The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Online Free Page B

I’m out here with the nearly doused fire, water sizzling on the white hot metal of the car, attempting to contain these inherited feelings, and ignore Bobby’s stifled amusement. They’ll dine out on this, wake their wives as they walk in their doors in the early morning: ‘You shoulda seen what that Sharen Wills did to old Remy Rawson.’
    A remnant of my grandmother’s English bedspread blows against my leg, brittle and disintegrating, the bobbles singed and loose on the fringe. A bed that should have been mine. The dividends of my father’s charm: my grandmother’s inlaid vanity attached to the trunk like a cancer and the sight of Sharen Wills watching through the smoke from the quaint bay window, taunting me while my father sleeps elsewhere. The busted-up mosaic table.
    I glance back at Sharen Wills with my watery eyes but turn away in disgust, drawn back to the smouldering aftermath, the last sprays of high-pressure water on the rusted black chassis, a blistered piano stool lodged deep in the back window, its legs reaching out like the haunches of a deer, the shapes of these snickering, adrenalised men in the beams of their truck lights. In the steam and ashes, the remains of the small, incinerated rocking horse. The silver mane and real leather bridle. My grandmother rode it as a child in the Cotswolds, and then rocked me on it in this strange country she called the Frightful Antipodes . The rocking horse is blackened, the painted wood sooty and blistered in the rubble. I move in to retrieve at least something, kneel down to the memories of her pretty English face, ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross . But the remains of the plaything are sodden and the wet, disintegrating feel has me moving away through the smoke.
    With charcoaled hands, I tread through the dark towards the house, past a wheelbarrow, to the figure now gone from the window. I am deliberate, climbing the chicken wire. My father, who cares less for belongings than for the chance at a woman like this, and I, who’ve been striving so hard to divorce myself from this ridiculous history. But it’s me who is pounding the green-panelled door. I don’t shout her name, just beat on the wood, unsure what I’ll do if she answers, or if she doesn’t. Then I realise it’s not even locked and I burst in, and there she is in her washed-out glory, through the frosted glass doors in the sitting room. The stale smell of her pot and adulterating rubbish now mixed with the remains of fresh-split mahogany. She’s had a busy night.
    Sharen in bra and panties slouches in a modern rocker-recliner in a room bereft of my grandmother’s things. The axe that’s done the job leans against the wall like a casual assistant. Despite me, she watches out the bay window, as if it’s all on television, the young fire fighters and their brightly lit truck, all framed with a bottlebrush foreground. Staring out like I’m not even in this entry hall. Her arms are tanned and slender, wrists I could snap in my hands; her fingers loose on a cigarette, legs crossed to support the ashtray in her brazen lap. I want to snatch her up from her tacky recliner, drag her outside by a fistful of stringy chestnut hair, across the hardwood floor, her bare heels furrowing through the chips from my grandmother’s dining-room table.
    â€˜How dare you,’ I say.
    She turns, recalcitrant. I move into the naked room, bear down on her.
    â€˜Don’t touch me,’ she says, fending me off with her cigarette, stabbing wildly at the air, her expression still snide but strangely playful.
    As I grab the cigarette, it burns into my palm. I let out a yelp that surprises us both, stamp the fag end into the floor and I can see her suppressing a smile.
    â€˜I don’t want to touch you, believe me,’ I say. She leans forward in her small dark bra, shows me what worked for my father, but her ashtray falls to the floor.