The Family Men (18 page)

Matt's complexion is slightly pink, the florid glow of a newborn during a bowel movement. He puts down the fairy lights and gestures for Harry to step into the kitchen. “I was going to ring you later anyway. I had an interesting call from Margo before. She wants to know if I can shed any light on your situation.”

“Margo?”

“Yes. Margo. The reporter. You know who I mean. Mum told me she came over. You're quite friendly, apparently. ‘Old mates,' I think she said, ‘always good for a natter.' Until you hung up on her the other day.” He crosses his arms. “What are you doing even answering her calls? She's a journalist. You get that, don't you? She writes for the newspaper. What have you said?”

“About what?”

“Cut it out, Squib. You know what. Tell me you haven't told her anything. Christ. Even small talk. It'll be something you think doesn't matter. That's how they work, these arsewipes – they collect little details and string them together. They can turn a shit into a daisy chain if they have to.”

“Nice.”

“Call it what you like. The fact is, she's making people paranoid.”

“What people?”

“Some of the boys. You got the email. That's why they don't want us talking to her. They reckon she's got an insider at the Club.”

“
She
rang
me
,” says Harry, emphasising his passive role in the exchange. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Not talk to her for one thing.”

“I told you, I didn't.” Harry thinks his brother's beard looks even patchier than usual. When Matt first grew it he'd felt sorry for him, thought he'd done it to stave off commentary about his growing bald spot. Now he just wants to spit on that spot. To spit on it and polish it with a dirty tissue like one of the trophies in their mother's cabinet.

“It is bullshit, right?”

“I hung up on her.”

“Yeah, but you've got to admit it doesn't look good. You are the only one who didn't take off at the end of the season.”

“It was just a phone call. What difference does it make?”

“'Cause it looks like you're about to drop everyone in the shit, that's what. And people don't like being dropped in the shit. You don't like it. I don't like it. And I don't like looking over my shoulder every two seconds waiting for it to happen. If the boys get wind of this—”

“What? What are they going to do, throttle me for not talking to her?” Harry wonders how can it be that he is so close and yet so distant from these people, pressed up against each other on the field, knitted together in sweaty Gatorade-drenched post-game jerking circles, singing the Club song, or naked, side by side, in the showers, exchanging tired barbs about soap and bollocks and
watch it you don't slip over
, week after week, year after year, some from as long ago as primary school; their intimate knowledge of each other as close if not closer than many of their lovers, yet he feels about as welcome as Wayne Carey at a Stevens family christening. When it gets down to it, they are more likely to beat the crap out of him than show him any respect. “They don't trust you, darling,” explains his mother, not that he needs to be told. If he's feeling sorry for himself he'll maintain that he's been crowded out; that there can only be so much love for their family and Matt holds the lion's share. But the antipathy comes as no surprise really, not given Harry's personal ambivalence about playing in the AFL (he's done nothing to endear himself to the side); it is a fair bet they feel the same way about him, especially in light of his contentious recruitment, so much for the team-building effect of the father-son rule, but he sees now the truth of it, the clarity of his aloneness, stark and clear, that his teammates would sell him down the river before they'd admit to any complicity. “You know what, stuff you,” says Harry. “I don't have to listen to this shit. If you don't believe me, that's your problem.”

“No, I think it's your problem,” says Matt.

Harry can't understand how Matt is able to rationalise everything so effortlessly, to only see what he wants to see. He casts his mind back to Sportsman's Night, the dancers, the way they left the stage before the song had fully ended creating a vacuum in their wake which Marty immediately stepped in to fill. Harry found it awkward, seeing Marty up there, a tuxedoed old-timer being serenaded to the strains of Christina Aguilera's “Dirrty”. But it was part of the game (Harry would have understood that had he attended the previous year), pretending the girls had stormed off and he had to cover their tracks. Marty said something to the effect of an apology, about that being the end of the scheduled entertainment for the evening, that it had been a long day, thanked everyone for coming, invited the boys to enjoy themselves at the bar, then picked up the microphone stand to carry it off-stage.

But the crowd wouldn't have it. They refused to accept
that's all, folks
for an answer. Shouts of “more” and “encore” struck up about the room as Marty paused, listening to their appeals, a mounting chorus of individual petitions fast becoming a group chant as more and more joined in, until soon everyone was calling out. “Encore. Encore.”

Marty mocked that he didn't know what to do. Camp gestures accompanying the words – “Golly, I am so sorry, but my hands are tied” – animated expressions like a circus clown. He might as well have been wearing braces and oversized shoes.

Jack and Eddy were plainly excited by the charade. They started clapping and calling “encore” again, setting off yet another round of chanting, some of the boys now leaving their assigned seats to make their way to the foot of the stage. This was the point at which Marty appeared to relent. He threw up his hands and shook his head, saying that the ladies were very tired. “Very tired,” he emphasised. But if the boys would give him a moment, he'd double-check and see what they had to say.

The answer was implicit. Yes.

The room went strangely quiet as he veered back and popped his head into the wing presumably to confer with the weary performers.

Everybody was drunk but it was only then that Harry realised how drunk everybody actually was. He could hear the steady pump of his blood circulating through his temples or maybe it was just the drum track, the music never having fully ceased. Jack winked at him as Eddy stood, picked up the Rising Star trophy and engaged the rest of the table in a display of simulated masturbation.

Harry heard himself speak. “Put it down.”

“What's that, Squeaker? You want me to stop flirting with your boyfriend?”

Jack and Richie laughed. “Don't hog it,” said Keith, “give the rest of us a go.” He reached for the statuette and commenced his own version of a rub-and-tug just as Marty returned to centre stage.

Marty was aping “forlorn”. “It's not great news,” he said. “I was right, the ladies are completely worn out. Regrettably they won't be able to perform another full set. But they hate to disappoint you. So they've made a generous offer. If you ask very nicely, one of them will come back for a special encore. But only one of them. Who that will be, however, is up to all of you.”

“Now you're talking,” said Jack.

Harry looked over and saw Matt, two fingers in his mouth, whistling.

Mitchell Baines of Baines Sports Management has been trying to sign the Furey brothers for years – “Let's talk,” his notes always say, hundreds of business cards pushed into pockets and under front doors – but neither Harry nor his brother have ever bothered with personal managers. If they need professional advice who better to counsel them than their father? His words. Their mother being no slouch when it comes to business matters either. Hers. A decision they took as teenagers, each of them wanting it to be true, telling themselves they preferred the independence –
we are free spirits, the Fureys
– but a choice he finds himself revisiting in light of present circumstances. How much easier it would be to assign his “Margo problem” to a minder. Nice, clean and dispassionate.
I'll take care of it
, he imagines them saying from the comfort of their high-rise corner office, bespoke suit pressed into their Eames Soft Pad leather desk chair surveying the multi-million-dollar view, the smoothness transmitted down the telephone like free vodka shots at 21st Century.

His first instinct is to ring back Margo himself, to ring her and tell her to back off, to leave him and his family the fuck alone. Though he knows that is about as smart as delivering a short off-the-ball jab to the ribs, more likely to land him in front of the tribunal for rough conduct than to afford him any reprieve. Ransacking his memory for an inadvertent hint, did he give something away? He's been so careful not to let anything slip, but has he been careful enough?

All that scrambling for a diversion, riddling his way around, such a familial strategy, his mother's theory, the real reason for his father's drinking (and everything else). The great hole Alan always finds himself in. Because he refuses to deal with anything with any honesty. “After so much bullshit for so many years, he doesn't know what the truth looks like anymore,” she reckons. The number of times Harry has heard her say, “You've made your bed.” That it is impossible for his father to face himself when he can't find a way clear to a mirror. Even his religion is more of the same, a smokescreen. His personal relationship with God an excuse for avoiding other personal relationships. Always devaluing the real in favour of the abstract. God. Team. Country. How about family, friends, himself? It sounded reasonable at the time but what Harry hadn't understood back then was the dread. The constant lurking menace. Yes, the media has always been a presence in their lives. But when you know you are culpable it is an entirely different experience. Closer to fear than revulsion. Like a hare in the path of sight-hounds. Exhausting, the relentless pursuit. It doesn't matter that they are only trying to turn you around. You are being hunted and can easily end up trapped.

He takes his usual route home, wandering past the footy field, giving the public toilets a wide berth. Not in the mood for junkies, their suppurating sores and bad attitudes. There is nothing chic about heroin. It rises up, grabs its user by the throat, choking the life out of them in a series of bleak, hopeless nods. One, and down goes their chin. Two, and the life drains from their eyes. Scabs perforating the skin, paper-thin and pale. The girls dressed in long sleeves and tights, always cold, even in the middle of summer.

When he is sleeping sometimes it is as though he is there on the street, a third presence on that terrible scene with his dad, urging the girl to stop.
No
, he calls.
Don't do it
. But she can't hear him. Light glinting off the needle as it pricks her skin, then her body, wraithlike, wading into the night. The squeal of tyres, a terrible thud and she is gone. Out. The final siren. Game over.

The house is dead quiet. He creeps around at first trying not to make too much noise, as though his father is asleep in the other room, his absence initially more inhibiting than his dull ubiquitous presence steadfastly lining the atmosphere like the unsealed floorboards running the length of the hall. It is so quiet Harry feels like someone is watching him, that same prickly sensation he used to experience as a kid when they went pig hunting, out with his dad and his brother in the middle of some desolate backwater, the khaki brush closing in, blanketing them in the dense scrub, the busyness of the landscape confusing his senses so that after a while, after the cordial had run out and the sandwiches had run out and they were operating purely on adrenaline, it became harder and harder to determine which shadows were prey and which were tricks of the eye, the yellow banksia flowers looking increasingly menacing under the heat of the blazing afternoon sun.

He turns on the television, grateful for the useless clamour. At least with his dad away he can watch whatever he wants. He flicks the channel to
Rage
and farts loudly on the couch.

For a person who swears he doesn't believe in God, he resorts to prayer more often than is sensible. If you can call it praying, muttering requests under his breath (a sublimated form of profanity). Down the street. In his car. Sometimes at the shops.

“Jesus Christ, can you make the line move faster?”

“Holy Father, get this lady out of my way.”

“Please Lord, let it rain.”

That kind of thing. Small-scale prayers, like the line from that poem of Father Murphy's.

At night he extends the ritual, praying for his family:
for Mum and Dad and Matt, keep them healthy and safe
. He used to pray for the girl too.

Dear God, dear God, dear God …

But after a while that didn't seem right anymore, or maybe it just didn't make sense, not knowing what to want for her.

His father's sleeping pills make his eyes scratchy, leave his body bloated and unsteady as though he could easily overbalance if he pauses too long in one place. He can't remember which day it is. Making coffee, he stumbles twice, losing his footing while standing on the spot. Maybe he should have only taken one?

It is late morning but it feels early. Too early for breakfast. Certainly too early to go outside. He nurses the coffee until it is tepid, then tips the liquid down the sink, the smell rushing back up at him as it circles the drain. As usual, the dog next door is barking (a bird landed on the fence, some kid ridden past on his bike – it could have been anything, nothing). Shut up, he thinks, though he can't rouse the energy to actually say it (
shut the fuck up you stupid mutt
).

He can't rouse the energy for anything much. Not for anger. Guilt. Regret. His sensibilities blacked out, his feelings hanging weightless in the stuffy air.

Someone is mowing their lawn. He opens the back door then closes it again, the action setting off an association (dream or hallucination?), something about Jack stalking him, one of their camping trips, the sound of dingoes scrambling into the thicket, keeping a hand over his left eye as he flicks on the torch, aims it into the bitumen dark, then flicks it off again and machete-hacks his way through the twisted ragged branches. His leg is sore. Did he trip, knock it on the edge of the bathtub drunk-stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night?