The Best Australian Stories (18 page)

The parlour door slammed open and she looked around to see a few more women, barely out of their teens, filing into the room. The hook-nosed detective scrutinised them each briefly before turning his attention back to the service.

‘This poor child,' her father explained, gesturing to the coffin, ‘was not even a week old when she was found—' he paused and caught his breath ‘—when she was discovered inside a green recycling bag that had been dumped in a lane behind a local hotel.' A gust of sighs and low moans rose through the room and the candle flames trembled, casting shadows against the sandstone walls.

‘She'd been wrapped in a towel and her umbilical cord had been crudely severed, possibly by a kitchen knife or garden shears – so much so that it had obviously become infected shortly after her birth.' Her father cleared his throat and ran his hand through his hair. ‘But the infection was not what robbed this child of her short life,' he added. ‘It was the hypothermia she suffered after she'd been abandoned in the lane.'

For a moment Ginger's eyes met her father's and she saw that he was looking directly at her, as if there was no one else in the room.

She suddenly realised she was shivering, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted ten degrees. Her stomach tightened and she found it difficult to breathe. She realised, now, why the detectives were there, why they were closely examining all the funeral mourners, especially the women. Gazing at the coffin, she felt dizzy and nauseous at the same time.

Later, she hoped, she'd feel better, when she and her father, as planned, would stand outside, on the veranda of the parlour, together with the other mourners. They would watch the small white casket, no bigger than a toy box, being pushed into the back of the hearse, along with floral wreaths, notes, dolls and teddy bears. She knew her father's hand would be a warm glove around hers, as it always had been. When her father nodded, she would pull the ornate pair of scissors from her pocket and cut the strings of the twenty pink balloons tethered to the porch. And she'd watch them float up, beyond the chimneys where her angel mother no longer lived, and into the cloudy sky.

But for now she stood up, and pressed her back against the wall, her eyes, like those of the detectives, roving over each woman in the room – those who were crying and those who sat motionless, wondering which one she was.

Speak to Me

Paddy O'Reilly

Not all fantasy writers are geeks, I tell my friends. Most of us are normal people who like a good story with heroes and villains and right and wrong. We love to weave new worlds, grapple with the strange physical laws we have created and test the fabric of our new world for consistency. There is a single story in fantasy, I tell them, and it is the hero's journey, where ordinary people become extraordinary. It teaches us that every person has hidden talents, that we are stronger and more able than we know, and that one person can make a difference in the world. This is what I hoped I would find in myself one day.

*

I was typing on my computer in the dawn hours while the rest of the neighbourhood slept. An object the size of a thermos flew past my window, bounced like a football, and rolled into the yard. I switched on the yard light and ran outside. I stood there astonished, afraid, staring at the creature lying stunned beside its craft, which glowed white-hot before fading to grey and slowly crumbling to ash. When the ash had cooled, I bent over and took the limp creature into my hands. My glasses were fogging up. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

‘Calm, Jules, calm,' I said. ‘Slow breaths, relax the muscles, put the thing down.'

On the kitchen table the creature's limbs shivered and its skin, the colour of raw chicken, puckered in the chilly morning air. With my hands encased in pink rubber gloves I carried it from location to location in the house. No matter where I put the creature down it squirmed, so I would lift it hurriedly, worried I was causing it distress. Finally, when I lowered it into my underwear drawer, it nestled into the silk fabric of an old petticoat like a puppy snuggling into a dog's belly.

Mouldy carrots and cheese from my fridge didn't tempt the creature. I raced to the supermarket and brought home everything from pig's liver to sesame seeds. Nothing made it stir until I brought out the broccoli. Slowly a suckered foot stretched out and closed around a broccoli floret. When the limb uncurled, the food was gone. It did the same with tiny portions of spinach, string beans, lettuce – anything green.

After it had eaten, I slid my hands into the new silk gloves I had bought and picked the creature up, careful to cup its spindly limbs. It trembled like a chihuahua for a few seconds before relaxing into my hands.

‘Don't be afraid,' I whispered.

On the first day the neighbourhood was quiet, I took the creature out to the yard and placed it on the grass where it grazed, chewing the blades down to the earth. A white foamy slime trail, its waste I suppose, showed where it had travelled across the lawn. I heard my neighbour's car pulling into the driveway and hurried to scoop the creature into my hands and carry it back inside. A day later, when my neighbour, Denise, was watering her garden, she saw the network of silver trails criss-crossing the grass.

‘I've got snail pellets if you want some,' she said, pointing to the trail leading toward the vegetable garden.

I shrugged. ‘Live and let live,' I said to her and she laughed.

‘You really are a strange one,' she said.

*

‘Do these feel familiar?' I asked the alien, putting an empty water glass and a small volcanic rock in the drawer. The alien's limbs rippled over the surfaces and inside the rim of the glass. I tried an ice cube and a screwdriver, watching as it read the shape of the objects like a blind person.

The next day I borrowed braille books from the library and left them in the drawer. Each time I looked the pages had been turned. I bought a fountain pen and green ink and marked out the dots of the braille alphabet on a piece of paper that I also slipped into the drawer.

Every day I had to wash the silk petticoat of its slime trail.

‘Imagine if someone saw this,' I said to the alien.

I bought two metres of expensive silk and lined the drawer. My petticoat went into a plastic bag. I knew that one day I would have to tell people about the alien and they would want all kinds of evidence.

‘Why are you here?' I asked by writing a braille message in green ink on paper and leaving it in the drawer. The creature communicated with me by pressing the pads of its feet against the paper. Needle jets of green, a bright chlorophyll green, spurted from the pads and it answered me in braille dots on the paper. It wrote an odd broken English it had learnt from reading the braille books I had borrowed from the library. There were many Regency romances.

The reply said, ‘Dear Lady. If you will allow. Express my feelings toward your home. This marvellous journey. A word in your ear.'

I took days to decipher the message because the creature's ink had bled into the paper. The dots were not spread evenly like printed braille but more like a finger painting or a Rorschach blob.

Next, I asked the creature's name.

‘Viscount Ryland Pennington,' he answered.

I laughed and then wept. Viscount Ryland Pennington. Like the name of a romance hero. I realised that loneliness and isolation had finally broken me. The madness of writing.

‘You seem so real,' I said to the Viscount. I stroked him with my fingertip.

I said that to the counsellor I booked into first thing the next morning. ‘I'm having a nervous breakdown. I believe an alien landed in my backyard and is living in my underwear drawer. It's all so real.' Her eyebrows lifted when I said underwear.

‘The alien,' I said, ‘communicates with me in braille and is called Viscount Ryland Pennington.' By this time I was laughing, gasping for breath. ‘He calls me Dear Lady, and My One Love.' The counsellor waited while my hiccups and snorting slowed.

‘I think I have a problem,' I said.

‘Yes, Julie,' she answered slowly. ‘It's good that you recognise it's a problem.'

I giggled wearily. The counsellor looked down at my sheet.

‘You're a writer?' she said. ‘What do you write?'

All my laughter was spent. ‘At the moment I'm writing about a universe with a fifth dimension. Like quantum physics.'

She smiled nervously and wrote a note. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun and she wore a suit and held her head on one side like an experienced listener, but I guessed her age at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She suggested medication to stabilise my anxiety.

‘I know a good GP,' she said. ‘You're obviously agitated. We'll get you a prescription and my receptionist will book some sessions so we can talk.'

I refused the drugs. I prefer to avoid even headache pills and, anyway, this problem was not anxiety. I understood anxiety.

‘Would you like me to bring the alien in here?' I asked. ‘Perhaps you could tell me it was a rubber toy or something and I'd be cured.'

‘Does the alien speak to you, Julie? Does it tell you to do things?'

‘Not really,' I said. ‘He's written me a few notes.'

When I arrived home I found the next message from the Viscount in the drawer.

‘Dear Lady. Our need to communicate. You alone My Love. Speak to me.'

Each spurt of ink left him pale and floppy, and after a bout of writing he needed several days of grazing to recover. The lawn was quickly shorn to dry nubs of chewed-off grass. Denise, calling over the fence, suggested the gardener was overdoing it.

‘When did you get a gardener anyway?' she asked.

I wished she would stop watching me. Before her husband ran off, Denise had spoken about fifty words to me. Now she dropped in, she called over the fence, she left notes in my letterbox.

Wheatgrass seemed to give the Viscount more strength but the health-food shop told me they couldn't grow it fast enough to meet my needs. I ordered deliveries from the wholesaler.

I imagined Denise inside her house taking notes. I thought she should get a job. Her children were away all day and sometimes I could hear her rattling around inside the house like a tin toy. The vacuum cleaner would drone for five minutes, a pop song would burst into the air followed by silence, the aroma of cakes and biscuits would waft across my yard before she brought them over in Tupperware containers. ‘They'll keep for months in the freezer,' she told me.

‘How's the new gardener?' she asked again, winking.

‘He's quite charming,' I told her, knowing I was stupid to say it and that she'd be looking over the fence even more often. ‘He writes me notes,' I said.

‘Ooh la,' Denise squeaked. ‘What's his name?'

‘Ryland,' I told her.

‘Ryland? How posh!'

The counsellor suggested that I attend sessions twice a week. Session two, we discussed my childhood.

‘Did you read a lot?'

‘I'm a writer, what do you think?'

‘I don't know,' she replied, deadpan, ‘you tell me.'

‘Look, I've never done counselling before. Is this what we're going to do – talk about my childhood? I think my problem's a bit more urgent than that.'

She recommended drugs again and I refused. She warned me that this kind of delusion could be the precursor to a full psychotic episode. I said she was on the wrong track.

‘I feel calmer than I've felt in years,' I told her.

Session three I brought in polaroid shots I had taken of the Viscount. She shuffled through the photographs, making odd little sounds.

‘This looks like some kind of seafood,' she said.

I laughed. ‘Well if it is, it should be pretty smelly by now.'

She reared back when I leaned toward her and took the snapshots from her hand.

‘I'll bring the real thing in next time.'

The counsellor winced. ‘I might invite my colleague to join us,' she said.

I stared at her. Did she think I would attack her with a rubber alien? If anyone was causing me anxiety it was the counsellor. The Viscount, real or not, had the opposite effect – he had given me a sense of purpose.

In the movies, when a UFO lands, the government always tracks down its whereabouts and sends agents to kidnap the aliens from the well-meaning citizen. No one came for the Viscount. On the day I was supposed to attend session four with the counsellor, I decided to give up the therapy. I was still washing the slime off the silk every day, I had an alien and a box full of notes at home and I had spent a fortune on wheatgrass. How deluded could I be? If I'd ingested that much wheat-grass I would have turned green.

The Viscount had things to tell me. I attempted to interpret his phrasing and syntax without prejudice but, perhaps because of the Regency romances, he did appear to be flirting with me while he imparted information about himself and his world. The flirting made me think about love. I thought about what love might mean to another species, how you could explain it when even humans can rarely explain it to each other.

At night I lay in bed imagining myself telling my friends about the Viscount. He comes from a very distant place, I would say to them. Where? they'd ask. But I couldn't answer. He calls it My Distant Estate. And his name. I would tell them, It's a translation. You know, like when someone from China called Xia Hue says, Call me Sadie. His real name is probably pronounced with pops and hiccups from some orifice we wouldn't even identify as a mouth, I'd say to them. And I knew they would laugh.

‘Dear Viscount,' I asked him again, ‘why have you come here?'

Two days later I had my answer. I noticed that he refused to use commas, although when I checked, the books he had learned from were filled with punctuation of all kinds. I wondered whether this was a sign about his own language. Perhaps even his thoughts were filled with long pauses that deserved more than the brief hiatus of a comma.