No Neat Endings

by Dominic Carew

  ‘Steady on. He’s hardly taking off.’

  But we both knew this was bullshit. Mum had called that afternoon. Elliott had been approached by an agent. He had a paid gig next month. If that went well, he’d be booked for the summer.

  ‘It’s normal, even expected, for a brother to feel…’ she paused.

  ‘What, Anne?’

  ‘Jealous.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ I said.

  But we both knew that was bullshit too. I was jealous alright. Who wouldn’t be? And Anne, as usual, had made a valid point. It was normal enough to feel that way. What wasn’t so easy to comprehend was how I could’ve missed it. All those years I’d lived with him, eaten dinners, sat in front of cricket games on sweltering summer arvos, I’d believed him as bland as our folks, and just as witless. How could I not have seen the glimmer of his talent? Why, more importantly, had he never tried to show me?

  I didn’t make it to his next gig, on account of work. By all reports: another hit. By the time his third one came around, he was working on retainer for the agent, with a string of Sydney shows lined up, and even a few in Melbourne.

  I sat up back, away from my parents, and drank scotch. His material, to my surprise, was different to, but just as well received as, his initial stuff. This time, instead of single jokes, he talked about his family. He took Mum and Dad off with incisive precision; a universally accurate display of age and sweetness and misplacing the keys. Then he switched his tone of voice, got all serious for a minute, and talked about brothers.

  ‘Got a brother?’ he began. ‘Yeah? Me too. Love him. Love the brother. But I sometimes wonder about his choice of job,’ he paused, then leaned towards the crowd. ‘He works in life insurance.’

  People laughed. They kept laughing before he’d even begun his ascent to the punch-line. He’d landed in a pocket, fully in control of the crowd, his voice and body his instruments, shaped around his whim.

  ‘Life insurance!’

  I felt myself go hot, then cold. A strange cluster of feelings had gripped me and I wanted to kill my brother. I had said those words in my head a handful of times in the past, but only as words, normally enough. But now I meant them. I drained my scotch and stood up and sidled past the people beside me. Into the aisle. To the back of the room and out the door as a hundred merry fuckwits erupted while my brother read from policy small-print all the little tricks we used to prevent a payout. The laughter mocked and followed me to my car.

  Anne wasn’t going to help, I knew, so I went to the garage and sat at the old wooden workbench I’d bought years ago thinking I’d learn to build furniture. I looked at the tools hung from nails on the wall, still sheathed in their plastic sleeves, and the boxes of screws and hinges stacked in rows and I thought about work and all the paper it used and the ink and those esoteric corporate terms we bandied about like shields against our deeper selves. It was a good job. I had two children and a wife and they loved me and I, most of the time, loved them. We owned our home. Our mortgage was large but not as large as some. Our children looked like they might be smart enough to do well at school, even Bob the Terror, and one day go to uni and, who knew, get a job in a big company with all the trappings afforded. This was how you lived a life. It was safe. It gave you time that in earlier periods of human history you simply didn’t get, absorbed as you were in the hunt for food, the single-minded struggle to stay alive. Who cared if your work was ‘dull’? Better than living with Mum and Dad.

  I picked up a hammer from its wall-hook, stood, walked out to the back lawn, gazed at the sky, inky-black and smattered with tiny stars. Surely a joke he’d told would return to me. An image of him pulling a funny face. I squinted into the past, ransacked the drawers and cupboards of our childhood, and found nothing. Oh, there was the time on holiday to Nelsons’ Bay when he’d tried to do a bomb in our motel pool and slapped his thigh and cried. I’d laughed at that. Then there was a grazed knee when I’d pushed him off his skateboard, which I’d laughed at too. From time to time I’d hide his homework and listen to him scream with fear the next morning, which I’d also found amusing. But nothing deriving from him.

  I went back into the garage with the hammer. I sat at the bench and pulled out a box of nails and, from the space beneath the benchtop, some planks of wood I’d bought all those years before. I got to work drawing lines on the wood, designing a bedroom cabinet. I had shapes in my head, of the tops and the fronts of the drawers. But when I came to hammer the first nails in, the wood split in two. Then in quarters. It was water-damaged. Inside it, teams of termites scurried along the jagged edges, spilling from the wood like foam from a fizzy drink. I couldn’t be certain, but they seemed to flinch in my haggard gaze.

  When Dad called me a few months later, I was having a quiet afternoon at work.

  ‘Sorry Dad,’ I said, ‘I’m really busy.’

  He told me it wouldn’t take long, then pressed on with the big news.

  I swallowed hard. My throat hurt. I said, ‘Okay, Dad. Okay, now. Bye,’ and hung up.

  I worked on the eighth floor of Building Ten Dash B in the north-east precinct of the Ryde Business Park. On some days, when the sky was clear, the buildings across the car park threw off silver panels of light that moved and shimmered. I stood up and walked to my office window now to watch them. Below on the ground, stop signs manned every corner. I stayed gazing out for a long time, trying not to let what Dad had just told me grate. But how could it not? I felt an urge to scream out some nonsense words, let off the steam that was building. Fuck this, I said, just as Glen, my boss, walked past. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

  That night at dinner, Anne told me that if I didn’t get over myself, I’d be in big trouble mister. What’s more, I should call Elliott to congratulate him.

  ‘Radio,’ she said, looking over my shoulder wistfully and clasping her hands to her heart. ‘What a star!’

  The postal gimp’s slot just happened to play during my drive to work. He was co-hosting one of those breakfast shows, with a blonde pretty woman and a fat, annoying guy with, it seemed, no filter. I didn’t usually listen to the program, preferring the more erudite formats of Radio National or ABC. Stopped at lights in a mass of traffic, I switched to Elliott’s channel, just to hear what his first show sounded like. Twenty seconds later, I switched it off, gripping the wheel so tight its rubber casing twisted in my hands.

  ‘Wasn’t he great?’ Anne said at dinner.

  But I just stared at my plate of food in silence.

  After this, Anne stopped mentioning Elliott. I lost contact with my parents for a while too and didn’t listen to the program, or indeed to any radio at all in case he’d shifted across to a new channel and one day surprised me with that whiny voice. I got up every morning and helped Anne with the kids, then went to work, adding value where I could. On the drive home of an evening, I would see a billboard with his face on it, or the back of a bus spread with his show’s name in bright red curlicue. I did my best not to anger, but sometimes couldn’t help yelling out an expletive or two, or three. Despite these occasional explosions, I believed I was handling the issue well. As long as I avoided him, my parents, and basically anyone else in our family or anyone that connected Elliott to me from the thirty-four years of my life, I was living more or less as I had lived before his rise to comic stardom. With one minor exception.

  My counsellor’s name was Fred Apple. Completely bald, he wore wire glasses, his office wall obscured by diplomas, but no degrees. I got him at half-price: a corporate discount.

  ‘I should add,’ I told him on my fifth session, ‘He’s not even that funny. The stand-up was mildly amusing. His radio input is banality perfected.’

  ‘Perhaps we should talk about the time you were ten, and teased Elliott about the pimple?’

  ‘In a minute. First tell me you agree. You’ve heard him. You’re a smart person.’

  ‘I agree, Gil.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that?’

  ‘Of
course not.’

  ‘Good. I know I’m not crazy. They’re crazy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘All those idiots who listen to his show and laugh.’

  My counsellor gave me that look he always gave me when he wanted to move along.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk about the pimple.’

  After ten sessions (the max permitted at the special rate), I had learned not very much about my issues. I believed the upshot was that I had unresolved conflicts with Elliott from childhood, and that communication, and honesty, were the remedies. But first, Apple had said, you must communicate with yourself. What a copout, I thought. Talk about delegating your work!

  But to show my willingness to confront what Anne had described as ‘a sad state of affairs’, I stood before the bathroom mirror one Saturday and gave myself a talking to. ‘You,’ I said, in the soft dusky light of the afternoon, ‘are just as funny as he is.’ And much better looking, I thought.

  Anne was watching in the bathroom doorway, with folded arms.

  Six months had passed. And maybe two extra months. While I’d not reached resolutions, I’d confronted myself to find myself happy with who I was. Despite not having talked to my parents more than cursorily, or spoken to Elliott at all, I had returned to a kind of balance. Work was going well as always. The kids were alive. And Anne had stopped nagging (at least about my family). But then, late one Wednesday night, I received a call from my brother.

  ‘Gil?’ he said, distant, barely audible.

  ‘Elliott?’

  ‘Gil.’ A silence. Full of that hot weight, I thought, of so many years knowing each other. ‘Mum just died.’

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it in my hand.

  At the house, Dad seemed like he’d been at war and now, the shelling having stopped, was locked in an empty stare. The place looked how it always had. Cream carpet. Cream walls. The blandness, even now in this dark and harrowed hour, made me seethe.

  Elliott and I stood in the backyard. I hadn’t been out there in years. The grass was trimmed, the fence had been painted. Elliott, to my shock, was still living upstairs.

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ I said. ‘I mean, you’re thirty-four next month.’

  ‘I’m thirty-four in June.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He looked at me. ‘Where’ve you been, Gil?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just…disappeared.’

  I wanted to tell him I’d done no such thing. But that would’ve been a crock. I’d disappeared alright. He sighed. He said, ‘Maybe now’s not the time to talk about that.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, without really thinking, ‘maybe it is.’

  He was silent.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to talk about everything, El. Like, maybe it’s time to talk about when we were kids. And how you couldn’t tie your shoelaces until you were ten.’ I didn’t know what had come over me. But it had come now and I couldn’t stop it coming. ‘And,’ I went on, ‘and, that I was the funny one, that I should be doing comedy instead of life insurance, and where you get off making jokes about my job.’

  I was trembling. He looked at me with soft eyes. He put his hand on my shoulder, gazed right down deep where my heart beat. ‘Dad and I have spoken,’ he said, unfazed, it seemed, by my outburst.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, like a sulking kid about to get his way.

  He paused. ‘We want you to do the eulogy.’

  A noise came out of my mouth, bird-like and sharp. I gulped for air. My brother’s hand still rested, soft and warm and a little plump, on my bones. At first, I didn’t know. Surely he, with his way with words, his insight and his substance and his presence, would be the better pick. But then I realised something. I’d never had my chance onstage. Maybe if I took to one, I’d have the crowd eating from my elbow crook, my neck nape, or whatever the expression was.

  I straightened up and raised my chin, like Dad had always done. ‘I’d be honoured,’ I said, and then he farted out a sob. One, two, five of them. So I stood and watched him cry for the next half-minute, his hand on my shoulder, while in my head I thought of how I’d open. And how I’d do the middle. And then, amidst a rolling, maddened din of laughs, how I’d finish off.

  The coffin sat on a bier, in the middle of the aisle, two steps from the altar. Flowers spewed from it. The church reeked of lilies. I looked around at the sullen faces, the silvered eyes, the bald spots on lots of the men, and some of the women, with their heads turned down. Tough crowd, I thought.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman. Friends. Father Reilly. Dad. Little El. I’d like to tell you about a time when I was ten. Elliott was eight. Mum, God bless her, was driving us to sport. It’s a funny story, and I think you’ll like it.’

  They looked up at me. The lot of them.

  ‘So Elliott,’ I said, ‘had this pimple on his chin…’

  At the wake, I sat by myself on the front porch as the family, the close friends, the entire staff of Mum’s deli, stood around inside the house. Elliott had made a quiet, teary speech on the back lawn earlier, which I’d watched through the slitted glass of the upstairs bathroom. Dad had asked him to do it. To ‘redeem Gil’s terrible words’. He’d talked about how decent Mum had been to him, to me, to Dad, and how he knew we all loved our mothers, but something about ours was different. He’d never seen her angry. He’d never heard her shout. Not once in all his life. Everyone listened to this, rapt and sad, arm-in-arm.

  Now, on the old wicker rocker that’d been on this porch for three decades, I remembered Elliott and my parents when we were kids, sitting downstairs on the lounge after dinners. I guessed they’d done their bonding then. Watching TV. Smiling. And I guessed, maybe, I’d missed out on that.

  The front door opened, creaking on its hinges.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, looking up, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘Gil,’ Elliott said, ‘we’re going to scatter Mum’s ashes in the garden. Come on and join us.’

  I stood up from the chair and looked at him. His eyes were like little volcanoes. But his mouth was set in that darling way. A smile, like Mum’s. I considered asking him whether he thought anything I’d said was funny, or at least interesting. The crowd hadn’t laughed and Dad had sat in the front pew shaking his head at me. I guessed he’d thought I’d gone too far with the pimple bit. Maybe he thought my squeezing Elliott’s zit and the pus spurting onto the back of Mum’s head a story for another day? Or maybe my timing was off. I was about to ask Elliott. He put his arm around me, though, and I smelled his scent, which was Mum’s too, and mine, and then I did what I hadn’t done for many years. I cried. It didn’t last very long, but two hot tears found their ways down my face, as evidence. Before I could regather my thoughts, he’d led me, gently, to the door.

  ‘You know it hurts, don’t you?’ I asked Anne a few nights later.

  She put her head on my chest. ‘I know, honey.’

  ‘It’s just, I’ve never gone in for the grieving thing. I’m not made that way.’

  She nodded, her warm cheek squished against my ribs. The smell of her, the soft weight. She’d been a dear to me since Mum died. Even the eulogy fiasco, she’d cushioned for me.

  ‘Yes. You know it hurts.’ I reached across to turn off the lamp. The air went quickly black. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, I’d ask her again to tell me it was funny.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you writing friends, Laura McPhee-Browne and Emma O’Neill. Thank you Tahlia Calvisi and Luke Carman for reading, and thank you Elle Williams for putting forward wonderful ideas. Thank you Mum, Mel, John and Pat and everyone else in my family. Thank you Sarah McKenzie. Thank you Debra Adelaide, Delia Falconer, Claire Corbett, Barbara Brooks and Anthony Macris at UTS. Thank you to the late Martin Harrison. Thank you Anna Solding, Alicia Carter and Kim Lock at MidnightSun (thank you Anna, for believing!). Thank you to all the friends to whom I’ve spoken about this weird thing, writing, over the years. Thank you to my father, for whom G
od was a poet, and thank you Steph, for putting up with my heartburn!

  About the Author

  Dominic Carew is a lawyer and writer from Sydney. He has practised law in Sydney, London, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands in leading global law firms and financial institutions. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UTS, for which he received an Outstanding Student Award. Dominic has won or been shortlisted for many major short story awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

  No Neat Endings is Dominic’s first collection of stories.