He raised his eyes at his empty glass. ‘Just another of these.’
‘Yeah? Really?’
‘Yeah. This is great. I think I’ll stay. I think I’ll stay here the night. The year. Get a room. Maybe catch some music. But you eat. Food’s not really my thing.’
‘Right. Like air’s not your thing.’
‘Yeah. I guess it’s like that. That’s a good comparison. You were such a dopey kid.’
My mind flicked to the lab equipment I had in my car, the echoing hallway leading to my classroom and my hollow-eyed students. ‘And now I’m bringing up the next lot. Edjamacating.’ I spread out my arms as though I was giving an audience. The sun warmed my cheek. I pulled my glasses out of my pocket and viewed Malachi through their garish yellow lens. It made him look even worse and I took them off again.
‘You teach?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, I teach. Grovelling, no-hoping, back-chatting kids. Well, not kids really. Young adults. High-school kids.’
‘I’ll be buggered.’
‘Yes you will.’
‘No, I’ll be buggered, Gordon. That’s great. That’s really great. And you were so useless.’
I smiled back at him.
‘I’m a god-damned baker.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I was until last month. I thought, if I see one more vanilla slice, one more neenish bloody tart. I threatened my boss. I said I’d shred him into the mince pies. I said the mix was so vile, no-one would ever know.’
I laughed then, and he laughed too, and the pattern of our laughter formed its own sort of melody like a song I hadn’t heard for a long time. One I’d forgotten the name of.
‘Yeah, funny what you take on. When they chucked me out of school, Da said I had to get a job. I thought I’d go through the alphabet. B for baker. I guess I didn’t get very far. I couldn’t get the smell and the feel of bread out of my head. All that yeasty, yielding dough.’
‘That’s the Catholic in you. The pent-up Catholic. I bet heaps of your lot are bakers. I always had you pegged as a builder. I thought one day I’d see you in the paper. Malachi & Sons. Quality Frames and Trusses. That’s what I thought.’
The waitress arrived with my lunch and another drink for Malachi. He dug around in his bag, moving things around, opening hidden pockets. He zipped it up, then unzipped it again and riffled around some more. It wasn’t just his hands. His feet were shuffling back and forth under the table. His jaw had started to tremble. ‘Malachi, you’re not looking great,’ I said.
He raised his brow and clutched his drink as though I might try to take it away from him. I bit into my bread, into the tepid salmon. Some capers rolled off onto the table. ‘You know, the distance from our old street to where you moved with your parents would have only taken about ten minutes in the car. That’s how close you were.’ He took a mouthful of beer.
‘Yeah, I know. I thought we’d moved miles away.’
‘I never thought to ask Da to take me to see you,’ he said. It was an admission of sorts and I could tell he thought the excuse was as pathetic as I did. Malachi sighed, a long sigh, as though he was taking in the space of those years. Filling up his lungs with them. He stood and said he needed to find the loo. He opened up his bag, rummaged around in it again and slipped it over his shoulder. He took another swig, a long one. A late-night, last-drinks swill. He walked inside with deliberate strides and a crooked torso.
• • •
When my friend came back, ten minutes later, he was balancing a Guinness. One arm of his glasses had slipped off his ear. His face was still pale, but the skin on his neck and limbs was red and mottled. His appearance made me think of the slow-boiling-frog story I sometimes told my students. He pulled his chair around so he was sitting next to me. Looking at the ocean instead of his face made me relax again. It was as if we were kids, side by side, travelling in the backseat of my dad’s car.
‘I went to one of the bars in the Cross last week,’ he said, leaning in a bit closer as though to share a secret. His fingers travelled up under his shirt sleeve and he scratched at his skin. ‘I was sitting there next to the pokies, and right near me, on a slouchy brown lounge, there was a man talking to his schooner of beer. A big, burly thug of a man. A King-Gee, Blundstone-boots man. He was saying, “You’re not gonna get me this time.” Talking to his drink like it was listening. He had his fists on a table, one on either side of the glass, and he said, “You got me last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, but I’ll be blowed if you’re gonna get me this week.” And then he stood up. A few blokes were listening in by that stage, and he looked around at us all, proud as a new dad, and he trudged out of there.’
‘Is this a joke?’ I asked.
‘No, Goddy, this is fair-dinkum.’
It was my nickname from school. The name my wife still called me. When Malachi called me Goddy, I realised how much I’d missed him. How much I wanted him back in my life.
‘So, I sat there looking at this wasted drink, just sitting there, and I said to the lad next to me, “What do ya reckon?” He said he thought it was fair game. So, I got up and I was just about to take ownership of it, and bugger me if the bloke didn’t come back in again. He sat down and he picked up the schooner and he looked at it like he was looking into the eyes of his own child and he said, “You got me a good one. I thought I had you that time, but I didn’t. You got me a real good one. Cheers to that.” ’ Malachi gulped his beer and then he held his stomach. He laughed like a kid being tickled, wincing and giggling till the couple sitting near us looked over. The man cleared his throat and the woman gave aloof, sideways glances between mouthfuls of her salad. ‘ “You got me a good one.” That’s bloody hilarious. I just find that bloody hilarious.’ He took out a cigarette and lit it. He blew smoke rings towards the salt shaker, as if playing quoits with his mouth.
‘Yeah, that’s pretty funny,’ I said. I looked out towards the esplanade. Sun-hatted grandfatherly types were stooped on park benches like theatre-goers. I imagined below them, on the sand, the sure-eyed surfers, the stray dogs and the burrowing kids. All watching the waves and their rhythmic seduction.
‘Do you want to go for a walk on the sand, Malachi?’
‘No mate, I’m right. The moment might get to me. I might want to reach out and hold your hand.’
‘Yeah, and I might want to drag you in and drown you.’ I slugged him in the shoulder and he grinned at me and blew smoke in my face. ‘Your glasses are all skewwhiff, you twit. You look like the village idiot.’
Malachi took them off and put them in his shirt pocket. He looked at me with his head on an angle. ‘You look hellishly better now; I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
I pulled a face. One I used to pull as a kid with my tongue out and my mouth twisted and my eyes bulging out of their sockets. I let my head drop and I dangled my arms like a zombie. Malachi twisted his face into the grotesque caricature of a vampire. He looked at the lady eating her salad and said, ‘I vant to suck your blard.’ She put her mouth to her partner’s ear and they turned their backs to us. Malachi tracked their scraping chairs with mad eyes and bared teeth. I sniggered and shook my head. I suddenly felt happier than I had in a long time.
‘So, you’re married,’ Malachi said, relaxing his face, allowing his features to fall back into place. I leaned across the table and offered him the other half of my Turkish bread. He waved it away and said he’d watched a show once, some Kawasaki or Suzuki man or something like that, who’d turned him right off salmon.
‘Susan,’ I said. ‘Fifteen years. Fifteen years of marriage.’
Malachi whistled. A high whistle, the Looney-Tunes-falling-coyote whistle. ‘That’s something,’ he said. He took another swig of his drink.
‘So, things didn’t work out for you?’ I wasn’t sure if I should bring up his ex-wife.
He made a low, growling noise, a noise that came right from the pit of his stomach. ‘We’d been having a rough tr
ot, I won’t deny that. I was dabbling in some pretty heavy stuff. We both were. Straight as a nail now though, Goddy. But you know, thick and thin, and all the rest of it. That’s what you think. But she got nasty. I mean really nasty. She’s Irish,’ he said, in a go-figure way. ‘Loopy. Lovely-looking girl, lovely Irish skin, but loopy as all get-out. Had a thing about moths; she’d dive under the kitchen table if she saw one. Pretty freaky when your missus throws herself under furniture like that. Anyway, right before she left, she killed Maurie and put her up in the roof cavity.’
‘She what? Who?’ I straightened up in my seat and Malachi shrunk into his.
‘Maurie. Short for Mauritius. She always seemed so relaxed. Have you ever spent time with a Mauritian? That was Maurie. Happy to just curl up on me and gaze out into the distance. Played the piano on my lap. She was jealous. The wife, not Maurie.’
‘You’re worrying me, Malachi.’
‘You know,’ he said, and he see-sawed his fists up and down, clenching and releasing them. ‘Sharp nails. Like talons. The nails were a problem.’
I nodded, not knowing what else to do.
‘And I searched all her favourite spots. The spare bed. The garden seat that got the morning sun. The back seat of the car. Called and called. “Here, Maurie.” ’ He sucked down the last dregs of his drink. ‘ “Here, Moz. Here, puss, puss.” ’
‘Christ, Malachi. Maybe the “puss, puss” bit could have come a bit earlier.’
Malachi gazed up into the sky. ‘Didn’t think to look up, though. Didn’t think to remember Ma’s words. The answer to our problems is always up there, just waiting to be acknowledged.’ Malachi kept his face upturned and closed his eyes and I wondered if he was thinking of Maurie or his Ma or maybe even God.
• • •
I looked at Malachi as the waitress cleared the table. In a raspy voice he asked for another schooner of Guinness. She moved to go and he smiled his daring, boyhood smile at me and said, ‘Make that two.’
She was one of the most efficient waitresses I’ve ever come across. She returned moments later and positioned the drinks on the table, one at each place setting. We both moved our chairs back to face each other. Malachi went to grab his glass but missed. He tried again, moving his hands slowly together, like he was cornering a rodent. I wondered how he was still upright. I checked my watch. Three years, three months, twenty-five days and nine hours. The froth in front of me diminished, bubble by bubble. I wiped my finger down the glass like a kid drawing on a foggy car window.
‘They say that men always marry their mother. That’s what they say. Maybe that’s why you married an Irish girl.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘And a cat-killer,’ I said, annoyed at him for trying to lead me astray. I stared into his eyes. His pupils flitted around. He couldn’t hold my gaze.
‘Me ma was a lot of things, Goddy, but she wasn’t a cat … she wasn’t a cat-killer.’
‘Kitten-killer, then. Is that a better description?’
Malachi sighed. ‘I don’t know; you’re telling the story,’ he said. He had a look on his face that I’d seen on my students over the years. A just-tell-me-the-answer look.
‘You had those two cats. You remember that, don’t you?’
‘The cats. I do. Course I do. Even the names. Funny how I can remember things like that. Gippy and Wuffles. The Gipster and Wuff Wuff.’ Malachi gazed out into the distance. ‘Wuff Wuff,’ he said again.
‘There you go, then. Gippy and Wuffles. And one of them, Wuffles I think, kept falling pregnant. Do you remember that?’
‘Maybe once.’
‘No, Malachi, not maybe once, maybe four times that I can remember. And your ma – your God-fearing, do-gooding ma – would let her have her babies, let her have her kittens, and then she’d stick them in a hessian sack and she’d fill up that concrete tub out the back with water. Do you remember that?’
‘Well, this is bloody nice.’
‘Do you remember?’
Malachi turned his face back towards the murmuring ocean and shook his head. Not up and down, not from side to side, but sort of on the diagonal. A half-no, half-yes. A bet both ways.
‘I’d forgotten about it. But I remembered last night. I was watching a duck being swallowed by a pelican.’
‘Ah, Goddy,’ he said, his face animated again. ‘I know a doctor who can give you something for that.’
‘It was on the telly. And it came back to me. It made me think about that last lot of kittens. The ones that were born right before I moved away. And before your ma got to them, we took one, do you remember?’
‘I don’t know. You’re making me miserable.’
‘We took one from its mother, the biggest one, and the mother looked up at us as if she knew. As if she thought maybe we could save her baby. It was warm as blood and slick with fluid. It had its eyes closed. And the smell; I can still smell the smell of damp earth and sugared milk and brine all mixed in together. You got some cream and water and you pinched an eye dropper out of your ma’s bathroom cabinet and then we took the kitten up into your cubby.’
‘I don’t know,’ Malachi said again. He threw back his beer as though it might help clarify things for him.
‘You swaddled that kitten up in a hanky, and I tried to get it to suckle from the dropper, but it couldn’t do it, it just kept mewling and struggling, and we were so busy trying to save it that we didn’t notice Meara. Do you remember? She called out to your ma. She told her we’d stolen one of the kittens and we were doing Lord-knows-what with it.’
‘Good old Meara. We’re kaput now, if that makes you happy. Kaput? Kaputz? Hair straight from the fiery depths of hell. She ended up marrying a blind man.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘That sort of makes sense.’
‘Blinds and awnings.’
I threw my head back and took in the sky and smiled despite myself. ‘I’ll never get that eye now.’
Malachi kicked his legs out in front of him, the way a kid practises on the edge of a swimming pool. ‘There once was a girl named Meara, something, something fear-a. Da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da. And that was the end of Meara. Something like that. Da used to sing something like that.’
‘They were both there. I remember your ma gathering the kittens up into the sack and filling up the tub and Meara hovering like a misguided angel in the background. I remember thinking that she could have at least used warm water. And the kittens were whimpering and writhing around, and you were kicking your ma about the ankles and pulling at her wrists and screaming at her not to do it. I remember her making us hold the bag as punishment. I could feel them, Malachi. They were trying to push up towards the surface and I wondered if I should hold the bag up a bit higher or plunge it in deeper so it didn’t take as long. And that one we tried to rescue. I thought it would be okay. I thought we’d be able to save it. By the time we got back to the cubby, it’d died anyway.’
I saw Malachi then, his skinny legs and his battered shins. I saw him taking the kitten. Touching its closed eyes. Running his finger over its shell-pink mouth. I was back there in the heat of the cubby with the summer sun and the thrum of cicadas pressing in on us. That afternoon we took the kitten to the local park. We dug a hole. I put my favourite marble near its paws and Malachi covered it with the embroidered hanky. He crossed himself and we formed a mound of dirt and clover. I think it was the first time I’d felt entirely responsible for another living thing. Responsible for its life and useless in my efforts to intervene in its trajectory towards death. Malachi had grime and snot and fat tears smeared across his cheek. Do ya reckon we’re going to hell, Goddy? Do ya reckon?
Malachi drummed his fingers against the table and then he squinted at his watch. ‘You haven’t touched your drink,’ he said. His voice had the slightest slur.
I looked at the beer and thought about how much I wanted to drink it. And the one after that, and the one after that. ‘You’re not going to get me this time,’ I
said, forgiving him for trying to tempt me, thinking that it would make him laugh.
‘I do remember the kittens,’ he said. ‘Sure I do.’ He rubbed at his neck and looked past my face, and then he said he should really get going.
• • •
We walked back towards the ferry. There was a lot of salt in the air and the view ahead was hazy, almost like a watercolour. A plastic shopping bag ballooned up in the breeze and blew onto Malachi’s legs. He attempted to step over it, shaking his arms and legs as though trying to get rid of a pesky dog.
‘You look like the dingle-dangle scarecrow,’ I said, as he side-stepped and manoeuvred and got more and more tangled.
‘This is doing my head in,’ he said. ‘This is doing me over.’
‘Just turn around,’ I said, laughing. He spun and the bag continued on its tumbling flight towards the ocean.
‘You’ve got the goods, Goddy,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the smarts. “Just turn around,” he says. Brilliant.’ He spun again and almost teetered over. I put my arm on his sleeve until he righted himself.
I had the piece of paper that he’d scrawled his phone number on in my pocket. I kept pressing my fingers against it. ‘So, I’ll get you from the station?’
Malachi reached into his bag and lit up another cigarette. ‘Yeah, West Ryde Station. I’ll be there next Saturday. I’ll be there at ten. I’ll wait on the seat, right where the train comes in. You know the one. Don’t go to the wrong side, Goddy. Or if you do, I’ll see you anyway. I’ll see you there.’
He slapped at the pocket of his cargo pants. Outside the cafe, I’d given him two hundred, a wad of twenties. He’d tapped his fingers against his teeth and then he’d nodded precisely, counting up the notes. Nodded like the plastic bird I used to have as a kid that bobbed its beak into a tube of water until it was empty. I could never work out where that water went, and how the vessel filled up again when you flipped it over.
‘Your place has gone, Malachi. Mine too. I drove past a few years ago. They’ve put in some townhouses. There’s that laneway, though. It’s still there. I went round the back. Round behind the backyard. And that bush your ma had growing behind the shed – well, the shed’s gone but that bush is huge now. That one with the round, juicy leaves. We used to eat them, remember?’
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