‘I just don’t know what those kids are doing anymore.’ He slouched further back in his chair. It was like his increasing lack of control over the world was hollowing out his body.
She sat down on the couch, slipped her shoes off.
‘I don’t know. You never know, do you, what your kids are really doing?’
Rose understood Antonio was one of those parents who used to feel sure that he knew what his kids were doing at every second of the day, but she was never under any such illusion. Everyone had their secret lives. Especially your own children.
She changed the topic.
‘Maybe you should get a hobby? There’s a hobby shop on Church Street. They have ships you can put together out of a model kit or you could brew your own beer or learn another language or maybe you could do some volunteer work or take up cards. They have bridge at the RSL. George likes bridge, you could go with him. You know, George across the road.’
She watched him shove his hands down the side of the couch and pull out the remote for the television. Since the party all his old friends had stayed away. She wondered if they would come back. She could never be enough to Antonio to fill a gap as large as they filled in Antonio’s life. She’d learned that when she had married him. She’d tried to reorganise their lives so that they wouldn’t need anyone but each other. It never worked.
Antonio switched on the news. That was his answer to her suggestions. She wondered sometimes why she even tried. She leaned back further into the couch. There was the casserole on the counter that needed to be heated up, but the effort of walking into the kitchen, of heating it up, of serving it to him on a plate, seemed like far too much for her at that moment.
Antonio fumbled with the remote, changed to another news station.
‘You tell me when he gets home.’
‘George?’
‘Francis.’
Rose was so tired.
A map of the world popped up on a screen behind the news reporter. He showed the audience where all the places he’d been talking about were. ‘There is Christmas Island, there is Indonesia, there is Nauru, there is Australia.’ They were talking about turning all those boats around and sending the people on them to camps on islands where there was no water to drink and the ground was crumbling into the sea.
Not on the news: something about her husband had shifted. He was beginning to crack some time ago but now he was splitting wide open. She watched him sitting there, staring at those newspapers on his lap. He was saying something to himself. Rose could tell it was some kind of argument he was having, maybe with someone only he could see. There’s just too many of them, he was mumbling to himself, and now we’ve lost Francis and Clare.
14.
Antonio woke up. He was lying on his recliner. The newspapers were still in his lap but the lights were off and the television was off and the only reason he could see anything at all was because of the moonlight coming in through the window and the digital clock on the VCR that threw red light onto the space in front of it. 11:30. Last thing he remembered was Rose bringing him a beer and a painkiller after dinner. He turned on the lamp beside him and looked at the double-edged quality of the room, the way the television seemed to have a fuzzy second image of a television existing behind it and slightly to the right. It was like being outside of the room and looking back at it through a distorted glass window.
He pushed himself up slowly with his good arm, found his cane next to his chair and he was up and off. He wasn’t quite sure where but he needed to go. He needed to get out of this room and his own fuzzy head. His leg hurt, his arm hurt, his head hurt. He walked into the kitchen and got his packet of painkillers from the pantry above the fridge. He put one on his tongue, opened the fridge and pulled out a beer to swallow it with.
He walked through the kitchen and out to the back porch where the breeze hit his face and the air smelled like overripe tomatoes and something burning. He couldn’t stand any longer. He sat down on one of the chairs they kept there. In the far right-hand corner of the yard he could see wispy clouds of smoke rising up from behind his lattice of beans and disappearing into the sky. Lately, in the evenings, Antonio was not so sure if he really saw what he thought he saw. He put his hand into his pocket and fumbled around in his crushed pack for a cigarette, pulled one out, lit it. He inhaled deeply and looked at the far corner of the yard again where he was beginning to understand that the small clouds of smoke behind his beans were attached to a figure sitting on the ground there smoking something. It was probably Francis, but he couldn’t be sure from here. It was one of those rare shared desires between him and his son, a smoke outside and a quiet moment to look at the world.
Then again, if it was Francis he should be slightly more civilised about it, should sit out on the porch like his father (with his father), not out there in the dirt. But that’s just the kind of thing Francis did. Sitting in chairs was too sensible.
‘Oy!’ It was all Antonio could think of to say. He yelled from the porch again, ‘Oy!’ and saw something rustle there and jump up and turn around. It was definitely Francis. He stood up straight, dropped something he was holding in one hand and waved with the other.
This was where he was, the son he never saw even though they lived in the same house and worked on the same building sites. Perhaps this was where he was always getting to. Francis was like a weedy shirtless garden gnome with unruly hair. He was kicking something in the dirt and fumbling with his pyjama pants until he produced a cigarette, lit it and moved forward slowly towards where his father was standing on the porch.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he said, stopping three feet in front of Antonio. Even though Francis was twenty-three and even though Antonio might not be as sharp as he once was, he still knew his son was up to something. But at least he’d found him here, miraculously, in his garden.
He wanted to talk to Francis like men talk to men but it was hard to talk to him in that way. How do you talk to your children when suddenly they are adults and still they are your children? Antonio’s father was much better at these things. He always talked to Antonio and his brother like they were equals.
‘Sit.’ Antonio whacked his cane against the other chair on the porch.
‘I got to go to bed.’
‘You’re up. I’m up. Sit.’ Under the back porch light Antonio could see that his son’s eyes were bloodshot. He wondered if Francis had been crying. He searched his face. His son had the same square jaw, high cheekbones, dark set eyes as him. They were unmistakably related. Clare looked much more like Rose.
Francis pulled the other chair further away from Antonio and sat down, putting one hand under his leg and using the other to hold his cigarette. Both of his hands were shaking, Antonio could see it, even from here, even in the dark. It worried him. He wondered how much longer someone with hands that shake like that could be a builder. Francis smelled like sweet burning cut grass. His eyes said he had been off somewhere in another kind of universe and was trying to pull himself back to the present, here with his father on the porch. Antonio had seen him like this before.
‘Have you been smoking the marijuana again?’
‘Have you been smoking the marijuana again?’ Francis repeated his words in a high-pitched tone and laughed. ‘You’re the only one who says it like that, Dad – “smoking the marijuana”.’
Antonio does not understand what he has said wrong. He was trying not to react, trying to remain calm. Francis wasn’t ten anymore. He couldn’t put him over his knee.
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘Aw, Dad, shit, don’t start. Not now, not tonight.’
‘I’m not trying to start anything. I am trying to have a conversation.’
‘No you’re not. You’re just trying to get on my back…’
‘No. I want to talk to you. I want to be able to talk to you.’
It was true. That was all he was looking for, just the ability to connect with his son. That was it. He was willing to put aside the s
moking the marijuana thing, or however you said it.
‘I want to be able to have a conversation with you.’ He could hear himself now, that kind of begging quality in his own voice.
Francis stubbed his cigarette out on the porch, reached up to his face and rubbed his eyes with his palms.
‘What then, what, what do you want to have a conversation about?’
Antonio didn’t actually know. ‘About anything. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. I’m not doing anything. Just trying to think. I can’t sleep. I was just out in the garden.’
He watched his son slouch in his chair. Francis’ body language made it clear that simply having a conversation was far too much effort to require of him. ‘Why can’t you sleep?’
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ he let out a giant sigh. ‘Why can’t you sleep?’
‘I don’t know, lots of things I’ve been thinking about. Did you know your sister doesn’t work at Arthur Phillip anymore?’
‘No. Where is she working now?’
‘I don’t know. Do you know?’
‘No. Probably a good thing though.’
‘Why?’
‘Because. Because it never really worked for her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, Dad, just because, ask her.’
Francis holds his hands up to his face and shakes his head from side to side in his cupped hands.
‘Because why?’
‘Because, just because. Ask her. I’m going to bed.’ Francis got up and left before his father could respond. Antonio wondered what he had said wrong this time. Why did everyone make him feel like he was always asking the wrong questions? Because, because, why. His head was too heavy, he couldn’t work it out. Things didn’t make sense anymore.
He heard a door slam somewhere in the back of the house. The moonlight was bright tonight and he could see all the shapes there in his garden – the tomatoes and beans on their wooden sticks, the hessian bags he had covered the pawpaws with so that birds couldn’t eat them – but when he tried to make out the specifics of things they still had that doubled-edged quality. He pushed himself up off his chair, leaned against his cane and walked out into his garden.
He needed to get out here more. To push everything back into the neat rows they once were in. Everything was disordered, the pumpkins were in the zucchinis, in the eggplants, the tomatoes.
He walked to the row of beans where Francis had been sitting and found a small tin pencil case lying on the ground, half covered in dirt. He leaned over carefully, pulled it out of the ground, flipped open the lid. Inside there was a small lump of green and two roll-your-own cigarettes already made up. He flipped the lid closed and looked back at his house.
On the left side of the house the sensor lights had turned on again. He’d installed them only recently, but they never seemed to switch off. They were always on, sensing things when there was nothing there. He walked up towards them slowly, and when he got there, there was nothing, as usual – only the cans of blue paint that he intended to use to repaint the window frames. He kept walking towards the front of the house. The concrete slab he’d laid there all those years before was firm and cold underneath his feet and he realised for the first time that he’d forgotten to put on shoes. He sat on the park bench Rose had bought second-hand and insisted that they put there, underneath the front window. He had allowed her this one concession, and also the pots of gardenias that she’d placed on each side of it. The rest of the front yard was neat, concrete, clean.
He opened up the tin pencil case again, pulled out one of Francis’ thin cigarettes and held it to his nose. It had the cut grass smell that was stuck to Francis’ clothes.
‘This is the marijuana,’ he said out loud. When Francis had been kicked out of school for smoking it behind the school oval he’d launched into an argument with Antonio about how it was natural, better for you than the cigarettes or the beer his father was into. His children were always arguing with him, arguing from the moment they were born. Antonio couldn’t remember ever fighting with his father.
He put it in his mouth, lit up, inhaled. It was harder on his throat than a cigarette. He coughed, inhaled again, got the hang of it. He looked at Lucy’s house to the left and back to that big ugly apartment building that was going up on the right side of his house. Soon, when he sat out here, the people in that building would be able to look down on him from their windows. They were all three- and four-bedders, twenty-two of them, he’d read on the signs that were creeping their way too close to his front footpath. They’ll be families, he imagined, too many of them shoved into too small a space and the noise of this neighbourhood will stretch all the way from Church Street to here, to his space. There’ll be no escape.
He finished the first of his son’s skinny cigarettes and started another one. Everything slowed down. He looked up at the skeleton of the building next to him, imagined people pouring out of the window frames likes waves of water and bodies everywhere splashing out onto the concrete of his front yard until it was inundated with people swimming around like it was some kind of giant above-ground swimming pool. He laughed, but he was angry, but he laughed some more. He looked to the side of his house where the cans of blue paint and the brushes he’d cleaned in turpentine were standing drying against the fence. He was trying to look there so he could stop laughing and getting angry at the people swimming on his front lawn.
That’s when he saw Nico standing there in the corner next to the paint tins shaking his head. Nico looked disappointed, not just about the people swimming in the yard. He looked disappointed about everything. He’d been standing around just out of Antonio’s view for weeks now, sobbing in the darkness. He’d been there, standing in the glare of the sun when Fat Frank had told Antonio that he and Nico were too old to be working on building sites anyway. He’d been silent in the doorway when the man from WorkCover had implied that what Nico and he had done that day was irresponsible. He’d been listening when the real estate agent had laughed at Antonio for saying there were too many apartments going up next door. He’d been watching when those kids pushed Antonio over in the street. And now, when Antonio turned to Nico standing there he had nothing to tell him, no way of explaining it all and Nico didn’t look like he was willing to listen anyway. Antonio wanted to say sorry, but he’d forgotten how to speak. And Nico, still, said nothing, had no wisdom to impart this time. Antonio watched Nico as he leaned over quietly, picked up a paintbrush and held it out towards him.
15.
She’d left teaching because of a hat. Actually, like everything, the story was much more complicated than that, but the simple version was that it all ended with the type of hat that Paul had rocked up to work in today, one of those 59Fifty hats with the wide brims, too big for any real head so that they slipped down slightly over the wearer’s eyes. That made it easier, of course, to see the silver sticker that was stuck on the brim, the one all the young guys leave, like displaying a price tag, except this price tag was much cooler because it was shiny and it was a sticker and it told everyone else that you had the money to buy a brand new hat.
Clare watched Paul’s hat bob up and down near the counter where he was pulling books out of a box and checking them off on the stock list.
‘You going to wear that all day?’
‘What?’ He looked up, tilted his head back so that he could find some place to see her from behind his fringe and the rim of his hat.
‘Your hat. You know. You don’t wear hats indoors.’
‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’ He took it off like an obedient school child and ran his fingers through his hair, placed it behind the counter and got back to unpacking.
Clare stood behind the counter. Watched the street outside. Again, she felt bad about talking to him like she was his teacher but she didn’t have any real inclination to behave like a better human being, not today, maybe not ever.
She picked up his hat and held it in front of her face like she was about to have a conv
ersation with it.
‘Why do you boys always keep the sticker on it?’
Paul leaned up against the counter. He was so thin, like he should still be in Year Ten. He smiled at her, his bottom teeth were all crooked.
‘Because it’s cool.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is.’ He smiled at her the way you smile at adults when you’re a teenager and you’re convinced they don’t know anything.
Clare put the hat back on the counter.
‘You don’t need an explanation for everything.’
She breathed in slowly. Things were quiet today, slow. Paul went back to unpacking books. She watched the two customers in the shop wander the aisles, picking up the books and reading passages from them like it was a library or something.
She wondered if Paul knew the story. Probably he did. That boy, she thinks, had been in his year. For a while she felt like everyone she looked at in Parramatta knew the story and so she avoided going home. The wearer of The Hat That Was Her Undoing was a twelve-year-old named Ahmed with so many fat freckles that they had begun to merge across his face so that he looked like he was sporting a patchy tan. He was in her maths class. The one the school made her teach even though she could barely add up. She was trying to show them how long division worked on the blackboard but she wasn’t doing it right, there were too many rows of numbers and she’d forgotten to carry one forward and skip a row or a space or something, it made no sense to her. She kept coming up with fifty-four divides into three hundred twelve times but even she knew that wasn’t right. She’d turned her back on the class too often and they were throwing bits of paper at each other. Someone’s hair got pulled, someone screamed and then when she turned around again Ahmed was still wearing the hat, the one she’d told him to take off about four times already.
‘Take…off…the…hat…Ahmed,’ she’d said slowly and loudly as the whole classroom began to disintegrate. ‘Take it off.’ It was the only thing she could see herself getting right at that moment. Everything else had gone to shit.
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