The Best Australian Stories (21 page)

‘What?' she says. ‘Who?'

She holds the receiver away from herself and looks into it, dazed. It resembles a nautilus shell. When she puts the shell to her ear, she hears ocean. She hears hurricane.

‘This is so strange,' she says. ‘This is very, very strange. Where are you?'

Steven moves, and Leah extricates one arm from under his shoulder.

‘For twenty years,' she says, ‘I hear nothing, and you suddenly call in the middle of a storm?'

‘The whole world', he says, ‘can watch a hurricane live on satellite TV. I've been watching it coming ashore and you're right in its path. I wanted to know if you were safe.'

She watches Steven making fish mouths in his sleep.

‘Where are you?' she asks.

‘It's daylight here,' he says. ‘It's tomorrow. But I know you're still in the dark.'

‘How did you find my number?' she wants to know.

‘That's a very curious story,' he says. ‘One I simply must tell you. We have to meet again. We have to meet somewhere. It's so curious, it has to be fate.'

Leah traces the whorls of Steven's ear with her index finger.

‘I'll tell you something even stranger,' she says. ‘You remember that picture the street photographer took?'

‘I still have it in my wallet,' he says. ‘It has “love Leah” written on the back.'

His voice, Leah thinks, is like the pull of ocean in the pearled curve of a nautilus shell. She can feel herself being sucked in.

‘Will you meet me again?' he wants to know.

‘I don't know,' she says. ‘I'd have to make arrangements, I'd have to think … can you give me some time?

‘Hello?

‘Hello?'

7. Voyage of the Pine Tree Galleon

A small fleet of rooftops and wardrobes beckons Steven but he steers clear. He knows what he knows. Dolphins brush the undersides of his feet. Jimmy Saunders waves and halloos from a floating table. ‘You're going the wrong way,' Jimmy calls. ‘All the islands have drowned.'

Steven keeps his hand on the tiller, his eye on the star. His sails are full of Francesca. The storm surge looms over the branches of his ship like a mountain and Francesca is taking him straight up its green glassy slope. Higher, higher, higher. He knows he will go over the top.

A pirate ship has thrown grappling irons, the pirate has boarded his tree.

‘I am taking your grandmother and Marsyas hostage,' the pirate roars, but Steven sees the white egret and claps his hands and the angel, sword drawn, comes stepping across the waves.

8. Anatomy of a Hurricane

Initial phase is a simple matter of smouldering tropical temperatures and turbulence. Latent heat is released into the atmosphere which becomes more buoyant. Instability increases. A chain reaction is set in motion and a cauldron of destructive winds spins into orbit and out of control. A hurricane devours everything in its path until it dies of its own exhaustion.

What can never be accurately predicted is the sheer velocity of the sequence from initial disturbance to chaos. Tumult begins without warning and can happen anywhere, any time, at an airport, a bookshop, a dinner party: eye contact, latent heat, a mad buoyancy, increased instability, derangement.

‘This is madness,' Leah protests. ‘This is insane.'

‘Your skin tastes like mangoes,' he murmurs, ravenous. The room is steamy. The air is bright with the flash of passion-bird wings. Leah sees gold, cobalt, emerald green. She smells jasmine. Their bodies give off latent heat, they are buoyant, floating far above the known life, orbiting through the canopy where tree orchids run amok.

‘You smell like rainforest,' she tells him.

‘You're wild as a hurricane,' he says.

‘And you. You're a cyclone. A crazy tornado,' Leah says.

‘We have to go wherever this takes us,' he says.

‘We can't,' Leah protests, suddenly panicked. Beyond the path of the storm, she can see the faint shape of her other life. ‘Think of the devastation,' she pleads.

‘Too late,' he says. ‘We've passed the point of no return.'

But Leah can see the blue arrows. Evacuation route, the blue arrows say. This way lies safety, they say.

9. Reprieve and Other Disappointments

‘During the night,' the National Guardsman tells Leah, ‘Francesca veered sharply north. She's going to miss us. Going to slam into North Carolina instead.'

‘So the order to evacuate—?'

‘Cancelled, ma'am,' he says cheerfully. ‘Should have the power back on soon. I see you lost a couple of windows.'

‘I've lost two of my pines,' Leah grieves.

‘Got to go,' the man from the National Guard tells her. ‘Got to knock on every door.'

‘Grandma?'

‘Steven!' Leah says. ‘Be careful. There's glass all over the floor. We've got broken windows, and look at our poor broken pines.'

‘Where's Francesca gone?' Steven's voice is dream-fogged and forlorn. He rubs his eyes and looks warily down at his bare feet.

‘She left us. She's gone to North Carolina instead.'

‘Would we have stayed?' he wants to know. ‘If Francesca had come, would you have stayed?'

‘I would have been tempted,' Leah confesses. She begins sweeping the shards of glass into a pile. She stoops with the dustpan and brush. She looks up at him as glass clinks against plastic. ‘But then I would have thought about you. And I could never tolerate the thought of you in danger.'

‘So we would have vacuated.' He folds his arms and hugs himself, glum. His words have the weight of accusation.

‘We would have obeyed the evacuation order. It would have been the wisest thing to do, the best thing, don't you agree?'

‘I don't know,' he says. He pulls a chair across the room to the broken window, climbs on it, and leans out through the empty frame. He is straining after Francesca. He smells the rich damp perfume she leaves in her wake. ‘Is it the best thing?' he asks plaintively. ‘Is it?'

‘I don't know either,' Leah says.

The Intimacy of the Table

Delia Falconer

But here I am in Sydney
At the age of sixty-one
With the clock at a quarter to bedtime
And my homework still not done.

—K
ENNETH
S
LESSOR

I was twenty when I met the great poet. It seemed to me then that I would always live in a long and narrow flat in a street between two steeples, that there would always be a bright arm of the harbour glimpsed sidelong through the eye's corner as I read in trams or trains. All that year I wore a shabby cream suit with a crimson handkerchief folded at the breast and a hipflask in one pocket. This day I had a nervous quiver in the corner of my mouth, my hair was brilliantined and combed. Is it possible that I also clutched a sheaf of my own poems, in a buckram folio, marked with the date and place of their composition, in the hope that he might notice them? I admit I did.

It was late on a summer afternoon when I climbed the steps to the Journalists' Club at the back of Central Station. The bar was dark; the sun squeezed in transverse cracks of heat through the edges of the blinds and the air was close and thick, as if it had been strained through dirty corduroy.

I saw him immediately at a table in the furthest corner, the thin neck and browless eyes I recognised from photographs, that broad and wizened head, the blue bow tie. There was a claret and a paper and a jug of water on the table. He wore a double-breasted suit, fastidiously buttoned. He made notes as he read the paper with a crabbed hand in a tiny notebook. From where I stood, ten feet away, I could hear the sharp, swift indentations of the pencil. I leant at the bar and sipped my schooner for now that I was here I had no idea how I should approach him. Although the temperature was less fierce than it had been outside in the street I seemed to sweat more. I had walked the full distance from my lodgings.

I wonder now exactly what I expected from him. I still imagined then that each writer knew himself as part of a brotherhood of authors, that the rules were sensible and clear, that one great writer would always recognise another. I had come across his famous poem for the first time in my school reader where it had been placed, miraculously, among the work of well-known, foreign poets; I could still recite it. I knew that he had rarely published another poem since.

At last he put away his heavy spectacles and came up to the bar where he placed a pound note folded neatly into quarters on the counter.

‘Which do you think is quickest transport up to the university, the train or bus?' he asked the barman. ‘I believe I'm to deliver a paper there at the English department in an hour.'

‘No you're not,' I said.

He turned; his glare was quick and blank, the appalled expression of the recognised and put-upon which to my shame I feel sometimes flash across my own face if some reader taps me on the shoulder while I am standing at a festival with my literary friends, or if I meet a student in the street. His mouth was the same grim line which I saw on the faces of my father's friends, and I also recognised something of their brittleness, which, with some fear, I considered a symptom of the office life, as if the atmosphere of heavy ashtrays and high-backed leather chairs had permanently pressed itself upon them.

‘It's next week. You can take my word for it.' I fished the crumpled flyer from my folio with shaking hands. I could not stop. ‘It's true. I study there. Believe me, if there was a change of date I'd know about it.'

He nodded as he read, then shook my hand and thanked me. His palm was hard and surprisingly boney, for he was not a small man. He smiled faintly as he appraised me. He had the formal kindness I was later to associate with men who spent long periods of time alone, the outback reserve of country gentlemen or mining engineers. ‘I've been dying to read your next collection,' I said.

‘Not dying, I hope.' His eyes had lost a little of their flint. ‘I'm sure there are better things to die for.'

We moved to the table he had just abandoned. ‘Do you drink claret?' I nodded although I did not. ‘Good,' he said, as he waved the bartender over. ‘Rituals are the great comfort of growing older. It is important to remember that eating and drinking are also a kind of life. Some toast, or sandwiches? I knew a man once, a barrister, whose great pleasure in life was to go to the Lawyer's Club in Bridge Street – do you know it? – they served up English boarding school food, quite dreadful preparations: tapioca, sago, trifle with the hint of the stale and confiscated cake about it. The rest of us would amuse ourselves by making up new names for the dishes: Matron's Surprise, willow sausage, flannel soup. They were sold at tuckshop prices, the menu was scribbled on a blackboard mounted on the oak walls, between the portraits. My friend was a rather wealthy man, but I have never seen him happier than when he suggested we make an excursion there for their threepenny tart with custard.'

I could only nod, faced with the scrupulous mechanics of his conversation. The club began to fill. Occasionally, one of the men, with the lines of his hat still imprinted around his forehead, would greet him loudly, looming at our table. He responded quietly and introduced me to them as his ‘friend'. Yet I could sense his eyes move across the backs lined up at the bar and felt that I would be soon dismissed. And I had not shown him my poems about flying foxes and Moreton Bay figs, or spoken with him about the cramped parks with their palms and memorial arches near my flat, or heard him speak about his great poems of the Harbour, or asked him why he did not write.

He asked me where young people ‘went' these days. I said I did not know; that I was fairly solitary ‘by choice' because I was ‘too busy writing'; that I did go to the ‘usual' bars around the university and the Greek cafeterias in Castlereagh Street; and that I went sometimes with my friend Robert who was a student politician to the branch meetings to which he was so frequently invited. He had no particular political calling, but had calculated that by this means we could save ourselves the price and preparation of around three meals a week. He had chosen the Liberal–Country Party because the women tended to be richer and the catering of a higher standard. The disadvantage was that we had often to travel up and down the North Shore train line to Lind-field or Wahroongah. We travelled to Willoughby only if the necessity was very great, for this required a bus, and the hostess at this particular branch lived in a house filled with uncleared mouse traps. She served without fail guacamole on a lettuce leaf balanced precariously on a piece of toast.

He had a charming way of laughing. He chuckled gently with his hands placed across his belly, bending back slightly, as if he took pleasure in gauging its vibrations.

I seized my chance. I told him where I lived, next to the Deaf Hospital in a pink federation villa which had been divided into bed-sits. I told him about the bathroom with its view of the railway tracks and the long ferny garden, the toilet pressed at an ungainly angle in the corner, the cantankerous water heater which I lit before each shower. I had been talked into minding a friend's axolotl which hung suspended in its green tank on the washstand and regarded my ablutions with the single lugubrious eye which remained in its possession.

‘Is there a trombonist?' he asked. ‘And an old lady with two sycophantic Pomeranians and an addiction to Epsom salts?'

There were no musicians, I said, but there was a thin Amer ican cartoonist who went out each Saturday evening and who, if he returned alone, played Mario Lanza on the gramophone and sang until the early morning. And once, I said, disturbed by his music which drifted unimpeded into my always-open windows, I had looked out of the bathroom at the grounds behind the Deaf Hospital and observed in the moonlight a game of naked rugby played in perfect silence.