Sensible Shoes And Other Stories

By John Ellison Davies

Every life contains a private joke. What's yours? Friendship, fetishism, romance and resurrection are only some of the themes explored in this intriguing collection of eight short stories from a contemporary master of the form. The title story appears in the current issue of Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature Vol. 27 No. 2 Dec. 2013.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Ellison Davies
• Release date: May 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301870066

John Ellison Davies

John Ellison Davies began his working life as a sub-editor for the Dundee Courier & Advertiser in its Fleet Street office in London. After returning to Australia he was an editorial adviser to K.G. Murray Publishers, then feature writer and dance critic for Nation Review, and contemporary dance critic for the National Times. He also contributed to Cleo, Quadrant, and Art & Australia. In 1979 he organised and led the Art March through Sydney streets to coincide with the Sydney Biennale. His poems and short stories have appeared in Northern Perspective, Eureka Street, Southerly, The Australian, Quadrant, Newcastle Herald, The Age, Adelaide Review, Overland, Mattoid, Phoenix Review, Fremantle Arts Review, The Canberra Times, Fine Line, Webber's, the Sydney Morning Herald, Ulitarra, and Weekend Australian Review – online in Diagram 3.5 and OpenWide. Individual poems were broadcast on ABC Radio National's A First Hearing in 1990 and Poetica in 1998. He has reviewed books for Southerly, Northern Perspective, Mattoid, and Australian Book Review. From 2003 to 2006 he was Poet Laureate of the International Corporation of Lost Structures, an internet based arts collective. ICOLS is no longer active but its web site lives on, archived by the Tate Gallery in London.

Book preview

Sensible Shoes

and other stories

by

John Ellison Davies

My thanks to the following magazines in which stories have appeared: Southerly for Jam Drops and Polaroid; Northern Perspective for The Man Who Was Heavy Going and The Fall; Antipodes: A Global Review of Australasian Literature for Sensible Shoes; Quadrant for Half a Wife.

- the author

This Smashwords edition © 2012, 2014, 2018 John Ellison Davies

Contents

The Man Who Was Heavy Going

Jam Drops

Albert’s Getting Married

Sensible Shoes

The Fall

The Party

Polaroid

Redheads

A Little Death

That Day

The Island

Half a Wife

A Moment of Genius

The Man Who Was Heavy Going

I let myself in using the spare key Caitlin gave me after the party.

I don't have to leave, I had suggested.

Be nice, she insisted, pushing me out. Come back and help in the morning.

The living room was a sour-smelling wasteland of overturned ashtrays and spilt wine, a festival of scattered bread crumbs, cheese, tabouli, champagne corks. I began collecting glasses. A half bottle of gin stood as if on duty on the stereo turntable, or rather on a Joan Baez album. At least, I thought, Caitlin had had the good taste to play one of my records before going to bed.

Hey tiger. Mark's lazy alien accent drifted down the hallway. Mark himself appeared in a red bathrobe, scratching his chest.

Don't tiger me, you Californian creep, I said, rubbing a wet finger around the dried gin tracks on Joan Baez.

Say Malcolm, buddy...

Shut up.

Okay, 'kay. Coffee?

Carl was the next awake, or nearly awake.

Tell me it was a dream.

No dream. Merton died last night.

Carl rubbed his pink, gentle, Serbian eyes.

I remember the party finished early, he said, limping into the kitchen.

Caitlin appeared in a loose shirt, one of my striped white-collared business shirts borrowed in happier times.

I still can't believe it, she said. Do you?

I felt his pulse. It stopped.

Oh God.

In the kitchen the coffee began to drip, making choking and gurgling noises.

I feel kinda responsible. Mark perched his coffee on one of two available knees. I wondered how he decided which one to use.

You should.

I guess you don't think much of me, huh?

Guess again. I think you're an elaborate device for carrying car keys. I think...

Caitlin shushed me before I could move on to my opinion of his latest girlfriend, the one who started the trouble.

Hey, she's a good kid, you know. We all say things we don't mean.

Some of us learn to get a rope around our big mouth.

Mark appeared hurt. It didn't suit him.

She had been the centre of attention when I arrived. To me she was just a loud blonde with a big nose. Merton had edged himself in on the group surrounding her, laughing when they laughed, listening while they joked. His eyebrows followed their trivial conversation like slow sad caterpillars above eyes trying to smile. A lost old man at a young party. I don't know how or why he was invited to these things. He never seemed to enjoy himself. Perhaps someone felt sorry for him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was worth three million dollars. I had spoken to him myself once or twice. He was heavy going.

Reminds me of the time I was prospecting, he interrupted clumsily. The younger men turned to him, tolerantly willing to be bored for a few minutes.

Jesus, grandad, said the blonde. We don't want to hear all that.

Merton sagged. This was the pin in his balloon. He did not pretend to smile any more. The caterpillars drooped. He saved her listeners from further embarrassment by walking out onto the balcony. I followed, passing Irina, Mark's previous girlfriend. She was already drunk.

She's very pretty, she hissed, sliding away from me. Caitlin gave her a seat and stayed kneeling beside her.

Merton poured himself a healthy whisky from the trestle table on the balcony. His stubby fingers pinched the railing. I expected his hands to be larger. He'd done a lot with them in twenty years prospecting, before he got lucky. The flesh on his fingers had regained their softness but it was still possible to imagine him in his days of stone, alone, clawing through sand and gravel, sifting quartz and rock chips, slinging a pick and shovel and setting dynamite. Nothing could repair the roughness of his face and neck and arms.

Mr. Merton?

He stared at the satin moonlit water and the yachts' masts bobbing almost level with us in the marina below.

You can call me Jim.

You like the water?

Yes, he said, not at all stony.

I thought you were a land man.

I'm not a city man. I'm no good here. Out there, he said, pointing west, or out there, pointing east. That's where the noise stops.

Buy a boat.

That could be the go, he grinned. Toss the fancy house and start all over again. Minerals under the sea.

I meant a yacht. Something to enjoy.

Who with?

I knew that his wife had left him. She lived now near their only daughter, in a comfortable unit he paid for. She asked nothing more of him though he regularly offered more.

I met her after the war, he continued, anticipating my thoughts. At a country dance, on a night like this. I can still hear them bouncing off the floorboards. The girls. They bounce differently, you know. He began to smile again and then suddenly reached for my arm. I need to sit down.

Let's go in.

Can't make it. His shoulders jerked forward. He clutched the railing, pressing a hand to his chest. Right in a minute.

No you're not. Let me help you.

I took one arm over my shoulder and walked him inside. The party withered around us as people realized what was happening.

Run out of puff, grandad? said the blonde.

I took him into Caitlin's room and helped him onto the bed.

Irina was the only doctor in the house. I found her in a corner, drinking vodka too quickly and flirting with a nearly unconscious computer programmer.

I think Merton's having a heart attack. Can you look at him?

Her eyelids fluttered. She collapsed, legs twisted, her skirt rubbed up above her erotic Japanese party stockings.

I shouted for someone to call an ambulance. Mark - I'll say this much for him - sobered in a second and made the call.