The Best Australian Essays 2017

Anna Goldsworthy

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925435924
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

'When a group of essays get together in a room they start talking to each other, often in surprising ways … The existence of these voices – stylish, vital frequently wise – is a source of hope.' —Anna Goldsworthy The Best Australian Essays showcases the nation's most eloquent, insightful and urgent non-fiction writing. In her debut as editor of the anthology, award-winning author Anna Goldsworthy chooses brilliant pieces that provoke, unveil, engage and enlighten. From the election of Donald Trump to digital disruption, from the passing of rock gods to the wonders of Australian slang, these essays get to the heart of what's happening in Australia and the world.Contributors include Shannon Burns, Barry Humphries, Stan Grant, Keane Shum, Richard Cooke, Nick Feik, Michael Adams, Micheline Lee, Mandy Sayer, Tim Flannery, Sonya Hartnett, Harriet Riley, John Clarke, Jennifer Rutherford, Amanda Niehaus, Sam Vincent, Lech Blaine, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Moreno Giovannoni, Janine Mikosza, Melissa Howard, Helen Garner, James Wood, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Skinner, Sebastian Smee and Anwen Crawford.Anna Goldsworthy is the author of Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, the Australian, the Adelaide Review and The Best Australian Essays. She is also a concert pianist, with several recordings to her name.

The Bystander

Lech Blaine

There were seven of us. Five in the car, two in the boot. We were driving to a party no-one knew for sure was happening. This is how our nights played out. We followed hints and whisper trails of action, motivated by the thrill of the chase, or maybe just the fear of staying still and missing out and remaining unseen by the enormous crowd of people that populated our imaginations.

Except now, with smartphones and social media, we were one step closer and three steps further away from the crowd. We didn’t need to be creative. We could see with our own eyes, in real time, exactly what we were missing out on and who we weren’t being seen by. So we climbed in cars and drove in the general direction of attention.

The trip began on a semirural street. Narrow road. Trees climbed higher than my line of sight. Before we left, I snuck outside and jumped in the front passenger seat. I was short and chubby with dark hair that ran a mess beneath my ears.

Tim sat in the middle of the back. Tall and square-jawed. He’d been my best mate since Year Eight. We went to St Mary’s, an all-boys Catholic school near the centre of Toowoomba.

Everyone else went to Downlands, a more elite private school on the richer side of the city. Henry was back left. Soft features and bottom lip permanently split. Will was back right. Large and laid-back. Dom was the designated driver. He was excitable, with a hint of an American accent.

The final two were out of view. They’d drawn the short straw of the boot. Hamish had pale and lanky limbs. He was quiet with a sly grin. Nick was short with thick arms and legs, a wild and prodigiously gifted rugby league player.

Eighteen months earlier Nick had switched to Downlands on a rugby union scholarship, drawing Tim and me into a different social orbit altogether. My dad was a country publican. Tim’s dad was a meat worker. We’d been accepted into a sphere of old money and new homes built on sprawling acreages. It was our final year of high school. Everything was ahead of us.

Up front there was nothing between the road and me except the windscreen. The speakers blasted ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, an elegy hidden inside a singalong. My memory is a blinking mixture of lyrics screamed out incoherently and the stink of beer and sweat and cigarette smoke. A million things and nothing in particular.

The trees disappeared abruptly, razed for the New England Highway. We waited at a freshly erected set of traffic lights. To our right was Highfields, a planned community fifteen minutes north of Toowoomba.

When the bottom circle of the lights blazed green, we turned left towards the city. No other traffic to clash with. The singing petered out. We concentrated on our phones or on the windscreen. The car accelerated. Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. I kept my eyes straight and my breath bated. Billboards flicked white streaks behind me. I felt light in the head and heavy in the feet. The road, half-lit and disappearing, burnt a blur into my brain.

My iPhone began to vibrate. I’d been texting a girl about a rendezvous planned for later that night. Sex was at the centre of my attention. I looked down to read the message. It was littered with emoticons. I typed a one-word response with two exclamation marks, but I never got around to pressing send.

There was a glitch in our direction. My gaze shifted quickly between the two competing sheets of glass. We’d drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the highway. The back tyre left the road for a fraction of a second, spinning out in the mouth of a gravel driveway.

Dom reefed on the steering wheel, a knee-jerk attempt to regain control. He overcorrected the overcorrection. We zigzagged across the highway – right towards the median strip, left towards the shoulder, and right towards the median strip again.

My first instinct was exhilaration. It looked like we were driving into farmland. Nothing serious enough to scream about. But my geometry was bad. Blame it on velocity. At ninety-five kilometres per hour, the car moved twenty-five metres every second. It took us approximately three seconds to travel from the gravel of the hard shoulder to the trees on the median strip.

The car ploughed front-first into the vegetation. The windscreen filled with greenery. As we flew through the branches, the front of the car scraped the stump of a tree, spinning us another ninety degrees.

The median strip led to the other side of the highway. We emerged boot-first into a flood of oncoming headlights. Screams howled from the back seat. I’m dead, I thought. Then it hit. Another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding.

*

I didn’t get the luxury of a concussion. I stayed awake the whole way through. There was a glimpse of black, a few seconds max, when my head reeled from the soft impact against the dashboard. White pinwheels spun on the inside of my eyelids. Blood flooded back into my feet and fingers.

After that everything went berserk. Liquids pissed from unseen engines. Radiators hissed with steam. The windscreen was missing. The wipers whipped against thin air.

I sat there for a long time, dazed and amazed to be alive, staring blankly at the bonnet, which faced back towards the missing windscreen. I couldn’t see what we’d hit or been hit by. A sticky fluid broke waves against my ankles.

I’ve pissed myself, I thought.

I looked down with mixed relief. Half a carton of wasted beers. I pulled my feet back towards the seat. My thongs floated in the foam. I unclicked the belt. My hand was like the claw inside a toy machine. I made it move without feeling anything. I wiped blood that wasn’t mine onto the sleeve of my jumper. I flicked shards of glass from my clothes with numb fingers.

My iPhone was missing. I searched frantically and found it down beside the seat adjuster. The screen resembled the windscreen, completely shattered, but that damage was pre-existing. It was 9.53 p.m. I looked beside me. Dom lay facedown on the steering wheel. I looked behind me. A mess of heads and limbs leaned forward. Will and Tim and Henry. Necks bent at unnatural angles. Sick sounds issuing from their lips.

I reached out and shook each of them by the arm, gently and then more urgently, to absolutely no avail.

‘Oi,’ I yelled. ‘Hey!’

This was the loneliest moment of my life. It was like waking up in a nuclear bunker where everyone else had been gassed.

So I waited. At no stage did it occur to me that they may not wake up. I underestimated death, the ease and speed with which it can sneak under your guard. My only visits from the grim reaper came in the dim minutes every morning and night via radio and TV. Earthquakes and tidal waves. Hijacked planes and celebrity suicides.

Death had less credibility to me than a reality TV show.

*

A shadow streaked across the headlights. This came as a revelation to me. I could leave any time I liked. The shadow came to the driver’s side window. It belonged to a heavy guy with terrified eyes.

‘Shit!’ he screamed. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Shit! Shit! Can you turn the car off?’

I hadn’t noticed it was still going. The engine revved and dropped again, lead foot on the accelerator. I reached for the keys. The ignition was missing. It was hidden in a mess of plastic.

‘I can’t find them,’ I said.

The man stuck his hand into the plastic and made the motor stop. Everything he said confirmed the dire straits we were stranded in.

‘HEY, CHAMP! Relax. Everything’s gonna be fine!’

I reached for the door handle. It had been obliterated on impact. The window winder was gone. Mine was the only window still intact. I was trapped in a fast-moving disaster. Each new fact was more startling than the last.

Meanwhile, a team of swift Samaritans was assembling beside the car. They divvied up the serious injuries between them. A blonde woman joined the man at the window. She was fearless. Later I found out she was a nurse on her way home from patching up other people’s broken body pieces.

‘Get me out!’ I screamed. At this stage in the proceedings, the police reports describe me as being hysterical. The reports have only a passing resemblance to my memory.

‘Sweetie,’ said the woman, ‘I’m going to need you to be brave. To sit still for a little bit. Is that something you can do for me?’

I nodded dishonestly. I had no intention of staying in the wreck a second longer. My eyes scanned for an exit route. I found one through the driver’s side window. The woman’s eyes went wide.

‘No! Don’t!’

I climbed over the top of Dom, hands pitched into the void, leaving the first responders with no choice. Cowardice is easy to commit and difficult to live with. They helped yank me to safety. My feet hit the bitumen with relief. I started running to the rear of the vehicle.

‘Wait!’ said the man, or the woman, or maybe it was neither of them. Fresh responders were arriving every second.

The boot was ripped open like a tin of tuna. Hamish reclined against the bumper. One hand reached back inside the boot. I used my iPhone to light up his face. Eyelids shut and unblinking. Blood dripped behind his ear.

The rest of the boot was crushed into a crawl space. I searched frantically below and beside the car. Nick was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if he’d ever been in the boot to begin with. I hadn’t seen him climb in. I just knew – that sudden certainty produced by a stray sound or throwaway phrase.

A woman rubbed my shoulder. The situation permitted these strangers to lay their fingers all over me.

‘He’ll be okay!’ she said.

I broke free and searched further afield from the car. Twenty metres away, I located a silhouette on the highway. I sprinted over to the shadow, using my iPhone as a searchlight.

Nick lay parallel to the fog line, eyes facing his brain. The glow from my iPhone illuminated the white shock of his skull. He’d been ejected headlong from the boot. A crooked Z was carved from his hairline to his eyebrow, deep and gushing with blood.

I noticed bystanders behind me. Half-a-dozen of them. Where did they keep coming from? A shadow pulled me aside, no gender in the lunar gloom.

‘Leave him be,’ the stranger announced to me. ‘He’s fucked.’

‘Ambulances are on their way,’ said another.

They were right. I heard the faint suggestion of sirens. The bystanders seemed down-beat, afraid of losing their proximity to the action. I clapped my hands enthusiastically.

‘Hang in there, buddy!’ I yelled. ‘You’ll be right!’

The bystanders looked my way admiringly. I just stood there, grimacing, wishing I were somewhere else.

*

Soon the dead end of the highway was alive. Si...