Love, Charlie Mike

by Kate de Goldi

  ‘—it’s just between you and me, and I understand why you want to keep it secret, even from your closest, I understand that, so I’ll never, never say anything, but Gran, would you tell me, please, just tell me who he is, this man you’re coming to see?’

  ‘I’ve told the priest,’ she says, still looking at me. ‘And he said I should stop. Go and sin no more, he said. And I said I would. And I will. Soon. But not just yet. Like St Augustine.’

  I nod yes, yes, I’m with her all the way.

  ‘Who is he, Gran?’ I say softly.

  And then she bats away my hand, frowns at me. ‘Who?’

  Gone. Spell broken. Conversational thread unravelled. Just like that.

  ‘The man you’re going to see.’ But I know she’s lost it.

  ‘What man?’ See. Lost it.

  It’s even harder to accept this time, being so near, being washed off course again. She’s leaning over now, frowning down the aisle at the Japanese group. I don’t care. Too bad if she insults them, they can fight their own battles.

  I feel deathly tired, too tired even to cry. I should think about Greymouth, what to do there, but I can’t be bothered. I might never be bothered with anything ever again.

  And we’re there. The train’s slowing, the carriage is coming alive, Duncan’s signing off, people are rising, reaching for bags, jerking as the train motion ceases suddenly.

  ‘Greymouth,’ reads Gran. ‘Oh, goodness. We’re here.’ Out with the compact, stretch the mouth, dab, dab with the powder. Put the compact away.

  I don’t know if I’ll even be able to get up and walk.

  ‘Joseph’ll meet me,’ she says, eyes bright. ‘He’s called Joe, but I call him Joseph. In private.’ Out with the compact again, stretch the lips, dab, dab. Click shut. Put away. ‘Greymouth,’ she says, reading the sign again.

  I stare at her. He’s called Joe? But it can’t be. Can it? Joe is Sonny’s grandfather. Jim’s brother. Can she have let it slip out as easily as that? No prompting? Like passing me a nice cup of tea. Thank you very much. Joe, was it? Fancy that. I can’t believe it. Impossible. But she said it. She said Joe, meeting her, well, why would he meet her? And she calls him Joseph in private. In private.

  But there are thousands of Joes. Could be a complete coincidence. But I don’t think it is. Deep down, I’m a believer.

  I can’t move. I’m staring at her and her lips are moving, but I’m not listening, my mind’s whizzing, frantically reviewing information, reorganising it, re-fitting history, redrawing the world yet again. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s Joe! I feel hysterical. Stunned. Overcome.

  There is a denouement, I think, giddy with triumph. And it is a catharsis. There should be a thunderous standing ovation.

  I look at everyone moving out, shuffling down the aisle, oblivious to the tiny bombshell Gran’s just placed on the table between us.

  I did it. I got it. I put my grandmother on the train, I steered her down a muddied Memory Lane, and it happened. It absolutely happened. One way or another. Brenna was five hundred per cent wrong. I got inside my grandmother’s head and miraculously, incredibly, against the odds, I found what I wanted.

  I want to hug her. But I want to stay very still too, hold the triumph. I want to imagine telling Dad, gift-wrapping this with the story of the whole trip, handing him the denouement, watching his face flower when he uncovers the gem at the centre.

  ‘Greymouth,’ reads Gran again, and I refocus. The tiredness has gone, vaporised. I feel euphoric. I want to hurl through the next ninety minutes, through the train ride back, into the taxi, up the path, to my unwitting family, soon to be blessed.

  ‘Here we are then,’ I say, looking where Gran’s looking, out the window at the teeming rain, the platform, the sprinkling of people, the little station,’ the white board with the black letters mounted on the stone wall: GREYMOUTH. And then my heart leaps to my throat, my skin creeps, a pulse beats crazily in my neck, and I see that my denouement is longer and more complicated than I could have known. This final act has another scene.

  Standing beneath the sign, hands deep in his coat pocket, eyes fixed on the train, his expression quite unreadable, is Sonny.

  As much as I want to turn instantly from the window and duck, hide under the table, it’s impossible. His broad figure is striking against the stark station wall. I look and look; my eyes are riveted, but so is my brain — it’s seized and gluey, unable to deal with this development, the what the hell now?

  ‘Yes, here we are,’ says Gran, getting up, and as she rises, busies herself with her coat, Sonny’s eyes, scanning the windows, find ours, and me, staring; he stares back, inscrutable, for several seconds, then raises his hand slowly, a salute of some sort, but indecipherable.

  ‘Chop, chop,’ says Gran. ‘Where are my suitcases?’

  But there’s Duncan, ready to heave the suitcases from the rack.

  ‘You ladies leaving us?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘no we’re just …’

  ‘—you won’t need those then,’ says Duncan.

  ‘I suppose not,’ says Gran gaily. She’s off, down some path, new, old, it’s impossible to tell — I haven’t thought about where Gran’s singular drumbeat will take her once we hit Greymouth.

  ‘Sightseeing then,’ says Duncan. ‘Off to the Bonsai, bit of apple strudel?’

  I sit down, panic rising. This is beyond me. But ‘Bonsai’ and ‘strudel’ chime discordantly for Gran and next second she’s doing her Filthy Nip-Kraut number and everything’s so out of hand that I hear it, but do nothing.

  ‘Charlie?’ says a voice, cutting under Gran’s. ‘Charlie, you coming out?’ Sonny towers in the low ceilinged carriage, fills the narrow passage.

  I can’t speak.

  ‘Could I have my cases, please?’ says Gran, casting Sonny immediately in the role of porter.

  Then we’re following him out of the train, onto the platform, to seats under the awning, away from the rain, which still comes down, steady and heavy, a perfect accompaniment.

  ‘If you could just wait here a while,’ says Sonny to Gran, and she does. She sits, knees together, a good, biddable senior citizen, while he directs me further down the platform, around the corner to some steps where we stand only feet apart now, after so many months separated by oceans and continents.

  And this is what gets to me, finally: the ease of his manoeuvrings, his authority and my faltering; his capacity, my paralysis. First he’s unavailable, next he’s there when I least expect it. And the other thing, it’s wiped out by his presence. The delight’s gone. I’m captive again, to self-doubt, confusion. And I hate it.

  ‘Fuck you, Sonny Callaghan!’ I say, low and foul. ‘Who are you to dispose of my grandmother so conveniently? If you knew what’s just happened, what I’ve just done. You going to dispose of me now? Eh? I wasn’t going to see you even, because you haven’t bothered to send me one word, not one word in ten weeks, you haven’t told me anything. I was … you … you broke my heart, Sonny Callaghan.’ The tears fly from my eyes. I can’t stop them. Weeks of pent-up agony boil over and I just want to flay Sonny Callaghan, my beautiful cousin.

  ‘What’re you doing here, anyway?’ My voice is ugly, spitting. ‘I don’t even want to speak to you now. When would you ever have got in touch with me, how would I ever have known, if Atamira hadn’t rung? I would’ve just gone on wondering, half hoping, half despairing. You hurt me, Sonny. After all our loveliness. You hurt me so—’

  But I have to stop, because he’s so still, his head down, two tears marking shiny paths down his cheeks, and when I pause I see that his cheeks are thinner, his hair is different, not army-cropped and bristly, but curling round his forehead.

  There’s a long pause, nothing said. I stare past Sonny, at a tour bus parked on the road side of the station, the Japanese party boarding, their guide waiting, respectful. It seems such a long time since Springfield.

  ‘Charlie,’ says Sonny, his voice only just under control. ‘I’m
sorry, I’m so, so, sorry, I … shit, Charlie, shit, I’m—’ He looks up, away, his eyes brimming, his face crumpled.

  The liberating wash of fury dries up. I’m aghast. This isn’t the cruisy, invulnerable Sonny of six months ago.

  ‘What’s happened, Sonny, what’s wrong?’ I touch his arm, but he moves away from my touch, and he’s already recovering, breathing deep, tightening his face.

  ‘Jesus, Charlie. I’m sorry.’ He pauses, swallowing, breathing some more, marking time. I’m breathing too, in, out, in, out, slow, slow, looking at him, longing to touch the hairline at the base of his skull, wishing he’d meet my eyes. ‘It was a terrible thing to do, I know, Jesus, I know it.’

  He knows it. That’s something, I suppose.

  ‘You got that number, Calvin, you bloody half-wit?’ A disembodied, full-throated request surges into our orbit and dissipates.

  ‘I got in the shit, Charlie.’ His voice is steadier now. ‘I’ll tell you about it, I’ll tell you the whole story’ — he takes a big, trembly breath — ‘soon, but … not yet. I can’t tell it yet, it’s too — That was the problem … over there,’ he says, not looking at me, starting down another road, ‘I couldn’t begin to tell it from over there, I didn’t know where to start, and those fucking little cards, I tried to tell you stuff … you know, the fucking stupid UN, the … the dead-end … but, shit, half the time I just couldn’t say it.’

  I want to touch him, just hold his hand. But his recoil before was like a slap, it’s sent a message as potent as his silence over the last weeks.

  ‘Can you just tell me a bit?’ I’m trying not to panic, not to be alarmed by his looking away, his distance.

  ‘I jumped the fence.’ He’s looking down the street, his voice flat. ‘Goodbye soldier boy—’

  Goodbye soldier boy? ‘You …’

  ‘I left. I deserted, Charlie.’

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

  A big car, a Valiant, packed with bodies, swerves round the corner of the station, spraying us with water. Two guys lean out their windows, call something, laugh and gesticulate. I remember Gran, patiently waiting on the seat. Or maybe not.

  ‘So how come you’re home?’ I ask, almost conversationally. Perhaps we’ll just do it like this: bald questions, flat answers. No touching. No eye contact.

  ‘Sent home. Detained. Well …’ He’s not looking at me, but I watch him, I see the muscles in his cheeks tighten, relax, tighten again. He’s gathering his thoughts, organising the sequence, because then he gives me the bald outline, unemotional. ‘I deserted, but I took weapons with me. I had a plan. MPs came after me. I was put in detention. Sent back. Shrink. Let go. Awaiting discharge.’

  He looks at me now, full face, and I can see how drawn, how much older that face is — dark pits under his eyes, lines of tiredness. He’s not the warrior king I fell for eight months ago, not the confident sportsman who chased my father round the tennis court, not the cool dude with a past who taught me to drive, showed me his cooking skills, not the ardent, funny, sweet-tongued man who kissed me breathless and made me weak with desire. He’s a man with tears in his eyes and a story that’s too hard to tell.

  ‘I didn’t not think of you,’ he says. He’s biting his lip, trying not to cry. ‘I thought of you. But over there, that place, the rest of the world was like a fiction, a wet fucking dream. The rest of the world …’ He stops again and I watch him crying; I’m sick at what he’s saying, seeing him cry, but I’m weirdly detached too. In the middle of all this I think with absurd clarity: your grandfather is probably my grandfather, which means we’re half first cousins, actually closer in blood, but not too close. But probably it’s all going to be irrelevant anyway.

  Duncan is over the road, under a shop roof; he’s holding a salad roll, drinking a cup of something steaming. He’s watching Greymouth, the ambling pedestrians, the old cars; he’s sniffing the salt air.

  He had a plan? What kind of plan? Who was he seeing? Who was he taking weapons to? Muslims? Croats? Fugitive Sonny: freighted with ammunition, ploughing through snowdrifts, nervous as a fox with pack-dogs at his heels.

  ‘I can’t get rid of it,’ says Sonny. ‘I can’t get that fucking place out of my head. They got me out of there, but the fuckers couldn’t get the place out of me. Ha.’ No smile.

  ‘You know what Ma says.’ Brenna’s voice rips through my thoughts. ‘You look at them and you ask yourself: do I want them in sickness or just rude good health?’

  What about us? I want to shout. Give me a happy ending, Sonny. Tell me that through all your misery, despite everything, you still love me. You want to be with me, do Happyeverafter. But I want to be loving too, I mean really loving. I want to be two metres tall, barrel-chested, old beyond my years, wise and tough, capable of anything. Someone to lean on, whatever the outcome.

  I think of Launcelot and Guinevere. I think of Anne of Green Gables, the epochs in her life. And I think of Gran. Tough, for sure. Heroic in her own way, coping with disaster, burying her grief. Brenna would say this was a seminal moment. And she’d laugh at the double entendre, blow deft, celebratory smoke rings.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say to Sonny at last, feeling about a century old ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to explain now. It can wait.’

  I’ve said it. I’ve given him licence to withdraw, to retreat into his bunker of private pain. I’ve given him permission to leave me no wiser, and feel absolution.

  ‘No,’ he says, surprising me. ‘It shouldn’t wait. I want to try. I owe you.’ He bites his lip, his head nods slightly, almost rhythmically, as his mind’s eye recalls the sequence. ‘It was a Muslim family, two brothers; they’d been fucked over so many times. I got friendly with them. They wanted ammunition—’

  But now — can you believe this? — I’m in overload. Muslim brothers, weapons, a soldier gone awol: I can’t compute it.

  ‘Sonny,’ I blurt, hardly believing my tactlessness. ‘I’ve got to get Gran, make sure she’s okay. And I’ve got to ring Dad, let him … I’ve found—’

  ‘Jesus,’ says Sonny, wrenched from Bosnia, shaking his head.

  ‘Sorry, but Gran—’

  ‘No.’ He holds up his hand. That hand, his big soft fingers, I want to grab them, kiss them. A remote possibility now. ‘He’s coming, they’re coming, your folks. They’re on their way—’

  ‘Excuse me.’ And there’s Gran, beside me, a bobbing madam, very put out. ‘Where is everybody? Is there somebody coming? Is there a taxi, thank you very much?’

  ‘Sorry Gran,’ I say, ‘just coming. Dad’s coming?’ I ask, confused again.

  ‘Finn rang,’ says Sonny slowly. ‘When he told them about . . .’ he gestures at Gran, ‘they freaked a bit, decided to drive over, they left about ten, they’re going to the folks—’

  ‘Finn rang you?’

  ‘Who’s Finn?’ says Gran crossly. ‘Is he collecting us? Who’s collecting us?’

  This is so mad. Here we are standing under an eave, the rain pelting centimetres from our faces, Saturday Greymouth meandering past us, and between the three of us, the old lady and the girl and the man, there’s so much hanging that’s important, but we’re stuck on the banal.

  ‘Hang on, Gran,’ I say patiently, looking at Sonny.

  ‘Finn rang,’ he says, ‘and told me what you were doing, that you were coming. And that your folks were on their way. He thought I might want to get to you first, here — in case you all arrived together, you know …’

  Finn, eh?

  Sonny nods. ‘He’s cool.’

  He is a cool guy, I admit, glad about it.

  ‘Sonny,’ I start, wanting to tell him the crazy new hiccough in the story.

  ‘They sent all your letters on,’ says Sonny, interrupting, back with us, our impasse. ‘I read them, but the stuff you were telling me … I was too caught up in the place, what I was going to do …’ He trails off.

  ‘How come it wasn’t in the news,’ I ask, ‘what you did?’ There’s that strange, almost
chatty tone to my voice again.

  ‘What wasn’t in the news?’ says Gran. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘They hushed it up. Stuff like that, they do deals. It happens . . .’ Sonny looks sick, closes his eyes, makes a great effort. ‘I’m a mess, Charlie,’ he blurts. ‘I can’t deal with … I’m no good for you at the moment, I’ve got too much shit to—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Gran, ‘that’ll be enough of that. I’ve got no idea who you are, young man, but I don’t like your language.’

  I look at Sonny, at his tight face. I’m back in that earlier moment, that knowing moment when I wanted to give him something — some peace, the comfort of time and silence.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, reaching out, touching his arm. ‘It’s okay, it really is.’ Too bad about your sensibilities, Gran, I think, looking only at Sonny. ‘I love you.’ I reach up, put my arms about his neck, kiss his cheek.

  His arms stay by his side, but I have his cheek, briefly, against my cheek.

  ‘Whenever,’ I say, wanting to say it, but wanting to crawl away and cry too. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘We are in public, girl! Pull yourself—’

  But the Valiant swoops round the corner again, the driver leans on his customised horn and the tune, blaring and fitful and harsh, drowns Gran, covers us all briefly, and — I swear this is true — the tune on that horn is ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.

  Epilogue

  In the Taramakau Valley we meet up with the railway track again, the road and the track crossing each other after that, swapping sides, competing for prominence, all the way back to the city.

  Gran’s asleep beside me, her little head against the window, cushioned by a pillow. I see Gran’s hand on the seat, loose and unfurled, and I rest my hand inside hers; her fingers close momentarily on mine, a sleepy, absent clasp.

  Mum and Dad are quiet, busy with their own thoughts, no doubt, after a long afternoon and evening, talking, and comforting.

  ‘About tennis,’ I said when I saw Dad.