Stories Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  THIS book brings Helen Garner’s short fiction together into one volume.

  Her most loved stories are here: ’Postcards from Surfers‘, ’My Hard Heart‘, ’A Happy Story‘. Garner’s focus is on love and longing, on the pain, darkness and joy of life, on the unexpected events, no matter how small, that transform us.

  Her mastery of the story is revealed in the sharpness of her observation, her honesty and humour, her ear for speech and the rhythm of her prose.

  Stories is the companion volume to Helen Garner’s True Stories: The Collected Short Non-fiction.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  A Happy Story

  Postcards from Surfers

  The Dark, the Light

  In Paris

  Little Helen’s Sunday Afternoon

  La Chance Existe

  The Life of Art

  All Those Bloody Young Catholics

  A Thousand Miles from the Ocean

  Did He Pay?

  Civilisation and Its Discontents

  My Hard Heart

  The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes

  What We Say

  Also by Helen Garner

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A HAPPY STORY

  I TURN FORTY-ONE. I buy the car. I drive it to the river-bank and park it under a tree. The sun is high and the grass on the river-bank is brown. It is the middle of the morning. I turn my back on the river and walk along the side of the Entertainment Centre until I find a door. I am the only person at the counter. The air inside is cool. The attendant has his feet up on a desk in the back room. He sees me, and comes out to serve me.

  ‘Two tickets to Talking Heads,’ I say.

  He spins the seating plan round to face me. I look at it. I can’t understand where the band will stand to play. I can’t believe that the Entertainment Centre is not still full of water, is not still the Olympic Pool where, in 1956, Hungary played water polo against the USSR and people said there was blood in the water. What have they done with all the water? Pumped it out into the river that flows past two hundred yards away: let it run down to the sea.

  I buy the tickets. They cost nearly twenty dollars each. I drive home the long way, in my car which is almost new.

  I give the tickets to my kid. She crouches by the phone in her pointed shoes. Her friends are already going, are going to Simple Minds, are not allowed, have not got twenty dollars. It will have to be me.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ says my kid every morning in her school uniform. The duty of going: I feel its weight. ‘What will you wear?’ she says.

  I’m too old. I won’t have the right clothes. It will start too late. The warm-up bands will be terrible. It’ll hurt my ears. I’ll get bored and spoil it for her. I’ll get bored. I’ll get bored. I’ll get bored.

  I sell my ticket to my sister. My daughter tries to be seemly about her exhilaration. My sister is a saxophone player. Her hair is fluffy, her arms are brown, she will bring honour upon my daughter in a public place. She owns a tube of waxed cotton ear-plugs. She arrives, perfumed, slow-moving, with gracious smiles.

  We stop for petrol. My daughter gets out too, as thin as a clothes peg in narrow black garments, and I show her how to use the dip-stick. My sister sits in the car laughing. ‘You look so like each other,’ she says, ‘specially when you’re doing something together and aren’t aware of being watched.’

  On Punt Road the car in front of us dawdles.

  ‘Come on, fuckhead,’ says my sister.

  I accelerate with a smooth surge and change lanes.

  ‘Helen!’ says my sister beside me. ‘I didn’t know you were such a reckless driver!’

  ‘She’s not,’ says my daughter from the back seat. ‘She’s only faking.’

  My regret at having sold the ticket does not begin until I turn right off Punt Road into Swan Street and see the people walking along in groups towards the Entertainment Centre. They are happy. They are going to shout, to push past the bouncers and run down the front to dance. They are dressed up wonderfully, they almost skip as they walk. Shafts of light fire out from the old Olympic Pool into the darkening air. Men in white coats are waving the cars into the parking area.

  ‘We’ll get out here,’ says my sister.

  They kiss me goodbye, grinning, and scamper across the road. I do a U-turn and drive back to Punt Road. I shove in the first cassette my hand falls on. It is Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: she is singing a joyful song by Strauss. I do not understand the words but the chorus goes ‘Habe Dank!’ The light is weird, there is a storminess, it is not yet dark enough for headlights. I try to sing like a soprano. My voice cracks, she sings too high for me, but as I fly up the little rise beside the Richmond football ground I say out loud, ‘This is it. I am finally on the far side of the line.’ Habe Dank!

  POSTCARDS FROM SURFERS

  ‘One night I dreamed that I did not love, and that night, released from all bonds, I lay as though in a kind of soothing death.’

  Colette

  WE ARE DRIVING north from Coolangatta airport. Beside the road the ocean heaves and heaves into waves which do not break. The swells are dotted with boardriders in black wet-suits, grim as sharks.

  ‘Look at those idiots,’ says my father.

  ‘They must be freezing,’ says my mother.

  ‘But what about the principle of the wet-suit?’ I say. ‘Isn’t there a thin layer of water between your skin and the suit, and your body heat…’

  ‘Could be,’ says my father.

  The road takes a sudden swing round a rocky outcrop. Miles ahead of us, blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spit.

  ‘What—is that Brisbane?’

  ‘No,’ says my mother. ‘That’s Surfers.’

  My father’s car has a built-in computer. If he exceeds the speed limit, the dashboard emits a discreet but insistent pinging. Lights flash, and the pressure of his right foot lessens. He controls the windows from a panel between the two front seats. We cruise past a Valiant parked by the highway with a FOR SALE sign propped in its back window.

  ‘Look at that,’ says my mother. ‘A WA number-plate. Probably thrashed it across the Nullarbor and now they reckon they’ll flog it.’

  ‘Pro’ly stolen,’ says my father. ‘See the sticker? ALL YOU VIRGINS, THANKS FOR NOTHING. You can just see what sort of a pin’ead he’d be. Brain the size of a pea.’

  Close up, many of the turquoise towers are not yet sold. ‘Every conceivable feature,’ the signs say. They have names like Capricornia, Biarritz, The Breakers, Acapulco, Rio.

  I had a Brazilian friend when I lived in Paris. He showed me a postcard, once, of Rio where he was born and brought up. The card bore an aerial shot of a splendid, curved tropical beach, fringed with palms, its sand pure as snow.

  ‘Why don’t you live in Brazil,’ I said, ‘if it’s as beautiful as this?’

  ‘Because,’ said my friend, ‘right behind that beach there is a huge military base.’

  In my turn I showed him a postcard of my country. It was a reproduction of that Streeton painting called The Land of the Golden Fleece which in my homesickness I kept standing on the heater in my bedroom. He studied it carefully. At last he turned his currant-coloured eyes to me and said, ‘Les arbres sont rouges?’ Are the trees red?

  Several years later, six months ago, I was rummaging through a box of old postcards in a junk shop in Rathdowne Street. Among the photos of damp cottages in Galway, of Raj hotels crumbling in bicycle-thronged Colombo, of glassy Canadian lakes flawed by the wake of a single canoe, I found two cards that I bought for a dollar each. One was a picture of downtown Rio, in
black and white. The other, crudely tinted, showed Geelong, the town where I was born. The photographer must have stood on the high grassy bank that overlooks the Eastern Beach. He lined up his shot through the never-flowing fountain with its quartet of concrete wading birds (storks? cranes? I never asked my father: they have long orange beaks and each bird holds one leg bent, as if about to take a step); through the fountain and out over the curving wooden promenade, from which we dived all summer, unsupervised, into the flat water; and across the bay to the You Yangs, the double-humped, low, volcanic cones, the only disturbance in the great basalt plains that lie between Geelong and Melbourne. These two cards in the same box! And I find them! Imagine! ‘Cher Rubens,’ I wrote. ‘Je t’envoie ces deux cartes postales, de nos deux villes natales…’

  Auntie Lorna has gone for a walk on the beach. My mother unlocks the door and slides open the flywire screen. She goes out into the bright air to tell her friend of my arrival. The ocean is right in front of the unit, only a hundred and fifty yards away. How can people be so sure of the boundary between land and sea that they have the confidence to build houses on it? The white doorsteps of the ocean travel and travel.

  ‘Twelve o’clock,’ says my father.

  ‘Getting on for lunchtime,’ I say.

  ‘Getting towards it. Specially with that nice cold corned beef sitting there, and fresh brown bread. Think I’ll have to try some of that choko relish. Ever eaten a choko?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know a choko if I fell over it.’

  ‘Nor would I.’

  He selects a serrated knife from the magnetised holder on the kitchen wall and quickly and skilfully, at the bench, makes himself a thick sandwich. He works with powerful concentration: when the meat flaps off the slice of bread, he rounds it up with a large, dramatic scooping movement and a sympathetic grimace of the lower lip. He picks up the sandwich in two hands, raises it to his mouth and takes a large bite. While he chews he breathes heavily through his nose.

  ‘Want to make yourself something?’ he says with his mouth full.

  I stand up. He pushes the loaf of bread towards me with the back of his hand. He puts the other half of his sandwich on a green bread and butter plate and carries it to the table. He sits with his elbows on the pine wood, his knees wide apart, his belly relaxing on to his thighs, his high-arched, long-boned feet planted on the tiled floor. He eats, and gazes out to sea. The noise of his eating fills the room.

  My mother and Auntie Lorna come up from the beach. I stand inside the wall of glass and watch them stop at the tap to hose the sand off their feet before they cross the grass to the door. They are two old women: they have to keep one hand on the tap in order to balance on the left foot and wash the right. I see that they are two old women, and yet they are neither young nor old. They are my mother and Auntie Lorna, two institutions. They slide back the wire door, smiling.

  ‘Don’t tramp sand everywhere,’ says my father from the table.

  They take no notice. Auntie Lorna kisses me, and holds me at arms’ length with her head on one side. My mother prepares food and we eat, looking out at the water.

  ‘You’ve missed the coronary brigade,’ says my father. ‘They get out on the beach about nine in the morning. You can pick ’em. They swing their arms up really high when they walk.’ He laughs, looking down.

  ‘Do you go for a walk every day too?’ I ask.

  ‘Six point six kilometres,’ says my father.

  ‘Got a pedometer, have you?’

  ‘I just nutted it out,’ says my father. ‘We walk as far as a big white building, down that way, then we turn round and come back. Six point six altogether, there and back.’

  ‘I might come with you.’

  ‘You can if you like,’ he says. He picks up his plate and carries it to the sink. ‘We go after breakfast. You’ve missed today’s.’

  He goes to the couch and opens the newspaper on the low coffee table. He reads with his glasses down his nose and his hands loosely linked between his spread knees. The women wash up.

  ‘Is there a shop nearby?’ I ask my mother. ‘I have to get some tampons.’

  ‘Caught short, are you?’ she says. ‘I think they sell them at the shopping centre, along Sunbrite Avenue there near the bowling club. Want me to come with you?’

  ‘I can find it.’

  ‘I never could use those things,’ says my mother, lowering her voice and glancing across the room at my father. ‘Hazel told me about a terrible thing that happened to her. For days she kept noticing this revolting smell that was…emanating from her. She washed and washed, and couldn’t get rid of it. Finally she was about to go to the doctor, but first she got down and had a look with the mirror. She saw this bit of thread and pulled it. The thing was green. She must’ve forgotten to take it out—it’d been there for days and days and days.’

  We laugh with the tea towels up to our mouths. My father, on the other side of the room, looks up from the paper with the bent smile of someone not sure what the others are laughing at. I am always surprised when my mother comes out with a word like ‘emanating’. At home I have a book called An Outline of English Verse which my mother used in her matriculation year. In the margins of The Rape of the Lock she has made notations: ‘bathos; reminiscent of Virgil; parody of Homer’. Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.

  Once or twice, on my way from the unit to the shopping centre, I think to see roses along a fence and run to look, but I find them to be some scentless, fleshy flower. I fall back. Beside a patch of yellow grass, pretty trees in a row are bearing and dropping white blossom-like flowers, but they look wrong to me, I do not recognise them: the blossoms too large, the branches too flat. I am dizzy from the flight. In Melbourne it is still winter, everything is bare.

  I buy the tampons and look for the postcards. There they are, displayed in a tall revolving rack. There is a great deal of blue. Closer, I find colour photos of white beaches, duneless, palmless, on which half-naked people lie on their backs with their knees raised. The frequency of this posture, at random through the crowd, makes me feel like laughing. Most of the cards have GREETINGS FROM THE GOLD COAST or BROADBEACH or SURFERS PARADISE embossed in gold in one corner: I search for pictures without words. Another card, in several slightly differing versions, shows a graceful, big-breasted young girl lying in a seductive pose against some rocks: she is wearing a bikini and her whole head is covered by one of those latex masks that are sold in trick shops, the ones you pull on as a bandit pulls on a stocking. The mask represents the hideous, raddled, grinning face of an old woman, a witch. I stare at this photo for a long time. Is it simple, or does it hide some more mysterious signs and symbols?

  I buy twelve GREETINGS FROM cards with views, some aerial, some from the ground. They cost twenty-five cents each.

  ‘Want the envelopes?’ says the girl. She is dressed in a flowered garment which is drawn up between her thighs like a nappy.

  ‘Yes please.’ The envelopes are so covered with coloured maps, logos and drawings of Australian fauna that there is barely room to write an address, but something about them attracts me. I buy a packet of Licorice Chews and eat them all on the way home: I stuff them in two at a time: my mouth floods with saliva. There are no rubbish bins so I put the papers in my pocket. Now that I have spent money here, now that I have rubbish to dispose of, I am no longer a stranger. In Paris there used to be signs in the streets that said, ‘Le commerce, c’est la vie de la ville.’ Any traveller knows this to be the truth.

  The women are knitting. They murmur and murmur. What they say never requires an answer. My father sharpens a pencil stub with his pocket knife, and folds the paper into a pad one-eighth the size of a broadsheet page.

  ‘Five down, spicy meat jelly. ASPIC. Three across, counterfeit. BOGUS! Howzat.’

  ‘You’re in good nick,’ I say. ‘I would’ve had to r
ack my brains for BOGUS. Why don’t you do harder ones?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t do those other ones, the cryptic.’

  ‘You have to know Shakespeare and the Bible off by heart to do those,’ I say.

  ‘Yairs. Course, if you got hold of the answer and filled it out looking at that, with a lot of practice you could come round to their way of thinking. They used to have good ones in the Weekly Times. But I s’pose they had so many complaints from cockies who couldn’t do ’em that they had to ease off.’

  I do not feel comfortable yet about writing the postcards. It would seem graceless. I flip through my mother’s pattern book.

  ‘There’s some nice ones there,’ she says. ‘What about the one with the floppy collar?’

  ‘Want to buy some wool?’ says my father. He tosses the finished crossword on to the coffee table and stands up with a vast yawn. ‘Oh—ee—oh—ooh. Come on, Miss. I’ll drive you over to Pacific Fair.’

  I choose the wool and count out the number of balls specified by the pattern. My father rears back to look at it: this movement struck terror into me when I was a teenager but I now recognise it as long-sightedness.

  ‘Pure wool, is it?’ he says. As soon as he touches it he will know. He fingers it, and looks at me.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Got a bit of synthetic in it. It’s what the pattern says to use.’

  ‘Why don’t you—’ He stops. Once he would have tried to prevent me from buying it. His big blunt hands used to fling out the fleeces, still warm, on to the greasy table. His hands looked as if they had no feeling in them but they teased out the wool, judged it, classed it, assigned it a fineness and a destination: Italy, Switzerland, Japan. He came home with thorns embedded deep in the flesh of his palms. He stood patiently while my mother gouged away at them with a needle. He drove away at shearing time in a yellow car with running boards, up to the big sheds in the country; we rode on the running boards as far as the corner of our street, then skipped home. He went to the Melbourne Show for work, not pleasure, and once he brought me home a plastic trumpet. ‘Fordie,’ he called me, and took me to the wharves and said, ‘See that rope? It’s not a rope. It’s a hawser.’ ‘Hawser,’ I repeated, wanting him to think I was a serious person. We walked along Strachan Avenue, Manifold Heights, hand in hand. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen to the wind in the wires.’ I must have been very little then, for the wires were so high I can’t remember seeing them.