New Australian Stories 2 (44 page)

Harry squinted at the pool, at the trees and bures and islands in the distance. Had he ever asked Ruth to go anywhere else? Would she have wanted to? Would he? The whole thing was moot now anyway, he was beginning to see that. He leaned over. ‘And yet you're not in New Zealand or Patagonia either.'

‘Ha! Harry, you are one hundred per cent right. I am not.' Alma ran a hand over her braids, shifting one that must have been pulling. ‘And life is all about taking risks. But for me, this is a risk — coming here alone? With all the pretty honeymooners? You telling me that's not some sort of craziness?'

Harry smiled. There was certainly a craziness to her. Possibly no real logic, but that didn't seem important. He called a waitress over. ‘Can I have one of those too?'

‘A Malolo Sunset, sir?'

‘Yes, please.'

Alma took a long sip from her drink and then placed a hand on Harry's arm. The novelty of it — that small, perfect hand on his — surprised him; that there could be any novelty, at this late stage, was a wonder.

‘Good on
you
, Harry. You go and crazy it up today.'

The duty nurse was curt when he called. In the background he could hear the clack of heels across lino and the rustle of papers accumulating at the nurses station. ‘There is
no change
, Mr Rogers. No change. I think the doctors explained that there's no chance of change, didn't they?'

‘Well, I don't know about that; they said there's little chance, which is different from no chance.'

She sighed, an exaggerated sigh that Harry thought inappropriate to the circumstances. ‘What can I tell you, Mr Rogers? She is still unconscious. I have some paperwork here for you, for when you get back.'

His head started to ache, and for a moment he thought he might be about to suffer his own aneurysm; that Ruth had sent one back for him, a pigeon pair. He hung up and rubbed the crown of his head, where the pain was at its worst. He'd wanted to tell Ruth about Alma, about their chat and the newness of the Malolo Sunset, which had gone down remarkably easily, he thought, even though he wasn't used to the rum — but of course that was madness. It was all madness. Because either there was change or there wasn't change — it couldn't be both, and yet that was what the duty nurse was telling him, what the doctors were telling him, and what Caitlin was telling him. No change, mister; except for you: infinite change. He put his face in his palms. Caitlin, of all people. Ruth had wanted her so badly. They both had, but Ruth …

He lay back on the bed. The pain in his head shifted to his temples and he began to settle; it was no aneurysm, just the alcohol. He wasn't used to it, but he soon realised that if he didn't fight it, the haze would carry him off to a deep sleep.

On their last day, Harry woke with a dry mouth. Caitlin was already eating when he arrived at the buffet.

‘Morning.'

‘Morning.'

‘Might just get some breakfast, then.'

‘You do that.'

He waited for the multigrain to shimmy through the toaster conveyor belt, and then hovered over the bain-marie. The sausages glistened under the light, a thousand different wrongs wrapped tight in casing. He grabbed two and a scoop of eggs.

Caitlin raised an eyebrow when she saw the meat, but didn't say anything.

‘I used to eat these all the time when I was a kid.' He cut a small piece off and studied it. ‘Sometimes twice a day. My parents didn't know any better.'

He popped it in his mouth and felt the hit of salt and fat and flavour. He cut another slice, then another. When he'd finished the first sausage, he took a sip of juice.

‘Not having the other one?' Caitlin's voice had an edge to it, but that would pass. It would all pass.

‘I might leave that one.' Out of respect.

They packed their things, and Harry went to settle the account. He wouldn't be back; he knew this now. He made his way out to the beach, for a final look — beyond the couples passing sunscreen and checking menus, beyond the sunlounges and musicians and waiters, beyond everything, so that there was only the lagoon, spread out before him, calm but for the occasional school of fish changing direction.

Theories of Relativity

CHRIS WOMERSLEY

You learn things in this life, don't you, whether you like it or not. God, it's awful. I'm eleven years old. Our father fills the bath with cold water, orders me to dump a tray of ice cubes into it and tells my older brother Patrick to strip off his clothes. Father is tall, angular and taciturn, a man accustomed to being obeyed by his family, if no one else. His crucial error is to mistake disdain for respect. He has a stopwatch in one hand. ‘We'll see what you're made of,' he says.

I stand in the dim hallway looking up at him, listening intently to his instructions; I know they will be issued only once and I risk a clip over the ear if I ask him to repeat them. Our little sister Janet lingers in a doorway with a strand of hair in her mouth, staring, like always. She's nine. Our mother is out somewhere. My brother's face is grim but stoic as he realises what is about to happen. It is midwinter. Rain is drumming on the roof. It dawns on me that I will remember this afternoon for the rest of my life.

Father is adamant that Patrick and I be toughened up and has devised a variety of techniques to ensure we will never be in the slightest bit girly. When we play soccer in the backyard, for instance, he never allows us to win because that doesn't happen in the real world. He refuses to help us up if we fall down (‘Self-inflicted. No crying. Stand up, little man'). Years earlier — and this is embarrassing — I faltered one cold night in my toilet training and my father took me outside, yanked off my pyjamas and hosed me down as a method of instruction.

Father doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and thinks those who do are damn fools. He has no time for sentimentality and the few jokes he utters are usually at someone else's expense. The world is a harsh place, and it's his job to equip his sons the best way he knows how. After all, it was good enough for him; we could do a lot worse than turn out like he did. Little does he know exactly what this will entail.

The bath test and the toilet training and so on happens long before the accident, of course. Afterwards, he wouldn't have dared.

There is a lot packed into a kiss. Even now, years later, it is one particular kiss I remember as the defining moment of my life. It wasn't even a kiss given or received by me, but one I glimpsed from a darkened hallway. It was then I realised a kiss is never only between the two people concerned: there are always others, out beyond the footlights, unseen.

The day of the kiss was a hot Sunday, ten years after our father's accident (or, more accurately, ‘accident'). Everything became so clear that I blushed not only at my own naivety, but at the thought that everyone else in the street probably realised what had been going on all this time in my parents' house. It was a good, middle-class area that kept its reputation trimmed by the brisk, whirring blades of gossip. People must have suspected something. What had they seen that I had missed? Did they think
I
was in some way implicated? Jesus Christ. Just the thought of it.

I was twenty-one that summer, in many ways still an innocent. I had started going out with a pleasant, bovine girl called Julie who did deliveries for the bike shop where I worked on weekends. My brother Patrick was taller than me, more athletic, much better-looking and possessed a roguish charm that attracted the type of girl willing to do things nice girls were not. He played guitar. He had been born missing the tip of the little finger on his left hand, a disfigurement that only heightened his appeal rather than diminished it, as it might have done in other boys. My brother also had a competitive streak that prohibited him from gaining any real pleasure from his success with girls or sport. He could be cruel, as I knew only too well: he forgot people's names on purpose; he mimicked people mercilessly behind their backs; he told vicious jokes about neighbours and classmates; he had long called me Mr Einstein, on account of my interest in the great physicist's theories of time and space.

But this. This kiss. The knowledge of it almost made me swoon with its dark power. I thought of Robert Oppenheimer, and the dismal thrill the American must have felt upon discovering the technology for the Bomb. Like all discoveries, the information had been there all along, for years, waiting for someone to figure it out. God, I had been so blind.

After witnessing this particular kiss — and when I had composed myself — I eased away from the study doorway, crept down the hall to the lounge room, gathered my jacket and bag and left without saying goodbye to anyone. Long after the gnashing implements were out of earshot, I heard the
snip snip snip
of garden shears as Father hobbled about the backyard.

It hadn't always been like this. It seemed that everyone changed in the months after our father's accident, or that the entire family was reorganised in a way that was never clear to me. I felt I had lived through a revolution, say, or a natural disaster, whereby everything had become different, but in ways too seismic to define. Mother took up smoking for a start, and became dry-witted and elegant. She began to say things like:
Oh, that's marvellous
or
Sweetie, please don't do that,
I have a headache
, while sitting on the couch in the afternoon flicking through a glossy magazine. Indeed, it seemed she had barely existed until the moment of Father's accident. Even her name, Marie, which had seemed rather pedestrian before, assumed a more cinematic quality. She took to wearing lipstick around the house and having afternoon ‘kips', a concept she had picked up from an American magazine. At first — in addition to everything else that had happened — it was somewhat disconcerting, but Patrick and I both came to like this new persona. She became the type of parent the other kids probably talked about at home with their own, more mundane families; hers was a low-grade, schoolyard celebrity, like the Cambodian kid Nam whose brother had been shot by communists.

People admired our mother when she came to pick Patrick and me up from school. She had fallen pregnant with my brother when she was seventeen and so was only thirty-one at that time, even though Father was ten years older. She was still attractive, and the other fathers paid her quite a bit of attention. I didn't mind, but Patrick became furious if she flirted too long with Mr Jacobs and he would refuse to speak to her after we returned home. When this happened, Mother would expend considerable effort coaxing him from the cave of his mood, fetching treats from the pantry and swearing to behave herself in future.
Come on, darling. There! Have an Iced VoVo
.

Patrick changed into another, more restless person. He was fourteen, so he was hardly old, but now he refused to accompany me around the neighbourhood to see whose fruit trees we might climb. No more hide-and-seek. He even took to calling our mother Marie, rather than Mother or Mum, a practice she did nothing to discourage, even though Father disapproved.

Patrick and I still shared a room, and I would lie awake and stare at his sleeping profile, hoping to detect a clue to his sudden alteration. After all, it wasn't like the accident had befallen
him
. Sometimes he prowled through the house at night and occasionally even slept elsewhere, on the couch in the living room, or on the daybed in Father's study. On the single instance I crept after him, he turned in the hallway, pressed a hand to my chest and shook his head in such a way that discouraged me from following him ever again. ‘Back off, Mr Einstein,' he hissed.

Our father was a captain in the army. Before the accident, he liked to talk authoritatively at barbecues about immigration policy and ‘covert actions' in South-East Asia as if he were privy to secret information. In fact, he merely shuffled bits of paper from one office to the next and overheard rumours in the canteen, along with everyone else who worked in his building. He had joined the army with the boyish hope of being sent overseas to some exotic war zone to battle terrorists or communists but had never been closer to genuine military action than manoeuvres in Darwin one year (the highlight of his entire life), and he certainly wouldn't be deployed now, considering his age — not to mention his injury.

His own father, my grandfather, had been in the army and had been bitter about being sent away to shoot people in Vietnam; Father was bitter that he never had the opportunity to shoot at anyone. He was merely a public servant with a fancy uniform. If asked about his foot injury, he mumbled something about a ‘hunting mishap', which was true, I suppose. Naturally, the accident changed him most of all.

The morning of the accident was wet and frosty. I heard my father moving about in the bathroom next door. Patrick slept in his bed on the other side of our room, blissfully unaware until Father burst in and roused each of us with a slap to the side of our heads.

‘Come on, lads,' he said. ‘We move out in ten minutes.'

The car interior was almost as cold as it was outside. Father didn't believe in excessive comfort. Besides, we were rugged up. We were going hunting; there was no point getting too cosy. In the back seat, I breathed on the glass and drew a face in the damp, silvery fog. The rising sun flickered behind trees.

He had been promising to take us hunting for some time, but my excitement at the prospect of shooting a real rifle was tempered with guilt. Mother thought we were too young for such an expedition and she didn't approve of shooting animals for sport — objections Father disdainfully overruled.