The Best Thing

  A sensuous, passionate story of first love, first baby, The Best Thing captures brilliantly the turmoil in Melanie’s life and the intensity of her pleasures and pains. Margo Lanagan uses words as though they were new minted—as though she were inside the skin of a teenager. But there is more to the novel than that. In a natural, unforced way it shows Mel’s growing understanding of love, individuality and responsibility.

  This is a thought-provoking, life-affirming book—and a great read.

  MARGO LANAGAN was born in 1960 and has lived in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Perth, Mundrabilla and Paris. She studied history at the University of Sydney. She works as a writer and book editor, and lives with her partner and their two sons in Sydney’s inner west.

  Her writing includes novels for teenagers and adults—The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly—and for younger readers—Wildgame, The Tankermen and Walking Through Albert.

  MARGO LANAGAN

  THE best THING

  The writing of this book was assisted by the Commonwealth

  Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding

  and advisory body.

  © Margo Lanagan 1995

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  A Little Ark Book

  First published in 1995 by

  Allen & Unwin

  9 Atchison Street

  St Leonards NSW 1590

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Lanagan, Margo.

  The best thing.

  ISBN 1 86448 824 7.

  1. Title.

  A823.3

  Set in New Baskerville

  Cover designed by Ruth Grüner

  Text designed by Rosanna Di Risio

  Cover photograph by Thomas Schweizer

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Victoria

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Muhammad Ali’s words on page 7 are from his autobiography, I Am the Greatest. The definitions of ‘pug’ on page 14 are from the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1993 edition. The paragraphs on life before birth on pages 24, 27, 39, 43–4, 51–2, 53 and 77–8 owe a great deal to two articles in Life magazine: ‘Drama of Life Before Birth’, 30 April 1965 and ‘The First Days of Creation’, August 1990. Any errors arising from their paraphrasing are the author’s responsibility. The quotations on pages 54, 97 and 113 are taken from the Right Honourable Dame Edith Summerskill, The Ignoble Art, published by William Heinemann in 1956. Muhammad Ali’s words on page 87 are quoted in the introduction to Peter Heller (ed.), In this Corner! 40 World Champions Tell Their Stories, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973. The quotations on pages 92 and 105–6 are from National Health and Medical Research Council, Health Aspects of Boxing, AGPS, Canberra, 1975. The scoring guidelines on page 99 are from the Australian Boxing Association, Referees’ and Judges’ Manual, 10th edition, 1962. The neurologist’s words on page 101 were cited in an article by Peter Fitzsimons published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 February 1990, ‘The hazy zone was unknown to Tyson’. The quotation on page 124 is from an article by Peter Fitzsimons and Daniel Williams in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 March 1990, and is used with permission. Kostya Tszyu’s words on page 127 are taken from an interview by Alan Attwood, ‘Eyes on the Prize’, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 November 1994, and are used with permission. Jeff Fenech’s words about Johnny Lewis on pages 133–4 are from an article by Peter Muszkat, ‘Lord of the Ring’, published in The Australian Magazine on 23 September 1989, and are used with permission. The quotation on page 140 is from Peter Corris’s history of Australian boxing, Lords of the Ring, Cassell Australia, 1980, and is used with permission. The quotation on page 159 is from Casey Meyers, Walking: A Complete Guide to the Complete Exercise, Random House, New York, © Casey Meyers 1992, and is used with permission. The quotation on page 169 is from Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, Vintage Books, London, © Deirdre Bair 1990.

  Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use these quotations. The author welcomes contact from publishers to rectify any errors or omissions.

  1

  HALF-DREAM ROOM

  The feeling is like being half awake and half

  dreaming … And your awake half knows what

  you’re dreaming about. A heavy blow takes you to

  the door of this room. It opens and you see neon,

  orange and green lights blinking. You see bats

  blowing trumpets, alligators play trombones, and

  snakes are screaming. Weird masks and actors’

  clothes hang on the wall.

  Muhammad Ali

  I find a condom in my locker, with a jelly baby poked right down to the tip. The baby’s had to be flattened to fit through the locker slots. I glimpse its squashed round face as I gather it up in a tissue, find myself tracing its life history, back into the box with its fellow babies, up into the machine that counts jelly babies into boxes, up along the conveyor belt through the drier, to the nozzles that squirt the exact amounts of jelly goop into the baby moulds. Gloved, hair-netted, white-coated workers in attendance: mould scrubbers, defect spotters, nozzle cleaners. These thoughts get me through the crush, out of the building, through the gate.

  Brenner comes up to me—no, he comes after me. Wants to know why we ‘broke up’. Why we can’t be friends.

  ‘Oh, you tell me,’ I say, not even stopping.

  ‘Why?’ he says, all innocent. ‘We didn’t have a fight or anything, did we?’

  ‘No, we didn’t. You just disappeared off the face of the earth at the first stupid rumour, that’s all.’ I stride on, trying to get ahead of him.

  ‘What rumour?’

  I snort.

  ‘Honest, I didn’t hear anything!’

  ‘Bullshit you didn’t.’

  He jogs up the path behind me. ‘Okay, so I did hear rumours. But there was nothing to ’em. I didn’t believe ’em or anything.’

  ‘You’re talking too much. Go away and leave me alone.’

  He walks along beside me to the crossing, expecting me to wait there. I go straight across the street, forcing cars to stop for me.

  ‘Hey, wait on!’

  ‘What’s the matter, Bren?’ I say over my shoulder. ‘Suddenly you’re all matey again. I don’t want you coming home with me, so you’d better tell me quick what’s on your mind.’

  ‘I dunno. I just saw Lisa today, and, gee, she’s being such a ratbag about you. Like, she was your best friend, wasn’t she?’

  ‘What, you feel sorry for me, do you? Well, wow, so I suppose I should feel flattered. What is it, three months now? A quarter of a year? I appreciate your concern, Bren, I really do.’ My throat is starting to close over, and I have to walk on.

  ‘Mel, don’t be like this.’ He’s following me again.

  Like this! I turn on him, way past anger. ‘Hey, Brenner, I think it’s really, really big of you to come round to my side of things after dropping me like a hot potato, for no reason, without even discussing it, three months ago.’

  ‘Come on, Mel, I didn’t know who to believe!’

  ‘How about me?’ Our faces are only centimetres apart before he backs up a bit. I go on yelling. ‘What was wrong with coming to me, for my side of the story
? I was the girlfriend, I was the one you were supposed to be able to talk to about anything.’

  Brenner’s eyes are all over the place looking for a way out. He’s pathetic. ‘Well, I felt uncomfortable, you know? The things people were saying about you—’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, Lisa said you were—’ He looks at me and his eyes have got a horrible expression in them. He’s really curious, greedy to know. ‘That you were pregnant, and everything.’

  ‘What do you mean, and everything? What else?’

  ‘She said you hadn’t told her who, but that she figured it couldn’t have been me, from what you said.’

  ‘“She said, she figured.” You two’ve been having a good old chat, haven’t you?’

  He’s not pretending to want to be friends any more. He’s just busting to know. ‘Well?’ he says. He’s practically twitching, practically on his tippy-toes.

  I almost start to enjoy myself. ‘Well what?’

  ‘How much of it’s true?’

  I look him up and down, very slowly. It’s not as if he even cares. Not about me, not about what happened. He’s just digging for gossip, hunting for stuff to shout at me tomorrow, when I walk past him and his mates at the school gate.

  I shake my head. ‘It’s too late for you to expect an answer to that.’

  ‘What?’ He puts his hands on his hips. Oh, he’s just so tired of dealing with idiots like me.

  ‘Three months ago you might have got a straight answer. But after all that carrying on during the exams last year, and pretending I didn’t exist over Christmas—no way. And all this shit you’ve been giving me since school got back—God, what Lisa’s doing is nothing!’ It’s not true, but it sounds good. ‘You can get stuffed. I don’t need you around. I don’t need shits like you.’

  He grabs my shoulder. I slap his hand away and back off.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ His face turns ugly. I start to put distance between us. He shouts across it, ‘You were up the duff to some bloke, like they all reckon!’

  They all. They all. Who? How many? I concentrate on keeping my head up, my steps steady.

  ‘You did have an abortion! You’re just a slut! You were sleeping with this guy all the time, weren’t you!’ I can’t see why he’s not following me, hitting me. I try to walk faster without seeming to. ‘It’s no wonder no-one talks to you. No-one likes a slut!’ He loves saying that word. He loves being angry, being so right, and swearing at me. Words of Power, that’s what Mum calls swear words. I call out over my shoulder, ‘Sticks and stones, Brenner.’ My voice is too high, but he’s not listening. A dog behind a tin fence starts yapping like a maniac.

  A stone whacks my schoolbag, another hits my leg. The Words of Power beat on my back. I feel as if there’s a whole posse of schoolmates and parents behind me; Brenner’s their mouthpiece, no more than that, just the noisiest, angriest one in the pack. ‘Fucking bitch! You’d sleep with anyone! Do you do it with animals too? With dogs?’

  So I think of Pug. Sometimes he wears a crazy-about-me expression that for a second makes me feel like a good person, a nice person. Then Brenner is just a mistake anyone might make, Lisa a nobody. Sometimes Pug says, in a really doleful voice, ‘You’re so smart, you know? You’re too smart for me, I reckon.’

  Brenner isn’t following any more. I refuse to look round, but he sounds distant, incoherent. Stones whizz in the air, but I’m getting out of range.

  He’s scared to ask for the truth, to ask properly, one person to another. They all are. You give them the truth and they don’t know what to do with it except use it against you.

  Cars stop for me at the Salisbury Road crossing, and I almost cry with gratitude. It feels as if the drivers are being incredibly kind to me, as if they know my leg and head are stinging from the stones and my knees are wobbling, and they’re stopping to help me escape, and maybe block the way if Brenner comes after me again.

  I make it home without having a major heart attack. Mum’s in the garden on a flex day, gouging weeds out of our tiny front lawn.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ she says, smiling up at me. ‘Just taking out my executive stress on a few dandelions.’ This is a joke—she’s got one of those public-service jobs where her title is longer than her working day. ‘You look hot.’

  ‘Yes.’ All my injuries are out of her sight. Blood weaves through the hair on the back of my head. ‘I’ll change and get us a drink, hey?’

  Up in the bathroom’s coolness, I shower and rinse my hair, press my finger to the cut to stop the bleeding, put on clean clothes. I can almost forget it’s Tuesday, almost not care about tomorrow. Bugger Brenner, I can think. And bugger Lisa and Donna and all the gossips at that bloody school. I am not going to let them make my hands shake. I’m not going to let them make me sick with dread when I open my eyes to face another school day. They can forget it.

  I can think these things, up here. Now.

  I thought Brenner, for sure, was the sort of guy I was supposed to aim for. Good looking in a really wholesome, blond way. Sporty, cool. Muscle-headed. Insensitive. Shit-for-brains. If I put him next to Pug I can hardly believe they’re the same species. The difference is so huge, just between the ways I feel about them. With Pug, I feel for him, whereas with Brenner I thought about him. I observed myself with him. I was always the watcher. I never really cared much. I was too busy being pleased I had someone. Any guy would have done, but having someone so good looking, someone everyone approved of, was a bonus. If he’d died (falling during a rock-climb, maybe, or being run over during a bike race) I could have got off on playing the tragedy queen for a while, but I don’t think my life would have fallen apart.

  Don’t I sound cold? It was different when I was with him. It was a big ego-boost, and I was in love because every other girl I knew was in love with someone. So I floated around, too, I smiled at everyone, I kept a diary full of movie ticket stubs, of pressed flowers, of bits of poems Brenner would have curled up and died to read, some I wrote myself and some I pinched from books. (I burned it over Christmas, ceremonially, in the backyard, when Mum and Dad were out.) I drew our initials twined together in secret squiggly parts of drawings I did in Art at school, and pointed them out to Lisa. I remember she squealed in rapture and immediately started working on a monogram for her and James, which was out of date by the time those pieces got marked; she was with Terry by then. Oh God, I did all sorts of stuff because it was the thing to do. I thought I meant some of it, but most of it was a big act, a waste of time.

  And then life gets serious, and you look back and realise what a kid you were, playing at being grown up.

  pug /pg/n.5 slang. M19 [Abbrev.] = PUGILIST

  But for pug n.2, other meanings:

  A term of endearment: dear one.

  A courtesan, a prostitute; a mistress.

  A monkey, an ape. Also (rare), a child.

  A small demon or imp; a sprite.

  (pug-dog) A dwarf breed of dog resembling a bulldog, with a broad flat nose and a deeply wrinkled face.

  A short or stumpy person or thing; esp. a dwarf.

  (pug-engine) A small locomotive used chiefly for shunting purposes.

  For pug υ.1 t.:

  Dirty by excessive handling.[!]

  For pug υ.2t.:

  Thrust, poke or pack into a space … Prepare (clay for brickmaking or pottery, by kneading and working into a soft and plastic condition).

  Thursday night at the supermarket. Cruel place: fluorescent lights (too many), metal shelving, shiny trolleys snarling and queuing, frazzled families, and over all the racket ‘Franklins’ Radio’ smarming on, alerting you to bargains in the meat department, the dairy, wherever, calling you ‘shoppers’ as if you had no other function in life. Too much stock, too many colours and shiny packets; it wears out your eyes.

  I report back to Mum with the butter and yoghurt. ‘How come Dad doesn’t come with us any more? We used to get this done in half the time.�
�

  ‘Would you come, if you could avoid it?’ Mum watches somebody’s three-year-old tear open a packet of Smarties and send half of them skittering across the floor.

  ‘We used to have fun, I thought.’ She gives me an ironic look. ‘I mean, I don’t mean we don’t have fun now.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mum sighs and runs her thumb down her list.

  ‘I do-on’t! Just—it used to be a quick shop and then a big long treat, like going out to dinner. Now it’s spending forever in here and then grabbing an ice-cream on the way out. Bor-ring.’

  ‘We can eat here if you like, downstairs. We’ll get the frozen stuff on the way out—no, forget I said that. I couldn’t stand another dose of supermarket queues. We can do something, though. Oh, look! There’s your mate Lisa.’

  ‘Quick! What d’you want me to get? I don’t want her to see me!’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘We’re having a fight! What do you want, quick!’

  ‘Orange juice. And apple. Morningtown!’ She calls out after me. ‘Not that reconstituted stuff!’

  The shopping turns into a nightmare of dodging around shelves and trying to keep track of where Lisa is. But at the checkout, as if fate drove us together, her dad calls out, ‘Well, if it ain’t the Dows! Having a night out on the town, are we, ladies?’ He manoeuvres his trolley in behind ours.

  Mum jokes back, and I smile weakly. My eyes drag themselves to Lisa. Even in this spotlight-every-zit lighting she looks flawless. She’s all Sixtied up, in a white mini-dress with a chain belt, white sandals with daisies on them, clanking bangles. Her lips shimmer pale in her golden face and her eyes are made up to look huge and luminous. When she sees me, though, she forgets the waif look she’s trying for. She goggles at me, her pink-iced lips pressed together; then she lets her gaze wander away over the checkouts, a superior smile on her face.

  Pug’s room is always a pigsty. Dead socks, dead magazines, the bed always unmade. There’s a smell. I guess part of it must be dead-sock smell. Another part is the frangipani tree at the window, its flower-stars’ sweetness complicating the light. Also dust, and the sheets, of course. Sheets, even fresh from the laundrette, can only take so much wear and tear, so much steaming and soaking and drying and being lain on. They start to live, to have their own breath. I couldn’t name for you what his scent is like; it’s not like any of its parts. I step in here and breathe it, and it’s relief, it’s excitement. It’s Pug’s own territory. Nobody comes here but us.