The Best Australian Stories (19 page)

‘Sweet One. I am charged with a duty. A chance encounter with fate. Your green milieu. My own Estate indisposed. My Dear Lady your charms ensnared me.'

He is on a mission, I interpreted. He comes from a planet of green that is dying. He is researching our green world. They want to colonise earth because they are running short of chlorophyll on their planet.

‘Where is your estate?' I wrote. ‘Can your people come to get you?'

I was so busy trying to nurture the Viscount when he first arrived that I was not thinking of the wider implications of his arrival. I am still amazed that we learned to communicate so easily – I have had more trouble understanding fellow human beings. But before long I became uneasy, knowing that I should give him to the world. Each day I told myself I would do something soon, as soon as he had explained to me what he needed, as soon as I had understood all I could about him, as soon as I was ready to lose him.

I waited for the Viscount's answer but none came. I opened the drawer and looked inside. The Viscount had barely moved. After three days I began to worry. I lifted the Viscount from the drawer and placed him on the lino floor of the kitchen, surrounded by the snipped stalks of wheatgrass he loved. He lay still.

At the veterinary hospital, a rambunctious golden retriever kept pawing at the cardboard box holding the Viscount. The dog's owner smiled and nodded at me and patted the dog as if such behaviour was cute. My name was called. Inside the surgery, I lifted the Viscount from the box and laid him gently on the stainless steel examination table.

‘My God,' the veterinarian said. ‘What is it?'

‘I don't know,' I answered.

The vet was a thin man of Asian descent. His hands were slim and clean, and he lifted the Viscount's limbs gently. He inserted a thermometer into a body opening I had never noticed on the Viscount. I suppose I had been a little shy in my dealings with him – poking and prodding him, touching and squeezing his small body would have seemed like an assault.

The veterinarian retrieved the thermometer, examined it and shook his head. He stood opposite me across the shiny silver table. As he spoke, he fondled one of the Viscount's delicate limbs with one hand while stroking his body with the other. I realised this man must truly love the creatures in his care.

‘Normally, an animal with birth defects this severe would not survive. How long have you had it?'

‘Only a few weeks,' I said.

He shook his head again and squeezed his face into a sympathetic frown.

‘I honestly don't think it will live much longer. Have you given it a name?'

‘Viscount Ryland Pennington.'

The vet bent his head and leaned in toward the Viscount.

‘Well, little fella,' he murmured, loudly enough for me to hear. ‘Maybe it would be kinder to let you go, Ryland?'

The vet didn't look at my face. He was probably used to people crying in his surgery. While I tried to compose myself he kept stroking the Viscount, murmuring reassurances to him.

‘Make it easy on you both, hey?'

‘I can't do that,' I said when I had caught my breath.

I lifted the Viscount as gently as I could and laid him back on the silk bed in the box. I paid the vet's bill at the reception counter and hurried past the golden retriever lunging at the box.

At my front gate I met Denise. She stared at the box as she asked me over for dinner the next week.

‘It's about time,' she said. ‘I can't believe I haven't had you over yet.' She put her hand on my arm. ‘I'll get the kids to bed early. We can have a glass of wine.' I noticed how thin she was getting.

‘That would be nice,' I said. I wondered what we would talk about.

Three days later, the Viscount showed no more signs of life. His cool inert body felt different to my touch. I thought he had died, but how could I be sure? I left him in the drawer for another day, then I wrapped him, together with his notes, in silk and plastic and put him in the freezer.

That weekend, my writing group came to the house. One of them was rummaging in the freezer for icecubes when the Viscount's body, wrapped in its shroud, tumbled to the floor. We were sitting at the kitchen table and she turned to us with the package of the Viscount in her hands.

‘Hey, Jules, is this octopus?' she asked. ‘Are you supposed to wrap it up like this before you freeze it? Maybe that why mine's always so tough.'

I had thought I would tell the story of the Viscount to the writing group but that day I changed my mind.

‘Yes, you should try it,' I said.

I got up from my chair, took the Viscount from her hands and put him carefully back in the cold dry freezer.

In a hero's journey the heroine is supposed to understand the clues. She overcomes obstacles with powers she never knew she had.

No special powers have manifested in me. Although I cared for the Viscount as best I could and tried to understand what I should do, he died. Perhaps my journey is supposed to lead on from here, but I have discovered that I am no heroine. I have no guide, the messenger is dead, and I am weak with grief.

Hurricane Season

Janette Turner Hospital

1. Foreplay

National Weather Service:
Francesca passed 200 miles north of the Leeward Islands six hours ago and has been upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane moving west/north-west at a rapid pace. Reconnaissance aircraft estimate wind speeds of 150 mph at flight level. Intensity has remained constant for the last thirty-six hours, but there has been significant expansion of the core and the outer circulation. The eye diameter today is about thirty nautical miles, compared to twenty nm yesterday. If the eye-wall contracts again, Francesca may yet intensify to the level of Category Five and could make landfall within two days. Coastal areas from the Carolinas to Chesapeake Bay are on high alert.

2. Obsession

‘Come and see the Weather Channel, Steven,' his grandmother urges, but the child at the window is transfixed by the tops of the pines. ‘You can watch the storm coming,' she promises. She stares at the frothing Atlantic, mesmerised. ‘It's a satellite picture. Come and see. The ocean is sucking in the sky.'

A dark fusion of cloud and wave skims a vortex. Writhing sky lunges at ocean; ocean swallows sky. ‘Obsessed with each other,' the grandmother murmurs, though not to Steven. She thinks of lovers tangled in their sheets.

‘The trees are angry,' Steven cries, his voice high-pitched, breaking a little, snagged on a fear that tastes thrilling. He dare not waver in his vigilance. The pines, immensely tall, are reaching for the house, reaching for him, bending low, thrashing about with their arms. Any second now they will snatch the little cottage up and hurl it at God and Steven will rocket into the secret places of radiance. The thought terrifies him and excites him. He is poised for the end of all things, the spectacular event that is going to happen tonight or tomorrow night, the thing that is even more scarily desirable than a swing that goes higher and higher until it goes right over the top: which is the moment when the swinger disappears. Vanishes. Steven knows this is true because Jimmy Saunders saw it happen to a little girl in the playground after school. One day the little girl was in their class, and then never again. ‘Her swing went over the top,' Jimmy said.

Steven watches the dangerous swirling lure of Francesca's skirts. He thinks that perhaps he would like going over the top.

But what if his grandmother and Marsyas were swept away and he was left behind?

He negotiates with the bucking pines. He implores with his arms, waving back wildly. ‘I will ride you,' he offers. ‘I will ride you like Marsyas's grandmother did. Don't smash the house and don't drown the islands, and I will ride you – me and Marsyas and Grandma – we will ride you out into the Deep and back again.'

Once, he knows, his grandmother has told him and Marsyas has told him, once upon a time, in the beginning, in the time of the dragons, in the time before hurricanes had names, this has already happened and it will go on happening, every August, every September, this year, last year, 110 years ago when the big one without a name drowned the islands, and thirty years ago when Hurricane Gretchen roared in, and fourteen years ago when Hugo lashed about and laid waste.

‘Look! Look!' his grandmother says. ‘Come quickly. You can see the eye.'

Steven tears himself from the window. ‘Is Francesca as big as Hugo?'

‘Bigger maybe. She's already a Category Four.'

Steven sees the one-eyed giant of the sea: red pupil inside a swirling mustard halo within an angry eyeball of whitish green. ‘Why's she got a red eye? Is Francesca the Cyclops?'

His grandmother tousles his hair. ‘Maybe,' she laughs. ‘That's a Doppler radar picture. Red is where her energy is.'

A man stands in front of the eye. ‘Storm Track is monitoring closely,' the man says gravely. Steven watches the Francesca-Cyclops shrink into a little box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. ‘If her present speed keeps up …' the Storm Track man says. Steven only half-listens. ‘Already high winds along the coast,' he hears. ‘Essential that windows be boarded up and adequate supplies of bottled drinking water, candles, batteries …'

‘Have we got enough bottles of water?' Steven asks, shivering.

His grandmother reaches for him and pulls him onto her lap. ‘We have plenty of everything we need, but if Francesca makes landfall here, it won't help. We'll know by tonight or tomorrow morning if we have to evacuate.'

‘Did you have to vacuate when Hugo came?'

‘Everyone did. The storm surge was fifteen feet high and most of the city was drowned.'

Steven's grandmother, and Marsyas too, are surrounded by mist. They smell of the time of the dragons. ‘Tell me about the other hurricane,' he begs.

‘Which one?'

‘You know. The biggest one ever. The one without a name.'

‘Ask Marsyas,' his grandmother says, seeing him through the window. ‘In fact, go and tell Marsyas that I want to know why in God's name he's still fussing with those wretched magnolias? Tell him to forget the garden and start battening down the hatches, for heaven's sake. In fact, tell him to get on home to his wife and grandchildren. He'd better board up his own windows.'

When Steven opens the door, the wind catches it and bangs it back against the outside of the house. ‘I'll close it, I'll manage,' his grandmother says, struggling with Francesca. ‘You run and tell Marsyas to get on home while he can.'

Steven hurls himself into an invisible elastic wall that keeps pushing him back. He gasps. His mouth fills with grit and a grey-green ribbon of Spanish moss.

‘Marsyas!' he coughs, but his words go whipping skyward with the flailing streams of moss.

Marsyas is wrestling with the magnolias and the crepe myrtles, lashing sacking around them. ‘Grandma says to stop,' Steven gasps, pummelling him. ‘She says to go home and batten … and batten your own … because maybe we are going to vacuate.'

The wind rips a sheet of hessian from the old man's hands and it swoops up like a kite. Steven shrieks with excitement. The fabric dips, flutters, bucks upward again, catches on a branch momentarily and then is lofted into the sky like a bird with tattered wings. A piece of roofing tile comes hurtling at Steven and Marsyas throws himself on top of the boy. ‘Root-cellar,' something screams in Steven's ear. He does not know if it is Marsyas or the wind, but Marsyas is crawling and dragging Steven with him the way a mother cat drags her kittens and Marsyas is fighting the bucking root-cellar doors and pushing Steven down the six concrete steps into dark. The air roars. The cellar smells of sweet potatoes and apples and wet pine needles and mould.

Everywhere, cobwebs touch Steven.

Spider – the biggest ever, the one without a name – watches him. Steven can see its red eye.

The air stops roaring. The quiet is as sudden as the dark.

‘Lord be praised,' Marsyas says, tumbling down against Steven, who puts his arms around the old man's neck and hangs on tightly. ‘That Francesca is one wild woman.'

‘Is she wilder than the one without a name?'

‘No, not wilder than that. There won't ever be another one like that.'

‘Grandma says to tell me about the one without a name.'

‘I told you already one hundred times.'

‘Your grandma told
you
one thousand times.'

‘That is the gospel truth, Steven. She did. She remembered that Big Blow all her life.'

‘She was seven.'

‘Seven years old, same as you.'

‘In 1893,' Steven says.

‘Thirty years after the Jubilee.'

‘And your grandma was born free.'

‘Yes she was. Born free. But the old slave market in Charleston wasn't even a museum yet, just a market not being used. Took the wrath of God and a mighty wind to wash that market clean.'

‘And all the sea islands disappeared.'

‘The sea islands sank under the waters for seven days and seven nights, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.'

‘What if Francesca drowns the islands?' Steven whispers.

‘She won't.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because the Lord God give my grandmama His sign. That mighty wave come to the top of the pines. My grandmama hold on tight and she pray.
Lord save me,
she pray, but everywhere she look, she see nothing but ocean and bodies. All drowned.'

‘Two thousand people, Grandma said.'

‘More'n two thousand,' Marsyas insists. ‘In one night. All drowned.'

‘But not your grandma.'

‘Not my grandmama. Her pine tree was torn up by the roots and she sailed it for seven days. No food and no water.'

‘Tell about the angel.'

‘You know this story better than me.'