by Peter Barry
There was something in fact, that he’d wanted to say to her from the very beginning, but had always been restrained by the feeling that she’d never understand his worries, or that she’d laugh at him. It was his awareness of her background, her upbringing, how well off her family was compared to his own. She’d grown up accustomed to having everything she wanted, to living in what amounted to luxury. And he had always felt, ever since they’d first gone out together, that he must continue to keep her in this manner, that he could never let her down, never expect her to lower her standards. She had expectations, whether she admitted it or not, and it was up to him to make sure she was never disappointed. For him, it was a matter of pride; it was also what husbands were supposed to do. She looked to him to take care of her and Tim – or that’s the way he saw it – and if he disappointed her he would disappoint himself. He wouldn’t be fulfilling his role as the family bread winner. He was old fashioned enough to believe in that role. That was his responsibility.
He could have told her this, as well as many other things, in his own defence, but she wouldn’t have listened. He could see her point of view, so why could she not see his? He could understand her frustration that he’d been forced to cancel the family’s camping trip in order to stay in the office and work, yet she was unable to see that he didn’t have an option. She simply had no idea of the pressure and the responsibilities he faced at work, no idea. The fact that Murray and Russell expected him to deliver on a whole variety of business parameters every day, the most important of which was profit, was completely alien to her. But that’s how it was in the modern world: everyone has to be profitable, and earn more than their company paid them. It didn’t matter if you were tightening widgets on an assembly line or were the CEO of a conglomerate in the city, you had to work harder, tighten more widgets, close more deals, produce more, otherwise you were out of the door. And every year you had to become more productive. You wouldn’t be paid any more, but you certainly had to earn more. The system was merciless. There was nothing charitable about employment nowadays, there was none of this, we’ll give the guy a job because he deserves a break, no, we can’t get rid of him because he’s got a wife and four kids to support. No one did anyone any favours now. There was nothing ennobling about work today, except for a lucky few. The lucky few, almost without exception in the private sector, usually earned excessive salaries and, if they proved to be totally incompetent, weren’t just shown the door, they were given golden handshakes that dwarfed what most people earned in a lifetime. It was like saying, Thank you so much for dragging our company down, for halving our share price, for losing us market share and for ruining our reputation, and here’s a little something to show our appreciation and to make your brief spell in the wilderness (because there’s always another fool around the corner who’ll employ no-hopers like this) that bit more comfortable. They called it a golden parachute, but it was more like a golden private jet.
Kate, however, understood none of this. She lived in the make believe world of Art.
‘You lead a great life, and you know it.’ For a moment he tuned in to what she was saying. ‘You may refuse to admit it, but you love your life. You love going out into the world and meeting people. You love playing business games. You love eating in swish restaurants, wining and dining your clients, and having beers with the boys after work. You love leaving your wife and child at home and going off and enjoying yourself. It’s all just one big game to you, so don’t try and pretend otherwise.’
Of course, she didn’t understand anything about the business world, and why should she? It didn’t interest her. Her reality was circumscribed by their home, playschool, her friends (most of whom were in similar situations to herself) and her art. Even when she was young, the closest she’d have come to reality would have been to hear about her father’s court cases, and they would have been presented to her with a very definite right wing, even fascist, bias. She was naïve, possibly ingenuous in a very un-innocent kind of way.
‘I’m going to bed.’ She had talked herself out. He hadn’t heard all that she’d said, but he knew the gist of it. There wouldn’t have been anything new. He didn’t reply. There was no point. They didn’t have anything to say to each other now. He’d be better off alone. At least it was done; at least he no longer had to worry about telling her. Maybe he’d have a drink and see if there was anything worth watching on television. She stood up, and without another word, left the room. Doubtless she hoped he’d spend some time dwelling on his failures as both a husband and a father. He heard her go into the bathroom, and a short while later into their bedroom. A minute or two later he heard her leave their bedroom, and it sounded as if she then went into the spare room. The door closed. So that was to be his punishment.
He poured a large whisky and mused on how greatly she’d changed in the five years they’d been together. From being a woman who hung onto his every word, she’d become a woman who now seemed happy to hang him for every word he spoke. The change was reflected in her hair: once bobbed and neatly groomed, it had been transformed into an almost shaven, spiky – even tumultuous – declaration of independence. He was struck by the fact they were becoming like every other suburban couple in the world with a first child. Their conversations were no longer those of carefree singles. All they ever seemed to speak about now was Tim, about what he’d said or what he’d done at playgroup, or how he could now do so many things on a computer. They never discussed anything meaningful or vital, like John Kerry clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination, or the Senate report saying that almost twenty per cent of the Australian population now lived in poverty. They didn’t discuss the CIA’s admission that there had been no imminent danger from Iraq prior to the invasion of that country. They didn’t really talk about art either.
Of course, that wasn’t the only way for them to cling to their youth and demonstrate their continuing involvement with the world outside. The other option was to talk about his day. After all, he was at least out there, he at least had some reality rub off on him every day. But that didn’t interest her, not at all. He knew she found it difficult to get excited about his current preoccupation, the launch of Bauer’s first ever, revolutionary four-wheel drive, or the significance of a state-of-the-art six-cylinder engine that has a top speed of 250 kilometres an hour and is capable of delivering three hundred and ninety kilowatts at six thousand five hundred revs per minute, but she didn’t even pretend to try. Work was important to him. He didn’t have any option, so wasn’t it reasonable of him to expect his wife to at least try to understand that?
He stayed up later than usual. He got through almost half a bottle of whisky while he flicked from channel to channel. Nothing held his interest.
* * *
When he was small – he can’t remember his exact age, only that he was still in shorts – his mother allowed him to walk the two blocks, almost to the main road, by himself. There he would wait for his dad. He sat on a low wall at the front of a grey brick, lace curtained bungalow, which was nondescript in every way except for the dazzling display of garden gnomes and windmills scattered over its small, neat patch of grass and immaculate flowerbeds. He can’t recall ever seeing the people who lived in the house, and he never spent much time studying the colourful array of ornaments in their garden, because his gaze was fixed on the junction with the main road, a short distance away. He stared at the stream of cars speeding past, nose to tail, waiting for one of them to turn off. The car that did was almost certain to be his dad’s Escort. When he came round the corner, he flashed his headlights. This was the signal for Hugh to jump off the wall and stand, fidgeting and grinning, at the edge of the pavement. When he opened the passenger door, his dad always sat, both hands on the steering wheel, and turned his head to say the same four words: ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ When Hugh climbed into the car, his dad would lean across the seat, put an arm round his shoulders and give him a big hug. It never varied.
Although it o
nly took a minute or two to drive home from there, he had memories of his dad saying so many things in that time. He was a fast talker, excitable and full of enthusiasm for everything. Looking back, it struck Hugh that it was the kid who was driving the car, and it was the adult who was sitting in the passenger seat, silent, wide-eyed and serious, his bare legs stuck out in front of him like antennae. Sometimes his dad would manage to coax something out of him, more than a shy grin or tiny nod of the head, but most of the time he was happy, as he drove, to hold forth all by himself, seemingly as entertained by his own voice as was his audience of one.
He skipped from one thing to another, not unlike a wagtail leaping erratically this way and that in a park on a summer’s evening. Often he would talk about something he was listening to on the radio. ‘They’re saying there’s been a bad crash on the M1. People dead and all.’ Turning the dial down, ‘Crazy speeds some of them drive at. That’s the reason, Hughie, bet you.’ And then, without taking a breath, as if he was short of time and had to get in as much as possible, it could be straight on to, ‘Know what this bloke told me at work? He said go and see Superman. Jack says it’s brilliant. It’s like Superman’s really flying. Animatronics, that’s how they do it. Want to go and see it, son? What do you reckon?’ And Hugh would nod his head, without any real idea what Superman was about, not that it mattered, because his dad was already off onto something else. Once, it was about three miners dying in an explosion at the Golborne colliery on the outskirts of Manchester. ‘Terrible tragedy,’ said his dad, ‘and just down the road, too. Deserve every penny they earn, those blokes.’ Another time it was, ‘And what do you think about a woman becoming Prime Minister of our country, eh, Hughie? First one ever. Not sure about it myself, not sure a woman’s up to the task.’ Most times though, he’d say something like, ‘Have to drop by the corner shop. Your mum forgot to buy bread. Typical! She’s such a scatterbrain.’ Or, ‘Let’s go and pick up a video.’ Hugh was happy to do any of these things, anything at all, because it meant spending longer with his dad, longer sitting in the still-exciting-to-be-in passenger seat, his feet not yet reaching the floor and his eyes only just able to see the road ahead if he sat up very straight and craned his neck.
More often than not, his dad talked about his work. He loved his job. ‘It’s the future,’ he’d say to Hugh. ‘My advice to you, son – and that’s what a dad’s supposed to do, isn’t it, offer advice? – my advice to you is, get into something to do with technology. Know it’s still a long way off, but if you want a job for life, that’s the way to go. They’re crying out for people.’ Hugh never forgot that expression – ‘They’re crying out for people.’ For him, it conjured up many tearful faces poking out of office windows and shouting, ‘People, people!’ It was another inexplicable tale from the world of adults.
It took many years before Hugh reached some kind of understanding of what his father did during the day, where he’d come from when he appeared, as if by magic, around the corner from the main road. First of all, it was a concept, hazy in outline, that his mother fed him: ‘Your dad works in an office, and he’s very important.’ He’d seen office buildings, had them pointed out to him by his mum, and he gazed in awe at the tall structures and imagined his father up there – always on the top floor – doing something, exactly what he had no idea, but something important. Then he came to understand that this work was something to do with computers, but he didn’t know what computers were, although once, probably early on, he could remember believing that they were some kind of person, probably foreign. ‘This is the most exciting machine you could ever imagine, son. What it does is just amazing. Astonishing! The speed with which it processes information! Can you imagine that?’ But Hugh couldn’t. Over the years, his father threw words at him, tossed casually without explanation, as if his son already grasped at least the rudiments of his business, meaningless sentences about how individual transistors were being replaced by integrated circuits, and punch cards were giving way to magnetic tape and disks as external storage devices. Magnetic core internal memories were in there somewhere, along with metal oxide semiconductor memories, integrated circuits and silicon chips. It was a foreign language his father spoke to him, as if he was sitting next to Hugh in the car speaking German or Russian.
But it all started to make sense, or much more sense when his dad brought home a Commodore 64 with its joysticks and paddles and Koala Pad, and they’d play Manic Miner, Ghostbusters and Le Mans together. He could soon beat his dad at these games. It must have been around that time he saw a television commercial for the Commodore 64, the only one that stayed with him from childhood. It showed an elephant picking up the computer, and ended with the words, ‘And don’t forget, it has an enormous 64K memory.’ It made him laugh. Today it made him laugh for different reasons.
His dad took him to the cinema when he was young – how young he wasn’t sure, but it was before the rocket happened. Every Saturday they walked there together. His mum never went with them, because it was understood to be a thing for the boys. After the cinema they went to a café in the High Street and ate what his dad called high tea. Like sausages, eggs, tomatoes, baked beans and chips. ‘It’s not what you’d call healthy, son, but once in a while it’s all right. Not all the time though or you’ll put on weight – like your mum. Not that she eats this kind of food. She just needs to exercise more.’
Part of the ritual during tea was talking about the film they’d seen. He had to tell his dad what it was about and why he liked it, or even disliked it, although, looking back now, he can’t remember seeing any film he didn’t enjoy. Hugh supposed that this was intended to be educational, that his dad was trying to get him to think for himself and be able to argue a point of view. The film that stuck in his mind for a long time was ET. It made a big impression on him, and possibly stood out in his memory because it was an unusual occasion in that someone else had gone to the cinema with them.
They ran into a woman from his dad’s workplace, and he said, ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ Hugh remembered that because he thought those words were only meant for him, that they were his words, even though he was now eight and only rarely walked up the street to meet his dad from work. He was disappointed. She was different to his mum, younger and harder, all bones and muscles with long hair and a streak of toughness. ‘Jane’s a programmer,’ his dad said, and Hugh nodded, none the wiser. ‘She’s very clever.’ And the woman threw back her head and laughed, showing lots of teeth. He always remembered her teeth, those on her top row seeming to be much longer than any he’d ever seen before; a bit like a horse. ‘Don’t exaggerate, James.’ ‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’ She grinned, still showing her mouth full of teeth, and Hugh thought she looked quite pleased with herself.
He was disappointed when his dad asked the woman to have high tea with them afterwards, although he changed his mind when he discovered how much she knew about films. ‘That film will be a classic. It’s a modern fairy tale about the magic of childhood. Isn’t that right, Hugh?’ He mumbled agreement. His dad listened to what she had to say, and didn’t contradict her like he did when Hugh spoke about films. ‘It’s about friendship, trust and tolerance, Hugh.’
On Sundays he went with his mum and dad to church. His dad insisted they always went together, as a family, just as he always insisted they eat meals together. ‘No child of mine is going to eat alone in front of the TV. That’s not what a proper family is about.’
His father wasn’t particularly religious; his mother was probably more that way inclined. But it was something he believed was good for Hugh, the teaching of morality, of what was right and wrong. His dad was big on that, doing the right thing, treating people decently, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, or however the Bible puts it. That’s what he was always saying, and it was one of Hugh’s strongest memories from childhood.
And everything about his father’s beliefs became much clearer to him one weekend when they all went for
a drive in the countryside. He must have been about eleven. It was like one of those old movies you see on television, in black and white, shot in slow motion, with ghostlike figures moving silently across the screen, but it wasn’t a film. It was a time of emptiness and darkness, a Grimms’ fairy story brought to life. Shops were closed, villages empty, streets deserted, houses with windows either boarded up or broken. The people resembled creatures from an underworld, almost like zombies, brought to the surface from deep underground, blinking, scowling and muttering into the light. He remembers them as being black, hungry and angry looking, with mournful, staring eyes, as if they’d stepped out of some old photograph from the war years or the Depression. He felt uneasy as they drove past in the Escort, his mum and dad in front, him sitting in the back. It felt as if they’d lost their way and were now driving in a foreign land, and he was seeing things that he wasn’t meant to, but which at the same time he felt his father intended him to see. He didn’t feel safe. He worried that the car would break down and they would be forced to get out. What then? Would these skeletal creatures paw at their clothing? Would they drop to their knees and beg for food? Or would they – and it scarcely bore thinking about – attack them with a ferocity and anger fuelled by desperation and envy?
They sat in the car in silence. Even his dad, for once, said nothing. The day was overcast and grey, slagheaps emerging all around them corpse-like from the mist. A few spots of rain started to fall. His mother, visibly upset, had her hand up to her mouth and kept whispering, ‘Dear God!’ He felt they shouldn’t be seeing these things, these obscenities, that it would be best if he averted his eyes, but he couldn’t.
