Singing My Sister Down and other stories Read online

  Praise for Margo Lanagan’s short stories

  ‘Lanagan is in a class of her own.’—The Weekend Australian

  ‘Lanagan uses fantasy to highlight certain universal truths about human relationships. She writes with wit and detachment, and a certain exuberant ruthlessness.’

  —The Times, UK

  ‘Dazzling.’—John Marsden

  ‘Absolutely outstanding short stories . . . a collection of extraordinary richness and power.’—The Advertiser

  ‘Margo Lanagan’s short stories are taut and layered . . . each tale feels newly minted and distinctly original.’—The Age

  ‘Margo Lanagan writes in a distinctly individual style that seems both modern and timeless. Her imagination seems boundless.’—Fantasy Magazine

  ‘A writer this startling and this original doesn’t come along very often. So for anyone who likes to be surprised, touched, unsettled, intrigued, or scared senseless, prepare to be dazzled by what a master storyteller can do in a few short pages.’

  —Fantastic Fiction

  Also by Margo Lanagan

  FOR TEENAGERS AND ADULTS

  Novels

  Sea Hearts

  Tender Morsels

  Touching Earth Lightly

  The Best Thing

  With Scott Westerfeld & Deborah Biancotti

  Swarm: Zeroes 2

  Zeroes

  Short story collections

  Yellowcake

  Red Spikes

  Black Juice

  White Time

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  Wildgame

  The Tankermen

  Walking Through Albert

  This collection first published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  ‘Dedication’ & ‘The Queen’s Notice’ copyright © Margo Lanagan 2000, from the collection White Time

  ‘Singing My Sister Down’, ‘My Lord’s Man’, ‘Red Nose Day’ & ‘Sweet Pippit’ copyright © Margo Lanagan 2004, from the collection Black Juice

  ‘Winkie’ & ‘A Good Heart’ copyright © Margo Lanagan 2006, from the collection Red Spikes

  ‘A Fine Magic’ & ‘Ferryman’ copyright © Margo Lanagan 2011, from the collection Yellowcake

  ‘Not All Ogre’, ‘Swing from the Moon’ & ‘The Wood-Queen’s Quarters’ copyright © Margo Lanagan 2017

  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. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 513 4

  eISBN 978 1 92557 695 5

  Cover and text design by Joanna Hunt

  Cover illustration by Rovina Cai

  Singing My Sister Down

  Not All Ogre

  Swing from the Moon

  The Wood-Queen’s Quarters

  Dedication

  Ferryman

  Sweet Pippit

  My Lord’s Man

  A Good Heart

  Winkie

  Red Nose Day

  The Queen’s Notice

  A Fine Magic

  WE ALL WENT DOWN to the tar-pit, with mats to spread our weight.

  Ikky was standing on the bank, her hands in a metal twin-loop behind her. She’d stopped sulking; now she looked, more, stare-y and puzzled.

  Chief Barnarndra pointed to the pit. ‘Out you go then, girl. You must walk on out there to the middle and stand. When you picked a spot, your people can join you.’

  So Ik stepped out, very ordinary. She walked out. I thought – hoped, even – she might walk right across and into the thorns the other side; at the same time, I knew she wouldn’t do that.

  She walked the way you walk on the tar, except without the arms balancing. She nearly fell from a stumble once, but Mumma hulloo’d to her, and she straightened and walked upright out to the very middle, where she slowed and stopped.

  Mumma didn’t look to the chief, but all us kids and the rest did. ‘Right, then,’ he said.

  Mumma stepped out as if she’d just herself that moment happened to decide to. We went after her – only us, Ik’s family, which was like us being punished, too, everyone watching us walk out to that girl who was our shame.

  In the winter you come to the pit to warm your feet in the tar. You stand long enough to sink as far as your ankles – the littler you are, the longer you can stand. You soak the heat in for as long as the tar doesn’t close over your feet and grip, and it’s as good as warmed boots wrapping your feet. But in summer, like this day, you keep away from the tar, because it makes the air hotter and you mind about the stink.

  But today we had to go out, and everyone had to see us go.

  Ikky was tall, but she was thin and light from all the worry and prison; she was going to take a long time about sinking. We got our mats down, all the food parcels and ice-baskets and instruments and such spread out evenly on the broad planks Dash and Felly had carried out.

  ‘You start, Dash,’ said Mumma, and Dash got up and put his drum-ette to his hip and began with ‘Fork-Tail Trio’, and it did feel a bit like a party. It stirred Ikky awake from her hung-headed shame; she lifted up and even laughed, and I saw her hips move in the last chorus, side to side.

  Then Mumma got out one of the ice-baskets, which was already black on the bottom from meltwater.

  Ikky gasped. ‘Ha! What! Crab! Where’d that come from?’

  ‘Never you mind, sweet-thing.’ Mumma lifted some meat to Ikky’s mouth, and rubbed some of the crush-ice into her hair.

  ‘Oh, Mumma!’ Ik said with her mouth full.

  ‘May as well have the best of this world while you’re here,’ said Mumma. She stood there and fed Ikky like a baby, like a pet guinea-bird.

  ‘I thought Auntie Mai would come,’ said Ik.

  ‘Auntie Mai, she’s useless,’ said Dash. ‘She’s sitting at home with her handkerchief.’

  ‘I wouldn’t’ve cared, her crying,’ said Ik. ‘I would’ve thought she’d say goodbye to me.’

  ‘Her heart’s too hurt,’ said Mumma. ‘You frightened her. And she’s such a straight lady – she sees shame where some of us just see people. Here, inside the big claw, that’s the sweetest meat.’

  ‘Ooh, yes! Is anyone else feasting with me?’

  ‘No, darlin’, this is your day only. Well, okay, I’ll give some to this little sad-eyes here, huh? Felly never had crab but the once. Is it yum? Ooh, it’s yum! Look at him!’

  Next she called me to do my flute – the flashiest, hardest music I knew. And Ik listened; Ik who usually screamed at me to stop pushing spikes into her brain, she watched my fingers on the flute-holes and my sweating face and my straining, bowing body and, for the first time, I didn’t feel like just the nuisance-brother. I played well, out of the surprise of her not minding. I couldn’t’ve played better. I heard everyone else being surprised, too, at the end of those tunes that they must’ve known, too wel
l from all my practising.

  I sat down, very hungry. Mumma passed me the water cup and a damp-roll.

  ‘I’m stuck now,’ said Ik, and it was true – the tar had her by the feet, closed in a gleaming line like that pair of zipper-slippers I saw once in the shoemaster’s vitrine.

  ‘Oh yeah, well and truly stuck,’ said Mumma. ‘But then, you knew when you picked up that axe-handle you were sticking yourself.’

  ‘I did know.’

  ‘No coming unstuck from this one. You could’ve let that handle lie.’

  That was some serious teasing.

  ‘No, I couldn’t, Mumma, and you know.’

  ‘I do, baby chicken. I always knew you’d be too angry, once the wedding-glitter rubbed off your skin. It was a good party, though, wasn’t it?’ And they laughed at each other, Mumma having to steady Ikky or her ankles would’ve snapped over. And when their laughter started going strange Mumma said, ‘Well, this party’s going to be almost as good, ’cause it’s got children. And look what else!’ And she reached for the next ice-basket.

  And so the whole long day went, in treats and songs, in ice and stink and joke-stories and gossip and party-pieces. On the banks, people came and went, and the chief sat in his chair and was fanned and fed, and the family of Ikky’s husband sat around the chief, being served, too, all in purple-cloth with flashing edging, very prideful.

  She went down so slowly.

  ‘Isn’t it hot?’ Felly asked her.

  ‘It’s like a big warm hug up my legs,’ said Ik. ‘Come here and give me a hug, little stick-arms, and let me check. Oof, yes, it’s just like that, only lower down.’

  ‘You’re coming down to me,’ said Fel, pleased.

  ‘Yeah, soon I’ll be able to bite your ankles like you bite mine.’

  Around midafternoon, Ikky couldn’t move her arms any more and had a panic, just quiet, not so the bank-people would’ve noticed.

  ‘What’m I going to do, Mumma?’ she said. ‘When it comes up over my face? When it closes my nose?’

  ‘Don’t you worry. You won’t be awake for that.’ And Mumma cooled her hands in the ice, dried them on her dress, and rubbed them over Ik’s shoulders, down Ik’s arms to where the tar had locked her wrists.

  ‘You better not give me any teas, or herbs, or anything,’ said Ik. ‘They’ll get you, too, if you help me. They’ll come out to make sure.’

  Mumma put her hands over Felly’s ears. ‘Tristem gave me a gun,’ she whispered.

  Ikky’s eyes went wide. ‘But you can’t! Everyone’ll hear!’

  ‘It’s got a thing on it, quietens it. I can slip it in a tar-wrinkle, get you in the head when your head is part sunk, fold back the wrinkle, tell ’em your heart stopped, the tar pressed it stopped.’

  Felly shook his head free. Ikky was looking at Mumma, quietening. There was only the sound of Dash tearing bread with his teeth, and the breeze whistling in the thorn-galls away over on the shore. I was watching Mumma and Ikky closely – I’d wondered about that last part, too. But now this girl up to her waist in the pit didn’t even look like our Ikky. Her face was changing like a cloud, or like a masque-lizard’s colours; you don’t see them move but they become something else, then something else again.

  ‘No,’ she said, still looking at Mumma. ‘You won’t do that. You won’t have to.’ Her face had a smile on it that touched off one on Mumma’s, too, so that they were both quiet, smiling at something in each other that I couldn’t see.

  And then their eyes ran over and they were crying and smiling, and then Mumma was kneeling on the wood, her arms around Ikky, and Ikky was ugly against her shoulder, crying in a way that we couldn’t interrupt them.

  That was when I realised how many people were watching, when they set up a big, spooky oolooling and stamping on the banks, to see Mumma grieve.

  ‘Fo!’ I said to Dash, to stop the hair creeping around on my head from that noise. ‘There never was such a crowd when Chep’s daddy went down.’

  ‘Ah, but he was old and crazy,’ said Dash through a mouthful of bread, ‘and only killed other olds and crazies.’

  ‘Are those fish-people? And look at the yellow-cloths – they’re from up among the caves, all that way!’

  ‘Well, it’s nearly Langasday, too,’ said Dash. ‘Lots of people on the move, just happening by.’

  ‘Maybe. Is that an honour, or a greater shame?’

  Dash shrugged. ‘This whole thing is upended. Who would have a party in the tar, and with family going down?’

  ‘It’s what Mumma wanted.’

  ‘Better than having her and Ik be like this all day.’ Dash’s hand slipped into the nearest ice-basket and brought out a crumb of gilded macaroon. He ate it as if he had a perfect right.

  Everything went slippery in my mind, after that. We were being watched so hard! Even though it was quiet out here, the pothering wind brought crowd-mumble and scraps of music and smoke our way, so often that we couldn’t be private and ourselves. Besides, there was Ikky with the sun on her face, but the rest of her from the rib-peaks down gloved in tar, never to see sun again. Time seemed to just have gone, in big clumps, or all the day was happening at once or something, I was wondering so hard about what was to come, I was watching so hard the differences from our normal days. I wished I had more time to think, before she went right down; my mind was going breathless, trying to get all its thinking done.

  But evening came and Ik was a head and shoulders, singing along with us in the lamplight, all the old songs – ‘A Flower for You’, ‘Hen and Chicken Bay’, ‘Walking the Tracks with Beejum Singh’, ‘Dollarberries’. She sang all Felly’s little-kid songs that normally she’d sneer at; she got Dash to teach her his new one, ‘The Careless Wanderer’, with the tricky chorus. She made us work on that one like she was trying to stop us noticing the monster bonfires around the shore, the other singing, of fishing songs and forest songs, the stomp and clatter of dancing in the gathering darkness. But they were there, however well we sang, and no other singing in our lives had had all this going on behind it.

  When the tar began to tip Ik’s chin up, Mumma sent me for the wreath. ‘Mai will have brought it, over by the chief’s chair.’

  I got up and started across the tar, and it was as if I cast magic ahead of me, silence-making magic, for as I walked – and it was good to be walking, not sitting – musics petered out, and laughter stopped, and dancers stood still, and there were eyes at me, all along the dark banks, strange eyes and familiar both.

  The wreath showed up in the crowd ahead, a big, pale ring trailing spirals of whisper-vine, the beautifullest thing. I climbed up the low bank there, and the ground felt hard and cold after a day on the squishy tar. My ankles shivered as I took the wreath from Mai. It was heavy; it was fat with heavenly scents.

  ‘You’ll have to carry those,’ I said to Mai, as someone handed her the other garlands. ‘You should come out, anyway. Ik wants you there.’

  She shook her head. ‘She’s cloven my heart in two with that axe of hers.’

  ‘What, so you’ll chop hers as well, this last hour?’

  We glared at each other in the bonfire light, all loaded down with the fine, pale flowers.

  ‘I never heard this boy speak with a voice before, Mai,’ said someone behind her.

  ‘He’s very sure,’ said someone else. ‘This is Ikky’s Last Things we’re talking about, Mai. If she wants you to be one of them . . .’

  ‘She shouldn’t have shamed us, then,’ Mai said, but weakly.

  ‘You going to look back on this and think yourself a po-face,’ said the first someone.

  ‘But it’s like—’ Mai sagged and clicked her tongue. ‘She should have cared what she did to this family,’ she said with her last fight. ‘It’s more than just herself.’

  ‘Take the flowers, Mai. Don’t make the boy do this twice over. Time is short.’

  ‘Yeah, everybody’s time is short,’ said the first someone.

  Mai stood, pull
ing her mouth to one side.

  I turned and propped the top of the wreath on my forehead, so that I was like a little boy-bride, trailing a head of flowers down my back to the ground. I set off over the tar, leaving the magic silence in the crowd. There was only the rub and squeak of flower stalks in my ears; in my eyes, instead of the flourishes of bonfires, there were only the lamps in a ring around Mumma, Felly, Dash, and Ikky’s head. Mumma was kneeling bonty-up on the wood, talking to Ikky; in the time it had taken me to get the wreath, Ikky’s head had been locked still.

  ‘Oh, the baby,’ Mai whimpered behind me. ‘The little darling.’

  Bit late for darling-ing now, I almost said. I felt cross and frightened and too grown-up for Mai’s silliness.

  ‘Here, Ik, we’ll make you beautiful now,’ said Mumma, laying the wreath around Ik’s head. ‘We’ll come out here to these flowers when you’re gone, and know you’re here.’

  ‘They’ll die pretty quick – I’ve seen it.’ Ik’s voice was getting squashed, coming out through closed jaws. ‘The heat wilts ’em.’

  ‘They’ll always look beautiful to you,’ said Mumma. ‘You’ll carry down this beautiful wreath, and your family singing.’

  I trailed the vines out from the wreath-like flares from the edge of the sun.

  ‘Is that Mai?’ said Ik. Mai looked up, startled, from laying the garlands between the vines. ‘Show me the extras, Mai.’

  Mai held up a garland. ‘Aren’t they good? Trumpets from Low Swamp, Auntie Patti’s whisper-vine, and star-weed to bind. You never thought ordinary old stars could look so good, I’ll bet.’

  ‘I never did.’

  It was all set out right, now. It went in the order: head, half-ring of lamps behind (so as not to glare in her eyes), wreath, half-ring of garlands behind, leaving space in front of her for us.

  ‘Okay, we’re going to sing you down now,’ said Mumma. ‘Everybody get in and say a proper goodbye.’ And she knelt inside the wreath a moment herself, murmured something in Ikky’s ear and kissed her on the forehead.

  We kids all went one by one. Felly got clingy and made Ikky cry; Dash dashed in and planted a quick kiss while she was still upset and would hardly have noticed him; Mumma gave me a cloth and I crouched down and wiped Ik’s eyes and nose – and then could not speak to her bare, blinking face.