The only place to be at times like these was in bed. I retreated from the rubbish and mayhem, room by room, until the bedroom that overlooked the backyard was the only vaguely habitable space. I climbed aboard the large, soft bed and hung on like it was a raft of some sort floating above the swell of bottles and butts and broken things.
And you can pretty much do everything you need to in bed: eat, sleep, dream, stare at the ceiling and jerk off to your heart’s content. The television sat on a milk crate at the foot of the bed and at my right hand was a chair on which was scattered an assortment of reading material and odds and ends. And, of course, in bed one can drink.
And drinking – and I mean real drinking – is pretty much a full-time occupation. It’s not only a glass of wine here and there, the odd long-neck after lunch. It’s true that drinkers are disorganised and irresponsible and unreliable, but that’s only concerning things other than drinking. A drinker might forget his daughter’s birthday or be incapable of managing laundry, but his mind is crystalline when it comes to locating booze. When he needs to call in a three-year-old debt of twenty dollars or remember the Monday night opening hours of a bottle shop on the far side of town.
When drinking, there is planning to be done, things to be considered, decisions to be made. Total destruction takes precision and concentration. It’s not as haphazard as it looks. You can’t buy takeaway alcohol easily at 4 am, for example, so one needs to be careful of running out at such an inconvenient time. Far better to run dry early in the morning – but not so early as to be caught empty-handed too long before business hours – so all that’s required is a short trip to the pub down the road for your morning cask of wine. Drinking is not a social event, it’s an interior monologue. God forbid you should ever have to sit with others to get it done. Doing it is only half the work. There’s thinking about doing it as well. It all takes time.
3
I can’t even remember why I went down to the shed in the first place. Probably looking for something to pawn or scrounging for empty bottles to sell. The only light was that of the late afternoon coming through the open door. Everything looked grey and furry. One wall bore the drawn shapes of garden tools, like the crime-scene outlines of murder victims. Grass was growing through the floor and vines curled between gaps in the walls. A light rain grizzled on the tin roof like an army of tiny feet. The shed smelled like all garden sheds, of dirt and oil and the bitter tang of fertiliser.
But there was something else. I was surprised to detect my own sharp smell, perhaps drawn out by the rain I’d staggered through to reach the shed. It was the machinery of my body, working vainly to expel the toxins I was pouring into it. I sniffed my armpits and yanked a handful of wet hair in front of my nose, but I was inured to myself. The smell was of something different, something muddy and fecund.
I stepped further into the gloom. An ancient handmower rested against a wheelbarrow; small packets of seeds were arranged on a wooden rack designed for the purpose. The desiccated remains of failed gardening enterprises. A battered paper kite hung in one corner.
I trailed some fingers across a dusty cardboard box of papers and books and reached out idly to caress a thick, squat roll of brown carpet standing on its end in the middle of the floor. To my surprise, it was not only wet but warm as well. It moaned and turned around heavily. I found myself staring into a pair of dark, apelike eyes, framed by dank hair.
By now the rain had stopped. There were just the sounds and smells of our breathing.
4
He sat in the kitchen, naked and wet. A grey puddle formed on the floor beneath his chair. The long hair covering his entire body was flat and black against his shiny, pink skin. He didn’t seem afraid, and made no sound apart from the occasional low groan, which may have been of distress or satisfaction, it was hard to tell.
He sat with his round shoulders hunched and hands clasped loosely upon his lean and hairy knees. Although his bearing changed very little, those large, sooty eyes circled ceaselessly and took in the entire room. It was difficult to know what he knew. He took no interest in the tin of baked beans open on the table in front of him, although his nostrils flared slightly when it was first set down. By now it was night. There was only the two of us. The back door and kitchen windows were all open wide to rid the house of his stench, one I could feel on my skin.
I was drinking from a bottle of sherry and eating chips from the local fish and chip shop, popping them into my mouth one by one. They were barely warm, like the small, narrow corpses of recently murdered things. I sat watching him on the opposite side of the table. Despite his hairy, unwieldy torso and barnyard eyes, he looked like a man. He breathed like a machine, deep and even.
5
He was still there two days later, but no drier. His wetness was apparently something that seeped from his pink skin. The puddle on the floor expanded and trickled away beneath the kitchen door. As far as I could tell, he had barely moved. I waved a hand in front of his eyes, held up a piece of toast to his dark lips. When I tried to scare him by clapping my hands or banging two old cooking pots together, he just angled his head away and screwed up his round face a little. His body made a sticky sound when he moved.
‘What are you, then?’ I asked. His unresponsiveness was getting to me. ‘What are you? Are you human? You stink like a fucking animal. You know that? You really stink.’
He sort of looked at me with his watery, brown eyes and let out a rumbling groan, not of anger or frustration, but something darker and far more terrible. The sound vibrated in the air. I lit a cigarette and watched him. Smoke filled the small space between us. I drank.
6
Sometime later, the following day or week, he was gone from the kitchen. I wondered if I had imagined the entire thing, but on the floor was a shallow puddle. Closer inspection revealed several clods of long, black hair. I looked through the grimy window into the garden. It was still raining. The shed door was still open. I imagined him snuffling around in there with his long, articulate fingers and liquid eyes. I would wait until the rain stopped and the place had dried out and then I would close the shed door and set fire to it, with him inside. I could wait. What else was I going to do?
It was only late morning and already I was in ruins. I checked my alcohol supplies and was relieved to discover an unopened cask of wine and half a bottle of port that I had forgotten buying. I made a quick calculation. If today was Friday, then tomorrow was Saturday, which meant I could still buy something locally until late if I needed to. Perfect.
I cut the mouldy corners from some bread to make toast and even managed to find some coffee on the laminated bench under the window. The wife must have bought it before she left. I was suddenly, inexplicably, in good spirits. I ate my breakfast, shaved off several weeks’ worth of thick beard and stood in the kitchen doorway to smoke a cigarette. Rainwater fell from the gutters and eaves like a trembling curtain. God knows why, but the world seemed full of possibility.
There comes a brief moment in every bender when you’re able to see things for what they are – not just what you construct in order to be able to keep drinking – and this was that moment. It is always frightening. I saw the tatty garden dotted with empty bottles and cans, the sink full of broken, mouldy dishes. I saw the stains on the walls and the wreckage of furniture, the cold skulking in the sharpest corners of the house. I held a hand in front of my face. It was like a foreign object, the nails ragged and worn, like something you’d use to dig in the dirt.
I flicked my cigarette butt into the garden and went back inside. Okay. It was time to clean the place up, to try to get things together again. I walked into the lounge room. It was dim and musty. I opened the curtains and window and there he was, sitting on the low couch with those hands, as always, clasped gently between his knees. He looked up at me with a look of something like embarrassment and it was like the first time, just the sounds of our breathing in t
hat small, enclosed space. We looked at each other. ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. ‘What are you doing?’
He didn’t answer, of course. Made no sign he’d even understood. And then slowly, very deliberately, I picked up the telephone. I was going to call the police, call someone, the local loony bin or something and get them to come and take this thing away, this thing that had taken up residence in my house. In my house. He watched me with those begging eyes as I did it, as I raised the plastic receiver to my ear. And I watched him watching me, so he knew exactly what was happening, but when I put the receiver to my ear, there was no tone, no sound of any sort, only the humming silence of an unpaid bill.
The moment, it seemed, had passed.
7
I woke up at some point in the day and waited. The bed smelled grey. Even from behind closed eyes, I could sense something was different but I was reluctant to find out what it could be. Whatever it was could wait. Things had moved beyond the point where I could reasonably expect them to improve. I could hear birds outside and the sighing of wind through trees.
When I opened my eyes, it was no surprise, really. His dark eyes staring down at me. His body was still wet, and dripped slightly, although the terrible smell was gone. Either that, or I had become accustomed to it. We stared at each other for a long time, me lying on my back under a thin doona, while he stood slack-shouldered at the end of the bed. I’m sure we could have stayed like that forever, trading blinks, waiting for something to happen.
After some time I pushed the doona aside and swung around to put my feet on the cold, rough carpet. He stayed utterly still while I moved around the room and pulled on some clothes, although I knew that in the time I took to stagger down the hall and through the front door onto the street, he had lumbered into my bed and eased himself beneath my covers.
Theories of Relativity
I’m eleven years old. Our father fills the bath with cold water, orders me to dump a tray of ice cubes into it and tells my older brother Anthony to strip off his clothes. Our father is tall, angular and taciturn, a man accustomed to being obeyed by his family, if no one else. His crucial error is to mistake our disdain for respect. He has a stopwatch in one hand. ‘We’ll see what you’re made of,’ he sniffs.
I stand in the dim hallway looking up at him, listening intently to his instructions; I know they will be issued once only and I risk a clip over the ear if I ask him to repeat them. Our little sister Janet lingers in a doorway with a strand of hair in her mouth, staring, like always. She’s nine. Our mother is out somewhere. My brother’s face is grim but stoic as he realises what is about to happen. It is midwinter. Rain is drumming on the roof. It dawns on me that I will remember this afternoon for the rest of my life.
Our father is adamant that Anthony and I be toughened up and has devised a variety of techniques to ensure we will never be in the slightest bit girly. When we play soccer in the backyard, for instance, he never allows us to win because that doesn’t happen in the real world. He refuses to help us up if we fall down (‘Self-inflicted. No crying. Stand up little man’). Years earlier – and this is embarrassing – I faltered one cold night in my toilet training and our father took me outside, yanked off my pyjamas and hosed me down as a method of instruction.
Our father doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and thinks those who do are damn fools. He has no time for sentimentality and the few jokes he utters are usually at someone else’s expense. The world is a harsh place and it’s his job to equip his sons the best way he knows how. After all, it was good enough for him; we could do a lot worse than turn out like he did. Little does he know exactly what this will entail.
The bath test and the toilet training and so on happen before the accident, of course. Afterwards, he wouldn’t have dared.
It seemed everyone changed in the months after our father’s accident, or that the entire family was reorganised in a way that was never clear to me. I felt I had lived through a revolution, say, or a natural disaster, whereby everything had become different, but in ways too seismic to pinpoint. Our mother took up smoking, for a start, and became dry-witted and elegant. She began to say things like: Oh, that’s marvellous or Sweetie, please don’t do that, I have a headache, while sitting on the couch in the afternoon, flicking through a glossy magazine. Indeed, it seemed our mother had barely existed until the moment of our father’s accident. Even her name, Kate, which had seemed rather pedestrian before, assumed a more cinematic quality. She started wearing lipstick around the house and having afternoon ‘kips’, a concept she had picked up from an American magazine. At first – in addition to everything else that had happened – it was somewhat disconcerting, but Anthony and I both came to like this new persona. She became the type of parent the other kids probably talked about at home with their own, more mundane families; ours was a low-grade, schoolyard celebrity, like the Cambodian kid at school whose brother had been shot by communists.
People admired our mother when she came to pick Anthony and me up from school. She had fallen pregnant with my brother when she was seventeen and so was only thirty-one years old at that time, even though our father was ten years older. She was still attractive and the other fathers paid her quite a bit of attention. I didn’t mind, but Anthony became furious if she flirted too long with Mr Jacobs and he would refuse to speak to her after we returned home. When this happened, our mother would expend considerable effort coaxing him from the cave of his mood, fetching treats from the pantry and swearing to behave herself in future. Come on, darling. There! Have an Iced VoVo.
Anthony changed as well. He emerged from the night of the accident into another, more restless person. He was fourteen, so he was hardly old, but now he declined to accompany me around the neighbourhood to see whose fruit trees we might climb. No more hide and seek. He even took to calling our mother Kate, rather than Mother or Mum, a practice she did nothing to discourage, even though our father disapproved.
Anthony was taller than me, more athletic, much better looking, and possessed a roguish charm that attracted the type of girl willing to do things nice girls were not. He played guitar. He had been born missing the tip of the little finger on his left hand, a disfigurement that only heightened his appeal rather than diminished it, as it might have done in other boys. My brother also had a competitive streak that prohibited him from gaining any real pleasure from his success with girls or sport. He could be cruel, as I knew only too well: he forgot people’s names on purpose; he mimicked them mercilessly behind their backs; he told vicious jokes about neighbours and classmates; he had long called me Mr Einstein, on account of my interest in the great physicist’s theories of time and space.
We still shared a room and I would lie awake and stare at his sleeping profile, hoping to detect a clue to his sudden alteration. After all, it wasn’t like the accident had befallen him. Sometimes he prowled through the house at night and occasionally even slept elsewhere, on the couch in the living room or on the daybed in our father’s study. On the single instance I crept after him, he turned in the hallway, pressed a hand to my chest and shook his head in such a way that dissuaded me from following him ever again. ‘Back off, Mr Einstein,’ he hissed.
Our father was a captain in the army. Before the accident, he liked to talk authoritatively at barbecues about immigration policy and ‘covert actions’ in South-East Asia as if he were privy to secret information, but he merely shuffled bits of paper from one office to the next and overheard rumours in the canteen along with everyone else who worked in his building. He had joined the army with the boyish hope of being sent overseas to some exotic war zone to battle terrorists or communists but had never been closer to genuine military action than manoeuvres in Darwin one year (the highlight of his entire life), and he certainly wouldn’t be deployed now, considering his age – not to mention the injury.
His own father, our grandfather, had been in the army and had been bitter about being sent away to shoot peo
ple in Vietnam; our father was bitter that he never had the opportunity to shoot at anyone. He was merely a public servant with a fancy uniform. If asked about his foot injury, he mumbled something about a ‘hunting mishap’, which was true, I suppose. Naturally, the accident changed our father most of all.
The morning of the accident was wet and frosty. I heard our father moving about in the bathroom next door. Anthony slept in his bed on the other side of our room, blissfully unaware until our father burst in and roused each of us with a slap to the side of our heads. ‘Come on, lads,’ he said. ‘We move out in ten minutes.’
The car interior was almost as cold as it was outside. Our father didn’t believe in excessive comfort. Besides, we were rugged up. We were going hunting; there was no point getting too cosy. In the back seat, I breathed on the glass and drew a face in the damp, silvery fog. The rising sun flickered behind trees.
Our father had been promising to take us hunting for some time but my excitement at the prospect of shooting a real rifle was tempered with guilt. Our mother thought we were too young for such an expedition and she didn’t approve of shooting animals for sport – objections our father overruled.
‘My old man used to take me out here when I was about your age,’ our father was saying to Anthony, who sat beside him in the front seat.
Our father didn’t usually speak unless necessary, and then in a clipped manner that suggested he was keen to be done with it as soon as he had made his point. But now I recognised in his voice the tone he reserved for speeches on The State Of The Economy, The Difference Between Men And Women or How To Tell The ABC Has Been Overrun By Lefties.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 18
