He sat back, finished at last.
‘I think you’re tough on human suffering,’ Nina said.
He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps I’ve faith in human resilience.’
‘But won’t the truth seep out at some later time?’ Zoe spoke quietly.
He didn’t look at her as he replied. ‘It might, and it might not. The fact is most people manage. Even with the catastrophic Japanese tsunami of a while ago, the experts estimated that post-traumatic stress might have occurred in twenty per cent of those affected. That means eighty per cent managed to move ahead using other resources. Resources like community, family, cultural traditions –’
‘And national pride and traditional notions of honour,’ Nina interjected.
‘Yes,’ he said turning to her, ‘those too. But I’d prefer to lay the emphasis on community and a determined looking-forward.’
Clearly Sean was not averse to a little cherry-picking of his own. Nina smiled at him. ‘You’re as selective in argument as others are selective in remembering and forgetting.’
‘Yes,’ and he was laughing. ‘But all in a good cause.’
The two of them had always enjoyed a good stoush. And they probably would have continued, but waiters were moving around them, setting up tables for the evening meal.
‘You’re welcome to stay on,’ one waiter said. ‘But Thursday’s a busy night so you’ll need to book.’
‘Occupation doesn’t grant any privileges then?’ Sean asked.
The waiter laughed. ‘I’m afraid not.’
Sean looked first at Nina and then let his gaze linger on Zoe. ‘I’ve learned that from direct experience.’
A few minutes later they settled the bill and left the café. Out in the street Zoe dashed off, muttering something about an appointment. It was the first Nina knew of it and decided her sister just wanted to get away.
Nina gave Sean a hug. ‘Even when you’re impossible I love you.’
He smiled and kissed her loudly on both cheeks.
As he turned to leave she tried one last time. ‘You won’t change your mind and come to Ramsay’s tea party?’
Sean twisted around, she saw his smile fade. ‘I once had a brother who was everything to me. I’ll not get him back over tea and scones.’
3.
Sean arrived home in time for the evening news. He switched on the TV, made coffee, changed into tracksuit pants, the only clothes that were comfortable these days, and was waylaid by a text from Tom: Don’t forget, not home for dinner. Viewing tie king’s collection! By the time he settled on the couch with his coffee the news bulletin had moved to sport. He lowered the sound and stared at the parade of footballers, rugby players, basketballers and swimmers as they moved over the screen. Several minutes passed before he realised he’d been watching these well-buffed, under-dressed men with what could only be described as habituated, mindless appreciation. He turned the TV off – he was becoming a pathetic old perv – selected the music cache in his phone, set it to shuffle and popped it on the dock. He lay on the couch and closed his eyes, although remained alert. It was a game he played, a musical Russian roulette: chance would select Ramsay from his music library, but he, Sean, would not.
He had not enjoyed the afternoon with Nina and Zoe; his body felt leaden and his mind was running on the spot. He had eaten and drunk far too much, as if food and drink could dispel the tensions between him and Zoe. Nina seemed unaware. She was always so keen for the three of them to get together – just like the old days, she said. And rather than a long and murky explanation of grievances he should have offloaded years ago, he had agreed to the lunch. The plan had been to float through the meal. The plan had failed.
It was not that he held a grudge against Zoe, although he did in fact hold a grudge, or that she and Ramsay were still close, which he resented as well; Zoe reminded him of the loss of Ramsay and all the other losses that flowed from it – music, family life, a sense of home. He didn’t want to remember, he never wanted to remember, but there were times when he simply could not help himself. He, who had kept strong amid violence and mayhem, remained thin-skinned when it concerned his brother.
It could have been worse, a lot worse if he had chosen a different life. Tom criticised him for being continually on the move, but it had worked for him; it had helped cloister his pains, and in the process he had made for himself a successful career – two careers: foreign correspondent and travel writer. Yet now he was beginning to doubt his choices, now he was wondering if he had failed.
Someone, it may have been Auden, coined the phrase ‘the well-stocked mind’. His was not. This was not a result of sudden looting; rather there’d been a gradual depletion over time so that now, beyond the unwanted thoughts and longings that sloshed about his head, there was little to feed the future.
He had planned to take a sabbatical until April. Tom had insisted they spend more time together – ‘If we don’t we might find we can’t abide each other when we move into the old queers’ home’ – and he had decided again to tackle his book. He had been unsure which would be more difficult: writing something longer than a couple of thousand words or staying home for longer than a month. But there was no doubt that at this moment, with disquiet and disgust churning through him, he wanted to toss in the book, risk Tom’s dire nursing-home scenario and fly far away.
Although he was going nowhere. He lacked the energy to cross the room much less the world. He’d never slept so much yet he was always tired. What he really wanted was to stay right where he was and actually enjoy it, but he had never acquired the knack. He needed, he expected, to be more like Tom.
Whenever he had compared Tom’s life with his own, Tom’s, with its simplicity, its day-to-day routines, came up poorly. But now, these past few weeks, he was coming to think differently. He felt bound by a sense of monotonous sameness: so many extraordinary travels and adventures, yet he might as well have stashed each in identical cardboard boxes for all the distinctive impressions they had left. As for Tom, he was happy, at this very moment Tom was elated. And even if the tie king’s collection was not up to scratch, there would be the story – imagining the possibility, the chase itself, the first glimpse, the silks, the seams, the facings, the provenance – and Tom was a virtuosic story-teller. It was one of the qualities that had attracted Sean when first they met.
At the time Tom worked in the theatre, in costumes – just the sort of job one would expect of a gay man, Sean had joked. Stereotype or not, Tom adored clothes, particularly vintage clothes, and most of all neckwear: ties, bows, cravats, ruffles.
Nearly a year later, with Sean about to take up the Central European desk, Tom announced he was leaving the theatre and moving to Melbourne.
‘I’m going to be a neckwear specialist. I’m going to be the neckwear specialist. And Melbourne’s the place for vintage clothes.’
Sean had tried to change Tom’s mind; anywhere, he said, not Melbourne. But as Tom was quick to remind him, Sean would be away most of the time in locations that enabled him to pursue his career. And Tom needed to be in a place that provided him with similar opportunities.
Tom was a large, flamboyant man, and an enthusiastic ambassador for his passion. He had bow-tie occasions and cravat occasions, there were even Texan shoe-string tie occasions. And parties, usually all-gay affairs, when he would wear one of his prized Swanky Yankees, wide gaudy silks sporting a scantily clad image of a woman. Of all clothing, as far as Tom was concerned, there was none as nuanced nor as expressive as neckwear.
He kept his collection of several thousand pieces in a showroom located in the old garment district of Flinders Lane in central Melbourne. Specially designed cabinets housed most of the collection, but at any one time there would be several hundred items on display. Friezes of ties adorned the walls, protected by sheets of clear plastic – not your common Perspex, Tom was quick to explain, but high-clarity, non-reflective material with an in-built UV factor. ‘The same stuff’s used in the Louvre,’ he said
. ‘My ties and the Mona Lisa are equally well protected.’ His neckwear had played in major theatre and opera productions; it had appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum; it had featured in retrospectives at the major silk manufacturing centres. Tom had forged a living out of his passion for neckwear.
Ties for Tom, the world for Sean, and Sean had never been in doubt about whose work was the more fulfilling. But with him tired and hung-over at seven o’clock on a Thursday evening, sprawled on the couch waiting for his music library to produce Ramsay, and Tom at an appointment that had him sizzling with excitement, he was no longer so sure. Perhaps Zoe was right, that no matter how proficient you might be at deliberate forgetting it will seep out some way.
Sean made fresh coffee and took it to his desk. He opened his laptop, glanced at his email, nothing urgent, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. How deeply he had loved his brother, more than he loved anyone, more than he had loved his parents, different from how he loved Tom. He would have done anything for him. Plenty of people thought they understood Ramsay, but only Sean really did. Or at least that was what he believed in those long-ago days. But he didn’t understand him, because he never thought Ramsay would choose anyone over him.
He didn’t want to think about Ramsay, and yet there were times like this when he was helpless at holding him at bay. How different his life would have been if Ramsay had loved him better. And he knows he should be grateful he had not. For without Ramsay’s rejection there would not have been friends, there would not have been a career, and there certainly would not have been the long relationship with Tom. If Ramsay had loved him better, there would have been only Ramsay. But it’s hard to be grateful when you have suffered such a loss. And like a death, the loss persists. All those years, all the life Sean had accumulated since, it made no difference to the loss. And where did he place the blame? Where does he still place the blame? On George Tiller. George Tiller arrived and everything changed.
4.
‘I hate him,’ Ramsay said. ‘He’s old, he’s ugly and he’s a know-all. And he sells stuff to dentists. What sort of job is that?’
Sean wasn’t sure how he felt about this new man in their mother’s life, a man she described as special, but with Ramsay so certain and Sean terrified of the dentist the issue was soon settled.
‘I hate him too, Rams,’ he said. And after a moment, ‘If she marries him, do you think he’ll make us go to the dentist more often?’
Ramsay ignored the question. ‘How could she choose such a loser after Dad – and so soon.’
The two boys were hiding out in the tree-house with a packet of Tim Tams and a stubby of beer. Their father had died just four months previously, died in his sleep of a heart attack. He’d checked on the boys as he always did before retiring to his divan in the study. He had watched the late news, again his usual habit, and then he went to sleep.
He never woke up.
‘There was nothing wrong with his heart,’ Marion said. ‘Parts of his body,’ she shrugged, ‘they’d given up the ghost years ago, but his heart was just fine.’
A post-mortem examination revealed a congenital heart fault, something which, according to the doctor, could have killed him at any time.
This was a week after the death, and the publicly grieving widow had become a bottomless trough of anger and tears at home.
‘He might have done things differently if he’d known,’ she said. ‘Might have put his heart under less strain.’
Their mother’s voice was quiet and cold, resentment was plastered over her face. At the time the boys, just fourteen and thirteen and not yet aware of the subtle signs of grownups that reveal the true state of their feelings, read nothing in her words or indeed her raw moods. A couple of months later, however, just before she produced George, she told them their father had kept a girlfriend, not ‘a brief weekend affair’ but a relationship that had lasted four years.
‘Four years,’ she said. ‘A whole other life.’ She seemed to drive a spike through each word. And it was odd, Sean found himself thinking, how she managed to look angry and sad at exactly the same time.
She told them the girlfriend had revealed herself in a telephone call a few days after their father’s death. She wanted to meet Marion, she said, ‘in order to discuss the future’.
‘I’d no intention of dignifying their liaison with a meeting,’ Marion said, with that haughty attitude she assumed whenever she was hurt or sad.
So the boys came to understand that their parents had not been so happy after all; certainly their mother was very unhappy with their father now he was no longer around. But that was no reason to inflict George upon them.
‘I think we should make it so miserable for him,’ Ramsay said, ‘that he packs up his dental instruments and looks for another widow.’
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Sean could not help laughing. Ramsay was about to embark on one of his campaigns, and once Ramsay put his mind to something it was sure to be successful. It was the way his brother was, and Sean different from him in this respect, in practically all respects. Ramsay’s determination whether applied to music, his protection of Sean against the school bullies, or getting rid of their mother’s new boyfriend was a quality Sean truly admired.
Ramsay’s plan to make George’s life a misery went into immediate effect. They feigned deafness when he spoke to them, they pretended he didn’t exist when he entered their mother’s conversation. Should they answer the phone when George rang they would not fetch their mother as requested, instead they’d leave him dangling on the end of the line. At every opportunity they exchanged ‘isn’t he a dickhead’ expressions, exaggerated and unambiguous facial contortions always in full view of George himself. When George began to stay overnight – in their father’s house if not his actual bed – they would pinch single socks, one shoe, and knowing how much their mother disliked body odour, his deodorant.
‘He shouldn’t keep his stuff in our bathroom anyway,’ Ramsay said.
After several lost objects, George was given his own cupboard in their mother’s bathroom, one of the few in the house with a key.
‘He’s so pathetic,’ Ramsay said. ‘He doesn’t even have the guts to fight us.’
And then George moved in. George’s possessions replaced their father’s: his daggy clothes, his assortment of teas – ‘He’s more grandma than man’ – his two bikes, his war books, the photo of his dead son, his reclining armchair. The boys refused to talk to him, they refused to eat with him. In the end Marion allowed them to have their meals in the kitchen in front of the small TV while she and George ate in the dining-room.
‘Do you think we should give him a taste of Dad’s rat arsenic,’ Sean said one day. ‘Not to kill him, just enough to make him sick.’
‘Good thinking, little brother.’ Ramsay was clearly impressed.
Out they went to the garden shed. At the end of the highest shelf was the tin; Ramsay climbed the small step-ladder and retrieved it. Across the lid and again on the side their father had written: ARSENIC! POISON! DO NOT TOUCH!
Ramsay levered the lid off and studied the contents. ‘I wonder how much you’d need to make him sick but not poison him to death.’
Sean watched and waited.
‘There are no instructions,’ Ramsay said. ‘Although Dad never used much for the rats, maybe a teaspoon.’ He thought for a moment. ‘A teaspoon to kill a few small rats couldn’t possibly kill a grown man like George.’
But something else must have occurred to him because a few moments later he replaced the lid and pulled out a large bag of blood and bone. It was nearly full and he buried the poison deep within.
‘No one will find it there,’ he said, and shoved the bag at the very back of the shed. He piled some old junk in front so it was completely hidden. ‘Only you and I know where it is,’ he said. ‘We’ll use it when we have to.’
The campaign to remove George went up a notch after they pulled back from the poison. The piano b
ecame a primary site of persecution. George had simultaneously confessed to a love of baroque music, of Bach in particular, and an inability to tolerate atonal compositions. Ramsay, rather partial to Bach himself, now requested his teacher set him modern works, the more discordant the better. Mr Orloff was thrilled. He had always said it was a matter of maturity, that there would come a time when Ramsay would understand the power of contemporary music. At the time of asking, Ramsay had not, but he was prepared to put up with his own discomfort if it caused greater discomfort for George.
When George was not home Ramsay would play the music he fancied, although it was curious, he said to Mr Orloff, how learning a piece, taking it inside yourself, opened out the work to you in a way that would not happen with more cursory contact. And he loved the challenge of these ferociously difficult works. Mr Orloff could not have been more pleased. As for George, he kept his silence, but he must, so Ramsay thought, be finding life at the Blake house increasingly irksome.
Sean certainly was. This new music sounded like traffic noise, or a factory filled with clattering machines, but he knew it was all for a good cause. So rather than suffer as he was sure George must be suffering, he escaped next door to Nina’s place whenever Ramsay took to the moderns. There was one piece by an Australian composer that was particularly awful. He told Ramsay it sounded like a flock of cockatoos squawking for fifteen drawn-out minutes. At first Ramsay said nothing, but gradually a smile appeared and a nodding of his head. The piece was called ‘Flight’, he said, only now did he understand why.
‘You surely don’t like it?’ Sean was incredulous.
Ramsay was still smiling. ‘I do rather.’
It didn’t matter what Ramsay thought of the music, Sean decided, as long as George continued to hate it. But this new music seemed to be growing on him too. He would stand outside the piano room and listen while Ramsay practised, and he had bought a compilation tape of the best of the moderns – Sean had seen it in his car.
The Memory Trap Page 7
