by Kim Lock
‘And they’ll still have that bond?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I take it you still haven’t told them about the cancer?’
Thomas glanced at the box of tissues. ‘Not yet.’
‘How are you feeling about that?’
Thomas dug his elbow into the arm of the couch, trying to jimmy himself into a position that didn’t send flares of pain through him. ‘After all this talk about keeping things secret from our loved ones, pretty rotten to be honest with you. Omission isn’t always mercy.’
‘“What we don’t know can’t hurt us”,’ Harvey quipped.
Thomas said, ‘But I’m still going to die, aren’t I? Not telling the people I love about it beforehand isn’t going to magically stop that from happening.’ He felt himself sag, suddenly weary. ‘I’ve become an old bastard.’ He sighed, then steeled himself. ‘All right. So the kids grew up.’
Part IV
The kids grew up
64
‘I don’t want to fight about it, Arthur.’
‘I’m not fighting, Ay.’ Arthur rolled his eyes. ‘I just said I’ll do it later.’
Aida struggled with a mounting exasperation. When had he grown tall enough to be able to look her straight in the eye, without tipping his head up? At fourteen, Arthur was all shaggy hair, knobbly wrists and ankles poking from clothing.
‘I’m not asking a lot,’ Aida said, tossing a tea-towel onto the bench. ‘If you do it now, it’s over and done with and you can go ride your bike for as long as you like.’ Was that bribery? she wondered. No, it was a statement of fact. ‘The more we talk about it the longer it’s drawn out,’ she added, glancing at the clock. ‘I have to go to work at the Mortons’ house shortly. Can’t you do it now and save us both the headache?’
‘Why does my room matter so much to you, anyway?’
Good point, she wanted to acknowledge. In truth she was not as vexed with the state of Arthur’s room as she was acting. When Millie had demanded a room of her own, Arthur had moved into the so-called ‘study’, a room so small that the door couldn’t open fully once a single bed was crammed inside. But Arthur was satisfied with his closet-like space, his own private boy-cave, and even now that Millie was away he displayed no interest in taking the larger room for himself. Aida, also, was content enough for Arthur to keep his room in whatever state of disarray he fancied, provided she didn’t have to dwell there herself. But she had promised Elsie, before she left that morning to rectify some Show Society related emergency (and Elsie had only recently taken on the prestigious role of secretary – an appointment bestowed at the recommendation of one of her well-connected knitting class participants – so Elsie took her responsibilities very seriously), that she would reinforce Elsie’s pleas to Arthur for tidiness.
Arthur’s scowl deepened. ‘You never used to give Millie such a hard time about her room.’
Aida dragged in a long, fortifying breath. Comparison with his older sister: a time-honoured weapon in his arsenal.
‘Because her room was never a swamp. And that’s got nothing to do with what I’m asking you right now.’
He mumbled inaudibly and she let it slide.
‘What if I helped?’
He looked appalled. Of course not. Teenage boys’ rooms were their own private, humid domain.
‘Just do it, Arthur. This isn’t a negotiation.’
‘Would you get off my back?’
‘Why are you being so obstinate?’
‘Why are you being such a cow?’
Aida recoiled. That one wasn’t like him.
‘Go to your room,’ she ground out. ‘Now.’
He groaned and his shoulders drooped. For a moment she thought he was actually going to go do it, until he cried, ‘No! I said I’d do it later.’
‘You’ve been saying that for two weeks.’
This was ridiculous. Now she was driving the point home merely to maintain a veneer of adult authority. Because I said so – a statement the bane of teenagers’ lives for time immemorial.
‘Look,’ she began, this time aiming to appeal to emotional reason, ‘I know things have been a bit different since Millie left . . .’
‘Oh, man,’ he moaned. ‘Don’t start this again. I don’t care about Millie and her stupid holiday.’
He did care. They all cared. For fourteen years, there had been five of them. And now, as of two weeks ago, there were four. Piled into a rented Kombi, Millie and two of her girlfriends had finally taken off to spend six months exploring the country. The absence of Millie’s dry-witted, buoying presence had left a raw, unnerving hole in the house that they were all going to take some time to grow used to.
‘She’ll be back before you know it,’ Aida said, reassuring herself as much as him.
Suddenly Arthur grew wild. ‘I said, I don’t care!’ he yelped, a toddler in an adult’s body. Spinning on his heel, he stormed from the kitchen and yanked open the back door.
‘Arthur –’
He ignored her; the door slamming rattled the windows in their panes. Wincing, Aida pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Failed at parenting, she thought. Again.
*
Housekeeping work had come to Aida unintentionally. After Arthur was born, and she noticed the world’s sharp teeth had begun to soften – did not seem as ready to bite and devour her – one afternoon, she had found a harried, rattled Mrs Swaffer behind the counter at the grocery shop. Mrs Swaffer explained that Mr Swaffer’s health had taken a turn for the worse, and as a result she was ‘run off her feet’. Before Aida could stop herself, she was asking how she could help.
After assisting with packing shelves and serving customers for a few hours a week, one sultry afternoon Mrs Swaffer, dealing with burst water pipe and a dodgy plumber, had turned to Aida, thrust out a key and begged Aida to run to the Swaffer’s house and grab the washing off the line before it rained. And while she was at it, could Aida let the Shih Tzu into the back yard so it wouldn’t poop in the laundry?
Not long after that, one of Mrs Swaffer’s friends was looking for a housekeeper. Then Mrs Swaffer’s daughter’s friend needed a nanny. In the eyes of the community, Aida might have been a widow with a largely unknown background, but she had now also become known as dependable, trustworthy and unfazed by other people’s dirty laundry. And for Aida, she may have had her father’s money to maintain her financially, but now she was earning for herself. Independently.
So Aida was dismayed when, as she was gathering her cleaning equipment and about to hurry to the Mortons’, half an hour after their fight about cleaning his room Arthur limped back through the door.
Arthur was cradling his right arm, a bloodied graze seeping above one eyebrow. He had been crying. Both knees of his pants were ripped open and blood dried on the skin showing through.
‘I came off my bike,’ he said. ‘My arm really hurts.’
Aida set her bucket down with a thump. She went to Arthur and clucked her tongue in sympathy. ‘Here. Let’s have a look.’ Gently she took his right forearm, resting it in her hands. His fingers were curled, useless, and the wrist was already swollen. ‘Can you move your fingers?’
‘No,’ he moaned, fresh tears bursting out.
‘Okay, sweetheart,’ she said, wrapping an arm about his shoulders. ‘Let’s go to the hospital.’
After scribbling a note for Elsie, she bundled Arthur into the car.
*
Tears were still making damp tracks down Arthur’s face when Aida pulled into the car park next to the hospital’s emergency entrance.
‘I don’t think we need to go into the ambulance bay, do you?’ she joked.
Arthur tried to laugh but with his right wrist pinned immobile to his chest by his left hand, it came out a whimper.
‘Don’t worry,’ Aida said, ‘you’re going to be okay.’
‘It hurts.’
‘I know it does. Here, careful now.’ She unclipped his seatbelt and unthreaded it carefully from beneath his arms. Once they were outside the car he suddenly seemed embarrassed and made a painful attempt to wipe his face on his shoulders. She handed him a handkerchief and he quickly dabbed his face.
As Aida slammed the Beatle’s passenger side door, flakes of rusted metal tinkled onto the bitumen. She pulled a face at Arthur. ‘I think I need a new car,’ she said. ‘This one appears to be decomposing. What do you think I should get? Maybe a Datsun Sunny?’
The idea cheered Arthur, and inside emergency he managed a wobbly smile at the nurse behind the counter.
‘Maybe a Datsun Bluebird,’ Aida said, taking the form the nurse handed her. They sat down to wait. ‘Or a Holden Gemini,’ she went on. ‘A wagon. In that nice shade of poo brown.’
He managed a stronger laugh. ‘You should get a Mini Cooper. Like the ones in The Italian Job.’
‘I couldn’t get one of those,’ Aida said. ‘They pushed them off a cliff.’
Arthur continued to suggest cars as she filled out the form. Name and address, telephone number. And then Aida came to the line marked Next of kin.
There it was, the little twist of pain.
As much as Elsie and Thomas, Aida had raised these children. She had been there for Millie’s first steps – three wobbling, barefoot shuffles beneath the gum tree when she was eleven months old. After thumping onto her nappy in the dirt she had laughed delightedly at Aida’s cheers. Aida had nursed Arthur through chickenpox, staying at his bedside when his fever had shivered up to one hundred and two degrees. In the middle of the night she had tiptoed to their bedsides to replace lost teeth with ten-cent pieces. And yet when it mattered, when it was being a parent in the form of ink on paper, she relegated herself to a visiting friend, a babysitter, while their real parents were otherwise occupied.
Elsie Mullet, Aida wrote. Mother.
The nurse appeared in front of them. ‘Arthur? You can come with me now.’
Aida picked up her handbag and followed the nurse and the boy who wasn’t her son along the hospital corridor.
*
The curtain surrounding the bed swept open. ‘Simple fracture of the distal radius,’ the doctor said.
Arthur, sitting up on the bed with his legs dangling from the side, sniffled and hung his head.
‘It won’t need setting,’ the doctor continued. ‘It’s a clean break, it should heal up fine.’ He held an x-ray film up to the light, pointing at the glowing lines with a pen. The ghosted, candescent shapes of Arthur’s bones suddenly brought up the thought of the bones in Aida’s own right hand. A memory of the straps the nurses had wound around her hands as she laboured, as she pushed her baby from her body. Panicked, in agony and fighting the restraints, she remembered the rope of fresh pain shooting into her wrist. Later, when they told her that her thumb had been wrenched from its socket, the nurses said, You shouldn’t have kicked up such a fuss.
Aida’s heart beat faster in her chest, thudding against her ribs. A wave of dizziness swam through her, and she swallowed, breathed, and smiled brightly at Arthur as he squinted up at the x-ray.
‘Oh, I see it.’ His tone lightened with a meek awe. ‘Cool.’
‘We’ll plaster it and then you can go home.’
At this Arthur cheered significantly. ‘I’ll have a plaster cast?’
‘For at least six weeks.’
‘Cool,’ he repeated.
The doctor turned to Aida and said, with mock-sternness. ‘Will you be in trouble with his parents?’
Next of kin.
Aida looked at Arthur, whose face dropped to the floor and his look of misery returned. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they’ll forgive me.’
65
Thomas was under the carport, bent over beneath the bonnet of his car, fumbling around with the plug leads when Arthur approached him.
Thomas was mid-curse, ‘Piece of sh—’
‘Dad?’
He leaned sideways, poking his head out. ‘Yeah?’
Arthur shifted from one foot to the other. He was clutching a tattered notebook to his chest.
Thomas, hassled, lifted his eyebrows impatiently. Daylight was fading and the air was growing cold; he didn’t want to be dicking around with spark plugs in the dark. The car had started misfiring, chugging and belching and carrying on as he was driving home from an appointment with his financial planner that afternoon. Ironically, the man had suggested Thomas’s financial state was such that he could afford a new car. It seemed the machine had sensed Thomas’s enthusiasm for this idea and, aggrieved, had lost its temper at him on the drive home.
‘I got my report back from Mr Higgs today,’ Arthur said. ‘Remember the one I was telling you about?’
‘Um,’ Thomas returned to hovering over the engine block. ‘Remind me again?’
Arthur stepped closer. ‘What’s wrong with the Kingswood?’
Thomas frowned. ‘It’s afraid I’ll scrap it.’
Arthur gave a small laugh. ‘That’s funny. That’s sort of what this report is about.’
‘Oh, right,’ Thomas said. ‘So – your report?’
‘I got an A minus.’
‘Bravo!’ Thomas said, straightening.
Arthur looked embarrassed.
Thomas gestured to the notebook. ‘Can I have a look? What’s it about?’
Holding the book to his chest, his son looked dubious. ‘It’s about that weird grave up at the cemetery.’
‘“Fear not, dry your tears”.’
‘Yeah. That one.’
Thomas was intrigued. ‘Did you find out who he was?’
Arthur’s fingers flicked at the edges of the pages. ‘I did as much research as I could. I don’t think it’s possible to know for certain, because it turns out the cemetery records are incomplete. In the fifties there was a fire in the chapel where they kept the older records. But I did find something.’
Thomas grabbed the rag draped over the Kingswood’s quarter panel and tried unsuccessfully to remove the grease from his hands. ‘What’d you find?’
‘In World War I Australia didn’t have conscription,’ Arthur began. ‘Not like the other countries. They tried, but Aussies voted no.’
‘It was bloody close though,’ Thomas said. ‘Plenty voted yes.’
‘It divided everyone,’ Arthur agreed. ‘Anyway, even though they couldn’t make men fight overseas if they didn’t want to, they could still arrest people for protesting about the war.’ He turned to a page and held out the book. Thomas squinted down at the paper, tried to make out his son’s handwriting in the darkening light.
‘I reckon that grave belongs to a guy named Edward Coney. He died in 1938, aged fifty-nine. He printed socialist flyers and leaflets and stuff.’
‘You’re joking.’ Thomas whistled. ‘A socialist. Well, that’s not so terrible. In that case why the weird, mysterious headstone without his name on it?’
‘He wasn’t popular.’ Looking down, Arthur mumbled the end of the sentence.
Thomas swivelled an ear in his son’s direction. ‘Huh?’
‘No one liked him. He was beaten up more than once. Someone torched his house and he was run out of town. Then one day he pulled a little girl out of a dam. It was the middle of winter. He got pneumonia and died.’
‘Jesus,’ Thomas said.
Arthur cleared his throat. ‘I wrote about how people like to criticise other people, for thinking or behaving differently. That we judge too easily, without walking in someone else’s shoes. About how what people think about you is not as important as who you are, and what you do. That being different doesn’t necessarily make someone bad. About how we should, you know, be more accepting, not do mean shit.’ He flushed at the slipped obscenity. ‘Sorry.’
Thomas took hold of the book and leafed through pages filled with his son’s handwriting. He turned to the final page where Arthur’s teacher had made notes in red ink, below a large A– in a bold circle. A generous, deeply insightful examination of the human mind and social behaviour, the teacher had written. Impressive, Arthur. It’s clear you have the capacity to be understanding and discerning.
Blinking rapidly, Thomas noticed his thumb had left a black oval-shaped print on the bottom of the page.
‘Well done, mate,’ he said, gruffly. He handed the book back to his son, adding, ‘Bloody terrific job. Sorry about the fingerprint there, uh –’ he he-hemmed energetically, clearing his throat and fussing at his hands with the rag. ‘What’s the minus mark for?’
‘I spelled conscientious wrong.’
‘Darn English language.’
‘Dad?’
Thomas looked up.
‘I’m sorry that I was . . .’ His son looked at his feet, drew his toe through the gravel. ‘I was hard on you, and Mum, about . . . stuff. I didn’t understand and it took me a while. I made it harder. But I get it now.’
Thomas wiped and wiped at his hands, and didn’t know what to say. Finally he managed, ‘Mate, you have never done anything wrong. Never, ever. I’m . . . I’m proud of you. Now, grab that torch and hold it steady for me. We’ll get more miles out of the Kingsy yet.’
Arthur grinned and picked up the torch.
66
On the weekend of Thomas’s fiftieth birthday, they hired a houseboat on the river for four nights. The family took two cars to get to the riverside town of Renmark, from where they would collect the boat. In the first car, Elsie rode in the passenger seat while Thomas drove, with Aida and Arthur in the back. Following behind them in their own car was Millie and her boyfriend, Joseph.
The two-hour drive to Renmark gave Elsie an opportunity to voice her feelings on Millie’s ongoing relationship with Joseph Baker. For over a year now Millie had been seeing the young man and honestly, Elsie had always liked him. She really had. He was a year older than Millie, twenty-five, and self-employed, too. Owned his own gardening and landscaping business. An enterprising, friendly lad; the couple had met – much to Elsie’s relief – in the beer garden of The Bushy’s in Gawler on a Sunday afternoon. For the months that Millie had been away, bumping around the roads of the continent with her friends in a van, Elsie had been terrified that Millie might meet someone, somewhere, and decide to stay put. Not to come back to Gawler. What if she’d found a beau over a thousand miles away in Perth? Or Darwin? So it boded in Joseph Baker’s favour that he was a local lad.
