The Best Australian Stories 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the room without announcing themselves, and he hoped that one day this coffee table would inherit a legacy of some kind, that it would provide him with an entitlement to history. Let’s not deplete this item too quickly; let’s make it bear witness to something first: some essential moment that speaks of us.
    But when Jennifer, eleven, was caught sliding the remote control across the table to Greg, Dad believed his plans for the table were being openly violated, and he felt for the first time – and not the last – that it might be sensible to have the coffee table locked away in his shed next to his second car and security system. In a rage, Dad lashed the back of Jennifer’s legs with his belt and sent her to her room. How dare they, when he had surrendered everything else, a man halfway through, with the little that he had to show for his life being eroded day by day, usually by invisible forces but occasionally by visible ones, right in front of his eyes, directly challenging him. And he had control over nothing at all. It was pure luck that the incident left no marks, but who can rely on luck?
    Eventually he covered the coffee table with a thick grey blanket that smelt of dog. The same rules applied – ‘no feet, no food, no cups’ – but they were mere tokens now, and this was a test. Dad stopped sitting in the lounge room and spent more time in his shed, gazing blankly at his security screens with their footage of his home’s front door. The stillness of the live footage – the way the verandah and the bricks and the steps never shuddered, even though live – was appealing to him, because in contrast with the Blu-Ray films he owned, this was how he would arrange his life: objects suspended in steady impassive time, his own and his loved ones’ figures present but at a safe distance, the objects buffered by some sympathetic gelatin. In Europe, he speculated, the air you breathe is objects turned to dust. Centuries of transient goods turned to cinders, their molecular pieces inhaled and exhaled daily, and what a fate! But let these objects accrue decades and maybe a couple of centuries of steadfast witnessing first, and let them transfer humble familial sentiments to revering descendants, because only then are they worthy of the air. That was his theory as he gazed blankly at the front door via a monochrome security screen, and wondered whether there was an alternative to this, wondering too what was happening right now with the coffee table.
    For a while the coffee table stood and was not interfered with. There were no events. Time passed around the coffee table: the item was autonomous. Greg edged to the lounge, and Jennifer avoided the room altogether. And in the name of preservation this was preferable, but Dad now felt the coffee table was being taken for granted. Why are we not celebrating the coffee table, and marvelling at what it signifies, that is, the beginning of a history, as if pressing the record button forever from here. He conceived a few possible objections to the coffee table: for example, that it was not historical enough, and that the history he had conferred upon it was negligible and petulant. And he would go to work and make files and feel angry about it.
    He needed to explain himself to someone. On a Friday night it was his routine to drink a bottle of Jim Beam mixed with Coke. He would do this methodically: the bourbon the length of his thumb upright, the Coke a centimetre from the top, and then three lumps of ice. He would marvel at the bubbles. And during these Friday nights he’d tell his wife that what would become of them and their kids was as unknowable as it was arbitrary, and that through some innate condition of things eventually they would have whole landscapes of dreams set out in plastic photo-books, eager, in their very design, to be burned or destroyed someday. There is a great weight bearing down, he would tell his wife,