by Steve Hawke
‘It’s not a defence, I know, but it is a reason. Why on earth would I want this to come between us.’
‘Because it’s real? You’ve never been one for avoiding reality, Dad.’
‘This is one reality I’d desperately like to avoid.’
‘Mum says they haven’t formally diagnosed it yet?’
‘There’s no definitive test, so they faff around. No-one likes giving a death sentence. She told you about the last lot of tests? The second round?’
Claire nods.
‘Don’t hold on to any false hopes darling.’
April 2006
SUPERHEROES
Joe weighs the folder in his hands. He feels like an archaeologist has unearthed a relic of his past. He is apprehensive. He is excited. He is fearful. Tony is po-faced.
It is in a ring folder, the way Tony has learned Joe likes his data. He turns to the back. Seventy-three pages. Daunting. The executive summary is two and a half; he takes a breath and reads these slowly.
Tony doodles, happy to wait. Even as he reads, Joe can sense him glancing again and again up at the print on the wall. It’s the Sydney Stadium that never was. The Ficus. His master sketch; oblique aerial view from the north-west. Tony had organised the scan and the blow-up and the mounting; even the hanging, here in his office, on the wall above the sacred picture of him and Claire and her mulloway.
He finishes the summary. Exhales. Straightens the papers and pushes them to the back of the desk, pushes against the desk’s edge to slide his roller chair back. Exhales again. ‘Is that saying what I think it’s saying?’
‘That requires a slightly more technical discussion, but I think the short answer is yes.’
‘So it wasn’t the engineers’ fault.’
‘Yes and no. They should’ve picked up the problem.’
‘The interleaf between the third and fourth buttresses?’
‘Maybe, Joe. Maybe. It needs more work yet.’
‘But still …’
‘It’s pretty bloody interesting, isn’t it.’
‘Pretty bloody interesting indeed. It’s fixable? Doable?’
‘Read the whole thing, Joe. But I reckon yes.’ There is a glint in Tony’s eye.
Joe looks at the folder, shakes his head. ‘Ok, I’ll read it.’ He swivels back to look at Tony. ‘What are you drawing there?’
‘Just doodling.’
Joe takes the sheet of paper, examines it, screws up an eyebrow as he looks at the print on the wall. Looks back at Tony with a question.
Tony looks shamefaced. ‘Just messing around.’
‘Southern wing, ground level. Looking up at the central portal?’
Tony nods.
‘You’re a freak, kid. That would’ve taken me half a day. And in chiaroscuro!’
‘Light and shade Joe, light and shade. If the olds hadn’t got on my case to get a real trade I would’ve been an illustrator. You into comics?’
‘Not really.’
‘Dick Tracy. The Chester Gould originals. Check ’em out. Shit stories, but great art.’
‘When I say not really—it’s true, but—well, I’ve just lately invented this superhero character …’
They look at each other, wondering if they should back off, but Tony can’t let this go. ‘Pray tell?’
Joe hesitates, then decides why not.
‘Captain Whatsisname. Captain Whatsisname to the Rescue! Think of it as a fallback position, Tony, if the Ficus fucks up again. We could become cartoonists!’
‘Ok, I’m in. What’s his special power?’
‘Special power?’
‘Every superhero needs a special power, Joe. I mean, there’s your Dick Tracys—tough guys, clever guys, all that, but no special powers—but if there’s a captain in the name we’re talking superheroes. And superheroes have special powers.’
‘Special power … mmm … rescuing his alter ego from any given fuck-up. Does that qualify?’
‘Only his alter ego? It’s a bit limited. For a superhero I mean.’
‘Be a good start. I’ll give it some more thought though. He’s got a photographic memory that’s never once failed. I know that much.’
‘Can I draw him in chiaroscuro?’
‘You can draw him any way you like, Tony. As long as there’s a ficus on his shield.’
‘Shield. Ficus. Got it.’ Tony’s eyes light up with an idea. ‘I know what his special power is!’
‘Enlighten me,’ Joe says.
Tony puts on his movie trailer voice. ‘Captain Whatsisname and his Mighty Mobius Loop. A click of his fingers and it starts to spin. Astride the loop, he travels at twice the speed of sound to the rescue of the memory-challenged!’
Reverting to a normal tone he asks, ‘Should I ring Marvel Comics tomorrow, or wait till we’ve done a bit more work on it?’
‘Why do I put up with you and your cheek?’
‘Cos I give good cheek?’
When he’d confided in Tony about his loops, the whiz-kid had been intrigued. ‘That’s no ordinary loop Joe, that’s a mobius loop, like on your letterhead. Weird and twisted.’
It was one of the things he’d come to love about Tony. There was no embarrassment and no inhibition between them. They just got on with the business. And Tony cracked jokes at his expense, which no-one else would dare to.
Tony had been delighted the first time he spotted the letterhead. They’d wasted time that was supposed to be spent on JKH business with Joe telling stories of fascinating a young Claire with mobius loops, and Tony spouting obscure maths that Joe had long forgotten. They’d even sat there in his office making them and marvelling.
And Tony’s observation was perfect. The half twist at the joint turned the loop into an enigma. A logic-defying shape with a single interminable edge, a single self-repeating surface. Cut in half it would not fall into two halves, but double in length and grow an extra twist. And with each cut it would become ever more convoluted. The mathematicians may have defined and described it, but to the layman’s eye it remained simply weird and mysterious.
Like his own loops.
FOOL’S PARADISE
Joe sees Tony out, settles back at his desk, and blows a kiss to Claire and her mulloway.
It was her that changed the dynamic, back in January.
Day two of the Sydney Test was tough, as she railed angrily at him for putting her mother through the experience of the bag.
Day three they had to work through the inevitable clash of his insistence on the matter of the bag against her religious beliefs and whether he might even contemplate letting the disease run its course. They eventually agreed to let things lie on that front.
Day four she and Anne disappeared into the garden for hours, leaving him in charge of James. He could sense something afoot.
Day five he hardly got a chance to watch; Claire had taken charge. Dramas with Geoffrey and his parents forgotten for the time being, she was on a mission.
My butterfly, he remembers admiringly. Shed the shit and move on.
Claire took her mantra from Anne’s ‘If you do nothing but wallow and surrender, we’re buggered’, and bullied Joe into agreeing to her plan.
Anne did the cooking, but Claire was the organiser and the host for the dinner she set up with the Johnsons. Despite his reluctance and his discomfort, Joe could but marvel at his daughter; her pitch was note-perfect. Johnson didn’t commit there and then, but he eagerly took the sheaf of notes she’d hassled Joe into preparing about the arts complex tender. To Joe’s relief there was no outpouring of empathy and commiserations, just an assurance as they left that he’d be back in touch soon.
Joe could not hold back a tear as he hugged his daughter goodnight.
She had headed back to Karratha before the denouement. But by the end of January the deal had been set up. No requirement to step foot in Subiaco. A retainer to Joe as consultant to JKH, mentoring Tony two days a week, more if required, with Tony to come to his office in Bayswater. Principal
brief the arts complex tender. Secondary project to research the notional stadium that would happen one of these years.
‘I don’t get it mate,’ Joe couldn’t help saying to Johnson, as they shook hands on the deal.
‘That’s cos you’re a dreamer, Joe, whereas I’m a schemer. It’s an investment. You bought us some blue sky with the civic centre, and I’m ploughing a bit of it back in. Into you, and Tony. No skin off my nose if it goes nowhere, but I’m hopeful. You’re a clever pair.’
And here we find ourselves!
He pins Tony’s sketch up, whistling ‘Little Red Rooster’—Big Mama Thornton, not Elvis—and shuffles a dance step as he goes to put the kettle on.
Joe can’t quite believe how it has panned out. The retainer’s not exactly handsome, but it’s steady, and there’ll be a bonus if the arts centre gig comes through. After talking to Anne about it, he’s made the call to stop chasing the renos and rubbish work, for the time being at least. Which means that all the work he is doing is nourishing, as he calls it. Even in the good times he couldn’t say that.
Anne has finally resigned from the committee of the English Teachers Association. She has arranged that as of term two she’ll be stepping down as head of department at the school. And from mid-year she’ll be on a four-day week.
‘We time’ is the new motto. They’ve even started doing walks together, which takes a bit of getting used to for both of them. And three times in the last two months they’ve made it to the shack for weekends that have felt like flashbacks to another time. One balmy night when the sea gale deigned to drop to a breeze they even made love on the beach.
It’s a fool’s paradise, he’s prone to remind himself from time to time. Well it might be—but he and Anne have both bought into it. They slide past his ‘moments’, and do their best to ignore the loops. There will be another appointment with Vanessa. Each week brings it closer. But this window of equanimity is too precious, and too fragile, to imperil. Claire has wrought a miracle, and they both feel a quiet, desperate need to honour her achievement, and to wring every last drop of pleasure and peace from it.
He decides to take the rest of the day off, but he picks up the folder to take home. It would be good to wrap his head around it before Eric gets here.
FLYING VISIT
I blew it.
That’s all Eric’s email had said, a week after he flew back to Sri Lanka.
He went straight from Sri Lanka to Mozambique and has been up in Manica Province near the Zimbabwean border since then on another IV project. Doing exactly what, they are not entirely sure. They did get some snaps of wildlife, sand dunes and swamps taken during the safari he did to the Okavango in Namibia during the Christmas break, but he has studiously avoided engaging further on the subject of Ruvini. There is no indication in his emails as to what the purpose of the trip back home may be, but this visit is going to be even briefer than the last one; just the twenty-four hours, once again en route to headquarters in Melbourne.
Eric raises his glass. ‘Bit of water under the bridge since last time I was here.’
He takes a draught, and lets out a rueful exhalation as he looks at Joe. ‘Remember telling me the story of your Constable Green moment? The humiliation?’
‘Yeah.’
‘At least he was a stranger.’ There is a pregnant silence before Eric continues. ‘I tried to talk to her about it when I got back there. The earworm. The ticket out thing. I honestly can’t remember what words I used, just this awful realisation that they were coming out all wrong. That, and the look on her face. Not angry. Indignant. That’s the best word I can think of. She was indignant that I could say such a thing. And it just fizzled from there. It never got hostile, she just held me at arm’s length.’ He shakes his head. ‘So when the project wrapped up, I took the Manica gig.
‘She even came to the airport to see me off. Gave me a peck on the cheek.’ He winces at the memory. ‘I was given a gift, the gift of a bloody lifetime, and I somehow contrived to spoil it.’
Anne wipes a tear from her cheek as she asks, ‘You didn’t try reaching out?’
‘It didn’t seem fair to. I’d screwed her around enough already, Anne. And now this.’
‘This?’ she asks.
‘This shemozzle that has them hauling me back from Manica, just when the project doesn’t need it, for “consultations”. There’s some sort of allegations about corruption around the Sri Lanka project, and it seems they centre on the logistics section where she worked. They were responsible for all of the local contracting.
‘There’s got to be more than what they’ve told me in the email briefing I was sent. Stuff they don’t want down on paper I’m guessing. Probably political heat over there. Anyway, there’s a witch-hunt—sorry, investigation—going on, and they say they need to talk to me.
‘Apparently I’m beyond suspicion, but all the locals are being “discreetly” investigated. If that bastard’s trying to lay it on Ruvini I’ll—’
‘Which bastard?’ Joe asks.
‘Her boss in logistics, the incompetent arsehole. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was on the take. Don’t you remember me telling you about him?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘They just better leave Ruvini alone, that’s all I can say. Tell you the truth I’m starting to get pretty bloody fed up with IV. They do good work, but they’re an arse-covering, politically correct bureaucracy too.
‘Sorry about my mood guys. Is it dinner time yet?’
‘Another half hour,’ Anne tells him.
Not the moment for my tales of woe, thinks Joe, deferring any notion of bringing Eric up to date on his circumstances. He brings out the orange folder, and tries to divert him with news of Tony’s research, but interleaving buttresses do not engage Eric’s attention or enthusiasm tonight.
Joe imagines the two of them out in the dinghy, swaying on a gentle ocean, wetting lines and catching a feed, sharing their war stories and untangling dilemmas in between fishing chatter and breezy silences.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Eric asks.
‘Why don’t you come back through after Melbourne. We could go up the shack for a few days. Some time on the water does wonders for the soul.’
‘Maybe. I’ll let you know Joe. See how Melbourne goes first’
Four days later Joe gets an email.
Hey mate,
I’m flying straight back to Mozambique. I’m officially cleared, and so’s Ruvini. But they’re holding their noses. There were all these questions about our ‘relationship’. I think in the colonial days it was called ‘fraternising with the natives’. There’s a whole new language around it these days, but the sentiment’s much the same—it’s frowned upon. The glamour of the noble volunteer thing is starting to wear a bit thin, but Manica calls. I’ll at least see that through.
The idea of Dongara was tempting, my friend.
Eric.
That weekend he composes a reply. It starts in their usual bantering style, but becomes a heartfelt call to Eric to stay upbeat if he can, and next time to bloody well stay long enough for a few crib sessions and some fishing time at Dongara.
Then, without having intended to, he spills the beans, tapping away at the keyboard to spell out the story of his ‘fall from grace’. It is the first time he has been able to be even remotely dispassionate about the prospect of dementia, but he ends with a confession that he is dreading the looming appointment with his personal prophet of doom, the ice-cool neuropsychologist, Dr Sykes.
Devastated mate. Sorry, but really don’t know what to say. Thinking of you. And Anne. Hang in there.
Eric.
Joe assumes that there will be more, after this immediate response, but the lines of communication between Manica and Bassendean remain silent. He feels abandoned.
PARADISE LOST
‘Where’s Captain Whatsisname when you need him?’
Anne tries to smile in response, but it is an unconvincing effort.
The joke
had grown. It seemed the easiest way to slide past the moments of awkwardness. Tony had even done some sketches. A Joe-faced, tights-clad superhero, with a bit of a paunch, and a rocket shaped shield emblazoned with a fiery CW superimposed on a spreading ficus. He did tell Joe that the ficus wasn’t going to work in a real comic book; far too detailed. But variations of the Captain Whatsisname sketches in chiaroscuro are pinned up at the office and at home. Anne’s favourite is the one of CW confronting the evil parking inspector man. Joe’s is the hero shot for the cover: CW in superhero pose, arms akimbo, standing astride the spinning mobius loop.
But tonight feels like fool’s paradise lost.
It is Anne’s first Friday off under her new four-day regime. They’d pencilled it in for an early departure to Dongara, until Sykes’ office called, finally offering a definite time for Joe’s twice-deferred appointment. After the session, by mutual, unspoken consent they’d abandoned any thought of heading north in what was left of the day.
The deferments had been an agony. The secretary had been fulsomely apologetic about her boss’s lingering flu, but there was nothing to be done. Joe’s anxiety levels increased further when Tony delivered the bad news; they’d missed out on the tender. Johnson was as kind as he could be when he rang a couple of days later, but the retainer was not sustainable any more, he apologised.
Joe made grumbled excuses three times running for bailing out of their river walks, and growled surly responses when Anne tried to ask if he was ok.
This morning he’d woken up with a crick in his neck. It was only when the tic started up again that he realised why. The head jerk. The sudden movement that throws his lower jaw to the right and his skull to the left, and leaves him momentarily brain shaken, but definitely back in the present.
He thinks it began as a mechanism he stumbled upon to ward off or snap out of the loops, but he fears it has taken on a life of its own. He can sense Anne flinching each time he does it. Thinking about it makes it worse. He jerked his way through the whole of the appointment with Sykes.
