We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  ‘You are such good boys,’ she said. And I thought of the times, so many, when we had trampled the flowers of her front yard in search of a ball.

  Geri delivered on our hope, and handed us discs of coconut, coated in chocolate: a Golden Rough each.

  ‘Thank you,’ we both said.

  ‘Marjorie,’ she started. ‘Your mother,’ she said. But our mum’s name wasn’t Marjorie, and she knew we were confused, and she stopped and couldn’t seem to get started again.

  And so we looked at her and she looked at us and her eyes were so bright and so desperate to say something more, but she couldn’t think, and we couldn’t either, and so we trotted awkwardly away, the chocolate’s gold foil glinting electric in the sun, and headed back in to Bobbie.

  *

  ‘I’ve got nine new emails and eight of them are from me,’ Bobbie said as we walked in from school the next day.

  ‘Hang on,’ Eden said immediately. ‘We have the internet?’

  ‘That clothesline bloke had a new trick today. He had a ruler out and was drawing bricks on the old render of his house. Drawing. Bricks. With a pencil. I used to strut down Collins Street as if I was somebody. Now I’m wandering around suburbia staring at loonies through cracks in the fence.’ As she stood up Eden charged over to where the computer was. ‘If I chuck a spack, you’ll know why.’

  ‘You send yourself emails?’ I asked.

  ‘Every time I turn around I think of something else that needs doing back at the farm. I’m sending them to the me who should be there.’

  ‘Who’s the other email from?’ Eden asked, typing.

  ‘We live in the golden age of irony. Funded my retirement by flogging Telstra in the floats. Now they’re screwing some of it back out of me. They emailed hello.’

  ‘There’s a webcam at the top of the Westgate Bridge,’ Eden said.

  ‘That’s what they do,’ she said. ‘They spy on us.’

  ‘You’re chatty today,’ Eden said.

  ‘I’m off the leash now that you’re home.

  ‘There’s one rule,’ she continued. ‘The computer stays in here, where I can see it. The internet’s like painting with a needle. Real life’s bad enough but at least you can see the strokes.’

  ‘Floorings,’ she said. ‘Every room in this house has a different flooring.’ She’d started walking around as though she didn’t quite know what to do. ‘What you trying to do anyway?’ she finally asked Eden.

  ‘Checking when the power station is on,’ he said. ‘I found a link to a webcam on a fishing forum.’

  ‘A bit of inside information never hurt,’ she said. ‘Short of malpractice of course.’

  She went to leave the room but then turned back. ‘Though if I were you,’ she hesitated, ‘I’d just climb on the roof.’

  *

  Eden tossed his kickboard into the steamy surface of The Warmies before launching himself in. The morning half-light. The steam curling around the concrete pillars of the pontoon so that all you could see was a tip of white, a ring of red, a helmet of metal. His hands on the board, his direction upstream, straight into the current of hot power water. His feet flipped white-brown foam, churns within churns. A boat was launched behind us. Earlier Eden and I had climbed the shelter in the sideway to get onto the garage roof and from there scaled the house roof, right to the pitched top. We’d straddled the high gable and peered out towards the station like pirates in a crow’s nest. We’d still had our PJs on. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s steam,’ Eden had said, a stream drifting from the power station’s chimney.

  ‘I like your possie,’ Bobbie called up, dressed already, as if she never slept. ‘Should I yell at you to be careful?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Eden said, scrambling down already.

  ‘Remember,’ Bobbie said, back in the house. ‘Ride straight into the rising sun. You’ll hit water. You’ll find The Warmies from there. I’ll be gone when you come back. You’ll be latchkey kids for a couple of hours. The cabernet’s so pregnant with flavour it as good as needs a caesarean.’

  We hardly heard her. We cycled to the end of our street, past the milk bar, across the roundabout and through the railway gates. Eden led the way; I followed his wheel. His kickboard bobbed in a bag on his back. ‘Hey,’ I’d called out. And he’d half-turned; I pointed at the street sign. The best way for us to ride to The Warmies was to go past the cemetery on Champion Road.

  As if the world had been planted for us like one of Mum’s seeds.

  The live chapter of a monumentally grand story. ‘Have you ever noticed,’ Bobbie had said in the car once, ‘that Grieve Parade leads to the crematorium? Town planners are poets in disguise.’

  Bikes locked to a steel pole. I threw my own board in and noticed that the sun was ahead, just to the right of the channel. I flutter-kicked behind Eden, the power station straight on.

  My lips stung. We sat high in the salt-drenched water. It felt neither warm nor cold; the water was at body temperature.

  ‘Do sharks like warm water?’ I asked as we swam.

  *

  What we wanted more than almost anything was to be twin brothers with a future rather than twin brothers with a past.

  And so we quickly built and committed to a swimming routine that would work. At The Warmies, whenever we could, whenever hot water surged through the outlet: cold mornings, hot days, when the power demands on the city were stretched. We returned to the club training squad where Mum used to take us, but on more days now. Monday mornings, Saturday mornings, Thursday afternoon and Friday. ‘The older squad trains eight times a week,’ Eden noticed, studying the schedule.

  ‘Give me a look,’ I said.

  ‘No one ever got fat by eating too much fruit,’ Bobbie said, ‘but you can over-train.’

  ‘Eight to choose from,’ I replied. ‘But they only do five.’

  ‘Duncan Armstrong,’ he said. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Dad named me after Jon Sieben,’ I said.

  ‘Mum named me after her garden,’ Eden said.

  ‘You have to appear at the coroner’s,’ Bobbie said putting papers in her bag.

  Straight from Saturday squad to the Flowerdale farm, the creek, upstream. It was impossible to tell for certain, the conditions so different: the levels, the swells, the currents against. But we knew anyway. We couldn’t shed the accident but we could build a new skin. Confidence bloomed in us like spring. One Sunday morning we emerged from the creek and Bobbie was there by the bank. ‘Oh my giddy aunt,’ she said. ‘You boys are getting slippery.’

  We’d already divided the world between the hurt and the unharmed but it was remarkable how quickly we divided it again. I stood at school assembly one Monday and looked around at the heads in front of me, their hair so dry, so unaffected by chlorine. I thought to myself: Non-swimmers.

  *

  As Bobbie prepared to talk she slowly, one by one and over a period of minutes, used her fingers to squash a series of ants. We were sitting at a table in the backyard in Newport.

  ‘I’ve been debating whether to tell you,’ she started. And then she stopped talking and looked out at the backyard grass, overgrown. ‘Now it smells like Grange,’ she said sniffing her fingers.

  It was Melbourne Cup Day, bright and warm, a day off school, late in the year of the accident.

  ‘Privilege is the best tailwind,’ she started again. Then stopped again.

  ‘I’m hopeless at this,’ she said.

  I wondered what it felt like to be drunk and how you could tell. It was still only afternoon.

  ‘My eyes are itchy,’ Eden said, relieving her.

  ‘It might be hayfever,’ Bobbie said.

  And then a mass of grey, curly, tangled hair popped high over the side fence and with it a face. It was Geri’s husband, Nectar’s dad, the beekeeper.

  ‘Wondering,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to butt in. But would the boys like to see the honey?’

  ‘The boys?’ Bobbie replied.

  ‘The su
pers are loaded,’ he said.

  ‘What am I, chopped liver?’

  ‘Ever tried comb honey?’ he asked her.

  ‘Ever tried combing your hair?’ she said.

  And so the three of us climbed over the fence and jumped down to his side. As we did two dogs came running, afghans, light brown and dark. ‘Big Ronnie and Little Ronnie,’ Bobbie said straight out because one of them was half-sized.

  The yard next door had stuff everywhere. Sunflowers, rows of vegies, fruit trees, wood all over, a workshop, a line-up of white bee boxes. A work bench out in the open air and a caravan of sorts, unpainted, just sheets of bare steel, as if he’d welded it together himself. ‘I rarely harvest at this time of year but this year isn’t average,’ he said. And he disappeared into the caravan.

  When he didn’t reappear, we followed him in.

  There was a bare lightbulb in there. It cast yellow light but the room remained mostly dark because there were no windows. There were benches and plastic tubs, like a photography studio, as if the van was used to develop flavours rather than prints. The room was warm. Stray bees flew in and out. It felt crowded with the four of us; our shoulders touched.

  Our beekeeper neighbour closed the door. He lifted a tray of honeycomb so heavy he struggled, although when he groaned it sounded as though he’d hammed it. He held the tray above a plastic tub and as he did honey oozed from it and mixed in with dead bees, wax and dirt. Everything suddenly seemed heady and vivid, even the closeness of our four bodies, and it did because of the smell.

  The air in that home-made van was dominated by it. The pure sweet pink-flower smell. It was as if every idea of a flower over the past autumn, winter and spring had been condensed into the liquid before us; as if every flower grown in the gardens, ovals and nature strips of Newport since Mum and Dad died had been brewed by the bees here and presented to us as a gift.

  I couldn’t hold my breath because it had already escaped from me.

  He struck a match, picked up a knife and then carefully ran the flame along its edge. He used the hot knife to cut a chunk of honeycomb from the frame and then divided it into three. We each picked a piece and slipped it between our lips.

  Honey. It landed sticky on our tongues, crusty almost but not really. Of course I knew what honey tasted like. But what we tasted then was so monumentally different to everything I’d tasted before. It was like we’d only ever licked at the front door of a vast food cupboard, a cupboard crammed with the capeweeds and dandelions, sour grasses and citruses of autumn and winter and spring, a cupboard somehow magically stocked by Mum and Dad. We tasted in silence, the honey squeezing through wax, the flavours exploding as they bloomed. Eating this honey was like suckling on ricochets.

  I wanted to run a hand through my hair, both my hands, and exhale like I’d just dodged something catastrophic, but both my hands were sticky with honey and there was no air left in me anyway. Instead then, I looked around the van. I saw on the floor of the caravan a clutch of spears. Each spear had three sharp prongs. They were for fishing with, I guessed.

  ‘That,’ Bobbie said. The warm yellow light. The windowless caravan. The home-made everything. ‘Is a flavour to wake the deepest slumber.’

  ‘Yes,’ our neighbour said, looking at me. ‘I hunt flathead by torchlight at night in the long shallows down Altona. Tide isn’t right for it now but I’ll take you one night if you like.’

  Bare hands. Honey, man and fish. The outside world of our new normal life felt for a second as if it was a long way away and yet it was only a step. ‘You could sleep in here,’ I said as if drowsy from the warm honeyed van, though I was anything but.

  ‘They work for the same queen?’ Eden asked, looking up at two bees as they crawled over the naked light globe.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Bobbie said, licking her fingers, diving in for more of that monumental honey, ‘get this on the daintier side of town.’

  *

  We left shortly after. He placed wooden crates, cut rough, by the fence and we used them to climb over. ‘Chopped Liver,’ he said as if it was Bobbie’s name now, ‘Anything,’ he offered.

  ‘Fuzzy Bear,’ Bobbie said, his name coined too.

  We stepped back into our house. ‘Steve Irwin eat your heart out,’ Bobbie said. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Hang on,’ she said. And she hurried back to where we’d just jumped over.

  ‘Fuzzy,’ she called. ‘Fuzzy. Just thinking – we’ve got flowering gums on our Flowerdale block. If you ever want to peel off a couple of boxes.’

  ‘They’d be in clover,’ he said. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘Where were we?’ Back in the house with us. ‘What a backyard. The crying shame is that it’d be worth a fortune,’ she said.

  *

  ‘I’m going to say something and then I’m going to explain it,’ Bobbie said.

  She poured a glass of wine and sat back opposite. The loungeroom’s walls were alive with the orange-brown flare of the refinery.

  ‘Life’s great inconvenience,’ she said, ‘is that it’s counterintuitive.’

  I saw then that Eden’s legs were wriggly just like mine.

  ‘I should tell you the news,’ she kept going.

  ‘Money,’ she stalled yet more, ‘has the coldest touch.

  ‘What I mean is, you’re getting a payout. The accident commission pays you money,’ she said, ‘when your parents are killed. Which is cruel. And heartless. And no doubt unsatisfying.’

  This news might have been significant but Eden swept it aside. ‘Did you hear about Jon?’ he said as if he’d hardly listened.

  ‘What about Jon?’ Bobbie said. She kept reaching for her wine and we kept watching her.

  ‘He’s fallen,’ he said, ‘for a girl.’

  And when I turned to him he said, ‘You look at her all the time.’

  ‘At who?’ I said.

  ‘So we can keep living in Newport?’ Eden said.

  ‘Don’t take it for granted,’ Bobbie said. ‘But you can take it for granted.’

  I felt my lips tremble as if I was nervous. I watched the orange light dance on the wall. I looked at Bobbie then and asked, ‘Will people think we’re lucky?’, because I didn’t want the money if they would.

  But before my words were out I felt Eden move and I knew he couldn’t wait any longer. I rushed off the couch and down through the house with him. We still had the taste of that honey in our mouths. We grabbed the seeds we had going on the sill of the bathroom and went for Mum’s vegie patch and got down and pulled at weeds. Fuzzy’s caravan was just over the fence and it had all that honeycomb in it. We wanted to be good sons. We had the baby tomato bushes with us. We trowelled grooves and made holes with our fingers and Eden and I put the plants in and then we spat honeyed spit into each hole and as we did we felt as though our future was suddenly brighter.

  I said, ‘How did you know about Carmelina?’

  ‘I watch you,’ he said.

  *

  We weren’t your average nine-year-old racers.

  The 100-metre freestyle. Under 9s. At Nunawading on the eastern side of town. A long-course pool. Mid-November, six months’ training as a lead-in, a year of squad prior. No sessions missed. Extra sessions at The Warmies, in our creek at Flowerdale, through winter even, spring, always against the current. Already our bodies sat squarely on the strong side of wiry. The farm on weekends: chopping maize, carting wood, bagging potatoes, spreading manure. We were fit and we were functional. We looked like two ordinary boys poolside, swinging our arms, feet jostling on the spot, ankles loose. But we were not. We were pent up with story: the end of one, the start of another. The two would now work as a braid.

  We were alive, we were busting to race and there were two of us.

  Towels around shoulders. Bunting strung from the roof. ‘Hard to stand out in a forest,’ Bobbie said. ‘Much easier in a nursery.’ She grabbed my towel and pretended to wipe my hair. She leaned in to tell me something. I waited, I breathed, I listened. E
den stood beside me but she whispered so that he couldn’t hear. ‘Confidence is the hardest opponent. Put a dent in it.’ And then she let me go and wished us both luck. The bubble of noise and energy. Races on already.

  I stood ready on the block. I was well, I had trained, I had Eden in a lane beside me. He had trained off his injuries and would command the race from lane four. I would follow him. I knew how Eden would swim. We’d raced daily, weekly, all our lives. He would start fast but not too fast. He would be steady, swift, the pace slowly winding faster, the over-eager reeled in, the field frayed, singed and then burned. He was born to overpower. If you didn’t go out fast he left you behind. If you went out too fast he scooped you up. I would never beat Eden on a long drag. He would negative split his races every single time. He didn’t just swim, he controlled.

  But when Eden dreamed as a nine-year-old he dreamed of butterfly. This first race was freestyle. When I dreamed I dreamed of my mum’s head on the back sill of our car.

  The race. The start was not the key. I jumped in, our bodies in tandem. I swam as close as I could to Eden, right up against the rope. We moved. Half-way down the first lap he was ahead. But I kept with him. Every stroke I made, I thought of him. I stole glances. I was not swimming my race. I was swimming Eden’s. Eden was my brother and my guide. His shoulder was my friend. I sat on it, just behind, not too far. I felt pent up, beautifully pent up, spun with energy. I swam on the bit, feeling each stroke, pulling hard but not so hard that it hurt.

  And then as we approached the wall I assessed. I could feel the other swimmers and sense their movement but they were all behind and drifting. There was no one in front of me except Eden.

  The wall loomed and I kicked. I was on Eden as we tumbled, as he thought of the turn, as he was distracted by it. There was the jumble, the confusion of it, the reverse, the reframing of momentum. When my feet hit the wall, I knew. My moment had come. I had not planned or known but it was not on the spur; Mum was the finish line and I was desperate for her. I flung off the wall like a squash ball and for the first time in the race I let myself go. I put my head down and lit the only match I had.