This Is the Life (14 page)

24

Melon Claw

My career as a Louis substitute was starting to take off and I was getting regular offers coming in for personal appearances, while I spent my daytimes emptying his wardrobes, clearing his junk, boxing his books for the Salvation Army, and trying to dispose of the accumulated debris of half a lifetime.

Babs, Halley's sister, called and said, “Derek is having a big birthday this weekend, and he's rented a place up in the mountains, and he's invited a load of people and he was going to ask Louis, but—”

I said I'd go.

It took three hours to get there. I went with Halley in Louis's ute—which would soon be Halley's ute, if the will copy ever got authorized—and he drove, since he knew the way. We sped along with the window falling down and the fan on perpetual maximum.

“How about I put the radio on to blot the fan out?” Halley said.

“The radio doesn't work,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. For he seemed the philosophical sort. Then he glanced at me sideways and said, “She had a false plastic thumb then?”

“That's how she did the trick. Removing the clothes was all distraction and sleight of hand.”

“Sleight of hand with a plastic thumb. It kind of takes the magic away.”

“But it's nice to know how things are done.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or sometimes maybe not.”

“She was magic, anyway,” I reminded him, “just standing there with nothing on.”

We drove on up through dripping rainforests and roads with layers of mist lying on them. Eventually we caught sight of Derek and Babs and Babs and Halley's mother in their car, and we tailed them.

Derek turned off up a track and we kept following. We drove another five miles or more and came to a farm.

“This is it,” Halley said. “I think.”

Next to the farm was a so-called homestead, with a couple of bunkrooms and a couple of doubles. There were others already there, people Derek had invited. He introduced me and said I was Louis's brother, and they all seemed satisfied with that.

We had a barbecue that night. The women were mostly tough and heavy smokers. Like Liam Neeson, they took no crap. We sat outside and knocked back the cabernet sauvignon and the Little Creatures.

Derek got a campfire going, and some of us sat next to it, perched on stones, staring at the flames, wherein all mysteries were solved and all answers danced.

Halley's brother Charles had turned up, and he too was
an artist who lived in a shed. His gray hair was in a ponytail and he wore charity-shop clothes, for being an artist does not always pay. In fact mostly it doesn't pay at all. It's really a kind of charity work in its own right.

The breeze blew the fire smoke into Charlie's eyes, but he didn't shift to get away from it. He just licked his thumb and then held his thumb out in front of him, and the smoke got the message, and it turned away and wafted in another direction.

Halley was watching this.

“That is such bullshit,” he said.

But Charles just gave him a thin smile, for the evidence spoke for itself.

“Such bullshit,” Halley said again. “That is total crap.”

The wind turned again and this time the smoke blew into my eyes. I licked my thumb and held it up, but the smoke kept coming.

“What am I doing wrong, Charlie?”

“You're not convinced,” he said. “You've got to believe in it or it won't work.”

“He's talking bullshit,” Halley said.

I was reassured to see that brothers are the same the world over, and have a tendency not to agree with each other, particularly on vital matters.

* * *

The next morning we had breakfast out on the big wooden table. The farmer's dogs appeared and hopped up onto the barbecue grill and licked all the taste and grease of last night's sausages from it.

“That is disgusting,” Babs said. “We'll be cooking on that again later.”

“It'll burn off,” Derek told her.

A friend of Derek's had brought his boat and we were going to the lake to catch red claw, so I heard. Red claw being smallish freshwater crayfish. Derek had been on the Internet and had assured himself by consulting various websites that the best bait to use was melon.

The rest of us thought this was a hoax of some kind, but it was Derek's birthday, so we went with it. We cut up melons and put them into crab pots, then went out to the lake and heaved them into the water.

Two hours later we returned to pull them up. Nothing. Just sliced melon. We moved the pots and came back another two hours later. Still no red claw but plenty of soggy melon. Same again another two hours after that. We were all feeling hungry by then, so we gave up on the red claw, reeled in the pots, and returned to the homestead for a cheese sandwich.

There was serious snoring in the bunkhouse that night, possibly due to the intake of alcohol, though the most serious snorer, another of Derek's brothers-in-law, was a reformed drinker on the twelve-step plan, and all he'd had was Coca-Cola.

Halley and I went for a bike ride early the next morning, past fields of startled wallabies, who froze, watched us a moment, and then ran, bouncing away into the mist. We passed ruined homesteads of hand-hewn timber and corrugated roofs, long since deserted, built on patches of scrub where some subsistence farmer and his family might once have eked out a hard living.

When you stopped pedaling, there was no sound of vehicles, not even from far away, only the sounds of the breeze and of birds and other living things.

Don't tell me Louis would have liked this, I thought, because I already know.

“Louis would have liked it here,” Halley said.

“He would,” I agreed. “He would.”

“Want to cycle back now?”

We did. The wallabies were back in the field, but on seeing us, they ran away again. When we got to the homestead the women were still at the breakfast table, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. They were all substantial and in their middle years. If you'd asked them for a favor, they wouldn't have let you down.

Victor, the snorer, was mechanically minded, so I asked him to have a look at the ute and see if he could stop the fan from constantly blowing on max, as I couldn't locate the fuse. He took half the dashboard apart, but he fixed it.

Halley and I were able to drive back in relative peace.

I thanked Derek for the invitation, but he was lying on a sofa, looking hungover and morose, as if the passing of his significant birthday had brought intimations of mortality with it which he had hitherto managed to ignore.

We cleaned and tidied the place up and threw the melons into the compost bin. There were so many empty wine bottles we took some of them back with us from shame. Then we all drove away in our various directions.

It was a good weekend. I got back to Louis's place quite late and it was cold and empty and the traces of him were going as, little by little, I was taking them away.

I found a Little Creature hiding in the fridge and I tried to pry the cap off with my thumb, as I had seen done. But I didn't have the knack and so used an opener.

Up in the roof the possums were moving. Maybe they were rooting away, maybe they were just getting comfortable.
After all, they'd have known each other some time now, and it can't be passionate sex every night, not even for possums.

I thought of all the strange and unexpected places life will take you to, and the ones that death will take you to as well, and the people you meet along the way who you otherwise would never have known.

I thought how strange and wonderful the world was, and how both sad and beautiful life had been, and then I thought it was maybe the beer thinking and not me.

I went and stood in Louis's room. I could have slept in his bed, had I wanted to, but I didn't. I put the light out, and went and lay on my own.

Who, I wondered, do I most wish were here right now?

But I found that it was a question not easily answered.

All I saw were dancing shapes on the wall, as the tree branches out in the garden waved in the moonlight, and then I fell asleep, and when I awoke, the telephone was ringing.

I hurried to answer it, and it was my wife, and she said, “How are you? How are you feeling?”

I said, “I'm okay. I'm managing. How are you?”

“I'm okay,” she said. “We're all fine here.”

And the sun came up, and the day started, though where she was, it was nighttime, and the light was coming to its end.

25

Dictation

“You'll write it all down, won't you?” Louis said to me.

“If that's what you want, I'll try to,” I said.

“It's what you do, isn't it?”

“I try to, Louis, but it doesn't always work. If you want to know the truth, most of the time it doesn't work. I got lucky with a few things and made enough money to keep going, but most of the time it doesn't work. I know I've got a wife and kids and a house and a car and a pension plan and we get the food at Waitrose instead of discount supermarkets, but inside, I'm a bohemian.”

“Well, you can make it work.”

“I can't know that, Louis, but I'll try.”

“And no crap,” he said. “No sentimental stuff and no crap. The world's full of crap and there's already too much of it. It doesn't matter how it is, just as long as it's not full of crap.”

“I can't make any promises, Louis. Why don't you, you know, get something down now?”

“I can't even write a shopping list now.”

Which was true. He had trouble signing his name.

* * *

Four days after the surgeon had cut a substantial part of Louis's brain out, Louis decided that he would walk home from the hospital. He managed the first two miles without incident, but then he felt immensely tired and had to sit down on a bench. He passed out and woke up two hours later, then continued on his way.

I guess the people who saw him sleeping there would have thought him to be a vagrant, with maybe an alcohol problem. He had the wild beard, the mad eyebrows, and the tattered clothes for the part. They would not have imagined him to be a graduate of prestigious universities, who had traveled widely, conversed in several languages, who had solved problems that others did not even know were problems, as they could not understand the question, let alone the answer to it.

Louis had been up on his feet the day after the operation.

“I'm not one to stay in bed,” he told me over the phone. “You see some of them in here, they've already given up. I've been walking around the hospital and down to Starbucks and I went outside awhile too. I've lost a few pounds, but nothing serious. Don't know what'll happen with the steroids, but right now, I'm at fighting weight.”

Once home, he cycled to the supermarket on his bike for groceries. But he nearly had an accident. The operation had damaged his peripheral vision. He stopped cycling. He got scared of running into someone.

The day I got there, he took me for a three-mile walk. He tripped and fell on a curb, and lay awhile on the pavement.

“Are you okay, Louis?”

“I'm so stupid,” he said. “I didn't see it coming.”

“Don't get up yet, just wait a minute.”

A car drew up and the window slid down.

“You okay there? Can I help? You need a lift? Is he all right? I saw what happened.”

“We're all right,” Louis growled. “We don't need any help, thank you. We can manage on our own.”

I thanked the motorist and he drove on. Louis got to his feet and I saw that his leg was bleeding.

“Louis, we should have taken the lift. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “I'm fine.”

“Let's turn back then.”

“No. I'm going to show you where everything is.”

So we walked on.

“You sure about this, Louis? You sure you're all right?”

“We're tough,” he said. “We're tough.”

26

The Way

Kirstin called and asked if I would like to see her house, which was a three-hour drive away, up in the outback.

“Louis helped build it,” she said.

So I said I would. She asked Halley too, whom she'd known a long time. She'd sold her art and he had sold his picture frames at the same country markets.

We left about nine one morning in Kirstin's Hyundai. She asked me to drive, and she sat in the back, and Halley sat in the front next to me, and we headed north out of the city.

As we drove, a large, white, new-looking car overtook us. It was a Lexus or something like that and it bore a personalized license plate, the first three letters of which were ZEN.

“Look at that,” I said. “How can that be?”

“What?” Halley said.

“How can it be Zen to have a ZEN license plate?”

“Maybe they're initials,” Kirstin said. “Maybe it's Zachariah Emmanuel Norman.”

“Possibly,” I agreed, “but unlikely, in my opinion. I think it's some teacher of Buddhism or something, trying to bring in the business.”

“So you think advertising Zen is not very Zen?” Halley said.

“No. How can it be? Surely the way of Zen is the way of nonattachment to material things, which would include personalized license plates, wouldn't it? If your ego is telling you that you need to tell everybody how Zen you are, then you're not Zen at all. It's a contradiction in terms.”

“But maybe,” Halley said, “you can get too attached to nonattachment. You could get so attached to nonattachment that it becomes a form of ego in itself. And so, to show that you are not overly attached to nonattachment, you get a personalized license plate. Because to deliberately and calculatedly avoid personalized license plates, in order to demonstrate to the world that you are not a personalized license plate kind of guy and above such things, would be a form of attachment even worse than having one.”

“You mean it's ‘The Way of the License Plate'?”

“Something like that.”

“I think whoever was driving that car was a bullshit artist,” I said.

“Then maybe he's trying to achieve enlightenment through ‘The Way of the Bullshit,' ” Halley said.

“There seem to be a lot of people taking that route,” I said. “So tell me, if you wanted to find out about Zen Buddhism, would you go and study under a guy who drove a big white Lexus and had a personalized license plate with ZEN on it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Halley said. “But I wouldn't rule it out completely.”

“Can you make smoke change direction by licking your thumb?” I asked him.

“I'm working on it,” he said.

“Left here,” Kirstin said.

So we turned left and changed the subject.

* * *

On we drove. In the car with us we had a loaf of bread, a large fish, and a bottle of wine. For some reason it made me think of Jesus. We also had some tomatoes, salad leaves, a bottle of water, and some Little Creatures. Everything except the bread was in an Esky.

The journey got tedious, but after a time we left the highway and took a minor road that led through tumbleweed towns and past hedgeless fields of scrub. Then we drove alongside cultivated land, with huge irrigation devices upon it, past orchards and green crops and massive greenhouses, and there were fruit pickers at work in the merciless sun, wearing hats with long drapes at the back of them, to protect their necks from the burning heat.

“They immigrants?” I asked Kirstin.

“Mostly,” she said. “Some backpackers too, making a little money, or staying on the farms and doing it for room and board.”

On we went. The land seemed eternal to someone like me from a small island. On and on it continued, as far as you could see, until it went out of focus in a blur of heat. As we drove there were mirages hovering about the road, promising water that was never there when you got to where it should have been.

“And left here now too.”

We turned off the road and onto a single-lane dirt track.
It ran over gullies and bridges and by creeks and woodland. Here there were acres of burnt and blackened trees, petrified by old fires and yet to recover and issue green shoots. We passed burning grass and a fire engine and some men beating out small flames.

“It hasn't rained for two months here,” Kirstin said.

“You worry about fire?” Halley asked her.

“I can't do much about it,” she said.

We drove on for miles, the Hyundai taking a battering. Red dust rose up into the air behind us, and advertised where we were. We saw the occasional homestead, but there weren't many, and they appeared deserted.

“How long have you had the place here?”

“I bought the land twenty years ago,” Kirstin said. “When I got divorced.”

“How much?” Halley said.

“Seventeen thousand.”

“How many acres?”

“I don't know—forty?”

Halley whistled.

“And then?”

“My son's an engineer and he designed the house and I had some help and built it. But now I'm looking to sell. I'm getting older and need to be closer to the city.”

“How far's your nearest shop?” I asked her.

“Nine miles,” she said.

“Long way to go for the newspaper.”

“I don't bother with them too much.”

We passed more scorched and blackened fields. There were koalas in the gum trees and wallabies standing by the tree margin watching us pass, indifferent, barely curious.
Galahs and parakeets were in the treetops, screeching at the rising dust.

“Had any viewers? How long's it been on the market?” Halley asked.

“Eighteen months and two viewings. One offer.”

“Not enough?”

“They offered to take it for nothing,” she said. “They were old hippies and had no money, but they felt that they were in tune with the place, and if I let them have it for nothing, they'd look after it.”

“Give your home a good home, huh?”

* * *

There was a ramshackle house ahead of us and a gate blocking the track.

“My neighbor,” Kirstin said. “He'll open it.”

Two men sat in the yard. One was in his seventies; one was in his forties, and he didn't look right. They sat on old chairs and between them they had a crate of beer and a cooler. The son looked vacant or stoned and the old man had a shotgun on his knee.

“Friendly looking,” Halley said.

The old man got up and opened the gate for us to drive through.

“Thank you,” Kirstin called. He saluted her with his beer can. Halley and I thanked him too, just to be on the safe side.

We drove on and he closed the gate behind us, then he sat back down and opened another beer.

“What do they do all day?” Halley said.

“What they're doing,” Kirstin said. “And there's a few chickens around the place, and some veg growing.”

“What's going to happen when the old man dies and the son's left on his own with the beer and shotgun?” Halley said.

Kirstin shrugged.

“Hopefully I'll be gone by then.”

“Is there any other way of accessing your property?”

“No.”

“You think maybe pappy and junior back there are the reason you're not getting too many offers?”

“They're fine,” Kirstin said. “Never been a problem with me. He usually asks me to stop and have a beer, but I say I'm busy.”

“Right,” Halley said. “Okay.”

But he sounded dubious.

* * *

And then we were there. We pulled off the track and parked under shade. The house was built into the side of a hill, its veranda held up by timbers, its back part resting on foundations. It was cool and elegant, but comprised only one room. You opened the door and there you were, everything faced you, living room, bedroom, kitchen, all in one, with only a screen for privacy, should you want some.

“A drink?”

There was lemonade in the fridge, which was powered by solar panels, and there was a generator in an outbuilding for backup if needed.

Next to the house was a studio, also built in wood, with an apexed roof.

“Louis used it as a workshop,” Kirstin said. “Originally it was my studio, but I didn't use it anymore.”

“Why did you give up?” I asked her.

“It gave me up,” she said.

Behind the house the land rose into the woods. The gradient was so steep that when you tried to climb up, your feet slid underneath you, and you had to scramble, leaning forward, using your hands as well as your feet, walking like an ape.

After we'd seen the view, we came back down and drank beer on the veranda, looking down into the valley and the creek and where—when the rain came—there was a swimming hole and cool bathing and fresh water.

“What do you do for drinking water?” Halley asked.

“Borehole,” she said. “And the rainwater tanks last forever. I don't use much.”

Then there was a sudden loud and ominous rumbling.

“What is that?”

We went around to the back of the house. The noise was boiling water. The day was so hot and the sun had been on the solar panels so long that the water in the reservoir tank was boiling. The pressure-relief valve had opened and vapor was hissing out, like steam from an old coal train.

“Never seen it do that before,” Kirstin said. “Shall we go in and eat?”

We grilled the fish and laid the table and cut up the bread and salad. When we had finished eating, Kirstin took out an album of photographs and showed them to me. They were of her and Louis building her house; of her and Louis on their trip up the coast, along the eastern seaboard to the Barrier Reef. She seemed a little wistful, and when Halley was out of the way for five minutes, looking at some wood she had that might do for his picture frames, Kirstin said, “I thought about Louis a lot, you know, after we broke up. There was an incident, you know—”

“He told me there was something,” I lied. “He never said what exactly.”

“But I felt I couldn't go back. Many times I thought about picking up the phone. But after the incident—I felt I couldn't risk that.”

I wondered about her ex-husband, and what kind of man he was.

“No,” I said. “Well—I'm sorry.”

“But thank you for calling me,” she said. “For including me.”

It was ten years since they'd broken up.

“Do you get lonely here?” I asked. “Or doesn't it bother you?”

“Sometimes, but mostly I like it. I do some gardening, plant trees, read, cook. I've a television here and Internet—it's slow, but it works—and I get visitors sometimes.”

“You really don't paint anymore?”

“No,” she said.

“Are they yours, on the wall?”

“Yes,” she said.

“They're good.”

“Thanks. Louis built his canoe out there,” she said, going to the veranda and pointing at the studio.

“How'd he take it home?”

“On the back of his ute.”

“He ever use it?”

“Once or twice.”

Halley reappeared and Kirstin said she wanted to clear up and why didn't we go and look around, so we left her ­to it.

We followed the track about half a mile and found another house; it was haphazard and disorienting and like some
thing from the brothers Grimm. It adhered to no formal house plan known to architecture.

It was like the
Mary Celeste—
the ship found floating with no one aboard, but with signs of very recent habitation.

The doors of the place were ajar; there were plates on the table, bright clothes on the line, knives and forks in the sink. Everything was disheveled and falling apart.

“Who lives down the road?” Halley asked Kirstin when we got back.

“Some hippie types use it as a weekend place. They chill out and smoke dope. They don't bother me. They don't come by as often as they used to. I think they find the drive too much. They're getting old.”

We drank some coffee and then Kirstin said we maybe ought to move soon, before the light went, as it was a long drive back. We packed up our rubbish and took it with us.

Halley drove this time. When we got to the beer and shotgun place, there was no one there. I got out and opened the gate and then closed it behind us.

We rejoined the road and drove back south, the darkness chasing us and the neon coming on.

We passed a sign reading Small Animal Hospital Ahead.

“Is that a small hospital for all animals, do you think?” I said. “Or a hospital for small animals, and you shouldn't go there with a large one?”

“The latter,” Halley said.

“So what if you've got a large animal and it needs attention?”

“You shoot it,” Halley said.

And that was the end of that conversation.

* * *

We got back toward Louis's place, but we were hungry again by then, so we headed for Tomato Brothers and ordered pizza. Kirstin rang her daughter who came over and joined us. She would spend the night there at her daughter's. It was too far to go back to her own house.

We stood outside the restaurant and said good-bye. Halley and I walked back to Louis's house, where Halley had left his ute, and he said he'd be in touch soon, and he got into his ute and started up the engine.

I went inside and sat at the table in Louis's kitchen, and it felt as if it had been a long day. But like all the other ones, short or long, it had ended. I tied the dongle to the bamboo pole and stuck it out of the window so I could check my e-mails.

* * *

I remembered an incident when I was very young, maybe seven or eight years old. I don't recall exactly what I was doing, but I knocked the saltcellar off the table and it smashed on the kitchen floor.

I was terrified of my father's anger and I went in search of Louis and told him what I'd done and how scared I was.