The red light was flashing on the answering machine, and Juliet had been listening to the messages, because she knew Rosa wouldn’t; writing down the names and numbers of the people who called, knowing someone would have to call them back eventually.
Though their voice mail still said You’ve called Whiskey and Rosa, all the messages were for Rosa. Mostly they were people who’d worked with Whiskey on one job or another, who’d heard the news through the advertising grapevine. Usually they didn’t know Rosa, so they began by explaining who they were before going on to say how they’d heard the news, how sorry they were, what a horrible tragedy it was, etc. Charlie thought these people were brave to ring up and leave these awkward messages, but he found it tiring listening to them, and sometimes he thought about turning the machine off.
When the answering machine picked up Mike’s call, and he began by saying, “Hi, Whiskey,” both Charlie and Juliet looked up from what they were doing.
“I’m wondering where you and Rosa are… I’m wondering if you’ve changed your mind.”
In hindsight, Charlie thought he should have realized as soon as he heard the Canadian accent, but Whiskey had worked on a lot of international jobs, and quite a few of the messages had been from overseas. Besides, at that stage, Mike was the furthest thing from Charlie’s mind.
Charlie was certain that everyone must have heard about the accident by then. He could not imagine how anyone acquainted with Whiskey and Rosa could not know. If there was someone who did not know, he did not want to be the one to have to tell them. He looked at Juliet desperately.
She pressed the speaker button. “Hello?”
“Rosa?” the voice asked.
“This is Juliet.”
“Juliet? Charlie’s wife?”
“Not wife,” she corrected. “Who’s calling?”
“Juliet, it’s Mike, from Canada.”
“Mike!” Juliet looked at Charlie, appalled. “Where are you?”
“We’re at the airport. Whiskey and Rosa were supposed to pick us up. We’ve been waiting over an hour, and they’re not answering their cell phones. I thought perhaps—you’d all…you’d changed your minds about…meeting us.”
Juliet took a breath. “No,” she said. “It’s not that, of course not. It’s just that…” She looked at Charlie for help. “I’ll come and pick you up,” she said. “I’ll explain then. I’ll be there in forty minutes. Where are you waiting?”
Charlie had made no secret of the fact that he hadn’t wanted Mike to come. If it had been up to him, he would have said thanks but no thanks, best wishes and good-bye. Unfortunately, Whiskey and Rosa had other ideas. They had argued that Mike had a right to know who his family was, that they wanted to meet him. After a great deal of debate, they had said they would be inviting him and his daughters to stay with them for a month over Christmas, with or without Charlie’s blessing. Now they were here, and Whiskey and Rosa were not available to play host.
“They can’t stay,” Charlie said, as soon as Juliet hung up the phone.
But even as he said it, Charlie understood that they couldn’t turn around and go straight back to Canada. They needed to sleep, for starters. Their flights would have to be changed. Until arrangements could be made, they would have to be accommodated.
“We could find them a hotel,” he suggested.
“I don’t think we should do that, Charlie,” Juliet said quietly. “This poor guy’s flown all the way from Canada to meet his two brothers, and he’s about to find out one of them is in a coma. He’ll be in a state of shock. And what about the little girls? The least we can do is offer them a place to stay.”
Charlie put his face in his hands.
“I know it’s hard, Charlie,” Juliet said. “It’s a terrible situation. But try to imagine how they’re going to be feeling. I don’t want to make things worse for them than they already are. We’ll send them off as soon as we can. But for a few days, I think we should help them, if we can.”
Charlie nodded.
Juliet squeezed his hand. “I know this isn’t easy for you.”
“We’ll have to let Rosa know.”
Juliet pulled a face. Rosa was barely eating or sleeping as it was. They were all concerned about her.
“I’ll tell Rosa,” Charlie said, standing up. “You take Whiskey’s car to the airport. That’ll give me some time to get my head around it.”
Juliet held him tight for a moment. “Good luck.”
x x x
To Charlie’s surprise, Rosa suggested that Mike and the girls should stay the month, as planned. Charlie had expected her to be upset by the situation, to say she couldn’t cope, that she didn’t want to know about it.
“He has come all this way,” was what she said. “We might as well to make the best of it.”
“But what on earth is he going to do?”
“He can show the girls around, come in to see Whiskey. I don’t know. Maybe it can help Whiskey.”
The notion that a visit from his long-lost half brother might bring Whiskey out of his coma was laughable to Charlie, like something out of a B-grade soap opera, but he did not say this to Rosa. He tried to stick to practicalities.
“They can’t stay with us indefinitely, Rosa. Even if we wanted them to, we don’t have the space.”
“They can stay at our place,” Rosa said. “That was what we had planned anyway. The house is empty. Let them use it.”
“But we don’t even know them,” Charlie said. “Okay, technically speaking, Mike is a relative, but in reality, we don’t know the first thing about him. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have him staying at the house when you and Whiskey aren’t there.”
“Oh, Charlie, please. I am too tired to argue with you. Don’t make it difficult. Mike can have the spare room, and the girls can have the room next door. Whiskey and I already bought them a bunk bed. It only needs to be—what is the word?—constructed.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t necessary to buy new furniture, Rosa. They’re only here for a month. Why don’t I get them an air mattress or something? You can return the bunk beds.”
Rosa shook her head. “They are our family, Charlie. They have come all this way to see us. I will not let them sleep on the ground like cavemen. It would make me unhappy.”
Charlie knew from experience that there was no point arguing with Rosa when her mind was made up. Besides, if she wanted to cling to the hope that having Mike around might help Whiskey, he didn’t want to take that from her. He was clinging to some pretty tenuous hopes himself.
x x x
The first few days were difficult. Charlie tried to avoid being alone with Mike for any extended period. He knew there must be endless questions Mike wanted to ask, but he felt incapable of providing satisfactory answers. Any conversation beyond the banal that the two of them might get into felt too awkward for Charlie.
Mike obviously sensed Charlie’s reticence because he did not push him or attempt to get him alone. When they did talk, he stayed on the surface of things—the weather, his first impressions of Australia, his work, Charlie’s work. He did not talk about their relationship or about Whiskey’s condition. Those conversations he had with Juliet, perhaps because it was Juliet who had been the one to tell him about Whiskey.
When she picked them up from the airport, she had put the roof down on Whiskey’s car, and as soon as they were on the Tullamarine Freeway, the wind catching their voices before the girls could, Juliet had told Mike about the accident. She said to Charlie that she told it straight and fast because she had found it to be the best way. Mike had said nothing, but when Juliet took her eyes off the road to look at him, she saw he was crying.
He was Charlie’s half brother, a complete stranger to Juliet.
“What did you do?” Charlie asked her.
“I reached over and held his hand.”
x x x
The day after Mike arrived, he had gone to meet their mother, and according to what he told Juliet, the first meeting had gone “as well as could be expected.” A few days later, their mother had rung and asked him to come again and bring the girls.
Charlie couldn’t believe how easily his mother had adjusted to Mike’s presence in their lives.
“It was a shock when the letter first came,” she told Charlie. “I won’t deny that. But after I had some time to get used to it, I realized I wanted to see him. When you give away a child, everybody tells you it’s best to think of that child as being dead. But you can never think of it as dead. Well, I never could, anyway. I thought about the baby I had given away every day; every day for thirty-odd years I wondered about him, where he’d ended up, what kind of person he’d become. It feels like a gift that he’s come back into our lives,” she said, “especially now.”
Charlie couldn’t see it as a gift. He saw it as an added complication in a situation that was already complicated enough.
x x x
Once Whiskey and Rosa’s house had been organized and Mike and the girls went to stay there, Charlie felt better. There was less pressure then to get to know Mike, to talk about feelings, to see if they liked each other, to work out if they would ever think of each other as brothers. As soon as Mike was gone, Charlie liked him more. He had held himself together in the midst of what could only be described as an atrocious mess. On top of that, he had protected Holly and Chloe from the fallout, concocting a G-rated account of why Whiskey and Rosa couldn’t see them right away, jollying them up until they were quite convinced their holiday was going to be as much fun as ever, despite the change of plans. In their few days at Charlie and Juliet’s, Mike had done everything he could to make the girls feel at home. He had read to them every night from The Secret Garden, a book they had begun before they left Canada, and on Sunday morning Mike had made pancakes for everyone—because, according to Holly, they always had pancakes on Sundays—complete with a bottle of real Canadian maple syrup, which they had brought to give to Whiskey and Rosa.
Mike had rented a car, but he returned it within a few days, after which, at Rosa’s insistence, he drove Whiskey’s car instead.
“Juliet told me I was not allowed to drive it, that I must to take taxis to the hospital, so now it is seeking cobwebs in the garage.”
Gathering cobwebs, Charlie silently corrected.
“You must drive it, Michael. The girls will like it. When I was a child, I always dreamed to ride in a convertible motorcar. Whiskey would want you to use it.”
This last comment clinched the argument. No one wanted to deny Rosa the pleasure of doing something that might please Whiskey. It would have been like denying a final cigarette to a man condemned to death.
After a week or so, a pattern had emerged. Every second day, Mike and the girls did their own thing. Mike took them to see their new grandmother, or they went sightseeing—to the zoo and the science museum, for a cruise on the Yarra, up to the top of the Rialto Towers. On the other days, Mike dropped the girls at Charlie and Juliet’s after lunch, and then he went to the hospital to sit with Whiskey so Rosa could go home and sleep for a few hours. Juliet would spend the afternoon with the girls, and they would have dinner together before Mike picked them up and took them back to Whiskey and Rosa’s.
This arrangement suited Charlie. Firstly, it relieved him of the pressure to visit Whiskey himself. Since his argument with his father, he’d been avoiding the hospital, embarrassed that his motivations for being there were so transparent. He hoped Mike’s presence might make his own absence less noticeable.
Secondly, though Charlie felt uncomfortable with Mike, he enjoyed having the twins around. Too young to really understand the situation, they had a lightness everyone else had lost since Whiskey’s accident. When he heard them laughing, Charlie realized no one laughed around him anymore, as if, as the grieving brother, he had entered a realm in which nothing was ever allowed to be funny again, like wearing a T-shirt with the slogan Don’t joke with me—my brother’s in a coma. Holly and Chloe were the only ones who didn’t know how to behave. They told him jokes. They asked him to tell them jokes. He only remembered one joke, so he told it again and again.
“What’s the difference between a hyena and a flea?” he would ask them.
And even though they knew the answer, they knew it was more fun when Charlie told it. So they would wait without speaking for him to say the punch line: One howls on the prairie, and the other prowls on the hairy. And then they would laugh raucously, even though Charlie was certain it couldn’t be funny to them.
They sang songs. They were obsessed with Manfred Mann’s 1964 classic “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” which they had on a CD they had brought with them from Canada. They sang it at least ten times a day, arguing every time over the parts—which one of them would sing the proper lyrics and which the gibberish refrain. It reminded Charlie of when he and Whiskey were young and their father bought them the record Peter Gunn. Every day they had played it over and over again until their mother called up the stairs that if she had to listen to it one more time, she would break it in half. Then they had taken to humming it instead, squabbling about who would provide the bass line and who the dramatic horn solo.
Charlie was fascinated by the dynamic between the twins. Holly had been born first, Mike had told him, and in their relationships with others, particularly adults, Holly was the spokesperson. But when it was just the two of them playing together, it was often Chloe who made the decisions, defined the parameters of their games, took the best roles. Charlie tried to remember being six years old. Once upon a time, were there ways in which he had taken the lead, made the rules? Had he and Whiskey ever been like Holly and Chloe, each dominant in different ways? Was it just his imagination that Whiskey had always had the upper hand, a convenient fiction he had created which corroborated his other ideas of his brother, himself?
x x x
Juliet liked having the girls around too. She had discovered that they liked old musicals and they had been making popcorn and having matinees, working their way through the films she had grown up with—Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes Genevieve dropped Oscar off, and they played school or took Chester to the park.
In Quebec, they said, their next-door neighbor had a beagle called Boomer, whom they sometimes played with. They began almost every sentence with the phrase “in Quebec.”
In Quebec, we would be at school now; in Quebec, we have underground shopping malls; in Quebec, it’s probably snowing.
Charlie teased them that he was learning so much about Quebec that if he ever visited, there would be no surprises left for him at all.
Once Charlie was on school holidays he volunteered to look after the girls some afternoons to give Mike a break. It was one of those afternoons, when Charlie and the girls were watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks, when Rosa rang in a state, asking Charlie to go straight to the hospital.
“I think I have catched something,” she said anxiously. “I must go straight home.”
“I’ve got the girls,” Charlie said. “What about Mum?”
“I have called to her already. She is not at home.”
“Have you tried Audrey?”
“She is in Bendigo until tomorrow.”
Charlie thought for a minute. Juliet was at the library, working on her screenplay; she wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours, and her phone would be switched off. Mike had had some errands to run that afternoon, and Charlie had no way of contacting him.
“I might be making Whiskey sick, Charlie,” Rosa said. “I must go directly.”
Charlie did not need Rosa to explain to him that Whiskey could not be left alone, that what she feared more than anything was some change in his condition when no one was there, some opportunity to get thr
ough to him being lost.
“Hang in there, Rosa,” Charlie said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He left a quick message on Juliet’s voice mail, grabbed some coloring books and pencils, and bundled the girls into the car. They can sit on the chairs in the corridor, he thought to himself. I’ll be able to keep an eye on them through the window. Juliet can come and pick them up as soon as she leaves the library. There’ll be no need for them to come into the room at all.
But when they got to the hospital, the girls had other ideas.
“Are we going to meet Uncle Whiskey?” Holly asked excitedly.
“You can’t meet him,” Charlie said. “He’s sleeping.”
“Daddy said he was in a coma.”
Charlie grimaced. “That’s kind of like sleeping. You’ll have to wait out here.”
“Can’t we have a look at him?” Holly persisted.
He’s not a fucking museum exhibit, Charlie wanted to say. “He’s very sick,” he said instead.
“We’ll be quiet,” Holly said. “We’ll be so quiet, we promise. Don’t we, Chloe?”
Charlie pressed his face into his hands. How did things get so out of control? What sort of person took two six-year-old girls to see a man in a coma? But he didn’t want to stand out in the corridor, arguing about it. Rosa was waiting.
“All right then. You can come in and see him. But don’t touch anything. And don’t say a word until Rosa’s gone.”
Whiskey & Charlie Page 18
