The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  After breakfast I went down to the beach for an early, hoping to avoid any of my old friends in the water. Got out an hour later feeling devo that I hadn’t seen them.

  Mum was in her studio, the ‘turret’, when I got home. It was a cube at the top of our house with a ribbon of window all the way round. With a sofa bed, bar fridge and ensuite, you could live there independently, which Mum sort of did for the months of in-house separation before Dad finally packed his bags. This morning she was sketching at the drafting table, with Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ open on the Mac screen beside her.

  ‘I brought you a cup of tea.’

  ‘How thoughtful, but I’m on a caffeine detox.’

  ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘Just another product launch, but it’s confidential so you mustn’t breathe a word.’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’ I made a three-finger salute.

  ‘My client, Sanctus Mineralis, have discovered the Holy Grail of the beauty industry – a secret ingredient that can delay the skin’s ageing process.’

  ‘That’s original.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t be interested.’

  ‘No, I am. What is it?’

  Mum opened an image file of seaweed. ‘They’ve bioengineered nanoparticles containing kelp spore seven hundred times smaller than a skin pore, which allows them to germinate inside the lower layers of skin and accelerate collagen production to a phenomenal rate. This will be a viable alternative to cosmetic surgery.’

  ‘How much for a jar?’

  ‘A seventy-five millilitre vial of the E-Radiata Serum™ will retail for around two-hundred and seventy dollars.’

  ‘Well within the reach of your average housewife.’

  Mum turned to face me with folded arms. ‘Ninety per cent of the women in the trials judged their appearance five to ten years younger post-treatment.’

  ‘Do you actually believe it?’

  ‘I believe the cross-platform marketing campaign will make the product fly off the shelves.’

  ‘Where do you fit in?’

  ‘Sanctus Mineralis are planning to upstage the opening of Fashion Week with a spectacular marine-themed launch, and they’ve given us the budget to pull it off.’

  ‘Cue the nude chick in shell.’ I snapped my fingers.

  ‘Yes, the Venus hero,’ she said, her eyes lighting up. ‘Imagine guests being served oysters and champagne inside a giant inflated pearl beside the harbour, while a choir sings something stirring by Enya.’ She played a YouTube clip of Enya singing ‘Only Time’ while she narrated the proposed action. ‘An enormous shell emerges from the sea and moves towards the shore as if blown by the wind. Ever so slowly it opens to reveal the goddess Venus. Lustrous tresses of golden hair and one hand protecting her modesty, the other holding an over-sized vial of E-Radiata Serum™, illuminated from within. Everybody takes photos.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘A banner unfurls that says, “Who knows? Only time” – which we don’t have the rights to use yet, but Morgan’s working on it. The guests are given goodie bags filled with product samples, a small gift to reward their endorsement on social media. Hashtag perfectly beautiful.’

  ‘Who’s playing Venus?’

  ‘Only the most divinely gorgeous creature on the planet right now.’

  ‘Vienna Voronova?’

  ‘Penny told you. That girl couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it.’

  Mum hadn’t always been a cog in the machine relentlessly promoting extravagant consumables. Decades before I was even a concept, she’d been the resident set designer for a radical theatre company. Late in the eighties, the government cut their funding so the company sought corporate sponsorship. She met Dad at one of the meetings. They fell in love and married, then she left the theatre scene to have Venn. When I was eight, Mum returned to work, staging small events for some of Dad’s clients. Four years later she formed her own events company, NOW BE TIGERS! She and Morgan had had a bumpy start, but now they were smashing it.

  I hadn’t brought My One Redeeming Affliction with me, but I found Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on Dad’s bookshelves and spent the rest of the day reading it. Later in bed, nightmares of transforming into the maniacal Mr Hyde, and committing heinous acts, had me tossing and turning. I woke early Sunday morning with my sheet in a ball on the ground, half-believing Nicole Parker had been well within reason for asking me if I was the beast. My nub was tender but I was afraid to measure it again. At the breakfast table Mum noticed that I kept touching myself, and I told her I had a sore back.

  After a hearty breakfast of French toast, Mum drove Venn and me to the Zen Gardens to help find a new backyard feature. She was immediately drawn to a granite Buddha, whose expansive stomach was being tickled by reeds. Disregarding the expense of chartering a helicopter to airlift him into our backyard, Mum began recording the Buddha’s dimensions with her FatMax®. Venn and I walked to the Pool of Eternal Bliss, which turned out to be a murky pond teeming with koi and a couple of scary eels. We crossed a stone bridge onto a miniature island, and I threw a pebble into the water.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Venn pulled me back. ‘You’ll traumatise them.’

  ‘Settle down. Fish love me,’ I said, then thought about little Pinky losing his tail in the school’s tank and left the fish alone.

  ‘The koi symbolises perseverance in times of adversity, because it can swim upstream like salmon,’ Venn said. ‘It’s also a charm for marital bliss.’

  ‘Maybe we should buy one for Mum and Dad at the gift shop?’

  ‘Too late. Mum told me she wouldn’t take him back in a million years,’ Venn said, extracting another Jenga block from my wobbly tower of false hope.

  ‘I thought it was a trial separation.’

  ‘They used that term to ease everybody into the idea that we’re no longer a family unit.’

  The truth hurts in different ways. Sometimes it’s a slap in the face. Today it was an elephant sitting on me and sharting. And still I persisted. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘That’s the burning question.’

  ‘He made some mistakes that can’t be fixed.’

  ‘He didn’t do anything that bad.’

  Venn shrugged. ‘That would be from his perspective, and I’m not going to argue against it. You have to live with him.’

  ‘Why are you acting like fucking Switzerland when it’s so obvious you hate him? You know something I don’t. Tell me what it is. I beg you.’

  Venn walked back over the bridge and I followed her to a little bench shaded by a Japanese maple. We sat down. She prefaced what she was about to say with a warning that it would change the way I felt about my father forever. And then she let it all out.

  After Mum’s fiftieth, one of the guests, who’d asked to remain anonymous, told Mum that she’d passed Dad’s study on the way to the bathroom and had caught sight of Dad in there with Maëlle. Apparently it looked like they were doing something they shouldn’t have been, but she couldn’t be certain. Mum questioned Dad directly and at first he was affronted but then he laughed, dismissing it by saying that he’d taken Maëlle there to sign a birthday card. His response only made Mum more suspicious, so she asked Maëlle to leave. Venn knew nothing about the reported sighting and took Dad’s side because she was so upset that Mum had evicted her friend for no reason. Maëlle had promised to update Venn on her travels, but the emails were brief and impersonal. The tension between Venn and Mum became close to unbearable for both of them while Venn was studying for the HSC, so Mum told her what the guest had revealed. Venn sent about ten emails to Maëlle asking if the allegations were true. Eventually she responded.

  Maëlle confirmed that Dad had taken her to the study to sign the birthday card but then he’d complained of a sore neck from the tension of preparing the party. She offered to give him a massage. He accepted. One thing led to another and they’d shared a kiss. She confessed that she’d been attracted to my father from the moment he picked her u
p at the airport, and then felt something building between them. But the kiss was an isolated incident – a one-off. A terrible mistake that she wished she could take back and would forever feel remorse for. Maëlle said that she and Dad had made a pact never to tell anybody, and now she’d broken it. She pleaded with Venn to keep the secret. Venn showed Mum the email, and the next day Mum told my father to leave or she would.

  Venn showed me Maëlle’s confession on her phone. I wanted to throw it into the Pool of Eternal Bliss. Instead I said, ‘That’s totally fucked up.’ I felt betrayed, to varying degrees, by everybody involved in the drama. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘We wanted to protect you from it.’

  ‘I’m always the last to know. Don’t tell anybody I do, though. I can’t deal with this right now.’ We walked back to the entrance and found Mum, still examining the Buddha.

  ‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘I can’t decide between this big guy and the water feature over there.’ She pointed to a stone bowl on a plinth that was overflowing with water pouring down from a spout above it.

  ‘Water bowl,’ I said.

  ‘I was leaning towards Buddha. We could have our own little meditation garden out the back.’

  ‘That thing’s gargantuan.’

  ‘Darling, he’d be dwarfed by the angophora.’

  ‘Mr Harris won’t like it,’ Venn said.

  ‘Then he might stop gawking over the fence.’

  Mum ordered the Buddha statue, but I doubted it would bring the serenity she hoped for.

  Late in the evening, as we drove from Signal Bay back to the city, I asked Mum if Nana Locke had bought the rescue dog because she was lonely without Pop.

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Tippi yaps a lot but your nana adores her.’

  Travelling through the harbour tunnel, I pondered my own sense of isolation and realised I was stuck in a limbo between Signal Bay and Kings Cross – and neither felt like home. It wasn’t the geographic separation that made me feel lost, so much as the emotional distance between my parents.

  Mum asked if I was all right as we approached the flashing Coca-Cola sign.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, distracted by one of its malfunctioning lights.

  Mum turned into Kings Cross Road and pulled over. ‘Promise you’ll tell me if anything’s bothering you.’ The driver behind blasted his horn. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow – okay?’ She leant over and kissed my cheek. ‘Love you.’

  ‘Love you too,’ I said as I got out.

  Standing on the footpath was an overweight guy with a comb-over, wearing a yellowed singlet and threadbare grey trackies devoid of elastic. He was staring at an illuminated rolling billboard that featured a blonde babe in a blue bikini biting into a Cornetto®, between ads for Vodafone® and home insurance. Each time the beautiful girl rolled away, he waved and his pants dropped to the pavement.

  ‘Good evening, Master Locke,’ Frank said as I walked into the lobby. ‘How was your weekend?’

  ‘Okay. Who’s the guy outside?’

  ‘You mean Leonard? He’s harmless. Been around these parts for yonks. They call him Loose Pants Lenny. He’s had the same pair since I’ve known him.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he get new ones?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have anything to keep himself busy.’

  My phone alarm woke me at 5.30 am and I was glad that squad provided a legitimate excuse to avoid my father. Bolstered by the lack of pain and swelling in my nether regions, I rode my bike to school and suffered no chafing. I wasn’t so worried about anybody spotting the nub – until I learnt that the swimming sets would be separated by three sessions of dry drill. Lucky I’d brought shorts, which I whipped on every time I got out of the pool.

  First was straight-arm raises with hand weights, Gelber using her megaphone to blast anybody who faltered. Second was linked-arm sit-ups, which felt like military training, Nads and Starkey muttering threats of violence to anybody dragging the chain. The final session involved jogging with knees to waist in a figure-eight formation like prancing ponies in team dressage, Mullows a thoroughbred with his ginger ponytail swishing from side to side.

  Alternating between wet and dry drills pushed me to the brink of my fitness level. I’d given it everything, hoping the exertion might somehow weaken the severity of anger I felt towards my father. But it only increased when I realised that I wouldn’t have been stuck there doing squad if he hadn’t cheated on Mum – and used my paralytic episode at the Nugents’ place as a pretext for dragging me into the city to share his luxury doghouse.

  In Maths, Monaro introduced the probability unit by stating that the likelihood of any particular event occurring at a given time and place could be predicted using a formula. And the more potentially havoc-wreaking the event – like a nuclear-reactor meltdown or terrorist attack – the more important for its probability to be calculated. He turned to write on the board and Tibor Mintz suddenly yelled ‘FUCK!’, which was probably a first. Monaro demanded an explanation, and Tibor said that he’d been stabbed in the left buttock. Starkey confessed by raising his arm, holding a pair of compasses. Monaro winced and sent Tibor to Student Welfare for a tetanus shot. Then, after rebuking Starkey for the assault, Monaro devised a formula for calculating the probability of his causing disruption in any class. Whatever variables were entered, the result was more than seventy per cent. Instead of expressing remorse, Starkey looked stoked that the chance of his acting like an arsehole could be so accurately predicted.

  At lunchtime I found a spot behind Old Block that catches the cool nor’-easter blowing across the harbour, beneath a Port Jackson fig that had been roped off. The tree’s trunk looked solid, its branches strong, but it was blighted by a pathogenic fungal infection that had weakened its structural integrity and could kill it. Pop Locke had been fighting fit when he’d been felled by the Pajero, but the tree reminded me of him. Probably because Venn had told me that if Pop was reincarnated as a tree, he would definitely be a Port Jackson fig. She would’ve hugged the diseased tree if she’d been here now. So I climbed under the rope, wrapped my arms around him and said, ‘I hope you get well soon.’

  With nobody else around, I took out My One Redeeming Affliction. I’d left off with Walter Hunnicutt possibly manipulating the planchette to communicate his dead wife’s wish for him to remarry. Funny how people manufacture or interpret ‘signs’ to support their dubious intentions or beliefs. I wondered for a moment how Dad would justify frenching the French house guest, who was the same age as my sister, if I confronted him. Then I opened the book to get the troubling mental picture out of my head.

  The following Monday, my grandfather, in a show of spontaneous benevolence, announced his decision to enrich the museum’s ornithology collection with five of his prized bowerbirds. The director responded to his generosity by allowing him to employ a studio assistant. Without deliberation, Walter chose his most promising student, Enoch Fernsby.

  On hearing the news, Esther was both indignant and aggrieved. Though opportunities of education and employment were usually withheld from women, there were some notable exceptions. Walter’s predecessor had been Jane Tost, the first woman employed at the museum and one of their finest taxidermists. How, then, could Esther’s father now spurn the only child who shared his passion for the natural world, and understood the agonisingly slow thrill of resurrecting the natural form of a creature, making it almost immortal? She knew more than all of his students combined.

  One week later, Walter attempted to console her by giving the museum her bowerbird illustrations to be displayed alongside the mounts – a dire miscalculation. Instead of being delighted with the surprise, Esther wrote that she had ‘gawped in utter disbelief’ at being robbed by her own father. Her devastation was made complete on discovering that he’d also given away the mounting of a cockatiel called Percy, who was once the family’s most treasured pet.

  The old dude from the junkyard had a stuffed cockatiel called Percy. What were the o
dds of two stuffed cockatiels having the same name? A million to one? Or maybe the old hermit’s Percy is the one from the book? Not even Monaro could come up with an algorithm to calculate the possibility of that.

  My curiosity about the cockatiel, combined with the recent revelations of Dad’s behaviour, dissolved any hesitation I felt about breaking his rule to stay away from the junkyard. I rode my bike down there after school and, pushing apart the vines that grew on the fence, saw the old dude pegging a pair of stained, blown-out grundies to a line strung between the plane tree and the fake totem pole.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, but he turned to go back inside so I yelled out and gave him a fright.

  ‘No need to shout,’ he said, approaching the fence. ‘What do you want, you little punk?’

  ‘I really like that bird of yours – the cockatiel. I was wondering where you got him?’

  ‘Percy? Can’t have him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I don’t actually want him. I just wanted to know where you found him?’

  ‘You stole my bike and now you want the bird.’

  ‘My dad left you two hundred dollars.’

  ‘Poppycock!’ He peered through the fence and saw my bike on its stand. ‘You’ve stripped off the fancy parts. Ungrateful little bugger!’

  ‘Sorry. No disrespect, but I thought all that stuff was more suitable for a girl.’

  ‘Well, you’re hardly the finest specimen of manhood.’

  ‘Look who’s talking.’

  ‘Piss off, you little turd!’

  That didn’t go well.

  I pushed my bike back up to T H E E Y R I E and got stuck into homework. When Dad arrived, I didn’t come out.

  Later he called me to join him for dinner. Spag bol is one of the few dishes he’s competent at, but my simmering resentment towards him had stolen my appetite. Holed up in my room, I decided to act like Dad was a stranger who I had to be polite to. Completely consumed with his work, he didn’t even seem to notice my absence.