Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  “As if,” Charlie said.

  “They say all’s fair in love and war, mate. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Charlie said emphatically.

  Marco put his hands up. “Point taken. It’s your business. But if I thought it, you can bet Whiskey has.”

  “Thanks for the heads up, Marco.”

  Sure enough, when Charlie got home, Whiskey was waiting for him, lying on his back on Charlie’s bed, legs crossed, arms behind his head.

  “Well, you’ve really done that dickhead Randall proud,” he said without even looking at Charlie.

  “How’s that?” Charlie asked warily, putting down his schoolbag.

  “You’ve got the most cunning fox-trot going, Charlie. You certainly know how to steal another man’s chicken.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Whiskey.”

  Whiskey nodded slowly. “So what really happens after she shuts the door and puts on the music?”

  “We practice the dance.”

  “Bullshit, Charlie!” Whiskey sat up suddenly, slammed the side of his fist against the wall. “When did you ask her?”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Don’t screw around with me, Charlie. I already know you asked her.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about Anneliese, dickwad, and the fact that she’s going to the prom with someone else. Ring any bells?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Charlie repeated.

  Whiskey looked at him hard. “So you’re saying you haven’t asked her?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “You haven’t hinted at it though?”

  He shook his head again.

  “But have you ever said anything that might have made her think you were going to ask her?”

  “We’ve never talked about it.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “So you’re not planning to ask her?”

  “Jesus, Whiskey, what is this? The Spanish Inquisition? I said no, didn’t I?”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said eventually. “That’s good. Because we’re decent men, aren’t we, Charlie? We wouldn’t take what belonged to each other, would we?”

  She doesn’t belong to you, Charlie thought, but he didn’t say so. He only shook his head again, worn out by the conversation.

  “Shake on it?”

  Charlie sighed.

  “I’m asking you to shake on it,” Whiskey insisted, putting out his hand.

  Charlie shook it impatiently. “There you go. Are we done now? Happy?”

  “Close as I’ll get,” Whiskey said, getting up off the bed. “Close as I’ll get.”

  x x x

  Needless to say, there were no more rehearsals with Anneliese. When Kelly Varga broke up with Todd Jackson that week, Whiskey asked Kelly to the prom. During their biology class, Melissa told Charlie she was going with Brett Speedman. Charlie didn’t even care. Miserably, he asked Bronwyn, couldn’t even bring himself to feel bad about how excited she was, bringing in a piece of fabric from her dress so he could match his accessories to hers, if he wanted. He heard, from Marco, predictably, that Anneliese was going to the prom with Todd. A neat swap.

  He told himself that if he could get through the last week of term, things would settle down. Once the ballroom dancing was over, he would hardly ever see Anneliese, have no reason to speak to her, would stop thinking about her eventually. There was only the prom itself to be endured. One dance with her, less than five minutes, and it would all be over. Charlie thought he could do it.

  But he hadn’t counted on Anneliese, on her lipstick and the strands of hair curled against her neck. He hadn’t counted on her strapless dress, on the fact that he would have to touch her bare shoulder with his left hand. It took him to pieces.

  “You look beautiful,” he said before he could stop himself.

  “Not as good as Bronwyn though,” she said cattily.

  “Don’t be like that, Anneliese, please. You must know I wanted to ask you.”

  “Then why didn’t you, Charlie?”

  “I couldn’t, not after Whiskey had.”

  “But why not?”

  “He’s my brother, Anneliese.”

  “I don’t see what difference that makes.”

  He felt despair. He didn’t know if he had ever truly felt it before.

  “It wouldn’t be right. I can’t explain it. I’m sorry.”

  Anneliese bit her lip and looked away from him. Charlie did not think about his heel-toe action or remembering to sway slightly on his chassés. The dance they had spent all term practicing no longer mattered. Whether Charlie danced poorly or perfectly made no difference now. He simply moved in time to the music, and Anneliese followed. He looked at her throat and her shoulders. He could smell her perfume. He tried to memorize its scent. Then the dance was over. Charlie bowed to Anneliese as they had been taught, and as he walked away from the first girl he had fallen in love with, to find the partner who had been his last resort, he wished Whiskey had never been born.

  Golf

  Charlie was sixteen when his father, who’d had a bad back for years, finally took the advice of his chiropractor and gave up running in exchange for golf. Bill asked the boys if they were interested in caddying for him.

  “Golf’s an old farts’ game,” Whiskey said. “I wouldn’t be seen dead on a golf course.”

  “I thought it would be a good way for you to earn some pocket money.”

  “Pocket money!” Whiskey was disgusted. “How old do you think we are?”

  “Well, you’re always complaining that you’re broke.”

  “I’d rather stay broke,” Whiskey said.

  “I’ll do it,” Charlie said.

  x x x

  Initially it was only the money Charlie was interested in, but as time went on, he found himself getting more and more interested in the game. He saw his father play with golfers good and bad, careful and indifferent, and he studied the shots, listened and remembered when he heard people say, “I should have used my 5-iron on that one.”

  He had been caddying for his dad for a few months when, one Saturday, the fourth member of their group didn’t turn up.

  “We’ll play with three,” one of the men said.

  “We can’t play with three, Greg; you know that,” a man named John said. “We’ll have to drop out.”

  Charlie’s father had played with John before. Charlie remembered that he had been a stickler for the rules.

  “What about your son, Bill? Why doesn’t he join us?” Greg suggested.

  “Charlie? He doesn’t know one end of a golf club from the other.”

  “Dad!” Charlie protested.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” John said. “He’s not a member. He’s not signed in as a guest. He’s not even appropriately attired.”

  Greg ignored him. “What do you think, Charlie?”

  “I’ll give it a go,” Charlie said.

  He found it awkward at first, harder than it looked, but after a few holes, he began to get a feel for it.

  “You’re doing pretty well, Charlie,” Greg said. “Is this really the first time you’ve ever played? You’re a natural.”

  “I taught him everything he knows,” Bill joked.

  By the end of the game, even John had come around. “You ought to sign up for a junior membership,” he said enthusiastically, shaking Charlie’s hand as they parted.

  x x x

  Though he lamented the loss of his own personal caddy, Charlie’s dad encouraged his interest, and before long, Charlie was on the driving range or the putting green whenever his dad wasn’t using his clubs. For nine months he caddied for competitions and corporate g
olf days to save the money for his own clubs, a half set to begin with, secondhand, but good ones and true. Even when he had a full set, Charlie carried on caddying, using the money to pay for lessons.

  Charlie got up early on Sunday mornings to work through math equations, label diagrams of human organs, and write essays on Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad so that Sunday afternoons he could go out and play eighteen holes. A couple afternoons a week, he went straight from school to the golf course, not even bothering to get changed, practicing his putting and driving with his school tie rolled up in his pocket. And on Saturdays, he played in the competition, putting in card after card until his handicap was down to thirteen.

  Whiskey was a surfer. He got up at five a.m. most weekends to get a ride down the Peninsula or along the Ocean Road with some friends from school. Even with five-millimeter wet suits, booties, and hoods, they emerged from the water blue-lipped, and it took them the hour and a half back to Melbourne with the car heater on high to thaw out. Whiskey never showed the slightest interest in golf, until Charlie won a trophy for the most promising junior. After all, Whiskey was the sporty one, the athletic one. If anyone was going to be winning trophies, it should be him.

  “Maybe I should give it a go myself,” he said at Charlie’s celebration dinner. He did not say, “There can’t be much to it, if Charlie’s winning trophies,” but the words were there at the table all the same. Only their father did not notice.

  “Charlie’s bloody good,” he said. “He’s better than me, in fact, but you might be able to give him a run for his money, Whiskey.”

  Their mother frowned. “What about your surfing, William?” She was the only person who still called Whiskey William.

  Whiskey shrugged. “The ocean’s not going anywhere.”

  x x x

  Charlie didn’t want to play with Whiskey, didn’t want to lend him his clubs so Whiskey could play with their dad.

  He didn’t want Whiskey hacking around the course with the clubs he’d saved up to buy. He had seen how Whiskey treated the things he borrowed—CDs stacked in piles without their cases, books with their covers bent back. If Whiskey wanted to play golf so badly, let him get a job and save up for his own clubs to ruin. Charlie wanted no part of it.

  “You’d be better off sharing Dad’s clubs, seeing as you’re taller than me,” he said when Whiskey asked him, knowing full well it was against the rules to play out of one bag.

  Charlie thought that would be the end of it, but he underestimated their father, who, though he had the utmost respect for the rules of the game, had what he called a healthy disregard for the rules of the club.

  “There’s plenty there for both of us,” he said.

  So Whiskey started playing with their dad while Charlie made excuses, saying he had a test to study for, an essay to write. Their dad didn’t notice Charlie’s reticence. Before Whiskey had put in a single card, he was telling anyone who would listen that both his sons were golfers now, joking that if only he could persuade Elaine to take it up, they could form a family team.

  Charlie knew playing with Whiskey would take all the pleasure out of it for him, and he managed to avoid it for almost two months, until their father signed the three of them up for a competition, with his friend Neil making up the foursome. Charlie thought about making another excuse, but he knew what Whiskey would think, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of saying, “Charlie’s scared I’m going to beat him.”

  “What’s Neil like, then?” Whiskey asked on the way to the club, already sizing up the competition.

  “Well,” their dad said, “he’s good company, Neil. I like playing with him, but to be honest, he couldn’t hit a cow’s ass with a shovel.”

  Whiskey laughed. Charlie said nothing, thinking it unsportsmanlike of his dad to speak of his friend that way. But once they were on the course, Charlie saw that his dad was right.

  Neil took a long time over his shots, seemed to plan them carefully enough, but once he stepped up to the tee, he went to pieces, shafting the ball as though it didn’t matter to him which way it went. He made the same mistakes again and again, muttered to himself as he saw it, yet seemed incapable of correcting himself.

  Their father was a different kettle of fish entirely. When anyone asked him how his golf was going, he always said shithouse, but in fact he played off a steady fourteen and, other than the odd bad day, was true to his handicap.

  When he was younger, he’d been a first-rate forward, faster and more wiry than the rest of the team, unafraid of plowing headfirst into the tangle of legs that had so terrified Charlie when he had attempted to play rugby. Charlie remembered watching his dad standing mud-smeared on the side of the pitch while a gash in his eyebrow was stitched up, and then going back out to finish the game.

  Whiskey took after their father. He had taken to golf the way he took to every sport he had ever tried. All those months of paddling out on his surfboard had given him the strength in his upper body to drive the ball a good long way, and his aim was good, his swing sure.

  “He’s not bad, is he, Charlie?” their dad asked at the third hole.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Charlie wanted to say but stopped himself.

  He was playing badly, allowing Whiskey’s confidence to erode his own, so blind with envy that they were on the seventh hole before Charlie could see that Whiskey lost his edge once he was on the green. He lacked the concentration for putting, and though he could have mastered it if he practiced, there was no chance he would practice. Charlie realized that golf was too careful a game for Whiskey, that though his swing was better than Charlie’s, golf required a focus and single-mindedness Whiskey did not possess and would not cultivate. Once he had seen this, Charlie knew Whiskey could not beat him.

  When the game turned, Whiskey became a stranger to the rules, failing to count penalties, throwing his ball out of a bad lie, nudging it with his toe.

  “I hope you’re going to count that,” Charlie said when he saw Whiskey dribbling the ball out of the rough as though he were on a soccer pitch.

  Whiskey shrugged. “We’re not playing for sheep stations.”

  Charlie had the urge to take a swing at him, to break Whiskey’s nose on the end of his club. “It’s only yourself you’re cheating,” he said.

  They were on the eleventh hole when Whiskey finally lost his temper. Charlie had been playing steadily, making up what he’d lost earlier in the game. The better he played, the more agitated Whiskey became. When he teed off on the eleventh, he drove his first two balls straight into the lake. His face was dark when he took the shot for the third time. He stood for a long moment at the tee, and Charlie could see the tension in his shoulders, knew he wasn’t going to make it. Whiskey didn’t even wait for it to hit the water.

  “Fuck it,” he said, and he swung the putter hard against the side of the buggy. Charlie heard it crack, watched Whiskey fling it into the bushes and stalk off, leaving the buggy behind him.

  Neil was the first to speak. “Well, golf’s not for everyone,” he said.

  “No indeed,” Charlie’s father said. “Looks like it’s back to just you and me, Charlie boy.”

  * * *

  In the beginning there is no real plan. No one thinks it will last so long that they will need to make a roster. Rosa is there almost all the time, except for a few hours each day when Charlie’s mother pries her out of the chair beside Whiskey’s bed, takes her home, and puts her to bed with a sleeping tablet. Aunt Audrey makes sure Charlie’s mother is also getting her sleep. And when Elaine’s not there, Audrey keeps Rosa company herself.

  Charlie has taken time off work so he and Juliet are free to come and go. On the third day, they are there early in the morning with Rosa and Charlie’s mother. Later that afternoon, they return, the route through the hospital to Whiskey’s ward already tiresomely familiar. But when Charlie looks through the window to Whiskey’s
room, the bed is empty.

  “Don’t panic,” Juliet says quickly, seeing the empty bed for herself. “They’ve probably moved him to another room.”

  But Charlie can tell by the look on her face that she thinks the same as he does, that Whiskey has died while they’ve been gone, that his body has already been removed to make room for some other desperate case.

  Juliet dashes to the nurses’ station, but Charlie can’t move. He sinks to the floor outside Whiskey’s room. It happened so quickly, he thinks. We should have been here. What were we thinking, going home to sleep?

  But then Juliet is back. “It’s okay, Charlie, it’s okay,” she says as she rushes toward him, a nurse behind her.

  “Your brother’s gone for some tests,” the nurse says kindly, helping Charlie into one of the chairs that line the corridor. She gives Charlie a plastic cup of water to drink. “Rosa’s with him,” she says. “Now that his condition’s stabilized sufficiently, the neurosurgeon wanted some X-rays and scans run, to get some more information about the damage to his brain.”

  Charlie nods. “Just tests,” he repeats, finding it difficult to let go of the thought that it is something far worse, that Whiskey is gone. He feels exhausted. It has only been three days, and already he feels like he can’t take any more.

  “How much longer?” he asks the nurse.

  The nurse looks at her watch. “He hasn’t been gone long,” she says. “He’ll be another couple of hours, at least. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”

  “How much longer in here, I mean.”

  “In ICU?”

  She doesn’t call it intensive care—none of the staff do. In the hospital, everyone is too busy to call things by their full names; there is an acronym for everything, Charlie has discovered.

  “He’ll be onto the neuro ward as soon as he’s off life support,” the nurse says. “That depends on how his other injuries heal. But this is the best place for him right now,” she adds reassuringly. “We can monitor him for any change in status.”

  “No,” Charlie says, frustrated at being misunderstood again. “How much longer in the hospital altogether?”