by Ian Wedde
Which raises another question. If he was using drugs again, where was he doing it? If they’d been in the house, the cops would have noticed and reported it. If an overdose killed Mick, they’d have seen signs of it. But he was just sitting in his La-Z-Boy, with the TV turned off, as if his quiet evening at home was over. The autopsy is sometime today and if there’s meth in his system it will still show up, but it wasn’t one of the bare essentials he kept in the house, any more than a hot-water jug was.
We’re crossing the road at the Pirie Street junction, and Vero is ever so subtly keeping the pace on, and a hand under my arm, as if she wants to hurry but is being solicitous of me. A young woman jogs past us on the pedestrian crossing; she’s got a toddler in a racy-looking pushchair.
‘We used to call them strollers,’ I say. ‘That seems to have gone out of fashion.’ The young woman’s wearing tights and has a truly gorgeous arse, so gorgeous I almost let out an inappropriate sound of some kind, and I start to say, ‘Jesus Christ, I loved being young,’ but instead I keep answering questions I haven’t asked yet. This time it’s, ‘What do you think Mick died of?’—only I say, ‘Watching a blank TV screen never killed anybody, that I know of, anyway.’
The beautiful jogger’s metronomic ponytail is conducting a little song of lust in my bloodstream as she goes swiftly up the hill and joins a small crowd of parents assembled outside the primary school, Ach, die erste Liebe/ macht das Herz mächtig schwach, but I don’t stop and sing it, or hum it while we’re walking, though I’d like to stop for a while.
‘You okay, Sandy?’ asks Vero.
I lean for a moment against the wall of Clyde Quay School. It is covered with a charming, colourful mural by the kids, in which people have smiles like curved orange segments, the sun as well, and there are profuse flowers all growing up straight out of bright green grass. We had a lot of fun when we were kids, we did different stuff from the others; sometimes it wasn’t so much fun, it’s true, but overall . . .
‘It’s okay, no rush,’ says my sister, who’s got what’s sometimes called a ‘thoughtful’ side to her nature, which doesn’t mean she thinks a lot, though perhaps she does, it means she cares about people, always did, even her dickhead husband. I’d quite like to sit down with my back to the mural, but instead I just close my eyes. A frantic jostle of pale and dark blotches is dancing beneath my eyelids. There’s a technical name for the condition, but as yet I’ve no desire to know what that is. There’s the racket of school breaking up for the day, kids yelling, the sounds of running feet. It’s nice to listen without looking, and to let the world sway a little.
‘What do you think Mick died of?’ I ask Vero, just to keep it simple. I think that if she has a good enough answer I’ll take it in, like a lungful of fresh air, and we’ll get moving again.
I don’t open my eyes when she puts her arms around me, and so for a moment it’s possible to imagine that her springy hair is my mother’s—they’re about the same height—though her big pillowy breasts pushed against me at the bottom of my ribcage aren’t my mother’s. Agnes used to come and meet us from school. We boys wore sandals and shorts, and the girls wore cotton dresses and mostly had white ankle socks. There used to be a class picture in the house of Mick in 1958, when he was eight years old. Because he was tall for his age he was in the back row, at the end on the left, the top button of his shirt done up the way he preferred it, the only one in the class who did, and he and the kid next to him are leaning away from each other as if there’s a wasp between them. Marty used to call it the fart photo.
‘I think his time was up,’ Vero says. ‘I think he just ran out of it.’
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘I don’t think it makes any difference,’ she says. ‘Come on, man, we can’t be seen doing brother–sister love outside a primary school, especially with you half-cut.’
I think Mick had been put on the end of a row in the class photo because that’s where he belonged, at the edge. He was leaning away from the other kid because that kid wasn’t part of his life, not because there was a wasp or a fart between them, and the other kid was leaning away from Michael Klepka because he was scared of him, most kids were. Mick wasn’t violent, he just had limits. There were always non-negotiable limits to him that he wasn’t going to go past—for example, taking swimming lessons, or later on turning the volume of his music down—and maybe his time was like that. There was an edge to it, pure and simple, and he got there and maybe even got his way.
We’re heading up the hill to the house. A few shafts of sunlight are shooting intermittently through the clouds that are heaving along from north to south, and a flickering afternoon lightshow plays on the faded red wall of Martin Klepka’s attempt to do what Farkas Molnár never could, actually build the fucking thing—ein Einfamilienhaus. Ein-familien-haus!
I drink a glass of water from the tap at the kitchen sink, and then go to the downstairs bathroom. It occurs to me as I cross the room from the sink to the bathroom that the glass I drank from is probably the one that last touched my brother’s lips, before someone washed it. The other thing that Molnár probably didn’t think of in 1922 was bathrooms, but my father put three of them into the house he built. So there! The one downstairs had a shower and a toilet, and a mirror wall above the washbasin, bog-standard now, so to speak, but verging on weird when we were kids. Upstairs there was an ensuite with the master bedroom, which had a large bath as well as a shower and a toilet, and the obligatory full-length mirror; and there was another with just a shower and a separate toilet, for the kids. Our friends from Clyde Quay were amazed. These provisions have also been described by architectural historians as ‘innovative’ for their time, but there had been a time in my father’s life when amenities like them were unavailable—for example, while he was classed as a ‘hostile alien’ when he got to New Zealand in 1939. He had limits, too, like his favourite, Mick, but he preferred to make something of them, a statement rather than a subtraction.
In what I take to be ‘Mick’s bathroom’ now that his entire inhabitation seems to have been limited to the downstairs floor of the house, there’s almost nothing that tells me where the limits of his time were. He had one toothbrush and one partly used tube of toothpaste. He had one cake of nondescript supermarket soap that I have to retrieve from the shower, where I see his plastic container of a budget-brand shampoo. There’s one damp towel folded neatly over the towel-rail, but it smells only of soap and dampness, not of my brother. There’s the famous mirror wall, which, according to my father, was there because you needed to think of your body as a whole thing, not cut off at the waist or neck. He wasn’t wrong about that.
‘Want to have a look upstairs?’ says Vero when I come back out. I sense that she’s ‘taking care’, but, really, it’s not called for. Mick’s downstairs bathroom, like my memory of him leaning away from everyone else’s time and place in his class photo of 1958, seems to have answered my question, the one I couldn’t work out how or why to ask. Mick died because, finally, he’d leaned out of the frame.
But I don’t try to find a way to say this to Vero, whose sturdy determination goes ahead of me up our father’s famous stairs which, if we’re to believe the architectural historians, were intended to, and did, or didn’t, depending on the position you took up, resolve a problem bequeathed him by Molnár, namely, how to reconcile the geometrical section of a comfortable foot-lift at weary end of day with the demand of a rigorously stacked double cube whose uncomfortable proportions were glaringly revealed in the sketch that is now on display in the Bauhaus Archiv I visited in the company of Gertrud Schoening about seven years ago, when the conception of my or anyone’s time running out didn’t get any further than my maudlin, self-pitying statement ‘I’m getting old’, and her reasonable derision.
Martin Klepka’s solution to the staircase involved leaning away from the problem. The stair-lifts got progressively lower as you approached the top. It got easier the higher you went. But, perv
ersely, the time it took to get there increased as you got closer. ‘Perverse’ was one of the architectural critic’s words he was proudest of, but for me it used to be maddening to feel my knees lifting a tiny bit less the closer I got to the top of the stairs. It seemed to be a vindictive thing to have thought of building into the Einfamilienhaus, the Ein-familien-haus, though perhaps, it now occurs to me, as Vero and I find it easier and easier but also slower and slower to get to the top floor, it also made tantalising our father’s ascent to the room where he took his nap, sometimes, it would seem, with the mother of our half-brother, the dark-haired girl who used to clean the house on Fridays, when Agnes was at the textile studio, and we were all still at school, or so Martin Klepka thought.
Except that once his favourite was wagging school, and Mick later told us how he’d listened to the man he called Marty and the girl ‘jumping on the bed’ in the big room. But that didn’t surprise us. He did that kind of thing all the time.
‘Micky knew,’ I say as we take the final, infuriating, shallow steps up to the top floor of the house. ‘He knew more about it than any of us.’
Vero doesn’t turn around, and nothing in her deportment tells me she’s taking any notice of what I’m saying, but when we get into what used to be her room, she does turn, and I see before me the sister who’s had the nous to get a life, keep fit, hang on to her capital, and along the way exert some willpower over her drinking problem. If there’s emotional business to transact at this point she’s not interested—as she’d said not long ago, ‘There’s a time and place for everything.’
‘Gutted,’ she says, meaning the house, not herself, though she may be for all I can see.
Then my phone buzzes, and she gives a jump, as if her nerves are after all barely under control. It’s a rote text from the hospital: please make an urgent appointment re autopsy and remember to nominate a funeral director. There’s a number to call back.
I give the phone to Vero because I can see that she’s in control mode, and I go along the corridor to the room that used to be mine, then to Mick’s, which was next to mine, which meant that mine was therefore closest to his music, and then down the passage to Martin and Agnes’s room, the largest, three-quarters of the house’s top cube, with windows on three sides. All the rooms are empty, of furniture but also of any other kind of presence, which is to say of time, as if Mick had performed some kind of historical purge as he emptied the house. Agnes got rid of the original drapes years ago, not long after her husband’s heart attack, but the furnishings that were left were all top-of-the-line showpieces of the Klepka enterprise, and they were all still intact when she died. Back then, twenty-six years ago, I stayed for the last time in my old room whose Klepka textile curtains had been replaced by Klepka wooden blinds. The rooms were musty as if they hadn’t been aired or cleaned for a long time, which they probably hadn’t, apart from the one Agnes had continued to sleep in, the big one, which got the northern sun from the east when it rose above Mount Victoria, all the way around to the west when it went down behind Brooklyn.
The sun is heading towards that western ridge now, and the empty room feels naked as the bright, late sun shooting out of clouds comes in through the three big square windows facing that way, their joined-together lateral proportions of course exactly Fibonacci-commensurate with the dimension of their wall. But this familiar order, the nearest thing to a haunting in the house, or the nearest thing to a history, is no defence against the room’s utter emptiness, its nakedness.
A woman’s voice calls from downstairs—‘Hello? Anybody home?’
I step into the passage at the same time as Vero. She still has my cellphone to her ear, so I call out that yes, there’s somebody home, and we hurry down the famous Klepka stairs, which get thicker and faster as we approach the bottom, with the word ‘home’ suspended somewhere behind us in the big empty room.
It’s a young Asian woman—she’s standing just inside the door to the room Mick had subtracted his home into. She’s dressed somewhat formally, in a neat skirt and jacket suit, with a pair of nice black pumps on, and her hair in a bun. My first thought is that she’s a real-estate agent, and much too quick off the mark, but as soon as she speaks I know she’s the woman who found Mick dead in front of his TV yesterday.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘the door was open?’ Her questioning inflection implies a kind of permission-granted, as if she might have come through the open door at other times.
‘Okay,’ says Vero into my phone, while looking at the young woman, ‘the Wilson Funeral Home, Adelaide Road. And we’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ Still looking at the woman, she says to me, ‘That was the funeral home. And the autopsy stuff tomorrow morning, at the hospital again. How do you turn this off?’ She gives me the phone without taking her eyes off the woman, who has one hand against the door frame, as if her entry is only provisional after all. Then Vero takes a step towards her, and begins to hold out her hand, but then holds out both arms.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘You must be Mick’s friend. I’m his sister, Veronica.’
I’ve got the phone to my ear and am listening to its disconnected hum, then realise what I’m doing and turn it off. The two women are embracing awkwardly, as if neither of them has expected to, and I feel I should do the same, but the young woman steps aside into the room and takes up a position next to Mick’s bed, where his coat is folded neatly on top of the faded Klepka bedspread.
‘I brought his coat back,’ she says, gesturing at it with an open palm, as if she’s rehearsed this moment. ‘I didn’t touch anything.’
‘What’s your name, dear?’ says Vero.
‘May,’ says the young woman, and stops there. She’s in her twenties, I’d guess.
‘Well, May,’ says Vero, ‘thank you for taking care of Mick. I mean, tidying up and everything.’
‘I just called the police,’ says May. ‘I didn’t touch anything.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t, dear,’ says Vero, giving me a look. ‘This is Mick’s older brother, Alastair.’
The young woman’s hand when I shake it is expressionless—it doesn’t grip mine, but just rests there until I let it go. Obviously, the passivity of her hand is how this transaction is going to be conducted from her side. What am I supposed to do: ask her what kind of friend she was? Did she have an understanding with Mick that she could come into the house any time she wanted?
But then she seems to answer my questions, as if she’s anticipated them and rehearsed what to say. ‘I’ve never been in Mick’s house before,’ she says. ‘I mean, before yesterday. The door wasn’t locked.’ Then she adds, in a phrase that seems borrowed or learned from American television dialogue, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’
‘But he left his coat at your place?’ I’ve heard what the police had to say about this. ‘And his wallet?’
‘Yes,’ says May. She seems to be both asserting something and not giving anything away—standing firmly just behind her passivity.
‘I’m sorry, May,’ says Vero, as if to cut me off. ‘I’d offer you a cup of tea, but there’s really nothing in the house at all. Except beer,’ she adds.
‘No thank you,’ says May, still seeming to wait.
‘Why was that?’ I say.
The look she gives me is certainly direct enough, even if it’s opaque. ‘Why was what?’ she says.
‘Why did he leave his coat at your place?’ I was a little bit drunk before, but the irritation I’m feeling now isn’t because of that, it’s because the house seems to be vaporising all the information that comes into it, and I want something, anything really, that will fix what’s going on in a time and place where I can get my head around it, and make sense of it, and stop this meandering around after ghosts.
‘Does it really matter, Sandy?’ says Vero, trying to cut me off again.
‘Mick was in a hurry to get home,’ says May, and now there are two spots of colour in her carefully made-up cheeks.
‘Was he?�
� I say. ‘Why was that? Why was my brother in a hurry?’
Vero’s hand squeezes my arm at the same time as the young woman May makes a hissing sound and lifts Mick’s coat from the bed. She reaches inside it and takes out an old wallet, which she opens and throws on the bed.
‘See for yourself,’ she says. ‘I didn’t touch anything.’ Then she turns and walks out with loud clicks of her heels on the wooden floor.
Vero gives my arm a vicious pinch and calls out ‘May!’ but the front door slams. ‘You’re a miserable prick, you know that?’ says my suddenly furious sister. ‘A pompous, judgemental, overbearing arsehole. What did you have to do that for?’
I don’t want to sit in the La-Z-Boy and there’s nowhere else except Mick’s neatly made-up bed, so I sit on the edge of it and pick up his old leather wallet. It’s the nearest thing to a meaningful object so far in the whole fucking day, even allowing for the codicil with its not-quite-there trace of Agnes, and the wallet even has a history of sorts—the man he called Marty gave it to him when he left high school, along with a wristwatch and a packet of condoms.
‘What did Martin give you when you left school?’ I ask my sister. He gave me a course of driving lessons, which I completed, successfully. Mick refused to learn to drive unless ‘Marty’ taught him.
Inside his wallet, what might be thought of in Geertzian terms as the ‘thick description’ of the event we’re trying but failing to understand suddenly gets thin. There’s not a lot we can ‘include in the consultable record’. There’s no way to go from ‘inscription’ to ‘specification’. There isn’t any sense. There’s no conclusion to come to. There’s a public library card, two twenty-dollar notes, a little bit of change in a zip-up pocket, and a betting slip from the TAB. The utter poverty of meaning is unbearable.
