by Jock Serong
A clock grinds away somewhere. People talking in the corridor.
‘Some things happened when we were awake, and some of them happened when we were asleep. In the end, they’re just images that you make up in your mind when you’re sad, or sentimental. Or lonely. Oh honey, lonely. Once you’ve got no plans left, all you’ve got is memories and dreams. They’re made of the same stuff. You stop worrying about the distinction, love.’
The thing with the truckies and the gratification isn’t the only time it happens.
A little later on, a little further down the slope of her senescence, I find her sleeping when I walk in and I take a little while to survey the room. Wally’s paid for everything. His flowers stand in a vase on the shelf at head height, but he’s never been here. I can imagine what you think of me by now, but you might be surprised to know I’ve been the most frequent visitor to this awful place: watching her sleep, reading to her, sorting her damn pills and smiling while she pats my hand and calls me Warwick.
Did I mention? Warwick was Dad’s name.
When she wakes and sees me, I’m brand new to her. That small mercy of the disease: the rendering of everything and everyone as new experiences.
Mum’s lost weight. I know her hands, the spots on them, the curl of the veins. Their grip is as resolute as ever, but the tendons show now in a way that frightens me. Darling man, she murmurs, with her cosmic smile. I don’t know if that’s an acknowledgment of the adult me or another rewind to Dad.
She peers at me with that sweet little smile, like she’s choosing from a box of puppies.
‘Ooh, wait wait wait,’ she says. ‘I can do this.’
Her nose scrunches with the smiling, her eyes overbright. ‘Yes!’ she exclaims. ‘You’re the good one!’
‘That’s me, Mum. Other one’s a rogue.’
She waves her hand dismissively. ‘Oh he’s all right, just no self-restraint. Self-restraint, darling. That’s all it takes. We all get those feelings, all of us from time to time.’
‘Who did your hair, Mum?’ I ask, rummaging through her top drawer.
‘They have a lady come round.’
There’s a will kit. Who the hell would take a will from a woman in this state? I’m tempted to open the folder but I don’t. A copy of a power of attorney underneath it, made out to Wally. That’s as it should be, but I make a note to myself to ask him about the will.
Smokes. Lighter. I take two and light them both, hand one to Mum.
‘Thanks, darl.’
She’s forgotten none of the ritual—draws deeply with her eyelids lowered, pours a jet of smoke towards the window. I hurry over and open it.
‘How’s the cricket, love?’ she asks, cigarette pointing from the back of her hand at the ceiling.
I haven’t picked up a cricket bat in nearly three years. ‘Terrific, Mum. Hitting ’em real sweet.’
We fall silent for a while.
‘Mum?’
She’s wide awake, alert.
‘How did you do it all on your own?’
‘Do what?’
‘Raise us. How did you pay off Fernley Road?’
She looks startled for a moment. ‘I didn’t. You know that.’
‘What?’
‘Warwick paid it off. Lump sum, before he left.’ Her fingers are absently straightening the fold where the bedsheet crosses her chest.
‘Dad? How?’
‘With the payout, honey.’ She’s looking at me like it’s me that has the memory problem.
‘What payout?’
‘Well, when the army pensioned off your dad, he used most of the money to pay for Fernley Road. Then he took off.’
I’m confused now. Maybe it is me. Maybe the chaotic state of her mind is heritable and I’m already coming apart.
No. She’s confabulating.
‘Dad was in the army?’
She sighs with exasperation. ‘He was a conscript. Nasho, went to Vietnam. He had a bad time of it and he, well, he broke down. The way his ankle was, they should never have sent him in the first place. So they paid him compo and that was that.’
‘So he wasn’t just depressed?’
‘He was certainly depressed. He saw awful things, I imagine. Never talked about them.’
‘Mum, I don’t know where I got this from, but I thought he was just a drip.’
She smiles, more generously than I deserve. ‘He was a marvellous man. So interesting and funny. He was very spiritual, a great learner and reader. Life just got the better of him. It happens.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘I’ve got a fair idea.’
Maybe not confabulating. Maybe disinhibited.
She goes no further. Something about her face changes, the line of her mouth. The topic’s closed.
I turn on the TV, in time to catch the last half of the local soaps. Mum in her heyday, even Mum five minutes ago, would have scoffed at this rubbish. Now she’s enthralled, lost in some childish fantasy world where I can’t reach her. The only sign of her real self, strong and true, is the pulse in the side of her neck, between the columns of flesh descending into her old-lady nightie. Dear God.
The news shines in at six; swirling chrome fragment animation to a newsreader I found interesting at a launch a year ago. Over her shoulder, the editorial image is a badly confected bat and ball on grass. I turn the volume up and this is what I hear:
The federal government has announced a judicial inquiry will be held into corruption in cricket. Speaking today outside her electoral office, the Minister for Sport and Recreation said the inquiry will be far-reaching and will spare no one.
The minister in pearls, a guy nodding in the background:
‘This inquiry will call in current and former players, coaches, celebrities, whatever it takes. The Australian public deserve to have confidence in their sporting heroes, and this government is determined to stamp out the cancer of corruption in our sports. Cricket is the major national sport in this country, and that’s why we’ve decided to start here.’
Stamp out cancer. Nice. Back to the newsreader with the half-smile and the big hair.
Although the minister didn’t specify what prompted this announcement, it’s widely believed to be connected to revelations earlier this week that Indian bookmakers have turned their attention to domestic cricket in Australia. Illegal bookmaking operations have been offering bets on domestic fixtures over the internet for some years now, although there has been no recorded instance of a game being thrown as a result…
Mum’s ashing on her bedsheets.
‘Darling,’ she says sweetly, ‘where’s that pretty girl?’
‘Who’s that? Honey?’
She creases her brow. ‘Was it Honey?’
‘We broke up, Mum. Years ago.’
She’s silent for a moment. Groping for something.
‘No, the little girl. She came to Christmas.’ Her face brightens. ‘She played cricket!’
A sudden choking-up, and I can’t respond. God, if I could have some of the erasure she has.
‘Such a lovely little thing.’
I scoop up the ash carefully into the side of one hand and throw it out the window, along with our two butts. Shut the window. Grab both sides of Mum’s head and plant a big kiss on her forehead. She looks up at me with that translucent glow.
‘The good boy,’ she beams. ‘So kind.’
Decline
The tape’s off my mouth and I feel like singing.
The answer, after all, was very simple. There was enough of a free end that I could tuck my chin into my collarbone and trap it against my shoulder. By unhappy coincidence the tape was unfurling towards the side of my ribs where there’s been some other damage done. Each grind of my shoulder against the tape released a chorus of crackling and popping down the side of my chest.
But it’s worked—with a little more contorting I’ve ripped it free. I roll my jaw around to reawaken the muscles, mouthing word-shapes like yaw yaw yaw.
If I
can roll my head over and put my mouth to the taillight I can yell at someone.
Mummy, the car in front’s yelling at us. But who would I yell at? And what if it didn’t work?
I don’t understand why things are the way they are for Mum.
She has a disease that affects memory, so why is she in a bed? There was never a day she was unavailable to us. Never a task she was physically unable to perform, from rolling pitches to retiling the shower recess at Fernley Road. She smoked when we were kids, loved an occasional beer, yet she flew serenely above any physical retribution from her own body.
So why is she lying here? The Dutch neurologist told me a disease that affects memory thereby affects daily functioning—hygiene, cooking, financial management—even the problem of just wandering off. Kindly old people called Gwen or Aldous found decomposing in parks or dismembered by trains. So the price of managing this head sickness is the imprisonment of the body.
Now some malevolent speck of her food, ingested somehow into her lungs and setting off an infection, has triggered the start of her destruction. She hasn’t spoken in weeks, a curled creature gone to shelter. She’s like paper these days, and the sight of her breaks my heart.
She is dying.
When she coughs, they come rushing in and wrestle a drain tube into her, and I’m back with Emily Weil and the hospital carpark. They roll her with scant regard for her dignity to alleviate the bedsores. Her grey and blonde hair falls foolishly over her face while they work. Robbed of recollection and therefore of the evidence for love, she has no will. Her eyes on mine are a plea for release.
Wally comes when he can and we sit in silence, watching her fade. He’s been back a while now, found conversation with me as though we never talked that night on the phone from Dubai.
Louise turns up occasionally, fractured and stern. Sometimes with him, sometimes alone. Sometimes clear and functional, usually smelling lightly, under the perfume, of stale booze.
Public recognition has recruited the three of us into other people’s families. Louise is the face of an advertising campaign for a cruelty-free moisturiser, a Clean Water Week, a Domestic Violence Memorial. Her gravitas, her solemn and indisputable words, are responsible for a tide of donations. Surveys indicate she is among the most trusted faces in the media.
Wally occupies a different space. A former captain of the Test side is conferred a kind of tenure. For a former prime minister, there’s a car and an office and a lifetime of air travel. For a former Test captain there’s something less tangible but equally valuable—an intimate space in the lives of the populace. People can map their own lives by reference to Wally and his feats: the century he made here or there, the transcendent moments of heroism. His press conferences. He’s perennial, leathered by sun as though for all of us. His televised moments can be tied to the index points in any ordinary life: a kiss, a fight, a holiday, a night on the couch.
And there’s me, known for wearing a high-gloss suit and delivering easy platitudes to camera these days; perhaps distantly remembered as an athlete. I’ve become a Twitter celebrity, firing off one-forty-character ripostes with links to cute things and aspiring actresses, endorsing everything from spec builders to footy betting. It yields me a constant haul of free stuff, a delivery van every couple of days, and I hoard the loot in a spare room, where it piles up like the gold in Smaug’s cave. Beneath the home gyms and mountain bikes and cartons of wine somewhere are the bags of cricket gear that started it all.
The Twitter following, coupled with my real and imagined misdeeds, qualifies me as a larrikin. It’s a euphemism, larrikin, a kind of willing blindness about character flaws.
He’s a lad.
He’s mischievous.
Clown prince.
Of all these dishonest labels, ‘bad boy’ is the one that troubles me the most, implying as it does an inability to grow up. I’ve got a bald patch fading its way through my crown, for God’s sake. I’m no one’s boy, ‘laser hair treatment’ notwithstanding.
Craig is gone from our lives now. The closest friend I ever had, driven away by Wally’s disapproval, by his own unsettling transformation into an ‘industrial mediator’ in pinstripes and cowboy boots. Rumoured links to bikies, belly laughs at the races.
He makes regular appearances on the news now, appearances of the ‘colourful identity’ type. He hasn’t rung since Emily Weil, and the string of text messages I didn’t return: streams of his life, deals, nightclubs, dreary shit about women and drugs in ranting, shouty capslock.
FKN AWSM HERE MAD CHIX FROM SPANE.
His tone became wounded as I failed to engage. Hard to explain why I didn’t, other than to say I’d outgrown him.
My life outside the media has become smaller with the Big Guy no longer there.
The three of us prop around Mum on the sticky vinyl chairs but we’re not enough to form a circle. For all the strangers we’ve attached to ourselves over our lifetimes, we are a constellation of three now, with a frightened, broken matriarch at our centre.
One still, slate-grey autumn afternoon marks itself as the last time I ever spend with my brother and mother. Our last moments as a family, fraught as always with the conflict that I choose to see as our bent expression of love.
She lies between us, her breath rattling.
She’s unconscious, alive by medical definition only now. Her hair’s been cut shorter than she ever liked to wear it—nobody asked our permission—and her mouth hangs slightly open. I’d found the gaping mouth unsettling until I got used to it. Looking at Wally, seated across the bed, I can see it’s still worrying him. He tries gently pressing her lips together, gets dribble on his fingers and the mouth reopens. He takes a tissue from a steel dispenser mounted on the wall and wipes his fingers. He flicks the tissue at the bin, irritation mounting to rage.
‘They can’t keep her like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like this,’ he gestures angrily towards the bed. His suit and hair are immaculate. He is a man at the peak of his personal authority, staring at something he cannot possibly control.
‘It’s not a care problem. She’d be like this if she was at home, or in a hospital, or in fucking Borneo, pal.’
‘Don’t get smart with me. Look at her.’
I’ve looked at her, hour after hour, for weeks. What I see is the patient body working by increments towards its own conclusion. Terminal decline. Can’t fight it, can’t change it.
Wally stands up abruptly. Starts pacing. His voice is clenched to a fierce whisper. ‘She’s got no quality of life. She’d be hating this.’
He turns his back on Mum and me, plants both his elbows on the high windowsill, stares out at the baleful sky. The backs of his legs are outlined the same way in suit pants as they once were in whites.
He drags a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. He remains perfectly still at the window for a long, long time as the afternoon darkens. The ceiling light isn’t on; the gloom descends. By the time he turns to face me, his entire expression has changed. There are blotches of red on his throat and the bags under his eyes are starkly apparent.
He walks past the end of the bed, takes the other guest chair and puts it against the door. He leans over Mum. Gently slides the second pillow out from under her head.
I still haven’t caught on.
He stands above her holding the pillow by its ends, looking at her with a heart full of hell. And I still haven’t worked out what he’s doing.
Then he lunges forward and presses the pillow over her face. Pulls the ends down over the sides of her head with his mouth pressed in a grim line of determination. I’m transfixed by a squiggled vein in his temple, the sinewed ferocity of his hands. He’ll break her neck before he suffocates her.
It takes me an eternity to move.
Then I’m on him, round his ribs, trying to get enough purchase to swing him over the far side of the bed. But his weight is forward, his balance perfect, and I can’t get him to budge
. He’s moved his grip so his elbows are pinning the pillow and his hands can grasp the metal crossbar over the bed. And while I’m looking at that I see the big red alarm button and slap it with one palm.
It lights up but there’s no audible sound.
He’s still going. It’s been so long now.
I punch him hard in the jaw and he slackens, has to regather. I hit him again in the ribs and this time he straightens up, a knee either side of Mum on the bed and gives me one back, catching me in the side of the throat. I grab his wrist on the downswing and pull him towards me. He doesn’t move until my weight falls to one side and the collective mass of both of us is too much for him. There’s a huge crashing of furniture as we take out the bedside drawers and the chair I was on a moment ago. His fingers again in my eyes, and a lamp on top of us. I can feel the hot bulb near my cheek.
Then there’s other noises, changes in the weight on me. The cavalry are here, two big islanders in orderlies’ shirts. They heave away at Wally until they’ve separated us, drag him out of the room and down the corridor, from where I can still hear him yelling. A young female nurse has appeared and is tending to Mum, who remains in unconscious suspension but appears to be breathing.
The nurse hisses at me furiously, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
I’m gathering my breath, can’t respond.
She’s still muttering. ‘Fucking Keefe boys. Everything they say’s true, isn’t it.’
In the midst of these bewildering days, a headline appears: Fall of the House of Keefe.
I don’t need to look at the by-line—it’s Amy Harris.
She charts our rise, subtly paralleling it with her own ascent through the ranks. I was a cadet journalist when I was first sent to profile two unknown sporting prodigies from Melbourne’s gritty western suburbs. She talks cricket with confidence by now. Explains Fed and Squibbly and treads gently through the loss of Hannah. She commends Wally on his professionalism and dedication, defends him against the allegations that he was boring or mechanical, rationalising that his dour approach was exactly what Australian cricket needed at the time—was what the Australian people needed at the time, because none of us can differentiate our sporting fortunes from our real ones. She charts my countless acts of idiocy, pausing to reflect on the untold damage left behind after Emily Weil. An unmitigated disaster. No argument there.
