The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc. Read Free Book Online

Russians: ‘I wouldn’t want to leave Sylvia on her own. She’s not very good on her own.’
    *
    Maybe the most impressive thing about Hugh Billington was his indifference to his own heroism. After he had told me how he won his Victoria Cross, he lay back. ‘I’m going to take a nap.’
    I had hoped to steal away before Sylvia returned, but I was still sitting there when a shadow fell across my chest and I jerked up, preparing to bat away a hungry crow.
    â€˜Well? Did he reveal all?’
    â€˜I think so.’
    Sylvia glanced at her husband’s prostrate figure, eyes closed, a dribble of gravy at the corner of his mouth. He was a big man who could move when he wanted to. Even so, it was hard to think of those legs and arms crawling back through the mud and darkness to rescue eleven of his men; this was after he had been tortured and interrogated by the Japanese. He had escaped, disguised as a Kachin villager, resolving never to leave Burma without his comrades.
    â€˜Hugh?’
    He nodded, not stirring nor opening his eyes.
    â€˜I’m glad. It’s important for people to know.’ She turned to me: ‘He’s so modest it makes one scream. Of course, he’s spared me the details, but it was beyond horror.’
    Imitating what I took to be his voice, she tilted towards me in case he overheard her whisper. ‘Think of the worst, most inhumane way you can treat people. Double it. The worst, the worst.’
    Hugh made a sound for her to be quiet.
    I said in a hushed voice: ‘What Hugh did was extraordinary.’ I knew lots of war stories, but nothing so brave, or selfless; and not because I had heard it direct.
    Sylvia peeled off her bathing cap and shook her hair. ‘You wouldn’t think so looking at him, would you? I get upset when he leaves it to me to blow his trumpet.’ She reached for a towel and patted her glistening cleavage. ‘I don’t go around asking people to listen to him, you know.’ She stared at me in a way to suggest that Hugh, by speaking, had conferred a rare honour on me, and that we were very few, we appreciators of the courage of her husband, this far-from-successful machinery importer who had begun quietly to snore.
    â€˜No, he’s a real treasure is Hugh,’ creaking into her chair.
    Sylvia let the towel fall to the grass and loosened her straps. Then she dipped her fingers into a shallow blue tin and started smearing Nivea into her calves and shins. Like so many of us, Sylvia didn’t see herself in the present, but ten years before. She was facing me, to make sure I was attentive, and maybe to intimate that she had been a good-looking woman when she was my age. But I was thirty, she in her mid-fifties. I didn’t find her sexually attractive or even poignant – not then, not in that moment.
    â€˜You’re catching the sun.’
    Before I could say anything, Sylvia had leaned forward and was rubbing Nivea into my shoulders. I could tell that my back was red from the tender way her fingers smoothed in the cream; from her breath that she had had a nip of gin.
    She lowered her voice: ‘In some ways, it was a difficult war for me too,’ and looked up.
    I waited with dread for her to continue when her face stiffened.
    She breathed in, holding her breath. She had seen the diver looming above.
    One couldn’t not look at this great blond idiot. Wherever you happened to be around that pool, if you were talking to someone you saw, out of the corner of your eye, his emphasising crimson Speedo.
    As he walked to the end of the board he straightened his body and gazed down on us.
    â€˜Someone please shoot that man,’ Sylvia said, but went on watching him.
    His chest was like a slab of factory chocolate. He stepped up and somersaulted into the air, entering the water in a perfect dive. He reminded me in his vanity of a boy I’d been at school with, a restless troublemaker in the classroom,