The Best Australian Stories 2017 by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Author:Maxine Beneba Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

The Boat

Joshua Mostafa

His name is Paul or Peter, I forget. We sit together, squashed among a couple dozen others like the human luggage that we are, below the deck, where years of putrefying fish have left their stink. No windows. Someone’s puked. An infant cries.

I fold my arms and try to think of nothing, but he’s talking in my ear again. About a boat, not this one, not the filthy bucket that we’re crammed inside; a sailboat, one he used to own, his pride and joy, it seems – though he insists it’s not a yacht. The word’s incongruous, as if it’s from another language, moulded by the habits of a foreign and exotic world. I try it on my tongue, repeating: yacht. A laugh begins to bubble up, or is it just a retch, the air is hot and thick.

He won’t stop talking, god knows why he thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, maybe just because I’m softly spoken, or that when he said that this last fortnight, crammed inside a fishy tin, had spoiled his love of seafood, I agreed, and when he rhapsodised about a little place in Darlinghurst that used to serve the most delicious oyster bisque, I said I used to eat there too. And now, despite the fact that Darlinghurst is just another wasteland – gutted houses, burned-out cars, a battleground for warring gangs, where feral dogs and beggar children prowl for scraps – it lives in both our memories, the strolls we individually took, a coffee on a Sunday afternoon, an exhibition opening. He seems delighted by this reminiscence, puckering his flabby lips as if it brings him closer to the life he’s lost. Our country. Just a dream, a make-believe. I don’t know when it ceased to be, but it was well before I paid my passage at the dock: ‘No Aussie dollars! Euros, yuan, American or gold’ (I gave the smugglers all I had: my ring, my granddad’s watch). Perhaps it stopped existing when the riots started, tearing through the CBD. Perhaps it faltered in the drought, and dried up with the dying crops, and hollowed out as shops and supermarkets closed their doors. Perhaps when all the television channels flickered out, and then the power stopped. That global warming nonsense, Peter says (or Paul), the Chinese wouldn’t buy our coal – they caught a cold, we sneezed – a perfect storm. I envy him a little: even now, when everything’s collapsed, his stock of simple clichéd explanations is intact. Like all the men, our beards are growing wild – no razors anymore – but he, I reckon, must have had a pale moustache, a perfect barrier that filtered any doubts or contradictory thoughts as he inhaled. But maybe not. There’s something in his eyes. A trembling of the iris, creature-panic that he can’t conceal, for all his talk. He flinches when the hatch is opened, sunlight streaming in, but it is just our daily meal.

The smuggler bringing us our food

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