This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

I felt my heart thump.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just another fifty dollars.”

  “For what?”

  “For the new set.”

  “No,” I said. “Just wait a minute. You sold my brother a TV set. The set does not work. Therefore you replace it. At no cost.”

  “Ah, but that set is no longer available,” Chris said.

  “That,” I told him, “is not my problem. That is your problem. I don’t live in this country. But I don’t imagine that your consumer laws here are a whole lot different. That TV is not fit for use. It is not of salable quality. So you need to replace it. At no cost.”

  “We can’t do that, sir,” Chris said. “Because that model has been superseded.”

  “Not,” I said, “my problem. Either you replace this set, or you refund the money.”

  “The set is two months old.”

  “And it’s not working.”

  “I’ll tell you what else we can do, sir. We can get this set fixed.”

  “Okay . . .” I was doubtful.

  “Only I do need to warn you that we’ll have to send it away. That could take up to three months.”

  “Three months?”

  “Up to three months.”

  “Let me tell you something, Chris. My brother has a brain tumor. He can no longer read. Listening to music and watching DVDs are two things he can do. In three months he might be dead, Chris. I don’t feel we can wait that long.”

  “It is fifty dollars for the new set, sir, and then—”

  “Excuse me. Excuse me, Chris. May I read you something?”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “May I? It’s just there, by the receipt. I brought it with me but you’re leaning on—thank you. Can I read you this? My ­brother paid an extra sixty dollars for it. It says, No Hassles, No Lemons. Your store logo on the front there. No Hassles, No Lemons Guarantee. Right?”

  “The thing is, sir—”

  “I seem to be getting quite a lot of hassle returning this lemon of a TV set and—”

  “Sir, that warranty isn’t valid yet.”

  “What?”

  “The No Hassles, No Lemons Guarantee only cuts in after the first year, when the manufacturer’s warranty runs out.”

  “So you charged my brother sixty dollars for a No Hassles, No Lemons warranty that is absolutely useless. And now, when his set breaks down, you want another fifty dollars on top?”

  “I don’t think you’re seeing things in quite the right way, sir, and—”

  “Listen, I came into this place three weeks ago with my brother, and he spent over a thousand bucks on a new fridge and a washing machine. And he bought this set from you eight weeks ago too. I’d say he was a good customer of yours. Wouldn’t you say that? He’s spent about two thousand dollars in here in the past two months. And now, now, when something goes wrong, you don’t honor the warranty he paid extra for, and you want even more money on top.”

  “The thing is, sir, the set is a discontinued line and—”

  “Not my problem. Your problem. I want this set replaced. At no extra cost. My brother is at home, with a brain tumor. We spent the morning in the hospital where he’s having his brain fried with radiation, and on top of that he has to swallow toxic chemicals—so toxic that if he drops one pill on the floor I can’t pick it up for him, he has to do it, in case I absorb the chemicals through my skin—and I come in here, with a set he bought in good faith, and you slimy, scumbagging, grasping, inhuman sons-of-bitches want even more money to replace the crappy TV set you sold him that didn’t even last ten weeks. Is that the deal? Is that how you treat people? Is that how you conduct your business? Is that how you treat a dying man? Because, if it is, I’m going home right now to call up every TV station and every damned newspaper I can find to tell them just what dregs of humanity you are.”

  I had maybe raised my voice by this point, and the branch manager, who had been sitting in her office some distance away across the store, left her desk and came over to the counter.

  “Chris,” she said. “Please let the gentleman have the new model. There won’t be any extra charge.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Sorry for any confusion,” she said.

  And she went back to her post.

  Chris brought the new TV over.

  “What about this No Lemons warranty? It has the serial number of the old set on it.”

  “I’ll issue you a new one.”

  “Today’s date.”

  “Of course.”

  I left the shop with the new TV and the new No Hassles, No Lemons Guarantee, and with a new receipt.

  A store man held the door for me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “No dramas,” he said.

  I loaded the TV on the ute and drove home. I was installing it in the sitting room when Louis woke up.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t mind some tea.”

  “Make some in a second.”

  “Is that a new TV?”

  “It is. We can watch a film later.”

  “You have any trouble changing it?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  “I told you it would be fine,” I said. “You keep saying that we’re screwed, Louis, but we aren’t, we really aren’t. We’re not without resources, Louis. We can make a difference. We are not without resources.”

  He didn’t speak for a second, then he said, “Did you have to shout at them?”

  “Maybe a bit.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I thought so.”

  I left him watching the afternoon news, and went to fill the kettle.

  29

  Wildlife

  Going along on Louis’s bike, I got punched in the ear. Just like that. Out of nowhere and painful too.

  “What the—?”

  I stopped and looked around the street. No one. It was deserted. But a bedroom window was open and some curtains were flapping. Some sonofabitch bastard must have thrown something and he was hiding under the sill chortling to himself now and wondering when it might be safe to look up and take a peek. If I just waited long enough . . .

  “Ignorant sons-of—”

  Then another punch. It happened again. My ear was ringing and there was blood on my neck.

  “What the—?”

  I saw the culprit fly away. It was a territorially minded magpie that had swooped down from a tree and had attacked, to get me out of its neighborhood, and now it was making doubly sure that I went.

  I swiped at it and it cleared off, leaving me free to make a getaway. I stopped at a drugstore and bought some bandages and antiseptic wipes.

  After that I started noticing cyclists with cable ties attached to the ribs of their cycle helmets, sticking up like the spines on angry porcupines. I made inquiries and found that this would deter and repel magpie attacks, so I got some and decorated my bike hat with them.

  The magpies left me alone then, but the price was that I had to cycle around looking like an alien. But it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind. And nothing’s really that weird—it’s all just ordinary stuff that you haven’t quite got used to yet.

  People told me that small children had had their eyes pecked out by those aggressive magpies. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not, but I kept on my sunglasses.

  I got to the hospice and went up to Louis’s room and told him that a magpie had attacked me, though he was in a deep coma by now, and probably couldn’t hear.

  It’s an interesting question: What do you talk to the dying about? Do you tell them you love them, do you discuss deep philosophical matters, or do you stick to the everyday, the banal, the benig
n, the small change and the small coin? Maybe the latter. For surely, even when dying, we still wish to be treated as part of life. We want to know what’s going on. Because we’re still here, we’re not dead yet, and there’s time enough for fine speeches and deep thoughts. Maybe we prefer to be included, and not stuck out in some special room, where only hushed-tone matters are discussed.

  The hospice café opened at nine, but I would be awake and hungry by five, having spent the night in Louis’s room. At seven a café up at Kangaroo Point opened its shutters. This was only half a mile away, so I’d go there for breakfast. The café had tables outside, on the top of the cliff, overlooking the city skyscrapers and the Brisbane River.

  The place was always busy, for the runners, the personal trainers, the bikers, the walkers, the tai chi types, they would all be there. They exercised together or alone, clad in bright colors and in expanding Lycra, with expensive sports shoes on their feet. The men were mostly bronzed and muscular, the women lean and tanned. They jogged, did push-ups, skipped ropes, jumped hoops.

  I don’t suppose any of them knew or thought or realized that a short walk away lay those to whom all this health and vigor was irrelevant. Life just seems like a big party sometimes, at which we all gradually get edged to the door, and then we are out in the cold. But the party continues without us, and our absence is barely noticed, and no one wants to look out of the window, at the sight of those departing. For to do so would spoil the fun and destroy the bright, Lycra illusion that this vitality will go on forever and that age can be postponed indefinitely, and if we just keep running and moving, we’ll be all right, and some slow-moving old man with a scythe and hourglass will never be able to catch us.

  After breakfast, I’d go back and sit with Louis again. The nurses would come and go. Sometimes a visitor might drop by. I’d change the CD. I’d read, do a crossword, get some coffee, sit in the TV room, go back to Louis’s bedside. You don’t want life to end but you wonder when it will.

  The nurse recommended the Old Bridge Hotel to me for lunch, so I walked down there and got a drink and a sandwich. When I bit into the sandwich, I broke a tooth.

  When I got back to Louis’s room, his friend Michael Meere was there. Michael was Louis’s only collar-and-tie friend, with a good job and good money and a company car. They’d met through Bella, many years since, and Michael’s wife had had leukemia, and Louis had helped him out, and now he was returning the favor. He had power of attorney and I liked and trusted him. He was all right.

  “I went to the Old Bridge Hotel down the road for lunch,” I said, “or I’d have been here when you arrived.” It felt strange only having half a back tooth.

  “The Old Bridge Hotel?” Michael said. “Louis used to work there. As a maintenance man.”

  “It was there, was it? Well, well.”

  “He told me the place is all right for a drink, but whatever you do, don’t eat there.”

  “Right. I see.”

  “How is he?” Michael said. “Doesn’t look like any change here.”

  “No,” I said. “Just the same.”

  “I’ll call in again,” Michael said. “I’ve got to go back to work.”

  The days just passed, long and slow. At night, at two or three in the morning, I’d find myself awake, sitting in the now-dark TV room, or wandering the corridors. I’d meet people—nurses, visitors like me, keeping vigil, patients, young and old.

  A woman in a T-shirt and a big diaper came into Louis’s room. She looked eighty.

  “Why have they turned the lights off outside?” she said.

  “It’s nighttime,” I told her. “Where’s your room?”

  She didn’t know, so I rang for a nurse.

  “Are you a doctor?” the old lady said, as the nurse came.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  I went to the visitors’ room and made some tea, then became aware of company, a young woman in a dressing gown, there on the sofa.

  “You like some tea?”

  “Thank you.”

  I made her some and we talked awhile. She wasn’t even thirty yet and probably wasn’t going to see it. She’d been suffering with cancer for more than seven years. After a while she went back to her room to try to sleep.

  You meet people and afterward you say to yourself, I don’t know what bad luck is, and what do I have to complain about? And yet even then, it’s hard to keep smiling, for some reason or another.

  The small hours of the morning are like the sea at low ebb, as it moves slowly, restfully, rhythmically—the tide lapping on the beach, the sound of the undertow sucking at the pebbles, the sight of water disappearing into sand.

  You see how weird life is, how huge and small, you feel you might even finally get a grasp on it, but then there is the sound of the morning cart, and the new nurses come in for the change of shift, and the room lights will soon no longer be needed, for you can open the blinds and admit the dawn.

  And all those answers you almost had your hand on have fled again from your grasp. But maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe one of these days soon, when the world is quiet again, you might understand what it is you need to understand.

  But really, you know you never will. And you’ll be baffled until the day you die. And even then, you might never find out. You’re like an ant crawling over a manuscript. You aren’t even aware the words are there, let alone able to read them.

  * * *

  One morning I cycled back from the hospice to Louis’s house, to pick up his mail. As I went, I saw that some people had put a stack of papers outside their house for collection by the recycling truck, but the wind had taken them and blown them away.

  They were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of letter-size pages, scattered all over the neighborhood. The couple were going about retrieving them. By the look of it, it would be several hours’ work. They were both dressed in office clothes. Maybe they had called in to say they would be late that day.

  The wind was still taking the papers too, and spreading them out over a wider and wider area. But the man and the woman just went on gathering them, patiently, diligently, without apparent anger or irritation, just with acceptance. Not even with resignation—which was too negative a word to apply to how they seemed.

  I felt maybe I should stop and help, but I had things to do, so I kept going.

  The papers were over the gardens and on the lawns; they were in the hedges and the trees. They paved the sidewalk and lined the gutters. White pages, with the odd line of print upon them. The couple gathered them into bundles and piles, and secured them properly this time, so there would be no more blowing away.

  The next day, the papers were all gone, like snow melted from a spring landscape, leaving greenery and not a trace of winter. And you’d never have known they had been there, so clean and tidy were the streets.

  30

  Flat White

  “I’m just a duffer,” Louis said.

  We were heading for the library to renew his membership card. Not that he could read anymore, but I couldn’t see much point in reminding him of that.

  “Who isn’t?” I said.

  He didn’t answer me.

  He had trouble getting his library card out of his wallet and I had to do it for him. People on the other sides of counters always know there’s something wrong, but they never ask, or want to know necessarily; they may even prefer not to.

  “Come here every Sunday afternoon,” Louis said. “Cycle over and read the boat magazines.”

  “Want to look at some now?”

  “Maybe later.”

  He renewed his membership for another year and we left. He was moving more slowly now, and with an air of distraction, like a man behind glass, peering out.

  “I just want to call in here,” he said, as we passed the frontage of a small accountancy office. The frosted glass do
or was jammed open, to let the air circulate, and inside the room, at the far end of it, a woman at a desk looked up. Perplexed at first, she then stood and came over.

  “Louis?”

  “This is Pearl,” he said. “She and her husband bought one of my boats.”

  “We lived on it,” she said. “But David’s gone now. How are you, Louis? Are you okay?”

  Louis couldn’t speak. His eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m Louis’s brother,” I said. “He hasn’t been well.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Pearl said. “I’m so sorry, Louis. So sorry.”

  He went on standing there, misty-eyed, dumb and inarticulate, seeing the past reappear, seeing old times return and as quickly vanish—turned pages, briefly glimpsed, of a snapshot album.

  Pearl embraced him, and Louis stood there in her arms, grizzled beard, beanie hat low over his eyes, paint-splattered shorts, scars on his legs and a peculiar disfigurement on the skin of his knees, which I assumed was the result of his roofing days, from kneeling on hot, sun-scorched metal and tiles. Louis wouldn’t have bothered with knee protectors. He was tough.

  “You take care now, Louis. Keep in touch.”

  “How’s the boat?” he managed to ask.

  “Still good,” she told him. “Still good. I’ve got it moored out on the creek. Not supposed to be there. They’ve moved everyone else on into the marinas. But I sneaked back. I mean, why pay rental when you can moor for free?”

  “Good to see you,” Louis said. “We have to go now.”

  “Take care, Louis. And nice to meet you too,” she said.

  And we went.

  * * *

  Later that day we were back in the hospital. Louis had an appointment with the consultant. The consultant was in his early thirties and he did what he had to as best he could. He was neither patronizing nor indifferent; he told you the truth, yet he left a little hope. He did a difficult job well. But then, he did it every day.

  “You know the probabilities, Louis?” he asked.

  Louis reeled them off. That much he was able to remember easily. The consultant nodded.