K:GENERAL FICTION

<section>

<title> K:GENERAL FICTION </title>

<sample><id> K01</id>

<note> 2005 words </note>

<source> Colours of the Sky </source>

<bl> By Peter Cowan </bl>

Crows lifted over the thin bushes. Settled to the stripped tree. On the
ground the bark lay twisted in long strips. The carcass near the edge of
the road was split, broken. Dry. Long ago dry. Come if you wish, he had
written. I shall be here.
  It seemed humorous now. A bit savage. A kind of joke no one was responsible
for. The flat ground to the left was rising, seemed to twist away in the
heat and hard glare. Nearer to the road, a ridge, sharp, red, the lip stained
in long white streaks, held like the breaking edge of a wave.
  
I had gone to see Sophia. Not knowing what to expect. I could not remember
anyone giving her a particular title, a role, aunt, cousin, one of these
she must have been. No memory remained of her appearance, only of a house
and single person in it. The sense of a person alone. But she too had written.
It was a small house, I had thought of something bigger, many rooms, now
the roadway cut in until there was no verge, only the strip of pavement.
Traffic crowded towards lights at the corner. She was very small, thin,
strong. Grey hair drawn back, smoothly, like that of a younger woman. Yet
I thought at once, had a kind of tiredness. Young man, she said, I can see
you do not remember me. She held the door. Why should you.
  The front room was very clean. Stripped, I was sure. It had once surely
held a great confusion of objects. Waiting now.
  She brought tea, and biscuits she had made herself. Her thin taut face.
Small, quick hands.
  As you see, I am fading quite comfortably.
  No, I said.
  Should dying be uncomfortable?
  No. No I didn't mean that.
  I'm sure you didn't. There is nothing I much care for any longer. Should
I like all this?
  What did the quick gesture of her thin hand take in. I don't know, I said.
It had become Dickensian. The small boy. Perched at bay. Indeed she could
well have been in the front row as that passionate voice ceased. To the
wild applause. Mr Dickens, please, your autograph. And though she was quite
without malice, I had become the small boy, inadequate, resentful. She,
a voice from the past.
  Your mother stopped visiting a long time ago. You may not remember.
  It was a long time ago. Half of my lifetime. At least. There seemed no
humour in her words. Time had perhaps shrunk in this house. She set her cup
neatly on the beatiful tray that I might have seen but did not recall. I wanted
to see you. I think you are almost the last.
  There did not seem any answer to that. Her thin face moved. A sort of
smile with precision.
  A preparation, she said.
  And whatever else we had tried to talk about while I ate her biscuits.
While you are here, she said, you should go and see Walter. If you can.
Do not be misled by him.
  Walter?
  My brother. As they would have it. Her smile this time with irony and
some faint bitterness I did not understand, but must be aware of.
  It is not far these days. A long way once. And I'm sure a long time since
ever I was there. But he may want to talk to you. 
  Distance, too, had shrunk in this house. My visit she accepted as if I
called in from a neighbouring suburb, a street away, rather than the other
side of a continent. Her letter had come before the other, after my mother's
death. I had not answered it.
  This place could have been yours, she said, as we stood at the door,
the traffic now building to the rush hour. But I'm afraid it has never been
mine. She lifted her hand as I reached the pavement, and closed the door.
The news of her death had come to me in England. The house was not left
to me, an expectation that had never occurred to me until she spoke. It
had belonged, all those years, to Walter. It was an odd visit, an impulse,
after I received her letter, and was on the way to England, a chance to
break the boredom and irritation of a long flight. Though it had not, in
the event, done that. The early convict hulks so plainly the prototype of
the jet liners. Even those were spared the endless clambering children.
A visit that owed something to an idea of seeing again that place where
I had grown up, and, without ever really thinking about it, expected to
remain. Looking down at a hot shadeless street from the window of a cheap
motel, I had not been able to pursue that. Perhaps in any case the intention
had been less strong than a curiosity at the complete lack of any trace
of these people in my mother's few enough belongings. Sophia, Walter, who
else? No papers or photographs. Only of my father. No voices were to reach
out from that past, it seemed. Otherwise I might have known Sophia in the
years when we had something to say to one another. It appeared I had been
steered away from my relatives.

Twelve thirty on the west coast. If the city radio laid claim to this as
some part of the coast. Thin bushes made dark patches like shade across
the ground, showed black along the top of the rise. Wattles. Or mulga. Neither
of which I could claim to recognise, despite the coloured spreads of endless
coffee tables. Perhaps they were all the same, some just drier, more brittle.
Curving slowly in an arc as the car travelled. Earlier there had been mining
towns about the backtopped road with its glitter of stubbies, bottles, cans,
small cartons like white everlastings, towns moving to new life as the price
of gold lifted, the shells of older buildings not too stark a comment. Beyond
the blacktop, long scars lying across the flats, the earth piled and abandoned,
raw scrapes along the dry creek beds, stones, bushes, brown and red earth
gashed back. Spoil from metal detectors and dozers no doubt. In the new
rush. Time would possibly soften them too. If it was not too late.
  Now ahead there were the black struts of a shaft, the earth held in clean
dumps, flat topped, like the ridge of land away to the left. There were
no buildings, a track half smoothed in dust, dead grass.
  From the old shaft-head patterns of shadow marked the ground, the car.
My water stained briefly the base of the solid upright. I could not imagine
why I had come. Into this mad time warp.

It had begun, or at least been decided, in the walled garden. Where no doubt
a lot more important concerns had begun. Mr Gladstone walking the paths.
Perhaps with Lord Aberdeen, possibly some official of State, or the powerful
of his party seeking to return yet again. Perhaps not for these things at
all, but in the half dark of evening with Catherine. Very far from those
other streets, the shadows beyond the lamps, figures half seen. Here light
glowing from the house whose windows overlooked the garden. A long way from
London, a retreat. The horses and carriage from the city. Lost one night
in a fog, near Hyde Park, with the Gladstones finding temporary lodgings,
to the amusement of their friends who thought Dollis Hill a hill too far.
But no locking the park gate at six o'clock for him. He would have been
surprised, it may have been, to know this would one day be named for him.
Perhaps even the gardens had been much the same. The purple and yellow borders
of the neat beds, the stocks, pink, white, delphiniums tall above them.
Carnations in gradations of colour beyond imagining. I had never been a
gardener. The old brick walls held, indeed may have been literally held,
in creepers. And of course the roses. A few here, and in special beds outside
the walls in the outer park, insolently luxurious. I did not see her at
first, coming from the narrow gate, walking slowly, unwillingly. I am not
meant for walking, she said, declining my voyages about the park. Her dark
hair loose, she had been back to the house. Mr Mason went home, she said.
So I left early. No one will notice.
  I moved the books, which she seemed unaware of, and might have sat on.
I think she was short-sighted. Those heavy eyes.
  By the delphiniums, I said. Those things, with that deep colour.
  They could be wallflowers. But I don't know about flowers.
  I never paid much attention to them myself until I came to this place.
  In our front garden at home there were two cement gnomes. Later someone
gave my father a cement Aborigine. I thought it was funny. They were loving
gnomes. Inside they hated each other's guts.
  The gnomes?
  The other gnomes. When they split up I was old enough to be glad. She
reached down, touching the deep brown petals very gently. I think it killed
my mother. The whole thing. I wonder sometimes if my father is still alive.
In America. I told you. Though I suspect he has reached your Boot Hill.
I think he'd like that. He was a great hater.
  Other relatives had been kinder, leaving her the house in the quiet street
with its lines of two-story semi-detached, set far enough away from the
through-road of Willesden and the older solid houses that had become tenements,
milk bottles and rubbish sprouting about their paths and doorways, empty
cartons kicked along the pavements. Dog turds. Not*no so far, perhaps, from
the Finchley Road where Dickens walked in the evenings, that great voice
declaiming his part in Wilkie Collins' play. To the alarm, it was said,
of residents. Nothing would alarm them now. Set back also from the railway
embankment that in summer discovered a thick green vegetation where children
might have played, once must have played, though they stayed inside now.
Heard from the pavements. Her street was close yet removed from these things,
almost without traffic, few cars, where you heard people walking, and the
occasional street trees threw a dirty felt of spent leaves across the pavement.
Where there was a kind of silence. Raised voices, yes. Occasionally the
day-long television. But somehow nothing. A peace.
  You don't have to go, she said. And do this thing.
  I have to go. Whether I do this thing, as you call it, or not. I can't
stay here.
  Yes.
  But no. It's a matter of nationality.
  Not that again. Look, there are so many people in this country illegally
they've given up bothering. They would never even look for you.
  With you as a cover, yes, it might work. A respectable girl in a solicitor's
office.
  A respectable solicitor's office.
  I do have to find this place, I said, and see whoever is there. Whatever
I do afterwards.
  You let it obsess you. But you could come back.
  Ellen liked to run separate problems together. Possibly a trick learned
from her solicitors. Confusing, if you tried to argue with her. She probably
did think my insistence that legally I could not stay indefinitely in England
was a quibble, but she ignored the fact that it would become very real if
I began to look for some kind of position. She was very forgiving, of all
save those gnomes whose seething guts she joined in hatred. I had thought
a good deal about going to this place I could barely remember, thought about
it sitting in the garden, half asleep sometimes. When she was not here.
But not, surely, letting it obsess me. As a child I had been there with
my mother, a long journey, by rail, then car. 

</sample>



<sample><id> K05 </id>

<note> 2004 words </note>

<source> Zat izz apples, sir </source>

<bl> By Janka Abrami </bl>

THE MUCH TALKED about holidays had arrived.
  On the last day of work, just before the break-up Party, I
received my wages with three days extra pay, which was a
pleasant surprise. "That's for Christmas" the boss explained,
when I asked him. He shook my hand warmly and wished me `happy
holidays' but I couldn't think of anything less exciting than
being home with Bronka for two weeks, while Nathan would be at
work.
  "I can't afford to laze for so long" he said a week earlier,
urging his brother to help him find temporary work for the
holidays. "The second instalment for our tickets to Australia
has to be paid and we have to buy a few little things; other
than food."
  "If you'd only start to look for a partner or borrow some money
to start a plumbing business of your own, as you pro+mised, I
would be much happier" I said when we were alone. But Nathan
shrugged his shoulders. "Give me time, Rela."
  Harry talked us into going to the city to see the Christmas
decorations. So on the last Saturday before the holidays our
two families travelled to the city by train, then walked along
Swanston Street to Bourke Street, where all the excitement was.
It was a clear evening yet I was surprised to see so many
people of all ages congesting the pavement in front of Myer
store. Excited children, many in pyjamas and slippers stood
fascinated at the display windows, or perched on the shoulders
of their parents looking fixedly at them.
  Their faces were radiant and eyes glistened as they tried to
follow each movement, each step of the walking, dancing and
singing human-like figures. They pressed their noses to the
glass in wonder, their mouths open, as though they were
actually witnessing a miracle.
  I glanced at Sonny. His face wore the same dream-like
expression and I was grateful to Harry for talking us into
coming.
  "Nu? Didn't I tell you it'll be worthwhile?" he asked, as
though guessing what I thought. I nodded.
  "I bet you haven't seen anything like it in your life" Bronka
said. "Not in Israel anyway."
  I wanted to ask her what she knows about Israel, when Harry
beat me to it. "Maybe it were possible if our uncle Myer
wouldn't have converted and gone to Israel instead of Australia
..." He laughed and then added: "As it is I don't think there
are many shops in the world that can compare with our good old
uncle Myer." He said it in half jest, but I was sure that I
detected pride behind it. It was strange, as the majority of
the Myer family were no longer Jewish, but as I found out soon
after, many of our friends took pleasure in half boasting, half
joking about `our uncle.' It wasn't long before I too, knew the
name of every Jew who contributed to the welfare, politics, or
in any way helped in the develop+ment of Australia, and I didn't
hesitate to disclose their names to newcomers and tourists.
  When we finally stood at the windows, I was as fascinated by
the display as the youngsters, following them from window to
window, trying to work out the meaning of each scene.
  "Look, mummy, that Angel looks exactly like Dinah" Sonny
exclaimed, glancing from Dinah to the window and back.
  He was right. Dinah was just as blonde and chubby, with blue
eyes and happy smile, as the angel in the window.
  There weren't many occasions for me and Bronka to share a joke,
trying as we may, so I was happy to tell her what Sonny had
said, and we laughed, feeling a pleasant closeness.
  It was good to be away from the confines of the flat, where I
felt more constricted as time went on.
  "You show me two women who could share a small kitchen and a
tiny bathroom where the toilet has a place of honour right
opposite the door, without having an argu+ment, even when the
children scream, and I'll agree to live like that for another
year" I said to Nathan the previous evening, after Dinah opened
the toilet door and told Sonny to hurry up, or she'll call her
mum.
  "And my poor son ran to me with his pants down and his bottom
dirty" I added.
  "You and Bronka deserve medals" he said. "I'll buy you some."
  I wasn't amused. "It's easy for you to joke. You're never home."
  Now, in the open and with the sky clear above us, all that was
forgotten. We were here to enjoy ourselves.
  "Want to go to a cafeteria?" Harry asked.
  "I want to wee" Dinah said, as we walked to Elizabeth Street
in search of a restaurant or cafeteria.
  "Me too" Sonny whispered in Hebrew.
  "There ought to be a toilet in a cafeteria" Bronka assured the
children. But they didn't want to wait and Dinah started to
cry. So we took the children into a lane and while the men
stood at the entry to it, pretending to be deep in conversa+tion, 
the children went about their business.
  Bronka went to help Dinah to pull her panties up, while I
watched Sonny button up his pants, when Bronka exclaimed: "Look
what you've done! That isn't wee ..."
  "I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it ... it came out
together" Dinah cried.
  Bronka threw a hanky on top of the evidence and we hurried from
the lane. "Let's go, let's go" we urged the men, running. We
turned back into Bourke Street, then to Swan+ston Street. The
huge Father Christmas on top of Foy's store sparkled with
flickering, multi-coloured lights, but the dis+play windows
didn't attract much interest.
  The cafeteria which we finally found, smelled of fried chips,
the coffee was watery and the snowballs, the only
sweet available at this hour were dry. The children dozed off
with the dripping icecreams in their hands and we had to carry
them to the taxi. On the way home Bronka asked, "Wasn't it
wonderful?"
  "Hmmm" I answered half asleep.
  "Don't tell me that you saw Christmas decorations in Tel Aviv
which were as lovely" she challenged.
  Too tired to answer, I only shook my head.

  It was raining on most days of the two week holidays. Gula and
her family went to Sorrento for two weeks and I spent my time
cleaning, cooking, washing and trying to amuse Sonny.
  Bronka and I tolerated each other and she let me use the stove
and other facilities, careful not to interfere too much and I
of course tried not to be in her way, as well, but it wasn't
easy for any of us.
  "Are we going to live with your brother forever?" I asked
Nathan one evening.
  He looked at me dismayed. "What do you mean? We're here only
seven weeks."
  "Isn't that more than enough?"
  The hurt in his eyes forced me to stop, but a few days later,
after I bumped into Bronka accidentally, making her spill some
soup from the pot she carried, I couldn't hold back my anger
anymore.
  "I want to find a flat" I said. "I know that we need key money,
but if I wait till we save enough, I'll go crazy.
  "You're crazy already if you think that you can have one
without money!" he replied patiently.
  "We can go to Jewish Welfare" I suggested.
  "I'm not going to offend my brother with that. And don't you
mention Welfare in front of him," he pleaded.
  "But I'm not going to wait forever, you'll have to do some+thing" 
I finished with a warning.

  The holidays finished, but the weather was still bad.
  "Worst summer in a long time" Sarah Colman assured me.
  That wasn't much consolation, when I took Sonny to a lady,
whose son went with him to kindergarten and then took the tram
to Balaclava, to work.
  Nathan returned to his permanent job, happy to have saved
eighty pounds from our combined wages and holiday pay.
  "Not bad after two months in the country" he said boast+fully.
But this was not enough to ease my tension. We needed at least
three hundred pounds key money for the smallest flat.
  I became nervous, easy to flare up and though I kept my temper
as much as possible, I was irritable and cried at the least
upset.
  One evening we were sitting in the `lounge room' which happened
to be our `bedroom' as well, while Bronka enter+tained some
friends. The time was dragging on, the children were fast
asleep and the discussion about the importance of traditional
Jewish food in the continuity of `Jewishness' seemed never
ending.
  I was tired after day's work and didn't take part in the dis+cussion, 
hoping that someone would notice my discomfort and
give a sign for the guests to get up, so that I could convert
the sofa they were sitting on, to the bed I was eager to sleep
in. Despite my silent fidgeting and frequent sighs, they were
sitting unperturbed.
  Finally I jumped up, ran to the kitchen and slammed the door
behind me.
  "Why did you do that?" Nathan hissed, coming after me. "Do you
want everyone to think that something is wrong?!"
  I wanted to push him out, to leave me alone, but he held me.
  "What do I care what they think" I cried, "what anyone thinks,
I'm tired, I want to sleep ... All the world knows how
fantastic your family is ... I know, you know. But who cares
... Let us be friends from afar ... All I want is to be on
our own. "Out of here ..."
  "Shash ... Rela, not so loud" Nathan pleaded.
  That was the last straw. I pushed him away screaming. "Shash
yourself, you softie! All you care about is not to upset
your brother and his wife! What about me, ha?! What about your
own wife, whom you dragged away from her brother?! We weren't
some `poor relations' in Israel, why should we be here?!"
  "We aren't poor relations" my husband whispered. "Have a little
bit of patience. I'll see what we can do, please, Rela." It was
quiet in the kitchen. Not a sound was coming from the
loungeroom either.
  "If you haven't any money, you can try and pawn your `bobes
yerusheh' I said sarcastically. I don't care what you do. I
want out of here, that's all."
  I looked at my husband, my heart felt heavy, but I forced
myself to continue, though in a quieter, distinctive tone. "I
can't go on like that. You don't have to commit murder, or to
steal, but I'm telling you to hurry and find other
accommodation, before I do something drastic. So ... either
you find us a flat very soon or else ..."
  "Oy vey is mier" Nathan wailed and I knew that I didn't have
to finish the sentence.

  After a sleepless night I was on my way to work the follow+ing
morning, with Bronka close at my heels telling me what to buy
on the way home, when Nelly stopped us.
  "Poor old Tilby from the flat above passed away" she said.
  "Sorry, I late to work" I said, walking on.
  But she stopped me. "This may be your lucky strike, Rela, you
know." She started to explain and though I only under+stood part
of it, I rushed after Bronka to their apartment.
  "Quick, go to the agent" she urged Harry. "Mister Tilby died
and we can have his flat."
  I shuddered. Oh, God. Could he have died because of my threat
to Nathan? The thought haunted me for a while, then came back
when Harry returned from the agent with the news that we can
have the flat. "The agent was so quick to agree to my proposition, 
that for a moment I thought he was waiting for me. And no key money. What do you say to that, ha?"

</sample>



<sample><id> K06 </id>

<note> 2004 words </note>

<source> The life that I have led </source>

<bl> By Serge Liberman </bl>

<h> Fame: or the Rise and Fall of Benny Liner </h>

Benny Liner called me over to his table the moment I entered the Scheherazade.
At first, I didn't recognize him. He wore dark glasses and a scraggy beard
that appeared to have been stuck on by a third-rate Vaudevillian make-up
artist. But the balding head, the tapering face and large pointed nose were
his alone. A Cyrano was he who was thirty-five but looked forty and suffered
visibly from hay fever.
  We had first met in the third form. Together, after school, we had studied
algebra and trigonometry, had quizzed each other about the lakes of America
and the Kings of England, exchanged copies of Steinbeck and the juicier
Erskine Caldwell, and later became infatuated with Mary Unger, a wide-eyed
narrow-hipped lip-licking coquette of the first form. For four years, we
were friends. Then the university separated us. I set sights on medicine;
he went into architec+ture. He failed, turned to history and politics,
defaulting in these through soporific boredom and loss of interest, and
drifted, a rudderless vessel, into a pen-pushing position with the Department
of Taxation. Then I lost track of him until his name appeared in the papers
in connection with some scandal of which I had garnered a few disjointed
facts. I had been engaged in post-graduate study in Cincinatti at the height
of the affair and did not know the details.
  After the initial formalities, during which he ordered an iced-coffee
and vanilla slice for me, he took a pipe from his checkered waist-coat pocket,
stuffed it with cheap tobacco, lit the matted pulp with considerable sibilant
sucking and blew white billows of smoke into the air. His hands were white
and plump. They were also without hair.
  `Well, I suppose you've heard,' he said, draping an arm about a chair
and crossing one leg over the other in an attitude of indolence.
  `Heard what?,' I asked.
  `You are a diplomat, aren't you?,' he said.
  The smoke of his cheap tobacco did not blend too well with the coffee
before me. I waved it away. Seeing my gesture, he smothered his pipe with
the palm of his hand.
  `Forgive me. I'd forgotten. You never were a smoker, were you?,' he said.
  He paused, probed at some probable molar cavity with his tongue, then
resumed.
  `Well, I'm a celebrity, did you know? I've earned myself a small niche
in history. I wanted the sun; and, man, I got it. I sowed, and as I sowed
so did I reap. I was rubbed lusciously with the sweetest honey, but taste
instead of the most caustic tar.'
  When I furrowed my brow at this flow of cryptic aphor+isms, Benny Liner
stopped speaking. He scratched at a patch of eczema at the root of his nose
and sniffed. He bit his upper lip and seemed disappointed.
  `So you really don't know? You really don't? - Do you have time then or
are your patients hustling you?'
  `It's my afternoon off. I have time,' I said.
  `Good. Drink your coffee slowly then.'
  I bit into my vanilla slice. Benny took a spray from his pocket, squeezed
it into his nostrils and sneezed. His relief, as he wiped his beard, was
immediate.
  `It all started for one reason alone,' he began. `It all started because
I wanted too much. I wanted - in one word - to be famous.'
  `Oh?', I said.
  `Listen. - Two years ago, I was a nobody, a Mr No-name, a Mr Zero, a Mr
Zilch. And it hurt. It hurt to realize that for all my thirty-three years,
I had achieved nothing important. Keats, you will remember, was already
dead at twenty-six; Einstein was the same age when he changed man's concept
of the universe. And then there were Newton, and Goethe, Mozart and Shelley,
all men of genius, famous before even their first grey hairs appeared. While
I, with half my life as good as over, all I had done was to ensure that
the people's tax returns were in order and that no-one was getting the better
of the Department. Surely - surely! - I had been destined for better things.
My parents had, after all, survived Europe. I myself had recovered from
meningitis, and once, when I was five, six perhaps, I was knocked down by
a truck and had crawled out with barely a scratch. There must have been
some greater purpose, some special mission for which I had been spared.
Surely that was a fair assumption, No?
  `Well, I had early on set my mind upon becoming a writer. And not merely
of books, of those potboilers and throwaways that fill to nausea the shelves
of every store like tins of tuna, but of sagas, chansons de geste, epics.
Epics! In the lower forms, you will remember, I was a good student and already
then I felt myself specially ear-marked for fame. My parents were not without
pride on my account, their friends praised me, my teachers commended my
talents, and everyone - everyone! - predicted success in whatever field
I chose. And like silver to greed, their praise naturally honed my conceit
all the more keenly. I filled my days with fancies. I sucked, as it were,
upon the lollipop of fame. Of fame! Fame! Fame! Wherever I walked, the thought
was always with me. Fame! Fame that made a man rise above his fellows, fame
that made other men raise their eyes in worship, fame that tantalised and
promised eternal life. Believe me, I could conceive of nothing grander.
  `From where I lived, I often walked to Ormond Hill. There, the sheer ecstasy
of creative thought soared its highest, for only from the heights can the
eye grasp the vastness of space, the expanse of time, only from the heights
can one compre+hend the unity that underlies the innumerable tiny separate
and scattered splinters of human existence. There, on my Everest, I was
a giant amont dwarfs. Ship's lights, port lights and the stars winked at
each other. Waves rose and crashed against the parapet below. Brisk winds
sprang up from the sea and brought all manner of redolences to the nostrils
and all manner of tastes to the tongue as from far away came also the sounds
of motors and horns, sibilances and muffed echoes.
  `Sitting there alone on the crest of my Olympus, I heard voices, saw faces -
saw builders and destroyers, prostitutes and virgins; saw schoolboys and
shopgirls, titans of business and toothless larrikins; and white-coated
doctors and dog-collared priests, pimple-faced addicts and six-fingered
freaks, and, in a hubbub as if from Babel come, they were whistling and
shout+ing, taunting and swearing; and they were hissing and bellowing, and
shrilling and shrieking. And as I watched and listened and contemplated
that which, as it were, came before mind's eye, as in that wake I took it
all in, I had a vision. They were bound in time, all those folk, they were
bound by time - that was clear - yet were they simultaneously timeless.
The present was a mere blinking, yet did even this mirror the eternal. For
that which men were now, that had they always been, and that would they
forever be; as they acted now, so had they always acted, and so would they
always act; what they lived for now, for that had they always lived, and
for that would they forever live. We had become modern, yes, we were masters
- or servants perhaps - of cars and electricity, television, computers and
all mod cons; our music, literature, architecture, engineering, art, one
could argue, had advanced in diversity, versatility, technique and maybe
in sophistica+tion; but at the nitty-gritty level of human affairs, nothing
- nothing - ever truly changed. Now, as always, a bronchitic child spent
sleepless nights while its mother fretted, old men raged against the night
and women everywhere sobbed and bit their lips over illness, disaster and
death, all these recurring, all these recurring, as did carnivals and terror,
rites of passage and rituals of grief, as did beauty and saintliness and
malice and waste and splendour and decrepitude. All these, from Eden to
the Black Death even to the present day; and from Cornwall to Melbourne
to Japan. The eternal, the infinite and the universal, each in the merest
moment caught, each in the weest trifle identified.
  `This, then, this was the world as I saw it. And none, our age being short
on great minds, had in our own time yet fully captured the vision. Nor -
so did I believe - had anyone yet effectively caught the gaping contrast
between the heedless flow of time and the flitting evanescence of existence
which both made meaningless and pathetic all our fretting, our ambi+tions,
our very lives, yet against this, despite all this, charged every man and
woman alive ever to create meaning, even to invent it if need be, for no
other world but this could they ever know, and, if they were to fulfil the
best of all that lay within them, only here, only now, in this life only
could they hope to do so.'
  Benny paused. He had been probing at air and now inverted his finger towards
the table which, in turn, he took to prod+ding for emphasis.
  `Both to present the world as I saw it and to fire others to give of their
best - in other words, to inspire and excite and to elevate - these became
my dual ambitions as I sat on Ormond Hill. And on such nights, I hurried
home, intoxicated. My imagination burned. Not bothering to take off my jacket,
I would sit down at my desk, take reams of paper from a drawer and begin
to write. Words streamed from my pen; the ink was a waterfall. I breathed
life into people, all manner of folk - professors, inebriates and seedy
crows, and children, wastrels, braggarts and cretins. In those hours, believe
me, which lasted well into the night, I was exhilarated, alight, alive,
and it was in a state of ecstasy that finally I would fall asleep.
  `But o, were such sleep, such sleep to last forever!
  `In the mornings I read again the sheets I had filled with ink during
the night. Gremlins, I discovered, mischevous sprites inhabited my drawers.
For, in the more sober light of day, all I found of all my ecstasy were
stilted prose, hollow phrases, a cornucopia of platitudes and, worst of
all, not characters alive who moved and thought and felt but caricatures
who didn't in the least bit breathe. How it hurt! Believe me! How it pained!
I wanted to give up, give it all up a hundred times. But to give up hurt
even more than to continue, for the prospect of mediocrity and with it the
dread of oblivion were alike past bearing; and I knew that, whatever the
pain, whatever the agonising, the coming evening I should try again.'
  Benny Liner rapped his pipe against his hand. A sprinkling of charred
tobacco powdered the table. His nose twitched. He sniffed. Then he sneezed.
  Wiping his beard again, he asked, `Can I buy you another coffee?'
  `My turn,' I said, calling over the waiter.
  `I am telling the story,' he replied. `I'll also pay for your patience.'
  He pushed the sugarbowl towards me even before the cof+fee had arrived.
`I'll have another cup later,' he said and coughed into his plump white
palm.
  `One day,' he resumed, `in the hold of a new idea, I left the office in
a hurry. The day was cold and bleak, the kind in which icicles hang from
walls. The wind blew viciously and the sky was menacing. People everywhere
turned up their collars. The air tasted salty. And then, and then, the storm
broke. Caught in the downpour, I ran for shelter in the doorway of a bookstore.
Other people pushed past me. They were wet.

</sample>

 

<sample><id> K08 </id>

<note> 2028 words </note>

<source> Winter in Jerusalem </source>

<bl> By Blanche D'Alpuget </bl>

<h> TWELVE </h>

  Alice tottered a bit when she stepped back from her front door, laughing
and clapping her hands.
  "Thy hair is as a flock of goats that cometh down from Gilead! Oh, let
me look at you. The screenwriter!"
  For Danielle it was always amazing to connect Alice with her age, to see
her shaky on her legs as a woman of eighty-five had a right to be, for she
was such a girlish creature, her eyes so bright with communication, her
voice so gay - and with all that she had a quality of knowing, of knowledge
of the goals of life. She looked a schoolgirl nine hundred years old.
  Danielle thought: She brings out in me the urge, almost uter+ine, to
exaggerate; to make everything brighter and more dra+matic.
  "My God, Alice! This place smells like a coal mine," she said, and they
went off into peals of laughter.
  "The wicked landlady will not fix the gas for me. I'll go up in a fireball
one day. And the prime minister will blame the PLO."
  "There'll be summary vengeance."
  "Yes. A couple of planes will whiz up to Lebanon and bomb some camp."
  They deflated.
  "You've come at a sorry time," Alice said. "I didn't think I'd live to
see ..."
  Chastened, she looked at the floor. - We've lost it all so quickly. All
the fun of the 1930s and of the fifties and sixties has gone. Is+rael was
"God and us" in those days.
  "You're limping," she said. "You mustn't fall sick here."
  She led Danielle into the kitchen where the reek of gas ham+mered their
noses until the kettle was boiled for tea, and the stove could be turned
off. Alice had herbal ointment for foot blisters and made Danielle remove
her soft red leather walking boots, red leg warmers, and the socks with
toe pockets.
  "Toed socks!" she said. "I invented them, I believe, for my trip to Moscow
in 1925. I knew I was going to freeze and wouldn't be able to wash."
  Danielle looked around at the leaky stove, the refrigerator that made
digestive noises, the cold-water sink. Alice saved pieces of string and
plastic bags; they were heaped on a peg behind the door; she had breadcrusts
stored in a plastic container and bean sprouts growing feebly in a jar by
the window. Danielle won+dered if she were getting enough to eat.
  "It's not Darling Point, with harbor views," Alice said. She had sold
everything when she turned sixty-five and run off to Israel again. After
a while snapshots had arrived: Alice outside the children's house of the
kibbutz; milking a cow. A note said, "When I came here in 1930 it was
half-swamp and we slept in tents. The achievement!" Looking at the frugality
of her exis+tence in Jerusalem Danielle wondered at the ends of life, the
loose fringes to its garment: Miss Sadler - suffragette, pacifist, Communist
fellow-traveler, Zionist, abortion-law reformer, fem+inist radical, member
of Amnesty International, and the Volun+tary Euthanasia Society. She had
wanted to save the world. Now she saved plastic bags. And she seemed happier
than ever.
  "Since you're getting on a bit ..." she said tentatively. Alice was tottering
about the kitchen, refusing help with the tea things. She gave a snort.
  "You think I should return to Australia? Yes. It would be more comfortable."
There was gaiety in her eyes. "But, my dear, the spirit. At my age, it's
the spirit."
  "Won't it travel?"
  "It does not need to. It's contented everywhere. Especially here."
  They went to the parlor where there was an electric heater and a blue
woolen curtain enclosing the room's warmth. Danielle was unwilling to yield
up her cheerfulness, but as she settled her+self on the settee beside a
pile of Listener magazines she experi+enced a sudden thud, as if her armor
had crashed to the ground. Without intending to she began relating her
problems: Eleazar was her big chance, but she would not be paid much until
the script was complete (and accepted), so she had gone into debt to keep
herself going: "I've had to put up my house in Avalon as collateral." There
were difficulties with the producer, who wanted her to move to Los Angeles,
but she could not leave Katherine alone in Sydney during her first year
at university. Then there was the dog. "The dreadful woman from whom I bought
the house, Mrs. Wellsmore, is staying in it while I'm away, minding Emma.
She has a diet of gin, cigarettes, and aspirin, and I expect she smokes
in bed."
  Alice listened to the undercurrent, to Danielle's voice saying, "I've
reached a crossroads - and I'm lost." A few months ago her letters had sounded
so confident; she had announced: I'm through with men! Radical celibacy
equals peace of mind.
  A deep breath turned into a sigh. "The worst problem is I think I've fallen
in love with the producer-director. He's a crook."
  Alice folded her hands and closed her eyes. There was some weakness in
Danielle's nature that drew her to tainted men - including Patrick, for
whom she'd grieved for years, although he was a drunk and unfaithful. As
a child there had been an inci+dent with one of Bonny's admirers. Of course,
living alone with her mother, who was more or less a geisha ... Rich men
paid the rent and the school fees for Bonny, who was a real beauty and as
high-handed as a duchess, her haughtiness that of a woman made bitter when
still young. The mother had been kept in furs and the daughter in trifles
like Swiss watches. But it was always on the edge, and the girl had been
scarred: she looked for God in men, someone to save her.
  "You told me you were never going to fall in love again, after - what
was his name? - the last one?"
  "James." Danielle's voice was glum. She'd helped James get a lead role
in a production of Arturo Ui, whereupon he'd turned layabout, and wouldn't
help with the shopping.
  Sipping the hot clear tea, Alice contemplated that aspect of women that
whispers, "You're not really good enough; you'll never achieve what you
could if you were a man." The serpent says, "But if you love a man, if you
become his soul for him, you can guide him to happiness - and that will
be an achievement." She had listened to its seductive murmur for more than
sixty years.
  Danielle, also sipping tea, pictured Bennie - he with the Filipino servant,
he who ate all his meals in restaurants, who drove a white Corniche (discounted
at $40,000 a year, thanks to the tax laws of California), Bennie Kidron:
supermarket shop+ping?
  "Is he a real crook?"
  "He has a certain reputation in Los Angeles. He had money troubles after
his partner died in a helicopter accident. The part+ner, Raphael Schultz,
was the " - she grimaced - "genius auter, as they say. He was famous in
the seventies for low-budget, cult movies." Kidron was the salesman of the
team; he raised the money, he did deals. "Now he wants to be a director.
I doubt if he could direct traffic - and he's hired me because he needs
a writer who will feed him every line. But he's full of charm, when it suits
him. And always full of cheek." Bennie had said, "I'm gonna make fifteen,
twenty million out of this. I need fifteen." What he needed it for was not
clear. Danielle was now sitting in silence, realizing she was already deeply
in conspiracy with Ben+nie, that her discretion about his greed sealed it
like a vow.
  There was a delicate query in Alice's raised eyebrows.
  "We're not lovers!" she replied quickly. "Nor does he give the slightest
sign of finding me interesting."
  So much the worse, Alice thought.
  Alice had a habit of punctuating conversations with periods of quiet during
which she sat with her eyes closed. When she opened them it was the signal
to begin a fresh topic. Danielle enjoyed the orderliness this gave, but
she dreaded what had to come next: her father. 
  "I tried to find his telephone number ..."
  "You shall find it, my dear. You have to. You knew you had to return to
Jerusalem, and now that you're here you know you must find him. Your mind
will never have peace until you do. You told me that yourself, once."
  "But it's not in the Hebrew phone book."
  Alice thought that a poor excuse. Danielle should know how small Jerusalem
was, that "everybody knows everybody." There were invisible structures,
like the crystalline lattice in a saturated solution. All the pre-Independence
people knew each other; all the German-speakers; all the Anglophones; the
Second Aliya; the Herut people. The country was a laminate of clans.
  "He's religiously - how that word is misused - active," Alice added. "My
born-again Christian girls know of him." And David had told her: Professor
Garin, retired, was still as troublesome as he ever had been since 1948
when his crusading against the Arabs had not been recognized for what it
was: a form of mad+ness. It was restricted, however, to a single area of
his mind so that Garin had been able to continue his research, begun under
the British who had sent him to Palestine, and had attained the status of
professor in the medical school where his work on viruses had been outstanding.
For thirty years he had been writ+ing pamphlets calling for the rebuilding
of the Temple (proph+ecy said that on its third building the Temple could
not be destroyed). Alice had seen them occasionally. They usually be+gan
with the motto "He who rules Jerusalem rules Israel, and he who rules the
Temple Mount rules Jerusalem." Since 1967 Garin's pamphlets had been taken
more seriously. She gazed at Danielle, whose face had become small and anxious
with ques+tions beneath its rug of copper hair.
  "He's considered a phophet, by some. He's part of the shadow spreading
over this country - it's a fearful thing." The Christian girls spoke of
Satan's wing darkening the Jerusalem sky, but they meant something different:
they prayed for Israel to bomb Damascus, "for Damascus shall be in heaps,"
the Bible said. When they mentioned Islam they said "Satan."
  "I wasn't prepared for something I saw at the airport," Dan+ielle said.
"What I can only describe as racial tension between some European Israelis
and some Middle Eastern ones."
  "The blacks! My dear, that's what the Sephardim are called. They're the
dogsbodies - Arabs aside - and they're blamed for everything. And, you know,
I think it suits -" The doorbell rang. "That will be Suzie from the home-help
agency. She'll know how to find Garin."
  The young woman who followed Alice back into the parlor was so thin Danielle
guessed she suffered from anorexia nervosa. She had pretty dark hair and
eyes, but there was something feral in her expression; she looked uncertain,
almost suspicious, as she stood close to the blue woolen curtain, her glance
directed down over her long Indian cotton dress, thick maroon stockings,
and clumpy sandals.
  "This is Marilyn, who's going to clean for me today because Suzie, who
normally comes, has a cold."
  In Danielle's warm hand Marilyn's fingers were icy and all bones.
  "You're freezing!"
  Both recoiled.
  There was a hint of perverse pleasure in the girl's expression: "I lost
my gloves yesterday," she said. "But Jesus will send me another pair," and
Danielle realized there was a challenge thrown at her from Marilyn's eyes.
She thought: scavenger's eyes.
  Alice had gone to make more tea. When she returned she found them watching
each other as warily as strange cats. She could see what Danielle was thinking:
that Marilyn needed a bath. She had folded the skirts of her dowdy cotton
dress over her knees in a manner suggesting that invisible men, across the
room, were leering at them; her hair, in particular, did smell un+washed,
especially alongside Danielle, who would as soon go out without wearing
scent as Alice would without wearing her beret. 

</sample>
                        


<sample><id> K10 </id>

<note> 2009 words </note>

<source> Five gazeboes </source>

<bl> By Marion Campbell </bl>

<h> I </h>
It's an odd sort of sentimentality that makes Billie use the
gas lamp in here. There's a cable connecting the house up to
the electricity. The pool of light isolates them, over the
board. Harry is reading, Lydia says, yet leaves me to the
penumbra. Looks like a seance going on. Billie, studying the
tiles, works away at her jaw. The movement makes the pinned-
back zebra tuft of hair jump. Odd departures: holidays for her
are a break with the taste codes more than anything, the rules
she sets herself in the city. She leaves behind all that
infrastructure of corsets and things and lets the massive
breasts have their way under the windcheater to an
indeterminate point of fusion with the belly. She leaves the
old butchers' and real estate agents' calendars on their nails,
hasn't bothered replacing the lumpy velveteen furniture, this
sofa with its embossed orange triangles and nebulae of
sparkles, springs popping through in places. Lydia sighs,
rattles the ice in her scotch. Juvenated by the soft light.
  Gaze! Billie says between her teeth.
  Lydia has put down gaze. The curve of her cheek relaxes a bit.
The high seriousness of it. That's where we've always had
problems: the emotion she spends over little things.

The immense effort she made that day, all soap-lathered in the
shower, to rescue an albino cricket that had been mishatched
in the drain. When do they get their colour? Does the sun bring
the pigment out? She got herself into a frenzy, skidding on the
soap, covering the poor bugger, as Billie would say, with
lather. If it had had the heart, she would have applied
artificial respiration there and then. What do they use to
breathe? Apertures? Little holes in the abdomen? What kind of
fluid transport for food? Kind of clear liquid when you squash
them. Liquid: good way of adding to someone's quid in that
game. But is quid slang? These two don't allow slang. Gaze, she
put. Always fancied crossing eye myself. The Y on a triple
letter:

That'd be, say, one plus three times four plus one, that's
fourteen twice, that's twenty-eight. Trouble is though, the
single player can't do it, can't go in two directions at once.
Just the two of them, night after night, at the Scrabble. Harry
would rather read, Lydia says.
  Would Harry? Does Harry? Billie asks.
  I think he's dozed off already, Lydia says.
  What can I do but doze off when they leave me without light.
Look at that: the small flat spread of my thighs. Were they
ever ... And then this old baggage. Lydia never said
anything, but for how long now has it been? Five, ten years,
more, that she has been buying these formless trousers with the
low crutch. Harry Grogan spreads his toes: see his pale old
horny nails.

Ageing, it's got her too of course. Except in that glow,
there's the peachy down on the cheek as reminder. Still that
same nervous quiver in the lip she had that first day. Lipstick
sometimes gets canalised in the fine cracks running up. No use
saying anything, though. First time I walked in on her
plastering herself with night creams, she gave a little
screech. I said, come on, Lyd, a face with a couple of lines
is more interesting, more touching. A face that has lived,
felt.
  Withered and sagged, she hissed.
  She took it that I was triumphing in her catching up on our
fifteen-year difference. If I said: Your face brings out a kind
of sorrowful tenderness in me, she'd take it that the old man
is just trying to wheedle something out of her. Her old
cornflower blue eyes with that touch of real violet, they still
have the occasional flash. No, not a flash: a sudden flooding
glow.

I didn't consciously go for the opposite in Bess. But there it
was: Bess all olive, with the scattering of small black freckles 
over the nose. Sinewy where Bess was softness. Hint of a moustache 
I saw that day on the ferry. Her rousing bitter wit. Something 
like savagery at times. Harry Grogan was just an excursion for 
her, anyhow. Harry she said, there's something almost immoral in 
your placidity, your British control. Something Lydia has never 
done, attacked my Englishness. Lydia with her poodle perm peroxide 
and the Australian wrinkles I know are there, at the back of her 
neck. The bowed nape calls out for touch. There is a tacit taboo 
against my wandering over to take a peek at their letters. Perhaps 
that's what's in this game for them: the tracing and crossing of 
little stories they won't tell out loud. Or they can't tell. 
Hinting through the grid their female unsayable.

Lloyd's muzzle is quivering, he lets out a groan. He shrinks
and ripples his skin: it's the irritation of the salt. My
bringing old Lloydie slightly resented. Nothing said of course.
But Lydia has Ratsel on her lap. That's all right but that dog
of yours smells, Harry. Burmese travel well, she keeps on
insisting. Despite the operatic yowl he maintained through the
ninety minute trip here. Billie asks: What is it between you
two and your pets?
  They relieve us of unnecessary talk, Lydia says.
  True, she makes little speeches about men to Ratsel, who's a
bloke anyhow, for God's sake. But she felt bound to sterilise
him, poor bastard .
  Ratsel, she says, you'd think an eighty-year-old man would have
at least learnt to carry his cornflake bowl to the sink,
wouldn't you?
  And I fall into the game too: Old Lloydie, I say, let's take
a walk, take a break from these fusspot women.
  There she is, anyhow, applying her palm to the sleek elastic
body of her beloved castrato.
  Five, Billie is saying. That's a double letter, that's eight
and one, that's nine and four and one, that's oh dear, that's
pretty poor isn't it, that's fourteen.
  Don't worry, Lydia says. I don't think I can do anything much.
Oh, wait, wait. It might just ... Dreiundzwanzig dreimal,
... Das macht neunundsechzig, she murmurs.
  That's how they catch spies out - now who told me that? -
they get them to count. Not many, even amongst the best
linguists, who can count in an automatic way in a foreign
language.
  Gazeboes, Billie says, my God, on the triple too. That's what,
that's sixty-nine. Harry, Harry, Lydia has gazeboes on the
triple word score!
  Five gazeboes, Lydia laughs. She gives Ratsel a long deep caress
this time.
  That house with the gazebo in East Fremantle is going for
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Billie says. Did you
see that? Seems the first owner stuck it on for her cigar
smoking husband.
  He probably planned it all. Probably took up cigars so she'd
have to give him his own space. Could tell them about the bloke
on the Costa Brava who built seven gazeboes onto his place, one
hexagonal turret for each of his daughters. In that case for
display? Seven daughters embroidering their complaints through
the latticed stars, dark limbs aglow. Lydia catches my look:
what has she meshed into? Or does she just want my accolade
for her tour de force?

Silly songs Bess improvised. Her laughter gypsy warm. Inside
the gazebo at South Beach, she stretched out in a lewdly
seductive pose:

  Honey just when you think you're spying on them 
  you find your bodies form a harem 
  inside it ...

I've got it here, that's what Lydia doesn't know. The postcard
inside the Anna Karenina: the Turkish Bath as only memento. Lydia 
is not such a psychic that she could see a connection in that. Keep
it more for its negative charge anyhow. Bess said she'd never
seen anything so repulsive. The painter she most hated, she
said, when I admitted my fascination. Especially his Turkish
Bath. It's not just cold, she said, it's arctic. It's an arctic
celebration of voyeurism, and you like that, Harry! Look at
that, that's how he sees women. Bess's exaggerations. Harry,
she said, it's pornography, all the more creepy because it's
so controlled. Nasty poreless, hairless, satin bodies submitted
to the demands of so-called Neoclassicism: balance. Taming
grids. And you like that, Henry Grogan!

Perhaps, perhaps there was something of that, but there's more
to the picture. As you stare, it's the three dark bodies that
come alive. And the dark recesses, the false exits, arresting
your gaze. Bess, Bess, never did unlock your secret. Bess, the
landlord's daughter tying a dark red loveknot in her long black
hair. Stock Road unribboning to her. But it had to be always
in the glare of the afternoon. Catching my breath on the bare
porch of her ugly little house in Palmyra. Bess who mocked me
for slavishly entering ticks for present and a's for absent in
my register. Bess, I said, it's your larrikin mentality that
is deviant, not my observation of a few rules. The way you cook
marks is downright dishonest. Bess: too much of an inveterate
actress or exhibitionist to keep discipline. Kids need a
certain predictability, consistency, and she was never that,
consistent. Her classes always riotous. Doubt if the kids ever
picked anything up from her lessons, but a certain fascination
for her unaustralian animation might have lingered. I would
find her leaping around, darkly flushed, picking up Plasticine
and paper projectiles from the classroom floor after school.
Once she lost her whole class to the lavatory block. They had
made their exits, one after the other, all miming desperately
over+burdened bladders.
  Harry's back in his Tolstoy, Lydia says.
  Harry is not. Harry is rereading Bess through Ingres. Her
surplus of energy diminishing mine. Harry's just all talk, she
jibed later in the staffroom. Henry's into the History of Crime
and Punishment: so she introduced me to the other guests at the
Rottnest Lodge.
  And Bess is into Histrionics, I said.
  But later, she was unable to give way to her normal sexual
exuberance. In the cell where they had locked away mainland
Aboriginals. And later, after 1907, wanton or homeless boys of
any race. She peopled the little room with tortured bodies,
unable to accept my white flesh intact. This time, the failure
was hers. The last time. And the texture of the moth-eaten
candlewick spread, I can still find its sad grooves and ridges
under my fingertips. Finally we fell into an uneasy sleep in
our disunited cots. The next morning, Bess had a terrible
darkness under her eyes.

Might as well shuffle off now. They're set to play for ever.
Lydia puts off sleep until later each night. She doesn't sleep
and claims that as a kind of virtue. Against my fondness for
siestas. Unnecessary siesta sleep breeds the best dreams.
Lloydie bows in a prolonged stretch, yawns. He tags along.

<h> II </h>
Look at that: his hip humped against where I am meant to lie.
The sheet drawn up to his side. What is it now? Close on twenty
years that we've had our separate beds, ten that we've been in
separate rooms. He never got used to eiderdowns. Nor Ratsel.
The sea's suspenseful crashing in this room full of breath, dog
breath and his shallower kind. Window white, blue white and
then darkened, whitening again: the lighthouse beam. He holds
his face pouched to the cushion and the mulberry mapping of the
capillaries laces the retina after the beam has gone. These
distances he establishes. Diese endliche Ferne. Although Billie
knows it, we didn't play in German. But I could have used
ferns. Ferns on the forest bed in that sifted light. Not this
sweeping alternation. Das brausende Getose des Seegangs says
it better for these rhythms, for the push, the big push, the
hush and then the stifled roar again, with the light curtain
lifting. If I had this place, I'd have no curtains, only the
shape of dunes shouldering the house, the rhythm of those and
the light.

</sample>



<sample><id> K17 </id>

<note> 2005 words </note>

<source>"i" is a versatile character </source>

<bl> by jenny boult </bl>

<h>5. </h>
<h> the tester </h>

the days are always full of suprises in this job. you never know what's
going on. there's always something different to do or eat or whatever it
happens to be.

take this morning for instance. i woke up to the sound of a new alarm clock.
it speaks the time &amp;amp; sings. it's o.k.. i put "alarming" in the additional
comments section of the report sheet. it's the first time i've ever done
that. usually,the boxes cover everything i have to say.

i light a cigarette from the plain white box stamped K36. i compare it with
one from an identical box stamped P54. i can't tell the difference. i fill
out the forms.

the toilet is sanitised. the form next to it asks, "how would you describe
the smell?" i tick the box marked "floral". there isn't a space marked
chemical. i suggest an irritant factor might be useful. no new box appears.

the soap is called S34, the toothpaste F+++. it's horrible. my teeth feel
like a chalk mine. tyre tracks on my tongue.

for breakfast there's another cereal that tastes like all the others. no
change. some are more chewy or harder than others, but they all taste the
same. it's the "no sugar" set's idea of variety, but bran's bran &amp;amp; it doesn't
seem to matter much which grain it comes from. i can tell the difference
between homogenised milk &amp;amp; unhomogenised. i know all the textures &amp;amp; all
the flavours. sometimes i make guesses about them, the collectors don't
tell you anything though. i don't think they know any more about it than
i do. they deliver my daily samples, put out the forms &amp;amp; writing implements
&amp;amp; then collect them again at night time. usually when i'm asleep.

it's an interesting life. or it would be except that i'm sick of not really
knowing what any of this stuff really is. i mean, you never know whether
the mayonnaise is poly-unsaturated or oil-free or any of that kind of thing.

i get so tired of white. flavour testing. that's what i specialise in. it's
the taste that counts, they tell me. colour will only influence your decisions,
they tell me. i don't care any more. i've started taking trips round the
supermarkets reading the labels. nothing puts me off my food. i think they
might have put me on a diet. i was quite heavy for a while there. it was
all the chocolate. i must be the only person in the world who's lived for
6 weeks on bananas &amp;amp; mars bars. some of those mars bars were really stale,
too. you know the ones that get left in the sun to melt &amp;amp; then go hard again.
i like fresh, dark ones better.

then there's the domestic testing. toilet &amp;amp; laundry products. i've had some
terrible dermatitis*dermatites since i've been here.

one thing about this kind of job though. you don't have to worry about
anything. you know exactly where the next meal's coming from, there's always
a roof over your head. you don't have to think about money or anything.
life's easy for you here. i don't like their ideas about entertainment.
i get so tired of commercials, but it's nice to know that i had a hand in
the marketing of the products. to be a part of a team. even though i don't get
to talk to anyone much, it's good to know about it. i've asked the collectors
about the weather, but i think they know about as much about it as i do.
we don't get out very often here. we're always too busy.

&amp;amp; now they've started diversifying me. they've put me on shoes. i never
had to test clothing or footwear before. not like this. we all did it. i
get a different pair of shoes three times a day. like medicine. &amp;amp; they give
me blisters. i hate sore feet. it makes me angry when my feet are sore.
&amp;amp; it makes me remember the times before i came here. my mother bought me
hard shoes that blistered my heels &amp;amp; gave me corns on my toes.

"you'll learn," she screamed. "you'll learn one day. there'll be a lot more
discomfort in your life than a pair of new shoes." she was so sure. so certain.
&amp; then, when i told her i was going to be a tester she screamed louder than
ever. "you'd sell your soul for a new dress &amp; a good dinner." i shrugged.
suffering didn't appeal to me.

so what's wrong with security? it's all right in here. better than one of
the company testing units. There are full-time testers on assembly lines
there. single purpose testers. imagine twenty five years of testing toilet
paper. they'd have to test laxatives as well to make it worthwhile. i like
it here, where we try everything, eventually. we get things first, before
anyone else. it doesn't get boring because everything's new. there's a
never+ending flow of variety. &amp; you can choose. there are choices. it's
comforting. you can shop. there are clothes, furniture, fittings. if you
aren't on a specific test you can have anything you like. as long as it's
here to be tested. 

they put the tv in strange places sometimes. the bath? the roof? but it's
easy enough to have it moved. you dial a number, tell them how long you
looked for it, how long before you started talking to yourself, responses,
that kind of thing. you get used to it.

i go out with the other testers sometimes. we don't worry about it too often.
we stand out from the crowd. like something out of the future. &amp; i guess
we are. my sister buys a new dress, &amp; it's a copy of something we had five
or six years ago. the crowd is a delayed reaction to our experience.

why shouldn't i be a tester? they think it's a cushy life. but we do fill
out the forms. it's hard work sometimes. the diets, the irregularity, you
know, i never felt like this before my feet got sore.

pill 58DX today. i hate the pharmaceuticals. this one works. the 369LK didn't
yesterday. &amp; the sleepers. i never needed sleepers before.

i can't dance. &amp; they're playing next easter's top 40 in the disco tonight.
now that i think about it, my feet are a lot better. unguent 220. i think
they've come up with a combination. i pass this information on to the collector.
collectors never smile.

it makes me feel good to know that i'm contributing to the well-being &amp;
continued pain relief of the rest of the world. in ten years someone will
be grateful to me for this one. but they won't even think about me. testers
don't get thought about much out there. most people don't even know we exist.
sad, isn't it?

the side effects are a bit of a worry sometimes. you aren't always prepared
for them. like the time i lost my hair after the M24 hairdressing trials.
they isolated the hairspray &amp; marketed it as a depilatory. it's broken all
their sales records. we had the whole lite'n'fluffy cake range after that.
a celebration. light'n'fluffy iced all over the cakes. that was unusual.
we weren't complaining. good old M24. i think they're putting a tanning
agent into it now.

still. this is a good combination. i like it here. i like my job. i'm an
important part of a team. i enjoy my work. don't think about independence
&amp; family. there are families here. they squabble among themselves. the children
don't like the white packets at first. they show peak resistance at about
3, then they learn.

they have apartments. children inhabit the creches. you can have as much
or as little time with them as you like. according to the rosters &amp; what
the programme is at any given time. some of them have gardens. anyone can
have a garden. they test pesticides &amp; lawnmowers in them.

look. the main thing is, you can get used to anything. in here, everything's
provided. you're out of the rat race. you're assured of the basic necessities.
i like it here. nothing's ever the same two days in a row, unless they're
monotony testing. the cooking's pretty bad sometimes. the sheets are washed
&amp; the beds made.

i made the right decision when i made up my mind to come here. snap of the
fingers. a record comes on. two snaps. coffee or tea. twitch of the finger
sugar or milk. we all know the codes. coffee number X12 is lousy. but it'll
be something else tomorrow. the forms don't change much. five snaps the
AV gear really starts up. anything you like. a video library that hasn't
been made yet.

i know exactly how lucky i am. i don't need to gamble. seven snaps. eternal
night. the pink boat on the green river. it's the sore feet, the winning
combination, the demons in me make me want to try my luck tonight. testing
... testing ...
snap. snap. snap. snap. snap.    snap.   sna   ...      


<h>6. </h>
<h> no room at the top </h>

1.
the panther creeps over the roofs of derelict houses. the planners refer
to this place as "redevelopment". it's perth of course. where everything
is new, or about to be built.
these houses skulk under the threat of demolition. they crack their windows
&amp; doorframes in defiance, but they know that their battle is already lost.
their banners have been pulled down &amp; left to rot in damp corners.
the panther is 25 years old &amp; feeling his age. he doesn't ram it up the
way he used to. the faces aren't as pretty as they once were. the shoes
are not as expensive &amp; are in need of repair.

a voice echoes down the dark tunnels that mark the territory of defeat.
we called them streets not long ago. smoke twisted from the chimneys &amp; students
of mathematics &amp; history pored over weighty texts late into the night.
"alice. alice." he hears it clearly now &amp; his yellow eyes beam over the
oblique canyons like spotlights. he picks out a figure crumpled into the
road.
the voice calls again. "alice. alice." she runs in &amp; out of the shadows
calling. this woman is hysteria. "alice. alice." her voice rises like an 
ill-made kite on the wind. tortured, out of balance.

<h>2. </h>
this is a teenager's bedroom, with pop-star posters on the walls &amp; cigarettes
under the mattress. cindy lauper sings "she-bop" on an inadequate transistor
radio. the three young women know the song by heart.

"ideally, he would be an astronaut."

"you're aiming a bit high aren't you?"

"she-bop, she-bop, she-bop-a-she-bop ..."

<h>3. </h>
"what time is it, then, if it isn't time to go home?"
the child can wander no further. she is cold, tired, hungry &amp; lost. she
is waif &amp; stray.

"alice. alice."
the voice bites the night, cold as frost. in the intimacy of a front bar
there is a man whose responsibility controls him like a hangover.
the woman's slippers flap like dead fowls as she crashes wildly from one
side of the street to the other.

the panther wonders whether she is aware that he is watching her. he focuses
on her, high beam, &amp; directs her to the child.

"alice. alice." she is weeping now. the tears burn like shame into the enlarged
pores over her cheek bones.
the child is too tired to cry, &amp; having discovered a familiar place, she
has already begun to doze in the woman's desperate embrace.

<h>4. </h>
she eats grapes as though her life depends on it. she has returned from
the dinner party where the hostess fell asleep in her own vomit. three bottles
of french champagne soak into the brightly coloured mohair sweater that
drapes her anorexic frame. she laughs. secure in the knowledge of her own
invulnerable charm &amp; impeccable behaviour. 

</sample>



<sample><id> K20 </id>

<note> 2001 words </note>

<source> Southerly - April 1986 </source>

<h> Guilt  </h>

<bl> By Laurie Clancy </bl>

IT WAS Jim Ireland who introduced me to the group of lefties
with whom for a time during my adolescence I became involved.
I met Jim in a pub in Parkville when I was about twenty-one and
a final year honours student at Melbourne University. Every
Friday night I drank with a group of school teachers at the
Mayfair hotel - since demolished, like most of the landmarks
in my life - and they used to pay for my drinks, for the
spaghetti we would eat at a little restaurant in Elizabeth
Street, and then for me to be admitted to the jazz clubs we'd
visit every Friday night, Frank Traynor, Graham Bell and so on.
Most of them were jazz aficionados of a type that was common
in Melbourne in the fifties and sixties but which seems to have
died out since.
  Jim, though, was different from the others. For one thing he
was older. For another, he was not a chalky, though he had been
one briefly; that was how he had come to know the group. He
worked in his father's weighing-machine factory and used to
come into the saloon bar of the pub wearing oily worker's
overalls. I used to admire his obvious indifference to the
impact he made on the clientele. Apart from the teachers, most
of them wore suits, were from the executive side of the nearby
factories across the roundabout in North Melbourne, and were
clearly unused to drinking side by side with a man who might
well have been employed by them. But though the publican Maurie
used to sniff and try to ignore Jim's order if there were
anyone else about, he didn't have the nerve to kick Jim out.
If he had, the teachers would have walked out too.
  He had been drinking there some months before I said more than
two or three sentences to him. Then one night, after I had
refused to join the others in our usual meal, pleading work,
I stayed on and drank with him instead till the pub closed and
then he drove me out to Clayton to a party at the flat of a
friend. I found out a lot about him that night, including the
fact that he was a member of the Communist Party, the first I
had ever met. Apparently his left-wing friends held parties
most Friday nights, alternating at different people's places.
  Although over the next two years I was to go to many of these
I remember that first night particularly well. Our host was a
genuine member of the working classes, a young mechanic whose
only passion in life apart from the revolution was automobiles.
He had four or five of them, in various stages of
dismemberment, in his tiny front yard, and in his bath where
usually the bottles were stored with some ice at these parties,
was a car engine. I suspect that if I'd turned back the pillow
on his bed I would have discovered a differential underneath
it. When we arrived he was finishing a story to the dozen or
so guests who were there.
  "Anyway, just as I come round the corner, heading for the pole
I noticed this tow-truck on the other side of the road, next
to the ti-tree, the driver having a fag behind the wheel. We
must have not synchronized our watches properly. Too late to
stop. I go into the pole doing fifteen and it's turned out
perfect. The safety belts held, the front end was stove in and
the radiator busted.
  "The tow-truck driver has come over, a funny look on his face.
`I've had pretty fast calls in my time,' he says, `but this is
the first time I've ever got to the scene before the accident.'
When we told him the whole story he laughed himself silly and
gave us the ten bucks anyway without telling the cops."
  I watched them as they laughed. It was a strange group of
people, to me anyway. There was a left-wing medical student
from Monash. There was a conservationist, years ahead of his
time, whom everyone thought was a crank. He used to chase after
motorists on his motor bike and hand them back the cigarette
butts they'd thrown out of their cars. Later, he became a
minister in the state cabinet. There was the senior journalist
on The Worker, who wrote nearly all the paper under different
names. There were beefy, hectoring women, all of them much
older than myself, who spoke of starvation in developing
countries. It may be sexist but it was nevertheless true, in
those days at least, that nearly all female radicals were
physically unattractive. That didn't change until Vietnam.
Except for the mechanic Ernie and his handful of young mates,
the room burned with indignation and middle-aged sexuality.
  Sex, as Philip Larkin says, had only just been invented and
most of these people - especially those in their forties and
fifties - had taken to it with some enthusiasm. It was not
exactly your throwing your car keys in the centre of the room
scene, of the kind I read about years later in the Sunday
newspapers, but there was a continual sense of predatory
tension in the air, the women as much as the men. You had to
be careful turning on the lights as you entered bedrooms and
I quickly learned to pause on the outside of doorways to check
for sounds. There was little room in most of those new, cream
veneer flats.
  I was involved with little of it. For one thing I was much
younger than nearly everyone else at those gatherings and I
felt like someone in a group of people who had all known each
other for years, were tied together by ideology even when they
quarrelled about its meaning, and who in general spoke a
foreign language. Subterranean currents of passion swirled
around me but I was in the eye of the storm.
  They had affairs with married people! This was something that
until then I had only seen in books. The only woman in the
group who was about my age was Virginia, and she was having an
affair with a married man, the senior journalist on The Worker.
She was twenty-six and he was forty-seven. Perhaps because she
saw there was nothing to fear from me, we became friends and
I was her confidant. Once she told me about her most
embarrassing moment.
  "We were at a party at this flat, see, Sam, and Simon and I got
drunk and started screwing in the spare bedroom on top of all
the coats. Of course someone came in and turned the lights on
and there we were stark naked. They called all the other guests
in to take a look."
  I could tell from the gleam in her eyes that she had fond
memories of this embarrassing moment. As she sensed something
in my expression she added hastily, "Of course, I was
underneath, they couldn't see much of me."
  I laughed.
  At the end of that year I graduated with first class honours
and was taken on as a tutor at Melbourne, on the strict
understanding that it would be no longer than three years and
possibly only one. They were expecting me to go to Cambridge
and be cloned. I delayed over joining the Party. Jim was too
wise to push me. The truth was that after more than a year of
going to those parties my faith in the intellectual power and
integrity of Communism as practised in Australia had eroded.
The discussions these people had concerning Communism, when
they were not talking about screwing or football, rarely went
beyond questions of tactics and expedience. I was bored, though
no doubt if I could have participated more I would have been
happier.
  Then one night in April, Jim Ireland invited me to a party at
the house of a couple named the Martins. They were not
communists, he told me, but were sympathetic; and the crowd
would include some younger faces. By the time we arrived at
about ten I had had a fair bit to drink, though not too much,
and after a few minutes talking to a woman named Maureen
Stevens, who was in her mid to late twenties, I finally asked
her to dance.
  As we danced - a professional tango on her part, a kind of
frantic scuffling on mine, glazed smile fixed to my face - I
reached out on impulse and lightly squeezed her right nipple,
safely ensconced in its padded cage, as I should have been. She
recoiled as if she had been stung. For a few seconds she
remained still, before resuming to the music, but this time
dancing stiffly at about two paces distance, so that we both
looked as if we were being jerked along, like a pair of
marionettes.
  "Why did you do that?" she said quietly.
  Later, I thought of all the answers I could have made, that
might have at least allowed the moment to be glossed over.
"Because I wanted to." Why not the truth indeed? It took me
many more years to make the obvious discovery that most women
prefer not to be lied to. "Because you have beautiful breasts."
One, anyway. The answer I actually gave was the worst one
possible. "I didn't do anything."
  I had hoped she might leave it there but she was a stickler for
truth. "Yes, you did. You touched my breast."
  "It must have been an accident." I had begun to perspire. The
glazed smile had changed to one of sheer idiocy.
  "No, it wasn't," she said in the same quiet, uninsistent tone.
"You did it on purpose."
  To touch a woman's breast when you were hardly twenty-one -
that was hardly such a heinous crime surely? At around the same
time someone assassinated John F. Kennedy, the C.l.A. were not
long involved in "de-stabilising" the Dominican republic and
preparations for the build-up in Vietnam were well on the way.
And I had touched a woman's breast! Yet it is difficult to
convey the shame and guilt I continued to feel at the memory
of that foolhardy gesture - made, let me insist, far less out
of a sense of lust or even lasciviousness than out of mere
impulse and ignorance of the rules of the game and an eagerness
not to be seen not playing.
  At last the music stopped and with it her implacable
interrogation and we both resumed our seats, on opposite sides
of the flat. I reached for my now warm, flat beer and downed
it in one gulp. Across the room, in the spaces opened up by
gyrating dancers as they whirled past, I could see Maureen
talking to her husband, a small, slightly balding man in his
late twenties, more conservatively dressed than anyone else in
the room, with a blue reefer jacket (where have they
gone, by the way?) and dark tie. From time to time they glanced
across at me and I knew Philip was being told all about the
incident. I pretended to look away. Jim Ireland swung by,
dancing with his wife for a change, and winked at me. "You were
stiff," he said. "You touched up the only Catholic in the
room." As soon as I could, I left the flat and drove home in
my utility, sober for once and half-hoping as I always did on
the few occasions when I was driving sober late at night that
I would be picked up by the cops.
  Just for once it happened. As I drove down the Dandenong
Highway doing about forty-five I heard the wail of a siren
behind me and sure enough there the blue light flashing in my
rear vision mirror. There was only one cop in the car, a big
man who came towards me carrying a huge torch.  

</sample>



<sample><id> K23 </id>

<note> 2006 words </note>

<source> Overland </source>

<h> A father's story of a lost child </h>

<bl> By Bruce Williams </bl>

What is it? Kathryn again, one of her dreams. Nuisance. Does she have to
scream like that? Time after time.
  It's cold out of bed. My toes home-in on solid objects in the dark with
uncanny accuracy. And the screaming! Stop it for god's sake. I'll be there,
I'll be there.
  I over-run the door and have to feel my way back. Fumble on the wrong
side for the handle, pull on it instead of push. You'd think a bloke would
know his own house. Does she have to scream like that? It's only a dream.
  "It's only a dream honey, only a dream."
  The room is lit for no reason and goes back to black. In the instant I
see the bed, made-up and flat, three months empty, my books on the shelf.
I hear for the first time the long, peeling screech of storm-rain on the
tin roof.
  I'd gone to bed with a quiet mind, sure all this was at an end. The heavy
rumble rolls through me, fills my head, rolling in my head. The walls move.

As a child Kathryn slept a great deal. She was slow learning to talk, though
she had sharp ears, and loved the sound of running water. She'd appear out
of nowhere when a tap was turned on, and stare at the stream as if it were
as clear as her eyes, not brown and brackish from the bore, or tin-tasting
and stale from the tank after pumping. It wasn't until she was four that
she was al+lowed to turn on a tap herself: a responsibility she took on
with extreme gravity. When she was five, it rained.
  The days were marked as the hills changed color. In the morning, red,
like light through skin, fading to a dull rust by noon, then a hazy, sad
blue against the amethyst sky of evening. An uneven shade would then push
its way through the streets and dirt driveways, over the houses of the little
town where Kathryn was born.
  Occasionally there was a forecast for rain. We got to thinking the weather
stations would throw in a shower every six months or so to cheer us up -
or more likely to keep us there so there'd be someone for them to forecast
to. And rain would fall: fifty miles east, a stone's throw west - anywhere
but on our little dust-heap where we thought it really mattered.
  When it finally did rain, when Kathryn was five, even the dogs went wild,
and a couple shot through. Funnily enough, with all the barking and the
noise, I didn't notice until she came in, soaked and shivering. I can still
see her, can always see her, standing in the doorway, backed by the grey
smear of falling rain, with the thin, sweet mist rising against it.
  I'd never thought to teach her about rain. How would you? She'd heard
about it, I know that for a fact. I went through all the books I'd read
her, and nearly half of them made mention of rain. It wasn't my fault.
  Kathryn stood in the doorway, quiet at first, though uneasy within the
silence. Her eyes looked nowhere. Held out her hands, and I took them and
pulled her to me. I hugged her until I felt the chill creep through my clothes.
She was shivering, and I shivered. Kathryn was crying, then spoke in a low
voice, a grown-up whisper, asking for her mother, long-gone. It hurt me
that, crying for her. Strange the grudges you bear, and the things you forgive.

"Guess what?"
  "What?"
  "I bet you can see the sea from the top of that tree up there."
  "I bet you can too."
  "It's over there isn't it," pointing with a thrust of her arm between
another spindly tree and a neighbour's dis+tant chimney.
  "Dead right, honey," and it was.
  "I bet you can see it from up there."
  "I bet you can too."
  She ran off, and I went inside to put things in cupboards and check the
gas and the lights.
  It had been no mean feat getting a transfer from that hole, my one-man
school: a good few years of forms and phone-calls. A dust bowl is no place
to bring up a child. Surprising you have to learn a thing like that, but
finally I did.
  "Daddy, Dad, guess what?"
  "You saw the sea." She couldn't possibly have seen the sea.
  "No, no. No! We've got a river!"
  "What sort of river?"
  "Oh, you know ... a river with water. And a herd of them swans too. They
flew away, but they'll come back won't they. Come on, look," she said, tugging
at my belt, "Come on, look. Come on, Dad."
  It wasn't even a decent sized creek, but it bubbled nicely and was banked
with soft moss and the occasional willow. All the best creeky things. In
an area where the water widened and slowed, there was a blurred spot of
sediment constantly turning over: a spring where water from underground
came up to meet the stream in the living air. This caught her attention,
and her tugging hand slackened and let go.
  I hadn't noticed the spring when I was there last to look the place over,
nor the smell. There was a slight bad smell, a sulphur smell. Not enough
to really bother you in the moving air tasting of grass and trees, but
noticeable. It struck me as strange that I hadn't noticed it the first time.
  The creek had decided me on the place. It seemed to speak Kathryn's name.
I knew she'd love it, and guessed at the games she'd play: racing sticks
down rapids, catch+ing things and letting them go, expeditions up the Congo
and Nile. My own little River-Queen coming home crying because she'd fallen
in. But she never came back crying from that creek, the little pool.
  After the first excitement of a new home, after no more than a week or
so, my daughter quietened down to nor+mal. I used to think she would have
made a good Victo+rian: she had a natural inclination to speak only when
spoken to. Her new teacher liked her.
  We'd come home from school, change and wash, and part ways - she to her
dream river, and I to my desk and later the kitchen. Our paths would converge
at dinner. What do you say to children? "Have a nice day at the Congo dear?"
We both liked bed early.
  "Have a nice day at the Congo dear?"
  "What?"
  "Pardon!"
  "What?"
  "Salt and pepper?"
  "No thanks ... Dad? Where does the river go?"
  "What, has it been hiding?"
  "Don't be silly. The water doesn't come back does it. It goes down the
hill, and it can't get back up can it."
  "No. It's always different water."
  "It tastes the same, but."
  "It tastes like water." She didn't look convinced.
  "Where does the water go?"
  "To the sea. It goes into the sea, and then it becomes the sea."
  "I don't think it should. It's still the water from our river isn't it.
The sea tastes different, doesn't it."
  "Yes, it's the salt."
  "Aren't there rivers in the sea?"
  "I suppose there are, sort of."
  "And our river's in the sea?"
  "Yes honey," Kathryn looked solemnly into her plate. "Your dinner will
get cold."
  It's hard getting used to a new school, a new way of teaching: more children,
and all the same age. For the first time Kathryn wasn't in my class. I'd
see her across the asphalt, skipping, tossing a yo-yo, punching boys: the
time-honored occupations of youth. I was tired getting home. The preparations
and the cooking seemed to take longer. The air was heavier, is heavier,
than in the dusty town where Kathryn was born: thicker with water. I didn't
spend a lot of time with her. Sending her out to play was easy. She was
always happy to go.
  Kathryn also seemed to tire more easily, or at least she was tired more
often. Perhaps her play had become more vigorous. The new school may have
been more demand+ing on us both. More and more often she was silent at dinner.
  She seemed to seek sleep as a refuge, which worried me a little, because
she soon began to suffer from dreams. It became a routine. Late, but before
dawn, she'd wake up crying, screaming sometimes. I'd rush in and, with a
mixture of sympathy and annoyance, make what I'd assumed to be comforting
goo-goo noises until she quietened herself down. When she was quiet, she'd
look confused at me, almost in reproach, as if wondering why I'd come in
to disturb her rest. I asked once if she'd like to sleep with a light. She
said a simple "No" which made me feel foolish. I don't believe she was the
least afraid of the dark.
  One week-day morning - it must have been Tuesday, sports day - Kathryn
was washing in the bathroom. She'd been in a while, and I needed a shave.
  "Can I come in?" I said for some reason, turning the handle.
  I stepped in, and had to catch myself up, grabbing at the door-handle.
The tiles were under a thin sheet of water. Steadying myself, I saw Kathryn
standing at the sink. The soap was in her near hand at her side. The other
hand was on the basin edge. She was staring blank-faced at the tap running,
the water overflowing. I don't think I'll ever lose my abhorrence of wasted
water.
  "Kathryn! You stupid girl!" and with more ferocity than I'd intended,
glared at her and turned off the tap.
  She looked up at me startled, almost panicked, as if she too had slipped
suddenly and caught herself without thinking. She looked at me as if waiting
for her mind to catch up with her body.
  Looking at her face, thinking these things, I didn't notice her reach
into the water and pull out the plug. The drain's gurgle and suck somehow
robbed the situation of the significance it had begun to take on.
  "Don't do that Kathryn. Open the window."
  "Yes Dad. Do you know where my sports socks are?"
  "If they're not in your drawer, they must be in the wash. You'll have
to wear your grey ones."
  I don't quite know how it happened, but in the final term I got roped
into the annual school production. One in a long and noble tradition of
pre-pubescent Pirates of Penzance. I had less and less time for her, and
she seemed to have less need of me. We'd hardly have seen each other at
all if not for her nightmares. The world's a small one for a busy man -
I told myself.

The year went on, and the weather became continuously humid and hot. It
always seemed on the verge of rain, whether or not the sky was clouded.
  One afternoon the clouds were piling up, coming in from the sea. The
pre-storm agitation hit me, and I began to wonder what Kathryn was doing.
  For some reason these things affect you, the state of the weather. When
the air's on the verge, everything seems in need of haste. I almost ran
to the little creek, to the pool that was her favorite. By that time the
wind was stronger - still hot, but carrying the edge of the cold to come.
The clouds were black at the line of hills, swelling white at the crest,
like great waves. 
  I had to catch my breath when I reached Kathryn's pool, leaning with my
hand against the crusted willow bark which had the look of dry, eroded earth.
Kathryn had been swimming. Her clothes lay on the bank.
  The air was heavy under the willow, and the exertion had tired me more
than I'd thought. I looked at my daughter from within a growing dizziness.

</sample>

                                        

<sample><id> K25 </id>

<note> 2022 words </note>

<source> Islands </source>

<h> The suppliant </h>

<bl> By Graham Sheil </bl>

For a one-time believer become estranged, the Church prescribes
he kneel - then believe. A ra+tional man, surely, would
reverse the prescription, requiring decision first, then the
deed; and insist the prescribed order reveals merely the
suppliant's will. Yet by this illogic might an unsure painter
draw his first charcoal strokes, by this tenet might a writer
start a story.
   For Rodney Hallens - driving, the needle towards a hundred
and twenty, the bitumen ahead quite straight between scattered
gums - rationality had been his polestar. Yet since his return
to people and places that chafed with their familiarity, the
decision whether or not to again leave the familiar had become
a search for a symbol or sign that would present the decision
ready-made and unequivocal to him.
   We would see a sign a poet had lamented, and he sought
one. Specifically, at the moment, a road sign. But the pointed
direction assumed in his mind trans+atlantic proportions: a
sign that might point the future direction of his life.
   A sign-post ahead, and he eased his foot on the 
accelerator. But it was miles yet to his sign. He sped on. To
his left a gum-strewn plain; but on his right there
increasingly rose above the red sandy ground and gums, a range
of craggy shoulders and hips of naked rock.
   A different range, this, to those he had gone walk+ing in
half a year before. There he had followed roads that climbed
and elbow-turned beside tumble-and-swirl streams, past houses
with antlers over door+ways and cow pastures called Blaa-alm;
then leaving the road to climb the track that brought him above
the tree-line, to see the glacier on the Dachstein suspend+ed
in the sky, and below, the village, dotted and blocked beside
the perfect pear shape of the lake.
   His memories of Europe were all like that: choco+late box
tableaus of fir and deer-antler and snow, or of an Openhaus
with marble steps and statues, or of artists painting at easles
among the sidewalk throng.
   His stay in Europe had been a dream exceeded.
   This European dream had grown out of his awak+ening from
another. This first dream had been of his own country rising
at last out of its cat-o'-nine-tails and English-overlord past
to become uniquely itself. His reading, visits to one-time
convict cells, dumps of gold and copper-mines, his notebooks
in which he recorded the accents and phrases with which old
peo+ple told of the past, had become the material out of which
he fashioned stories and plays of his country's past. Magazine
and stage-stories that were celebra+tions of the heroic.
   But what could rise heroically out of the clipped lawns and
pruned roses of suburban streets, the macadam, carbon-monoxide
and chrome of the highways?
   That something heroic and unique could rise, he had held no
doubt. And had counted himself a vol+unteer among those who
worked to make it happen.
   He had been woken from that dream by the sound of police
boots kicking into a felled demonstrator dur+ing the Johnston
visit. And hearing cabinet ministers braying hoarse with
denunciations of demonstrations against the war to be flagrant
lawlessness on our streets.
   The south-east Asian wars had been one part of his
awakening; the disintegration of his marriage had been the
other.
   His marriage to Victoria had commenced with a honeymoon on
the Queensland coast. Then year fol+lowing year they'd returned
to walk far out on the mudflats at low tide. Days were spent
fishing from the beach; nights in playing cards with people
from the caravan park or holiday flats; and to clinging and
panting together in the warm nights.
   This life of shared hedonism came in time to be blown away
by the smallest of puffs: squabbles over the TV programs she
watched, her resentment that he would again be writing for
hours, or at yet another meeting or march or demonstration. In
the end they sold the house and split the surprisingly little
they had to show for their eight years together.
   Victoria was going north to the coastal town of their holidays.
She had arranged lease of a shop there and was confident she
could make a living selling to tourists and to people from the
caravan park opposite.
   Victoria delayed her own drive north until the day he left
for Europe. In what had previously been his car, she drove him
to the airport. They sat in the car park. Each, at first, made
attempts at conversation. Then they sat without speaking. They
shook hands. Neither attempted a kiss.
   His disenchantment with his marriage and his country had
become linked in his mind as the public and private faces of
the same thing. So as the plane took to the air and he saw the
coastline slip behind, it seemed symbolic to him that he had
left both on the same day.
   After his slow awakening from one dream, he dived from the
sky into another.
   He prowled London streets with a satchel of plays under arm
and a street guide in hand, searching out backstreet playhouses
where he left copies of his plays. He left manuscripts of
stories on editors' desks, being able to remind one editor of
a story pre+viously published by his magazine.
   On his second morning in London, he rang Michael Bruthern.
Bruthern converted novels into playscripts for British
television.
   The pub in which they met was the one pub in London
(Bruthern pronounced) where you could get a Carlton and United
icy cold. The bar was crowded with Australians. Not the place,
Hallens reflected, to plead that cold beer gave him bladder
trouble.
   His bladder was still painful next day when Bruthern
introduced him to a television producer. The producer scanned
an offered script, pronounced it competent, though far too
Australian. He stated that later in the year they would be
embarking on a series of European Classics. Previously they had
done Madame Bovary and The Idiot. The producer sug+gested
Hallen make his own selection, do a precis of, say, ten
episodes, and a pilot script of the first epi+sode. Nothing
promised, the producer said, but, wel+l-l-l, we'll see ...
   Elated at not having to immediately set to work, Hallens
stayed another week, endured another bladder-aching session of
the amber fluid, told Bruthern he would return in about three
months when his money would have run low, then boarded a plane
for Hannover.
   If London had been an up-tempo version of a world he already
knew, Hannover was his introduc+tion to what might well have
been another planet.
   His first aerial glimpse, was of ancient three-tiered barns
and triple-storeyed farm buildings squatting among flat green
fields. Then, feet-on-the-ground, he stared at men in peaked
caps and overcoats riding bicycles beneath bare branches of
linden and birch under soft grey skies.
   In this mystic world the theatres he attended were not the
cramped back street playhouses of London, but giant Openhausen
where doormen in tails ushered you to even the cheapest seats.
Here, too, was an open-air stage in palace gardens where a row
of gilt statues formed the backdrop. There a season of open air
theatre began in June, so he pencil-marked the program and
altered his plans so as to return for per+formances of Moliere
and Brecht and Shakespeare. 
   Then from train windows he glimpsed castles veiled in rain
and deer seen in the early-morning half-light; he walked
beneath linden trees in northern deer-parks and in Austria
climbed among rocks and snow and the mountain lying fir; at
sidewalk stalls he ate herring in rolls, smoked salmon in
rolls, and drank bier that was warm, frothy, and kind to his
bladder. On railway platforms and in carriages and pensione
rooms he read novels by Tolstoy and Tur+genev and Flaubert, and
made tentative divisions of each into episodes.
   By then the shape of his own future had presented itself
sharp-edged and primary-coloured to him. He would live and
work, say, nine months of each year in London; then three
months of each year in Europe.
   Any likelihood of returning to Australia did not appear in
this possible future at all.
   He was in Milan, visiting prescribed galleries, and had
returned to his box-sized room after a morning that included
Leonardo's Last Supper, when the pro+prietor handed him a
package. He sat on the bed and opened it to find inside a
letter from Bruthern, and a sealed envelope with an Australian
postmark.
   Though the second letter intrigued him the more, he read the
first. Bruthern wrote that while none of the London playhouses
expressed interest in his plays, a theatre in Leeds was
impressed to the point of almost certainly putting on one of
his plays in July or August. Would he be able to be present
during rehearsals?
   The second letter was typewritten and as terse as a
telegram: 

     <misc> Rod </misc>
Vicki's stacked your car and in hospital. The
     Holden's a write-off and Vicki damn-near. 
     On Intensive Care list. If she gets over 
     con+cussion etc she'll be in traction for months. 
     Shop's shut. Rent and wholesalers' bills still 
     to be paid and bank low. Don't let a little 
     thing like this spoil your gadding about. No 
     love
                                               Val.

   His youngest sister had never accepted his mar+riage to
Victoria was finished. On re-reading the let+ter, he felt the
barb go in. He left the room to walk the crowded footpaths,
apologizing to people he kept bumping and finding himself at
corners without any idea of which way to turn. He became hungry
and bought cassata but later found he was still holding the now
soggy cone and the cassata melted in pink and green dribbles
over his wrist and down his sleeve. Later that night, he was
first sarcastic, then bullying, to the man who answered the
'phone at the airport terminal.


Along the Queensland coast Summer had continued through the
months of Autumn without a glimpse of the sun-routed season.
Holiday flats bordering the esplanade and the foreshore caravan
park continued full in May. Though mackerel began their run up
the coast on-calender, the winter whiting refused to appear.
   Rodney Hallens twice put down his cases and tried to arrange
his coat on top of one of them as he walked the esplanade
footpath. The second time was outside Victoria's shop. He stood
sweating, as he peered through locked glass doors at the rows
of groceries behind counters, the deep freeze, card racks,
fishing rods, reels and lines arranged in a corner. Though he
held the key, he pushed arms into coat sleeves and carried the
cases around the corner at the restaurant next door; then two
blocks along and up stairs to Victoria's second storey flat. 
   Plane, train, bus and taxi had finally discharged him at the
Harcourt Bay Hospital an hour and a half previously. Mrs
Hallens, he had been told, was now out of Intensive Care. She
was in Ward Three. Yes, he could go up.
   Ward Three was really a balcony enclosed by high, vertical,
aluminium louvres that could be opened, angled and shut.
Victoria lay with one leg bare from the knee raised in
traction. He saw her eyes open wide on seeing him, then she
closed them. She said he might at least have given her warning.
   For an hour he sat beside the bed, trying not to stare at
the stainless steel pin to which weights were attached that
protruded each side of her shin. He made the bantering remarks
he had prepared during the thirty hour plane flight; then they
sat, not so much conversing as each offering phrases then
wait+ing and watching to see if the other accepted.
   On subsequent visits that tentative note remained. Only when
discussing pricing or ordering or the tak+ings for the day did
they regard themselves on neu+tral ground.
   Each day he opened the shop at eight, took de+livery of
bread and milk, then swept the floor and the footpath outside.
At first he had taken an exercise book, pencils and thesaurus,
for he had definitely decided upon Flaubert's Sentimental
Education as the European Classic to be adapted for television.

</sample>
 

<sample><id> K27 </id>

<note> 2026 words </note>

<source> The Adelaide Review </source>

<h> The third commandment of Cologne </h>

<bl> By John Emery </bl>

THERE IS a moment, some mornings, when Kurt wakes up and, waking, thinks
he is in Cologne. He thinks he can hear the sound of little men in trilbies
and roll-neck sweaters clomping on the pavement. Standing at the kerb blowing
on their fingers against the cold. He thinks he can hear the roar of traffic.
The smell of industrial fumes brought down by the cold, damp wind off the
Rhine. If he went to the window he would see their closed-up faces, staring
down at the grey pavement, avoiding each other as they scurry to the office,
the factory, wherever.
  It is a moment of panic and there is only one way to over-come it. He
throws off the blanket and heaves himself up from the bed. He is naked and
he is not cold. That is the first sign of reassurance. He can hear his wife
singing, not in German, not even in French - even though her French is
excellent, better than his - but in a language made up almost entirely of
vowels. An oceanic language. Limpid, languid, mellifluous. He hears his
children shout in the same tongue.
  Reassured he pulls aside the Dayglo drape and looks out.

  THE COLOGNE feeling is explained by the low cloud, clinging to the peaks.
Up there are growing rows and rows of pines. The cloud hugs the shape of
the peak. The great brooding mass of rock that looms over the ruins of the
Nunnery. Ka veve o ke zine.
  He peers out and now he knows he is not in Cologne. He thinks it could
be somewhere in Spain. The white cobblestone blocks that lead under the
trees to the Cathedral. The peeling blue paint on the cathedral. The nick
in the side of one of its towers where a charge of shot slammed during the
dispute, 130 years ago, with the Jesuit missionaries who had press-ganged
all the inhabitants into building the cathedral, the summer palace for the
king, the cobbled roads. Thousands of the inhabitants died, he remembers,
in that insane burst of building, when Pere Laval had his vision that here
would be the Pacific's centre of Catholicism. From here would the tide of
Protestantism be rolled right back to Manchester.
  And he built the Nunnery beneath Ka veve o ke zine. Hill where women jump
in the old tongue. An activity almost given up until the nunnery's regime
of Catechism, sewing, the singing of dirge-like hymns instead of the dancing
of the tamore, revived it.
  Kurt hates the Church, and now he hears the bell toll out that today is
All Souls Day, and he realises that his wife is singing precisely because
she is going to Mass, and for him to fight it would not stop her, would
do nothing but point up the division that lies between them, the chasm that
he is not yet ready to cross. The chasm of the Pacific Ocean; between Cologne
and his home, here, on the island.
  He lights a Galloise. The patisserie will be open soon and he'll get some
fresh croissants for breakfast. Today he is going to set levels for the
concreting work he is doing for the gendarme. He turns away from the town
window and goes to the other window and opens it, and smiles.
  He keeps this view till last. He likes to feel the panic that maybe he
is back in Europe. He likes to resolve it slowly, step by step. And this
is the second last step. He stares down at the wharf. There's a ship at
the end of it, must have come in last night. A small trader. He immediately
looks across the bay, but the French destroyer is gone. The cloud is breaking,
but the lagoon is still a dirty grey. Soon it will sparkle blue. There is
a wind from the south-east and it's bringing up chop. If his friend, Tihoni,
is on that boat then he won't be able to get out to his island.
  He looks for Tihoni's island: Kamaka. It's a small volcanic peak with
a sliver of beach. As the cloud lifts he can see out to the reef. It's always
a reassuring sight to see that reef, even though it's 25 km away, so far
all you can see is a line of coconut palms, like telephone poles, rising
out of the lumpy ocean. A row of telephone poles that circles Mangareva
and keeps the Pacific Ocean from slamming the brittle volcanic debris that
makes up the islands into powder.
  "O Kurt? Kurt? Take the boys down to the baker, will you? Get them some
breakfast. My sister is here for Mass."
  He turns slowly, for the final confirmation that he has made it, he has
got rid of Europe, little men in trilbies, cold smog, closed in faces. He
shuts out the mention of Mass. Just as, if he had seen the destroyer over
by the pearl-farm when he looked, he wouldn't have seen it either.
  She smiles at him. Her eyes are brown, almost black. Her hair is black,
long, fine. Her skin is brown and so clear. No one in Europe ever had skin
that clear. She wears a tight, red and blue and yellow dress. It is too
tight. He stops himself from frowning. Last year it was just tight enough.
Next year she will have to admit the truth and buy a larger size. Polynesian
women expand to fill their years.
  And the boys look up at him, too. Not as brown as her. He smiles at her
as he takes their hands. Their young fingers are browner than his, but clear
and unweathered. She brushes against him, letting him feel her thanks that
he is not making a scene about Mass.

  WHEN KURT was a boy Cologne was a pile of rubble being bulldozed. It
was a street of G.I's with gum and jeeps. It was a place where no one talked
about anything that had happened. History had been a bad dream and now that
they were awake they'd not mention it - even though everyone had the identical
dream, even though there were still bodies waiting to be discovered, bombs
that would explode as Kurt and his friends clambered amongst the ruins.
  There was a cathedral in Cologne, too. He could just remember the way
its twin towers soared into the sky, like gingerbread mountains. The cathedral,
too, was full of rubble. People picked through the rubble as if they were
looking for the Relics, unable to believe that so Holy a place could have
been touched by something as mundane as bombs.
  If the home of the Relics of the Magi could be desecrated, then what hope
was there for any dreams?
  Through the rubble the dreamers walked. The only people who seemed awake
were the G.I's. Kurt watched them closely. He watched how his own people
both shrank away from them and also kow-towed to them. He watched the return
of the men to the town. The haunted, broken faces of the men. The women
trying not to watch their return, trying not to act as if they knew their
own man was not amongst them. Kurt's mother's man. Kurt's father. Not there.
Gone.
  Kurt made three silent vows. And, being the vows of a child, uttered in
secret, they would bind him forever.
  One. He would become a soldier, like the G.I's. 
  Two. He would leave Cologne forever.
  Three. He would never think about history.
  He also made a wish. That, in his life as a soldier, at wherever it was
soldiers went, he would find his father. But he already knew the wish would
not come true. He only made the wish in anger at his mother's association
with the G.I's.

  KURT DISCOVERED you couldn't be a soldier in Germany any more. The Germans
were people of the broken dream. Kurt searched until he found an army he
could join. It was in France. The Foreign Legion.
  Kurt went first to Africa. He didn't like Africa. It, too, was full of
dream-walkers. Impatiently, he pressed for a transfer, and was offered
Polynesie. He didn't know where it was, or what he'd be doing there. He
didn't care. He went.
  Kurt takes the boys down to the Patisserie. The people on the street shout
hullo to him. No trilbies. Shorts and open, flower-strewn shirts. Sarongs.
In the hair cascades of real flowers. That's what he loves the best. Those
intricate baskets of flowers they weave into their hair. The men with floral
head-dresses and frangipani and hibiscus behind their ears. That's what
he likes. 
  The church-goers are streaming ahead of him. All the fine young girls
and the young family men with wives and children. If he joined the church
he knows he would close off just a bit more of the chasm between himself
and, not just Eugine, but also her sister, and her mother, and by that process
all her relatives. But something blocks inside him at the thought of it.
  The boys want ice-cream. Of course they want ice-cream. What he would
like to do right now is take their breakfast and go out to the boat and
head out over a patch of coral and put a couple of lines over the side and
see what comes up.
  But he knows what would come up. Siguratera gambiera would come up.
  He frowns and lights another smoke. For a moment there, history crept
in. Blue-green algae. French destroyers. The long concrete and iron shed
away off across town, with the sprinklers on the roof.

  THAT SHED was the biggest joke of all. When he first arrived in Mangareva,
with the Foreign Legion, they were just building it. There used to be 15,000
people in these islands, the Gambier Islands, of which Mangareva was the
largest, before Father Louis Jacques Laval and his assistants had arrived,
in 1834. By the time they were removed the population was down to 5,000.
  By 1963 the population was 2,500. Mangareva was becoming a ghost island
with a huge white cathedral and the tombs of the old Polynesian kings. 
  The French authorities were worried about the wind.
  The wind which blew from Muroroa Atoll, about 800 km to the west. They
offered the islanders a deal. Free air fares and freight if they shifted
to the island of Tahiti.
  That's right, they said. Join the relatives in the metropolis. Be where
the action was. Dancing and drinking. Buy a Citroen. Use some of your
traditional rights and request a piece of land. Get to hell out of this
dying atoll.
  And most of the Mangarevans did just that. But about a thousand stayed
on. Well, Polynesie, is a Province of France, and France is the home of
democracy. French officials were not going to force people to leave their
homes. Indeed, no. 
  But they would suggest to the Mangarevans that, when the hooter sounded,
they all file down to the nice new shed the Legionnaires were building,
with the sprinklers on the roof, and stay there until the next hooter sounded.
  "But, why? What's the danger?"
  "Danger? Danger? There is no danger. This is but a precaution."
  "A precaution against what?"
  Kurt had seen it before. The baffled faces. The officer being pleasant,
until pressed beyond a certain point. The troops sitting in the truck, rifles
between their knees. He'd seen it before, but could barely remember it -
even though it was now him sitting in the truck, holding the rifle, watching
the officer's back.
  All he could remember was the Third Commandment of Cologne.
  Forget about history.
  He built the shed. He herded the islanders into it. Once they sat there
for 24 hours without food, Kurt included, staring up at the chink of sky
they could see where they'd run out of roofing iron, along one side. The
sprinklers were sprinkling away, flushing whatever it was the officer didn't
want anyone to know about, off the roof, down the concrete channel, and
into the lagoon.             

</sample>



<sample><id> K28 </id>

<note> 2000 words </note>

<source> Quadrant </source>

<h> Marching on a great road </h>

<bl> By Peter McConnell </bl>

IN HIS THIRD YEAR at university, Jeffrey Watson grew a beard and took to
wearing jungle boots into lectures. He bought a Mao badge and a Little Red
Book, joined the Labour Club and on a visit home announced to his parents
that he was rejecting, out of hand, the entire existing social order.
  His mother was a little shocked. She had brought her son up in a respectable
way, a Christian way, and had always wanted him to have nice friends. It
was her hope that he should settle down in a good career. At Scotch College
Jeffrey had been a Prefect and a Cricket Blue. He had won a prize for an
essay entitled "What Does the Commonwealth Mean to Us?" But now all that
lay in the past. Jeffrey had grown a beard and was associating with a scruffy
crowd of radicals, many of whom were not even British. Where would it all
end?
  Jeffrey's father on the other hand was non-committal. The boy was still
very young he would say, and going through a stage. He must be left alone
to work out his own pathway in life.
  In spite of Mr Watson's tolerance however, relations with his son did
become rather strained at times. At weekends Jeffrey would arrive home with
carloads of his new friends. They would virtually occupy the old Vic+torian
house in South Yarra. Its panelled rooms would echo to the strident sound
of Chinese songs: "Red is the East" and "Marching on a Great Road." Violent
arguments would break out beneath the family portraits on Imperialism,
Revisionism and other "isms" which no-one else in the family had so much as 
heard of. At his own mahogany*mahogony dinner table Mr Watson would be needled
about his Directorships, his BHP shares and his Heysens by wild-eyed, bearded
youths.
  However, he remained unfailingly tolerant and at the most heated moments
would calm everybody by saying: "Gentlemen! What about some more wine?"
  Jeffrey seemed to blame his father for so much. Behind his back he would
describe him as "a reactionary bourgeois" or "a comprador". It seemed to
him that the men of his father's generation had betrayed the youth of today
and had left them facing a world of poverty, war and injustice. Take Vietnam
for example. It made him angry and bitter to think that people like himself,
with a good education, could be packed off to Vietnam to fight.
  On May day, Jeffrey Watson was arrested at an anti-war demonstration at
the US Consulate. On hearing the news Mr Watson proceeded at once to the
police station to bail him out. As a civic leader with a legal background
he was able to arrange this quite easily. Jeffrey was amused by the whole
experience. It gave him something exciting to talk about at the Labour Club.
  A little later, on July 4th, Jeffrey was arrested again at a second
demonstration. Mr Watson was not so quick on the scene this time. He was
forced to spend the night in a small, damp cell. There were also some
unpleasant threats from an insensitive policeman. When Jeffrey mentioned
his father's name the threats ceased abruptly. Still, for a moment he had
been thoroughly frightened. On his release next day he resolved that he
would avoid undue prominence at future demonstrations and con+centrate more
on agitational work among the broad student masses.
  Besides, he had another distraction now. He was becoming very involved
with a new girlfriend whom he had met at a political meeting.
  Her name was Hannah. She had long black hair, pale skin and a very dramatic
personality. A firm believer in Women's Liberation, she refused to wear
make-up or dresses on principle. Jeffrey was fascinated by her. With her
independence and contempt for convention she was a complete contrast to
the middle-class girls he had known in the past. After a short acquaintance
they decided to set up house together in a student commune in Carlton.
  The commune, or "foco" as it was sometimes called, was situated in an
old, run-down terrace with a wrought-iron balcony. Jeffrey shifted his stereo,
his clothes and his textbooks there from South Yarra and comforted his mother,
who insisted on weeping at his leaving home.
  He and Hannah spent a whole day painting their new room white and decorating
the walls with red and yellow posters from the East Wind bookshop. The posters
showed the workers of the world breaking loose from their chains and striding
heroically towards the sunrise.
  Their life together was very happy. On Saturday mornings they went shopping
in Lygon St. They wan+dered hand in hand through the park, helped one another
with their essays and slept together in a big double bed with a red and
black bedspread.
  At night, students from the commune and the radical movement would crowd
together in the lounge. The room would fill with blue marijuana smoke and
to the sound of clinking beer glasses Maoists, Anarchists and Guevarists
would clash furiously. Someone with a guitar would strike up a Bob Dylan
song. Karl Marx himself, in his black frock coat, gazed benevolently down
from the wall, next to Mick Jagger. Looking up at them with a "joint" in
his hand Jeffrey would think proudly of how far he had come. He was light
years away now from family and his old college friends.
  Nonetheless, he never lost touch entirely with his former world. Now and
then he would run across old Scotch College acquaintances in the university
cafe. Smiling faintly he would listen as they talked of their boring bourgeois
lives - the same old chundering sessions, sports cars and law studies. Then
quietly, with the air of an insider, he would relate some incident from
hs new life. He would describe how they had exposed a Revisionist, thrown
rocks at a govenment office or let down the tyres of the Vice-Chancellor's
car. His old friends would listen, horrified, yet secretly impressed.
  Nor did Jeffrey lose touch with his family.
  In second term he even took Hannah out to South Yarra for tea. The evening
however was not a great social success. Hannah insisted on wearing her
filthiest blue jeans and on parading her full vocabulary of four letter
words. Mrs Watson was frigidly polite. Mr Watson did his best with questions
about Hannah's family - her parents had kept a small shop - but it was clear
that nobody was at ease. Among the family portraits and monogrammed silver
Hannah seemed strangely out of place, and a little vulgar. Her table manners
were atrocious.
  It was soon after this visit that they began to have their first quarrels.
There were several things about Hannah which puzzled and worried Jeffrey.
It turned out that she had slept with several other boyfriends before him.
That shocked him a good deal, and they had a quarrel about it. Then again,
she was absurdly over-sensitive on some subjects. Once Jeffrey had made
a perfectly harmless joke about the Jews and she had flared up at him in
a ridiculous way. They had a quarrel about that too.
  It was a very difficult relationship on occasions. Sometimes Hannah would
cling to him like a child, then at other times she would act as if she hated
him. She would tell him about her unhappy childhood: her alco+holic father,
her chaotic family and the Polish relatives who had died in concentration
camps. She would break down, cry and cling to him, and Jeffrey would feel
embarrassed and guilty. At these times he wanted nothing more than to get
away from her.
  Little by little he was also becoming disillusioned about the radical
movement. The demonstrations were no longer as exciting for him as they
had once been. It was always the same old red flags and familiar faces from
the Labour Club and SDS. The political discussions were beginning to bore
him too. Sometimes, sitting in the middle of a long, involved debate about
Dialectics or Alienation or what Trotsky said to Bukharin in 1928 he would
find himself yawning and almost dropping off to sleep.
  The student radicals were starting to irritate him. He couldn't help thinking
sometimes that they were narrow-minded, resentful and envious, and a little
unbalanced with all their talk of injustice. They all seemed to have chips
on their shoulders, and were forever in a rage about something - Vietnam,
Aborigines, prisoners - if it was not one thing it was another. Certainly
there was injustice in Australia, but, as his father said, no society was
without its faults. You couldn't change human nature. It was all very well
for them to do away with God, the family, private property and the State,
but what were they going to put in the place of these things? Utopian theories
which had never worked! It was not very constructive.
  Sometimes, watching them arguing furiously away about the worries of the
world, Jeffrey would find himself thinking of his Uncle George who was
a Colonel in the Army. Uncle George had said once that all these grousers
and malcontents and radicals were just people who couldn't make it in normal
society. They should all be given a taste of the lash and clapped into the
Army for a few years: and that would cure them. Dear old Uncle George and
his simple notions.
  There were incidents at the commune which got on Jeffrey's nerves.
  Because he had an allowance from his parents they expected him to contribute
constantly to every cause which came along. Money was always being needed
for legal expenses, for getting draft resisters out of gaol, for medical
aid to Zimbabwe or Vietnam or the West Zanzibar Liberation Front - and they
looked down their noses at him if he didn't contribute. They seemed to think
he was made of money.
  Another of his pet grievances was that the others at the commune had no
sense of property. They were forever borrowing his stereo and his typewriter
and his Bob Dylan records, and somehow he never liked to object. To object
would have been "bourgeois".
  But the worst thing of all about the place was the dirt. Jeffrey did his
best to keep the house clean, but the others seemed to simply revel in squalor.
There was always rubbish lying about, dirty dishes in the sink and half-starved
cats prowling through the kitchen. Hannah was the worst offender of all.
In spite of his efforts she kept their room like a pig-sty, with underwear,
books and papers scattered everywhere. It was driving Jeffrey up the wall.
  And then, beyond all the temporary problems at the commune, there loomed
the rapidly approaching final exams and the prospect of having to get a
job.
  Mr Watson was becoming worried by this very question. On one of his son's
rare visits home he invited him into the study for a heart to heart talk.
  "Isn't it time Jeffrey that you devoted some thought to the future?" he
began seriously. "I'd be the last one in the world to interfere with your
freedom, but all this political activity - is it doing you any good? It's
all very well now - you're just going through a stage - but if it goes on
too long it could have repercussions on your career."
  Jeffrey defended himself half-heartedly, but the unknown future when he
would have his Arts degree loomed over him now like a menacing black cloud.
  Then, a month before the exams, to cap everything off, Hannah announced
that she was having a baby.
  Jeffrey was simply flabbergasted when she told him. He had the feeling
that his life was turning into a nightmare.
  They argued until 3 in the morning about what to do. Hannah became quite
hysterical. She behaved in a very immature way. Naturally there was no question
of them keeping the baby or of getting married.  

</sample>


              

<sample><id> K29 </id>

<note> 2003 words </note>

<source> Ghoul Days and Other Stories</source>

<h> Avidya and the Atman </h>

<bl> By Kenneth Simpson </bl>

    Doug McNab had returned to his flat after driving his sweetheart home.
I knew his movements because whenever he drove in or out of the drive he
tooted, not only to warn any approaching pedestrians that they were about
to be run over but to let everyone know that Doug was arriving or Doug was
leaving.  My flat was above his and I had developed my opinion of his
personality from these and other habits that he had, metaphorically, thrust
under my nose.
    That evening Doug and his sweetheart had walked on the beach holding
hands in the best tradition of young lover triumphant at the end of a
wide-screen epic: The hero and heroine silhouetted against the setting sun,
walking barefoot by the water's edge, their footprints melting and finally
vanishing, washed by slippery wavelets.
    When I first met him I was impressed by his mediocrity.  There seemed
to be no depth to his personality.  His conversation was banal and strewn
with cliches.  It was a relief to escape and have myself for company.
    From that first joyless meeting I couldn't seem to avoid Doug.  Invariably
his movements coincided with mine*mind.  He would pop out unexpectedly
from diverse places: from underneath my stairs, his garage, shrubbery,
shop doorways, and from the sea, dripping, to hover disconcertingly over
me while I sunbathed.  If I wasn't with him or unable to see him I could
always hear him since, apart from other distracting noises, he was liable
to shout greetings from one end of the block of flats to someone at the
other end, and he was no respecter*respector of doors which he slammed 
uncompromisingly.
    Needless to say our relationship didn't mature.  I came no nearer to
knowing Doug and apparently he had no desire to plumb my depths.  Commonplace
repetitious words were our only means of communication.  I tried without
success to raise our level of intercourse above the monotonous and mediocre.
A pet dog would have been more responsive.
    I attributed Doug's apparent satisfaction with the situation to the
fact that he had contrived its creation.  My dissatisfaction was due in
part to my role as a pawn in a drama I knew nothing about.  Almost as a
means of self-defence I began to analyse Doug's behaviour.  I attempted
to probe beneath the surface of his personality.  However, by doing so,
I inflated him out of all proportion so that he developed gradually into
a kind of omnipresent incubus:  corporally, aurally and mentally.
    Irritation was, I suppose, my dominant feeling towards Doug but it was
liable to swing from tolerance at one extreme to contempt at the other.
    I came to realize that beneath the surface of the mind a subtle
undercurrent flowed, compared with which the surface was transparent as
a muddy pool.
    Beneath the surface, carried by the current, I translated Doug's sounds
and actions into a language based on suppositions, intuition and probabilities.
    I recalled that first meeting and revived a dormant impression.  It was odd 
but Doug had appeared to be introducing himself to himself, rather than to me, 
as if verifying his identity through me.  I was then, and had remained, a 
computer that accepted his information, processed it and finally emmitted the 
result via a particular wave-length beyond which, at either extreme, my 
response became scrambled and meaningless due to Doug's mental censoring 
apparatus.  It was really a form of closed circuit, self-imposed brain-washing.
    Another clue was the careful, almost scripted way he spoke, as though
he were afraid of letting something slip out that might compromise him.
There was a slight but definite emphasis to his remarks, not in an inflexible
or bombastic vein but rather an excess of forced joviality or a `tentatively
determined' delivery that suggested he was afraid of being contradicted.
He introduced his exploits into a conversation somewhat slyly, matter-of-factly
and with a degree of pseudo-humility that he probably meant to be disarming.
    I also conjured up a mental picture of Doug.  It was an unremarkable
image of a medium sized, lean, wiry old man; balding but with long hair
at the back, white bushy sideburns and a half-smile that suggested cunning,
confidence, and a sense of humour which he didn't possess.  The less
noticeable, more subtle trait was his self-consciousness.  He never looked
abstracted; he always appeared to be alert and there was a staginess about
his movements like the posing of an actor never off the stage.
    The sound of pop music, loud and urgent like a howling child, invaded
my flat.  I called out, "I know you're a swinger, Doug.  You don't have
to convince me, so turn it down."  Nothing happened of course.  He wouldn't
have heard me.  I closed the windows and turned on a fan.
    That night I dreamt I was an audience oppressed by demanding Dougs;
young middle-aged and old Dougs, all with the one-and-only face I knew so
well, frolicking in the water, turning into a school of fish, then a submarine
with me on board that shot from the water like a rocket to become a flying
fish soaring up and then landing with a thud to slide along the deck of
a magnificent ocean liner where Doug was captain, chief-engineer, mate,
crew, all the passengers and even the ship ... I woke with relief in a room
free of Dougs.
    It was Sunday morning.  After breakfast I walked to the back of the
beach to preview the day.  I sucked in as much salty air as possible and
surveyed the scene.  Some gulls were wheeling above me.  The sky was blue
and cloudless.  A few boats were scattered near the horizon.  A speedboat
towed a skier across the river mouth to the north, and to the south, where
the bay began to curve, I noticed a small figure running along the sand
by the water's edge.
    I think I knew who it was even before I could identify him.  It was
Doug without a doubt.  He glanced towards me then accelerated to finish
full of running in line with me as though I were the finishing post.
    He waved casually in my direction, pulled his tracksuit top over his
head, stepped out of his shorts and sprinted enthusiastically towards the
sea.
    He cavorted about energetically in the water like a drunken porpoise
pretending to swim the butterfly, but in the shallows where his feet could
reach the sand.  I even clapped him but I don't think he noticed.
    Doug's interpretation of other people's opinion of him was the one which
he had created and accepted as reality, so not only had he assumed a fantastic
opinion of himself but he had indoctrinated others with the same opinion
by letting them know, verbally and by example, what their opinion of him
should be.
    "God, that was good," he said. "I feel like a new man every day."
    His voice was loud and hearty.  I felt he was shoving his personality
down my throat and forcing me to swallow it, leaving the residue - the reality-
untouched and inviolable.  It was like a smokescreen designed to hide something
he considered fragile and precious.   
    "How are you?" he asked me.
    "Fine," I replied, but the question had irritated me. He didn't care how I
was. It was his usual, slightly patronizing display of magnaminity, a gambit he
used to bring me into range so that he could recharge his batteries by draining
me.
    "How are you?" I countered, but as I expected he evaded the question.
    "It's a great day," he said instead, grinning with self-satisfaction
and investing his words with an intimate quality so that the sun seemed
to shine personally for him.
    "Where do you get all that energy from?" I asked him, looking at his
brown, self-confident face.
    "I've always had it," he said casually and smiled contentedly. "I suppose
I was born with it."
    That and showing off, I thought.  One inspired the other.
    "Have you read any good books lately?" I asked in an attempt to divert
Doug from Doug.
    "I don't have much time for reading," he replied casually.
    It's a luxury active people like me can do without, was the implication,
but I assumed it was more likely to be because books dealt with other lives
and Doug was unwilling to expose himself to the trauma of invidious or
humiliating comparisons - either that or he was illiterate.
    "I watch television now and then," he remarked.
    "I know," I said, but he didn't react.
    "You like pop music, don't you?" I asked him, still perservering.
    "Yes," he said with a notice of pride, "anything lively."
    We stopped by the steps that led to my flat.  A resident, Mr. Townsend,
bald and very old, hobbled by.
    "The old man is almost a cripple," Doug remarked quietly.
    "It happens if you live long enough," I said, aware of the incongruity
of Doug referring to his contemporary that way, as if he had forgotten his
own age.
    That's it, I realized suddenly.  Dissolution - that's why he made smoke:
to cover up his fear of death.  He thinks of death in personal terms, someone
he can ward off if he's fit and energetic enough, someone he can grow away
from.  He tries to be a superman or a shadow to bluff death, to pretend
that he lacks death's mortal meal, the substance in between.
    "I must be off," said Doug dogmatically, "but I'll see you later."
    "Yes, I'm sure you will," I told him, and I'll hear you and be obsessed
by you, I thought.
    After dialogue with Doug I was usually mentally and emotionally exhausted
by the fatuousness of it all, by being cast as a prop in one of Doug's
make-believe, torpid productions, but back inside my flat I felt alert and
vigorous; I thought of Doug as a problem to be solved rather than as a pest
who haunted my privacy, who had unwittingly forced me to observe that part
of his personality he wished to hide.  I felt like a missionary or a crusader.
I would try, I decided eventually, to turn Doug inside out.  That, I thought,
should disperse some of the smoke.  Later, the sound of Doug's pop music
wafted upwards and impinged on my eardrums, relating his personality once
more to `his-in-mine'.  Instead of closing the windows and turning on the
fan I banged on the floor with a shoe.  The row, magically it seemed, ceased.
Gleefully I rubbed my hands together and forgot about Doug for the rest
of that day.
    Doug's T.V. tuned in as usual during the evening but I tuned him out
with a few blows from my magic shoe.
    I went to sleep that night with Doug and death on my mind.  I dreamt
I was watching a film.  Doug was the star; the scenes were his visions;
the action his thoughts and the sound his voice.  Then I was in the film
and death was chasing Doug along the sand by the water's edge.  I was death
and Doug was a child who smiled.  I let him go.  We were standing on the
edge of a cliff.  I tried to push Doug over but I lunged right through him
and floated down to the rocks below where he was waiting for me, seated
in the lotus posture, transcendent and transparent, larger than a mountain
... It felt good to wake into a world of illusion once more.
   I was on my way to the letter-boxes to pick up my paper when Doug jogged
past me, his chin jutting, arms acting like pistons, chest heaving and legs
pumping.  He looked an odd figure in his long, baggy shorts which emphasized
his thinness.  He stopped by the letter boxes and extracted his own paper.
   "I had a bad time of it this morning," he said bravely (or stoically).
"I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs."  He pointed to his legs.  

</sample>

</section>