Tom Houghton (9 page)

‘There's no point in that, Mum. He's not breathing. He's already dead.'

‘Can you be sure? For how long?'

‘I'm positive, Mum. I sat and watched him for a few minutes, I tried to wake him, I was yelling. I tried to get a pulse like they do, but I couldn't find anything. And you know that little vein that throbs in Pa's head all the time? Well, it's not beating any more. Everything is just . . . still.'

‘Baby, you're my brave man, you're just so . . . What would I do without you?'

‘You'd be all right, Mum.'

‘What do you think we should do, then?'

‘It's late, Mum. There's nothing we can do. Pa looks so calm and peaceful in there, why don't we just leave him for the night and we'll get the morgue to come and get him in the morning?'

‘Is that . . . is that the right thing to do?'

‘I guess so. I don't really know. It
feels
the right thing to do.'

‘I'm not gonna be able to find a replacement here, Tommy, I –'

‘Mum, you need to keep working. You can't throw away your job now, you know what Roger's like, he'll just fire you. I'm looking after things. I'll be okay.'

‘But you're all alone . . .'

‘No, I'm not. Pa's right here.' I hadn't thought twice about being in the house with a dead body. My mother never left me home alone, yet something about Pa's lifeless presence must have reassured her. There was always our neighbour, Mrs B, to call in an emergency, but I didn't view Pa's death as one.

When Lana got home from work a little after two in the morning, I was still wide awake, crouched over my magazines, feverishly making notations on my movie index cards.

‘You'll ruin your back,' my mother said, her voice full of fatigue. ‘That's why you got a desk for your birthday, Tom.'

We went to see Pa together, and stood holding hands, looking at his pristine face, all the worry taken from it, all the hard-work lines simply melted away. My mother sighed.

‘He looks beautiful, doesn't he?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You did the right thing tonight, Tommy. You made me proud, my strong man.'

That night as we lay in bed together, my mother curled in snugly behind me, she rubbed my spine softly until she thought I had fallen asleep. A few moments later I felt her crying into the back of my head, trying hard to stifle her sobbing, but it was not long until my hair was slick with her tears. I wanted to turn around to her then, to take her into my arms and be a solid foundation, but I didn't turn, or make a sound.

When Roger found out, he showed he had a heart after all and gave Mum the remainder of the week off from both the butcher shop and pub. He simply said that he'd make do. From that moment on my mother behaved like a woman possessed, frantic in her organisation of the funeral and cremation. She called a funeral director first thing Tuesday morning and arranged for them to collect the body that afternoon after clearing with them that it was acceptable for her to cleanse it. I asked to help, wanting to be with her at this time, but she'd insisted she would do it alone and had closed Pa's door behind her firmly, a bucket of scented water in one hand and freshly laundered washcloths in another. She spent close to two hours in there with her father and I heard her speaking to him occasionally, or crying, and it nearly broke my heart not to be there to help. I'd found it impossible to concentrate on magazines or movies and instead made my way around the yard, picking ripe fruit and vegetables, collecting the eggs, mowing the lawn – anything at all to keep myself occupied in the intervals between standing outside the closed bedroom door.

Mum called the funeral home and arranged the date and time of the service. She spoke with the funeral director and laboured over the right coffin. She spent another two hours in Pa's room choosing the right suit for him to wear – the very same one he'd worn to his retirement banquet after thirty-seven years with the company – even though she'd decided not to have an open casket. Once Pa was taken away, an eerie otherness settled over the house and Mum set to another kind of work. She went to her father's room and folded all of his clothes meticulously, emptying his wardrobe and chest of drawers of every last thing. These she drove down to the local Salvation Army. She stripped his bed clean of linen and threw it all away. While I was feeding the chooks, she single-handedly dragged Pa's heavy mattress out into the sunshine and scrubbed away at it with soap and a thick wiry brush until a white lather formed. Then she hosed it down with water warmed by the day and left it standing upright against the side of the garage, hoping the sun would be strong enough to dry it out.

In the laundry she poured out his flagons of port and threw the empty bottles so hard into the bin they exploded like the copper bungers I'd heard older kids setting off on cracker night. One half-used cake and other unopened packets of Solvol were thrown into the bin. When we sat together to eat lunch, my mother was not mad or morose, she was simply efficient.

‘I never realised how much there was to do,' she said over her corned beef sandwich. ‘It's never-ending. I can't see an end in sight.'

‘Can I help?' I felt both useless and excluded, as though I had done something to upset her and she was punishing me by keeping me from all of the important actions and decisions.

‘You're being a darling out in the yard, Tommy; let me take care of inside. I've been thinking, though. Over the summer, I reckon if you could attack the garage for me that would be a big help. Give it a good scrub and throw away the things we won't need for us, just you and me?'

To be allowed to enter my grandfather's domain, to sift through an entire history and decide for myself what of it should live on, gave me a genuine thrill.

While she was focused and business-like during the day, each night my mum repeated the routine of stroking my back until she was tricked into thinking I was asleep, and she'd sob some more into my pillow and the back of my hair. On the third night she'd developed a chill and her shivers had shaken me awake from the deepest of sleeps. Though Mum called me her little man, I wasn't equipped to deal with her pain, and I chose instead to concentrate on the treasures that might be found in the garage and, specifically, whether that signed Katharine Hepburn theatre program existed.

•  •  •

Now that he'd been farewelled, and his body was more than likely on its way to being tickled, then melted, by flames, a routine without Pa needed to be established. Friday evening marked Mum's return to work and she'd come up with a brainwave. I was not old enough to be left on my own all night and, despite my protests to the contrary, on this matter she refused to budge. Behind the bar there was a tiny manager's office where they counted and stored the evening's takings. I was to remain locked in the room and not move, under any circumstances. The pub could get quite rough, especially on a Friday night, and she was concerned for my safety, not to mention what would happen to Roger's licence if a child was found on the premises. She'd spoken to her colleagues and they'd cautiously agreed to her idea, acknowledging that it was temporary and feeling sorry for her in light of her loss. The alternatives were impossible to consider. Her father had died while she was at work and if anything were to happen to me, she said, she'd never be able to forgive herself. At least this way, she could control what happened.

So I found myself curled under the desk in the money room, my pillow from home propped behind my back. It was not uncomfortable, but difficult to stretch out my legs and I worried they might cramp. Mum had snuck me in the back door ten minutes before her shift began, out of sight of any of the patrons. I'd been set up with a large bottle of cola, a packet of crisps, a large packet of chocolate buds and an empty cordial bottle in case I needed to urinate.

Beyond that closed door I heard a bevy of deep male voices, gradually getting louder as the evening progressed. Music played in the background and occasionally the volume would be turned up for one song then lowered again. Female shrieks were sometimes heard above the din, a squeal of delight, perhaps, a cackling, flirtatious laugh. Once in a while I heard the timbre of my mother's voice: calling out for so-and-so to settle down; her familiar throaty chuckle in response to someone's crude joke; calling out to her colleague they were running low on such-and-such. Motorbikes came and went, parked directly beneath the window of the manager's office. One pair of male and female voices kept returning to the car park – talking, giggling, sighing. Back inside the pub, the chinking of glasses and, once or twice, the smashing.

My only entertainment was the Katharine Hepburn biography. That, I conceded, was really all I needed to keep myself occupied for the night, however long it would be. With the turmoil of Pa's death, I found it impossible to pick up where I'd left it, so I started again from the very first page. Within minutes, I was up to that heart-pounding moment, the discovery that the greatest actress of all time, at least if the number of Academy Awards under her belt was anything to go by, could possibly be a distant relative. Even though I already knew this, and had considered it several times during the week, reading it again somehow added validity, as though a dream had been made real.

Most Hollywood biographies followed a formula with which I was accustomed and this was no exception: it began with a glimpse of the star now and moved on to create a portrait of her in her heyday, a timeless snapshot of someone who'd reached legendary status. Then a time machine transported the reader back to before – prior to the fame and adulation, the success and accolades, the wealth – and it was the reader's duty to make the connection between those early beginnings and link what took the subject from mere mortal to international sensation. For Hepburn, it had been life as a tomboy in a busy family with a renowned and wealthy surgeon father and a mother who fought to have the rights of women recognised. I wondered whether Hepburn had been left alone by her parents, just as my mother was forced to leave me so often. But like my mum, Hepburn's was a fan of the arts and shared this love with her children – taking them to plays, introducing them to actors and playwrights, and instilling a love of the movies. Unlike us, the Hepburns lived comfortably, had more money than my family would ever know. And their house was full of activity and life, an endless array of characters and helpers filling its rooms with a hum the young Katharine found mysterious and glamorous. There was no chance she had been lonely like me, for, aside from all of that, she also had her siblings. I had noticed that a majority of stars suffered some kind of trauma. I wondered what Hepburn's was going to be, or if she'd be the exception to prove my rule.

The biographer wrote of the conjecture over Hepburn's true birthdate: her birth certificate stated May 12, 1907, but the star often referred to her birthday as being November 8, 1905. But November 8th was
my
birthday! Though Ms Hepburn had not confirmed his discovery, the author was confident of his detective work. I shook my head in confusion and read the date over and over again, convinced I was imagining things. I even went back to the early pages to confirm that Houghton was her mother's maiden name. Could we not only be related, but share a birthday as well? My heart started pounding heavily; I was the private eye tantalisingly close to the climax of the case. My eyes skipped ahead to grab snippets from further down the page, then darted back like frightened fish to try to absorb what was on the line in front of me.

Katharine Hepburn had many siblings, but her favourite and the one she was closest to had always been her older brother, Tom. Again the familiarity of the name struck me and it made my heart leap with excitement. Tom! Thomas Houghton Hepburn! This was
my
namesake, my relative – it just had to be, didn't it? A surname was possible to overlook, but my first name too? How else to explain the coincidence? It just wasn't possible that this connection to Katharine Hepburn was not my preordained, deserved destiny. I shared the same name as her brother, and the same birthday, damn it! I knew then that I would need to write to Ms Hepburn and she would write back, introducing me to her older brother with my same name. Why did this make me so special, though?

Over the past months, with all the schoolyard taunts, the pushes and shoves, I knew deep down that things were not going to miraculously get better on their own. I could ignore them for as long as I pleased, but it wasn't going to change the way they felt towards me. My only way out was if I could just show Harlen and them that I was better than stupid Seven Hills Tom Houghton, if I could impress upon them that I deserved better, that I had something special about me. They needed to see me not as someone to tease, but as someone whose differences had a reason, a purpose.
Oh that Tom,
they'd say,
he's a bit different but he's okay, that Tom. Did you know . . .
And the rest of the school would know it too. Why I was special. Why I should be celebrated not decimated.

But why would those boys give a damn that I shared something in common with some brother of an ancient celebrity? I knew it had to be something more than mere coincidence to make an impression on those stupid thugs. Something bigger was coming to me, otherwise why would I have felt so full of promise? The excitement I felt was indescribable. I was utterly convinced the answer would lie in those pages but I could not bear to face my destiny in that stinking room.

I heard the murmur of the patrons outside in the bar, I pictured my mother standing there in her black shirt, I heard her laughing gaily at some stupid joke and I knew she'd unbuttoned her blouse just so, enough to garner more tips. The men would have their biceps bulging as they rested hairy arms on the bar. Mum would be bringing one of them home, of that I was sure. Maybe it would be Steve again, or maybe a biker, like that other time. All the men would be ogling my mother and she could take her pick of them, take any single one of them she wanted. Lana was a flame.