Barracuda

by Christos Tsiolkas

  And it was true. It was confirmed by the women’s shared awkward silence that it was Dan’s future being woven and crafted, his future.

  Clyde turned to him. ‘Do you want to be a father, Dan?’

  Demet confirmed it again by using his old name. She reached for his hand and said, ‘Danny, please say yes. We’d so love you to be the father.’

  He could see her, his young daughter, he could conjure her up: Regan’s placid good nature, her desire to please. She would have Demet’s almond-shaped dark caramel eyes, with a sparkle in them that would come from Dan’s mother. But he couldn’t answer Clyde because he didn’t know what Clyde wanted and he couldn’t say anything if he didn’t know what Clyde wanted.

  It was then Margarita said, ‘We’ve talked about it so much, we’re ready to be parents.’ She couldn’t mask her delight, her pride: she too was seeing their future, it was spread out in front of her, as vivid and clear and compelling as the moon above. He wanted to say yes. But there was Clyde, stiff and unbending and forbidding beside him.

  There was the longest silence, behind which was thumping music from the shore, the breaking waves, the clanking of plates and cutlery being collected by the waiters, the good cheer and murmured conversation from the remaining customers: there was noise everywhere but over it was their cheerless silence. The three of them were waiting for Dan to speak.

  Clyde finally clicked his tongue in exasperation. He refilled his glass and, deliberately avoiding Dan’s gaze, said, ‘I’m not sure I will even stay in Australia. I can’t be part of this.’

  A convulsion snapped at Dan’s spine, a disquieting surge of dizziness flooded through him. Was it fear? Was it relief?

  Margarita shook her head. ‘We don’t expect either of you to put any of your plans on hold. Please believe us, this won’t stop you and Dan heading off to Europe to live if that is what you want to do.’

  The men couldn’t look at each other. Clyde unfolded his arms and dropped them to his sides. ‘I appreciate being asked, I really do, thank you, but being a father has never been part of my plans.’

  Dan was looking down at the soiled tablecloth, at the streaks of lurid pink taramasalata smeared on the cloth. He sensed that Margarita had blanched at Clyde’s words; he looked up to see that Demet’s face had darkened. ‘That’s bullshit, Clyde. I don’t believe you’ve never thought of being a father.’

  Clyde was tapping his pouch of tobacco. When he replied his tone was mockingly effete. ‘Aye, I did once, sweetheart, you’re right. It was back in 1999, peaking on a pill. I think it lasted all of ten minutes.’

  Demet snapped, ‘That’s right, make a joke of everything. Why don’t you just say exactly what you mean? Why don’t you just be upfront and say that you’re not interested in having a baby with us?’

  ‘Baby, please.’ Margarita placed a warning hand on her lover’s arm.

  But Demet wouldn’t be pacified. This was the old Dem, thought Dan, the furious wild Demet from his past, the Demet who was convinced she was right about everything. He wished he could tell her that in this case she was wrong. Clyde had no fear of saying what he thought—Clyde had never talked to him about having children. It wasn’t Clyde’s future. But it could have been Dan’s, it could have been his.

  Clyde was taking deep, frustrated breaths. Dan sneaked a look at his partner. Could it be that Clyde was lost for words?

  ‘It’s OK, guys. The last thing Demet and I wanted was to put any pressure on you. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.’

  Margarita’s tone was measured. She was making peace. She turned to Demet. ‘It’s OK, mate, we said that there was no need for anyone to make a decision tonight.’

  But Demet couldn’t let it go. ‘Exactly what is your problem with having children?’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Clyde started rolling a cigarette. ‘I’m not interested in the middle-class fantasy of being superpoof. I don’t want to get married, I don’t want the responsibility that comes with being a father. It’s fine if that’s what you and Margarita want—no bother. Good luck to you. It’s just not for me.’

  The drying pink crusts of dip were fascinating and repulsive to Dan. There was a pressure in his belly, in his bladder. He wanted to say yes to the women, but he didn’t want to say the wrong thing to Clyde. He wouldn’t look up. He was sure they would be glaring at him: his lover, his best friend, her girlfriend. They wanted him to speak.

  ‘We have to grow up, Clyde.’ Demet’s tone was bruising, callous in its disdain. ‘Being queer doesn’t mean being bloody Peter Pan forever. Wanting to have some responsibility is not middle class.’

  ‘No? Moralism isn’t middle class?’ Clyde’s tone was equally scornful. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are preaching to me about responsibility and growing up? Don’t think you’re excused because you are some self-declared working-class hero. Having parents who are immigrants doesn’t make you working class, not where I come from. I should take you to Glasgow—I should drop you in the middle of fucken Easterhouse and see how much working-class solidarity they extend to you there.’

  He paused to lick the cigarette closed. The slide of his tongue across the paper conveyed his disgust. ‘How long are you going to be dining out on your folks’ experience, appropriating it as your own? You went to university, pal, you’re an academic. What the fuck are you if you’re not middle class?’

  Dan shut his eyes. She would fly at Clyde now, she would fling herself at him and strip away his flesh. She would retaliate with all that she was, all of her pride in who she was. She would tear him apart.

  Nothing. Dan opened his eyes. Demet’s features had slumped; she was staring at Clyde, slack-jawed, red-faced, punch drunk. He recognised the shame, he read her confusion. And for the first time he got it, how university had shaped and moulded her, how for Demet, university was her own Cunts College.

  Clyde couldn’t understand what that loss, that realisation, would have meant to her. Everything he’d said had been true, he had laid her bare: Demet had confidence, vocabulary, manners—she had all that came from opportunity and knowledge. She now lived in a different world: Shelley and Boz and Mia and Yianni, those friendships, that past, that world had gone. She was middle class, and so was Dan. But what Clyde didn’t understand was what Dan and Demet both knew in their bones. Clyde was the son of a pharmacist and a teacher, he’d excelled at a selective comprehensive school, he’d grown up in a part of Glasgow that Dan’s granddad had never visited—‘They didn’t allow our kind there,’ Bill had teased Clyde when the two had first been introduced—he was a cosmopolitan with the freedom of an EU passport, but what Clyde could never understand, because he could never conceive of such a thing, never concede the thought, was that for all Dan and Demet had gained, they both shared the same fear: that middle class wasn’t worth it.

  Couldn’t she just look at him? He was desperate for her to look at him. He knew that there would be light between them, a light that they shared. A past from before university and Cunts College.

  But Demet was cowed, her bottom lip was quivering. Margarita was about to speak, to allay the tension, to bring their table back to equilibrium. Dan couldn’t let her; Margarita didn’t understand that for all her talk of social justice and human rights—she was still the child of a successful lawyer and a father who was a top public servant—it couldn’t be Margarita who defended Demet, it had to be Dan. It had always been Dan.

  He straightened his back, ignored the searing discomfort from his full bladder. Margarita had begun talking but he cut her off, interrupted her without apology, addressing Clyde. ‘That world you’re describing, that world in Glasgow you keep banging on about, you know, that world of council estates and drugs and three generations of unemployment? The one you want to drop me and Dem in? That’s not fucking working class, Clyde. I don’t know what it is but it isn’t working class.’

  It worked. It was a sucker punch and it was now Clyde who was deflated. Margarita appeared uncertain and confused, as i
f Dan’s words were another language. But Demet looked up, he’d made Demet look up. He couldn’t read her expression.

  Dan was exhausted. He had to piss.

  Clyde quickly recovered, incredulous and incensed. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, pal? If they aren’t working class, who the fuck is?’

  Dan understood that it was because he’d defended Demet. It was the schoolyard again and he’d defended Demet. He groped for words that would pacify his lover but would also be loyal to his friend. But words remained dangerous, elusive; he couldn’t move them in the direction of his ideas and notions. He saw himself slicing open boxes and stacking supermarket shelves, smelled how sour and tart his sweat was at the end of an all-night shift; saw his father driving back and forth across the sea of the Nullarbor; saw his mother cutting hair. Someone’s got to cut hair. He thought of Mr Celikoglu’s long years at the Ford plant in Campbellfield, and Mrs Celikoglu’s lifetime as a seamstress and his granddad Bill’s skill as a bricklayer and his nan being a typist: all that labour and exertion and sweat, how the body was moulded and transformed by that work.

  He struggled for the words. ‘I don’t know, mate, I don’t know what those people you talk about are, I don’t know them. But they are not my class.’

  Clyde and Margarita were still unsatisfied; for them the words were certainly not enough. But Demet was nodding, was mouthing something covertly to him: he catches it, can almost hear it. ‘Thank you.’

  His and Demet’s daughter. There was no Clyde, no Margarita—they didn’t belong to his future.

  The sounds came rushing back: the sea, the music, the restaurant.

  Clyde flicked the rolled cigarette to his mouth. ‘Enough. This was meant to be a holiday.’ But his tone was conciliatory, his ire had vanished. One of his fingers was beating a double-stroke at the small of Dan’s back. ‘I’m going to have a smoke.’ He nodded shyly at Demet. ‘You coming out, mate?’

  She didn’t quite let him off the hook; she waited for a tense few seconds to pass. They were all holding their breath. Then she reached for her cigarettes and followed Clyde out to the landing.

  Margarita and Dan sat in an uneasy silence, watching their partners outside. Clyde said something to Demet and her response was a raucous laugh.

  Margarita visibly relaxed. ‘God, they’re alike, aren’t they?’

  Quick to anger, opinionated and loud but also generous.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Dan answered.

  The pressure from his distended bladder was now acute, he was desperate for the toilet, but he knew it wasn’t the moment to leave Margarita alone. He twisted and shifted in his chair.

  The smokers returned and Clyde looped an arm around Dan. ‘So what do you say, Kelly? You up to being a dad? I was just telling Dem that a son of yours would be one handsome lad.’

  Dan buckled, the pain in his bladder overwhelming, a flame torching at his heart, his lungs, as if some beast had landed on him, its weight crushing him. A son. To love, to raise and to teach. To fail.

  In a fury, he twisted away from Clyde’s arm, pushing him away, clumsily rising and upsetting the table. He almost ran from the table, needing to piss, but also to get away from Clyde.

  Inside the restaurant, he saw a group of people, an extended family, there were grandparents and there were children, a little girl had fallen asleep in her high chair.

  He is at the head of the table, he is pudgy now, carrying a weight he never had at school, he is thick-bellied and his hair is thinning. And it is then he recognises him. He is calling out to a little boy at the end of the table, he is saying, ‘There’s ice-cream, Michael, you can have ice-cream,’ and it is Tsitsas, he recognises the boy’s voice in the man, and Dan spins on his heel, knowing he daren’t walk past them, and goes back to the table and takes his seat and Demet and Margarita are talking but their words make no sense. Clyde is examining him anxiously and saying, ‘You alright, pal? You OK?’ but his words fall like blows and Dan can’t breathe, he can’t manage his lungs, his lungs won’t work and he is going to turn blue and he thinks what a mistake it was to come here, to their world. He could never take a son here, he could never bring a child here because they know who he is and they know what he did and he can’t breathe, why can’t he fucking breathe, and now the others are frightened and Demet is half out of her chair and there it comes, it comes, the blessed relief. He hungrily devours the air, sucking it in in heaving gulps.

  I’m sorry, he says quietly as the warm stinging fluid fills his crotch, slides down the back of his legs and starts a terrible slow drip drip onto the wooden decking of the jetty. All he can see is the soiled, screwed-up white napkin on the table, filthy and stained from their meal.

  He bolts from the table, knocking his chair flying, off the deck and across the boat landing, through the adjoining grassland, his shoes pounding, staggering on the unstable sand, making for the waves, ignoring the puzzled looks and cries of the teenagers on the beach, lurching and splashing into the water until it has reached his waist, until the unexpectedly icy water has covered the humiliating warmth and wet and stink of his drenched trousers. This is me, he thinks, and the shame is almost comic, it reveals exactly what he is and who he is. A life lived in and only through shame, it clings to him, it rises like the sun within him every morning, and it is there waiting when he sleeps. He lives in the shame, he reeks of it. And then, the next thought: I am in water.

  But the water doesn’t want him, the water is repelled by him. He hears his name called, can make out Demet’s urgent, frightened plea, the shock in Clyde’s voice. He turns from the unwelcoming sea to meet his friend, his lover, who are rushing to him. Margarita is hiding back in the shadows, fearful, disbelieving. He smiles weakly at her. She’s finally seen who he is.

  ‘Dan, what happened?’ It is Clyde who has spoken but it is Demet who has got to him first. She takes him in her arms, holding him, ignoring the wet, not caring that he is dripping the ocean on her. She smooths back his hair, she caresses his cheek. Without words; she knows to not use words.

  ‘Dan, what the fuck happened?’ Clyde snaps it out. He wants words, he wants explanations.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Dan’s teeth begin to chatter. Even in the mild warmth of the summer night, all he feels is the cold. ‘I’m sorry, mate. I pissed myself.’

  A young girl nearby on the beach begins to giggle, and one of the boys with her lets out a loud hoot.

  Dan doesn’t care. That’s what I am.

  They lead him back to the apartments, Demet on one arm and Clyde on the other, Margarita treading warily behind them. He is aware of people stopping, turning, couples and families sitting at the footpath tables, all turning to look. Back in the apartment, Clyde says briskly but gently—with fear, there’s fear in his voice now—‘You have to get in the shower, warm yourself up, babe.’ The whole time he’s in the shower, Clyde stays in the bathroom, won’t leave him alone.

  He comes out in a robe and Demet doesn’t want to leave, she’s insisting that Dan wants her to stay and he is relieved that Margarita says firmly, ‘No, Dem, let’s leave the guys alone.’ And Demet is kissing him, on his brow, the top of his head, on cheeks, his lips, she keeps saying, ‘I love you, Danny, I love you, and I’m sorry we put you on the spot, you don’t have to make a decision, Danny, and whatever decision you make is the right one,’ and Clyde has his arms crossed and Margarita is pulling at her girlfriend, saying, ‘Dem, he knows that, let’s just go,’ and even at the door, even on leaving, Demet turns around and says, ‘I’m sorry, Danny,’ and then says, ‘I love you, Danny,’ and he just wants her to go, just go. Because he knows she loves him and it isn’t enough. There’s not enough love in the world to cleanse, to eradicate, to scour away the dishonour of who he is.

  And you wanted me to father your child?

  ‘You know you can cry, Dan, there’s no shame in that.’

  They were sitting next to each other on the sofa. Yes there is, he wanted to say, there is shame in that. And his body
had lost the language of tears, it had been too long.

  ‘I think I need a drink.’

  They had bought a bottle of whiskey at the local bottle-o and Clyde poured a long tumblerful for himself, and another for Dan.

  Clyde took a long swig from his glass. ‘Why is it so hard for you to speak? Why can’t you have your say? What is it that stops you?’

  Words. The words inside are not the words that come out into the world.

  The men were sitting together but they were also sitting apart. Their skin was not touching.

  ‘I was watching you all night, mate, all night. You don’t want to offend Demet and you don’t want to offend me. You can’t live life like that—that’s not living.’ Clyde shoved him hard against the armrest of the sofa. He pointed a finger at Dan’s head, pointed it exactly as if it were a gun. ‘What’s in there, man? What’s going on?’

  The waves were pounding in the world outside, there was a grunt of an ignition coughing to life; the beam of light from the car flashed through the window, and then was gone.

  ‘Are you going to fucken answer?’ His finger was still there, drilling into Dan’s head, like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  Clyde dropped his hand, gave an empty laugh. ‘Yeah, answer a question with a question. That’s your form, isn’t it, Dan Kelly, that’s exactly your fucken form.’ He gulped from his drink again. ‘I want you—I’ve made that clear. I want you: the man who knows how to sit in silence, who is not mean, who is like he is from another planet. I mean, you’ve never been to a dance party, you can’t tell bitchiness or cynicism when it is being aimed right at you, right fucken at you.’

  Clyde was pointing that finger again, but not violently—almost indulgently this time. ‘I like you, Dan, I like that you are so into me that fucking with you is like having sex for the first time. Every. Time. I like you so much, Dan, that I am scared I’m falling in love with you. And why it is so terrifying, why I haven’t said the words before, is because I really don’t have a clue what you think, what you feel. I don’t have a fucking clue.’