The Family Men (3 page)

Harry shrugs, takes another bite of the banana. He knows what his mother wants, a report on who he's seen, which of her friends were there, which ones weren't, who was sitting with who, anything interesting they might have said or done. Typically he would have entertained her with a few choice guesses at what was being discussed in the confessional – the provisional status of Sally Connolly's soul a safe bet, having recently abandoned her husband for the very married arms of her youngest's fourth-grade teacher – but that was before, prior to what he has come to think of as “the day”, the pivot point delineating time as belonging to then and now, a marker after which everything changed, the old rules no longer applying. Now he doesn't have the inclination for those kinds of frivolities, as though to go along is to be complicit in some aspect of the same game, a game in which he doesn't want to participate. It irritates him that his mother even asks, most of the time telling him to save the details for his dad, that she doesn't want to know, preferring to keep her head in the sand –
I'm over it
, a standard refrain. She doesn't really care now either, he knows that too, aside from the fact that he is reluctant to divulge anything, to pander to her curiosity. “It was the same,” he garbles, his mouth still full of banana, “exactly the fucking same.” Thinking of the crowded anteroom of smokers and gossipers, two-thirds of the congregation, the women like slutty mourners in their black lace and short synthetic skirts, the men more interested in that parade of push-up bras and hair extensions than anything Father Murphy had to say about grace and salvation.

Diana stops scanning the newspaper and turns to him. “Pardon me? What did you say?”

Harry feels the sea stir inside him. He briefly closes his eyes, a breakwater against the rushing swell at high tide as the ocean strains for the shore, the image of the girl tumbling then dissolving as a sandcastle might beneath an oncoming wave, as his mother starts again, berating him about his language and everything else. “That's very nice, Harry. Very nice. A lovely way to speak to your mother. Is that how you talk to Father Murphy? Do you talk like that in church? I don't know who's worse, you or your father.”

“What do you care? It's not like anyone's paying attention. No one gives a shit about that stuff.”

“Is that so, mister? I think you'll find plenty of people are paying attention. Not that your father can ever be counted on to point these things out to you.”

“At least Dad goes to church.”

Diana brushes it off. “Now you're being ridiculous.”

The phone rings. “That'll be your girlfriend,” says his mother.

“Very funny,” says Harry, but he makes no motion to move.

The two of them sit staring at each other, waiting for the ringing to stop. They've been playing this game for days now. The home phone ringing off the hook, Harry refusing to answer it, refusing to take any of his calls. Not from his coach, not from his friends, not even a long-distance one from his brother. “Maybe I should answer it,” says Diana. “Have a bit of a chinwag. Tell whoever it is a thing or two about what goes on around here.” She leans towards the phone, thinking it might goad him into snatching it from her, a dramatic confrontation that will trigger a watershed moment between them, but it doesn't have any effect, Harry continuing to hold her gaze, his eyes slightly off-focus.

“Look, are you avoiding somebody or something?” says his mother, trying a different tack. “Are you in some kind of trouble? You can talk to me. Tell me what's going on.”

But where to start? Harry can't see a way to make sense of it for her, to describe what he is feeling, isn't clear that there is anything to describe, beyond what she already knows, that he is agitated, having trouble sleeping. Certainly there are the events themselves, facts are facts, but they are none of her business (
what happens at Sportsman's Night stays at Sportsman's Night
). And if they are none of her business then none of the other stuff is her business either, not the rage or fury or resentment or insanity of it all – is it his fault? – not understanding why he doesn't want the same things as the other guys (is it proof that he doesn't have the goods, why he's taken one liberty over another?), is second-guessing his primary inclinations.

It isn't something he ever imagined himself doing, dressing up like that for work, not something he equated with the job, though he probably should have. He'd watched his father do it often enough, for the Brownlow, for the Best & Fairest dinner, for Sportsman's Night. Showering, shaving, trimming his nose hair, and then dousing himself in aftershave, the smell lingering like an arsonist's accelerant, still detectable in the house for hours after he'd left. It had always been bittersweet, that ritual, attending his father's preening for the outside world, the intricacies of his process of self-improvement, his elaborate protocols for separating himself from them; the young Harry mimicking his moves at the vanity mirror, soaping up his face then employing a toothbrush instead of a razor, peering under his nostrils for overlooked bristles, all the while knowing that his mother was already locked and loaded with her latest grievances, ready to be unleashed the moment his dad returned. Or, if his parents went out together, that they'd be arguing long before they got home. Either way, keeping it up until the early hours of the morning, his mother looking especially ragged the following day, a wicked hangover to match her deathly complexion. “Why don't you go outside and play?” she'd say, her head in a fog of cigarette smoke.

It wasn't a suggestion.

Why don't you go outside and play.

He and his brother still said it now when they were trying to get on each other's nerves.

What is clear to him, what has always been clear to him, is that “play” is all he has ever wanted to do. It has never been about anything else. Not the attention nor the accolades, the false gods of statistics and popularity contests (winning the Best & Fairest three years running, tallying his weekly Brownlow votes, narcissistic displays of showmanship); his is an unvarnished vocation. Pure. Unbred. He lives and breathes football.

That was the very point Laurie drove home when they first discussed his recruitment, that joining the team was his road to freedom, his opportunity to fulfil that ambition. “It's time for you to put football front and centre. No more fitting it in around school; training late on Wednesday nights, your parents driving you to the game on the weekend. Those bush leagues aren't serious,” he said. “They don't have the stuff. Not like you. You're better than that. You know that. It's time to take your game to the next level.”

It sounded like something he wanted to hear.

He was recruited under the father-son rule, a policy that allowed clubs to select the sons of past players who have made a major contribution to the team, but they would have wanted him anyway, Laurie said. It was only a matter of time before they came after him. His was a natural talent. He could have been anybody's kid.

His mother looks at him, her brown eyes boring into his skull, an expression he recognises from way back, invariably paired with some remark about him being so inscrutable it makes it impossible for people to get to know him (or if she's had a couple of white wines then it might be tales from his infancy, particularly the one about how as a small baby he preferred to sulk by himself than have her comfort him).

“I don't understand what's going on in your head, that's all,” she says, part question, part exclamation, frustrated by this change in his demeanour, wanting to get to the bottom of it, the withdrawal, why her usually stubborn yet polite offspring has overnight transformed into this—

She bites her lip because she doesn't know what to call it, but whatever it is she's had enough of it.

“No one's in any trouble,” he finally says, struggling to sound convincing. “I just don't have anything to say to anybody right now. I need some time alone.” He might have added something about his inability to tolerate even the idea of his teammates, how everything is rearranged inside of him so that nothing about what he thinks or feels is certain anymore, that he can pin nothing down, but that would have led to an entirely different conversation, and he definitely isn't up for that.

The phone rings again. Diana looks to him. “Go on, pick it up.”

“You get it,” he tells her.

“Why should I answer it?”

“Alright. Don't.”

She lets it ring ten times before relenting, hoping that he'll beat her to it, but right when she thinks she has him broken, he reaches for another banana. She watches him slowly peel it down to the nub as she goes through the motions –
hello, how are you, yes, everything's fine thanks –
then holds the phone out in his direction, announcing it is Laurie again.

Harry pauses a minute to finish his mouthful before taking the phone from her. He stares at the mouthpiece as he swallows the fruit, then presses the “off” button on the handset and rocks back in his chair.

Diana's face is flushed. She looks like she might slap him. Do it, he thinks.
Do it
. Relishing the prospect of being put in his place like that, that his mother might lose control, really let him have it. But she doesn't, she never does (not like that, not with them). She just continues to berate him for being unrealistic – “There's always a lull in the off-season, you know that, what do you want me to say? This too shall pass? I thought my children would be more resilient” – lamenting his refusal to adapt.

“Give me an example,” Harry demands, when she suggests he is behaving strangely, that his entire demeanour is uncharacteristically hostile, pugilistic.

“What are you talking about, an example?” she says, gesturing at him slumped at the table behind a pile of blackening banana skins. “You, here, now, this is an example. You're not a child anymore, Harry. It's no way to live,” she insists, reminding him that he always has a choice, lest she be held responsible somehow for appearing to have allowed it, to have inadvertently given her permission for the business to devour him, to have eaten him alive. Just as it did his father (and so many before and since), at first quickly, and then slowly, until that was all that was left of the man, her first husband, her only husband, the husk of a career supported by a tired aging body governed by a mind too cosseted to cope with failure. “You've got to find a way forward, to be comfortable with who you are. You can't let football dictate everything. You see that, don't you? That you've got to have a plan. Otherwise, where will you be in ten years? At the pub? Crying into a beer that someone else has paid for? There's only so long a player's career can last. You've got to keep an eye on the morning after, take a long-term view, think about tomorrow,” she repeats as though it is a chorus from a song (now that is helpful advice, not).
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow
. The words ring in his head until he is so sick of hearing them he deliberately slams the door behind him when he leaves.

Fucking bitch. He doesn't need it right now. He doesn't fucking need it. He takes off in the direction of the oval, at first walking, but quickly breaking into a run, the sky a pale shade of slate grey as though it wants to rain but can't.

That is the way the weather has been lately, the seasons distorted approximations of themselves that have got everyone into a tizz about heat and water levels and the future of the planet. Not in such a tizz that they do anything differently, mind you. Just enough to give themselves a headache. At the Club they started a recycling drive, installing three different coloured bins in the change rooms with transparent panels down the sides so you could see what was being put in them (rubbish, paper, bottles and cans), “Reuse Reduce Recycle”, the sticker said. A red rag to a bull. Within twenty-four hours the garbage had been stuffed with a truckload of condoms –
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!
– a photograph of the prophylactic wrappers finding its way to page one of the
Herald Sun,
sending Ted Parker, the Club president, into a tailspin, instructing Laurie to burn the offending articles immediately, which Laurie did, all players in mandatory attendance out the back beside the dumpsters (with the exception of Jack, sequestered at home, buried deep in the doghouse, taking a blow on Club orders), sending a great plume of black smoke against the muted sky. Matt reckoned it would have been visible as far away as Whittlesea.

Jack made it his business getting in people's faces, but especially the Fureys'. Pulling out of a pack at Harry's first training camp, telling him, “I've got my eye on you, Nipper,” then a knee in the groin just to teach him a lesson, how to be a man; the two dynasties having long been at each other, an agonistic species constantly asserting how it's done.

“Ignore him,” said Matt, about as useful as putting Tony Liberatore in the ruck. Not that Harry needed to be told. That Jack was testing him was implicit. Less clear was how to make him stop.

Harry runs until his lungs give out, the burning forcing his pace to a crawl until he can catch his breath. He's never been one to pace himself, his style more the mad dash to the finish line, the late leg scramble, rather than the heel-to-toe chain of successive possessions – driving the coaching staff crazy (
no “I” in team
, etc., another of Laurie's maxims, interchangeable with
make it happen
and
sometimes less is more
).

A lack of faith, Father Murphy calls it. A crisis of confidence, whatever that means. Even his teachers used to tell him to exercise more control.
Be harder for longer.

Harry knows what they want from him, recognises the discipline of the marathon runner over the sprinter, eking out that energy over a longer haul, but he doesn't understand why it is such a big deal. He isn't greedy or ostentatious. His isn't a hoarding mentality. For him it is more like swimming in a chlorinated pool without goggles. He knows vaguely where he is heading; it is simply a question of waiting for the right moment then taking a deep enough breath and pushing off until he touches the other side.