It turned out to be just a severe case of croup, and he was back home in bed within hours, but Charlie was still upset when Genevieve rang and told them.
“First Whiskey, now Oscar. It feels like the last straw,” Charlie said to Juliet.
“You really love him, don’t you?” Juliet asked, touched by Charlie’s response.
“He’s my little buddy,” Charlie said.
It had taken him a while to warm up to Oscar. When Juliet first started spending time with him, Charlie had kept clear. He loved the children he worked with at the school, but toddlers were a different story. Oscar could walk, but he couldn’t run or throw and catch a ball, and though, allegedly, he could say a few words, Charlie couldn’t understand a thing that came out of his mouth. Apart from birthday parties, which Charlie was expected to attend, looking after Oscar was Juliet’s thing.
Then one Saturday, long before Whiskey’s accident, Juliet had agreed to look after Oscar so Genevieve and her husband, Maurice, could choose the fixtures and fittings for their bathroom renovation. Genevieve had just dropped Oscar off and Juliet was making him some fairy bread when the phone rang.
“I completely forgot!” Charlie heard her say. “No, no, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“My dentist appointment,” she said to Charlie when she hung up. “I can’t believe I forgot it.”
Charlie could believe it. Though she was extremely organized in other ways, Juliet dreaded going to the dentist and somehow always managed to forget her appointments.
“I have to go, Charlie. You’ll be all right with Oscar for a couple of hours, won’t you?”
“Me?” Charlie was shocked. “Can’t you reschedule?”
“I’ve already rescheduled twice.”
“Why can’t you take him with you?”
“I’m going to be stuck in that horrible chair for over an hour. What’s Oscar supposed to do for all that time?”
“You could take some books for him,” Charlie had suggested hopefully.
“Don’t be silly, Charlie. I can’t possibly take him with me.”
“Well, maybe we should ring Genevieve and ask her to come and get him.”
“I don’t want to do that. She only just dropped him off. They’ve got things to do today; that’s why I took Oscar in the first place. All I’m asking you to do is look after him for a couple of hours. I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss about it.”
“I’m meeting Marco,” Charlie protested. They often caught up at the Windsor Castle, a pub that at one time had been their local and years on was still their favorite. They had a couple of pots of Tooheys pale ale and a counter meal, always the same: a rib eye for Charlie, medium rare, chicken parmigiana for Marco, crinkle-cut fries all around.
“You can take Oscar with you.”
“To the pub?”
“Of course not. It’s too smoky for a child in a pub. I’m sure you could find somewhere else to have lunch this once.”
“What time will you be back?”
“I don’t know. Around three, I suppose.”
“That’s more than three hours! What am I supposed to do with him for all that time?”
“Take him on the train,” Juliet suggested. “Take him to the park. Take him to Marco’s workshop, he’d love that. He likes tools, like Bob the Builder, don’t you, sweetheart?” she said, giving Oscar a kiss on his sticky cheek.
“Who’s Bob the Builder?” Charlie said, but she was already gone. He had forgotten to say good luck.
Charlie rang Marco. “Change of plans. I’m in charge of Juliet’s nephew. We can’t have lunch at the pub. It’s too smoky, apparently.”
“What about the beer garden?”
“Good idea,” Charlie said, brightening.
x x x
Charlie had held Oscar’s hand as they walked down to the station. Juliet always chatted to Oscar, but Charlie couldn’t think of anything to say. He was surprised when Oscar pointed at a Holden Commodore and asked, “Is that a Porsche?” Charlie hadn’t realized how much his language had come on. He couldn’t think of how to keep the conversation going. It was only later that he thought he could have asked Oscar if he liked cars, thought of telling him about Whiskey’s convertible.
Charlie was relieved when they arrived at the station, and the process of letting Oscar press the buttons and put the coins in for the tickets consumed all their attention.
“It’s a new train,” Oscar said when it pulled into the station.
Charlie looked. Oscar was right. It was one of the new trains. Charlie sat down in a double seat halfway down the carriage. Oscar did not sit next to him.
“I want to sit near the doors,” he said. They changed seats.
“The doors go like this,” Oscar said, and he held his palms apart in the air and then moved them slowly together, making a shhh sound. When his two pinkies were touching, he brought his hands toward his chest. Ten seconds later, the doors closed in exactly the way Oscar had demonstrated.
“Can we go on the elascator?” Oscar asked.
“That’s only in the city. We’re not going to the city. We’re only going as far as Windsor.”
“How many stops?”
“One.”
On the train, people looked at the two of them. Charlie supposed it was because he was fair and Oscar was dark, like Maurice. People could see at a glance that Charlie wasn’t his father. Charlie wondered what they were thinking. He tried to wear an expression suggesting kindly uncle. Oscar demonstrated the action of the doors over and over again. Women smiled at him and then, less certainly, at Charlie.
“He’s beautiful,” one woman said. Charlie looked at Oscar’s little round face, his dark eyes and long eyelashes. He looked like pictures Charlie had seen of the Dalai Lama as a child.
“How old is he?” the woman asked.
“Nearly two,” Charlie said, trying to remember.
The woman frowned suspiciously. Charlie wondered if he might be wrong about the age. He was relieved to get off the train.
x x x
Marco was already sitting in the garden with a beer when they arrived at the pub.
“Hello, young man,” he said. He introduced himself and shook Oscar’s hand.
Oscar did not seem to find this strange. He said his name and shook hands back. “We came on a new train,” he said by way of conversation.
“A new train, eh? Did it go very fast?”
Oscar nodded.
“How old are you, Oscar?” Marco asked.
“He’s two and a bit,” Charlie tried.
“I was two,” Oscar said, “but I turned into three.”
“I thought you said he was a baby,” Marco said to Charlie.
Charlie shrugged. “He’s grown up a bit since I last spent time with him. Listen, what do you think about taking him to see your workshop later? I’ve got to keep him entertained all afternoon. Juliet said he might like it. He likes tools, apparently.”
Marco checked with Oscar. “You like tools?” he asked.
Oscar nodded.
“I’ve got a lot of tools.”
“Have you got an angle grinder?” He pronounced it gwoinder.
Charlie and Marco laughed. “That’s a big word for a little guy,” Marco said. “Do you go to preschool?”
Charlie noticed Marco was much better at talking to Oscar than he was.
“Not preschool. Kindy,” Oscar corrected.
“And do you like kindy?”
Oscar looked at Marco and Charlie slyly. “I like it. But I tell Mummy that I don’t.”
“Why do you do that?”
Oscar looked at Marco as though he was stupid. “Because I want to stay at home and watch The Wiggles!”
“Who’s your friend?” the barmaid, Emily, asked when she took their order.<
br />
“Oscar,” Charlie said. “He’s Juliet’s nephew.”
“And what’s Oscar having?”
Charlie hadn’t even thought about Oscar. He hadn’t a clue what children ate.
“Chicken curry,” Oscar said decisively. “I like chicken curry.”
Emily giggled. “Eat a lot of curry, do you?”
“Sometimes it’s too spicy for me,” he admitted solemnly.
“What a character,” Emily said, and Charlie felt strangely proud, as though he was responsible for Oscar’s charm.
“We’ve got chicken pasta. Would that do?”
“Yum,” Oscar said.
x x x
After he had finished his arts degree, Marco had decided what he really wanted to do was make furniture. He said he was too old to do an apprenticeship and he liked the good life too much to work for two hundred dollars a week, so he took whatever jobs he could find—a bit of turning, a bit of carving, a bit of French polishing—until, after a few years, he had learned enough and saved enough to have a go at doing it on his own. He set up a workshop and made chairs and tables and beds, whatever people asked for. After a couple of years, one of his clients had asked him to make a new front door for his house. He had shown Marco a photo of an ornate door he had seen in Prague and asked if he could replicate it. The door was hundreds of years old, and Marco had spent several months aging the wood, carving it, copying every detail until the door he had made looked exactly like the door in the photo. After that, Marco was suddenly a specialist, and before long, all he made were doors. People paid over five thousand dollars and waited up to six months for some of them.
Charlie always liked going to Marco’s workshop. He liked the smells of wood and varnish, the combination of chaos and order. Oscar seemed to like it too. He went over to the workbench to examine Marco’s tools.
Marco sat him up on a stool so he could see better. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up a screwdriver.
Oscar examined it carefully. “Phillips screwdriver.” Scwoodwoiver.
Marco took it back. “Phillips head. He’s right. Priceless. What about this one?”
Marco held up a tool Charlie would have described as a saw.
“Hacksaw,” Oscar said without hesitating.
Marco whistled. “Are you going to be a carpenter when you grow up?”
“And a train driver,” he said.
x x x
The game of naming all the tools took a long time, and then Marco put on a bit of a show, did some sanding and sawing and boring for Oscar’s entertainment. By the time Charlie got him home, it was after four.
“You’ve been gone for ages,” Juliet said. “Why didn’t you take your phone? I’ve been worried about you. Is he all right?” She picked Oscar up and gave him a kiss.
“He’s perfectly all right,” Charlie said, feeling slightly put out. “There’s nothing to worry about. We had a great time, didn’t we, Oscar?”
“We went to Marco’s workshop,” Oscar said. “He’s got more more more tools than I’ve ever seen.”
“Sounds like you boys had fun together,” Juliet said, relieved.
“It wasn’t as bad as you expected then,” she said to Charlie once Oscar was playing with his toys in the family room.
“He’s more grown up than I thought,” Charlie said. “I didn’t realize he could talk so much. He’s amazing.”
“He does seem to be quite advanced for a three-year-old, doesn’t he?”
“I didn’t realize he was three.”
“We went to his third birthday party.”
Charlie shrugged. “I couldn’t remember how old he turned.”
Juliet laughed. “Sometimes you’re truly useless, Charlie.”
“Rubbish,” Charlie said, putting his arms around her. “You’re just jealous because I’m his new favorite.”
x x x
After that, Charlie had tried to make sure he was around whenever Juliet looked after Oscar. He bought him toys, shoes with lights that flashed when he took a step, a T-shirt saying Talk to My Agent. Charlie took dozens of photos of him, wrote down the funny things Oscar said so he wouldn’t forget them.
“I can’t come over,” he had said on the phone one day. “I’ve got chicken pops. I’m in quarantine.”
Charlie cracked up when he told Juliet. He couldn’t say pox but he could say quarantine.
Before long, Oscar’s visits were established rituals. They would ride a couple stops on the train, go to a nearby park for running races—in which Charlie was under strict instructions from Juliet to let Oscar win two out of three—and then catch the train home again.
“Play dough now?” Oscar would ask after lunch, and they would roll out the dough on the kitchen bench and cut shapes out of it with cookie molds. And now and again, if Juliet was busy, they would go to Marco’s workshop.
x x x
“Shall we go and see Oscar?” Juliet suggested after Genevieve rang to tell them about the croup.
“Is it catching?” Charlie asked.
“Not for adults, I don’t think.”
“Let’s get him a present, to cheer him up.”
They stopped at a toy shop on the way, and Charlie picked out an enormous LEGO robot.
“That seems a little bit over the top,” Juliet said when she saw the size of it. “I mean, I know he’s sick, but…”
“He went to the hospital, Juliet,” Charlie said defensively. “He deserves something special.”
Oscar loved the robot. Charlie sat on the end of his bed for two hours, helping him build it.
“Look how big it is, Mummy!” Oscar shrieked excitedly when it was finished.
“You’ve perked up,” Genevieve said. “Perhaps Uncle Charlie should have been a doctor, Oscar. What do you think?”
“Why?” Oscar asked.
“Well, you certainly seem to be feeling a lot better since he arrived.”
“It was really Oscar who cheered me up,” Charlie said, “isn’t that right, Oscar?”
Oscar beamed.
x x x
“You’d make a great dad, Charlie,” Juliet said on the way home.
“I think one day a fortnight’s enough for me at the moment,” Charlie said lightly.
“That’s true. But still. Don’t you think about having kids of your own one day?”
“I can’t really think about that right now, Juliet.”
“I know you’re thinking about Whiskey. And I am too. But for some reason, the accident’s made me think about other things, kids and stuff. Have you found that?”
“I’m still trying to take it in.”
“Has it made you wonder though,” she said carefully, “about what Whiskey and Rosa asked us, about the decision we made?”
“We said we wouldn’t talk about that.”
“I know. But it feels different now. I’ve been thinking about it, haven’t you?”
“No, Juliet,” Charlie said. “I haven’t and I don’t want to. What’s done is done.”
But Charlie was lying when he said he hadn’t been thinking about the decision they’d made. Since Whiskey’s accident, it had been one of the things he had thought about most. Two years before, when Rosa broached the topic with them, things had seemed simpler, clearer. Rosa had told Charlie the facts. They had started trying to have children as soon as they were married. When nothing had happened after six months, they had gone for testing, which was how they had found out Whiskey was, as Rosa put it, shooting blanks.
Rosa said Whiskey’s infertility was probably due to an accident he’d had when he was twelve. Charlie knew immediately which accident Rosa was referring to. Whiskey and his friend Joel had built a makeshift bike ramp up against an ancient piece of farm machinery in the abandoned yard behind their house. On the first run, the ram
p had collapsed under Whiskey’s weight, and he had ripped open his groin on the rough edge of the rusty old machine. Charlie hadn’t seen Whiskey cry since they were very young boys. Whenever he fell out of something or crashed into something, when he broke something or cut something open, he staved off the pain by swearing, muttering every foul word he could think of until their mother or father loaded him into the car for the hospital. This time he didn’t swear. He lay on his back groaning, and Charlie could see tears sliding across his face and running down the back of his collar. Seeing the mess and blood down below, Charlie had felt the pain in his own groin. Even Joel, who never knew when to shut up, was momentarily silenced. After they had stitched him up, the doctor said the accident might affect Whiskey’s ability to have children. Charlie had hardly understood what he meant. They were still children themselves.
The details came later, via Juliet. Trying for children straightaway had been one of the conditions on which Rosa agreed to marry Whiskey. Already twenty-nine when they met, she had been thinking about having children for some time, and now that she had met Whiskey, she didn’t want to wait.
This detail was one of the things that had bothered Charlie. Until he met Rosa, Whiskey had shown no interest in children. Charlie had thought he was too selfish for it, that he would be afraid it would cramp his style. It did not seem right to Charlie that Whiskey could have changed his mind so quickly.
To get married after two weeks’ acquaintance was one thing. If it didn’t work, Whiskey and Rosa could separate, never had to see each other again if they didn’t want to. Financially speaking, Rosa would be slightly richer, Whiskey slightly poorer; emotionally speaking, they might both be more cynical, less likely to jump so quickly the next time, but otherwise intact. But children were something else. To have them or not to have them did not seem to Charlie to be a decision you should make in the throes of a whirlwind romance. It wasn’t a choice you could make to please someone else. It was a decision that needed a lot of time and thought, that you had to make slowly and carefully, that you had to be sure of. Certainly this was how Charlie viewed the decision when it came to having children of his own.
Because Whiskey and Rosa had started trying for children so quickly, by the time they asked Charlie to be a sperm donor, they hadn’t even been married for a year. True, this was longer than any of Whiskey’s previous relationships had lasted, and from the little he saw of them, Whiskey did seem different with Rosa than he had been with girls in the past. But Charlie wasn’t convinced the changes in Whiskey were permanent. Nine or ten months was no time at all. It didn’t mean they would last the distance. It seemed far more likely to Charlie that within a few months, the luster would wear off Whiskey’s relationship with Rosa, and he would revert to type, cheating on her with a cutout doll who would be impressed by his salary, his car.
Whiskey & Charlie Page 16
