Free The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc. Page B

listening to them, I was reminded again that I was in a small town in a foreign country.
    I thought of my father in my dusky bedroom. He had kept the door closed as I left. I thought of how he had looked when I checked on him before going to bed: his body engulfed by blankets and his head so small among my pillows. He’d aged those last three years. His skin glassy in the blue glow of dawn. He was here, now, with me, and already making the rest of my life seem unreal.
    I read over what I had typed: thinking of him at that age, still a boy, linking him with who he would become. At a nearby table, a guy held out one of his iPod earbuds and beckoned his date to come and sit beside him. The door opened and a cold wind blew in. I tried to concentrate.
    â€˜Hey.’ It was Linda, wearing a large orange hiking jacket and bringing with her the crisp, bracing scent of all the places she had been. Her face was unmaking a smile. ‘What are you doing here?’
    â€˜Working on my story.’
    â€˜Is your dad here?’
    â€˜No.’
    Her friends were waiting by the counter. She nodded to them, holding up one finger, then came behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. ‘Is this it?’ She leaned over me, her hair grazing my face, cold and silken against my cheek. She picked up a couple of pages and read them soundlessly. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said, returning them to the table. ‘What are you doing?’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜You never told me any of this.’
    I shrugged.
    â€˜Did he tell you this? Now he’s talking to you?’
    â€˜Not really,’ I said.
    â€˜Not really?’
    I turned around to face her. Her eyes reflected no light.
    â€˜You know what I think?’ She looked back down at the pages. ‘I think you’re making excuses for him.’
    â€˜Excuses?’
    â€˜You’re romanticising his past,’ she went on quietly, ‘to make sense of the things you said he did to you.’
    â€˜It’s a story,’ I said. ‘What things did I say?’
    â€˜You said he abused you.’
    It was too much, these words, and what connected to them. I looked at her serious, beautifully lined face, her light-trapping eyes, and already I felt them taxing me. ‘I never said that.’
    She took a half-step back. ‘Just tell me this,’ she said, her voice flattening. ‘You’ve never introduced him to any of your exes, right?’ The question was tight on her face.
    I didn’t say anything and after a while she nodded, biting one corner of her upper lip. I knew that gesture. I knew, even then, that I was supposed to stand up, pull her orange-jacketed body toward mine, speak words into her ear; but all I could do was think about my father and his excuses. Those tattered bodies on top of him. The ten hours he’d waited, mud filling his lungs, until nightfall. I felt myself falling back into old habits.
    She stepped forward and kissed the top of my head. It was one of her rules: not to walk away from an argument without some sign of affection. I didn’t look at her. My mother liked to tell the story of how, when our family first arrived in Australia, we lived in a hostel on an outer-suburb street where the locals – whenever they met or parted – hugged and kissed each other warmly. How my father – baff led, charmed – had named it ‘the street of lovers.’
    I turned to the window: it was dark now, the evening settling thick and deep. A man and woman sat across from each other at a high table. The woman leaned in, smiling, her breasts squat on the wood, elbows forward, her hands mere inches away from the man’s shirtfront. Throughout their conversation her teeth glinted. Behind them, a mother sat with her son. ‘I’m not playing,’ she murmured, flipping through her magazine.
    â€˜L,’ said the boy.
    â€˜I said I’m not playing.’
    Here is