The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  In the matrimonial property file her father had brought all the way to Venice there would be the note he’d written to her, the one that ended, That’s my final bob’s worth, darling. Except that it wasn’t. Underneath in his own handwriting he’d scrawled: This isn’t advice I would give to any other client, Clarebelle, but here it is: on balance, and with apologies to John and Paul, Let it Go.

  Was that what they called dry humour in legal circles or just wet? He could at least have got the name of the song right. What had happened to the hard-arse from 4 October 1976?

  Tomaso was crying after the game. The opposition loosehead was boring in and he did nothing. He’s only 19, still got his baby fat and plenty of it. I told the ref who did nothing, then warned their loosehead, who gave me the old Non me ne frega un cazzo bullshit. So I told our second rower Domenico if he did it again, whack him. Next scrum the guy bores in again and Big Dom hooks him through the second row with one that comes all the way from Tokarahi. So obvious, even that blind bastard of a ref saw it. Domenico got sent off. We lost again. After the game, Tomaso was in tears because he thought he’d cost us the game and that was true, though I’d never tell him that, he’s just a kid. But I got the guys around me and told them a bit about rugby etiquette. If you pull my jersey or obstruct me or step over the fine line, you get whacked. That’s the way it goes. It’s not personal. If you let someone obstruct you and do nothing, you may as well wqlk off the field because you’ve been intimidated and you’re no good to anyone. But you choose your moment. I looked at Domenico, sitting naked on the bench, his huge shaggy head and beard. Not in front of the fucking ref, Domenico! E allora quando? When then? he asked. Fuck what was I going to say?

  Rumour has it that Domenico is a comunista di base, one of the extreme left. The Red Brigade is whispered, but if he is, no-one here would know, except maybe Franco. Everyone seems to be a socialist of some persuasion, but it’s almost like this year’s fashion for most of them, the political version of the winkle picker shoes, tight stove-pipe jeans and V necked jerseys they all wear. Not Domenico. He wears workman’s jeans, steel capped boots and sleeves rolled up over huge fucking forearms. Some of the guys are scared of him, they tell me he’s been to gaol, they didn’t say what for. Domenico seems to know their fears, sometimes shouts out Bomba! just for the hell of it, then pisses himself as he watches them cringe. Bomba!

  I’m telling this guy how to take care of himself on a rugby field? I’d started it, so I had to finish, otherwise I’ve made a brutta figura of myself and the respect is gone. The scrum breaks up, I told him. The ball goes left or right, that’s where the ref is looking, that’s where everyone is looking. Ah, says Domenico, with a big grin breaking through his beard. Si, Dio can’, he roars, Yes, God is a dog! Capito!

  Christ, what have I done.

  This man was telling her not to fight?

  If you let someone obstruct you and do nothing, you may as well wqlk off the field because you’ve been intimidated and you’re no good to anyone.

  That’s the kind of advice she wanted to hear. She wanted to somehow, some way, stick it right up Nicholas. How could she let it all go when he’d shamed her so badly she didn’t want to walk down the street in her own town?

  And yet. If she had the baby forgiveness would be essential. She’d done the matrimonial files for her father when she’d graduated and seen enough custody and access battles not to wish that on any child. If she didn’t have the baby, Nicholas would know nothing and she’d be able to move on, as per her father’s advice. Which had been given with no knowledge of the fact that she was pregnant, but made letting it all go even more important . . . Didn’t it?

  What if the baby was a boy and looked so like Nicholas that she couldn’t bring herself to love him? Could such a thing happen? What if she loved the baby but he wanted custody? What if it was a girl?

  She wished she and her father had both talked about their secrets in Venice. The fact that he didn’t know about the baby, and now never would, made it less likely she’d have it. And if she wasn’t going to have it, she could see a way of punishing Nicholas. Her response to Sheila McLintock QC could be very simple: I’m pregnant. Nicholas would probably get very excited about that. He was the sort of man who might fight tooth and nail to pay no maintenance for his child, but whose ego and vanity would delight in the prospect of a little Pedro. Two weeks later, she could send another e-mail: I’m no longer pregnant.

  Could she be that cruel? Could she do that and still ask her father to forgive her, if she got the chance?

  She had to calm herself and start again. There seemed to be no change in her father. If he came to, she was going to get him into one of those wheelchairs down in the hideous yellow reception and push him through emergency arrivals to that little knoll of grass and trees across the driveway. When she’d arrived yesterday afternoon there’d been a guy out there in slippers and dressing gown pushing his drip along on wheels, dragging on a fag. Not a good look but a human look. As soon as her father came out of the coma she would do it. And say what she needed to say, how much she loved him but not how terrified she was of a future without him. While she was saying what she needed to say he could have a last look at trees and grass.

  She put her cheek close to his to feel those butterfly wings of breath. ‘Please come back, Dad,’ she whispered to him. ‘If only for a moment or two. Please.’

  44

  October 11, 1976.

  A draw at Brescia. Feels like a win. Maybe this is the turning point.

  One weird thing. I could never understand the strange words my father would yell at his dogs between whistles. Ndemo via! Dai figa! Avanti fioi! Fermati stronzo! Va in mona de to mare! Now I hear his words during the game, the players exhorting or cursing one another. He’d trained his dogs in Venetian dialect, no wonder no-one else could work them.

  October 25, 1976.

  On a roll, beat Roma at home in the mud and Padova away. Feels like a different team — problem now is keeping them from thinking they’ll win without working for it.

  November 8, 1976.

  A narrow loss away at Torino. Our prep wasn’t great. On the way here, our bus was overtaken on the autostrada between Padova and Verona by a police Alfa with siren and ordered to pull in to one of those autogrill places. There were armed Carabinieri with Uzis waiting for us. The officer walked up the aisle of the bus and pulled out Big Dom and then Franco. Both went quietly enough, though you could hear Dom’s Dio can’s outside the bus. I was stunned that no-one said anything. If this happened at home, the team would be challenging the cops, giving them heaps probably. I guess the difference is the Uzis. So we sat there until Dom came back. We clamoured to know what the Carabinieri asked him? Where I was last night, said Dom. No-one else said anything so dumbo here asked the obvious. What happened last night? The Brigate Rosse had another funding drive, said Dom. Hit a bank in Padova killing two security guards. Bomba!

  We waited another five minutes for Franco but the Carabinieri put him in one of the Alfas and took him away. He turned up later that night at the hotel. When I asked them what they had wanted from him, he just smiled and said, News from the real world, caro.

  I’m the naive straniero so I asked him whether there were any connections between Lotta Continua and the Red Brigade. He took his time replying, his eyes carefully checking who was around out on the garden terrace. Well I guess that’s what he was doing. He said Lotta Continua and the Brigate Rosse were both elements of the radical left, so yes, it stands to reason that there might be some connections. I must have looked a bit shocked. Every second day, I said, there are headlines about the Red Brigade maniacs blowing something up, killing innocent people. Franco didn’t respond for a bit, probably wondered whether it was worth wasting words on me. Then told me that in the last war the resistance had fought the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists. They blew up railway lines, electricity pylons, factories, they
tried to disrupt by whatever means they could the organs of the corrupt fascist state. He said his father had been one of these partigiani, and they are now regarded as heroes of La Patria.

  You listen to Franco and it all seems so logical. Lo Stato is so corrupt that the populace has no faith that it can do anything to improve their lot. So they don’t pay taxes and they look to other groups in society to help them and protect them. This is why the mafia flourish. And this cycle of cynicism feeds on itself to the point where right-thinking citizens must take up arms against the corrupt organs of the state to stop the cycle.

  Later, in the hotel room, I realise I’ve just heard a manifesto of violent revolution. At the time, sitting there listening to Franco, it sounded more like a blessing from St Francis of Assisi.

  His sister Cinzia challenges him all the time, tells him the real world is too complicated for him, he has to reduce it to silly self-serving slogans. The only bit of that which seemed to bother Franco was the last. In what way self-serving?

  You’re as vain as any fascisti, she chides him. Try a different coloured bandana at least. What colour would you have me wear? Cerise, she says. And away they go. It sounds as if they’re about to come to blows, but they never do and it all just blows away, like the rain storm you think will never end.

  Clare tried not to be impatient. She stood up and stretched. She was tempted to race forward through the pages, skim the on-field battles of San Pietro. She wanted to see whether her father’s heart had been burnt by La Testa Calda, but she owed it to him to try to understand the full picture, even though his diary was so fragmented that it was like joining the dots. There’d be nothing for a week or ten days, then a big cluster of days together:

  November 30, 1976.

  I’ve learnt that everything here is political, but it’s not often as overt as this.

  After practice tonight, the boys had their hqir dryers out — I’ve never seen so many hair dryers in a changing room — for soft-voiced girls waiting outside in the dark, bums pressed against the warm stone where it abuts the hot water cylinder. I’d finished the practice by talking to them about the next game, the Calabrians on Sunday, tried to keep them grounded, to concentrate on the little things each of them had to get right to make a team performance. I’ve kept my speeches shorter after my gaffes with dialect. I thought they were calling each other fiori — flowers — which seemed strange, but I thought when in Venice. So in my team-talks and on the field I’d be saying Come on flowers, climb into them! Finally, Aldo took me aside last week in the bar and said he didn’t know about the custom in NZ, but here in the Veneto, men didn’t call each other flowers. Turns out they were saying fioi, which is dialect for guys. There’ve been other fuck-ups which the language course in Perugia couldn’t have prepared me for. The dialect for lui, him, sounds like you. So they’re talking about you you you, which I think is me me me and it turns out to be about him him him.

  Anyway, after the showers, I’m dressed and ready to head for Aldo’s, when Domenico comes over, still towelling his balls and says he needs to speak to me. Now. So we go back into the steamy shower stall and stand on the boards. Big Dom’s a fearful sight at the best of times but naked he looks like the closest thing I’ve seen to Cro-Magnon man, huge forehead and covered from head to foot with brown fur. He tells me he wants to jump at number 7 in the lineout on Sunday, not at number two, where he usually jumps. Why? I ask. Because we play the Calabrians, he says. I tell him he jumps at 2 because he can explode into the air quickly and has great timing. That’s sort of true but it’s also because he can’t actually get off the ground. At 2, it’s more of an all-in wrestle and Big Dom excels. At 7, we need someone who can actually jump. Si, si, dio can’, he says, when I give him my censored explanation, but these are Calabrians. When I ask him what difference that makes, he says that Calabrians are strange people, terroni, poor but fascist, the quintessence of stupidity.

  I still don’t really understand where this is going and I’m worried that if Dom gets excited, the acoustics of the shower will broadcast whatever he’s going to tell me right through the dressing shed. What difference does jumping at 7 make? I ask. He tells me that the Calabrian captain jumps at 7 and he must oppose him. Why? Because otherwise I might not get to see him face to face — he plays loose forward, I am buried in the tight. Why should that matter? Big Dom has infinite patience. Because, he says, the captain of the Calabrians is a known fascist and I want to break his arms, his legs, his neck, his head, I want to break his balls so that he has to carry them back to Calabria in his pocket.

  My other home is Aldo’s bar. I eat there most nights, courtesy of the club. Good country food. You ask for a bistecca and that’s what you get, a piece of steak on a plate. The insalata is always separate. They eat everything, small birds and what we’d regard as weeds. Aldo’s a strong voice on the dirigenti, the committee that runs the club and if I need anything, I ask Aldo. He’s like the kind uncle I never had. His wife Beatrice is lovely, and the two boys are always in the bar too, with other kids. That’s so different to home. The guys from the team drift in and out, either for a birra fresca or an aperitivo or to sit and eat with me. Tonight I told Aldo I needed to talk to him alone.

  In the backroom, I told him what Domenico told me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. If it was anyone else but Big Dom, you’d take it as a bit of bravado. But Aldo pursed his lips, shook his head in sorrow and said we had to drop Dom from Sunday’s game. He said that if Domenico felt that way about the Calabrian captain, the man’s life was in danger. Fuck a duck.

  December 1, 1976.

  Franco was away in Bologna today, so Cinzia was helping Beppino at the market. Cinzia invited me to come with her to some do tomorrow night — I didn’t understand exactly what it was, because before that she said her fidanzato couldn’t come, that’s why she wanted me to accompany her. After the word fidanzato, I didn’t hear anything else. She’s engaged. She’s got a diamond cluster on one finger. I never saw it because I don’t look for those things. I’ve got no right to be thrown — I don’t even know her.

  December 3, 1976.

  Last night, as instructed, I waited for Cinzia in Campo Santo Stefano. The sky had started dripping and the passeggiata hour was at an end, canopies being rolled up, chairs being stacked and chained, the god-awful roar and bang of the shop shutters coming down. Then the kind of silence you don’t get anywhere else. Creepy — you know they’re in there somewhere, but the shutters are closed, you might see a sliver of light. I read somewhere this is the real Venice, a place of conspiracy and brutal intrigue, where in the old days you didn’t want to be wandering the dark alleys at night.

  She turns up with Max, her fidanzato. I think he’d come to check me out. He’s a big guy, kinda pudgy but dressed immaculately, tweed and brogues and cashmere scarf, looked every inch of what Beppino had told me he was: the son of an aristocratic Venetian family who had provided more than one Doge. I was in my best jeans and Max must have been reassured by what he saw: scruffy no-account. He was amiable enough and soon sloped off.

  Cinzia took me under the arm and steered me towards San Marco then off to the left. She’s doing straight-legged toe-hops down the steps of the bridges because her jeans are so tight she can’t bend them at the knees.

  We pass through a little square with a statue of a horse and rider. Cinzia tells me who the sculptor was and says it’s famous because it’s the first sculpture where the horse is moving, and because it’s being ridden by a general with ‘tre coglioni’, three balls. He looks comfortable enough, considering.

  I could have read that stuff in a tourist brochure, if I’d bothered. Venice is more or less what they say it is, canals, palazzi, gondolas, etc. which I’ve kinda walked past going oh yeah, that one, tick. I’ve tended to go straight to the market below Rialto, then go to a local bacaro in Santa Croce with Beppino and Franco when the market’s finished. Could be a bar anywhere in ol
d Italy, then I head back to Piazzale Roma, hop into the Opel and charge back across the causeway and up the plains to San Pietro. Last night was a glimpse of a Venice I could never have seen without Cinzia, and it was pretty strange.

  She took me to a hall with old columns in front but plate glass behind, which opened up to an air-conditioned foyer of marble and carpet where mainly older people were removing expensive shawls and overcoats helped by uniformed attendants. Cinzia introduced me to a bald bright-eyed guy called Saul, a Fulbright scholar from New York. The guest speaker, says Cinzia. Not much I could say about that, because I had no idea what he was to speak about. Didn’t matter, Saul talked non-stop and it wasn’t to me. He was so intense with his New York spiel, weaving a web of words around us, there was no way in, nothing to say. When he was called away by a little guy with a white moustache, Cinzia introduced me to a tall thin blonde, Lady Phenella and her husband, Hartley, who Cinzia maids for, and who had invited her. They were polite and understandably completely uninterested in talking to me — I got the impression they‘d been expecting Max — and made for their seats as soon as they could. As they went, Cinzia told me she was a ‘Bloomsbury bambina’ and he was ‘old Boston’. She had a pithy little description of almost everyone, as we watched the different groups filing through the double doors into the auditorium. That was the British Ambassador, and the two behind him were ‘Texan grandees’ whatever the hell that means, and the big old lady in the kaftan with a walking stick on one hip and a toy boy on the other was Peggy Guggenheim, followed by ‘bits and pieces’ of exiled royalty from Greece and the Balkans, fragile old ladies and arthritic men who were princesses or crown princes according to Cinzia, living in Venice she said because it was as old and irrelevant as they were. That last bit surprised me.