Trifecta

by Ian Wedde

  ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus.’

  ‘Bugger it, pour me another, Sandy.’ She wipes her eyes on the napkin and takes a decent swallow. ‘Just keep an eye on me, will you, brother? I need to get home in one piece. Things are a bit ropey back at the ranch.’

  Mick was always aggressive and usually derisive on the battered subject of culture versus biology—for him the human world was basically no different from the world of bacteria, except that we’d deluded ourselves into believing that consciousness trumped neurotransmitters and biochemistry. But the appetite with which I now begin to enjoy the monkfish on my plate, even though it’s getting cold, is certainly because of the surge of affection I feel for my sister when she begins to tell me her story about the German man who’d smoked a cigar in bed after making love to her—or rather, the way she tells it, with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn’t had the chance to talk about this before, or hasn’t wanted to—who’d smoked a cigar in bed after they’d fucked each other to a standstill. Quite possibly, after she’d fucked him to a standstill. It’s the pleasure of our intimacy and the joy of a good story that makes me hungry again, as well as the prurient interest being taken in my sister’s unabashed account by some of the neighbouring diners. She does a good impersonation of a large German male blowing smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’ I ask.

  ‘Only in my dreams,’ she says, sitting back with a self-satisfied smirk. ‘Because then you phoned, remember?’ Her eyes have the slightly awash look of someone whose tolerance for drink is out of proportion to their desire to talk and therefore to their need to keep their hand on the tiller of narrative. ‘Otherwise, who knows?’

  ‘I can tell you one thing for free,’ I say, seeing a need to slow her down.

  ‘What’s that?’ She pours herself the last glass in the bottle and looks at me. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Shall we get another?’

  ‘You were a mess when you got back.’

  ‘Nothing to do with Uli,’ she says. ‘Ul-richhh. Christ, was your German wench that much fun?’

  ‘What about a sticky with dessert,’ I say as Vero begins to look for the waiter.

  She heaves a sigh. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘but answer the question.’

  ‘Was my German wench that much fun?’

  ‘Sorry, Sandy,’ she says. ‘Insensitive of me.’

  ‘She was a lovely girl,’ I say. ‘But overall it was mostly just sad.’

  The roar of the lunching crowd has begun to get bolder, as if to compete with the unnecessary piped music, which is a jazz trio, Bill Evans by the sound of it, and I’m beginning to have trouble hearing what Vero’s saying. She’s going on about our mother, Agnes, how she always seemed to live between the words that describe where and how we are: now and then, here and there, angry and amused, sad and happy. But then I hear her repeat something, a bit loudly.

  ‘But you were always sad, Sandy. You were the sad one, I was the bad one and Micky was the mad one. Remember?’

  Vero’s having a late-harvest Riesling with her crème brûlée and I’ve got a grappa with my coffee. I down both quickly and head for the toilet. Sad, bad and mad. Or rather, when I shuffle them into the right order, sad, mad and bad.

  I pay the bill on the way back to our table.

  It’s a short walk down to the lawyer’s on Blair Street off Courtenay Place. We’re halfway along Cuba Street before Vero comes out with it.

  ‘Do you think he fucked us all up?’

  I know she means our father, not poor old Mick, whose harm was mostly confined to what he did to himself.

  The usual ‘grungy’ types are hanging about along the mall; there’s a fairly lagered-up crowd outside the Irish pub, they’re eating steaks with chips and punching at each other; there’s a lone busker playing wheedly Paul Simon songs behind an empty hat on the footpath, and a few deadshits inhaling from plastic bags under their coats. A little kid has just fallen into the bucket fountain and is yelling blue murder. A bit further back the way we’ve come some people with plenty of money have been eating expensive lunches. What’s liberating is not feeling the need to make sense of any of it.

  It’s been a while.

  ‘Of course he did. The bastard totally fucked us.’

  She takes my arm again. ‘Luck-y,’ she says. ‘Luck-y for us. All the better for it.’

  I don’t know what she means by that. ‘And Mick?’ I say. ‘What about Mick? I mean, really?’ I make her stop and look at me. Sad and bad, the survivors.

  Her eyes are slightly glassy with wine and optimism. ‘Mick was Mick,’ she says. ‘He could be a nasty bugger. He thought you were an idiot. He thought I was boring. But he was fucked. He was the most fucked. And now he’s dead.’ Despite the winey swagger in her expression, her gaze doesn’t waver, and she grips my arms tightly and makes me look at her. ‘So it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s nothing you can do about it.’ She gives me a little shake. ‘He’s not going to be ringing you up again, Sandy, and having a go.’

  The law firm’s offices are up one flight of stairs in a refurbished warehouse where the old fruit and vegetable markets used to be. I had a school-holiday job there once, pushing barrows for the energetic, bullying Chinese buyers. They used to overload me and then yell if stuff fell off. Our father made us get holiday jobs, but when Mick refused he let him work in the furniture studio off Adelaide Road. When Sad and Bad complained that this was unfair, the old bastard just said that life wasn’t fair either. He wasn’t wrong about that.

  Some of the original market brickwork has been left exposed in the law offices; there are skylights in the roof, and the floor is broad, sanded-back rimu planks. There was a craze for this kind of nonsense a few years ago, but short-lived, so that now the place looks like a carefully preserved specimen, a museum of itself and at the same time a palimpsest with its plain mercantile past showing through a veneer of quickly dated taste. It’s the kind of thing that used to make my father laugh—the provincial colonialist obsession with heritage, a kind of historical bad faith. I don’t remind Vero of this, though I want to, just to wind her up.

  The young woman who comes into the meeting room with our Trust folder and holds out her hand for us to shake looks like an intruder in this space of nostalgia—Thai-boxing fit, short-cropped hair, an earlobe full of rings, black cotton sweatshirt and pants.

  ‘Sorry about your brother Michael,’ she says, pouring us all glasses of water. She’s not, of course, but she’s got what Jilly calls good lawyer’s manners. Jilly’s got them too, among the best, QC sharp; they work by uttering emotion at the same time as sealing it off from engagement, so that sincerity is mostly a form of rebuff.

  ‘I’m sorry for the short notice,’ I can’t resist saying, not liking her much, but then a little smile breaks through her sophomore cool. Of course I could hardly have contacted her any sooner, is what it says.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I’ve had time to look at the documents and get the investment statements.’

  We go through the familiar Trust paperwork. We’ve all had yearly drawing rights—up to ninety per cent of our shares of the invested capital. Jilly and I spent mine years ago, building the house she still lives in, when we were a professor–lawyer combination and often ate at good restaurants. Half my percentage of the house settlement will be hers under the terms of our separation, and she’ll take it too. What’s left plus a smidgen of capital might buy me some time at the gym. Mick’s draw-down share has also ‘maxed-out’, says the lawyer, but his residual capital share and its income will now become part of the consolidated investment fund, of which the majority belongs to Vero, who’s never touched a cent since Agnes died twenty-six years ago. The lawyer, whose name is Sue, is wearing thin black-rimmed glasses to read, and she looks at Vero over the top of them in a rehearsed kind of way.

  ‘It’s an unusual arrangement,’ she says, meaning, I suppose, likely to generate conflict.

  Vero doesn’t respond to this—perhaps Sue exp
ects her to be surprised and thrilled by her situation, in which case she doesn’t know my shrewd sister, who takes a good long drink of water and then says, in as many words, thanks for wasting my time, now can we get to the sealed codicil that Agnes left, please?

  Neither of us has mentioned this to each other—me because I’d forgotten about it, or if not exactly forgotten, stopped thinking about it after Jilly and I had finished filling our lawyer-professor house with Provençal terrines and a bespoke rolling-ladder library bookshelf wall in recycled kauri.

  The way Vero’s looking not at me but at the lawyer, her eyes fully alert despite their winey shine, suggests she’s been avoiding the subject of the codicil.

  Sue has a nice thin designer paper knife, and she slits the sealed envelope that Agnes had instructed be opened by the trustees when the house that Martin Klepka built in 1947 is finally vacated by all of them. She takes out a single folded sheet of paper and pushes it across the table towards us.

  ‘This is to be read by you, the surviving trustees, in the presence of a lawyer, which I guess is me,’ she says, with another carefully rueful smile.

  It’s now that Vero looks at me. She rests her hand on the folded sheet.

  ‘Sampan,’ she says.

  Then she unfolds the sheet of paper.

  It’s Vero’s precise enunciation of the word ‘Sampan’ that seems to have stopped my heart, so that I read the first paragraph on the page without breathing, with a ringing in my ears. Then I notice Vero’s finger creeping carefully down the lines of type, and pausing from time to time, so I follow the finger, which has a nicely trimmed nail with magenta nail varnish on it, a colour said to denote common sense and a balanced outlook on life.

  When I glance up over the tops of my glasses, the lawyer Sue’s head is an elegant blur.

  Unlike my sister’s methodical finger, my thoughts have stalled at the codicil’s key item. I can’t make them move.

  At the same time, I’m not surprised by what I read, because the information fits into a pattern whose whole effect, like so much of Martin Klepka’s effort, seemed intended to sabotage the rigorous order and symmetry of the things he made, including the austerely proportioned house we all lived in, which, however, could never discipline the limits of his world or the unruly shapes he twisted it into.

  I’m also not surprised because ever since I was a kid, my father’s least favoured, the one he cajoled into jumping from the piano, the one whose graduation he refused to attend, I’ve always gone on expecting something like this, the predictable and even banal warping factors in the narrative of my father’s performances, like the ones he made a show of enjoying while mowing memories of the ghosts he’d brought with him from the Berlin Bauhaus after 1933 on to the impeccable nap of the lawn at the back of the house which will now move away from his history—from both that history’s implacable order and from his attempts to escape from it.

  Vero and I read the document shoulder to shoulder, having both had to hunt for our glasses, while the young lawyer Sue looks away from us across the room.

  How did Vero guess?

  The other child that our father had, our half-brother, whom we were never told about, has always been taken care of through a provision Agnes made after her husband died, when the Trust was set up. The child is intellectually disabled and needs care, and funds were set aside for that purpose by Agnes, separate from the Trust investment and undisclosed within it. When the house is sold, a proportional amount of the proceeds will go to support this child, if he is still alive. If he’s died, the remaining funds allocated to his care will have been kept in escrow. The contact details of those charged with his care are appended.

  The mother isn’t identified in the document.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘The cleaner’s kid.’

  Vero takes her glasses off and closes her eyes.

  ‘It’s got to be.’ Though I’m not surprised, you could say because this revelation fits the narrative probability of my father’s life, which of course didn’t end when he died, still my face has gone cold and I want to pant as if I’ve just finished my twenty lengths. The name Vero’s already reminded me of is Sampan. ‘Sampan,’ I say. ‘Sam-bloody-pan.’

  ‘Good on her,’ says Vero, opening her eyes. ‘Agnes, I mean. Good on her. All those years. Dear wee thing.’

  The ‘dear wee thing’ is Agnes, again, our mother, not the cleaner, or the child, but the calculation that spools haltingly through my brain puts the current age of my father’s other child at about fifty-something, if indeed he’s the Sam part of Sampan.

  Out in the street, in the tumult of cars competing for innercity parking spaces, and the bustle of the back-to-work after lunch rush, with many different kinds of music coming in gusts of sound from the opening and closing doors of bars and restaurants, and with buses arriving and leaving in quick succession with hissing air-brakes, it’s as though time has suddenly begun to speed up and disintegrate, and the narratives and meanings that depend on time passing smoothly have also begun to fall apart into randomness and incoherence. The city that had earlier in the day seemed so banal and grungy and dourly purposeful all at once seems full of untidy life, restless and impatient, breaking step, talking languages whose tones seem constantly to be inflected towards doubt and laughter.

  We turn without consulting each other into a bar underneath Downstage Theatre, and order a glass of wine each.

  ‘Well,’ says Vero.

  She doesn’t at once pick up her glass. Where earlier in the lawyer’s offices a familiar pugnacity had begun to harden her expression, now Vero looks calm.

  ‘Well, well,’ I say, as if to get our old game going again. ‘Gosh.’

  But Vero doesn’t want to play. ‘We all knew, really, didn’t we,’ she says. ‘Except Mick. I mean, he knew, I reckon, but he didn’t know he knew. Or he repressed the knowledge.’ Her calm expression has been replaced by something like my father’s stare. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Mr Smartypants.’

  ‘Like what?’ I say. ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Of course the alternative,’ says Vero, still not touching her wine, ‘is that he stayed there in the house to keep an eye on the kid.’

  ‘How likely is that? Even if we knew he lives round here. Or lives at all.’ Unnecessarily, I add, ‘I mean the kid.’ Then I add, ‘The middle-aged disabled man.’ I’m getting drunk.

  ‘Or to keep him out of the house,’ Vero says, as if she’s not talking to me but to some kind of Mick-intermediary.

  ‘The middle-aged disabled man called Something Klepka,’ I say, trying to get her off the subject of Mick. ‘Our brother.’

  ‘Or both,’ says Vero. Now her eyes are focused on a plane somewhere between us.

  ‘Come off it,’ I say. ‘You’re starting to make stuff up in your head.’ I give the table a professorial tap to regain her attention. ‘And no, I didn’t guess.’

  Her eyes get my focal length and she does, finally, take a sip of the wine in front of her. ‘Bull-shit,’ she says, with that small-town emphasis on the ‘shit’. ‘Of course you bloody knew.’ But then she pushes the glass away. ‘Why didn’t you stop me?’

  ‘Stop you what?’

  ‘Having another drink.’

  ‘I didn’t have to, did I.’

  My sister heaves a big sigh. ‘There’s a time and place for everything,’ she says, and isn’t being ironic. And then she says, after reaching across the table for my hand, ‘More to the point, are we going to meet this kid? And why don’t you drink that for me? Pity to waste good wine.’

  ‘Pretty much what Martin thought, obviously,’ I say.

  It’s there between us, the shadow question that’s cast by my bad-taste joke: And what did Agnes think? The answer should perhaps be in the minimal, unambiguous language of her codicil, whose words are not hers really, only their effect is. It would seem she didn’t want us to know about the child or about how she felt. Though telling us she didn’t want us to know about either of the
se things doesn’t really tell us how she felt. And even then, she didn’t really tell us ‘in as many words’ that she didn’t want us to know, she just implied it. Or got her lawyers to imply it by sealing the implication in an envelope. Or the answer could be in the way she lived on in the house after her husband died and she’d carefully wound the business up, and sold the redundant real-estate including the warehouse and the workshops, and the back catalogue, and the current stock, and the design templates, and the marketing archive—all of which had been her domain—and even the good will, which was Martin Klepka’s, and which she put a high price on, because the genius’s clients were good, sustainable trade business.

  ‘Where did you go?’ asks Vero, giving me a poke.

  ‘Agnes really sorted it all out, didn’t she,’ I say, beginning to answer the question I know we’ll have to ask before long. I shouldn’t be drinking Vero’s glass of wine, but I already have. When I go to stand up, she gets one hand under my arm to steady me.

  ‘One of us has to do it,’ she says, and I think she means get pissed, not meet the love-child, if that’s what he was. Is.

  ‘Taxi?’ she says.

  There are some parked at the curb. But I march her with her hand still under my arm towards the pedestrian crossing that will turn us to face back the way we’ve come.

  This already feels like an ending of some kind, but of course it’s not. Professor Klepka, who isn’t sad at the moment, and his sister who isn’t bad, walk with studied sobriety back towards the house where all this began, and where it will probably end, whatever that means. I’m surprised by the steadiness not to say resoluteness of my sister’s tread, one foot in front of the other, her hand under my arm occasionally giving a small directional hint.

  We pass the bar where I know Micky used to spend time and where we sometimes met. A pleasant babble of conversation comes out into the street along with a woman taking a cigarette from her pack. It’s mid-afternoon, but the bar on the corner with the betting monitors on the wall is about two-thirds full. I’ll bet he kept going there, not as an extravagance of any kind, and not even as a regular relaxation, but because the place was one of his minimal necessities, part of the minimal, obsessive structure of his life, which wasn’t any more ‘empty’ than the house he’d emptied of everything except what he needed.