Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 4, Issue 5

  Volume 4: Issue 5

  Patrick Holland & Leah Swann

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Candle Dancer” Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Holland

  “The Way That You Found Me” Copyright © 2012 by Leah Swann

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Editorial

  Ever since reading The Long Road of the Junkmailer (2006), I have had Patrick Holland’s name on a wish list of authors for inclusion in the Review of Australian Fiction.

  Following this astounding debut, Holland has published two more novels—The Mary Smokes Boys (2011), and, most recently, The Darkest Little Room (2012)—as well as a collection of short stories, The Source of the Sound (2010), and an idiosyncratic book of travel essays and reflections, Riding the Trains in Japan: Travels in the Sacred and Supermodern East (2011).

  His prolific work is both unique and enigmatic, and I place him alongside other Australian writers of the same generation—such as Jennifer Mills—that I constantly turn to when I need to feel optimistic about the future of Australian fiction.

  So, naturally, we were very pleased when Holland agreed to contribute a story to our little eRag. “The Candle Dancer” is reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s short fiction, particularly from his early collection, The Elephant Vanishes (1993). It blends the mundane, the mystical, and the mysterious.

  I think you will like it.

  The writer that Patrick Holland has chosen to be paired with in this issue is Leah Swann. Swann’s short stories and poems have appeared in Best Australian Stories (2011), Award Winning Australian Writing 2011, page seventeen, Masthead, Reflecting on Melbourne, and now, the Review of Australian Fiction.

  She has recently published the first in a Young Adult fantasy trilogy, Irina the Wolf Queen: Book I of the Ragnor Trilogy (2012). Her first book, Bearings (2011), a collection of short stories and a novella, was shortlisted for the Dobbie Award in 2012.

  The long story that Swann has contributed to the current issue, “The Way That You Found Me”, only adds to this already impressive body of work.

  Enjoy.

  The Candle Dancer

  Patrick Holland

  It was an afternoon like any other and I did not sense the storm that was coming—how could I have? It was September in Brisbane, one of those balmy evenings so sublime you forgave the city for the summers it subjected you to. Of course, I felt those summers much more in the old days, when I was a poor student of economics. Now I had a middle-management position at an investment bank, did half a dozen trips to Singapore a year, which satisfied my moderate desires for adventure, and had brought a pregnant young wife to a well-appointed little Queenslander in Ashgrove. Three bedrooms, front and back decks; a herb garden; a macadamia and even a mangosteen tree. Without realising it, without preparing for it or even expecting it, I walked onto my front deck with a beer that spring night, my wife in bed, a bit of Polish jazz—perhaps the Stanko Quartet—drifting from my sound system, and was surprised to discover I was happy. I remember looking at my phone in the dim glow of a streetlight. It was after twelve, and happiness had come upon me like an angel in the dark. I smiled. Breathed deeply of air so fresh it seemed ground from crystals. It was then I looked across the road to Victor’s place—he was the middle-aged accountant with the triplet teenage daughters—and I saw him in a second storey window dancing with a candle. His greying curly hair was lit like a halo; his bloated face aglow like some strange redux of the Buddha in an esoteric Japanese shrine. And the dance… like a waltz? But no, that wasn’t quite it… the way he bobbed up and down… the way the candle circled his face… the way he seemed to sing to it. It was like a solemn religious ritual.

  Perhaps all would have been well if I had taken what I had seen to bed with me then. Perhaps, on waking the next day, I would have confused the incident with the night’s dreams. But instead I burst out laughing, and I went inside and woke Jenny.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jen, but you’ve got to see this.’

  She squinted her eyes and scowled at me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Victor. He’s dancing with a candle in his window.’

  ‘Dancing? How dancing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like some pagan rite. Like he’s casting spells. Come and see!’

  And so she did.

  We snuck out onto the veranda together and hid behind shirts drying on a clothes line. I laughed again. Jenny giggled and put her hand to her mouth. And then we realised that the shirts and the dark did not give us the cover we thought, for he had seen us. Undoubtedly he had seen us, and seen us laughing at him. I suppose twenty-five metres stretched between his front door and mine, but there was no mistaking the embarrassed and then hostile look on his face before he blew out the candle and disappeared.

  We shot inside our front door, though it was already too late for stealth. Jen was still giggling.

  ‘What on earth do you think it means?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got no idea. Though one thing’s for sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can never ask him.’

  * * *

  The next day we both sat in our houses—certainly I did—staring through gaps in the venetian blinds and waiting for the other to come out first to get in his car and go to work. Finally it was a quarter to nine and we had each sweated the other out of his hole. We arrived on the street at exactly the same time. I tried to be discreet, but not noticeably different in manner from any other day. I am sure I did not stare at him any longer than usual. God, did I?

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Great. You?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Something on your mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You look like you’ve got something on your mind?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Fine.’

  And I ducked into my car, ignited the engine, set eyes front and drove.

  But when I arrived home that afternoon Jenny said someone—perhaps Victor’s wife—had left a note under her windscreen wiper saying not to park in front of their house anymore.

  ‘There are parks all along the street!’ Jenny declared.

  ‘Just let it slide.’

  Victor’s wife was a defeated child psychologist in her mid-forties. I was not sure what she did at work, but whatever theories she concocted in the university office where she worked did not extend as far as her home, as her daughters ran amok. Victor avoided them by endlessly polishing his vintage Jaguar and cutting planks for the flooring of a new downstairs room. Often you saw him standing at the head of his carport looking over his yard, and I imagined he was formulating some ratio of square metres left by the years before his daughters became adults and could be made to leave.

  ‘Humph! Parking on her side of the street!’ said Jenny. ‘I’ve got a good mind to go over there and tell her off about the behaviour of the ‘three wyrd bitches’ she’s raised up out of hell over there. God, the gall of the woman! Isn’t she embarrassed? If I was her I’d keep my head down.’

  ‘Don’t work yourself up, Jen. It’s just a stupid note.’

  ‘What if there were no parks in front of our house? Which there weren’t this morning? What if I have to be rushed to the hospital? I can’t be expected to walk half way up to Banks Street to get in a car.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll talk to Victor.’

  But I didn’t. How could I? The day before I would have done so happily—even told him off if it came to it. But now there was
this unspoken thing between us: the candle dancing. Somehow I felt it, whatever it was, and the note on the windscreen were related. Though how, I could not say.

  * * *

  That afternoon I was out front replacing a faulty stair. Under the circumstances—the risk of exposure–I would have left it, just stepped over the damn thing, but there was Jen to consider… Victor was downstairs putting the third coat of polish for the night on his Jaguar. His daughters sat on their balcony smoking and laughing. Behind them was a “No Smoking” sign that their father had put up, and it had become a source of great amusement for the girls. Shortly afterwards they set up their pink one-man tent and turned their music up which meant they would be spray tanning and then I realised it was Friday and probably they were having a party.

  I got up from where I knelt on the stairs and saw Victor staring at me from his driveway. I waved. He cut me cold and went back inside the carport. The girls must have been having a few vodka pops as the upstairs of Victor’s house began to sound like an army barracks. In the past Victor had politely asked me to excuse his daughters‘ ‘arguments’… this was the catch-all term he used for the barrages of sailor talk that came down from the top deck of the house at any hours, sometimes just minor things like, ‘get down to the fucking car this instant, Dad, or I’ll be late for school.’ To which he would reply, ‘Coming’. But at other times the talk got nasty. As it did tonight once Victor and his wife had driven off and left the girls to themselves and teenage boys started pouring in off the road and out of taxis. On the milder party nights, Victor sat in his downstairs office indulging his penchant for fantastical adventure movies, with which he drowned out the barbaric talk of his children, while on the bigger nights he and his wife left town. Which was what they did this night.

  Jen sat watching a BBC Poirot film and fuming while I attempted to read the more literary columns in The Economist and enjoy a scotch.

  ‘You fucked him, didn ya?’ came a male voice from across the road.

  ‘He never laid a hand on me!’

  ‘Well why was e in ya bed?’

  I should say this conversation was conducted at the decibel level of a rock concert.

  ‘I don’t know, I was asleep.’

  ‘How’d you know he never laid a hand on ya if you were asleep?’

  ‘Cause I woulda woke up.’

  ‘You wouldn know who ya fucked!’

  ‘That’s it!’ screamed Jen. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  I do not know why, but this sort of thing never really worried me. And I could usually persuade Jenny not to let it worry her either. For me, it was like having comic theatre performing permanently out the window, and I remember I had been smiling at the conversation while reading a piece on the Chinese gold standard when Jen had stood up.

  ‘It’s that note on your car, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s those bloody harlots across the road, Peter. God, can’t you hear it?’

  ‘I– ’

  ‘Call the police, will you?’

  ‘Don’t you think– ’

  Just then a bottle flung from the house smashed on the bitumen.

  ‘I’m not asking.’

  The police arrived in twenty minutes. Drugs were found in the house. Only marijuana, but still… We heard through a neighbour that the girls’ school was contacted. Victor even had to go into the station with them and make some kind of statement and promise to keep a more careful watch over the girls: this of a man whose one hope and dream in life seemed to be that one Saturday he would come home and the aftermath of the previous night’s party would include a pregnancy, or perhaps three pregnancies, and he would be freed. It was easy to imagine the only thing keeping him alive were those odd weekends away where he and his wife could forget they even had children. And now what nature had not cleaved together was bound by law.

  Now on party nights he could not leave as he had before and he sat in his downstairs office with the volume of those fantastical adventure movies he liked nearly reaching that of the party. He no longer simply cut me when I waved to him that Sunday night. He scowled. His eyes were venomous.

  * * *

  I sat up through the night—through many nights that month—with a bottle of scotch, watching, waiting. But neither dancer nor candle came to the window. I was researching.

  There was a thousand-year-old dance from northern Thailand called the Fon Tien, literally ‘candle dance’. A slow, meditative dance to be performed in the open air at night, typically on festive occasions and before dignitaries. There was a royally-sanctioned candle dance performed by villagers in Cambodia to re-sanctify their temples and bring blessings. I looked both up on YouTube. Lovely smiling girls with tapers in each hand made those graceful, elastic movements typical of Indochinese dances. The dancing did not seem to have much—anything—in common with what I had seen Victor doing. But I sincerely hoped the accountant had been performing one or other of them, as the only other examples of candle dancing I could find were pagan. Black arts.

  * * *

  That weekend we had what might loosely have been called a cocktail party. A few friends from the bank, a couple of Jenny’s old school friends, and a young crime novelist she had picked up from somewhere. The girls drank cocktails and the men beer. I served my own—what turned out to be a really top shelf little pilsner. I remembered I had promised Victor a couple of bottles, and then I remembered that we had deliberately, accidentally, forgotten to invite him. Jenny circulated with trays of Spanish tapas she had made through the afternoon, and I caught her looking across the road every time she went back to the fridge. I followed her and looked too. Victor and his wife were on their front veranda, staring back at us like that old American Gothic picture by Grant Wood, where nothing is ostensibly amiss, but there is menace coming out of it like cold out of a deep freeze.

  ‘Go back and try to enjoy yourself,’ I said to Jenny.

  ‘Yes,’ she shivered.

  * * *

  The next day she found a note in our mailbox. Just one half-sheet of paper on which was written ‘Bitch!’

  ‘Do you think it’s the mother or the daughters?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jen. I suppose we did get them in trouble with the police. Perhaps we should let it lie.’

  ‘Let it lie! That candle-dancing twit and his malevolent women have pushed me over the edge.’

  ‘Jen, please–’

  Her eyes lit up.

  ‘You know what you should do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know how sometimes when they’re on the booze they whistle at you when you go for a bike ride?’

  ‘That was only once. And I don’t wear the lycra anymore.’

  ‘Well I’ll dig it up for you. I want to scare the hell out of those girls.’

  ‘They weren’t exactly scared.’

  ‘The lycra’s just to draw them out of the house. All you’ve got to do is ride around out there one night when they’re emboldened by drink, then when one of them comes out on the street to whistle, call her across and tell her you’ll give her twenty bucks for a bit of oral.’

  ‘God alive, Jen! Did you hear what you just said?’

  ‘I don’t mean to actually do it! Just threaten. It’s a joke.’

  ‘The police will get a laugh out of it when I’m explaining it to them. Those girls are fifteen years old! Jen, you’re scaring the hell out of me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m at wit’s end. Perhaps we should move.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind? It’s wonderful here.’

  ‘Is it? Ever since that night we…’

  I sat Jen down and told her about my research. I told her about the Indochinese dances, the possibility that Victor had been performing one.

  ‘Doesn’t seem very likely?’

  ‘We better hope it’s one of those. Everything else was witchcraft.’

  ‘Let’s be reasonable. Maybe he was just working by candlelight, singing a song, the
n picked up the candle and happened to go to the window.’

  ‘The power wasn’t out.’

  ‘My friend the novelist does it. Writes by candlelight.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how tax returns improve by the light of a flame.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘What if that damn accountant has cast a spell on us? Just look at us, bickering at each other.’

  ‘Well he’s not doing too well out of it either.’

  ‘Isn’t that the way of magic, why it’s dangerous? It comes back on the caster too.’

  ‘Well it’ll look good on the flyer if we have to sell the house. Ideal for young couples. Fully air-conditioned. Walk to cafes and shops. Owners moving because accountant placed an evil enchantment on them.’

  * * *

  That night, I kept my vigil as usual, expecting nothing. But at some time around midnight he was standing on the road. I spoke low to Jenny and she woke.

  ‘Come to the window.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He’s on the road.’

  ‘Does he have a candle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘God, Pete, he’s just standing there like a madman. And he’s staring right at us.’

  Our bedroom, to my eyes, was completely dark.

  ‘He couldn’t have seen me watching him, could he?’

  Jenny looked around the room. She agreed there was very little backlight. And yet…

  ‘I’m going out to meet him,’ I said.

  ‘No, don’t. He could be dangerous.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to sleep with him standing there in the middle of the bitumen staring in at us like that? I’m going.’

  ‘Well, wait then.’ Jenny sat up and fished through her bedside drawer. ‘Take the gun.’

  ‘The what?’

  Now I saw the thing glinting in the shallow scraps of light that came in from the street.