Desperate Husbands (4 page)

It’s my view that we should make no preparations for my mother’s arrival. None at all. ‘She’s the one with the problem,’ I tell Jocasta. ‘Why should we get uptight about it?’

But Jocasta just shakes her head. ‘You don’t understand. The woman of the household always gets the blame. It will be on my head. Not yours.’

My mother believes we live like pigs in our own filth. She will arrive on Wednesday wearing white gloves to ward off the germs, and will insist on washing all our glassware, plates and cooking utensils before she agrees to eat anything prepared in our kitchen. During her last visit, she located the Spray n’Wipe, and attacked our stove top—squirting in so much cleaning fluid that the thing wouldn’t work for three months. Many women of her generation have a cleaning fetish, but not many have actually cleaned one of their son’s appliances to death.

My mother also believes that I’m obscenely overweight and possibly close to death. She will arrive wearing a solicitous look, pulling her white gloves on ever-tighter, as her eyes swivel between my belly and the stained kitchen benchtops. She will exercise self-control and decide to say nothing—the corners of her pursed lips twitching with the effort. It is an effort at self-control that will break down in a spectacular fashion sometime on the second day.

And so I scrub and I diet.

I say to Jocasta: ‘Why should you be responsible for the fact that I’m just the tiniest bit overweight? It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t care what she says, and neither should you.’

Jocasta replies in a dull, beaten-down monotone, as she scrubs at a recalcitrant piece of skirting: ‘You know nothing,’ she says. ‘It’s the patriarchy. The woman always gets the blame. The mother blames the wife, and never the precious son. Oh, no. He’s
perfect.
’

It’s true my mother has two photographs of me on her hall table. They are side by side—one of me at age fourteen, looking painfully thin. And another, taken a year ago, in which I’m photographed from below in a way that makes me look like Marlon Brando after a binge. Says Jocasta: ‘It’s her way of saying, “This is him when I looked after him; and here he is under the regime of that fat girlfriend of his.”’

Jocasta squirts some Spray n’Wipe onto her cloth and starts singing a mournful slave song from the American south. She appears hopeful that some sort of chariot might swing low and take her to heaven, sometime before Wednesday.

Says Jocasta: ‘She’ll think the shower recess is dirty, but actually it isn’t. The tiles are permanently stained, and so is the grouting, but I’ll get the blame. I think you should regrout it.’

I reply: ‘I’m not going to regrout the whole bathroom just so my mother can have a single shower on Christmas Day. You’re insane.’

I clean the ceiling of the kitchen with sugar soap—a job which sends rivulets of caustic chemicals straight into my eyes. After further discussion with Jocasta, I then decide to regrout the bathroom. The process takes about four hours. The house is getting cleaner and surely—by mere dint of sweaty effort—I’m getting thinner. Maybe this time we’ll reach Day Three of The Visit before my mother and I have our standard conversation:

HER
: ‘I can see you’re not doing anything about your weight problem.’

ME
: ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Mum. I’m not that fat and, besides, why don’t you mind your own business?’

HER
: ‘I would, but it’s a health issue, darling.’

For her, it’s like trying to ignore the huge elephant in the room, the one named Richard. For me, it’s a matter of contemplating my time in Long Bay should I snap and kill her. So I exercise as I clean—wiping the cupboards, polishing the benchtops and chucking expired medicines from the bathroom cabinet.

Jocasta says: ‘Don’t leave any medicine bottles at all. They are evidence of illness. She’ll think we got sick because
we live like pigs in our own filth.’ Jocasta is on her hands and knees in the bathtub, scrubbing while she sings ‘Oh Lord, Will You Let My People Go’ in a yearning alto.

I wash down the back of the house, vacuum some crumbs out of the kitchen drawers and wash down the kitchen windows. As I peer through the soap scum into the kitchen, I see Jocasta collecting up the cleaning products, putting them in boxes and hiding them in cupboards, so that my mother cannot once again kill our stove. After years of preparing for my father’s visits by removing all the alcohol, she now repeats the procedure. Instead of hiding the Scotch, this time she hides all the bottles of Domestos.

Meanwhile, I tackle our bedroom—discovering five apple cores beneath my desk and a beer bottle under the bed. The thought strikes: maybe my mother is right and we do live like pigs in our own filth.

Outside the back door, Jocasta is spraying the dog with air-freshener and singing ‘Death Be My Friend and Take Me to My Lord’, while I consult her list. Three days to go and all I have to do is clean the car, scrub the steps and lose six kilos.

The day before Christmas, my mother arrives. She looks at the house but says nothing. She then gives Jocasta a hug, after which she draws me aside, saying Jocasta is ‘a natural mother’. This, I’m pretty sure, is my mother’s codeword for ‘fat’. At least she hasn’t said anything about me. We go for a walk, me slightly ahead with the dog, while Jocasta walks along with my mother. I take comfort from the fact that (a) I’m not that overweight—not after all that cleaning; and (b) to the extent that I am a little overweight, Jocasta will get all the blame.

I can feel my mother’s eyes on me as I walk. I sense she is battling with herself about whether to say anything. As usual, it is a battle her better self rapidly loses. ‘Ah,’ sighs my mother, confiding in Jocasta. ‘It’s such a shame. He used to be taller.’

For us guys, it’s great to have a new drama show to hook into—one that’s about our lives. This time around it’s the new hit series
Desperate Husbands.
It’s only been on for one season but already you hear of groups of guys getting together—maybe one brings the beers, another the nachos—and settling down to watch. There’s been so much TV for women recently—
Sex and the City
and
Footballers’ Wives
—we guys are hungry for the chance to get together, relax, and reserve a little time for ourselves, and for our friendship. This new show—
Desperate Husbands
—gives us that chance.

All of us have our favourite characters. For me, it’s Bryn, the super-husband, whose hair is always perfect, whose lawn is always mowed and whose edges are always perfectly trimmed. He’s got the gym-toned body, pulls a good salary, and can turn out a plate of fluffy muffins. Yet his wife doesn’t
appreciate him. I guess I perceive something of myself in his situation.

Other guys in our group connect with different characters. They come around Monday night to sit and watch, to laugh and cry. ‘That could be me,’ says my friend Tim, as he watches one of the Desperate Husbands wade into the swimming pool, in a full business suit, in order to untangle a kink in his Kreepy Krauly automatic pool cleaner. ‘I think some people just don’t realise the pressure we guys are under, trying to balance everything—the job, the kids, the pool chemicals. Finally you snap. Before you know it, there are chlorine stains all over your best Armani.’

Maybe that’s why we all appreciate the ‘wish-fulfilment’ character—the middle-aged man who’s having a steamy affair with his eighteen-year-old housemaid. How we laughed when the wife came home from the office and demanded to know what the housemaid had been doing all day! We knew exactly what she’d been doing: having glorious sex with our Desperate Husband while we cheered them on! We especially loved the scene later on—where the middle-aged bloke has to get up in the middle of the night and secretly iron a whole basketful of pleated dresses—all to convince his wife that the housemaid had done some
real
work during the day.

‘Been there, done that!’ we all shouted as we watched, wolfing down the nachos—even though the truth is we wouldn’t dare. All of us know too well the difficulties involved in ironing pleats.

Why do we guys like the show so much? I guess it’s because we feel locked in a little; we feel our lives are on a railway track, all laid out. It’s great to imagine that we could
jump the tracks every now and then—and do something really
desperate.
After the show is finished, we sit there, polishing off the last of the nachos, draining the last of the beers, and we start to dream. Could we really just throw off the ropes? The mortgages? The soccer-practice chauffeur service? The emasculated deference to the boss at work? Could there be another way to start each day, other than with ironing a shirt for work?

Who knows? But with the help of
Desperate Husbands
we’re starting to open up a little; confessing the ways in which middle age is hitting us. Sitting around after the show, we admit we used to think about sex all the time…but now it’s different. ‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong,’ says my mate Ryan, staring pensively at the last of the nachos. ‘Sometimes these days I can go a whole minute without thinking about sex.’ The rest of us nod supportively, trying not to let the shock show on our faces.
A whole minute without thinking about sex.
Ryan’s situation is worse than we thought.

Desperate Husbands
is certainly having its effect. Just yesterday, Tim found he was no longer wearing a tie to work; he’s also swapped his cotton shirts for a no-iron drip-dry number. ‘I just felt: why not? It’s time to take some risks.’

Ryan, meanwhile, is now considering having an affair—just as soon as he clears his credit card sufficiently to be able to pay for the motel room. He also wants to get a bit further ahead in his yoga so he doesn’t do in his back during whatever athletic sex session might be ahead. But after that: straight into an affair, as steamy as he can get it.

And me? Well, I’m just going to stop trying so hard. Sure, I’ll keep the body perfect; and continue to use sufficient hair
product so that I always look my best. But this weekend, I may well drop the kids off at the wrong end of the oval for their game; and then let the grass verge go without its weekly trim. After that: an affair, or perhaps skydiving.

Once husbands get desperate, you never know what chaos will ensue.

She looks worried but
I’m not too concerned.
The children are alive. The
house has not burnt down.
There have been no major
outbreaks of disease.
Frankly, I think I deserve
a bloody medal.

We’re in Kmart, the four of us. We refuse to let our anxiety show, even though Batboy is about to get on the plane. He’ll be gone for two and a half months: overseas, on student exchange. Apart from a week at school camp, it’s his first time away. His younger brother thinks it’s funny, as he watches us pick through the store buying final supplies. ‘Our little boy is all grown up,’ says The Space Cadet, using a faux-American accent. ‘Oh, I’m so proud.’ We all ignore him. This is no time for joking.

‘What you really need,’ Jocasta tells Batboy, ‘is a Chapstick. You can put it on your lips so they don’t crack with the cold.’

Batboy says he doesn’t need a Chapstick but Jocasta seems very focused on the idea. ‘I
really
think you need a Chapstick,’ she insists, her voice edged with what can only be described as hysteria. But Batboy is adamant, and the two
of them pause, locked in a stand-off somewhere between Toiletries and Cosmetics.

‘They are really good,’ says Jocasta, picking one up from the display. ‘They really protect you.’ She hits the word ‘protect’ a little hard and holds the Chapstick upright in her hand as if it’s a miniature wand from
The Lord of the Rings.
She looks as if she may suffer a grand mal seizure unless she somehow manages to get the Chapstick into Batboy’s backpack.

‘I really don’t need the Chapstick,’ replies Batboy, amiably enough.

‘Now come along,’ says The Space Cadet, dancing in between them and using the same faux-American accent. ‘Let’s not have a fight just before our little boy goes.’

The Space Cadet thinks he’s enormously funny. I think he may be right.

‘Well okay,’ says Jocasta finally. ‘You can always buy one overseas, once you’re there.’

I can see her line of thought: the boy is about to handle ten weeks in a rural village, bang in the middle of rural Germany. It will be winter, his host family doesn’t speak English and a bus passes only once a day. Given all this, lip care may be the least of his worries.

Not that the family doesn’t sound wonderful—even if they do live a very isolated, traditional life, quite different from anything Batboy has experienced before. His host brother has been emailing him every day, describing the farm, the motorbikes and the animals. Only a few days back he emailed very excitedly: ‘Good news, visiting brother! Father says we will hold off the slaughtering of the cow until the day you arrive.’

Batboy took the news surprisingly well. I guess there’s no cure for jetlag like a few hours of playful cow butchering. Already he has been told about how they have their own pigs, from which they make their own sausages, and chickens which they slaughter for Sunday lunch. Either he’ll come home twice the size and wearing
Lederhosen
; or as a rake-thin vegetarian.

Certainly he’ll come back Lutheran. When we first received details of his host family, we sneakily put them into Google, together with the name of the nearest village. What came up was a village diary, showing that their house was used every Tuesday for meetings of a local choir. According to our best effort at translation, the family comprises the principal members of the local Evangelical Lutheran Trombone Choir. A picture does form of Christmas Day: Batboy and his host brother working their way through a couple of family pigs, starting at the head and moving down, their
Lederhosen
tightening as their stomachs expand, while the rest of the family pump away on a trombone rendition of ‘Silent Night’.

I’m momentarily concerned, but they send us a photo and everyone looks reassuringly normal. A friend tells me to ignore the word ‘evangelical’—it just means they are normal Lutherans and not the sort of insane, wild-eyed Protestants you find in certain exotic out-of-the-way places. For instance: Sydney. He is, however, unable to explain neither the religious nor musical point of a choir consisting solely of massed trombones.

Back home, it’s a few hours before departure and Batboy is packing the last of his things. A CD of Australian rock music, an old hardback copy of the poems of C.J. Dennis,
two jars of Vegemite and his own body weight in Tim Tams. I go off to work and imagine him taking off. I keep looking at my watch and charting his progress. Above Brisbane now. Cairns. Singapore.

We have dinner, the remaining three of us. There’s not many pots and plates to wash up and I remark on this fact to The Space Cadet, who’s standing beside me as I scrub away, flicking my legs with his tea towel. ‘You know why?’ he says, with all the sensitivity of a younger brother. ‘It’s because that lard-arse isn’t here.’ I glance towards Jocasta, sitting on the couch with a faraway look. I guess she’s also charting Batboy’s progress—a dotted line arching through her mind, stretching from his bedroom to this new world of slaughtered cows, joyful trombones and home-made sausage.

We hosted an exchange student ourselves, only a few months before. Maria from northern Germany survived our odd family, so surely Batboy would survive his hosts. While Batboy is in the air, I find myself thinking about the time Maria spent with us. I always feel sorry for tourists who fall into our hands: we are so insistently proud of the town. Every spare minute Maria was here, we showed her the wonders of Sydney. ‘Look at the Opera House. Isn’t it the most beautiful building in the world? We’re not leaving this spot until you agree with us that it is. I mean, how would you rate it, exactly, against the best buildings in, say, Europe?’

It’s that wonderful mix of pride, bluster and deep insecurity that says so eloquently ‘Australian’.

We certainly sent Maria back home with a very fine and detailed knowledge of Australia. Not only of the Opera
House. But of the flora and fauna as well. ‘Isn’t that koala amazing?’ I say to her, as we walk through the animal park. ‘And, quick, look at the wombats—how cute are they? The platypus, you know, is one of only two monotremes. And the Tasmanian devil is facing an amazing and terrifying epidemic of disease within Tasmania.’

With an exchange student to educate, I’ve suddenly turned into an effete version of the Crocodile Hunter. Everything is amazing, fantastic and incredible. Half-understood facts from school come tumbling out. Australia had a gold rush in the 1850s, I tell her. The gum is a sort of eucalypt. The wombat has a backward-facing pouch so that dirt doesn’t fall in while it is digging.

I haven’t had a chance to expound this stuff since Year 5 and I seize the opportunity with enthusiasm. Suddenly, I’m the Professor of All Knowledge; each barely remembered fact a jewel to place before the visitor. The merino is Australia’s leading sheep. Pineapples are grown in Queensland. Australia has a bicameral system of government. I can’t quite remember what a bicameral system of government is but it seems unlikely she’ll ask. By this time we’re driving home, and in the back seat of the car, Maria appears to have fallen into deep, deep slumber.

We pull up outside our place and Jocasta tries to awaken the visitor. ‘Australia has nine of the ten most deadly snakes in the world,’ Jocasta insists, as she tries to shake her awake. ‘There are six states and two territories. And the water in the plughole goes the other way around.’

Maria is unfailingly polite. ‘Really?’ she says, squeezing her eyes open and shut to dislodge the sleep. ‘How fascinating.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say, ‘and Burke and Wills got lost near a tree. Plus, the Hume Highway is named after an explorer called Hume, who grew up in a hovel. And Tasmania was circumnavigated by a man called Flinders, who was accompanied by a cat. The cat, of course, was later used to punish convicts in a way still not understood by historians.’

Says Maria: ‘And, please, why does the water go the other way?’

‘Ah well,’ I answer, as we walk towards the door, ‘that would be because…’

‘Because,’ Jocasta says, coming to my rescue, ‘because of the way Australia is…’

‘On the bottom of the world,’ I take over. ‘So there’s more gravity, because of all the weight.’

Maria glances at us for a second and then thanks us. Her look says: ‘I’m stuck here, 20,000 kilometres from home, living with mad people.’

We show her the rugby league on the television and make her Vegemite toast, which she describes as ‘most interesting’. I show her a wattle tree and point out the bright yellow flowers. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it,’ I say, ‘that this, too, is a eucalypt?’

‘Actually,’ says Jocasta, ‘it’s an acacia.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ I say. ‘An acacia, thought to date from the time of dinosaurs. Older than anything you’d find in Europe.’

I decide I should give her a break from the learning—just as soon as I’ve taught her a little geology. Having once read the back of a Tim Flannery book, I feel pretty well equipped and so, as we help her into the house, I explain
that Australia is the oldest land on the planet, possibly older than the planet itself, I can’t be quite sure, but certainly older than Germany.

‘Everything’s been worn down over time. Imagine something just wearing you down, hour after hour, day after day.’

‘Yes,’ replies Maria, limping up the stairs, ‘I can see how that might work.’

Will Batboy’s host parents be like this: forcing him to express joy in every detail of German flora, fauna and geology? The days go past. He rings home after about a week. I say to him: ‘I bet we overdid it when we imagined them living this really rural existence. You know, the trombone choir and the pig slaughtering. Now you’ve met them, I bet it’s not like that at all.’

‘In fact,’ he says over the phone, ‘it’s more extreme than I imagined; more remote, more traditional.’ He explains how his family never buys soft drink: the main drink is apple juice, crushed from their own orchard. They grow all their own food, right down to their own wheat, barley and spelt, an ancient grain which the mother grinds into flour. Only last night they had pizza with the base made from hand-ground spelt. For entertainment they really do have the church trombone choir, of which all the family are members. The only thing we didn’t understand is that a trombone choir, for some reason, has more than just trombones. It has a variety of brass instruments. The whole village, he says, is heavy with brass instruments.

And yet, says Batboy, he’s having fun. And he really admires his host father, Volker, and the rest of the family.

Ten weeks later he arrives back home. We greet him at the airport, thrilled to have him back. He has vastly improved German. In fact, his problem now is his English. ‘My father, Volker, sent me out to collect some, some, you know,
Sägemehl
,’ he says to us, the English word entirely lost to him. He acts out a sawing motion. ‘You know, the white stuff that comes out of the tree.’

‘Sawdust,’ suggests Jocasta.

‘That’s it,’ says Batboy, before running ahead with his sentence only to get tangled up once more, this time in a chainsaw. ‘My father, Volker, cut the tree down with a, you know, a
Kettensäge.
’

But it’s this ‘my father’ stuff that gets me. I know the exchange student is supposed to embrace the new family, but does Batboy have to be quite so enthusiastic? As the days go on, it’s all Volker this and Volker that. Maria was never like this about me, despite all the effort I put into her education.

We stand at the back door, looking out at our small suburban backyard. ‘On our farm,’ says Batboy, ‘we have an orchard. And our own small plantation of pines to supply the family with timber. And, of course, our own cows and pigs. Volker oversees it all.’

Why do I suddenly feel so inadequate, looking out over our suburban block, and wondering how to meet my son’s newly expanded expectations. Perhaps we could slip a small piggery into the space between the fence and the clothesline, but I’m buggered where I can put the pine plantation.

‘If my father needs a door, he’ll just make one out of timber instead of buying it at the shop,’ says Batboy, trying
to explain how it’s done, before giving in to my insistent interruptions. ‘I know, I know,’ I say, somewhat petulantly. ‘You don’t need to tell me. I’ve done it myself. Look at the door on the shed. Built by me. Out of timber. Volker’s not the only father who knows how to build a door.’

‘Ah yes,’ says Batboy. ‘But Volker’s timber comes from the plantation not the timber yard. And what about the hinges? I suppose you bought yours at the shop? When my father builds a door we search the farm for scrap metal, melt it down in a furnace and then cast our own hinges. They’ve been doing it this way for centuries.’

I’m fast losing patience with Volker and his thrifty German ways. I fight off an urge to mention the war.

With the combination of farm work and healthy food, Batboy has lost six kilos and put on a layer of muscle, all in ten weeks. And this despite the cakes. ‘My mother makes a couple of cakes every day,’ he brightly tells Jocasta, as she stands, weary from work, stirring that night’s bolognaise. ‘She makes chocolate cake, caramel cake and a cake called The Waves of the Danube, which has chocolate on top, forming these tiny little waves. It’s delicious.’

‘I bet it is,’ says Jocasta bleakly. She rolls her eyes and whispers to me so that Batboy can’t hear. She’s only been home from work for half an hour and considers it ‘a bloody miracle’ that any food at all is being provided, never mind a cake in the shape of little waves. Besides, it’s not as if she wasn’t planning to provide some dessert for the boy. Already a box of No Frills brand chocolate paddle pops lies waiting in our freezer.

‘For dinner,’ Batboy continues, unaware of the growing threat to his life, ‘we would have meat from our own
animals. My mother would make it into these beautiful stews.’ He then starts describing the process of slaughtering pigs, collecting the blood for blood sausage, and removing the organs; at which point I take over the stirring of the bolognaise as Jocasta, turning green, retires defeated from the kitchen.

Of course, as each day goes past, Farmboy starts to convert back into Batboy. He stops using German words quite so often; and stops getting hungry at about five—his body clock no longer on the lookout for a slice or two of The Waves of the Danube. When he uses the word ‘our’, it increasingly refers to this rectangle of Sydney suburbia; ‘my father’ is increasingly his hinge-buying, supermarket-shopping Australian father; and ‘my mother’ his overstretched, non-cake-baking Australian mother.