Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Have a listen,’ she said. She handed him a CD. ‘Back soon. Catch ya, hey?’

  Leon remained watching until the two figures disappeared, and longer. Evening was coming.

  =

  Why had he assumed that the electricity was on in the house? It wasn’t. Or if it was, he couldn’t find the mains.

  He ate a small meal made up of what Lucas had left behind: a Ski, three Tim Tams, a Valencia orange, a mouthful of Diet Coke.

  The night came down gradually, then suddenly. Leon sat on the marble steps shivering in his blazer. The foliage of the trees became a theatre of silhouettes, growing blacker as the night deepened. The moon formed a sharper and sharper arc halfway up the sky until it seemed too distinct to be merely natural. As the hours passed the stars thickened. By midnight they looked as crafted as the moon.

  Leon discovered moments of comfort listening to the muted roar of the cars on the distant highway. He could pick out the headlights at intervals. At night, all cars seem headed nowhere. That was one comfort: that destination was a myth. Another comfort grew from an idea that became convincing only for a few seconds at a time, that the world and the heavens could be made painless if only one concentrated hard on things like vastness and immense stretches of time and the anonymity of things once night fell.

  But it wasn’t true. In the cars that showed the brief glitter of their headlights, people seethed or sighed or hummed along with the radio and their hearts beat steadily and they imagined comforts to come, warm food, television, lovemaking, the smiles of their children, money in the bank. Or, if nothing else, escape. The world was only people and the things that people did.

  It became too cold for Leon to remain sitting on the steps. He sat in his car with the engine idling and the heater on. The windows turned white. He closed his eyes wishing for sleep. He thought of Lucas rejecting his offer of a lift to Albury. Lucas thought him odd and pitiable and didn’t want to take advantage of him.

  He remembered the CD that Kristobel had given him. He took it from his pocket and studied the cover in the pallid illumination of the roof light. It appeared to be a self-made disc. The image on the cover was of Kristobel and Lucas sitting on stools at the counter of a fish and chip shop. A sign above them showed a board lettered in yellow on a black background, Wanga Burger Onion Beetroot Egg Bacon Wanga Burger Onion Lettuce Tomato Bacon Super Wanga…The CD was titled ‘Wanga Burger’. Leon turned the disc over and read the song titles:

  Too Early in the Morning

  Sweet Words

  Perfect Day

  Not My Name

  Plane Crash at Los Gatos

  Wanga Burger

  Sister of Mine

  If I Had a Hammer

  Joyful

  All but three of the songs were credited to Kristobel Birkin. Guitar and harmonica, Lucas Bonython. ‘Album recorded at Joyful Werks Yackandandah. Produced by Christopher Makepeace. Special thanks to David, Candice, Swellie, Bernadette, Auntie Tessa Wright, Pig Boy and Teddi.’

  Leon found the CD slot and inserted the disc. Kristobel’s voice filled the car. Leon listened with concentration, his heart lightening. It was a pure voice, much bigger than Kristobel’s skinny frame would have suggested, supple and seemingly produced without effort.

  He let the disc end and start again, and again.

  chapter 16

  Purchase

  LEON ARRANGED to have the power turned on at Joyful but otherwise didn’t bother about comfort. He slept without sheets or blankets on the mattress left behind by Kristobel and Lucas and lived on tea and whisky.

  Susie drove up from Melbourne to find out what was going on and burst into tears as soon as she laid eyes on him. She made him wash and shave, then dressed him from the suitcase of clothing she’d brought with her. She took him to Beechworth, sought out the deli and prepared him a proper meal.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ she said. ‘Are you the only man in the world who has lost someone he loves? It’s shameful, Leon!’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is shameful,’ said Leon.

  ‘Don’t answer me in that way,’ she scolded. ‘You’re not listening! Pay attention to me, I will tell you something.’

  They were sitting on the observatory floor over the remains of their meal. Before she started speaking, Susie brushed crumbs from her fingertips and wiped her lips with a red paper napkin. Then she shut her eyes for a moment and raised her chin, a way she had when she was about to say something censorious.

  ‘When I was a student in Rangoon we went to a village to help the children. We took them paper to write on because they had no books and the government wouldn’t let them go to school. We taught them arithmetic. But the government soldiers came and killed all the children. For something like this, you can cry and go mad. Not for Tess.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leon. ‘I see what you mean.’ Did he? He thought he did, although he was more conscious of his love for Susie than anything else. He thought of the times he’d dressed her with such pleasure, once in Fiffer slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. She could wear slacks like no other woman he’d known.

  ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘you must love a person who loves you. Sometimes Tess would bring men to the shop when you were away and go with them upstairs. Daniel many times, I am ashamed to tell you. One day a boy not so old as her own son! I am making myself sick to tell you this. Tess was very, very beautiful but she was very, very dishonest. She never loved you. Do you think a woman can love a man and then treat him like that? Never! Never!’

  ‘No, I dare say you’re right,’ said Leon.

  Susie wiped the tears from her face. ‘When will you come back to the shop?’

  ‘In a week,’ said Leon, without any intention of returning to Melbourne in a week or a year or ever.

  ‘Do you promise me, Leon? Is that the truth? I am Burmese, remember. A Burmese woman knows when people are telling lies!’

  ‘In one week. I promise.’

  Susie studied Leon’s face closely. ‘Okay. I believe you,’ she said.

  Leon walked Susie down to her little red Hyundai. She gave him a thick wad of letters secured with rubber bands, including one Evie had given her to deliver to him. She especially urged him to reply to two letters from a certain Sandra Perelman from Monash University who had phoned many times and had come into the shop looking for him.

  ‘She is a professor, something like that. She wants to talk to you. I told her to write down everything about her project, and then you can help her. Okay?’

  She kissed him on the lips as she always did and stroked his hair, comfortable in the knowledge (as he knew) that his response would be limited to affection.

  As soon as Susie was gone, he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of scotch. As he sipped, he watched the brilliant red and blue parrots rocket past the window on their way to the bushy greengages of the side yard. He knew he was nurturing a dependence on booze and was very pleased about it. He wished he’d developed more habits of the sort: heroin attracted him; cocaine, amphetamines. He still hoped to buy a gun and shoot Daniel and himself but a policeman in Wangaratta with the rather wonderful name of Cuff had told him there were no handguns for sale in the north-east. Gazing at the parrots shaking the glistening foliage of the greengages, he suddenly thought of Kristobel and Lucas. He missed them! Maybe they understood things that he didn’t; he fancied they did, especially Kristobel, who’d made a present of her music. He imagined her as he’d first come upon her, clasping Lucas as she slept. It had made him happy for a moment to watch her asleep holding on to Lucas, her lips moving as if she were talking to her boyfriend in a dream.

  He glanced with aversion at Susie’s pile of letters sitting on the kitchen table. Not one of them would have the slightest bearing on what mattered in his life. Maybe Evie’s; he would read Evie’s letter, only.

  I don’t know how anybody can get in contact with you if you don’t answer your mobile! Unless I drive up there! Which I might!

&nb
sp; Susie tells me that you’re more or less not coping. Honey this is no good at all. It’s no good at all. I would not have mentioned a thing about Daniel if I’d known it would throw you like this. The thing is, I’ve been used to what Mum gets up to for years before you came along. What Mum got up to, I mean. Past tense. What you worked out with Mum—how could I possibly know all the details? I wouldn’t have wanted to know! You married into the most dysfunctional family in Australia, you poor dear thing! On that subject—you think you’ve got problems!—have you had a close look at me?? I’m currently dating (past couple of weeks) a 60 year old Chinese guy, a married 60 year old Chinese guy if you can believe it, and he’s not even an Australian citizen, he’s a diplomat with the Chinese consulate. It’s a mistress situation. I met him on RSVP. If that’s not tragic enough, I’m seriously considering getting pregnant—single mum disaster scenario. I need my head examined! Although having said that, he’s the most unbelievably nice and charming and considerate man on earth. But bye bye sweet little family daydream! Which is all I ever wanted. Dearest dear Leon, you deserved better truly truly. But can I say (well I’m going to) if you marry my mum, boy oh boy! I loved her and still love her crazy mad crazy, nobody can say I was a bad daughter, and remember just what you put up with if you’re Tess’s daughter, ‘Oh Tess Wachowicz, from the radio, oh my favourite person on earth, oh Tess Wachowicz, so clever, so beautiful!’ Making sure they don’t add, ‘Gosh, you didn’t inherit her looks terribly much!!’ I always feel like shrieking, ‘No, I didn’t, you know who did, Justin did, and her morals!!’ Speaking of whom, Justin wants to know if he can sublet the spare rooms at Moore Street. God knows why he’s asking!—he’s already got about ten people crowded in there, and he’s fucking about half of them. Between Justin and Mum and my father, I’m lucky if I can find anyone who hasn’t had their intimate bits massaged by at least one close relative. Hence RSVP. Hence Zhou. Who I’m happy to say has never heard of Tess Wachowicz. Before I forget, Justin also sends you his love. Which is maybe not entirely to do with the sublet thing. He always admired you in his strange weird twisted corrupt way—I can say that, he’s my brother and he knows how much I love him. But dear sweet good man, dear Leon, don’t tear yourself apart with this Daniel thing. He’s really a piece of shit, not worthy of your concern. And don’t tear yourself up about Mum either. Tess was one thing and another, sure, but I suppose in her way she was sort of heroic, and I really do believe she loved you, sweet man. Write to me. Call me. You could be the sort-of granddad to a little Chinese-Austro baby in a year or so!

  Best Best Best love,

  Evie

  =

  That night Leon drank a bottle and a half of scotch and awoke in a paddock somewhere out of sight of the house. A dog with brilliant black eyes and a wet, dripping mouth stood over him. It was morning, apparently. The dog dashed away with its nose to the ground. Leon found his way back to Joyful, but it was a long hike.

  In the kitchen, he stared dazedly at the assortment of packets and cans standing on the bench: Cheerios, Coco Orbits, Spam Lite, Chocolate Teddy Bears, Monte Carlos, Harvest Meal in a Mo, Cheezels, Oreos, Sirena tuna, lollies and chocolate bars. Also twelve rolls of toilet paper, a big bag of disposable shavers and two pink towels from the People’s Republic of China. Susie had sent him to the supermarket while she was in the deli and this was the result. He opened a carton of Lorimor’s 4-Real Free Range Eggs, broke three into a new Duralex glass, filled the glass to the brim with Black Douglas and swallowed it down. He could feel it doing him good.

  His big problem was that without a gun, he was useless. Murder was the only goal he felt motivated to achieve. He could have hanged himself, gassed himself in the car, dived headfirst out of a tree, but he had his heart set on wiping the smirk off Daniel’s face then putting the barrel of his firearm into his own mouth the way people did in films. Also, he hoped to get through his remaining stock of scotch before he did anything irreversible. He’d bought eighteen bottles from the liquor store in Wangaratta, a few good single malts and a lot of cheap blends, since the store owner refused to hand over his entire stock of quality scotch to one customer.

  =

  He spent one day then another and another shuffling about the house with a bottle in one hand and a bag of Snakes Alive in the other. He wondered where Tess and Daniel had gone about their business. But why think about that? Why? It was too horrible to contemplate. Because the thing about Tess was this: she could never grasp that beauty like hers was a thousand years in the making. It redeemed a world half given over to barbarity, torture, pain and stench. It redeemed every ugly thing. To have squandered her inspiration on people like Daniel, lived her life through her vulva, all squealing and rut, when she’d only to look in the mirror to see the light in herself! It maddened Leon; it made him hiss like a locomotive and stamp his feet on the bare floorboards of the upstairs library.

  The hissing and stamping kept Leon alert at least, and one morning after a drink or two, an idea jumped into his head. He lay down on the floor to study it, the tail of a jelly snake lolling from the corner of his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. The window above him was a sheet of blue with a single cube of milky cloud at its centre. How much cash could he lay his hands on immediately? It would have to be cash. Perhaps a hundred thousand dollars? Two?

  A pen—yes he had one, a ballpoint, in the pocket of his overcoat, but what would he write on? He searched about the house feverishly for a scrap of paper, without success; he was not willing to use toilet tissue. He finally settled down in the library and wrote a draft of his proposal on a freshly sanded section of floorboard, shuffling along on his knees, following the grain, each sentence two metres long. What he drafted pleased him, but he couldn’t take it to town, could he, a floorboard? He made a second search of the house and found a solution in the kitchen. The back of the label on each of his four tins of Harvest Meal in a Mo was blank. He scurried back to the library and copied his proposal onto the labels.

  He showered sipping his third scotch of the morning, hand over the top of the glass. Would he shave? He would. He couldn’t make the proposition he had in mind looking like a hobo. Rewarding to see, once he’d dried his face, that despair and whisky were beginning to run seams through his baby complexion and muddy the puppy lustre of his brown eyes. He’d pitied his reflection over the months since Tess’s death, prisoner as it was of all that its owner could not make happen. But here was progress at last: decay; the start of dying.

  He dressed in dark slacks, chose a fresh blue shirt, a pea-green tie of Scottish wool, a navy blue blazer. And drove to Yackandandah, to the newsagent on High Street, where he stood at the counter with his Harvest labels spread out, rewriting his proposal on sheets of A4:

  To Daniel Mikolajczyk, Emily Williams and Gareth Williams,

  I wish to purchase from you every item in your possession that relates itself in any way at all to Tess Wachowicz: letters, postcards, emails, notes; photographs or films, anything on tape or disc; every gift she may have given you, no matter how large or small, no matter how seemingly insignificant. If you still retain receipts for things she purchased for you, I would request those too. Also ticket stubs to performances you may have attended with Tess—the cinema, concerts, anything of that sort. Travel—anything to do with travel, tickets, receipts. Anything with her signature on it. Any items of her apparel that may still be in your possession. Any book of yours that she may have read. Anything she may have used—a toothbrush, for example. Any cosmetics. Anything. The more you provide, the more I will pay. I would like a written statement to accompany each item, explaining how it is related to Tess. Except, of course, when it is obvious: letters, and so on. Furthermore, and most importantly, I would request that you write a complete account of your relationship with Tess, everything you remember. Please be exhaustive. I would request that you start with your first meeting and put down everything that happened between you. I want your feelings and your experiences in detail. The more exhausti
ve you are, the greater the payment.

  Concerning payment, I am offering a cash sum of up to $100,000.00 (one hundred thousand dollars) to Daniel Mikolajczyk for a full and genuine response to my requests, and a cash sum of $20,000.00 (twenty thousand dollars) each to Emily Williams and to Gareth Williams for a similarly full and genuine response. I will pay a cash sum of $5000.00 (five thousand dollars) to each of the three named persons at the top of this proposal as a commencement fee. The remainder of each payment, up to the sum stipulated for a full and genuine response, will be placed in the care of a solicitor in Yackandandah or Beechworth. I would be prepared to allow three weeks for your full response. At the point of a full and genuine response, the balance will be paid in cash. All payments will be made over as gifts, and will therefore not attract taxation.

  I wish it to be understood clearly that in complying with this offer, the three parties named as addressees at the head of this document effectively alienate their moral ownership of all memories of Tess Wachowicz. I wish to be entirely distinct on this matter: I will be purchasing your memories of my late wife, and your relationship with her.

  I sign this document in the full knowledge of its valid status in a legal context.

  Leon Roger Joyce

  Leon could read the telephone number on the window of Enchanted from the pavement on his side of Main Street. He dialled it and heard the telephone ringing from where he stood. Daniel answered. Leon told him that if he came to the Star Hotel, fifty metres away, he would hear something to his advantage.

  Daniel strolled into the bar of the Star Hotel in his Afrika Korps cap, tartan shirt out at the waist, faded black jeans, lace-up boots. He had the manner of a man to whom insolence came easily; a man confident in his ability to irritate. Leon could imagine what Tess had seen in him, that nihilistic masculine disdain.

  The barman called him ‘Dan the Man’, fondly it seemed. Leon didn’t call him anything, but accepted a handshake.