‘I can’t get it to thicken,’ I said.
The saucepan was off the stove but I was still stirring it. ‘It tastes good,’ I said, ‘but it just won’t thicken.’
‘Don’t be too cute with it,’ he said.
‘I don’t want it to scramble,’ I said.
‘Just serve it,’ he said.
‘Carmelina’s here,’ I said.
‘Do you want me to have a go?’ he asked.
‘It won’t thicken,’ I said.
Eden took the saucepan and put it back on the stove. He flicked at the milk as if it was water and he could command it. I had both my hands in my hair when he lifted the spoon. It wasn’t milk anymore, it was custard. It clung to the spoon as if it had been waiting for him.
*
We had a girl over for the first time. We served apricot pie with custard. There were five of us at the table. Bobbie kept hooking into her red wine even though we’d moved on to sweets. Three ginger cats played on the floor. The sun had gone down but the custard was yellow. Everything tasted and felt different with Carmelina there.
‘Do you take forever in the shower too?’ Bobbie asked Carmelina.
*
I drained my custard as everyone devoured their serve but instead of eating the apricot pie I shaped my piece with my spoon, millimetre by millimetre, into a comically exact square. I looked at it and thought of Dad’s unfinished scoreboard and how my single exact piece was just like it.
They all finished and looked over at me and their own plates were clean but mine had that perfect square of pie still on it. I looked around at them and the first thing I wanted to do was to apologise. Eden sat on one side of me and Carmelina on the other. In this moment as the pie sat square and cold it came to me that if I couldn’t save things with Carmelina that I might stop swimming or at least racing.
If Dad had looked down on me then I’d have looked him in the eye and told him that I was half-lost and half-found but that I’d trained just like he’d hoped and that I’d got fast, really fast, and that I’d given it everything, I had.
‘What,’ Bobbie then said, looking straight at Werner – she’d drunk a lot by then – ‘if he comes back?’
This sounded like a question but I knew that it was an answer or a kind of one. She was talking about our Grandpa Jack. In Bobbie’s mind he was still in the house or at least his absence was. I wondered for a second if Werner knew.
‘For Chrissakes, Bobbie,’ Werner said quite loud and he went to stand but he kicked a leg of the table and so he stayed sitting.
Bobbie stood up then and walked around the table and I had no idea what she was going to do but everyone was still staring at my pie as if no one knew what to say. When Bobbie reached me, she put one hand on the table as if to steady herself and with her other hand she picked up my fork. I thought she was going to pinch some of my apricot pie but instead and with some force she used my fork to mash my pie flat and to keep mashing it until it was mushed across my plate. She did this in front of Carmelina and then she walked to her couch and flopped onto her back as if she knew what I had just decided in my head and that now she too was done.
*
In front of Carmelina, I kept thinking.
*
I have been angry in my life but never so white-hot embarrassed angry as I was at that moment.
*
Eden looked at my mashed-up pie and I thought he might laugh or not appreciate what had just happened but he reached over and picked up my fork. I knew that Bobbie could still see from the couch. I had no idea what he might do and my hands trembled on the table and I couldn’t even look at Carmelina. Eden lifted my fork and without any hesitation he pushed the sides of my pie back together and he was careful to make it neat. When he’d finished he put my fork back down and then we both kept staring at my squarish piece of pie. It wasn’t back to normal but I thought he had done a tremendous job. By the time Eden spoke he had everyone in the room on the end of a string. He said, ‘I wish we could put Mum and Dad back together like that.’ He looked over at Bobbie then and she had lifted her head slightly and even in the dark of the loungeroom her face now looked white. He was still looking at Bobbie when he spoke again. ‘Carm is here,’ he said. He pronounced each of those three words as if they were wood and he’d just carved them.
Bobbie said, ‘You’re not littlies anymore.’
She was right and that made it worse.
*
I had on my best collared shirt but suddenly it seemed too much. I went to our bedroom and changed and before I came out I felt under my pillow for Dad’s watch. I stood there holding it and Bobbie came to the door and I turned away towards the wardrobe. She did not say that she was sorry. From the corner of my eye I saw that one of her hands held onto the doorway. Her fingers wriggled there like a caterpillar. She waited as if she expected me to turn but I couldn’t look at her. She said, ‘You’re my grandchild.’ She spoke as if this was the most significant sentence in her world. I wanted Bobbie to go the hell away but as soon as she began to move off I hoped that she’d come to me and put her arms around me for the first time in maybe ever. I turned then and stepped towards her and she stopped and we faced each other.
I wanted to tell her that she had humiliated me, because she had. In my bedroom there though, she looked old, tired and drunk and I thought of her bedroom with Jack’s things still in it and how Werner was desperate to go out with her. I tried to think of everything at once but mostly I thought of Carmelina and how she was on the other side of the door but that she’d be gone soon and she might never come back. Instead of talking I crunched my teeth to the point where I felt one crack. When I looked at Bobbie then, and it was from up close, I saw year after lonely year running in lines down her face.
I stepped even closer so that we were almost touching and I spoke to her in a bitter way. I said one word. I said, ‘Hopeless,’ though by the time this word came out it could have meant any number of things.
*
I caught the smell of apricot pie each time Bobbie breathed but when she went to talk her teeth were stained purple and I noticed this because my eyes had lowered. She took a deep breath but no words came out and then the smell of red wine gushed my way. Bobbie hovered and then she turned and I heard the sound of the couch as she landed.
*
I came out of our bedroom and Carmelina had moved to beside Eden. Both she and Eden stood up immediately and she asked if I wanted to go outside. Werner was at the kitchen table playing with his glass of wine and Bobbie was on the couch and it was just Eden, Carmelina and me standing together in the lounge. Eden reached out and took Carmelina by the upper arm and I thought he’d say something but all he did was turn her towards me.
Carmelina and I walked outside and there was moonlight and I was still shaking but she was here and I was with her. We walked over to the corn and the old spray tractor was out of the garage and we climbed on it. I was in the tractor seat with Carmelina on my lap. In the morning Bobbie would tell me that Eden had looked through the window at us and told her that we looked good together. After she told me this she said that she thought things might be right for us now. In the morning we’d get showered and dressed and then drive Carmelina back to Newport and in the car it would feel as though she was part of our family. She wasn’t and we weren’t and I’d soon know this for sure. What I wanted most though as I sat on the metal tractor seat with Carmelina on my lap was for this night to last all day. I wanted to kiss her out there too and she knew and so she did and I felt all of me take off and fly towards her and she must have sensed this because she broke off and said that she should sleep.
‘Stay,’ I said.
‘I should go in,’ she said.
She climbed down from the tractor and as she did I looked so hard at the clear bright sky that the creamy haze of the Milky Way seemed to bloom and grow purple in my eyes.
She had not gone in yet and so I said, ‘Believe in me.’
‘Jon,’
she said.
‘Is it that hard?’ I said.
‘I’m not doing this,’ she said.
‘Please,’ I said.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. She made it sound as if tomorrow was a day when everything would be better.
Carmelina then walked in the direction of the house. I watched her go. She did not walk fast, she walked slow. I kept sitting on the tractor and it was cold and I should have put on a jumper. I heard the door then and hoped it would be Carmelina again and if not, Eden, but instead it was Werner. He had two of the kittens cradled in his jumper. He was quiet. He climbed onto the tractor and handed me a kitten and we arranged ourselves so that we were back to back. Everywhere felt cold except where the kittens were. Werner and I sat staring into the night sky. Into this silence he said, ‘You have to go away if you want to come back.’
Wind ran through the corn and over the tops of the trees and in the background was the sound of the creek.
‘Bobbie thinks she’s the only one whose dreams didn’t come true,’ he said.
I wanted to tell Werner about Bobbie’s bedroom but I had too much going on in my head. Werner half-turned to me then. ‘I’m getting too old for this but you’ll be okay, you’re just getting started.’
*
As soon as Carmelina stepped out of the car Bobbie turned to us and said, ‘I’m cutting back on my drinking.’ I waited for her to say more but that was the only sorry she had and I might have been pleased but that day I wasn’t. She turned back onto the road and I didn’t feel like talking but I looked out the window and said, ‘I know who wrote the letters.’
‘The letters?’
‘The Stunt Driver,’ I said. I didn’t throw these words at Bobbie but I said them in a way that I hoped would hit her.
‘Geri?’ Eden asked or exclaimed.
Bobbie didn’t react at first but then she repeated as if in slow-motion, ‘The Stunt Driver has been writing my boys letters.’
‘She’s a librarian,’ I said.
‘I’m too old to be surprised,’ Bobbie said.
‘I don’t get it,’ Eden said.
With Carmelina gone I felt hollow and almost angry but what I really felt was let down. Bobbie glanced at me and she knew I was all about Carmelina but she said, ‘She’s no Pam Shriver.’
I was in no mood. I kept looking out the side window as I said, ‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She seemed to contemplate it for a few seconds and then she said, ‘Maybe I’m wrong.’
We drove towards our Newport home and as we did Eden turned to me and said, ‘You’re going to give up?’
I hadn’t decided but I said, ‘I’m going to fight.’
And he said, ‘Is she worth it?’
And I said, ‘She is.’
‘Worth the best years of your life?’ he asked.
‘Can we just, like, not,’ I snapped. I was not mad or cold with Eden and when we got to our bedroom I would tell him.
‘I’m going to go over and talk to Geri,’ Bobbie said. We pulled into our drive off Jubilee Street. As we climbed from the car she added, ‘I’ve never been much good with women.’
*
Bobbie went straight over and knocked on Geri’s door and I know this because I listened. I kept just below the top of the fence but I could still hear clearly. ‘All I want to do is protect them but how would I know what to do?’ Bobbie said.
I thought Geri may not answer and if she did that I might not be able to hear but I heard that high bird-like voice of hers say, ‘Yes.’ She said Yes with the kind of emphasis that made me think she wished she could say it twice.
*
We were at an oval or a paddock with dry grass and I think we were near the back of Kmart. I had begged Carmelina to see me and we’d walked the streets and I hoped this wasn’t it but it was. There was an old wooden telephone pole on the ground with grey sleepers and tanbark, like an unfinished scoreboard but lying down. We sat on it. Carmelina said, ‘Don’t turn up at my work.’
It was windy and her hair blew about her face and she kept pulling it away and the late afternoon sun didn’t make her squint but it made her eyes look piercing.
Carmelina had a world that was hers and I no longer had a place in it. I wanted then to lift my face and scream her name to the sky but she sat there so still and so composed that the only thing left for me to do was nothing.
She said, ‘I have to go.’
I said, ‘Okay.’
She said, ‘Not yet.’
I said, ‘Stay.’
She said, ‘I am.’
I said, ‘We needed each other.’
She said, ‘Are you going to be okay?’
I said, ‘Are we over?’
She said, ‘I’m sorry.’
On a telephone pole. In the wind.
‘You said to wait,’ I said.
‘I shouldn’t have,’ she said.
*
I thought to myself that I was on a road but I couldn’t have said which one.
*
What I had imagined was that I would lick my wounds and that Eden would race and that I would be his witness. What I had believed was that we were twins but different. What I eventually learned in those months after Carmelina was that I am the other half of Eden and that he is the other half of me.
*
Swimming was my church and I kept attending but I had lost my faith. Every morning of every day I still rose early and headed to squad or against the current at The Warmies or to swim upstream in the creek at Flowerdale. I thought of Dad as I entered the water and looked for Mum when I got out, but in between I grieved for Carmelina. I needed Bobbie then. This need for Bobbie came at me with such force that it pressed down on me like cold. I could not turn against Bobbie but I could turn away and I did because I had not yet forgiven her. As I moved through these many hours in the water I began to think of racing as something that I used to do and this thought at least brought relief. There were never any answers and there were never any miracles waiting at the end of those lanes and for so long I’d hoped that there would be. I did not tell Eden straight away that I would no longer race but I did in time and he did not argue and it was as if we’d already been through it. Instead he said, ‘I’ll swim for both of us.’ I knew he would and I’d help him do it and I never thought that things would turn the way they did.
*
It wasn’t an important race and he hadn’t tapered but Eden targeted an event in August. It was in Canberra. ‘Swim as though Jordan Baker’s driving the other way,’ Bobbie said as he left the stands.
Eden swam as if he knew that he’d win and so he didn’t need to hurry. He never led at the first turn, he was never far behind, he swam as though his arms were plates and all the bullets would bounce. Bobbie and I sat in the stand and everything seemed normal and by the end of the second lap he was high in the water and up there. I watched only him. He could race through lap after lap of butterfly as if it was little more than a flick of his wrist. He was a pure swimmer, unteachable, drilled to perfection but with magic dust applied. He turned for the third lap and then pressed up further and he had the field by the neck. I watched him and marvelled and I felt no pressure or jealousy. He was still second at the third turn and the race had been thick to start but it had thinned to just him and one other. He ducked under and turned and the final lap was here and now it was time to go. The crowd made noise and people rose to stand but I remained seated and still. I was concentrating. I knew that he would win and I didn’t want to miss it. He rose from underwater and flew forward and the lead was there and he had it. There was still forty metres to go but I leaned back in my chair. I wanted to enjoy the way he won. As soon as he took the lead though I noticed that the water trailing out behind him had suddenly become hard balls of white instead of the usual swift soft flurries. I stopped leaning back and stood straight from my seat. I wanted to grab Bobbie’s arm but I was still being cold with her and she looked at me in exc
itement and I said nothing. There was thirty metres to go and it was neck and neck again and Eden hadn’t gone on with the race and choked it. I looked at those hard balls of white in the water and I knew that he was labouring in a way that I had never before seen him do. I wondered then if he was waiting for me even though I was not in the water. I knew that he wasn’t. They got to twenty metres and then to ten and he could still win but he was not high and he swam as if he’d hit sadness or a hill of it. They reached the wall and I didn’t stop to look. He may or may not have won but something was wrong. I ran down to the deck. Before I reached him though I stopped. I wondered if he should settle, if we both should. He came to me. I said, ‘That last split.’
‘I flicked the switch and nothing happened,’ he said. He didn’t sound worried but I was.
I said, ‘How did you feel?’
‘Relax,’ he said.
*
In bed back at Flowerdale it was pitch black in our room and I wished I hadn’t packed away the night-light. Eden spoke then into the black and as he did I reached back for my pillow. ‘What I hate,’ he said, ‘is that we never said goodbye.’
*
The Olympics were coming and Eden was primed and Bobbie said to me, ‘You’re going to regret it if you miss it.’
‘I don’t want it,’ I said.
‘Because of Whatsherface?’ she asked.
‘Because of everything,’ I said.
‘You’re retiring of a broken heart.’
‘I’m barracking for Eden,’ I said.
‘Eden’s your brick,’ she said. ‘She’s your briquettes.’
‘Can you just, you know, stop,’ I snapped.
‘We can’t live as if we’re preparing for the past,’ she said. ‘We have to—’ But before she could finish I stood and walked from the room and I didn’t slam the hall door but I pushed it and turned the handle noisily and made sure that Bobbie knew that it was shut.
We Were Not Men Page 25
