Still, Margo must sense he is serious. “Alright then, if it means that much to you.” She holds up the book to the relevant page. An incomprehensible entry, all squiggles and dots. “Shorthand,” she explains. “Us girls, we all started out as secretaries.”
Outside it is warm and bright. Another long November afternoon. In the car park, asphalt wedges portion out the vehicles, a sea of cars huddled in the sun, now a stately grid. “Chin up, Harry,” says Margo, as she hands him a note out the window of her olive-green Citroën GS. More squiggles and dots. “Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.”
It is almost four, but still glare dances across the bonnets, pirouetting off the windows, a blinding display, so that even with his sunglasses on he has to squint to find his way.
Lately he is always squinting, as though the world around him is overexposed, smudged, difficult to read. Diana is waiting for him in the car. “You should get your eyes checked,” she says. “You might need glasses.” But that won’t help. It is his eyes but not his eyes, a different kind of vision.
He picks up his mother’s magazine. “You can write shorthand, can’t you?” he says, as they stop at the lights, the slow drip of passing traffic.
“I could once. A long time ago.”
“But you know what it means, all those curly little lines?”
“It’s no mystery, Harry. It’s the same as English, just a different alphabet.”
“So you could translate it?”
“That depends. I could give it a go. Why?”
“No reason.” He moves the magazine further and further from his face imitating his father with the form guide, trying to pinpoint a position where the text starts to blur.
“Stop that,” says Diana, grabbing her Women’s Weekly.
Harry looks like he’s been through the wringer.
“Maybe you should move home again,” she proposes (guilt). “Until you sort yourself out, figure out what you’re going to do next. Did you ask the Club? Can’t they find you something to keep you busy?”
“No.” It hadn’t crossed his mind. Not that he wants them to find him something. Unless it means having nothing to do with them. That is a job he’d happily sign on for. “Dean’s asked me to fill in over the break. And Dad says he can probably get me a couple of shifts at the warehouse, at least until Christmas.”
“You’re not doing that.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s undignified, that’s what’s wrong with it. Don’t make me explain, Harry, you can see that.”
He can but he doesn’t want to discuss it again, all the ways he should or shouldn’t behave, when it is okay to be himself and when it isn’t, who he has to check with and why. Dean doesn’t give these matters a second thought. If he wants to go to the pub, he goes to the pub. And if he gets shit-faced, he gets shit-faced. No one gives a stuff which DVDs he watches. He could rent The Notebook for all anyone cares. But they’ve been over this ad nauseum. He isn’t up for another colloquium on the price of being in the public eye. It is an argument he is never going to win. He changes the topic back to the press conference. “So if I show you something can you tell me what it says?”
“What ‘something’? What are you talking about?”
He presents Margo’s note. “Shorthand.”
“I don’t know. Possibly. Parts of it. It’s been twenty years. Twenty years at least. Why? Who wrote it?”
“Margo,” he says. “And in her notebook too. Pages of it.”
“Give me that,” says his mother, snatching the paper out of his hands. She presses it against the steering wheel to examine while she is driving. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” she manages with some difficulty.
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s one of those sentences with all the letters of the alphabet. They used to make us type it over and over at school for practice. Not much call for it these days. Why’d she give it to you? Is it code for something? An in-joke?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Are you sure?”
“It’s nothing. She’s okay.”
His mother is far from convinced. “You watch yourself there. You don’t want her hanging around. You remember what she was like at your father’s inquest. A leopard can’t change its spots, Harry. Just ’cause she’s a woman doesn’t mean she’s playing straight with you. We’re not all sugar and spice.”
Daylight saving makes the early morning look like evening and the evening glow like dawn, the shoulder hours stretching out the middle, slowing time until it almost stops. Father Murphy drops by to check on Alan, to exercise a little pastoral care, the two men poking about in the tomatoes, like that has anything to do with God. He catches hold of Harry on his way out. “You’re not going to do anything rash, are you, son? No need to quit the team to make a point. Your dad’s worried enough about you as it is. He doesn’t need any additional stress.” Like the article is Harry’s fault. “This is a good opportunity for both of you. Time for some mutual healing.”
You look after him then, thinks Harry. You tell him everything’s okay and this is just a blip, that his new sponsors won’t find out, that he’ll be back on track again before he knows it. You call the doctor at three in the morning and help strip him and wash him while he’s hurling his abuse: “Pussy, pussy, pussy,” hissed under his breath, then the following day no sign of recalling any of it (“You’re weak. Toughen up. I would have fixed you up alright,” his father trying to punch him in the stomach, then collapsing again on the floor, sobbing like a child. The doctor telling the old man to quit it, to cut it out, and to Harry, not to take it on, not to take it to heart. Part of the sickness, he says).
Everyone’s always got such good advice about what he should be doing. But why don’t you try it, he would like to have said to Father Murphy. You and all your do-gooder friends with all your Christian energy and best intentions. You take care of the shit and stink and mess for a change then show up to practice on Monday after school fresh as a daisy like the two things have nothing to do with each other. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything much, other than “Thanks for coming,” and then shows Father Murphy the door.
“What a know-it-all. But I told you, I told you, I told you.” She keeps saying it, over and over, that they have come for her, that this is the way it would be. The sound of knuckles hammering at the door. “Let us in.” Or is it, “Let me in” (and that voice again with the vaguely familiar ring)? He isn’t sure now. The fluid nature of dreams frustrating any sense of accurate recall. The girl laughing to herself, then daring him. “So, will you?” Sitting there calmly and unafraid as all hell is about to break loose.
“Will I what?” says Harry. Will I what? Picturing himself saying it as he speaks, his mouth wide open, unnaturally so, bellowing in the tiny hotel room (though what sort of nasty hotel is that?), as though he is addressing a crowded stadium, and then his jaw opening wider and wider, hinged, like a cartoon character, until that is all one can see of the room, his oral cavity, like a player’s race, the floor bounded by his tongue, a thick pink spongy carpet on which the girl now sits, a perfect dummy, expertly balanced between his teeth.
… I’m a sexy mama …
“Be quiet, can’t you?” he says, as fists continue to pummel the door (or perhaps they are using something more forceful, a battering ram?), the frame visibly shaking as they hit it, the structure threatening to give at any moment.
Sometimes he mixes them up, the girls. What happens at Sportsman’s Night stays at Sportsman’s Night. He’ll be dreaming about one and then the other will appear, her features miraculously reconfigured. His girl. His father’s girl. Increasingly interchangeable. Neither of them clear enough in his mind’s eye to definitively dislodge the other’s image, to delineate whose role is whose, which one belongs in which man’s fantasy.
*
The girl peered out at the crowd but from the stage you couldn’
t really see anything. That was the biggest surprise. The venue wasn’t especially large, but the lights were bright and obscured the best part of the audience, the area beyond the first two rows an overbright unknowable galaxy. The girl fixed on a point at the back of the room, where she imagined the back to be, and performed to that, fashioning herself as Beyoncé addressing the camera, her secret admirer; countless people might be watching but she was dancing just for one.
Everything was so strange. She felt herself staring dead ahead, knew she was going through the motions, completing the steps as she’d been taught to do, but it was like she was watching herself at the same time, as though she was both herself and someone else, neither fully in or out of the situation. She had expected to feel nervous, had been worried that she’d forget the sequences, but she wasn’t nervous at all. Or maybe she was but the feeling didn’t stick long enough for her to focus on it. By the time she came back around to it she was thinking about something else.
Line formation, spin, dissolve, do it again.
It was over before she knew it. Act one.
Greta said she did well. Very well. That was good. Better than doing poorly. Good was always better than bad, though in all honesty the girl didn’t really care.
*
Embrace the challenge. That and See it, believe it! Positive affirmations, Club psychologist Judith’s prescription, a daily mantra of platitudes to help him develop his winning imagination (in-house counselling one of the Club’s non-negotiable conditions during Harry’s hiatus). His father walks into the bathroom as he is running through them, practising making stupid faces in the mirror as he does it, his chin jutted forward (the skin drawing in around his scar), lips pursed in a cat’s bum, though it might look like he is blowing himself a kiss, dumb idea either way, their eyes meeting briefly across the mist before the old man walks out again, quietly closing the door and that is the end of the matter, no mention of Laurie’s house call, no indignant claims of being quoted out of context, no examination of events other than to say he isn’t going to rehab again, no way, no how. They’ll work it out at home. It was just a couple of drinks and given the situation, who can blame him? A few more days and he’ll be himself again. Their lives turned upside down by a renewed round of interview requests, eager junior reporters camped at their front gate, keeping pace with their various errands as the two of them gamely persist with their routines. But this is exactly as desired, according to Diana, who doubts her ex’s every move, right down to his choice of toilet paper. “Selfish turd. Couldn’t he stay on-message for once, say something about the t-shirts and keep his mouth shut about the rest of it? What else did he think would happen? Really, tell me,” she says. “How else could this play out?”
Harry doesn’t know. He just wants them to back off.
“Never mind, darling. They’ll forget about you again soon enough,” she says, a truth as incontrovertible as it is irrelevant when reporters are knocking at their front door.
He’s stopped listening to the phone messages, ignores the machine’s incessant blinking. Margo has left him another one, something she wants to run by him (he isn’t touching that) – carefully transcribed in his father’s peculiar hybrid script, capitals and lower case run madly together on the back of a power bill envelope, the note slipped under his bedroom door like a peace offering – but otherwise they are all for his dad.
“You wouldn’t say anything to anyone, would you, son?” Alan ventures the next time they are out in the car together, another bland afternoon en route to the pharmacy, the same banged-up white Corolla following them all the way to and from the shops. Meaning, especially your mother, don’t tell her about my little breakdown, will you? No need for her to know. Like Harry has to be told (not that it has stopped him from telling her, and Father Murphy would have said something if he hadn’t). Doubtful though that it would modify Diana’s opinion. Set as it is already. Benevolent pity. Well, she might pity him a little more. But it is too late to be worrying about that.
At the Club they run a battery of tests: eyes, ears, chest, nose, throat. Harry sounds out the letters on the eye chart, large to small, as though he is scanning the crowd for familiar faces at the MCG.
“Now the other eye,” says Dr Preeta.
Harry switches his hand from left to right, blinking as his pupils adjust to the light.
“You look like a pirate,” she says, as he cups his hand over his eye socket. “Lucky you’ve still got all your teeth.”
“Mouthguards. Are you going to make me walk the plank?”
“No. But if you ever need to get up in the night, if you keep one eye closed like that you won’t lose your night vision.” She brings her palms up to her face, alternatively covering and uncovering each eye. “That way you won’t have to wait half an hour again before you can see where you’re going.”
But what if he doesn’t want to see? Can night blindness stop his dreams? His memories? Thinking of that night, the way the girls tottered out on stage, eighteen of them in team colours, in various stages of undress, as though each one represented a progressive frame in a short cinematic striptease. How the crowd leant forward, lurched to the flesh, a beery vapour enveloping the scene in its own hot humid mess. “Tits,” they’d called. Live tits on stage (that’s what they’d been promised) as Harry clung to the bar, his heart thumping, fog swirling in the footlights (dry ice) as the women began to gyrate, the music so loud the sticky floor vibrated, a skeletal rattle, though the tune was barely discernible above the wolf whistles and jeers, just a steady drum through his feet and shins, a bass Jurassic caution. From the back of the room, his eyes fixed upon the girl: a blonde, young (too young?), in fishnets, high heels, blue hot pants and a matching sequined bikini top. She looked familiar – so many women looked familiar. Did he know her? Like the others, her eyes appeared closed, or perhaps it was just the angle, for as the group turned she seemed to return his gaze, as though she felt his stare across the writhing mass.
Harry covers both eyes with his hands, takes a deep breath. What he wants is to be relieved of this ordeal, to sleep a dark empty sleep that will carry him through to morning. That’s what his father’s pills do. Leave him dazed but wiped clean. Reborn. Does Dr Preeta have something that can guarantee him that?
“You want a sleeping pill?”
“That’d work.”
“Tell me about it,” she says. So, of course, he changes his mind.
At his next appointment Dr Preeta says there is nothing wrong with him. “The results have come in and you’re fine. Physically, that is. Fit as an Irishman’s fiddle.”
“That’s good,” he manages, Dr Preeta smiling as he makes his way out of the office, though in actual fact he is disappointed, fucked up as that sounds. He would greatly prefer if there was something officially the matter with him. What can he do with an “all clear”? She may as well have handed him her jar of jelly beans.
Rosie has let herself into the shed, big muddy prints on the cement floor, though Harry smells her perfume before he has fully opened the door, the brackish fragrance heralding her visit like an omen. “It was meant to be a surprise,” she tells him when he doesn’t say anything. “I needed a break from work.”
“What if Dad had been home?”
“His car’s not here.”
It is still raining. Water hammers the corrugated iron as he opens the slatted window, hoping the fragrance will dissipate before his next workout.
There is nowhere comfortable to sit. He leads her back to the house where they fuck silently on his unmade bed, him withdrawing at the last minute to come on her thigh because he doesn’t want to use a condom.
“Some of the girls at work were talking about you this morning.”
“Who? Which girls? What were they saying?”
“About leaving the Club. They saw you on the telly.”
“What of it?”
“Is it true? Are you going to quit?”
“What do you care? I didn’t think
you followed footy.”
“I don’t know. I’m just asking.”
Harry isn’t used to spending time with her during the day, the natural light illuminating the gaping chasm of their respective disappointments. When he looks down, the smears of her eye shadow are gathered so distinctly in the creases of her eyelids, it is as though someone has attempted to cross her out, to rule a line through an unfortunate chapter.
“Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.” Rosie rolls over, drapes her arm across his midriff. “Don’t you love that rhyme?” she says. He can hardly stand to look at her, let alone to feel the touch of her body as she presses herself against him, tackled – the tangle of legs, the taste of blood in his mouth. He turns his back to her, closing his eyes, willing her to leave.
Shouldn’t you be getting back, he suggests. Or perhaps he just thinks he does, the clunky numbers on his digital clock clicking over the minutes as she prattles away about the locum pharmacist, English, just granted his residency visa, filling the room with small talk about his travels (six months in the Northern Territory preparing tranquilisers for alcoholics before transferring to Bondi where it was all drug overdoses), proposing plans for joint activities, as though they are a real couple, impregnating his sheets with that perfume (he is going to have to do laundry now when she leaves), making no secret of what she wants, to insinuate herself into his life. She is like his mother in the way she has it all worked out, how he should renew his contract and then the two of them can move in together. She describes a three-bedroom house. Nothing fancy, it can be single storey, but it will have a carport and enough room for a clothesline and a barbecue and somewhere for the children to play out the back.
“How many children?” he asks, though he knows his mother would never green-light the match – Rosie is too skanky, too needy, too not good enough for him.
She smiles. “Maybe three.”
The Family Men Page 11
