Marie was still adjusting to his Pacific accent. ‘The who?’
‘The Wreckers?’
‘Aren’t they bikies?’
Brian smiled at her pityingly. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He fiddled a cigarette out of his pack of Longbeach, then put it back in. ‘Fucken racist cunts they are too. Scuse my French. Glad she’s not working there anymore.’
‘She’s done almost everything I have,’ Marie said proudly.
‘I could never afford someone like Rhys,’ said Brian, not without self-pity.
He chose the chair next to her that night in the television room. Everybody else had gone to bed. He sat down carefully, as though his body were precious cargo. Previously avoiding his gaze, Marie now watched his face constantly, for the battle of disparate elements that took place there — timidity, joy, confusion, anger, and the dazed non-expression of the sick and medicated.
‘I got three others in my room, right? One of ’em coughs all night. Another fights with his missus till visiting hours are over. And the third one looks like he’s gonna cark it any minute.’
‘How depressing.’
‘Yep. Can’t wait to get out of this joint.’
Marie had been moved to a double room, the patient opposite recovering from surgery. She had come into the television room for solitude and a larger screen that she didn’t have to crane her neck to see, but she welcomed Brian’s presence. Each time he appeared she was struck by how frail he was, as though in his absence he inflated to an archetype that was increasingly irrelevant. Marie consulted the program. ‘There’s a James Bond movie on in half an hour. Do you like James Bond?’
‘Yeah. I’ll make a cuppa.’
Marie went to her room for the fruit her children had brought her, and cut up a mango. She could see now how much of Brian’s irritation was with his ailing body. The demeanour he bore to the outside world seemed neutral. He wore a dressing-gown with a design of dull green checks. Part of an exposed thigh bore what looked like a Samoan tattoo that moved in semi-circles all the way down to his calf. She passed him a piece of fruit. ‘If you eat some of this, it will help me eat too. I’ve lost too much weight.’
‘What can you do?’ Brian patted his thighs sadly. ‘I used to be two hundred and ten.’
‘I loved it at first, all the weight loss.’
‘Don’t like skinny women. All those diets and shit.’
‘I’ve got an appetite tonight.’
The movie began with James Bond drinking a cocktail on a boat in the Caribbean. For the next fifteen minutes, he moved through an impossible world of colours, gadgets and superhuman strength. It was exactly the sort of thing Marie was in the mood to watch. When the ad break came on, she asked Brian, ‘Why do you think you got it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I was just unlucky.’
‘Do you believe in all those theories about stress and anger?’
‘All I know is that I’ve got it and I’m gonna beat it.’
Marie said something she hadn’t wanted to say to anyone else: ‘I think I might have got mine from drinking.’
Brian raised his eyebrows in polite enquiry. ‘Oh yeah?’
James Bond got on a plane, looked at his watch and frowned.
Brian said, ‘I’m hep C, eh. Got it in gaol.’
‘Oh,’ said Marie, more concerned by the gaol than the virus. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Ah, you couldn’t avoid it. At least I’m out now.’
The plane began to plummet. They watched the film in silence. Marie thought about Brian in gaol. She pictured a long room of stone floors, cells lining the walls, sartorial guards strolling up and down, truncheons swinging from their belts. An ordered, ascetic, masculine environment.
‘I ran the heroin in Long Bay for a while. Too much of the good life,’ Brian said airily. ‘That’s why I got it.’
‘You took drugs in gaol?’ Marie was suitably shocked.
‘Anything you want, sister. The best smack in Darwin for years was sold out of the gaol.’ This said to up the ante. ‘I’m just waitin’ for crystal meth to get a hold in the penitentiary system. Imagine the fucken riots then, eh? Ha. They’ll be talking about the good old days of heroin. Don’t worry, I’m more of a Jim Beam man these days.’
‘Oh, really? I was a Chivas girl for a while there.’
They snickered as footsteps stopped in the corridor. The door opened, revealing the night supervisor. Brian turned down the TV. ‘We’re just hevving a cup of tea,’ he said politely.
‘We’re watching James Bond,’ said Marie with a touch of insolence.
The nurse regarded them suspiciously. ‘Lights out in half an hour.’
When he was gone, Brian pulled out a joint, announcing, ‘Best medication for cancer.’ From the other pocket he pulled a hipflask.
‘You’re organised.’
‘You on the wagon?’
‘I have the occasional tipple.’
Brian sloshed some bourbon into their tea. ‘Your health, madame,’ he said in a posh voice.
The bourbon went down like fire, lighting up her whole body, as car after car exploded on television, and James Bond ran for his life.
Leon drove into the city along the winding back roads. The newsreader was saying an arsonist had been charged with lighting a bushfire in Ku-ring-gai Chase. Leon was dismayed by the obliteration of the land’s natural contours by the new houses: Mosman was no longer a semi-feral foreshore, it was a luxury getaway, landscaped to within an inch of its life. God, he loathed this city, the pretension, the disregard, the wealth — the selfishness of the wealth. As he took the hill onto the bridge, he went into his mother’s fantasy of a bushfire on the foreshore, consuming vegetation and houses alike. Then he was over the harbour, driving towards buildings sequinned with setting sun, and the beauty of it took his breath away. How he had missed it.
He was nervous about seeing George. He had avoided looking him up on previous visits and George eschewed online profiles so Leon couldn’t check up on him. He had worn his memories like old polaroids into near blankness. George’s misted form in the shower cubicle; his neck, his smell, as they kissed in the palm grove of the Botanical Gardens. The thick line of hair from navel to groin, George rolling onto his back and lifting his legs for him. Leon had moved up to Brisbane mainly because it seemed like a place that George would never visit, but he still found himself scouring the papers for an event that would entice him. Some days, walking down the street, every dark-haired man looked like George. Leon had rung him for his birthday in January and surmised from the screeching parrot in the background that George had moved in with Linus, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.
Leon admired himself in the shop windows, a naturally bulked six-foot silhouette with tawny bushy hair, in a faded wife-beater, low-slung Diesels and Cons. He arrived at the restaurant first and was sitting facing the window, chest puffed out, arms crossed in front, when George arrived. George greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and sat down opposite. He appraised Leon’s body calmly then looked into his eyes. ‘Long time no see. You look really well.’
‘You too.’ Leon felt nervous.
George ordered almost straightaway.
‘So,’ he cut to the chase, ‘your mum. Which oncologist is she seeing?’
‘This guy at the hospital.’ Leon tried to pronounce his name. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Wroblewski? I know of him.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s alright. Their new oncology floor’s pretty good. Well equipped, well set out.’ George made it sound like a theme park: Scare yourselves silly on the new Oncology Ghost Train! ‘That hospital’s also rife with staph.’
‘Great.’
‘Sign of the times, mate. We’re sterilising ourselves to death. So what’s her prognosis?’
‘Stage four.’ Leon handled the jargon like a new weapon, aware he still neede
d lessons, hoping nonetheless it looked powerful in his hands. ‘Roe whatshisname’s given her six months.’
‘No surgery then?’
‘Nope.’
Their food arrived and George paused while the waitress arranged it. It was a noisy restaurant, full of the hard shiny surfaces so prolific in Sydney now, and they had to raise their voices to be heard. The sides of Leon’s face ached with the strain. They helped themselves to food.
George said, ‘Listen, you don’t need to worry about the staph. The main thing will be palliative care. If she has good palliative care, that’s the best you can do.’
Leon kept his eyes on his Mussaman lamb curry. ‘She reckons she can beat it.’
George said nothing.
‘This food’s amazing,’ said Leon.
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
George looked thinner, fitter and more serious. He had grown sideburns, the lines around his eyes were more pronounced, and his hair was quite grey, all of which Leon found painfully sexy. He feared and trusted George’s professionalism. George had cut his teeth in Ward 17 at the height of the AIDS epidemic; now he was managing Triage. In Leon’s eyes he had always carried the wounded glamour of the returned soldier. Leon had never known anyone with AIDS let alone anyone who had died, a fact that used to make him feel inadequate in the company of George’s friends. All the older gay men’s stories of the halcyon days of wild dance parties were laced with death, like Mexican festivals. To Leon, death seemed a higher truth, the only place where he would finally understand. But now that the possibility of it loomed, the questions only increased.
He felt himself yielding again, not to George who evidently didn’t want him, but to an old desire that now floated beyond both of them. He wished George could have been seduced by him. He was like a hitch-hiker tired of waiting, hefting his bags onto the same old truck.
‘Mum was looking quite well,’ he said. ‘Then she had a bad reaction to the chemo so they kept her in for a few days.’
‘That’s a bummer. Hopefully they’ll get the mixture right next time.’
‘So you don’t reckon she can beat it?’
‘I really can’t say.’
‘But generally what is it with stage-four stomach cancer?’ Leon insisted.
George inclined his head sympathetically. ‘Generally it’s end game.’
Leon spooned more rice onto his plate. He wanted to swear or throw something. He could feel George watching him.
George said quietly, ‘Are you moving back to Sydney?’
‘Why’s everybody think I’m moving back to Sydney?’ Leon said with a bitchy lisp. ‘This town’s a dump.’
‘Feel loved, matey.’
‘I left too quickly to pack my stuff up.’ Leon watched four guys at the next table pay their bill and leave. White, Arabic, Asian, all muscle-bound, short-haired, in designer t-shirts. George forked food into his mouth and looked up through his brows, nodding.
‘What’d you do for Christmas?’ Leon asked him.
‘You won’t believe it.’ George grinned. ‘I spent it in Villawood.’
‘What?’
‘My uncle’s been chucked into Villawood. They want to deport him. He’s been here since ’69, married with three kids, but he never got it together to get proper papers.’
‘Fuck that,’ Leon fumed. ‘This whole fucking country’s a dump. Poor bastard.’
‘He’s a bit of a fuckwit, actually. Homophobic Leb, you know. Which doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry for him. We took loads of food in and had a pig-out Leb-style. We’re getting a barrister for him, but apparently his chances aren’t good. Most of the people in there are Chinese.’
‘Oh yeah?’
George laughed again, partly to himself. ‘Y’know, Leon, I hate to sound cheesy, but it’s not such a dump as all that here. I mean, where else would you be? Jordan? Where they torture us?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m gonna figure out over the next while.’ Leon reached for the water. George wasn’t drinking: part of the fitness regime maybe. Leon was dying for a beer but didn’t want to drink alone. ‘Been going out much?’
‘No.’
‘Gettin’ old, are ya?’ Leon said in Strine.
‘Ancient.’ George smiled. He was forty-five, twelve years older than Leon for this half of the year, eleven years older when Leon turned thirty-four in August. ‘It’s pretty dead anyway. The sniffer dogs are everywhere and if I get caught with so much as one joint I can get struck off. You haven’t missed anything being away, y’know.’
Leon wondered if George wasn’t being a bit melodramatic. Those medicos were the biggest party animals he’d ever come across. Drug pigs, the lot of them. Hard to imagine them stopping just like that. ‘I was thinking of going for a quick beer. You want to?’
‘You go ahead. I have to turn in.’
They said goodbye out on the street. ‘It’s gonna be a long haul, mate.’ George rubbed his back. ‘If you need anything, just give me a ring. Okay?’
Leon walked down to Oxford Street alone. He felt like a tourist: disoriented, out of place, faintly excited. He went into a bar and ordered a beer, for which he was charged seven dollars. He stood against a wall watching the crowd. It seemed to be all clean-cut young men, fresh out of high school. He bitched to George in his head: I felt like I’d stumbled into a Young Liberals convention. The music was Cher on a video screen above the bar; there was no DJ booth. Leon wandered into the room adjacent and found two walls of poker machines attended by three people. He went back into the bar. A couple of preppy guys in the corner were eyeing him off, but Leon ignored them. It was cold beneath the air-conditioning so he moved along the wall and picked up a gay paper. There was a column about the scourge of gay bars titled Female Arse Crack, which made him laugh. He looked around the room and saw a couple of straight girls sipping cocktails, but they were standing, so he couldn’t see their arse cracks. He couldn’t see any safe-sex packs either. It all began to feel ominous: the shiny steel and pine finish, the expensive drinks, the loud hollow music. The young perfection. He probably just needed to have another beer and loosen up. He pulled all the coins out of his pocket and counted them. Not even enough for a middy. He left.
Up at Taylor Square he saw four cops on foot patrol. Their uniforms were baggy trousers, army boots and baseball caps. They looked like riot police or kids pretending to be. Moving away was supposed to cure the disappointment in what his home town had become. But sights like this still riled him.
Did his mother realise what lay ahead? he wondered as he walked the laneways to his ute. George had told him more tonight than he had learnt in weeks of conversation with his family. Had Dr Wroblewski been clear with Marie and told her everything she needed to know? If he had, why did she say she could beat the cancer? It seemed to Leon that all of them, let alone his mother, were sitting ducks, and he didn’t have the strength to move out of the way. Indeed it felt right to receive the impact straight on. His two and a half weeks home seemed longer and more eventful than the two and a half years he had spent in Brisbane. He searched for a memorable incident during his time away and nothing came to mind. He realised that everything he had tried to escape — his family, George, his vexed relationship with Sydney — had never been more than cursorily buried. And that he had rushed down here not just for his mother but for himself. Even while writhing with hatred for the place, he couldn’t keep away.
He was woken the next morning by a phone call from Clark.
‘Are you picking up Mum on Sunday?’
‘I thought you wanted to.’
‘Something’s come up. I can spend Monday with her instead. I’ll bring groceries over and cook some meals and freeze them,’ Clark said excitedly. ‘I’ll fix up the house.’
‘Okay then, but give her a ring so she hears it direct from you. Oh, and Blanche has been looking for places for Mum. And she’s emailed some link
s to us and we’re supposed to check them out and get back to her.’
‘Yep, will do.’
Clark put down the phone and punched the air. He danced into his bedroom to shadow-box the mirror. He let his heels fall to the floor and watched his flab wobble then pinched it. Not too bad. He kissed his mobile, containing Sylvia’s latest text: Sweetheart I’m free! All weekend! xo. On Tuesday night, in Clark’s car at Gordons Bay, they’d had two hours of amazing conversation followed by gut-wrenching laughter imitating the characters from Summer Heights High; then, completely unexpectedly for Clark, half an hour of loud, urgent sex squashed in the back seat. He went into his inbox again to look at Sylvia’s message. He caressed the bruises on his knees.
They were back on.
He went down to Hall Street for food, candles, wine and flowers. Took the narrow walkways that ran between the streets, exulting in the pink frangipani and weathered paling. On the steep path above Forest Knoll, he heard a rustling and watched a blue-tongue lizard slink through a crack beneath the wall of a house. He hadn’t seen one for about ten years. On his way back up the path forty minutes later, labouring beneath a backpack full of groceries, Clark opened his Opinel knife and cut two leaves from a copse of bananas then carried them carefully home.
He changed the sheets. He remembered Sylvia saying she hated cleaning so he left his flat dishevelled and went to the beach for a swim. He began to cook at four o’clock, listening to Nina Simone’s Baltimore. He made cucumber raita with mint, and spinach raita with fenugreek, cumin and black mustard seeds. He made pappadams and a coconut, coriander and green chilli paste to dress the fish with. Sylvia arrived as he was wrapping the last piece in its banana-leaf packet. She had been at a conference at Macquarie Uni all day and her skin was hot and sticky from the drive. She gave him a bottle of wine and flopped into his arms.
‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Your neck’s salty.’
‘Can I have a shower?’
‘Down the end of the corridor. There are towels in the cupboard.’
‘Can I take my bag to your bedroom?’ She looked at him shyly.
‘Yeah. Second room, past the study.’
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