by Steve Hawke
A gloomy pall hung over the session. Anne was on edge. Joe was flat and tic-ridden. The doctor’s red nose and a remnant puffiness around her eyes did seem to somehow soften her normal aura of detached professionalism, but to Joe and Anne it seemed that she was dancing around the central issue. However, any illusions they may have been clinging to melted away when Joe mentioned losing the JKH retainer, and having to start looking for reno gigs again. Sykes said that if he wanted to think about applying for a disability pension she would be able to provide a supporting letter.
He unpins the sketch of CW and the parking inspector from the board, telling Anne, ‘It feels like he’s laughing at me tonight.’
He puts it face down on a low shelf, out of sight.
May 2007
THE BLONDIE GABRIEL INDEX
Joe checks the expiry date on the pills.
Bet they’re good for another couple of years yet. Best to play safe though.
He puts the packet back into the tartan zipper bag that sits in the little backpack with the book, the oven bag and the bottle of whisky. Pulls the notepad and pen out of the pouch he has taken to wearing slung around his neck, scribbles Fresh sleeping pills, and stows them away again.
He checks the velcro straps are gripping, and are still taped on securely, then starts blowing the oven bag up like a balloon to test it for leaks, when he hears Anne coming down the stairs.
‘Pop goes the weasel!’ he exclaims as she enters, making to slam the oven bag against the open palm of his other hand, as if bursting a paper bag; but he swerves away from the palm at the last moment.
The look she gives him!
This perpetual checking of ‘the kit’ has joined the list of his isms. Far less frequent than the head jerk, to be sure; but far more aggravating to her. Her theory is that it’s his way of asserting control and independence, even as the reality is that both are diminishing. He finds it a hard argument to counter.
‘You promised you’d put that damned thing away in the shed.’
‘I will.’
‘It’s not just Claire. What if James stumbles across it? He’s getting to that age now. You’ve got to watch him like a hawk. And not leave stuff like that lying around.’
‘I will.’
‘You better. I’ll be checking,’ she tells him, as she heads through to the kitchen.
He has Dylan on the CD. ‘Mozambique’ gives way to the track he’s put it on for, ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’. He sings along as he packs the oven bag in with the pills inside the tartan bag, and stashes the whole kit into the backpack. ‘One more before you go, hey. You’re putting it off Bobby,’ he says, before he turns it off and heads out to the shed, where he hangs the backpack on a spare peg next to the saws on his pegboard of tools.
On the cribbage table an eight of diamonds is face up. The packet of sinkers is in front of Eric’s chair, so he sits there, turns over Eric’s hand.
Thinks.
No recollection of why he played the eight last night, or what the other three cards in his own hand might be. Blank. He drums his fingers and sings a line from Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Don’t Remember’. Another one on the Procrastinator’s Top Twenty that he is compiling. He pulls the notebook out of the pouch to double-check that he’s written it on the list. Yep, it’s there, along with ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’.
He looks at Eric’s hand of four cards and smiles. Rubbish. Pair of sevens, king and two. The seven’s dangerous, but if Joe’s planning on a six for the run of three, the king’ll give him thirty-one. He goes for it. ‘Seven makes fifteen, for two.’ He moves Eric’s peg, shifts the sinkers over to in front of his own chair, then takes a sheet of paper held down by the crib board, and puts another cross down for the Gabriel ‘Don’t Recall’ tally. The page is nearly full. He runs the numbers, flicks back to the previous page, compares. Not good.
Each evening he plays a card for himself or Eric, depending on the dictate of the sinkers. It’s always been the best part of the game; the sly, speculative combat of the turn-by-turn pegging. When the two rounds of four are completed—the eight days, the week plus one, the whatever it has become—he tallies each hand and the crib and pegs them too, bantering with ghostly Eric all the while.
The important thing is whether he remembers last night’s play or not. The cards the other fellow holds. If he does, he’ll ruthlessly take advantage, and put a stroke down for the ‘Gotcha’ tally. Its song is Blondie’s ‘One Way Or Another’. Though at some point he found himself twisting the words into a version that suits him better; ‘It’s gonna get me, get me, get me, get me, get me.’
Month by month ‘Don’t Recall’ is getting stronger in the battle with ‘Gotcha’. And Eric’s won the last two games, which is really annoying.
He’s planning to show his Blondie Gabriel Index to Dr Sykes on the next visit. For all the pain it causes, he’s rather proud of it. A more sensible test than any of the ones she’s inflicted, he reckons, though he admits it is not feasible for a surgery appointment. He’s no longer sure whether he’s doing it every night, or sometimes twice or thrice a night. He knows he should scribble the date down each time for scientific rigour, but that’s not how it started out, and he doesn’t want to change the vibe of this ism; there’s something about it just the way it is that gives him pleasure. He always has to resist the temptation to swap chairs, keep the game going; but that would destroy both the point of the exercise, and the rhythm of the ism.
He hasn’t told Eric about the Index, despite his mate’s unknowing role. There was radio silence for a few weeks after that first ‘devastated’ reply from Eric. He’d quizzed Anne by email, but the next one to Joe was newsy chitchat about the Manica project and local politics. It seemed that ‘don’t know what to say’ was a statement of fact as well as sentiment.
He pushes himself to his feet and goes over to the workbench to contemplate the wooden puzzle he is in the process of making for James. It is shaping up nicely, but the intricacy of the work is challenging, which gives him the irrits. It would have been a piece of cake once upon a time. Not in the mood tonight.
Restless, he moves to the drafting stool. A rueful thought bubble reminds him that he doesn’t sit here often these days. He contemplates the sketch of Captain Whatsisname and the parking inspector. Anne had stumbled across it last night on a bottom shelf in the kitchen, as she was childproofing the house.
He can remember the night he folded the sketch up and put it away. Getting on for a year ago now, he calculates.
‘Are you still laughing at me?’ he asks it.
Nah, I don’t reckon. Just powerless to help. Which makes you a pretty poor fucken superhero.
GAZUMPED
Joe turns away from the sketch. Superhero, super doctor. There’s nothing any of them can do. The rot has well and truly set in. Dr Sykes insists he’s doing comparatively well, but the Blondie Gabriel Index tells him otherwise. He has his days of rage, his periods of despondency, but mostly it’s a sense of confusion, a gradual, erratic adaptation to the narrowing confines of his life.
He’d tried one more work gig, back at the end of last year. Designing an upward extension for a cousin of Mrs Scapides; virtually a replica of the job he’d done for her. Not a project to get excited over at the best of times, but the mojo was gone altogether. Silly drafting mistakes, missed deadlines, an unprofessional, snappy response to the cousin, a parting of the ways.
Not long after that Tony had come round for the first time in months. ‘I kept playing around with the arch,’ he told Joe, ‘but then I saw this.’ He slid across a printout from an online magazine. ‘We’ve been gazumped.’
Architect’s drawings for a major new stadium in the Emirates. Headlines about the stunning design breakthrough.
‘Do you want me to run you through it?’ Tony had asked.
Joe shook his head. Looked at the drawing again.
‘It looks beautiful, Tony.’
‘Yeah. The one I had in mind would be better though.
’
‘I’m sure it would be lad.’
‘Something I’ve got to tell you, Joe.’ Tony looked at the ground. ‘I’ve got a new job … in Sydney.’
‘Be careful over there. They eat you up.’
But when Tony looked up, Joe was smiling at him, holding up a hand for a high five.
Tony gave a thumbs up instead.
‘Indeed Tony. No-one should live all their life in Perth. It atrophies the brain.’ He pointed at his own temple.
Tony seemed to be mimicking the gesture, but it turned into a salute.
‘Aye, aye captain.’
And then he was gone.
Joe gave a month’s notice on the lease of the Bayswater unit, and literally and mentally packed his architectural career away.
Joe considers the shed. Glances at the bag pegged on the wall. This space has always been his own, a place where he can let his mind rest and wander. But in recent months it’s become his refuge, too, in moments when the ferocity of his frustration scares even himself. Like that bloody Centrelink fiasco last year.
Anne had warned him and prepped him and begged him to stay calm for the interview at Centrelink. He almost managed what felt like an endurance test. But when the ‘jumped-up clerk’—he was ashamed for saying it—told him that due to Anne’s income he would be eligible for a part payment of twenty-three dollars eighty a fortnight if the claim was favourably assessed by the medical panel, he lost his rag.
‘Why the fuck didn’t you say that at the start?’
‘There is a process we have to work through, Mr Warton,’ replied Client Services Officer Pamela, in a coolly detached voice that gave him a flash of his first, hostile session with Vanessa Sykes. The next step, she informed him, would be an appointment with an Approved Medical Officer. After an inordinately long wait whilst she consulted her computer screen, without asking whether it would be convenient, she advised him of a date in nine weeks’ time. He threw his insult and stormed out, leaving Anne to apologise.
Anne also handled the superannuation company. They decided they might as well try for a cash out, given his situation, and his ‘attitude’, as Anne called his obsession with the bag. It took some doing, but with an appropriate supporting letter from Sykes, Anne was able to harass the company into it.
That did something to alleviate their finances—they were now SINKs, he asserted: single-income no kids—and his sense of guilt about it.
Joe stands to stretch, and rub at the sore spot in his back. He doesn’t feel disabled. Just reduced, and unreliable. Physically he is better than he has been for a few years. He’s succumbed to Anne’s recommended regime of vitamins and supplements, with little interest in the specifics. They go walking almost every evening. At least twice a week, often more, he prowls the river shallows with his fly rod after she leaves for work. And since a friend told Anne about the golden raisins miracle cure—‘It’s just sultanas soaked in gin,’ he insists on pointing out—the stiff knee and sore joint in his back seem to have improved.
There have even been periods when he’s felt if not content, almost reconciled. ‘No, not reconciled,’ he said, when he was trying to explain it to Anne. ‘It’s just the patches when I’m not thinking about “it”. When it’s not looming, not hovering like some fucken eagle, and I’m the rabbit waiting for the swoop.’
The best such patch, by far, was the spell with Claire and the kids when Anne went to Ecuador.
ECUADOR CALLING
Anne wonders whether she should poke her head into the shed to see how Joe is going; he seems to have been out there a long time tonight. But she can’t suppress a flash of annoyance at his performance with the oven bag earlier this evening. Instead she turns her thoughts to that list on the fridge. So much to do, with Claire and the kids arriving in three days’ time.
She’s worried about that girl. Claire has told Geoffrey that she’s just coming down to see them, and to sort furniture and what not for the house they have bought for their looming move to Perth. But—she’s sworn Anne to secrecy—she’s also got a preliminary job interview for a research assistant’s position at the uni starting in the second semester.
Claire’s last visit seems a lifetime ago—though it was only last year. It all started with the violet-tailed sylph.
Anne had been out of sorts for months. Ever since Claire had asked her to come up for Miriam’s birth. She made various excuses, but all three of them knew the real reason; she was scared to leave Joe on his own for extended periods by then.
The worst patch was that nightmare couple of months of Joe packing up his practice, and navigating the horrors of Centrelink and super companies. He was deep in self-pity, and failing to come to terms with his new realities. Some days she felt like she was drowning, between managing him and dealing with bureaucracies, not to mention staying on top of her job. It felt like it was only talking to Claire that kept her sane.
One evening Joe walked in on her as she was trying to mimic the sylph’s call from the recording on the website.
‘Birds’n’blues hey,’ he’d said when she told him what it was. ‘Still thinking about that?’
‘Just birds Joe. I’m not going to be escorting you through the Americas. If I ever make it to Ecuador it’ll be my trip.’ She felt awful as soon as it slipped out. The crestfallen look on his face.
Another door closed.
But she wasn’t about to let that hare start running. What she didn’t say was how much the idea had begun to consume her. An escape, an indulgence. A week or two without Joe in her head and on her hands.
The funny thing was, it would have remained a dream if he hadn’t whinged to Claire. ‘She wants to go to Ecuador without me.’ He’d winked at Anne as he spoke on the phone, making light of it, but the ‘poor me’ undertone was unmistakeable. The next day Anne got a call on her mobile at lunchtime. Claire wanted to know more. By the end of the call, her daughter was once again on a mission. It wasn’t long before Claire had Joe thinking it was his idea.
The night the super payout was confirmed they rang Claire with the good news. With the phone on speaker at their end, her first question was how much. Her second was, ‘How much is Ecuador?’ Armed with that, she got in quickly. ‘You owe it to her, Dad. That’s come from the business, and she did the books for you forever without ever drawing a cent.’ That logic made them both feel good about it, and by the end of that week Anne’s twitcher’s tour of Ecuador was booked.
Claire organised it all from Karratha, and told Geoffrey it was non-negotiable, her mother needed the break, and she needed to spend some time with her father.
The one thing Anne was grumpy about was missing time with the kids. They had two days all together before they took Anne to the airport. Joe hadn’t seen her so excited and upbeat since he took her to the domestic airport to fly north for James’ arrival. This time though she did look back, blowing kisses to the four of them until she had to finally turn and step through the sliding doors of international departures.
PELICANS
James’ll be here in three days! First time since Anne went to Ecuador.
No doubt Anne’s getting things organised in the house. Should be helping shouldn’t I. Nah. I’d just be in her way.
Jamie boy. Three years and … How many months?
He tries to remember, but decides it doesn’t matter. It’s easier, and far more pleasurable, to sink back into memories of that last visit.
For twelve days he played with James. Took him to the tackle shop in Midland and made a fuss of selecting a miniature rod and reel. Went and sat on the little jetty at the river park, disturbing Old Frank’s peace with the palaver of teaching James how to fish. In reality the toddler was more interested in the pelicans, and not up to anything more than holding the rod for a few moments now and then. The two of them laughed a lot though.
Joe laughs again now as he remembers the day Frank actually caught a fish. James was completely entranced watching the undersized bream flapping around o
n the jetty, scales glinting in the sun. Frank tipped him a wink, and he distracted James from the sight of the fish being unhooked. And then the boy was given the honour of returning it to the river. He squealed in nervous delight as he held his palms out and momentarily felt the lithe, moist life of the fish before it slipped through his fingers back to the water. ‘You’re bringing me luck, young feller,’ Frank smiled. ‘You better come back tomorrow.’
‘Can we Pop? Can we?’
‘I reckon so.’
When they got back home James burst through the door calling, ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy! Old Frank catched a fish!’
Miriam startled at the commotion, pulling away from the breast. For a moment Claire was going to try to quieten James, but she went with his joy, and instead passed the baby to Joe, as James exclaimed his story.
‘It was dancing on the jetty. Dancing.’ He flop-danced his imitation.
‘And then Old Frank gave me the fish. And I gave the fish back to the river, just like he said.’ He threw his arms wide.
‘All the billycans got frighted, and flap, flap, flap, they all flied away.’
‘Did they my darling.’ Claire enveloped him in a hug, but he broke free, there was more to tell.
‘Pop told me a song for the billycans!’
‘A song?’
She waited as James struggled for the words. They wouldn’t come. But then a big grin, as he recalled a line. He chanted, ‘His beak holds more than his belly can!’ And again, and again, he sang the line. The twinkle-eyed smile Joe exchanged with Claire is about as good as it gets, he reckons.
And every chance he could, every time the breast would not quiet her, or Claire was busy with James, he would gather up Miriam, inhale that glorious infant scent, and walk her. Left shoulder, right hand patting. Switch shoulders if she would not settle. Cradling her in rocking arms when she seemed happy, and drinking in her smiling eyes when they were offered. All the time cooing, humming, singing, imprinting his voice.
