This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

  There used to be a bumper sticker once that read If you’re so clever, why aren’t you rich?

  I wondered about this and what the answer to the question was. I eventually got it. Being rich is not necessarily the product of intelligence. In fact, if being rich is what you want, then being clever won’t of itself be enough. It might even be too much—a handicap of a kind. If you want to make money you can’t afford to take too much into consideration, only what is relevant. If you think too much or too deeply, you can be frozen, maybe from a plethora of choices, maybe from anxiety.

  There are people with just enough brains to keep them out of institutions walking around with billions, while men with quantum physics on their minds are buying their clothes from charity shops.

  Once a week Halley came into town and rode his bike along the river; then he headed for Louis’s place, where they would sit in the kitchen with a six-pack of Little Creatures Pale Ale, and put global matters into perspective.

  Halley had a married sister called Barbara, who led a straighter life and who was married to Derek, a heavyset extrovert with a booming voice and many opinions who had once had a fine occupation as a fixer for a multimillionaire and who had always flown club-class. But he and the millionaire had fallen out and Derek had seen and felt the parting of the ways and now had a new job working the phones as a debt chaser. He still maybe hankered after the club-class days and found them hard to leave behind.

  Barbara and Derek lived on the south side of the city in a stylish house with cool tiled floors, not far from the harbor. They had dogs but no children, although they did have Halley and Barbara’s aging mother to live with them. Halley was a regular visitor, and Louis had become a family friend.

  They would all spend Christmas together, eating turkey out in the hot Australian sunshine, while Derek did the basting or pried the top off another bottle, his voice booming as he barbecued the ham.

  * * *

  Halley turned up one day with a supply of foods that he had discovered from the Internet were good for tumors. There were a lot of oranges and ginger and cranberries. Louis never touched any of it and left the fruit to rot. I threw the stuff out with the kettle and didn’t tell Halley anything.

  “Derek’s suggesting meeting up for lunch this weekend down at Fried Fish. Bring your brother,” Halley said.

  It wasn’t really a question of Louis bringing his brother at all. It was a matter of his brother bringing him.

  They’d taken Louis’s license away the day they found the lump. He’d called me a few times over the preceding weeks, complaining of headaches and that his memory was going and that he was having trouble reading now and couldn’t understand what was going on.

  “Louis, it sounds to me like you’ve had some kind of a ministroke. You need to go to the doctor.”

  He went, eventually, and the doctor sent him for a scan. He took a morning off work to get the scan done. When it was finished the woman operating the machine came into the room, pale as snow, and said, “How long have you had this?”

  “Had what?” Louis said.

  “How long have you had these symptoms?”

  “Couple of weeks,” Louis said. “Why?”

  She showed him the scan. There was a tumor in his head the size of a billiard ball.

  “I don’t know how you’re still walking around. Sit down. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  While they waited for it to arrive, she demanded his license.

  “That means I can’t drive anymore?”

  “You can apply to get it back at a later date.”

  He never did. Never got it. Never applied.

  * * *

  By the time I got there, Louis had already been operated on and was back out of the hospital. He didn’t want me to drive the ute at first as he said I had gone soft and had become effete and soft-handed due to having driven nothing but automatics for the past ten years.

  “Louis,” I said. “It’s like a bicycle and an elephant—you never forget.”

  “When have you ever ridden an elephant?”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “You’d better rent a car,” he said. But by then pride and stubbornness had got the better of me.

  I spent a morning on the phone and sorted out insurance. Then I got the keys and started up the ute. Earplugs would have been useful, as would a window that stayed up. But the gears were nowhere near as bad as Louis had made out. I ground them a few times and maybe drove the wrong way up a couple of one-way streets, but once I’d got over that, we were fine.

  For all that Louis’s short-term memory was giving him problems, he still had a map of the city fixed in his mind, and he knew the way to Fried Fish with his eyes closed.

  “Okay. Left here now,” he’d say. But then he’d raise his right hand.

  Or it would be the other way around.

  “It’s right at this next intersection coming up.”

  And he’d point left.

  I decided that it was the gestures that were accurate and the words that were wrong, and so it proved to be. When he said left, I turned right.

  “That’s fine now. Just keep going straight on ahead here and follow the car behind you.”

  “Louis—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I knew what he meant so I kept my mouth shut and we kept going on our way to Fried Fish. We sat outside the restaurant, with Louis in his beanie hat, smiling serenely like the Buddha, and Derek pouring the drinks out, and Babs looking kind and comfortable, and Meg, who was maybe eighty-three, looking cryptic, and Halley being genially sarcastic whenever Derek expressed a political opinion. And the afternoon passed, and everyone kept talking to Louis, even when the conversation wandered and he could follow it no longer, trying to keep him included.

  But he just sat there, more Buddha-like with each passing minute and with the slow declining of the sun.

  “So you’re back at radiotherapy tomorrow, Louis?” Babs said.

  He gave her the milky-eyed look, and there was the usual moment of suspense when you wondered, Has he heard, will he answer? Then he nodded and said, “That’s right, Babs. First thing tomorrow.”

  “Then that’s good, Louis,” she said. “And we’ll all be thinking of you.”

  And he gave her the Buddha smile, peering out from under the beanie hat.

  “Thank you, Babs,” he said. “That will be nice.”

  “We’ll be thinking of you, fella,” Derek said. He had large hands, like garden forks, the kind of thing you might use when repotting.

  I looked at Louis and shared a glance with him. They were nice people, but they didn’t know about the long-ago, nor the day I had come home to find Louis waiting for me in the back garden to tell me the bad news. And I didn’t know about their long-agos, and that’s the way the world is. You meet on the open ground somewhere, at Fried Fish or somewhere similar, out in the sunlight. But your dark cave of memory is your own. And even if you once shared that cave with someone, they don’t always seem to remember the same paintings on the walls.

  “Louis,” I said to him once, “our childhood was the most miserable thing, wasn’t it, though? I used to go to sleep praying I wouldn’t wake up again. And I was only ten.”

  He looked at me with incredulity and hurt bewilderment.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “There were a lot of good things there. Apart from the soup.”

  The past isn’t just a foreign country; it’s a place we see different parts of. Louis had gone and looked at places there I hadn’t even known existed.

  8

  Matadors

  Iona didn’t take too warmly to news of the sun-kissed blonde from New Zealand by way of the Black Mountains. And she hadn’t even met her yet. I think it was the sun-kissed blonde part she took exception to, as if to ask what was wr
ong with redheaded Celts with freckles? She and Louis had clashed before, like when he said to her, “Your sense of humor underwhelms me,” and as a consequence I got it in the neck.

  “What does he mean, my sense of humor underwhelms him?”

  “Iona—I don’t know.”

  “Well, he’s your brother.”

  “It’s just the kind of thing he says. Don’t take it seriously.”

  “Was he trying to be funny?”

  “What about?”

  “Was he trying to be funny about my sense of humor?”

  “Iona—”

  I think she had it in for him after that, at least for a while until she forgot about it and something else came along instead.

  “So is he going to bring this so-called sun-kissed blonde back here like he did the other one and have sex on the sofa while we’ve got to listen through the wall?”

  “It was a one-off,” I said.

  “It was a one-off that went on all night,” she said. “How come he doesn’t stay on his boat?”

  “He’s only got a small mattress,” I said.

  “I expect they’ll want breakfast too.”

  “We can spare two bits of toast.”

  Sure enough, Louis turned up with the sun-kissed blonde and they gave the sofa a good pounding.

  The sun-kissed blonde was used to equestrian living and wide-open spaces, and terraced houses and small flats seemed quite a novelty.

  “Look at the funny little houses, Louis,” she’d say. “Aren’t they small?”

  I don’t know what women saw in Louis, but they must have seen something invisible to my eye. It was only toward the end that he got lonely, and the lonelier he got and the more straggly his beard became and the more the dust piled up on the carpet, the harder it became to start anew.

  * * *

  Back before Louis and I fell out with God, we were altar boys three and a half times a week. (On average.) Three times on a Sunday we had to drag ourselves up the hill to church: for high mass at eleven, back for altar-boy tuition at three, back again for benediction at six thirty. And then every Saturday we would take it in turns to be the servers at early-morning mass.

  Looking back I realize our parents probably sent us to become altar boys not merely from a sense of devotion but to get a break from us and maybe to have sex undisturbed on a Sunday afternoon.

  One Saturday, a few weeks after our father’s funeral, it was my turn for the six thirty Saturday rising and the bitter solo trek up the hill to put on the red cassock and the white cotta and do the honors at an ill-attended morning mass, to which only fanatics and the elderly came.

  Afterward, as I left the church, a man stopped me. He was a stranger to me and I had been warned about such and had no intention of going anywhere with him. But that wasn’t what he had in mind.

  “Hey, son,” he said. “Your mother’s the widow, isn’t she?”

  Inside I was angry, ashamed, and somewhat offended at hearing my mother so described but was unable to argue with the truth of the statement. I think that those who attempt to deal with the effect of familial death upon children and the young constantly overlook one essential aspect of it all—the sheer embarrassment.

  “I don’t know,” I said. As I couldn’t deny it, I feigned ignorance.

  “Look, things can’t be easy. You see she gets this.”

  And the unknown man, who knew all about us, but whom I did not know, pressed some folded banknotes upon me.

  “You give that to your mother, all right?”

  I stared at him, uncertain what to do.

  “You go straight home now and give that to your mother, okay?”

  I nodded, but I did not thank him. And then he was gone and I was alone in the street with the banknotes in my hand.

  A sudden excitement came into me. I was going to hurry home now, the bringer of joy and glad tidings. I would place the money upon the table and see our mother’s face, at first clouded with perplexity and distrust, but then lightening with belief and with doubt dispelled as she reached out and took the notes in her hand and realized that for a brief while things would be easier and we were saved.

  And it wouldn’t be just her. Louis too would be amazed by my ability to go out single-handed into the world and attract good fortune, just like that, when left to my own devices.

  So I turned toward home. I was anxious to keep the money safe. But along with that, I had a hankering for a certain kind of style which I had seen in films in the cinema, where men would reach into their inside pockets and take out wallets, or flat gold cigarette cases, or small guns with which to shoot their enemies.

  I didn’t have a coat with an inside pocket. So I stuffed the money inside my pullover and walked quickly home. It was a twenty- to twenty-five-minute walk.

  As I entered the house, I called to my mother.

  “I came out of the church,” I told her, “and there was a man . . .”

  Her fear changed to interest to anticipation as I described what had occurred.

  “Then let’s see it,” she said. “Let me see it.”

  I reached to my imaginary inside pocket, under my pullover, and, you’ve guessed it, the money had gone.

  Her dismay was palpable, and I felt an inner sickness. To have come home with hope and then to have destroyed it was worse than coming home with nothing at all.

  “It’s gone. It was there. It’s gone.”

  I ran out and realized they were both behind me, and we scoured the street, all the way up to the church and back. But the money had gone.

  I don’t know if she ever believed that the money had really been there or that the incident was but a product of a child’s imagination: the aspect of it that dreams of fixing everything for the helpless, hopeless adult world—the child as hero, feted and applauded, saving the day.

  She never mentioned it again. And Louis just looked at me as if I was either a liar or a thief, and he couldn’t decide which, but whichever it was, I was letting the side down.

  I never saw the man again either, but I would think of him, and how he must have felt as he walked away from handing me those banknotes, feeling that he had done a generous and a decent thing that would make someone else’s life easier for a while. He must have been some acquaintance of my father’s. He should have given the banknotes to Louis. Louis would never have lost them. But it had been Louis’s turn to stay in bed that Saturday. But then again, had it been Louis’s turn, maybe he would never have attracted the good fortune, so we were stymied anyway.

  We carried on without the money. Its difference would have been transient and temporary. Maybe that was when I started falling out with God. I just came home from the church one morning and told my mother I wasn’t going anymore. She didn’t try to make me, just asked me if I was sure, and I said I was. She said it was our father’s idea for us to become altar boys and to have to go to church three times a day on Sunday.

  Louis kept on going and said I was letting the side down again. And then there was his brief dalliance with the possibility of the priesthood. But after he came to his senses, he stopped going to church and fell out with God too, although our mother hung on to Him, right to the end. But even there, it wasn’t God so much as the fact that all her friends and acquaintances were there, all regular attenders, and without at least the simulacrum of belief, she would have had no social life and have been even lonelier than she was.

  It wasn’t so much God I had the trouble with, as the people who purported to act on His behalf, and who gave Him such a bad name.

  * * *

  “You remember that, Louis?” I asked, as I looked across the table at him.

  We were drinking flat whites—a kind of Aussie latté—and sitting underneath the burners at the café run by the Malaysian girls. Louis was sitting there, looking dapper and neat with his freshly t
rimmed beard and cropped hair and eyebrows. He had pulled off the beanie hat as the gas burners were roasting him now.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t.”

  But I carried on reminiscing.

  “You remember the soup, do you, Louis?” I said. “You remember Mum’s soup? Every Sunday, when we were back from the altar-boy training, and before we had to go off again to benediction. We’d have dinner, remember? Soup made out of mutton bones, and you had to eat it quick before the fat congealed on the top of the soup. You remember?”

  “Don’t,” Louis said. “Please don’t.”

  But I was remorseless.

  “And then mutton for the main course, and then tinned fruit and condensed milk for dessert.”

  “Don’t,” Louis said. “It’s too painful.”

  “Happy days, eh, Louis?” I said.

  “You’re a bastard,” he told me.

  “Come on, Louis. And do you remember, after benediction, how we’d go to the Perkins’s house, because we didn’t have a TV, and they’d let us watch it, and Mum would keep jam sandwiches in her handbag for us to eat on the way home.”

  “No,” Louis said. “No more now. It was bad enough the first time around.”

  “You remember their son, he was in your class. What was it he drank again? Arsenic?”

  “Cyanide,” Louis said. “He did chemistry, same as me. But he was a geek and a nerd and he didn’t get along with anyone, so he got cyanide out the lab, stopped the elevator between floors, and drank it.”

  “His brother was nuts too, wasn’t he? He’d be there at the weekends, on day release from the asylum.”

  “They lived just down the road from the prison,” Louis remembered.

  “That’s right. They did.”

  “Why were they all weird?” Louis said.

  “Why were all who weird?”

  “All our parents’ friends. All weird or outcasts or crippled or screwed up or they had pieces missing. You remember that couple of friends of theirs? He had a brace on his leg and she had a bad eye that looked at you sideways. All their friends were like that. They all had something wrong with them.”