We. Are. Family.

by Paul Mitchell

  Peter’s never heard of hypochondriacs, and that night he learns another term: Chinese bladder. It’s how Peter’s mum describes David’s need to empty himself every hour after he’s added beer. On one of his returns from the bathroom, he stops and points at the sliding doors.

  ‘What’s that?’

  None of the Cranes look. And the Stevensons know the chemist’s joking ways by now. But David keeps on.

  ‘What the bloody hell was that?’

  There’s ivy on the trellis, an empty outdoor setting, and a bin lid-style barbecue, black from frying sausages.

  ‘What?’ Wendy asks, her thin smoker’s lips drawn tight.

  ‘It came down over there...’

  David’s at the doors and opening them, stepping onto the porch and saying something to the backyard.

  ‘...it had red lights, and green, and it was glowing,’ he adds on his way back to the table. Wendy has a look on her face like a teacher watching a brilliant but problematic student. Is her David using an old trick or a new one? Peter can’t tell, then or later. But Wendy joins in when everyone else starts asking questions.

  Could you see aliens? Did they have lightsabers? How close was it?

  UFOs are the talk for half an hour. Peter says he used to believe in them. David says he should, because one just landed in his backyard! Ron brings discussion of the first cricket Test to the rescue. David doesn’t joke anymore that night. He glances now and then at the sliding doors, and disappears through them for a smoke as often as he goes to the toilet.

  The Stevensons become close friends with the Cranes. Peter plays football with Andrew, and David joins Ron’s tennis team as a fill-in. The chemist never sees another UFO and he dies of lung cancer in his early 50s, leaving Wendy a widow for the second time.

  David is the only dad Peter sees die. That’s one more than he wanted to see, and two more than the Crane boys wanted to see. He visits David with his mum in the sick room at the chemist’s house and David manages to joke. As Peter leaves, he takes a last look at the suddenly old man’s bulbous head and wafer skin. It’s stale pickle grey, and flaky enough to float from his bones.

  Peter’s father says he should never have visited him.

  ‘Your father is under a lot of pressure,’ his mum says, and Peter wonders, if UFOs exist, can they see in windows? Can they see when sons become teenagers who don’t know what’s happening to their bodies? Can they see when their fathers are screaming at them, like engines roaring, that their drug-taking behaviour has lost them, lost them like a picture of a stumpy alien in a secret army filing cabinet?

  And still when his father’s fists land on him, Peter senses nothing but an echo rising from somewhere inside.

  Peter will become a poet and then a painter.

  Ron won’t see that coming.

  Because he always thought his son would play footy.

  Peter was a brilliant junior. Starred. Kicked nine goals from centre-half-forward one day. Ironed out one of the red-haired St James’ boys. A fair hip and shoulder.

  Ron told his mates his son would play at the top level, it was just a matter of when. But in his late teens, Peter got into drugs and girls and never lined up in the big league. Ron said it was a waste of talent.

  Christ, I’d have been a premiership player.

  On the dais, medal around his neck.

  Ron didn’t talk to his kids much when they’re were little. He didn’t know what to say to them. Kids were for wives. They sorted them out.

  I was at work all day, and then I had the lawns and the bins and the dishes, chucked the papers in the incinerator, played footy, golf and tennis, went fishing. The boys came fishing. And I got them into sport.

  He wasn’t hard on his boys.

  I was a bit of a stress-head when they were teenagers. I was doing million-dollar deals then, in Westmore. But I did what I could at home.

  Ron never forgot coming home and going to town on his boys; belts, whacks and punches, throwing pens and plates, yelling, saying they were no sons of his.

  They drank a heap, you see, got into that bloody drug nonsense, too. Terry? He even planted the frigging things on my roof...

  He whacked Peter and Simon, both of them with a shovel on the arse in the front yard. Ron never forgot that, either.

  Didn’t get any clues from my old man. Well, I did. The wrong ones. And I couldn’t ever figure out how to put the right ones in my head.

  Ron got his boys through to their late teens. Through and off his hands.

  Not because I didn’t like them.

  It was different at work. His staff liked him; he managed the yard well, even the first stint in Corumbul. But, by Jesus, it took it out of him. Sales were down for a long time and wasn’t he copping it from Head Office?

  ‘What are you running, Stevenson? A fucking charity?’

  But he kept the yards running, with his bare hands and his late night typewriter. Kept his chin up for the staff. And when he got home and the kids were acting up and bickering and fighting—and his wife rode him about it all—well, he wanted to disappear.

  You know, I never blamed Jules for leaving me. By the time we got to Westmore, I was sick of myself. Fairly obvious she was as well.

  It’s a rainy day in central New South Wales. The Parkes radio telescope looks like it’s drowning in dishwater. Peter’s there with his mum and brothers. His dad has moved out and his mum works full-time now. But she’s taken the boys away for school holidays. He’s fourteen, on holidays and listening to a murky science talk. The lab-coated man drones on and Peter sees a poster: the giant telescope and its smaller sibling at dusk, two ears listening to the universe. If anyone or anything is whispering beyond those photographed orange and purple clouds, the telescopes will hear. Peter buys the poster with the money he’s saved from mowing his mum’s lawn and sticks it on a large pinboard above his bedhead.

  Somewhere in his weightlifting, wet dream teens, after his dad has left and he only sees him on weekends, Peter replaces the telescope with Sylvester Stallone. Machine gun at his waist, red headband keeping fake sweat from his sharp blue eyes. In his early twenties, he consigns Rambo to the same case that holds his footy cards and early attempts at poetry and sketches. He’s now Mulder’s biggest fan, searching with him for hidden truths, werewolves, shapeshifters and Scully’s kiss.

  At a dinner party at his rental house in the nineties, Peter’s friends laugh at him and say there’s no such thing as a UFO. Notwithstanding the popularity of The X-Files, despite UFOs occupying the front cover of Time magazine and being the subject of numerous documentaries. He knows he should let the subject rest and go back to talking about the Three Colours film series, but fuck them. Peter works part-time at a magazine and he does research and he knows things.

  ‘What’s going on is similar to what happened at the turn of the last millennium. There were mass hallucinations and people seeing crosses in the sky. But, of course, there was nothing there...’

  ‘Just like UFOs,’ says Walt, a man-child with a black goatee beard and parents with too much money.

  ‘Yes. And no. Yes, because most sightings are hot air balloons, weather probes, planes, searchlights on clouds, helicop-ters—and even flocks of birds caught at certain angles in the moonlight...’

  Walt’s getting bored. And so are the others, in their black polos and ripped jeans, sipping their cheap wine.

  ‘But some sightings can’t be explained.’

  ‘Little green what-the-fucks?’

  ‘Real unidentified flying objects.’

  ‘Can you hear yourself, Stevenson? Real unidentified flying objects? I’m going for a smoke...’

  Fuck him. And his parents’ money.

  ‘Yes, real UFOs, Walt! They get hearts racing. They root people’s feet to the ground. They shake up the earth. They grab it by the collar and shout that we might not be as lonely as all the empty caves and canyons say we are!’

  ‘You’re fucking nuts.’

  ‘What
ever. Despite all the bloody skepticism, we can, I’m telling you, look into the skies in wonder.’

  ‘I wonder about you, mate.’

  And Walt goes for his smoke. And Peter’s girlfriend Jayne looks at Peter like maybe her hope that this man might one day father her child is not such a great plan after all.

  In the night Peter leaves Jayne to her worried dreams and gets up and goes to their dining room that doubles as their lounge. He smells the wretched aftermath of the dinner party, the carpet stained with squashed sundried tomatoes. He sits in an armchair and writes verse after verse of poetry about invisible men.

  He sees a psychologist regularly in his thirties.

  What did the voices say? And when did they stop? Have they stopped?

  The portly man with varicose-veined calves tells him that if an adult remembers an incident from early childhood, if a pea bobs its head out of the bubbling soup of memory, chances are the event happened only once.

  Before primary school one morning in Corumbul, Peter’s father appears on the porch where his mum should be. Ron wears a pale blue shirt, a patterned tie, dark blue shorts and knee-length cream walk socks. He holds a black briefcase and smiles. Peter doesn’t smile back.

  Where’s his mum?

  She normally drives him to school. What if he’s been naughty?

  Where is she? Is she sick?

  Peter watches how his father holds his briefcase and he grips his own smaller, white school case firmly. Does his father say anything? Is he saying anything? Listen: Ron’s feet, Peter’s feet, together on the gravel and then the bitumen.

  Is his father going to reach for a knife? Is this what it’s all about, this walking to school?

  He’s walking with Peter, but he’s not talking. What should Peter say? What should he do? Keep walking?

  They reach the end of the court and the laneway entrance and his father holds his hand. He’s never done it before and he’ll never do it again. But his father’s hand is on his. The laneway and the blossoms that hang from the fences on both sides spiral, loop and form a tunnel that seems to have no end.

  His father’s hand in his carries Peter all the way to the dirt car park behind the truck yard. Then he lets go. Ron’s still smiling and he says Peter can walk the rest of the way to school.

  But his mum always drops him off at the gate.

  Peter stands and scuffs his school shoes. But his father says go on, son, you go. You can make it the rest of the way down the lane.

  The next ten seconds and however many years, he can do it, because his father will be watching him.

  Peter walks; he crunches gravel, spots the school gate across the road, but turns around. His father’s briefcase is on the ground and his hands are behind his back. Is he walking towards him now? Is he angry?

  Peter runs to school, he runs and doesn’t turn around again.

  7. Terry Stevenson

  On the Saturday morning, the phone rang in Terry’s one-bedroom flat and he knew it would be his mum, Jules. And he knew exactly what she’d have to say about his father. Terry put the spliff he’d just rolled onto the phone table. Jules was crying and he heard himself say, It’s all right, Mum, and they made arrangements to get together later in the morning. He hadn’t showered, he was still in his jocks, but he’d have time to see her before he had to work in the Mitre 10 nursery.

  After he hung up, Terry went to the back porch and sat on his stained deckchair. He tried to prepare himself. The spliff useless in his hands, he watched clouds shitting around above the bare plum tree.

  His mum had been showing up at the hospital for weeks, sitting all day in the plastic chair next to Ron’s bed. She said it wasn’t just about doing the right thing, but her voice was always flat. Like the shirts she’d ironed for him when they were married and he worked at the truck yards. She’d stare at Ron in his hospital bed and ask if he needed anything. The remains of Ron’s grey hair were always sweaty and stuck to his forehead. He’d half open his eyes and say, ‘Nah, nah, I’m right Jules... I’ll be right.’

  Most days, Ron looked like shit sliding down the side of a dunny bowl. Terry would watch the old man wriggle in his bedclothes. What a mess. But there was nothing Terry could do about it.

  ‘Heading off now, Ron,’ he’d tell him. Terry had never called him dad.

  Ron’s eyes would brighten for a second as if Terry had turned into something that sparkled. Sure enough, he had.

  ‘No worries son. You’re a gem for comin in.’

  One dreary afternoon in the hospital, Terry stuck in his Walkman earphones and was about to say goodbye when Ron chirped, ‘Tez, did ya hear Gazza’s comin in to see me?’

  Terry pulled one earphone out.

  ‘No, I haven’t heard that...’

  Ron had played at the same football club Gary Ablett Senior had played when he was a kid. But it would take a miracle for Ablett—or ‘God’ as they called him—to come and visit Ron Stevenson. And, anyway, God was busy getting ready to strike the Eagles dead in that weekend’s second semi-final.

  ‘Yep, Spider Thompson gave me a tinkle and said Gazza’d be in later in the week. Maybe early next... Best player to ever pull on the boots, don’t you worry...’

  Bloody Gary Ablett. The way Ron carried on about him you’d think he was the saviour of the world. And with all that religion Ablett went on about, thanking Jesus left, right and centre, maybe Ron believed it. But if you had to have that God bothering stuff, Terry would rather his mum’s take on it. Sitting there, turning rosary beads over in her fingers without anyone noticing. He wasn’t sure if she believed in any of it, but spinning the beads calmed her down.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll be great, Ron,’ Terry said, watching Jules fiddle around in Ron’s bedside drawers. ‘And seeya Mum, thanks for comin in.’

  The first few times he’d said that she’d taken the bait. She’d given Terry a spiel about Ron being her ex-husband so of course she was going to come in, what else was she going to do? But she had a new tactic now.

  ‘No worries, Terry. Thank you.’

  She rearranged the Get Well cards on Ron’s dresser, though they were already in perfectly good order, and Terry left for the nursery. It was empty that afternoon, except for an old couple wandering the Australian Natives aisle. Terry sat on a plastic milk crate, hidden behind a bunch of rubber plants. He stuck his Nirvana tape into his Walkman. AC/DC had always been his thing, always would be, but he’d seen Nirvana at the Big Day Out with Scotty Collins the year before. Scotty had taped their new CD for him. He loved their train engine guitar sound and mad lyrics about getting contagious and denied while polly got a cracker.

  He and Scotty had formed a band. Scotty could play three chords and Terry yelled. Ron had got wind of it before he’d ended up in hospital. He’d let loose with his usual crap: ‘Stick with what you know, son’. Christ, how many times had he heard that? There was a recession on that goose Keating reckoned they had to have, and that seemed to have given Ron extra license to badger him: ‘You can’t pay the bills with that music bullshit. And what about if you get a woman?’

  So Terry stuck with what he knew. Which wasn’t a hell of a lot. About the only thing Ron had ever taught him to do was kick a footy, and he hadn’t even done that well because Terry had played Under 16 Cs and had hardly ever got a touch. He’d run around the backline with his jumper hanging out, watching other boys pounce on the ball like cats looking for a feed. He was bloody useless. And, as far as he could find out, Ron hadn’t been much better. A little rover, he was. Jules said he used to get in and under the packs. But Terry didn’t think Ron would have done more than shirk a few issues while the hard men got their hands dirty. His folks were the same like that. Jules endlessly rearranging the bloody Get Well cards, and Ron who’d once loaned Terry his car—a fucking Mazda—on the proviso he put some air in the tyres because Ron didn’t know how to do it.

  All this from a bloke who’d worked around truckies! No wonder he pushed paper.

  An
d now he couldn’t even die properly.

  The thick chords of ‘In Bloom’ thundered in Terry’s earphones and Scotty pushed a double-decker trolley under the rubber plants. He had his Yankees baseball cap on backwards. He stopped in front of Terry.

  ‘How’s ya old man?’

  Terry pulled off his headphones

  ‘Same.’

  Scotty leant on the trolley handle. The herbs and

  seedlings wobbled.

  ‘Same? Shit, he’s been the same for weeks.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Scotty looked at him. All crinkly eyes.

  ‘Gotta get these herbs to their brothers and sisters,’ he said, fingering the leaves on a basil bush. ‘Are yours right for tonight?’

  Terry put his headphones on, but didn’t turn on the tape.

  ‘When are they not?’

  The way Terry saw it mull was from the earth so it had to be good. Forget all the other drugs. Smack might come from a poppy, but bikies wrecked it. You didn’t get nature’s best. If a drug was made in a lab, it cooked your grey matter and left you feeling like a cockatoo without any feathers.

  Terry knew how to turn nature’s herb into cash. As long as he didn’t dig too far into his supply. He was down to a choof a week, and that was usually only three cones. Daily bucket bongs, hash pipes and massive spliffs? Things of the past. Like ‘The End’ by The Doors. He’d listened to that song so many times that when he and Scotty had driven around the factories, their own big spliffs throwing smoke into the night, Terry reckoned he could hear it with the stereo off. He even heard the rotor blades from Apocalypse Now above that ugly bastard’s guitar picking. Jim Morrison’s voice felt like it was coming out of Terry’s mouth.

  Too much dope. One night he saw Jesus in the sky and the son of God pulled every nail out of the cross he was hanging on. Terry didn’t know how he managed that because he was well and truly stuck there. But those nails came out, one by one. Truth be told, Terry shouldn’t have been getting hallucinations on grass. Unless it was laced and how could it be when he was the freakin dealer?