The Slap (3 page)

Washing his hands and staring at the grimy mirror, he shook his head at his reflection.

‘You have no control.’

 

He sat in the car outside the clinic, smoking while he listened to Art Blakely and the Messengers. He always found the sharp discordant horns of ‘A Night in Tunisia’ both sensually charged and calming. When he found himself reaching for a third cigarette, he abruptly switched off the music, jumped out of the car and walked across the street.

The waiting room was full. A thin elderly woman was clutching tightly to a cardboard cat box that emitted regular distressed, pitiful cries. Two young women were sitting on the couch, flicking through magazines as a black Pomeranian sat desolately at their feet. Connie was on the phone. When she saw him walk in, she offered a small, tight smile and then looked away. She placed another caller on hold then resumed her conversation.

‘I’m going through,’ he whispered to her, pointing down the corridor.

She nodded. As he walked past the closed door of the consulting room and into the surgery, he felt breathless. The girl made him anxious. Seeing Connie was always difficult, confusing, as though seeing her peeled away the years of his maturity back to the shy, tongue-tied boy he was at school. But he was also aware of a deep and satisfying pleasure, a warmth that flooded his whole body: when he was with her it was as if he had stepped out of the shade and into the warm invigorating sunshine. The world felt colder to him now when Connie wasn’t around. She made him happy.

‘What are you doing here?’ There was nothing menacing in her question. Her arms were crossed and her blonde hair was tied back in a thick ponytail.

‘It looks busy.’

‘Saturdays always are.’

She moved over to the X-ray table, and started picking pieces of lint off the pale blue sheet that covered the machine. He could hear a dog growling in the consult room.

She was refusing to look at him. She had no idea how to treat him when they were together in public and it always made him acutely aware of her youth: the ridge of pimples below her bottom left lip, the freckles on her nose, the awkward droop of her shoulders. Stand up straight, he wanted to say to her, don’t be ashamed of being tall.

‘Aish asked me to pick up some Valium.’

At the mention of his wife’s name, Connie looked at him and sprang into action.

‘They’re in the consult room.’

‘It can wait till Brendan’s finished with the client.’

‘It’s alright, I’ll get them.’ She rushed down the corridor and returned with five tablets in a small plastic bag. ‘Is this enough?’

‘Sure.’ He took the bag and as he did so he rubbed his finger softly across her wrist. The girl looked away, but did not pull back her arm.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ She was now looking straight at him, her sharp blue eyes daring him with the request. Brendan was notorious for his objections to smoking and he would disapprove of Hector giving a cigarette to a teenager. No, not a teenager, Connie was a young woman. Connie’s dare seemed deliberate, provocative; her insistent stare aroused him. He gave her a cigarette. Connie opened the door to the back verandah and he was about to follow her.

‘Keep an eye out for Brendan, will you? Or if someone comes through the front.’ When she gave instructions she still sounded like a Londoner. He nodded and she slammed the screen door behind her.

Through the surgery window he watched her smoke, drinking in every aspect of her. The thick, fair hair, the plump bottom and long, strong legs in too-tight black jeans. The gracious curve of her neck. The phone rang and she pitched the cigarette onto the ground, stubbed it into the earth, picked up the butt and threw it in the industrial bin. She brushed by him to answer the phone.

‘Good morning, you’ve called the Hogarth Road Vet Clinic, Connie speaking. Do you mind holding?’ She turned back to him. ‘Is there anything else?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll see you this afternoon.’

A look of confusion shadowed her face and again he was struck by her youth, her adolescence, the naivety she so detested about herself. He wanted to praise her for throwing her cigarette butt into the bin but stopped himself because he knew she would interpret any comment as patronising. Which in part it would be.

‘The barbecue, at our place,’ he reminded her.

Without a word, she turned her back to him.

‘Thank you for holding, what can I do for you?’

 

Back home he helped Aisha unpack the groceries then went to the toilet and, over the bowl, he masturbated furiously. He was not thinking of Connie. He was picturing the luscious buttocks of the Vietnamese woman he had spied at the market. He came in a minute and he wiped the semen off the seat, chucked the toilet paper in the bowl, pissed and flushed it all away. He had no need to fantasise about Connie. Connie was inside him. He looked into the bathroom mirror as he was washing his hands, and again he noticed the grey amid the black bristles on his chin. He wanted to smash his fist into the face staring back at him.

 

Just before the guests were due to arrive, Adam and Melissa started a fight. Aisha had laid out a feast on the kitchen table: a lentil dahl, samosas and curried eggplant, a potato salad and a salad of dill and black beans. He was standing in front of the stove, waiting to throw calamari into a sizzling pan, when he first heard his daughter’s angry scream. He was about to yell out when he heard Aisha running from the bathroom. She started to mediate between the children but Melissa’s cries were rising in intensity and he could hear that Adam too had begun to wail. His wife’s voice was drowned out in the commotion. Hector threw half of the calamari rings into the pan, lowered the heat, then went to investigate.

Melissa had her arms around her mother’s neck and Adam was sitting on his bed, sulking defiantly.

‘What happened?’

It was the wrong thing to ask. Both children started shouting at once. Hector raised his hand. ‘Shut it!’

Melissa immediately went silent, except for a series of low, sad moans. Tears were still running down her face.

He turned to his son. ‘What happened?’

‘She called me a fat pig.’

You
are
fat.

‘What did you do to her?’

Aisha stepped in. ‘Listen, I want both of you to behave this afternoon. I don’t care who started it. I want both of you to go and sit in the lounge and watch TV until the guests come. Deal?’

Melissa nodded her head but Adam was still scowling. ‘Something’s burning ,’ he muttered.

‘Fuck!’ Hector raced into the kitchen and quickly began turning the rings. Oil splattered across the front of his shirt. He swore. Aisha was standing in the kitchen doorway and started laughing.

‘What’s so bloody funny? I just changed into this shirt.’

‘Maybe you should have changed after cooking the calamari.’

For a lightning moment, he imagined throwing the frying pan straight at her. She came up and slipped her hand under his shirt, her fingers cool and soothing.

‘I’ll do it,’ she whispered. ‘You go change again.’

It tickled where she had touched him.

His parents were the first to arrive. He watched them from the bedroom window as they unloaded bags and boxes from the boot of their car. He went out to greet them.

‘Why did you bring all this?’ His father was holding a tray of chops and steaks. ‘I bought all the meat we need at the market this morning.’

‘It’s alright, Ecttora,’ his mother answered in Greek, kissing him on both cheeks, two large bowls of salad in her hands. ‘We’re not barbarians or English to bring nothing to a barbecue. What we don’t eat today, you and the children can have tomorrow.’

Have tomorrow?
They would be eating the leftovers till the following weekend.

His parents put their trays and bowls onto the kitchen bench. His mother gave Aisha a small pet on the cheek then rushed into the lounge to greet the children. His father hugged Aisha warmly.

‘I go bring the rest of food from car.’

‘There’s more?’ Aisha’s voice was warm and cordial but Hector noticed the tightness around her mouth.

‘Just dips and things?’ Hector queried.

‘Yes,’ answered his father. ‘Some dips and drinks and some cheese and fruit.’

‘There’s going to be too much food,’ Aisha whispered.

Just leave it, he wanted to say, they have always been this way. They will always be this way. Why are you still surprised by it?

‘It’s alright,’ he whispered back to her. ‘What we don’t eat today we can have for lunch through the week.’

 

Within an hour the house was full. His sister, Elizabeth, arrived with her two children, Sava and Angeliki. Aisha popped
Toy Story
into the DVD; the film was a durable favourite. Hector had lots of time for his nephew Sava, who was only a year younger than Adam, but already seemed more assured and knowledgeable, more daring, than his own son. Sava was lithe, agile, secure in his body. He was sitting close to the screen, mouthing the dialogue off by heart, pretending to be Buzz Lightyear. Adam was sitting cross-legged next to him. The girls, Melissa and Angeliki, were sitting side by side on the couch, watching the movie and whispering to each other.

‘It’s a beautiful day, you should be outside playing.’

The four children ignored their grandmother.

‘It’s alright, Koula, let them watch a movie.’

His mother ignored Aisha and instead turned to Hector, speaking in Greek. ‘They’re always in front of that damn television.’

‘So were we, Mum.’

‘That’s just not true.’ And with that, his mother brushed him aside and went into the kitchen. She took the knife from Aisha’s hands. ‘I’ll do that, love.’

He noticed that his wife’s back had stiffened.

 

The weather was perfect, a lush late-summer afternoon, with a clear blue sky. His cousin Harry arrived with his wife Sandi and their son, eight-year-old Rocco, and soon after Bilal and Shamira arrived with their two kids. Little Ibby ran straight into the lounge and plonked himself next to Adam and Sava, barely acknowledging them, his eyes riveted to the screen. The toddler, Sonja, at first refused to join the other children, nervously clutching her mother’s knees, but the laughter from the lounge room slowly enticed her away from the women in the kitchen and she eventually, quietly, went to sit on the floor next to the girls. Aisha placed a tray of party pies and sausage rolls on the coffee table and the kids swooped on them.

Hector went out into the backyard with Bilal, and his father handed them both a beer.

Bilal refused the alcohol with a slight shake of his head.

‘Come on, just one drink.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol anymore, Manoli. You know that.’ Hector’s father laughed. ‘You must be the only Aboriginal in Australia who not want drink.’

‘No, I’m not. I hear there’s also this other guy in Townsville.’

‘I go get you a Coke.’

As his father shuffled slowly to the verandah, Hector pulled his friend aside and apologised.

Bilal raised his hand to stop him. ‘Don’t worry about it. He remembers me from when I was drunk all the time.’

‘We were, weren’t we?’

And as young men they had been. It was the tail end of school, back when Bilal was a bloke called Terry. Hector’s memories of his late adolescence were of seemingly endless nights of parties, clubbing, seeing bands, taking drugs, drinking, chatting up girls. Sometimes there were fights—like the night outside the doors of Inflation in King Street, when a bouncer had taken one look at Terry’s proud black pockmarked face and refused the youth entry. Hector swung at the massive bouncer and punched him square in the nose. The man bellowed and rushed at both of them, throwing Hector against a parked car—he still remembered it was a Jaguar—and with one arm keeping Terry at bay, he kept punching into him, a volley of jabs, into Hector’s back, his face, into his belly, his groin, his jaw. He’d been crippled for a week, and on top of that Terry had been furious with him for starting the incident in the first place. ‘Fucking useless wog, did I ask you to defend me?’

Hector’s mother, of course, had blamed it all on his friend. ‘That Terry is an animal,’ she screamed at him. ‘Why are you friends with that
mavraki
, that blackie, all he knows to do is drink.’ But they had always been good friends, since sitting together in Year Eight in school, a friendship that continued even when Terry left to go to tech to start his sign writing apprenticeship, that flourished even as Hector went off to uni to do his commerce degree. They were still good friends—now in their forties, still living in the same neighbourhood in which they had grown up and gone to school. It was a continuity they both cherished even though they saw each other rarely. Terry had found Islam, changed his name, and stopped drinking, dedicating himself to his new faith and to protecting his family. Hector watched fondly as his friend took the Coke from Manolis, thanking him for it in the school-yard Greek that Hector had taught him when they were both fourteen. He knew that his friend was happier than at any other moment in his life. Bilal no longer lost himself in destructive rages, no longer hurt himself or dared death. But Hector also missed those nights of drinking and laughing and listening to music and being high. He wished he could split his mate into two: mostly he wanted him to be Bilal, but sometimes he wanted a night with Terry. It had been a long time since such a night.