Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  Now, looking away from the screen, I think for a bit about two guys.

  One, the old gaffer I’ve just seen lying lifeless on white linen, on what will likely prove to be his deathbed. A man known to me all my life, yet a stranger. A man I don’t love, have never loved and will never love.

  Two, a young boy waiting for me, with golden skin, with brown eyes full of life, on the other side of the world. A boy who — the boy —

  Frightening thought.

  A trilling. The phone. Carmen.

  ‘I’m sitting at some traffic lights. Hear that mewing sound?’

  ‘Can’t hear anything but cars. Why would I hear a mewing sound, anyway?’

  ‘Oops, lights changed! Hang on. Okay, scorching along expressway one-handed now. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. An hour ago I hooked up with a guy. We first found each other a couple nights ago courtesy of cyberdating. Online the guy billed himself as tall and an air traffic controller. Always been keen on submitting to control, at least when in the mood, so seemed like a plan. We met on Oxford Terrace. Now, as you might expect the first question I asked at our rendezvous was How are you? And he — oops! Am being tailgated. Hang on again. Gonna put both hands on the wheel for a bit and slam my hoof down on the accelerator to beat that speeding bitch behind me — her in her bloody Audi!’

  ‘Carmen, don’t talk to me while you’re behind the wheel, okay? Call me when you’re home safely.’

  My words float away feebly while my earpiece fills with a revving roar.

  ‘Hah! Shook off the silly sow. Now — where was I?’

  ‘Call me when you’re back home safely.’

  ‘Oh, yep — so we met, and my opening ploy was the deeply lame yet blameless How are you? Phatic communion, right? The guy then proceeded to start droning on in an unending monologue about his recent disastrous relationship and how he was depressed and suicidal, etcetera. So he was losing points fast! Not to mention having already lost a lot more when I saw at first glance that he was way shorter than me, and chubby. Chubby, by contrast with me, who am of course voluptuous. Also it turned out that he’s no longer working as an air traffic controller. He’s not working, full stop. Consequently, I told him the truth. Which is, that I don’t want to spend my time listening to the troubles of someone I don’t even know. So, after a civil referral to the services offered by his nearest mental health facility, I hoofed it off to a coffee house with the thought that it would be good to drown my sorrows with a double mochaccino and maybe throw in a cake — well, admit it, a couple of cakes — without aforementioned loser. However, a pet shop caught my eye. I walked straight in and bought myself a cat.’

  ‘A cat? Well, that’ll be nice and cuddly.’

  ‘Very. Why won’t he die?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just fucking die and get it over?’

  One hour later, flicking on the tele while fixing myself a bite of cold tucker, I look at the news. The president of the Council of Trade Unions is talking about Chinese breaches of intellectual property rights. Our factories are having to close down or shift their operations to China because competitors over there keep stealing our patented products. Cut to a local manufacturer of saw blades saying that one Chinese manufacturer not only stole his company’s designs down to the finest detail but even copied a batch number onto every blade rather than sequentially numbering the batches. Cut back to the trade union leader saying that another worry is that our government isn’t lobbying the Chinese government enough about labour rights for factory workers in China.

  Killing him would be easy, wouldn’t it?

  ‘Failure to enforce China’s own minimum labour code has kept down the price of Chinese labour,’ he says. ‘If you buy goods made in Chinese factories you’re exploiting Chinese workers —’

  So tired of waiting for his death.

  Bolting down my food, swilling down a beer, I watch the rest of the news. Jumping up, I dump the dishes. I slip on my trainers. I head out for another lonely walk along the beach in the warm screaming wind.

  Noon next day, having got myself home from a third long walk — this time through a forest for a change — I find another message from my sis waiting on the answerphone.

  ‘Bucket kicked. Call me.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ I squawk into the plastic handset after keying in her number quick smart.

  ‘Drowning, basically. Water inhaled into his lungs. Some sort of glitch with the peg tube in the middle of the night. He must’ve tried to get a drink while he wasn’t thoroughly awake. No sign that he was thrashing about or anything. So maybe he carked peacefully.’

  ‘You’ve had a look at his body?’

  ‘Not yet. Still can’t bring myself to go that far. We can do it together, holding hands, okay?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Overwhelmed with grief as I am, I’m having a latte and a tiramisu. Next I thought I’d nip out to grieve a bit with you over another latte at the Lido. A latte and maybe some of their yummy boysenberry cheesecake. After fortifying ourselves in our sorrow, we can then go back to town together and check out the cadaver at Palm Grove.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘You’re not very chatty. Are you okay? Are you in shock?’

  ‘I’m okay. Maybe it’s shock at our good luck.’

  ‘Mm, well, as for me, dunno how I feel, really. Goatman going so much sooner than we’d expected is a definite boon. I’m scared, though.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘Scared that now I’m really going to have to feel something about the old bastard, and that won’t be good.’

  One hour later we’re walking together in the northerly on our way to the Lido. The wind blows even more strongly today than yesterday. Pines Beach seems restless, distraught — agitated by the hot gale. The boughs of trees are tossing frantically. Hedges are surging and swaying, alive yet rooted helplessly, bound to live and die forever in one spot. We skirt the river, whose silted waters growl while running high between the stopbanks. We pass the lagoon. Kids are screaming, splashing, running in and out of its warm shallows while their mums sweat under the sun. Willows on the stopbanks welter in the wind, heave, send streaks of themselves into the sky, raw branch and dying green leaf, launched by the wind, ripped away by the fiercer gusts. The sky seems almost yellow, yet with low, livid clouds. Black pods on the broom bushes crack open to shoot black glittery little seed, sending it flying wildly.

  ‘When we look at his body what’ll work best for me will be to sit with it for a bit to try and find out what I feel,’ says Carmen ten minutes later, chewing cheesecake.

  ‘Me too, I think.’

  Yep, that sounds right. Yep, sit yourself down inside the white walls of his room and stare at his corpse. Allow yourself to emote. All sorts of feelings must be lurking inside your skull, waiting to burst out, wanting to be felt, needing to be known. You’ve got to get yourself in the right mood. You’ve got to feel all your feelings, finally. All your feelings for that remote and unseeing and unheeding stranger whose name is entered on your birth certificate as your father but who for the whole of your life has seldom seemed more than an ersatz interloper.

  After leaving the cafe we take a slow walk around the domain. Carmen’s still a blonde, but it’s no longer the colour of straw. She’s more what you’d call ash blonde, with lowlights of honey.

  ‘I had a complicated dream about our family last night,’ she says. ‘Dad sexually abused me.’

  Dad what? Dad — of course! Fuck. The dirty prick. Shit. My little sis. All of a sudden everything makes sense to me. Somehow I must have known already. Somehow I must have known subliminally. A blink of an eye and it makes sense why we both feel so bad about the old bugger.

  ‘Carmen, you poor kid. You poor baby.’

  ‘No — no, it’s okay.’

  ‘It’s not okay.’

  ‘No, I mean he didn’t. He didn’t do it. He didn’t do anything li
ke that in real life. That’s what I mean by okay. A strictly relative okay.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Got ya.’

  Now, once more, it seems not quite to make sense that we should feel so bad. Why do we hate our dad? You could understand our feeling this way if we were the victims of some gross violation, couldn’t you? Sexual abuse has a good, solid, sordid sort of certainty to it.

  ‘Look at that gull beating into the wind,’ says my sis pensively.

  ‘Mind you,’ I try, ‘maybe it would’ve been better to have been groped by him than ignored altogether.’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Maybe not better, but something we could get a grip on. Something we could get our teeth into. Something other than the truth, which is just nothing. Nothing is all there ever was. Not even the proverbial big fat nothing, just a small scrawny nothing. Something’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nothing’s the card we were dealt,’ comes the crisp reply. ‘Anyway, while he was doing it to me in the dream you were standing in the sea watching, holding some banknotes, and when I got angry with you and threw your money into the water you were anxious cause you needed the notes to buy off bullies at school, which in turn straight away made me feel bad.’

  We sit in the shade, not saying much more. A slithering tangle of some shiny fine ribbon, caught in the branches of a lemonwood bush, is glittering in the sun while whipping back and forth in the wind. Plastic? Nylon? One of those audiocassette tapes, unravelled, which were a common sight in the seventies of last century and aren’t so common now. My mind flips back to those days. Audiocassettes were the latest technology. You binned your big old outmoded plastic disks, disks you’d been spinning on your stereo turntable. You swapped the lot for dinky little audiocassettes which you’d poke into a plastic slot and then play. Yet not a lot later the audiocassettes were old technology, fit only to be binned. You swapped them for the newest technology, iridescent little compact disks. A lot of tossed tapes went astray. Tossed, they unravelled, like this tangle on the lemonwood. Open spaces those days were often gay with unravelled tapes, glossy and flimsy — like tinsel on a tree at Christmas.

  ‘Hey,’ says my sis, ‘I forgot to tell you that last night I got a phone call from Godfrey.’

  ‘Godfrey? Who’s that?’

  ‘Our brother.’

  ‘Blah, that Godfrey. Wanting news about Dad?’

  ‘Ostensibly, but I think what he really wanted was to talk about his new boyfriend.’

  ‘Get any dirt? What’s the boyfriend like?’

  ‘Well, the most salient fact is that he’s no boyfriend. He’s seventy years old.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  Godfrey, you’ll recall, is only one year older than me.

  ‘Our prat brother offered a bit of self-psychoanalysis on the topic. He reckons that his preference for an older man stems from the fact that when he was a kid he didn’t really have a father.’

  ‘Hmm, so on the one hand we have me attributing my near-paedophilia to lack of a dad, while he comes out with an entirely opposite diagnosis.’

  ‘You’re both just bloody sick, is what I say.’

  ‘Did he ask you about you?’

  ‘Only one question: Do you own your own home yet? And when I said no he asked why. Apparently he now owns a townhouse and a house in the country and he’s about to buy a rental property. I said I prefer to blow my money on life, not bricks and mortar. Hoping like fuck he wouldn’t ask me for a definition of life. Luckily he didn’t. Anyway, he plans on retiring to live off his investments after another year or two. Wonder how he’ll fill his days. Join a bowling club?’

  ‘Look for a boyfriend who’s eighty. I think I’m ready to call Palm Grove.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I pick up my cellphone. A nurse answers. I ask whether my father is still in his private room.

  ‘Oh — no,’ says the nurse somewhat emotionally. ‘He’s been taken away.’

  ‘Away?’ I say. ‘Has he been moved to another room?’

  ‘No, he’s been taken away by the undertakers. We’re very sad. He was a delight, your late father. So patient and cheerful and friendly, and always ready with a bright word for everyone.’

  Everyone except his own children, I think, though I say nothing.

  ‘Oh, I see — um —’

  ‘He left instructions with the undertakers. He asked them to take him straight away. He didn’t want to trouble the family.’

  Family meaning two unloved daughters and two unloved sons, by no means a full rollcall of the seven embryos he and his wife with their lack of contraceptive skill foisted upon an already burdened planet. Four embryos allowed to survive the abortionist to grow into, among other things, depressives, near-suicides and then, in the fullness of time, men who needed to be fucked by men old enough to be their dads, or by boys young enough to be their sons.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘A lovely man,’ she says, crying slightly. ‘We’ll all miss him so much. Our thoughts are with you.’

  Which of the two of us knew the real man? I wonder, putting down the phone.

  Both of us, maybe.

  Next, a call to the undertaker. The undertaker, like the nurse, turns out not to have custody of my dead dad. She, also, has been given clear orders by the oracle. An oracle she calls, like her counterpart who tends to the breathing rather than the unbreathing end of the death trade, your late father. Not only were the orders clear, they allowed no compromise, and have been acted upon in the same spirit.

  ‘He’s been cremated,’ she says.

  ‘Cremated!’ I yelp. ‘You mean you’ve had him burnt already?’

  Carmen, having till now lolled on a bed of dry pine needles like an opulent fakir, jerks upright.

  ‘Your late father was cremated early this afternoon,’ says the undertaker edgily, annoyed I think by my use of the very unprofessional word burnt. ‘He didn’t wish to trouble the family.’

  ‘The family was troubled already!’ I snap back. ‘Not an uncommon circumstance, I would’ve thought — one which in your work you’d encounter not infrequently, I also would’ve thought!’

  ‘What? Well — we —’

  Climbing onto my high horse won’t turn our done dad from a pile of ash into a whole corpse, however, so after a few more waspish words I give up. After all, what could fit better with the feeling that you never really had a father than for that putative pop not only to vanish like a genie or a ghost in a puff of smoke but to do it without your say-so, without your okay, without even your knowledge?

  Now it’s already more than a week since the old stranger kicked the bucket and I still have no idea how I feel about it. How can you come to grips with the truth about this bloke? When I think about my mum she’s there, real, a big slack woman, a whirl of feelings, smells, words, songs. Always she was very much somebody, in her body — a body with boobs drooping, eyes watchful, lips thin yet moist. Shut my eyes and she’s there — her shiny red arms as she swings a shiny black steel tray of shiny hot scones out of the electric oven, her armpits damp, the kitchen swooning with the scent of her sweat blended with the scents of baked butter and baked sugar and baked soda, the aroma of those hot crumbly yummy toothsome scones we’ll soon eat, piping hot, scooped out of a swaddling teatowel, slashed with lashings of yellow butter and bolted greedily, scalding the tongue in their hurry to the belly.

  Dad? No words, no warmth — no body.

  A quick flurry of little printed lies.

  MORSE, Malcolm Cyril. Dearly loved father and grandfather to Lenore, Daniel and Louise. At peace at last.

  ‘Hah!’ says Carmen. ‘Who’s at peace exactly? Dad? Or Lenore?’

  Yet we don’t care enough about our brother and sister to bother following up this line of inquiry. We sit looking at each other across our lattes, feeling stumped. So he’s dead. Yet somehow I seem to lack emotional closure, as we say these days, speaking our psychobabble. How could I hope for closure, anyway, when the old coot nev
er once during his lifetime even gave me an opening? You can’t close something never opened!

  ‘My new cat turns out to have some sort of scarring on her neck.’

  ‘Oh?’

  I’m not so very far away from my own death these days. Certainly much closer to my death than my birth. And as I sit thinking about my lack of grief for the old coot now that his cankered corpse has been slid into the white flames of the crematorium, I also think with a kind of grim comfort about the day to come when the same white flames will sting my own corpse. Comfort, because I know that my corpse will be mourned by real mourners. Tears will fall. Wails will rend the air. Carmen will be there, sorrowful. My daughters will be there — and maybe Jay. Will my lovely lad be there too? Comfort doesn’t last long, mind you. After I’ve thought for a bit about the day they’ll see off my body my next thought is — but they’ll die too! My witnesses. Carmen first, most likely. My daughters a lot later, and Jay. We’ll all switch off our cellphones. No witness of my dad’s life, of my life, of my sister’s life, of my daughters’ lives, of my lover’s life, will stay too long. Afterwards, after we’ve all gone — no knowledge, everything lost, everything forgotten. Gobsmacking, isn’t it? We scoot around, living our lives, yet always knowing that it ends with a blank. All the lessons we learn will get lost. And then in the end the sun itself will flare up, red, and afterwards will hunker down, white, whiter than the throat of any volcano, any crematorium, and our small ball of dirt and water will scorch away like a drop or sweat or snot on a nuclear reactor.

  ‘I took the scabby tabby to the vet,’ says my sis. ‘She’s now on a course of antibiotics, but the vet says she’s in good nick otherwise.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Want a chocolate?’

  ‘Yep, okay — wouldn’t say no.’

  ‘Good. Buy some for me when you buy yours, would you?’

  ‘Ha de ha.’

  ‘You think I’m not serious, don’t you?’