I stand up and walk to the cupboard where we keep the scotch. I’ve been drinking more of it lately. It’s a drink he loved too. I used to sit with him most afternoons after getting back from school. We’d converted the sunroom into a kind of hospital. With his favourite chair, a couch, his medicines. He’d always have his scotch beside him. At first, he didn’t talk. He wanted me there, but he didn’t say much other than to ask if I could get him a cushion, prop his head up, pour him more drink. It was like spending time with a ghost. He’d gaze out the window at the garden, his eyes gone watery. Sometimes he’d stand up and just gaze into space. I caught him holding a pen once, his eyes on a sheet of paper like a man with a lot of work to do. I didn’t know it then, but soon I’d find out that this was true. Only he was dying. So the person whose task it was to do the work, was me. Her name was Angie Brown. One afternoon, two months into his illness, when Mum and my sisters were out of the house, he told me that he loved her. That he’d never loved another woman, the way he loved Angie. He cried. He begged me to forgive him, not so much for his adultery, but what he was going to ask me to do.
I tell Jill all this. Her face is changing, partly from the drink, maybe wholly from it, but I’m not so sure. She’s pale. It’s been a while since she’s been pale like this.
‘Your father,’ she says, slowly, as if testing the words themselves, ‘was having an affair?’
‘He never put it that way. He said he loved mum, and always would, but Angie, he said, was a lightning bolt. Made him see the world anew.’
‘Sheesh,’ she says, going quiet for a moment. I can hear the trees outside, creaking in the wind. ‘What,’ she says at last, ‘was this ‘work’ he had you doing?’
‘He wrote to her,’ I say, flatly. ‘I delivered letters and brought hers back.’
She looks at me.
‘He was dying,’ I say.
‘Did you tell your sisters?’
‘He swore me not to. I kept the secret. For years.’
My wife puts her finger to her glass, to the rim there, and lightly runs it in a circle. Her mouth’s a straight line and her eyes are slits, no longer drooped but focused. I guess she’s trying to understand. Not so much about my father, but why in twelve years of knowing me, I’ve never mentioned this. She knows he died from cancer, that I was young, that it was hard on all of us, but beyond this I’ve not divulged a thing. After he died, while my sisters mourned and my mum sat still for months on the lounge, I asked myself, why. I was too young then to think about their marriage, middle age, the raw, renewing powers of desire. I considered only my father. He’d been good to us. He drank a lot, but he wasn’t violent, was rarely angry. The only thing that came to mind, negative-wise, was the way I’d seen him look at women. The waitresses, I remembered. He’d been a flirt. Or if not a flirt, a man still searching for something else.
‘What about your mum?’Jill asks.
I finish my glass of scotch and pour myself another one, sitting back down. I glance at the phone, then across to my wife. She’s peering at her drink. My mum never talked about it. Not while he was sick and not afterwards. I was pretty sure she knew, though. One day I went to Angie’s to drop off a letter. On my way down the drive Mum’s car went by. She didn’t stop. I don’t know if she saw me. Dad had convinced me how important this was – one day he knew I’d understand – but seeing Mum’s car brought me undone. The reality of it. The betrayal. I want to tell Jill more. How I punished myself for years about it. How I didn’t cry because I hated him for what he’d made me do. How I never thought I’d get it, in all the years I’d live.
But instead I take another sip of drink and sit there, quiet. She doesn’t speak. I guess she’s thinking pretty hard, by the way her brow is bunched, full of creases, and her eyes are fixed down on her glass. I love her. But lately something’s changed inside. I don’t know what to do about it.
Oh God.
I hate myself.
‘You going to pick that up?’ she asks, nodding at the phone.
‘Hello?’ I say. ‘No one,’ I tell her. ‘Wrong number, maybe.’
I return it to the wall-hook. My hand’s shaking. I can feel my heart racing in my throat.
‘Just going to the loo,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back,’ I say.
I walk up the stairs and into the bathroom. I use the toilet. I avoid the mirror. I stand before the sink and run the taps and tell myself I’m doomed. I feel my heart, my hand on my chest. I hate my heart. I sit down on the edge of the tub, looking at my feet. I’m going bald. I run my hand through my hair and feel how thin it is. How close it all is to ending, every minute. I think of her, downstairs in the kitchen, and the thought of her is soon replaced by the other her, whose face I can’t picture, a sign, I know, of how intensely I am feeling. I wish I had more drink in me. I think this, walking back downstairs, towards the kitchen. When I get there, though, ready for another glass, my wife’s gone. The door’s open. I can see out to the street, black and empty and the wind blowing. ‘Honey,’ I say, and cringe at my choice of word. I don’t know where she’s gone. Then I notice it. Over by the fruit bowl beneath the calendar marked with crosses, all our shared events, forthcoming, bygone, the phone’s lying off its cradle at an angle to the wall. She must’ve picked it up while I was upstairs in the loo. She, the other her, must’ve called again. Something about the way that phone looks, discarded, turned away in shame, reminds me of a dead animal.
‘Jill!’ I yell, but she’s well and truly gone.
I’m Funny Too, Okay?
My brother’s first stand-up gig was a hit. Big time. This surprised me. As far I’d always known, Elliott lacked comic timing (not to mention comic substance, comic presence and comic insight). I’m not saying I’m an outrageously funny person. I work in life insurance, sales side, and let my wife buy all my clothes. I’m not what you’d call ‘daring’ or ‘brazen’. But I’ve always believed myself to be livelier (and funnier) than Elliott.
We’re eighteen months apart in age – I’m older – and have no other siblings. Our parents were loving, caring, hospitable types, always driving us to sport and school. But they were terrible bores. I never knew them to do anything more exciting than visit a cinema once every six months. My father didn’t own a car. My mother drove an old, white Ford. Their bedroom was a bed and a chest of drawers and a mirror. My father wore the same grey socks and slacks to his job at Australia Post for thirty years. He had five pairs of each. If they found anything about the world amusing, they never gave it vent through laughter. They smiled sweetly at their two sons, and at each other, but they were short in stature, softly spoken, and remote from anything one might connect with wit or bravado.
The reason I mention my parents is that Elliott was their carbon copy. We would sit around the dinner table and I would watch the three of them slowly fill their plates with neat little portions of mash, peas, carrot, meat, then slowly, with delicately hunched shoulders, eat their food, all the while clenching my fists beneath the table. They were painfully polite. Conversation was thin to the point of silence. My father, from time to time, would mention the next day’s weather. Beyond that, he said nothing. I often wondered, had it not been for these three people, whether my life might have become more interesting than it had. It was still more interesting than their lives were (Elliott had followed Dad to Australia Post and still lived at home; Mum had worked at the same Deli for thirty years) but I’d sensed in myself a larger spirit which, over time, had been dulled away. I tried in the beginning. I cracked jokes. Passed comment about sport. Anything to wrench them from their silence. But always they replied with those simple smiles. In the end I learned to be quiet. I ate my dinner, I washed my plate, and I got the hell upstairs to my room where I would listen to music or read while Elliott, out of what I guessed was mindless docility, stayed downstairs with Mum and Dad, watching bland TV shows and every now and then passing comment about the plot.
I was at work when Elliott called me, quite out of nowhere, t
o let me know about his first gig. I had on my desk a foot-high tower of new policies and product disclosure statements to read. It was Friday afternoon, late, and if I didn’t break the back of things soon I’d be in on the weekend. I hadn’t spoken more than a few words to Elliott in several years. After my wedding, I lost touch with him but even before that we’d only seen each other at Christmas or at an uncle’s funeral. He’d left me messages, and sent me texts, even emails, but I’d been busy. I had kids, a wife, a big job, et cetera. Besides, he had an awkward phone manner, as if he’d never learned what part of the machine to speak into and, instead, stood on the other end, turning it over in his hands. This disinclined one to calling him back.
‘Gil,’ he said, with a falling inflection, as if about to say something further. Instead there was silence.
‘Elliott?’ I replied, annoyed at myself for answering. ‘Long time no speak. How are you?’
‘Gil,’ he said again, his voice faint, like he was holding the mouthpiece away from his face. ‘I want to
invite you to something.’
I assumed it was his birthday (I recalled the date, vaguely) and readied myself for a stock excuse. Kids are sick. Some excuse like that.
‘Gil,’ he said, for the third time. ‘I don’t know if Mum or Dad have mentioned anything to you but I’m doing a bit of comedy these days, or trying to. I have a gig in Glebe next Wednesday night, in fact. My first one before a live audience. Would love you to come.’
I was certain I’d heard wrong. I made an enquiry in that direction. Apparently I’d heard right. I took counsel with myself for a moment. Elliott? Comedy? Then I grew bored and began to read the PDS sitting on my desk.
‘But you’re a postal bureaucrat,’ I said, flicking through the pages. ‘You do logistics and postal stuff. Comedy’s a world away, isn’t it?’
He laughed his soft, simple laugh. ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said and I stopped reading.
‘Gil?’ he said. But I was quiet for a moment. I thought about what might’ve happened to him to prompt this call. Had he lost money and needed help? Was he ill? He’d never been much into money, nor cared about material things, so I supposed he must’ve been sick. But I didn’t really suppose that. He sounded well. And excited, even through his difficult-to-hear phone manner. I’d always had him down as an easy going coaster, resigned to a simple life. I’d gone off to uni after school (business with a finance major). He’d gone to work with Dad. I’d tried to convince him he was making a mistake. Look at Dad’s life, I’d said. Those same pants! Day in, day out. He’d looked at me with his quiet eyes and did what he’d always done when I’d tried to get real: smiled.
Now, on the phone, I asked him if he was calling for something else. I made myself big enough to tell him he could ask for help straight up if he wanted. Again he chuckled, though with a sharpness this time that made me stop breathing for a second.
‘The gig starts at eight,’ he said, and then he hung up.
The next few nights I sat quietly at the dinner table. Anne, my wife, thought it great. Comedy, she said, what a crack!
‘Do you even know Elliott?’ I said.
But she just keep repeating that word, crack. I returned to my silence. Although it could’ve been mistaken for brooding – Anne told me to stop being a sulk, for example – it was, in fact, confusion. Bafflement, even. My little brother, the postal gimp, up on stage before a crowd.
The night before his first gig, I lay in bed working as Anne snored beside me. The company had just issued a new product, which allowed people to halve their insurance premiums by bundling other products together from other insurers. The new thing in the industry. We were right at the cutting edge. I leafed through the documents that set out the terms and conditions, and the numbers, and the various price-points, and felt full with my career. The niggling of Elliott remained, but distant, like a mosquito on the far side of a room, nowhere near your ear.
Anne agreed to stay home with our two-year old, Ellie, and Bob the Terror (or so I called our four year old son), the night of Elliott’s first gig. She stopped me at the front door to brush the dandruff from my shoulders. She rested her hands on them. ‘Remember, Gil,’ she said, gazing into my eyes. ‘He’s your brother.’
‘And?’
‘Try to be understanding.’
My parents, stooped and leaned against each other like a couple of broomsticks, were waiting out the front for me. The venue, from the street at least, looked like it had been bombed and the planks of wood and cracked bricks had been piled back up by a group of blind men. It might not have been that bad, but it was a comedy night, so I was getting hyperbolic. My parents just looked at me when I told them this.
‘Forget it,’ I said, and I took them inside to the box office (which was the bar).
‘Listen,’ I said to Mum, as we stood in line. ‘Is Elliott sure about this?’
‘What’s that?’ said Mum – her hearing was buggered.
I looked at Dad, who appeared to have heard me. I said to him, ‘Is he sure, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry about Elliott,’ he said, rocking on his toes and raising his chin, all proud. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’
We sat in the third row. The place had been set up for gigs and, although tonight would be novice-central, it looked and felt like the real deal. The stage up front had a velvet curtain, lit by a yellow spotlight. On the floor: a dozen rows of velvet chairs. At the back of the room: the bar. What was more, the place pretty much filled up.
A bloke appeared onstage and told a couple of jokes, then said we were in for a treat or a nightmare, he couldn’t say, ‘cos he’d not heard the acts before. This drew a healthy round of applause. I didn’t pay the first acts attention; instead I flicked through my work emails as they stood on stage. When Elliott came on, I pocketed my phone and watched fixedly, a cold, slippery feeling in my gut, which I decided to call shame.
‘Hello ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Good to see you. Thanks for coming.’
He wore what I guessed he usually did when not at work. A pair of old jeans and a flannelette shirt. His hair was neat. He’d shaved.
‘So just a quick survey, are there any single people in the audience? No? Yes? Right. A few. Don’t worry I’m not here to harass single audience members.’
Jesus, I thought.
‘As a single man myself, I feel your pain. A single, 33 year old man, I should say.’
Christ, Elliott.
‘People tell me, Elliott, you know what your problem is? You don’t make eye contact with women in the street. Eye contact, Elliott, will you get you laid. So I started making eye contact. Only thing is, when I make eye contact, I do this,’ and he suddenly did something crazy with his eyes, opened them up all wide so the whites showed and trembled in the sockets. I’d never seen eyes like it. Everyone laughed. You couldn’t not. His mouth went funny too. Puckered tight as a peach pip, wrinkled, downturned. The picture of angst.
‘Hey lady,’ he said. ‘How about it?’
Laughter rippled through the room.
‘You know what I reckon?’ he said, as the crowd caught its breath, ‘people are too uptight these days.’
He tensed his body, stood with his arms straight as planks. His face turned red.
‘There’s just too much stress in the world.’
And purple.
‘People need to…’ He clenched the tendons in his neck so hard, fifty of them showed, ‘just chill out.’
By now the crowd was convulsed in mirth. Some people raised their fists. Others pressed their eyes with their fingers and grinned like fools.
‘I went to a psychologist,’ he said, a little later. ‘She thinks I’m not ready for love. Which is confusing, ‘cos my psychiatrist and counsellor say I am.’
Beside me, my parents were sitting quietly, smiling that tight little smile I knew so well (and hated so much). I looked at them closely. Their mouths were open. Even though I couldn’t hear more than a light wheeze, it was
clear they were laughing.
The gig went on for another few minutes. It occurred to me that Elliott’s persona was at odds with himself in a spooky way, as though he’d been possessed by a spirit. He moved about up there, left to right and back again, the mic in one hand, his other gesticulating, as he regaled us with self-deprecation. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t recognise, either, the feeling inside me. The shame from earlier had transformed into something else. Hot and prickly, it shivered up my spine. My hands were trembling. Later, as I stood beside Elliott outside the pub, I found that I couldn’t look at him. I stared at his feet. My parents were congratulating their hilarious son. I couldn’t bear the sound of it a moment longer.
‘Where’s he going?’ I heard Elliott say, as I walked off without a word.
I was so enraged, I didn’t make out my father’s response.
The next few days I lost myself in work. I literally burrowed my head in documents; great teetering piles of them towered along my desk, occluding my colleagues’ views of me as they walked by. For the most part, I got a lot done. But every hour or so, a spear of unwelcome thought would pierce my mind. Elliott, up onstage, totally free and bigger than himself. Bigger than the little bloke I’d made of him in my head. Bigger than all those memories I had from childhood and adolescence, the quiet, boring git who wouldn’t know a joke if it landed in his lap. How had he done it? How, exactly, had he become a funny man?
At dinners that week, I said very little. Anne sat and watched me, first with patience, then in reproach.
‘For God’s sake, Gil. He’s your brother.’
‘That again.’
‘You should be thrilled he’s found a calling.’
No Neat Endings Page 12
