he leaves and she's soaking in the bath she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. Anthony will knock next, then Iain, then Bead, then that woman whose name she didn't catch (yes, she'd gone over to that side too), Billy and George and Jennifer, David, Col, Samuel, Sunjit and then the other Iain. She snoozes, and as the water turns cold she dreams that they all come through the door together, fleshy, flushed and well, in all their shades of nude. She is getting smaller and older and then, in the dream, it is only her and Robert, spooning in the cold water together. She wakes, gasping, tears running down her face. She steps out of the bath, trying to cover herself with the towel, shivering. She's had too many pills today, and not enough to eat.

She's sure Robert had at least one affair. They'd been apart for two months and he was still, at that time, insisting on staying in Australia most of the year. Laura was with him, four years old. Brenda came back and they went to some suburban barbeque (that she did warm to after a few champers and sausages). She was getting lots of attention and answering questions when she spotted Robert in the corner with their dentist, Susan, a mousy-haired woman – a little plump but it suited her and made her appear younger. It was the look on her face and how close they were standing. Afterwards, Laura took Susan by the hand and led her over to the cubbyhouse to show her something. Brenda felt she was on the outside, as in some ways she always had done. She warred with her feelings in bed that night. He wasn't exactly distant, but he was a little quieter than usual. She didn't want to lose him, and she thought asking might push that, so she stifled it. He rarely asked her, after all, but he knew. They had an understanding.

She has to leave. Before Laura feels any pressure about the kidney. She thinks about the dialysis centre here for a moment – at least Frank is here, maybe other ghosts – but no. She would go mad with boredom. She knows that notion of boredom would be offensive to her daughter. What about the grandson? She should want to be around them, she knows. But she doesn't want to be forgiven, to be loved, because she's felt sorry for. Because she's getting older. Because her blood will be cleaned by a machine, three days per week. Because she
is
blood.

Before falling into a bleary sleep, six pillows surrounding her like a nest, Brenda changes her flight to two days from now. She thinks, briefly, of not going on the machine at all. Of just expiring. But she's not young enough for that to be seen as tragic.

She will stay with Laura tomorrow night. She will talk about Robert, how good he was. They can drive her to the airport in the Holden. She will kiss her grandson goodbye on his tiny nose.

Civility Place

J.Y.L. Koh

Breakfast is last night's leftovers.

You leave your plate in the sink and splash water over it. You brush your teeth. You rub gel between your palms, work it through your hair and use a comb to arrange a neat side part. You cut Friday's dry-cleaning tags off your suit. You straighten your tie. You pick up your bag, sling it over your shoulder and walk to the train station.

Thirty seconds after you arrive on the platform and walk to the point where you know the first door of the first carriage will open, the train arrives.

You're on your way to work.

The entrance to the tower is comprised of six revolving glass doors. Their action reminds you of hand-cranked egg beaters, or one of those spy films where the hero is stuck in a tunnel in his battered suit, pitted against wind and gravity and tonnes of water that are bearing down on him and forcing him closer and closer to a giant fan with rotating blades.

You can feel the egg-beater fans sucking you in.

Whump, whump, whump.

You look up for a second at the tower looming above you. It's so tall that you can't see where it stops and the sky begins.

You steel yourself and walk in, preparing to be served as suggested – beaten or chopped.

On the front desk in the foyer stands, as usual, an extravagant floral arrangement. Today it's an immense concoction of birds of paradise.

‘Welcome to Civility Place,' grins the concierge, who is standing to one side of the flowers.

‘Hi, Serge.'

As usual, you stop to ask after his motorcycle.

He once showed it off to you at the end of one of his shifts. As it gleamed in the artificial light of the car park, he told you how he often took it on holidays up the coast to a little shack that looked out over the ocean, and how he was planning to ride it overseas one day – maybe around Japan.

Serge smiles when you enquire after the bike's health. He says it is well. He is, however, thinking of selling the bike. He wants one that's just a bit shinier and louder. Serge says that, in his last performance review, the head of the tower's security team hinted that a promotion would be on the cards if Serge continued to demonstrate outstanding commitment to his role. A promotion would give him some extra cash for a new machine.

‘Wow, that's great,' you say.

‘Thanks, I reckon it's almost in the bag,' says Serge. He nods to others passing by. ‘Welcome to Civility Place,' he says, giving them the same friendly grin of recognition you had thought was reserved for you alone.

The lift greets you, good morning in a recorded female voice, smooth and mature.

Beth from Banking steps in and greets you too. She has a voice similar to the recorded female voice. You wonder if she could simultaneously be a lawyer in your building and the smooth-voiced woman trapped in the walls of the lift.

You are close enough to Beth from Banking to be able to smell her shampoo and whatever expensive scent she has on. As you inhale, you look at her pearl earrings and down at the spikes of her patent black heels, which have those red undersides you noticed once in a training seminar when she crossed her legs and arranged her impossibly straight chestnut hair so that it swept forward over one shoulder.

Beth from Banking is a woman made for this building.

The glass of this place is in her DNA.

The lift zooms into the sky.

They say these lifts are the fastest in the country. They're not as fast as they used to be, though. Rumour has it that they had to be slowed down because some chump couldn't cope with the speed and threw up all over the lift buttons.

The entire building, including the lifts, is made of glass. The internal walls are glass, the conference tables are glass, and the desks, doors and shelves are glass.

Even the floors and ceilings are made of glass, and there is an unspoken and unpoliced rule that one must never look up the skirts of the women on the floors above.

You've been told that a middle-aged woman was once found wedged in one of the glass ceilings, her legs hanging down into the lower floor, still in motion as if walking, and the top half of her engrossed in flicking through a file. She licked the tip of her index finger intermittently as she read, unaware of the consternation surrounding her. No one knew how she got there, and the resulting rescue services bill was enormous.

As you are taken up to Level 403, you see the surrounding city. All roads lead to this tower, and all the buildings look as if they were forced to part to accommodate this monolith as it erupted from the ground.

The lift announces your level and you step out. As levels go, it's not a very prestigious one. Your team has a reputation for bringing in less money than others, hence its relegation to this floor, where a view of the outside world is only possible when the whole level isn't engulfed by clouds.

They say that on Level 1200, at the very top of Civility Place, one is able to dictate letters to clients while looking across into the infinite blue and down onto rolling carpets of clouds as if one is God. No one you've spoken to has ever been to Level 1200 but they all suggest that to arrive at that point in your career, you would have to have parted ways with your soul.

You walk through the automatic sliding doors and past the kitchen. Two secretaries are discussing hypo-allergenic varieties of lip balm while hovering over the daily fruit box. You excuse yourself, reaching between them to take a banana.

This would never happen on the higher levels. You don't know what it's like on Level 1200 but you've heard that, on Level 1199, the secretaries never utter a word. They don't even arch their eyebrows so as not to cause any disturbances to the flow of the rarefied air.

The day at work begins just like any other. Perhaps the air conditioning has been set one or two degrees colder than usual, but otherwise, everything is normal.

You settle into your death chair. You call it this because – although it's handsome and designer – it will eventually kill you: first by weakening your spine and then by rolling its five vengeful chrome wheels in starfish formation over your vital organs.

You start up your computer and open your inbox.

A query from a prospective client awaits you, as well as thirteen replies from existing clients concerning urgent matters. There's a joke email about metaphorical flying hippos, forwarded to you by a friend you've recently been trying to shake. Another chain email appears, courtesy of your aunt, which describes the wonders of a Mayan superfood that can make your hair sprout faster in all the right places and reduce your risk of oesophageal cancer by 43.8 per cent.

You open the firm's time and billing software.

You've already wasted one six-minute unit of billable time imagining a giant hippo falling from the sky onto your unwanted friend, and another two units wondering how the Mayan superfood is able to distinguish between right and wrong places for aggressive hair growth.

You record these three units of time to Office Administration and forward the prospective client's email to your secretary, Mona, asking for a conflict check.

You want to focus like you usually do but somehow you can't. You stare at your computer screen and nothing registers. The words begin to float and rearrange themselves.

Through the multiple glass walls that separate you from the outer offices, you watch two window cleaners hanging in harnesses on the outside of the building, drawing squeegees across the windows. They can't see you – the tower's exterior is all mirrors. It's so high up that they're breathing oxygen from tanks on their backs. The wind is strong and the cleaners swing like pendulums, sometimes smacking right into the building with loud thuds. No one in the outer offices seems to notice them.

Mona knocks on your door, handing you a file you need.

‘Shocking working conditions,' you mutter. ‘Shouldn't they be on some sort of scaffold?'

‘What?' she says, then follows your line of sight to the window cleaners. ‘Oh, they'll be right – they're foreigners. They probably come from some place with super huge mountains. Plus, where they're from, they're probably used to getting smacked around.'

‘That's outrageous,' you say.

You don't like Mona. She's only been working for you for a couple of weeks. She's the replacement for your old secretary, who accidentally suffocated last month in a room full of files. The firm has since toyed with the idea of transitioning to a paperless office, partly to prevent further losses of Human Resources.

‘It's not outrageous,' says Mona, crossing her arms. ‘You're just being politico correct, or whatever.'

You turn back to your computer screen and hear one of the cleaners crash again into the glass.

‘I tell you what's outrageous,' Mona adds. ‘It takes them a whole year to clean this building.'

You've heard this before – that once the window cleaners get to the top, they begin again at the bottom, after being allowed to break for two hours on Christmas Day to carve a turkey and wear ill-fitting paper crowns liberated with a snap from shiny red-and-green Christmas crackers.

One of the emails in your inbox is an urgent follow-up query from a client who is a national distributor of fruit juices.

You don't care about the juice company. Its CEO is upset that another juice company is using a logo of an ugly orange cow with bad teeth, which he believes is deceptively similar to his company's logo of an ugly purple cow with bad teeth.

The slogan at the bottom of his sign-off is:
Everything you could have asked for, and more.

You don't understand how this slogan can be true in any respect. It's not even real juice this company sells. It's faux juice. Cordial, basically, with a barely qualifying squeeze of third-rate fruit.

You open a new email window.

Dear Mr Laing
, you type.
Your cow needs a dentist.

You stare at the screen and yawn so much that tears run down your cheeks. You hold down the delete key until the window is blank.

You call Haline's extension.

‘Coffee?'

‘See you in the foyer. Give me five.'

You watch the time in the corner of your computer screen. One minute. Two. Three. Four.

You grab your jacket and walk to the lifts.

Today at the cafe underneath the tower, the barista is the bearded one with the eyebrow ring. The quality of this guy's coffee depends on his mood, and he's looking grumpy this morning.

Haline looks over her shoulder to check who's in the line.

‘Everywhere I go in the city,' she says to you in a low voice, ‘I see this fucking tower. I can't escape it.'

‘Well, it
is
twelve-hundred storeys high.'

‘With a frigging spike on top of that.'

‘You could just not look at the skyline.'

Haline squints. ‘You know,' she says, ‘I closed the curtains last night to get away from it. Then I turned on the TV and it was in the opening credits of that shit spin-off, you know, where that cartoon pen draws the skyline? It took a whole four seconds to finish the spike. I could've thrown the TV through the window and jumped out after it.'

‘You're not going to jump out any window,' you say. ‘Right?' ‘I've worked it out,' says Haline, handing exact change to the girl behind the counter. ‘If you factor in the extraordinary amounts of time we spend at this place, we're being paid six dollars an hour and we're being charged out at three hundred. By the collective sweat of our junior white collars, we are paying for Phillips Tom's boathouse and his third wife's fake boobs and his sons' private-school educations and his extended family's annual A-Reserve opera subscriptions.'

‘So what are you going to do about it?'

‘God knows. It could be too late to leave. Plus I don't know if I have it in me. They hire masochists like us for a reason.'

‘I don't think I could find another job,' you say, taking your flat white and nodding to the scowling barista. ‘The longer I do this, the more specialised I become. So far, all that my professional skill set amounts to is an unparalleled knack for spotting similarities between pictures of cows.'

‘Speaking of jumping out windows,' Haline murmurs, ‘remember Windy?'

‘Who could forget Windy,' you say.

With coffees in hand, you and Haline wait for a lift. When one arrives, you both make way for a gaggle of winter clerks who strut out, on their own caffeine run. These are the top law students in the city, and over these few weeks between semesters the firm is showing them the incredible lifestyle they too could have if they decide to accept a job at Civility Place upon completion of their degrees.

‘Smug little shits,' says Haline as the doors close. ‘Did you hear one of their induction modules is Aerial Yoga for Stress Management? One day they'll realise no one here gives a flying fuck about people who can only function properly in Suspended Updog.'

In the Level 403 kitchen, you take a sip of your coffee and realise the milk in it is burnt. You pull the plastic lid off the cup and pour what remains down the sink.

‘I can't bear to start work,' says Haline. ‘Let's go see Pravin.'

You drop into Pravin's office and ask about his weekend. ‘What weekend?' he says. ‘I haven't left since Friday.'

‘That's terrible,' says Haline.

‘It's okay,' Pravin shrugs. ‘I'm getting efficient. Now I spend every waking minute doing work, and I've done an online course on lucid dreaming that's shown me how I can hang out with mates while I'm asleep. So I still have a sort of social life. Wild times, actually, all while taking naps under this desk. Boy, did I dream we got smashed last night.'

Your attention drifts. You stare at the collage on the wall of Pravin's office.

It's part of the firm's billion-dollar art collection, which has been built with the dual aim of Supporting Artists while Creating a Vibrant Office Environment that not only enhances the mental health of the firm's employees but also satisfies the artistic yearnings of those with an imaginative bent, allowing them to integrate creativity into their working lives without having to sacrifice income or material comfort.