Tom Houghton (34 page)

‘I wouldn't insult you, Lexi. I think I realise I need to be a loner. It's in my nature. I love you, I'm proud of you, but I can never be what you need me to be.'

‘And that's where you're wrong again. I never wanted you to be anyone other than Tom Houghton.'

M
al came to get me from the hospital. I didn't ask how long I had been in there, nor did I care. I did not ask where Lana was and this information was not offered to me either. When Mal took me back to his house, I did not question why. I was tired, beyond exhaustion. I could not say I was full of remorse or anything of the sort. In the hospital, I had hit a low when I realised my life could not get any worse. Hopeless was an understatement. I craved death so ravenously I tried to starve myself in the hospital but they simply stuck a drip in my arm. Doctors spoke to me condescendingly, psychologists pretended to be my friend while asking a barrage of inane questions intended to catch me out and certify me loony. At odd moments I was proud of what I had done. I had given the plan my entire energy and though it had not worked, hadn't it been otherworldly once inside the silver suit? Hadn't Spencer looked at me in a way that showed he was truly in awe? And even if I had failed in some respects, I knew I was no longer Seven Hills Tom Houghton. I'd been made stronger.

They did not explain why Mum had not been to see me, but I had worked it out for myself. Hushed conversations in hospital corridors have the habit of sounding like yelled arguments; they echo and carry to you as if by magic, every precise syllable you're not meant to hear. But Mal overruled my doctors and stepped in to tell me the truth eventually anyway.

‘They say you're not well enough to hear this, buddy, but I told them they're full of shit, eh? I reckon it's all the lies and pretending and not being honest that gets people into these sorts of situations and I'm not gonna stand for it any more, mate. I'm not gonna let you be shielded from the things you need to know. See, I know you, Tom, I know you better than them and it's the truth you need to hear, eh?

‘Your mum, mate, she checked herself in again. On one of her, what does she call them?'

‘Spirals . . .' I whispered.

‘Yeah, that's it. Spirals. Lana hasn't been well for a bit, we've both seen her in that bed, mate. But that day, the day you . . . well, she found you, mate, in the garage. You were on the floor, unconscious. She called the ambulance, she called me and she was shrieking, off her head like a rabid monkey, Tom, I can't tell you how sad and desperate she sounded. And in her voice I heard it, eh? I heard something I've never ever heard before, Tom – a love so deep that it hurts, you know? She loves you more than I've ever seen a person love anything, mate, and when I keep replaying that phone call in my mind, I can't stop myself from thinking that you're the luckiest boy, to have a mum who loves you as much as that, eh?'

He wiped a tear from his right eye. Just the one.

‘She rode in the ambulance with you, Tom, made sure she got you here and made sure the doctors took you in and when they told her you were gonna be all right, she just called a taxi to take her straight to the . . . mental hospital, you know? I dunno how long she's going to be away for but you understand, don't you? You know she needs to get better so she can help you. You forgive her, don't you?'

I said yes because I was desperate to tell Mal what he wanted to hear. I was too numb to feel anything, if the truth were known. Sorrow seemed wholly too vacuous a word to describe my pain.

Mal came every day to the hospital. The first few days while I was drugged and dazed, and every single day since I'd returned to consciousness. He never passed judgement over what I had done, never asked about the silver suit or the smouldering bonfire. Every day without fail he just told me how glad he was that I was all right, how much he would have missed me had I succeeded, and that no matter how low I felt, he promised me life was going to get better. I was young and stupid, but I could tell he too was nursing a bruised ego, an aching heart. Mum's spiral affected him too. He never let on how much he liked her but I could tell by the way his face lit up that she meant everything to him and one day he planned on marrying her and creating a life for the three of us.

‘It may not feel like it now,' he said to me one evening after his delivery shift when the nurse agreed to let him in outside visiting hours, ‘but everything you feel inside your head and your heart, bro, is completely natural. Believe me, you are going to grow up and look back on this time and wonder why the hell it all felt so fucked. I promise you that, Tom, you will get better and stronger every single day.'

And in some respects, I suppose, he was right. He saved the real bombshell for my last day in hospital, again building up to it by telling me that my doctors didn't think I was well enough to hear the news but he knew me better than that, knew I was man enough to take it on the chin. Mum had lost her son, my brother, after one of her spirals. She'd checked herself into the sanctuary but not told anyone, simply upped and disappeared one day, leaving three-month-old Liam at home with his dad. They thought she'd been murdered or something. That was her first one, the first anyone knew of, a spiral so all-encompassing Liam's dad went to court and got custody of him and then took him away to live in Perth. The news that I had a brother did not shock me as much as it ought to have, because all I could think of now were the times when my grandmother looked after me as a kid, when for weeks at a stretch we would go ‘on holidays' and when I returned to tell Mum all about them, she was never as enthusiastic or interested as I wanted her to be. How foolish and ignorant I'd been, to never have realised what was wrong with my mother. And now look what I had gone and done – so consumed with not being me that I had failed to save Mum from not wanting to be her.

Mal explained that conversations had already taken place over who should look after me, so I went to live at his house and he paid for his auntie to fly over from New Zealand. She looked after me when he was working late, or early. Between the two of them, they never left me alone. He lived too far away from my old school and said that when the New Year began, he would look at taking me to a different school, get a brand-new start.

He brought most of my possessions into his house for me, the piles of magazines I'd not had the energy to burn, but they lay untouched in my room. He brought videos on an almost daily basis but as I sat there watching them with him and his auntie, my mind wandered and I could not engage, though I pretended well enough to get away with it, I presumed. On the weekends he took me places to do things I had never before imagined doing. We kayaked and abseiled and did some boxing lessons and all those sorts of things fathers and sons would normally do in my fairytale view of that relationship, at least.

Mum's doctors refused to let me see her. Mal tried to explain that this was a bad spiral, that it was going to take longer for her to pull herself out of. I know he went to see her often, could tell in the shifty way he made up an excuse as to why he was late home from work. But he never spoke to me about those visits, just updated me on her progress, or lack thereof, from time to time.

I suffered a series of nightmares during a week when Mal had back-to-back shift work. His auntie Kiara would come rushing into my room and rub my back as I turned away from her, offering to deliver me warm milk, but I could say nothing. She was a stranger and, sweet though she was, I knew she hated Australia and did not want to be here tending to someone else's child, some crazy who'd dumped the kid with her nephew. The final nightmare happened after Mal had come home from work. I lay in bed wet with perspiration and finally found the courage to walk down the hall to his bedroom. He always slept with the door open and I crept under his sheet as soundlessly as I could. I edged up next to him and felt he was naked. Every ounce of my will silently egged me to turn to face him and place my body on top of his. I could be for him what Mum could never. I imagined our two bodies pressed together, how firm he would feel beneath me, the wiriness of his hairy chest and legs. I longed to press my lips against his. I would never disappoint him in the way Mum had, I'd never go off and leave him, no matter how bad things in my mind might seem. If he promised to be with me, to stay with me forever, then I would be with Mal until his dying day. I enveloped myself in the sound of his soft snores and the strong scent of his flesh and as I cast my mind back to our weekend away, drifting in the boat together, watching him shower naked, sharing my first ever beer, I eventually fell to sleep.

I knew as soon as I woke that a dark cloud hung over the house. Mal and Kiara were whispering in staccato tones. It sounded like she was lecturing him, telling him to do something he was reluctant to do. I was still in his bed, could have stayed there all day, but this would have been what Mum would choose to do. I put my hand over my stiff penis and walked into the bathroom to force out a wee. The flush was enough to make the hushed kitchen conversation stop.

‘Morning . . .' I said as I entered the room.

Kiara looked at Mal and gestured with her eyebrows for him to say something.

‘You know I love you like my own son, right, Tom? I need you to know I think of you as my son, eh? You know what that means?'

I nodded my head, but I wasn't completely following.

‘Mate, they're gonna be looking for any reason to take you away from me. And what does that mean? You don't even wanna know, trust me. Foster homes, more arseholes than you could ever imagine. You can't sleep in my bed, all right? That can never happen again. I had no clothes on, eh, mate? You imagine what someone would say they come in here and see you in there with me? I'd be in prison and where would this leave you and me both, eh?'

I couldn't respond to him, hated being berated for something that had felt so beautiful and liberating.

‘So I need you to promise you won't come into my room again, eh?'

‘Mmm,' I said half-heartedly.

‘Nah, I mean it, eh, bro? You need to say you promise. If you're scared or have a nightmare or something, you call out for me and I'll be there, but no coming into my room. Or Kiara's, eh? You stay in your own bed. You promise?'

‘I promise.'

I knew what he was saying made some sense, but we weren't in the outside world, were we? It was just us and we shared something nobody else could understand. Most of his words were lost on me, except for the way he'd said
I love you
and I clung to that for dear life. I was, despite the lecture, buoyant.

‘Good. Now let's pretend like this never happened,' he said, causing Kiara to tut.

•  •  •

More visits to the mind doctors occurred. Mal insisted on coming in with me, though he never interrupted. When we left what turned out to be my last consultation, we drove away in hysterics at how stupidly they were treating me. That was a good moment, an ounce of gold after months of panning through mud.

‘They don't know a fucking thing, I reckon,' Mal said, after taking the piss out of one doctor's accent. ‘Now, Thomas, I wonder would you care to inform me of . . .'

‘I can just tell they're trying to trick me into something,' I said to him after I had finished chuckling. ‘I'm not gonna fall for that.'

•  •  •

I thought about Katharine Hepburn a lot during those weeks. I wondered why she never bothered responding to my letter. As more of her telemovies and interviews showed on our screens that summer I tried in vain to dig beneath the iconic exterior, to find a semblance of the girl who'd discovered her brother's body then changed her birthday to be his. Without her blessing, what hope was there for me to be Thomas Houghton?

Mal's company made cuts after the Christmas break. His was one of the first jobs to go. The new school year was getting closer but I was still not enrolled in the local high school, as Mal and I could not agree whether I was ready to return; I thought yes, he was not so sure. It was Kiara who suggested we all return to New Zealand. It would be temporary, just until Mum got better and got out. I still wasn't allowed to see her or call her, but I had been writing her letters that remained unsent. I figured these would be good for her to read when she was well enough.

In New Zealand more of the family would be around to help Mal out, and he could return to his job helping one of his brothers with removals. I could tell Mal was not keen on the idea and had it not been for me, maybe he would have chosen another path but as it was Mal's father reluctantly agreed to pay for all of our fares.

Just before we left, I returned to the locked-up house in Seven Hills. Mal waited outside while I went in to gather up any last possessions. It was stale and cloying inside and for the first time I could see the house objectively. It hadn't been updated since Pa had it built; Mum's nicotine sheen lay over every surface. I didn't want anything from my bedroom except the Hepburn biography. I'm not sure why I still wanted to hold on to it, but it seemed to beckon. I went into Pa's room and took one of his large handkerchiefs to remember him by. My whole life, he'd always had one on hand when needed – always freshly laundered and ironed, never used. It was nothing really, but I felt it his due. In the backyard I noticed something, a hungry cat maybe, had dug up angry bird and her feathers were strewn about. In the garage the fire and coils of rope had been cleared and I wondered when Mal had thought to do this.