by Steve Toltz
On his return, Terry joined the local football club. They played rough in those days- the parents watched the battered heads of their children crash together in chilly autumn dusks, and they writhed in ecstasy. Their kids were proving themselves, and even when they came off the field wearing wigs of dried blood, nobody could have been more pleased. In Australia, as anywhere, rites of passage are no small thing.
It was immediately apparent that Terry was a naturally outstanding player, a star on the field. To watch him tackle, pass, dummy, duck and weave through the skinny legions of little athletes would give your eyes spots. He ran like one possessed, his concentration absolute. In fact, on the field Terry underwent a transformation of character and disposition. Though he played the clown in just about every situation conceivable, he had no sense of humor about the game whatsoever; once the whistle blew, he was as serious about that tough oval ball as a cardiovascular surgeon is about squishy oval hearts. Like me and probably most Australians, Terry had an innate opposition to authority. Discipline was abhorrent to his nature. If someone told him to sit down just as he was reaching for a chair, he’d probably have tossed it out the nearest window. But in the realm of self-discipline he was a Zen master. You couldn’t stop him. Terry would do laps of the garden even while the magnified moon rose up like a soap bubble. In storms he’d power on with sit-ups and push-ups, and as the sun sank behind the prison, his boots chomped through clumps of thick wet grass and lakes of mud.
In summer Terry joined the local cricket team. Again he shone from the first day. As a bowler he was fast and accurate; as a batter he was deadly and powerful; as a fielder his eye was exacting and his reflexes sharp. It was unnatural how natural he was. Everyone talked about him. And when they opened the new swimming pool, guess who was the first in the water? The guy who built it! And guess who was second? Terry! I ask you: Can a person’s body be genius? Can muscles? Can sinew? Can bones? You should’ve seen him in the pool. And calm! At the start of a race, while the other boys trembled on the swimmer’s block, Terry stood there as if he were waiting for a bus. But suddenly the gun fired! He was so quick you wouldn’t remember seeing him dive; he glossed through the water as though towed by a jet ski. So that Terry could have his hero cheer him on, I went, always half concealing myself in the back of the stands, roaring louder than anyone. God, those swimming carnivals! It’s like I’m there now: the echo of the splashing bodies and the wet feet trotting along the cold sopping tiles of the indoor swimming pool, the pungent stench of chlorine that would make an embalmer nostalgic, the sound of a swimming cap sucked from a head, the dribbling of water emptied from a pair of goggles. And those boys loved it. It was as if someone had said to them, “Human beings need water to live, so get in!” And they got in. And they were happy.
Terry was the happiest of them all. Why wouldn’t he be? Football star, cricket star, swimming star. The town had its first local celebrity, made all the more remarkable because he was a seven-year-old boy. Seven! Only seven! He was the Mozart of sport, a prodigy unlike anybody ever seen. The town adored him, all its lovesick eyes caressing him, encouraging him. There’s no point denying it was out-and-out worship. The local paper made a big hullabaloo of the amazing Terry Dean too. When one of the city papers did a story on young athletes most likely to make sporting history and Terry was listed among them, my father almost died from delight.
In case you’re wondering, there was no sibling rivalry between us, not a speck of jealousy on my part, and even though I felt forgotten like those burned-out cars in derelict suburbs, I was proud of my brother, the sporting hero. But I was concerned too; I was the only one to notice there was more to Terry and sport than mere skill and athleticism.
It wasn’t the way he played that keyed me into it, but the way he watched when he was a spectator. First of all, you couldn’t get two words out of him before a game. It was the only time in my life I can say I saw him display anything that resembled anxiety. And I’ve seen him stand in court about to be given a life sentence, so I know what I’m talking about.
We’d arrive to watch a football game and a deep excitement would come over him- for Terry an empty oval was a shadowy, mystical place. The match would begin, and he would sit upright and expectant, his mouth half open and his eyes glued to every action. He was genuinely moved. It was as if he were hearing a language only he understood. He sat with a quiet intensity, like he was seeing something holy- as if scoring a goal in the last thirty seconds was an immortal act. After a game, win or lose, his whole soul seemed filled with satisfaction. He was in a religious fervor! When his team scored a goal, he would actually shudder. I saw him do it with my own eyes, and I don’t care what anyone says, a young boy shuddering with religious fervor is just plain creepy. He couldn’t stand a draw. You couldn’t talk to him after a draw. Bad calls from the umpire set him off into a violent temper too. I’d say, “Can we go home now?” and he’d turn slowly to face me, his eyes full of pain, his breath shallow; he seemed to be suffering. At home, after unsatisfactory games, we all had to walk on tiptoes (which isn’t easy when you’re on crutches).
As I’ve said, Terry and I were different in our bodies. His gestures were loose, effortless, honest, and agile while mine were laborious, painful, hesitant, and inept. But our differences were most keenly felt in our obsessions, and contrary obsessions can be a real divider. For example, if you have one friend in a monomania about not having found love and another is an actor who can only talk about whether God gave him the right nose, a little wall comes between them and conversations disintegrate into competing monologues. In a way, this is what was beginning to happen to Terry and me. Terry talked only of sporting heroes. I took some interest, but a significant part of having a hero is imagining his heroic deeds as your own. The fact was, I got only nominal pleasure from imagining myself scoring a goal or running the four-minute mile. Daydreams in which effusive crowds cried, “Isn’t he fast?” just weren’t that satisfying for me. It was clear I was in need of another kind of hero altogether.
Terry’s obsession eventually took over his life; everything from meals to going to the toilet was an unwanted interval between the times he could play, practice, or think about sport. Card games bored him, books bored him, sleep bored him, God bored him, food bored him, affection bored him, our parents bored him, and eventually I bored him too. We started arguing about silly things, mostly about my behavior: now that he was out enjoying life in the company of children who weren’t lying in bed moaning, my pervasive negativity and my incapacity for joy became wearisome to him. He started criticizing me for every little thing: he didn’t like the way I gently tapped people on the shoulder with my crutch when I wanted to get by them, he didn’t like how I quickly discovered the thing a person was most proud of and immediately ridiculed it as a way of undermining them, he was tired of my deep suspicion of everyone and everything, from church doors to smiles.
Sadly, in the space of a few months, Terry finally saw me for what I was: an eleven-year-old grump, a sour, depressive, aggressive, proud, ugly, mean, myopic, misanthropic kid- you know the type. The days of following me around, imitating my cough, and pretending to share in my stabbing abdominal pains were but a sweet, distant memory. Of course, looking back, it’s easy to see that Terry’s anger and reproaches were born of frustration and love; he didn’t understand why I couldn’t be as easy and happy in the world as he was. But at the time all I could see was the betrayal. It seemed that all the world’s injustices were rushing at me like a strong wind.
***
Now that I was losing my only ally, all I wanted to do was hide, but the fucked thing is that in a small town, there is no such thing as anonymity. Obscurity, yes. Anonymity, no. It’s really rotten the way you can’t walk down the street without someone saying hello and smiling at you. The best thing you can do is find places everyone hates and go there. And yes, even in a small town there are areas that people avoid en masse- make a mental list, and there you can live your life undis
turbed without having to wall yourself into your bedroom. There was a place in our town that Lionel Potts had opened. Nobody ever set foot inside because Lionel was the most despised man in the district. Everyone had it in for him, but I didn’t understand why. They said it was because he was a “rich bastard.” They thought, “Who does he think he is, not struggling over the rent? What cheek!”
I thought there must be something secret and sinister about Lionel Potts. I couldn’t believe people hated him for being rich, because I’d noticed most people were aching to be rich too; otherwise they wouldn’t buy lottery tickets and plan get-rich-quick schemes and play the horses. It made no sense to me that people would hate the very thing they aspired to become.
His café was dimly lit, and its dark wooden tables and long wooden benches made it look like a Spanish tavern or a stable for people. There were indoor ferns, paintings of overdressed men on horseback, and a series of black-and-white photographs of a cluster of ancient, majestic trees where the pharmacy now stood. The place was empty from morning to night; I was the only customer. Lionel would complain to his daughter that it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to close up and go out of business, while peering at me curiously, obviously wondering why I was the only one in town not adhering to the boycott. Sometimes his daughter stared at me too.
Caroline was eleven years old and tall and thin, and she always stood leaning against the counter with her mouth half open as if in surprise. She had green eyes and hair the color of a golden delicious apple. She was flat-chested and her arms and shoulders were muscular; I remember thinking she could probably beat me in a fight and that would be very embarrassing if it ever came to pass. At eleven, she had that thing that was eventually perfected on Parisian catwalks- a pout. I didn’t know it then, but pouts operate like this: they suggest a temporary dissatisfaction that entices you to satisfy it. You think: If only I could satisfy that pout, I would be happy. It’s only a recent blip in evolution, the pout. Paleolithic man never heard of it.
I sat in the darkest corner of the café and watched her carry crates of bottles up from the cellar. Neither she nor her father fussed over me or treated me that nicely, considering I was their only client, but I drank milk shakes and Coca-Cola and read books and thought my thoughts, and with an empty notebook in front of me struggled to make sense in words of the visions that had come to me in the coma. Every day she brought me drinks, but I was too shy to talk to her. When she said “Hello,” I said “OK.”
One day she sat down opposite me with a face that seemed about to burst into cruel laughter. “Everyone thinks your brother is hot shit,” she said.
I almost fell over, I was so unused to being talked to. I regained my composure and said wisely, “Well, you know how people are.”
“I think he’s a show-off.”
“Well, you know how people are.”
“And up himself.”
“Well,” I said.
That was it. The one person in town who didn’t fall all over my brother was the girl I chose to love. Why not? Even the Kennedys must have had some sibling rivalry. Caroline went to the games like everyone else, but I could see she really did hate him, because whenever the crowd jumped and clapped for Terry, she sat as still as a library shelf and only moved to put her hand over her mouth as if stunned by bad news. And the time Terry rushed into the café to take me home for dinner, you should’ve seen her! She wouldn’t talk to him or even look at him, and I’m ashamed to say I found that scene delicious, because for five minutes Terry was getting a little taste of the slimy frog I was forced to swallow day after miserable day.
This is why Caroline Potts goes down in history as my first friend. We talked in that dark café every day, and I was finally able to unleash many of my banked-up thoughts, so I felt a tangible improvement in my mental state. I met her with sweaty palms and prepubescent lechery, and even when I walked slowly toward her, the sight of her smiling, slightly androgynous face was as visceral a shock as if she’d sneaked up on me. Of course I knew she had befriended me because she was friendless too, but I think she really appreciated my snide observations, and we were in total agreement when we compulsively discussed the boundless stupidity of our town’s sappy devotion to my brother. I volunteered her the one secret I knew about him: his spooky, religious reverence for sport. It felt good that I wasn’t the only one who knew there was something not quite right with Terry Dean, but soon after Caroline and I met, something terrible happened, and then everyone knew.
It was at a birthday party. The host was turning five, a big occasion. I’d missed my own because of the coma, but I wasn’t looking forward to it because I anticipated a somber affair, you know, when a child’s innocence shows signs of strain and the five-year-old begins, with sadness and alarm, to question why he’s suddenly torn between ambition and the desire to sleep longer. Depressing! But I was now off the crutches and could no longer use my illness as an excuse for avoiding life. Terry, on the other hand, was so excited, at dawn he was already standing by the front door in his party clothes. By now you should know the answer to that irritating question, what was Terry Dean like as a child? Was he an outcast? An antiauthoritarian stubborn prick? No, that was me.
When we arrived at the party, the sound of laughter led us through the cool, bright house to the back, where all the children were seated in the large fenceless garden, in front of a magician in an ostentatious black-and-gold cape. He was doing all sorts of cheap tricks. When he exhausted his doves, he went around the crowd and read palms. Trust me, if you haven’t experienced it, there’s nothing more stupid than a fortune-teller at a children’s party. “You will grow up big and strong,” I heard him say at one point, “but only if you eat all your vegetables.” It was obvious the fraud was taking cues from the parents and scamming the kids with phony futures. It’s disheartening to see lies and corruption at a kid’s birthday, but it’s nothing surprising.
Then we played pass the parcel, in which everyone sits in a circle and passes around some shoddy gift wrapped in newspaper like a dead fish, and each time the music stops, whoever is holding the parcel removes a layer. It’s a game of greed and impatience. I caused a stir when I stopped the game to read the newspaper. There was a headline about an earthquake in Somalia: seven hundred dead. The children were screaming at me to pass it on, their bitter recriminations ringing in my ears. I tell you, children’s games are no joke. You can’t fool around. I passed the parcel to the next boy, but every time another layer was shed, I picked it up hoping to find out more about the earthquake. The other children didn’t care about the lives of seven hundred fellow human beings; they just wanted the gift. Finally it was revealed: a fluorescent green water pistol. The winner cheered. The losers cheered through clenched teeth.
The November sun was making us all sweat, so some children leapt into the clear blue swimming pool for a game of Marco Polo, wherein one child with eyes closed swims around trying to catch the children with eyes open. He shouts “Marco!” and they shout “Polo!” and if he says “Fish out of water!” and opens his eyes to see a child out of the pool that child becomes the poor sap who has to swim around with his eyes shut. I don’t know how it relates to the life and times of Marco Polo, but there seems to be a criticism in there somewhere.
While Terry joined the others in the pool, I subjected myself to a dreadful thing called musical chairs, another cruel game. There’s one chair short, and when the music stops you have to run for a seat. The life lessons never stop at a children’s party. The music blares. You never know when it’s going to stop. You’re on edge the whole game; the tension is unbearable. Everyone dances in a circle around the ring of chairs, but it’s no happy dance. Everyone has his eyes on the mother over by the radio, her hand poised on the volume control. Now and then a child wrongly anticipates her and dives for a chair. He’s shouted at. He jumps off the seat again. He’s a wreck. The music plays on. The children’s faces are contorted in terror. No one wants to be excluded. The mother tau
nts the children by pretending to reach for the volume. The children wish she were dead. The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe…and yet the music goes on.
I was one of the first to lose, and I was thinking how in life you should always carry your own chair with you so you don’t have to share dwindling common resources, when I heard a commotion by the swimming pool. I walked over. Terry’s arms were plunged deep into the water and two little hands were reaching up from the crystal depths trying to scratch his eyes out. The scene wasn’t open to interpretation: Terry was trying to drown someone.
The other children were now standing on the lawn, all fish out of water. A dismayed parent dived in, pulled Terry off the boy, and dragged both of them out of the pool, where the horrified mother of the half-drowned boy whacked Terry across the face. Later that afternoon, in a huddle of outraged parents, Terry, in his own defense, explained that he had seen his victim cheating.
