The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  ‘He’s on his way over. We’ve enjoyed having you, buddy, and you’re welcome to stay for as long you need. But I can’t stand between you and your father.’

  ‘He can’t force me to go with him.’

  ‘Of course not, but—’

  ‘Thanks for having me, Mr Locke,’ Pericles said, defeat tugging down on the corners of his polite smile. I’ll pack my stuff and get out of here before he arrives.’

  I followed Pericles but Dad stopped me.

  ‘Let me talk to him,’ he said.

  Dad somehow persuaded Pez to stay and at least speak to his father, but he couldn’t eat his dinner, and when Mr Pappas buzzed the intercom he flipped out and went to the bathroom. Dad greeted Con at the door. Short and stocky like Manos, he was carrying a box of vegetables under his arm, which he presented to Dad.

  ‘There’s a fine-looking specimen,’ Dad said, lifting a bunch of silverbeet for me to see. ‘Are you a greengrocer, Con?’

  ‘Nah, that’s my brother. I work in airport operations. Potter around in the garden for stress relief. I hope Pericles hasn’t been any trouble?’

  ‘It’s been a pleasure having him. Lincoln, could you go get him?’

  ‘Lincoln?’ Con said. ‘You’re the boy who knocked him out of the relay team?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Good job. It might put a bit of fire back into his belly.’

  ‘He doesn’t need it,’ I said without bothering to add that I’d already been kicked out of squad. I went and knocked on the bathroom door. Pericles told me to come in, and I found him sitting on the toilet with the seat down.

  ‘I think you should come out,’ I said. ‘Your father seems in a good mood.’

  ‘He’ll be laying on the charm offensive.’

  Dad and Con were on the sofa with beers when we returned to the lounge room. Con’s jaw practically disengaged when he saw his son’s bruised face. ‘Pericles, have you been in a fight?’

  ‘No. I just got beaten up for being a poofter.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that in front of these nice people.’

  ‘Are you suddenly trying to be politically correct now?’

  ‘No. You’ve misunderstood me because you don’t listen properly. I don’t have a problem with you being a homosexual, but this is what happens when you wave it about in people’s faces.’

  Pericles closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  I jumped in. ‘Pericles was standing up for me and our friend Tibor against a homophobic bully.’

  Con looked confused. ‘Is there a whole group of you at the school?’

  ‘I’m not gay, Mr Pappas. Pericles and Tibor were the only people who made me feel welcome when I started at Crestfield. Pericles lent me his goggles and taught me how to swim butterfly properly.’

  ‘That’s commendable, son.’

  ‘Then why are you always so disappointed in me?’ Pericles said.

  ‘I’m only disappointed that you’re choosing this lifestyle.’

  ‘Don’t start that again in front of everybody. I need some air.’ Pericles walked out to the balcony. Dad left me with Con to fetch another couple of beers. Con immediately dropped his attempt at the nice-guy façade and pointed his finger at me.

  ‘I hope you’re not secretly his boyfriend.’

  ‘Afraid not, Mr Pappas.’

  Dad returned with the beers and a bowl of unshelled pistachios. Something about the way Con opened them with his teeth instead of his fingers and then chomped away caused my tail to rise and prickle. I wanted to knock the bowl out of his hands and tell him to eat with his mouth closed.

  Pericles came in and sat a distance away from us, backwards on a dining chair.

  ‘Sit properly,’ Con said, ‘or you’ll break the good people’s furniture.’ Pericles turned the chair around and sat stiffly with his hands clasped in his lap, silently mocking Con’s directive. ‘A man’s home is his castle, Pericles. And the castle has rules. When you come home you’ll follow my rules until you turn eighteen and then you can run around and do whatever you like. That’s reasonable. I’m sure Mr Locke would agree with me.’ He looked at Dad for backup.

  Dad looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes, Con, it’s true. Every family has rules, spoken and unspoken. But I’d be the worst kind of hypocrite if I sat here pretending that I hadn’t broken one of the most fundamental ones. Because I already lied about it more than once and lost the trust of my family in the process. This isn’t my castle, Con. It’s just where I live after my wife threw me out.’

  ‘No need to elaborate,’ he said and walked over to Pericles, gripped his shoulders and shook him twice. ‘All I ever want is the best for you, Perilakimu. Will you come home with me now? Your mother’s been sick with worry.’

  Pericles surrendered himself with a small nod. I followed him to the guest room to get his stuff.

  ‘That was his best behaviour you saw tonight. He’ll start yelling at me the moment we get in the car.’ Pericles lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Sorry about all the drama I’ve caused, Lincoln.’ He looked up. ‘And thank you for letting me stay here. You saved my life.’

  ‘Now you’re being dramatic.’

  ‘No, fully literal. I was teetering on the brink for a while. I was really fucking hating on myself and lost hope of ever feeling different. But something inside me has changed, even if my father hasn’t. I used to be terrified of him and now I’m not. It’s because I’m not afraid of who I am anymore.’

  ‘That’s good. You know I’ve always got your back.’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘It was a short stay but I’m going to miss having you here. Dad will too.’

  I hugged Pericles hard – square on, not just right shoulder to shoulder. No pat-pat-patting on the back. And I told him that I loved him.

  He said, ‘A hundred per cent.’

  After Pericles and Con left, Dad and I pulled apart everything that had just happened. ‘Con’s a hardarse,’ I said. ‘But at least his visit tonight has made you seem not so bad in comparison.’

  ‘That’s lavish praise.’

  ‘Seriously, that was huge when you spoke so honestly about yourself. You didn’t have to, but it shut Con up.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. One day when you’re a parent you’ll come to understand how difficult it is raising a family. And how wonderful.’

  ‘I don’t want to have children. The idea doesn’t appeal to me.’

  ‘Not right now, but the time will come when you’ve settled down with the right person.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I’d barely started coming to terms with the tail, and wasn’t thrilled about the idea of reproducing that part of myself. Maybe Edwin had? I said goodnight to Dad and returned to the book.

  In Chicago, I took the world’s longest elevator to the rooftop of the Auditorium building, where I caught a glimpse of Lake Michigan through the smog. After playing Pittsburgh and Cleveland, we reached our final destination, New York City. America’s largest town seemed no better than Sydney in its planning or sanitary arrangements. Everywhere squalor nipped at the heels of extravagance. Immigrant factory workers were packed into four- and five-storey tenement buildings with no gaps between, yet not a quarter-mile away were grand apartment buildings, elegant theatres and department stores with marble flooring that made Pemberton’s Emporium seem hardly magnificent at all. There were fancy dining establishments that my father would’ve loved, and just down the street, food carts in their hundreds selling fried potato knishes, baked pretzels, pickles and clams, nuts and sweet pies.

  The population was a heaving mass of almost three million people, each seemingly intent on getting somewhere fast, seizing the opportunity to make a new life for themselves by working around the clock. And when they stopped for just a moment of relief, there were two places they visited: the green of Central Park or the blue seaside pleasure resort of Coney Island, Brooklyn.

  Coney Island was the birthplace of the manufactured
dream and there was no greater dream-maker in those early days than the Fearless Frogman, Paul Boyton. After performing countless aquatic feats around the globe and touring with P. T. Barnum, he’d capitalised on his fame by opening Sea Lion Park, the first enclosed outdoor amusement park in America. Built around an artificial lagoon, it featured a water flume ride and the world’s first looping roller-coaster. Unfortunately, the loop’s diameter was only twenty-five feet and the sudden transition into the thrilling climax gave so many riders whiplash the ride was permanently closed. The sea lion shows proved more successful, especially when Boyton joined the performance. He loved challenging the visitors to swimming races and, with the advantage of a rubber buoyancy suit, he always won.

  By the park’s third season, the novelty-hungry public had seen just about every conceivable act that could be performed on the water’s surface. Hungry for a piece of Boyton’s pie, Irving Melinkoff had purchased a small plot of land close by and come up with a brilliant point of difference – he would allow the audience to see underwater! He had an enormous glass tank built, three-quarters of it underground. It was surrounded by two curving stairways descending to a cavernous viewing area. Electric light bulbs were installed behind the tank, illuminating the walls with magnified ripples, and there was an air pump at the bottom that released flurries of bubbles.

  Melinkoff planned to open the Underwater Grotto with The Battle of the Atlantis Brothers, starring Hilda Groot as the mermaid princess, with Paulo and I fighting for her affection. He began promoting the show before even bothering to ask if Paulo could swim, assuming that with webbed fingers and toes he’d be a natural. But Paulo had never been in anything deeper than a bath and I was given just one week to train him. Though his limbs were extremely short, his torso was powerful, so I taught him the rippling motion of the dolphin kick and soon he was gliding through the water as if born to it. Hilda had grown up on Lake Michigan, and with the addition of a rubber tail easily outclassed both of us. Advertising bills featuring a photo of Hilda in the tank, flanked by Paulo and me brandishing tridents, were pasted up all over Coney Island and drew a crowd at least five times the venue’s capacity.

  Never before had the public had an opportunity to view bodies underwater – bodies barely concealed by clinging suits, magnified into god or monster-like proportion by thick glass. Never before had they been able to scrutinise so closely such strange forms as those belonging to Paulo and me. And just as Pemberton’s display of authentic artefacts had lent credibility to the fake hybrid creatures surrounding them, so Paulo’s and my abnormalities lent plausibility to Hilda’s tail. A New York Times reporter, so impressed by the illusion, wrote a tongue-in-cheek article espousing the existence of mermaids, and Hilda Groot became famous almost overnight.

  Hilda’s sudden rise to stardom, and corresponding earning capacity, made her even more desirable to Melinkoff. He took her to restaurants and shows, and lavished her with flowers, chocolates and jewellery. She accepted the gifts but resisted his passes. This strange dance continued for weeks until one day she returned every gift that hadn’t perished or been consumed. Melinkoff suspected she’d found a lover, but his imagination failed when it came to airing his conjectures of who that could be. Then, one night, he spied them together down near the Elephant Hotel: Hilda Groot and Paulo Esposito, ravishing one another in public view, beneath an almost full moon.

  Delirious with jealousy, but lacking the dignity to confront his rival directly, Melinkoff worked his revenge into the plot of the aquatic drama. He switched Paulo’s character from ill-fated hero to a lecherous villain whose appearance was the result of an unnatural coupling. Seven times every day Melinkoff would stir the latent prejudice of the audience with his melodramatic narration, whipping them into a jeering chorus. Seven times Hilda was forced to revile the man she loved. And seven times Paulo would be strangled by me, his truest friend. Of course, up until that point we were only acting, but in the dying moments of the new, more violent finale, Melinkoff would delay the killing of the lights. Paulo, exhausted by the struggle, would be forced to lie motionless on the tank’s floor, sometimes blacking out before the lights.

  I recalled the photo I’d seen at the exhibition on my birthday, the one of Edwin and Paulo with their tridents on either side of Hilda. With stunted limbs, Paulo couldn’t have been more than a metre tall and yet Hilda Groot, the beautiful mermaid princess, had fallen in love with him. What was Paulo’s secret?

  The thick glass tank would have enabled the audience to ogle the performers’ bodies in their ‘clinging suits’, and to see Paulo’s and Edwin’s unusual features magnified. The possibility of anybody spotting mine in the pool had terrified me. I gained a new respect for these so-called freaks, who for the sake of their families had put themselves on display for the world to see. Maybe it was Paulo’s courage that had won Hilda’s heart?

  Saturday morning I went down to visit Bert. The gate was unlocked so I walked around the back. Crimson chair empty, no pink rubber ring. I called through the flyscreen and got no reply, so let myself into the kitchen. All of the objects were neatly arranged on the shelves, with different coloured stickers attached. The kitchen was immaculately clean and smelling of lemon Jif™ – not usually the scent of trouble, but today it was.

  A woman’s voice came from upstairs. Nothing more said than a casual ‘shit’, as if somebody had asked her what cows do besides eat grass and make milk. Bert had never mentioned friends – not a high priority for a hermit. And I knew that, statistically, burglars were mostly men in a hurry. Maybe it was a mental-health outreach worker, or a volunteer from Meals on Wheels?

  I sneaked back out and rang the cowbell. There were footsteps coming down the stairs. A silhouette behind the flyscreen.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m here to help Bert get things ready for the antiques and vintage sale.’

  ‘Which school do you attend?’

  ‘Crestfield Academy.’

  ‘I’m not aware of any arrangement to donate articles for a sale.’

  ‘It’s not for school. Bert’s having a garage sale before he moves.’

  She withered me with her eyes. ‘I’ve heard troubling stories about Crestfield boys. Please go away now.’ She closed the door, but I knocked until she reopened it.

  ‘Your presence here is unwanted.’

  ‘I just want to see Bert. He’s a friend of mine.’

  The woman clicked her tongue and shook her head. She walked away then returned, dusting something off her shoulder. ‘Very well. You’d better come in.’ She opened the door and directed me to sit. She had short black hair with a jagged fringe that made her eyes look impossibly blue. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but Bert had a seizure. They say it happened three days ago.’

  ‘Oh no. Poor Bert. I knew he wasn’t very well. Lucky St Vincent’s is so close. If you’re picking up some stuff you should probably take Percy, his cockatiel.’

  The woman’s mask cracked, like a sheet of white ice breaking from an iceberg and sliding into the blue sea. And I floated somewhere safer above, watching a stupid schoolkid being told bad news by a woman in a sharp white suit. Her lips were moving but the kid couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  ‘What?’ The kid was me but younger, smaller and naïve. ‘What?’ His mind tried to push the words back out of his ears. ‘What?’ Before they could take root. ‘What?’ he said, again and again, because he couldn’t think of anything else.

  The woman took a deep breath. Cleared her throat. Recomposed herself and lifted her head with the mask firmly back in place.

  This incongruity – this dizzy chasm between the terrible news and the forced poise of the messenger – induced vertigo. The kitchen tilted and revolved like the automatic toilet the time old Bert had come charging up on Miss Daisy to rescue me. I closed my eyes and almost heard him yelling at Nads, Mullows and Starkey, scaring them away again. Bert was outside waiting for me. DOOR OPENING.

  I opened my eyes. Th
e woman with precision-jagged black hair was sitting opposite me in Bert’s kitchen but there was no Bert anywhere. She touched my knee. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Where’s Bert? Can I see him?’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’ She poured me a glass of water. It seemed a kind gesture but as I drank she tapped her fingernails on the Formica, and the dark alchemy of impatience turned the water bitterly metallic in my mouth. ‘The funeral service is on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid it’s family only.’

  Bert is dead.

  Who appointed her to inform me? What was she doing in Bert’s house? In her white pants and white jacket, in Bert’s house? I asked if she was the white lady from White Lady Funerals.

  ‘No.’ She almost smiled. ‘My name is Lana. I’m Bert’s daughter.’

  ‘Bert never . . . You didn’t visit much?’

  ‘We live in Melbourne. I used to make the effort so that my daughter could get to know her grandfather – but over time we stopped coming.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My father had become a very bitter man and he made our visits difficult. In fact, over time, unbearable. My mother left him a very long time ago – nineteen seventy-nine.’

  ‘Ruby?’

  ‘Yes, Ruby.’ She waved her arm around. ‘All of this was her dream and she left it behind when she walked out on him, took nothing but me and the car. She was a brave woman.’

  ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘I was an only child.’

  ‘Bert talked about someone called Johnny.’

  ‘Did he? Well, there you go – his memory was very disordered.’ Without missing a beat, she said, ‘Please excuse me now. I have a lot to do.’

  ‘He talked about Johnny and fighting. Was your father a soldier?’

  Lana looked at the ceiling and drew a deep breath. ‘Johnny Drinkwater and my father were best mates from the age of five. At school they made a pact to join the army. Thirteen years later Johnny enlisted but my father didn’t pass the medical. Some spinal issue. Johnny went off to fight in the Korean War and was very badly injured. My father believed it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been by his side.’