by Scot Gardner
Oh it’s good to hear your voice, Mum, glad you’re okay. Where are you? Do you have any idea when you’ll be coming home? I miss you. So does Dad. So does Si.
I wanted to say that and more but I’d been dumped by the unexpected wave of awkwardness in hearing her voice.
Dad was humble on the phone, his voice squeaking like an adolescent’s.
‘We’re doing okay,’ he lied.
He wrote down the address and phone number of the place she was staying in Springvale. She was paying the rent weekly, one week in advance.
Dad found the courage to ask her when she’d be back, but Mum didn’t have the courage to answer.
‘When you’re ready,’ he cooed.
Mum couldn’t see the desperation in his face, but I could. The phone call ended and Dad, filled with a false cheer that made him seem sadder than usual, declared that we’d go to the pub for a counter meal. It was Friday after all.
Simon must have shit his pants. He rode to the pub in the back of the ute so Dad and I didn’t notice until we’d settled into the crowded bar. Splitters Creek noticed. It was Col Terry, the publican, who had the guts to say something.
‘Righto,’ he shouted along the bar. ‘Who’s shit their pants?’
There was a chorus of ‘Wasn’t me’ and ‘Cor yeah’ and ‘What is that stink?’ then Dad looked at me. He stood on the bronze foot rail and addressed the whole pub.
‘Sorry about the stink. It’s my son Simon who’s the culprit. He won’t let us wash him since Adrienne left. If anybody has any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.’
He sank back onto his stool and there were tears on his eyelashes. My dad, the rock, was melting.
Col Terry was apologising, saying that he didn’t realise it was Simon. Then Col’s wife, Emma, was there with her hand on Simon’s, whispering in his ear. Next Emma was leading Simon by the elbow out the back.
‘She used to be a nurse in Orbost,’ Col said. ‘She’ll look after him.’
The stink of shit was eventually swallowed by the smoky yeast of the bar. Squid Hegarty slapped Dad on the back and said the full resources of the Splitters Creek fire brigade were at his disposal. Dad forced a grin.
Half an hour later, Si and Emma returned. The hair on Emma’s brow was wet. Si was clean-shaven and a half-smile had settled on his lips. He was wearing one of Col’s old black Bundy polo shirts and a pair of grey tracksuit pants. He smelled of powder and stale cologne and Emma had parted his hair on the side like Mum used to.
Dad had tears in his eyes again and he gnawed at his bottom lip. ‘Thanks, Em. You’re a miracle worker.’
‘It was nothing, Hughie. Send him around every other day and I’ll hose him down for you. He was no trouble at all. Honestly.’
So, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I’d drop him off at the pub after we’d had breakfast. We started to realise how important routine was for Simon. He’d wake early on washdays and shake me awake like my personal alarm clock at exactly six-thirty. Emma said he was good company when Col was off at Catalpa in the truck doing his twice-weekly trips to pick up supplies for the locals. Two hours each way to Catalpa and an hour stuffing around at the market or scouring the town for some special requests, then deliveries when he got back – Col was away for the best part of the day. Emma had taken to giving Simon little jobs in the pub. Folding napkins, cleaning tables and washing glasses. Si seemed to enjoy it, but who could really tell?
The only good thing that came of Mum leaving was the fact that Tori and her boy started visiting. Mum and Tori hadn’t spoken since the accident. Mum had never said a word to her grandson, born eight months after the wreck. Somehow, in Mum’s head, it was Tori’s fault that Simon was the way he was. That Patchy was dead. Somehow, the fact that Tori walked away from the accident proved she was guilty. And in the three years since, the anger had festered. Mum never talked directly about it and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. In the beginning, the mention of Tori’s name would entice a spitting red rage in Mum. Then you could fire her up by talking about Hargate – the hippie village near Splitters Creek where Tori and Francis lived. And that grew to hating anything that was hippie or alternative, then single mums. Eventually, Mum couldn’t even talk about little kids. The rage had become a black hole. A septic pond of antimatter in her heart, with gravity so strong that any micron of happiness passing by her was sucked into its inky depths.
And it was all Tori’s fault.
Tori, for the most part, didn’t lose any sleep over the fact that Mum hated her guts and I loved her for that. She wanted Francis to know his father. She thought it was important for Simon to know his son. After word passed around that Mum had left, Tori began to arrive just after I got home from school – often loaded with some wild and invariably delicious vegetarian meal – and watch Simon and Francis together. It was a kind of nature documentary to begin with and Si was like a mountain gorilla next to Francis the little monkey. Tori never took her eyes off them.
At first we drank coffee and watched, but after a few days Tori stopped bringing casseroles and took it on herself to teach me how to cook. I had the need to learn and she was a great teacher.
She became increasingly more edgy as the evening closed in around us and she’d usually be gone by the time Dad got home.
Dad’s relationship with Tori was chilly but impeccably civil. They never talked about Mum and they were capable of pleasantries, but Dad insisted Francis call him Hugh and Francis told me that he thought Hugh smelled funny.
I took Simon out to Hargate one Sunday to visit Tori and Francis in their rented hand-made mud brick home, but Simon wouldn’t get out of the ute. Francis and I played rough and tumble on the rug in the lounge until the boy’s hair stuck to his forehead with sweat and his cheeks glowed with a permanent smile. Tori spent the whole time trying to coax Si out of the car. Si just stared at the dash and rocked.
I stopped the car in a heavily treed siding and had a piss.
I knew I’d let Bullant down, but I’d make it right. We’d still be mates.
I’d let Dad down, but I’d always been the second son. He was used to me letting him down. It wouldn’t be the end.
Monday morning would see me letting Mick Fenton down – the boss at the sawmill – when I didn’t turn up for the first day of my holiday work. He’d survive.
I’d done a runner on Cappo, but who cares about the feelings of cops?
I’d left my brother, but he probably wouldn’t even notice I’d gone.
I kissed the bark of the grey gum in front of me and revelled in its cough-lolly glory.
I tried hard not to think about Tori and the boy.
Four
When I joined the highway in Orbost and pointed the Suba west, I sighed and planted the foot. I drove in silence but I kept sighing. I didn’t stop for fuel until Lakes Entrance and I chose a service station that I’d never visited before, met an attendant that I’d never seen and found a smile in me that the attendant obviously liked. She smiled back and blushed when I thanked her. A prickly heat of freedom and a new life raced through me. I’d made the right decision. I cranked the radio so loud that the speaker in the passenger foot well began to fart and distort. An Eminem song came on and I started to sing. It matched my mood – defiant and edgy. The speaker eventually stopped working altogether. Soon as I got a job, I’d buy Bully a new set of speakers. Damn it, I’d get a killer job and buy him a new car.
I bought a dozen cinnamon donuts at the shopping centre in Morwell. They were cold and a bit stale. I ate three, then pulled into the drive-through at Macca’s and spent twenty-two dollars. Good shit. I was eleven when I first had Macca’s. I’d seen it advertised on telly for years and when we did one of our rare family pilgrimages to Eden, I met the manager. I thought he was Ronald McDonald – I hardly recognised him without the face paint and the clown suit – and I got his autograph. Simon laughed about it for three days.
It was the traffic that shook me out of the romance of a
flawless new phase of my life. I stuck to the highway until it became freeway, then hugged the left lane and gripped the wheel as the late Sunday traffic whizzed past like a meteor shower. I left the freeway before I had to pay for the privilege of driving on it and started my search for a place to stay on the slower bustle of the side roads. There were hundreds of hotels and motels to choose from and I couldn’t decide. When I came down with Bully to get his tattoo, we stayed in a backpackers’ joint in St Kilda. There was the tattoo and there was the clubbing. Bully’s trip to the city wouldn’t be complete unless he picked up at a nightclub. He didn’t pick up, and we ended up staggering to the backpackers’ alone. I decided that – if I could find it again – it would be as good a place as any to crash until I worked up the guts to go to Mum’s.
At eleven p.m., when I finally tracked the joint down, I prayed that finding Mum would be an easier task. I parked the Suba and found the manager bloke half asleep at the front counter. He was watching the TV behind me and didn’t make eye contact as he mumbled and checked me in. On the form where they asked me for my address, I wrote c/o Splitters Creek Post Office.
I could hear laughter and broken English coming from a room along the hall. The happy-head at the counter pointed up a flight of red-carpeted stairs and mumbled directions.
‘Have you got a sleeping bag? Where’s your gear?’ he said, as I started to walk off.
‘In the car,’ I said.
‘Sheets?’
‘I’ve got a sheet,’ I said. ‘All organised.’
The last time I’d stayed in this place, Bully and I had a room to ourselves. We’d claimed a top bunk each, but this time there were people and gear in every room. The place I eventually settled contained one body. In the glow from the hallway I could see his wiry blond hair and the cavern of his mouth slack with the easy rhythms of sleep. The room smelled faintly of cheesy feet and that was somehow comforting. I rolled my swag out over the top of the bare mattress on the lower bunk. I undressed down to my boxer shorts, suddenly conscious of the voices floating up the stairwell, and scrambled into bed. I pulled the boxers off when I was under the covers.
I couldn’t sleep. The whole place seemed to rattle with traffic noise and foreign language. City people would never really know silence, I thought. Not real silence. To somebody in the city, their ears deadened by the constant background noise, silence would be the gaps between traffic, gaps that grew longer as the night progressed but never matured into full-blown silence. I could always listen harder and find a noise in the city, but in the mountains there are times when the silence is infinite. Like the stillness after a storm, when the birds are too frightened to speak or the pregnant silence of three a.m. covered in fresh snow. Silence so thick that the sombre songs of night birds seem to bounce impotently against it. Silence that stretches beyond the range of your ears so far that your head rings as you search for the edge. When your own breathing sounds like a jet taking off.
It’s easy to make noise, but silence is much more elusive and scary. I think that’s why so many of the four-wheel-drivers who make it up to Errinundra Plateau carry stacks of CDs – salve against the stillness. Something to keep the nothing at bay. Something to keep you away from the dark clefts in your mind where the sad thoughts lie waiting.
There was no real silence that night, but the sad thoughts found me anyway. I was on the wing, but the weight of my past was drawing me to oblivion. There were so many things that I longed for as I was growing up in Splitters Creek, dreams that when they finally came to ground around me turned out to be nothing like the vision. They always seemed like cardboard cut-outs compared to my pyrotechnic image of them.
Like losing my virginity.
I couldn’t wait for it to happen. I was fifteen when I finally convinced Karen Hegarty that going for gold was a sensible idea and we did the deed. Instead of making me feel like a man, it left me feeling hollow. Like I’d won the best and fairest and all they could give me was a dodgy plastic trophy.
Nothing lived up to my dreams.
I went to school and bitched about being there. I knew I’d get a job at the end of it – like Bullant had done at the end of year eleven – and it would be sooo much better than school. I took Dad’s advice and worked at the sawmill every day during the school holidays, cleaning up and learning the botanical names of the trees harvested, hoping that when the time came Dad would be right and Mick Fenton would give me a job.
Mick had promised me a job. And I should be thankful.
I got my learner’s permit when I was sixteen and for two years Dad told me to slow down and I’d slow down, knowing that in a little while I’d be driving by myself at whatever speed I wanted. Then I got my licence and bought Dad’s ute. It was a weary beast with cancer in the tailgate that I’d patched with Bundy stickers, but it would go. I cut some neat circles in the grass on Nigel Fenton Reserve and zipped along the Catalpa road until I had a couple of near misses with logging trucks – one of them being driven by my old man. I got a couple of frights and I started driving like Hughie. Next I’d be quoting from the Bible at the bar and telling blokes off for swearing.
In the half-dark of the hostel, in the small hours, I realised that my life was a fizzer. I looked into the future and all I could see was more of the same. What did I expect from Melbourne? What did I expect from Mum? That life would begin anew? That some force field would operate around us, wash away our pasts and make us immune to pain? Immune to fate?
Somehow, fate would bring me down. I’d live my life like my parents, from one calamity to the next, trudging waist deep in swamp water, not knowing on which step the swamp would claim me but knowing that it eventually would.
Ironically, it was a fart that saved me from the black spiral of my thoughts that night. Mr Smelly Socks – in the next bunk – turned and rustled in his sleeping bag like he couldn’t get comfortable. He grunted and flipped and at the end of it all, sighed and farted. It was a mellow little parp, like a distant car horn, and it made me think of Francis. My nephew had discovered – quite by accident – that farting is a good weapon in play fighting. I had him pinned to the floor one Sunday afternoon, blasting intermittent raspberries on his belly with my mouth. Tori was chuckling in the kitchen and egging me on. The little man was laughing so hard that his face went red and no sound came out.
His mouth.
In that breathless quiet, Francis’s bottom squeaked and I rolled away, theatrically fanning my face and pretending to die, flopping on my back, eyes closed, my tongue hanging from my mouth.
‘Oh look, Francis, you’ve killed him,’ Tori said, sombrely.
Francis chuckled.
He clambered over my chest and rested his velvet lips against my cheek.
‘Ohh,’ Tori whispered, her voice soft with emotion. ‘You’re a nice boy. You kissing him better?’
‘Uh huh.’
Kiss.
Kiss.
Kiss.
I didn’t want to move, but I started to smile.
The smiling dead.
Until Francis’s finger gouged into my nostril and I was forced to grab him, whiz him through the air and cast him onto the couch.
And there, peeking through the window at the end of my hostel bed, was a single star. It could have been a distant streetlight, but the effect was the same.
Five
The Subaru barely started. It wound and wound and I thought the battery would give out but she sprang to life at the final turn.
The flat on Mungo Road in Springvale was old and brown. It was clean enough on the outside but it looked like a fossil from the seventies. There were twenty doors – two buildings, two storeys, and five apartments in each. Between the two buildings was a flat concrete car park pocked with oil stains. There were only two vehicles to be seen. One had a flat tyre and a nest of cobwebs over the driver’s side mirror. The other was Mum’s Corolla. I stepped confidently up the stairwell – with the blackened constellations of discarded gum trampled into its grey
ness – but my confidence dissolved to fear as I stopped at number seventeen. I stood there for a full minute with my knuckles poised and a zealous pulse in my neck. Might take another half-day to develop the courage to knock. I’d been playing our meeting over in my mind but every time it ran through, it was different. She variously slammed the door in my face, she hugged me, she screamed and bolted the door, she called the police, jumped like she’d won a game show, spat at me and laughed scornfully, and invited me in like she’d been expecting me. And in every scenario, I just stood there seething with emotion and unable to move or speak. Made mute by equal quantities of rage and relief. Crippled by the desire to hug her locked in battle with the desire to scream a torrent of abuse at her for leaving us.
My knuckles drummed on the security door, almost of their own volition, and I held my breath. I heard traffic on the street and movement. A door opened but it wasn’t Mum’s door. A face peered at me from behind the mesh in number eighteen. Mum’s neighbour.
‘Are you looking for Adrienne?’ said a wheezy man’s voice.
‘Yes,’ I said. I stepped closer to the face behind the security door and a little dog snarled and yapped at me.
‘Gingy, get out of it,’ the man said, and the dog obediently retreated, growling indignantly. ‘She’s not home yet. She won’t be back until six or so.’
‘Oh. Okay. Six o’clock?’
‘She’s at work. I can give her a message, if you like.’
Work? Mum had a job? She came to Melbourne for a rest and found herself a job. In one breath I felt betrayed and abandoned, in the next I found comfort in the fact that any job Mum could find wouldn’t be as hard as her Splitters Creek life. A job would be a rest.
