A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  “You don’t want to do it?” asked Delaney, a sort of hope taking over from desire.

  “It’s my job. Besides, I like a handsome man of your age. You wouldn’t believe how old some of the people are we get in here. Not that I have anything against beer guts.”

  Delaney raised the can and the frosted glass. “I’m working on it,” he said.

  “But you’re in good condition,” said Karen. “I like a man in good condition.”

  It was not said languorously. It was a statement. “I’ll give you your money’s worth,” she said with that same simplicity. “Even if I’ve got to stop once or twice. After all, we’ve got half an hour.”

  She led him into a bedroom—mirrors, turquoise paint, a low bed, spread with towels. A black-tiled shower cubicle gave off the bedroom with a black toilet bowl and washbasin. First, she said, she would have to inspect him. Would he put on a bathrobe and she would do it now?

  He turned his back, undressing as he did in primary school in public baths, crookedly hanging his sports coat and slacks in a cupboard, neatly balling his socks so that she would know that he wasn’t slovenly. The way those little nylon and cotton bundles stuck in his brown shoes, like small marsupials emerging from their holes, infected him for some reason with a withering sorrow. He kept his back to Karen, who liked tight stomachs, and began to shudder, a yelp emerging from his throat, a small supply of tears astringent on his lids.

  “Anything the matter?” he heard her call from the bathroom, where, still fully dressed, she was cleaning her teeth. He wondered if the sperm of the last stranger was what she was rinsing away.

  “Ready?” she asked through the foam of toothpaste. He came forward dressed in his bathrobe. She took his penis functionally in her hands. She moved the foreskin back and forth across the glans.

  Gratefully he felt desire revive. When he asked if she was looking for bugs, she laughed and said, “No. Lesions, breaks in the skin, rashes, pustules. You’re fine,” she told him, dropping him and going to the washbasin again to rinse her hands.

  It was all a little like a visit to the doctor, he thought.

  She sent him to the low bed, where he waited for her. She came from the basin and undressed. He saw the strong young stomach and the elegant legs almost luminous, in the bordello dimness, with shift worker’s pallor. She came across and caressed him—he was willing to let her lead. As she did, straddling him, lowering her body onto his, she felt extraordinarily cool. As Delaney began to arch against her thighs, she turned her head and seemed to retch. “Pardon me,” she called, vaulting onto the floor and rushing for the black-tiled bathroom.

  Of course they have these tricks, Delaney thought. Then they don’t have to sit too long on one man after another. He followed her, consumed with a genuine interest in the authenticity or otherwise of her nausea. She heaved into the black bowl. He saw the sweat bursting out on the back of her neck. “You really are sick,” he said. “You poor little bugger!”

  Gasping when the spasms ceased, she apologized. “No, no,” he said. “There’s no need for you to do anything. What if I go down to the front desk and see if they have an aspirin.”

  He embraced happily the idea that she was an honest woman and now would have been very pleased to play elder brother to her.

  “No, no,” she said. “You’ve paid.”

  She led him back to the low bed and applied her mouth so energetically to him, moistening him with saliva, that he managed to release himself within minutes as a matter of good manners to a girl who was putting herself out. “Now lie beside me,” he instructed her, “and have a good rest.” He wished there were tea-making facilities in here.

  She was very quickly close to sleep and he forgot her, or she became a token for Danielle. To lie like this at a safe distance, somewhere in Queensland!

  The girl was awakened, and he aroused from that dream, by a noise from down the corridor. Karen shook herself, found a bathrobe. So too did Delaney. They stepped out into the narrow hallway. Even its windows were shuttered, Delaney noticed. Three doors closer to the front of the house, Gorrie was struggling with a large muscular man. Gorrie himself was large and muscular, but this other one was ornately body-built in the manner of a weight lifter, a professional wrestler, of someone who enjoyed throwing weight. From other doors along the corridor strangers and friends appeared. Eric and Mansfield and Borissow, all in the establishment’s shaggy bathrobes. Simultaneously, from the stairs, rose the woman who had first greeted them to the place. She seemed pigeon-chested with anger. “I warned you,” she said. “We expect manners here. You Rugby League crowd never know where to stop!”

  Mansfield had begun wrestling loyally with the bouncer, trying to get him to release his hold on Gorrie. “What happened?” Eric Samuels was asking.

  The girl whom Gorrie had chosen, the angular one with the freckles, emerged panting from the door of the room which she had been sharing with Gorrie. “The bastard started to beat me up,” she said in the voice of someone who has been winded.

  “Gorrie?” asked Delaney, not believing it.

  “I felt her belly clench up,” said Gorrie, out of a throat constricted by the bouncer’s forearm.

  “I want you all to go,” said the madam. “Unless you’d like a little help from the boys in blue from Darlinghurst.”

  “We paid our money,” Steve Mansfield protested.

  “I would have thought he-men such as you would have had full value by now,” said the woman from downstairs. The muscular one said nothing but maintained his hold on Gorrie.

  “Collect your things, ladies,” the woman instructed the girls. It was like a scene from one of those films, when the headmistress catches the hockey team in the football team’s dormitories at schools in England and America, as remote as Szechuan from Delaney’s comprehension.

  “Well,” yelled Mansfield after the madam. “We’ll tell all our mates never to darken your poxy door.”

  “I hope you will,” said the madam witheringly from halfway down the stairs.

  “Sorry, love,” said food-poisoned Karen as she grabbed her handbag and party dress and brushed past Delaney, who for a second thought he would split with desire. The inarticulate bouncer let the girls pass him, a true eunuch, indifferent to how well they looked with their glad rags hooked in their elbows and their good legs beneath their bathrobes. When they had all gone by, he released Gorrie and blocked the head of the stairs with his body. Yelling abuse at him, Mansfield and Borissow got dressed in the corridor. Delaney preferred to dress in the dim room where for a short time he had nursed Karen. Her fragrance and that of her colleagues were blended there, not altogether pleasantly, with the tang of a hundred men.

  “Come on, Terry,” he heard Eric calling. “We’re off.”

  “If King bloody Kong will let us,” Mansfield could be heard screaming.

  He led his party downstairs to the street door, speculating aloud about whether Frankenstein’s mother was watching them go on some closed-circuit television set. Before closing the door behind himself and the others, he gestured vastly with his thumb, the old-fashioned profane gesture of their childhood, before Italians and other immigrants had made the middle finger popular in the antipodes.

  As they stood in the street, unfulfilled lust and tenderness both souring in Delaney’s stomach, he remembered that the first editions of The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald, detailing his shame, were already printed up. I have no game. I have no love. Employees of the Parramatta lawyer, approached by Margin, had informed their boss, who threatened to have him arrested. In a hearty, corrupt state like New South Wales, it took an idiot like Margin to botch a bribery attempt.

  Mansfield had an idea. Why didn’t they go up and look at the gay bars in Oxford Street.

  “No poofter bashing,” Erie Samuels stipulated.

  “No,” said Mansfield, leading them off. “Just a visit.”

  Everyone told Gorrie what a silly prick he was, except Delaney, who was demonstrably
the silliest prick of the lot. Only loyalty, based on their turning up in Phillip Street earlier in the night, kept him with them at this crack-brained end of the evening.

  “These queers are dynamite,” said Mansfield as they began to walk. “Some of them have five roots a night.”

  “That’s why they’re riddled with disease,” said Gorrie with a sort of bush rectitude.

  In Delaney’s disordered perception they walked for perpetually dark days. Past car salesrooms on William Street where girls in miniskirts with pinpoint addicted eyes barely saw them pass. Past little terraces, their doors smack on the street. Delaney would have liked to go to sleep, or at least to die for a month or two, on one of those threshholds. After an age they came to Oxford Street and on a corner a gay bar called “Cheeks.” The very name rocked them with hilarity on the pavement.

  The interior of the place was hung with black fabric. A polite and well-built boy in his mid-twenties gave them the sort of lecture the brothel madam had earlier given. They were welcome to have a drink, but would be ejected if they caused trouble. He should also warn them that drinks cost somewhat more than they did in hotels.

  “Christ,” said Mansfield. “You’d think that we were the outcasts of bloody society.”

  Cheeks was very crowded, even though it was one in the morning. The barman gave a small toss of the head when Mansfield ordered beers. Delaney could see that at remote dim candlelit tables Perrier bottles and tall watery drinks were much in evidence. Nearly everyone here wore the loose, voluminous pants which had become fashionable that year, and white shoes with stick-down tabs you didn’t have to do up. It’s the same everywhere, Delaney recognized, even in the pubs out in Penrith. Everyone has a night-prowling set of gear. Except me, in the sports coat I wore to the judiciary.

  They sat at the bar drinking their beers. Steve Mansfield turned around once or twice trying to catch an eye, looking for trouble.

  “Stop looking for trouble, Steve,” Delaney warned him.

  “How did all this happen?” Mansfield asked the smoky air. “How did it happen? In the land of the bloody Anzacs?”

  None of the others were comfortable. They were bored, they were uneasy. They pecked their beer down into digestions already overloaded. They had come to the wrong place, and there was no time left tonight to find the right one. All of them—except Delaney—had training tomorrow.

  “Might be good,” Eric Samuels confided to Delaney, repeating Gorrie’s earlier advice, “if you turned up for training runs. And help on the sideline during games. And when one of us is knocked arse-over-head, run out in a track suit with a bucket and a sponge. Might be good to show Golder the bastards haven’t got you down.”

  They began to discuss what a good and loyal bloke Golder was. “Turning on a lawyer and all. He didn’t bloody have to.”

  Eric Samuels laughed a little. “Rough as bloody bags though. His wife’s not a bad sort. But a root with him must be like being run down by the Western bloody Pacific.”

  Mansfield now grew particularly outraged by the passage to the back of the bar of a boy in a scarlet shirt with spiked carroty hair. “The things you see when you haven’t got a gun!”

  But Delaney did not try to follow the boy with his eyes. He was distracted by a familiar voice behind him. It was ordering a Riesling and soda, a Campari and soda, a Perrier. As if being suspended for six months were not enough shame, he was about to be discovered in a gay bar by an acquaintance! Then he understood in a sluggish way, all the beer and wine of the evening haying spilled to the front of his brain, that the acquaintance was equally vulnerable. He turned. Standing a few paces behind him in the uniform of Cheeks, the ballooning trousers and the kinky shoes, was Father Doig. What was worse was that Mansfield witnessed the pulse of recognition between Delaney and Doig and began to ask some bumpkin question, “Hey, aren’t you the …?”

  Doig did not wait to be accused of being anything. He held Delaney’s gaze a second, but his face was pale. “Would you take those over to my table?” he asked the barman. Then he turned and walked out into the street. Delaney left his chair and stumbled after him. Doig was waiting outside.

  “Well, Terry,” he said. “What can I say?”

  “Nothing,” Delaney admitted.

  “Well, I said it, didn’t I? You know—that sexuality could be rationally arranged, that it doesn’t have to eat you alive. This is part of my rational arrangement.”

  “Are you going to tell your flock about this?” asked Delaney. “Are you going to explain it away for my old man the way you explain every other bloody thing?”

  “I would tell them, Terry, if it was within their means to take it in. I should tell you I’m monogamous. A one-man man. I’ve got a lover who lives out this way, in the Eastern Suburbs. Without him I would have shot myself.”

  Delaney could not sustain the anger as he wanted to. He had hoped for a while that in Doig he had found the pariah of the evening, but he remained the pariah himself, and in an hour or two people going to work would discover the fact on the back page, Delaney in his best sports jacket and his mute face descending the Phillip Street steps.

  “Oh Jesus, Andrew, you bastard!” said Delaney. The life went from his legs. He sat like a child on the pavement, and for the first time Doig showed old-fashioned embarrassment, or perhaps fear of patrolling police, and tried to drag him upright. Delaney had, however, in a strange self-aware way, lost two-thirds of his consciousness and the control of his limbs.

  55

  By now, on the strength of his ill-starred elevation to the top of the game, Delaney had a telephone in his flat. Gina must have expected as much and got his number from information, because one afternoon she called him. When he heard her he flinched, fearing the tightness of her voice, being intimidated by the correctness with which she offered her sympathies over the matter of his suspension.

  As they went on talking, he felt an aggression growing in him. She should be saying, “Imagine what we could have done, as a team, with first-grade match fees! Imagine what a blow we could have dealt the mortgage!” It was unreasonable, Delaney felt, for her not to state that sort of natural regret.

  “You probably didn’t hear about this,” said Gina. “It wasn’t on television like poor Brian. A girl had a baby in the fitting room at Fossey’s. The one in Main Street. An ambulance man delivered it.” Delaney began to shiver. He could predict the news that was coming. “It was your friend,” said Gina without any edge, any weight on “friend.” “It was Danielle. We were all on the street watching—thought there’d been a shooting. I saw her carried out on a stretcher. One of those paramedics carried the baby.”

  Thanks were not the proper thing. It wasn’t right for him either to let the phone fall and rush to the district hospital. He asked her how her parents were. Cunning told him that that would quickly end the conversation. As it did. He hung the phone up and spent a little time trembling and distracted, forgetting where his car keys were. Danielle and his child were five minutes down the highway.

  The air was full of the sound of protesting babies. The new generation, Delaney thought, of wronged women and sidestepping five-eighths.

  He stopped at the desk by the maternity ward. Still, always, because of Greg’s training and his mother’s, he was an orderly young man. He could not discover her by bursting through doors. He wanted their reunion to be condoned by the hospital authorities.

  He asked for Danielle Kabbel. The woman at the desk tossed sheafs of paper, looking for Danielle’s name. This nurse was a pretty woman in perhaps her early thirties, working for the marital mortgage, the first webbings of exhaustion in the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t find a Kabbel.

  Delaney made a speech about how certain he was she was here, in Penrith District. Unless there were complications. (The idea struck him harder than it did the nurse.) “But she would have been admitted here,” said Delaney. “Two days ago.”

  The tired mother of two again denied there had been anyone named Kab
bel.

  “But she gave birth in Main Street, Penrith,” said Delaney. “It all happened very quickly.”

  “Oh, but you mean the Kowolsky child.”

  “No. The Kabbel child. Danielle Kabbel gave birth in Fossey’s in Main Street.”

  “No, not Kabbel. Kowolsky.”

  “That’s the Polish spelling of their name,” said Delaney with a cleverness he did not know he had. “I went to school with her and with her brothers. They grew up in Forth Street, Penrith.”

  These homely details captured the nurse. “That’s right. And they live in Kingswood now.”

  “Yes,” said Delaney. “But I don’t know the new address.”

  “Well, it’s that new townhouse setup, isn’t it?” said the nurse. “You know the one near the Toyota dealership.”

  “Oh yes,” said Delaney.

  “Are you the new five-eighth?”

  “That’s right,” said Delaney. “I grew up with the Kabbels—I mean the Kowolskys.”

  At least, along with all her fatigue and mortgage dedication, the woman knew what a good game of football was. She said, as if it were a service to a team humiliated since the late 1950s, year by year, “Well, you know the place. Those new townhouses down the highway. Turn left toward the railway line. The Gardens.” She referred to her notes of the recent obstetrical emergency. “Number seventeen. But she left within twenty-four hours, you know. A daughter—3.79 kilos. Tough girl. The brothers and the father wanted to get her home, you know. For once, I pity whoever was the father of the kid.”

  “Kowolsky,” said Delaney. He could not believe that a few vowels had defeated him. He muttered his thanks and went off toward the parking lot.

  The Gardens was one of those small villages of townhouses, well curbed and guttered, young trees standing along the pathways. By the time those trees were as large as the one Stanton cut down, Delaney computed, the place would be a slum. For the moment though it had a little style—brick, aluminum windows, shiplap carports. Its internal streets were in the form of a T, and anyone with a child—looking at it and remembering how fast people drove in some suburban streets—would consider it a safe place.