In the living room, Queenie had been nice enough to make up the fold-out for me. The vast room had grown cold after the heat of the day, and I drew the French doors closed, sealing myself off from the rest of the house, and flicked on the lamp. In front of the fireplace a bronze screen was set in place, and a country landscape, two horses in the foreground, was embossed in the metal. I ran my fingers across the horses’ manes. They were freezing as they stood there in the goldfields, set in their strong poses for all time.
I climbed into bed and flicked off the lamp and lay there in the dark, very drunk and very tired, and too far from my home. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but feel some intrinsic affinity with my father. It was in this fold-out, for all the years he’d lived under Queenie’s roof, that he’d slept each night of his childhood and adolescence, never given proper quarters, never given his own room. Every night, he’d be forced to wait until each member of the household was finished utilising the grand lounge room before he could make up the bed – waiting patient and frustrated, surely, for his parents and aunt and grandmother to be finished with their TV programming or their knitting.
As I rolled onto my side, my bare shoulders grazed the itchy maroon fabric of the couch, etched with fine swirls of feathers and tree branches, reminding me of the pattern in Noonie and Pop’s technicolour carpet.
Every one of my movements caused a creak. Just by rolling over on the couch, I sent a vibration through the floor that rattled the cabinet on the far side of the lounge and the accumulated heirlooms within. You had to get pissed to sleep in this room, because you had to drink yourself into a rigor mortis-like state in order not to move, and numbing yourself meant, too, that you wouldn’t need a wank to get to sleep. Christ knows what kind of noise you’d make if you started that up …
But there was another reason to drink to survive the night: the photographs, the dozens of them. All of the spectral figure that haunted the old place: Alexander McCullen, baby Alex.
The photos of baby Alex – which took pride of place on the mantelpiece and on the cabinets and on the television set – were black and white. They depicted Callum and Queenie’s much-treasured, deceased baby boy in an array of poses: in one holding a bassinet on the front lawn, in another propped up on a photographer’s dais. Lying in that creepy and vacuous space, I watched as the haunting stills were illuminated by the road trains travelling around the outskirts of Shepparton on the highway. Their headlights sliced through the white lace curtains that billowed and danced before the open windows.
The circumstances that had brought my father into that house and the conditions under which he’d grown up there had shaped every aspect of his mind and spirit. He was always the adopted son, Robert. Most strange was the odd coincidence of his and Alex’s name. Before my father was Robert, he too was Alexander, and in the aftermath of their loss Queenie and Callum had likely been drawn in by Dad’s original first name in choosing a replacement for their son. But while it may have first drawn them to him, it had soon repelled them. Possibly considering it a bad omen, they made a change.
Thinking of this, I realised I would never get to sleep. This place is a shrine, I thought. I’m trying to sleep in a fucking tomb. I flicked the lamp back on and got out of bed and turned the photos to face the walls. Down the corridor I could hear my grandmother pissing into a bedpan; the sound of her urine hitting the porcelain bowl was followed closely by a coughing fit. Getting back into bed, I put my discman headset over my ears and blasted Tool into my head. I imagined setting the old house aflame. I was entertained by visions of the elderly women melting in their bedsits, and of my father running naked, his hairy back on fire until he dropped dead on the back lawn beneath the Hills hoist, a smoking, charred carcass. These thoughts of death and destruction – the end of the McCullens – eased my mind into a meditative state.
I’d carried these secret resentments everywhere I went, ever since I could remember. It was Queenie I hated most. It was Queenie whom I’d deemed the architect of all this misery, and it was her naming of the main road through the property development that best demonstrated how past traumas, when clung to, when one is incapable of letting them go, could go on resonating into the future, all the way along Robert-Alexander Drive.
My father had spent his life existing in the wake of loss. And now, because he’d left, so did I.
Somehow Dad got up before me. I could hear him in the kitchen talking to Queenie over the ABC news coming through the wireless. I’d never seen him nursing a hangover before.
I rolled out of bed and pulled on my jeans and t-shirt. It took me a moment standing in the hallway to set my mind to go through to the hot kitchen. When I walked out across the lino, the soles of my feet sticking like suction cups, I knew what would follow.
‘Good morning,’ Queenie said. She wore an old candlewick dressing-gown. ‘Would you take this over to Glenda? You should say hello to the kids.’ She was handing me a folded copy of the local newspaper. I looked down at her feet; even her soft red slippers had slits in the sides for her bunions.
‘Sure,’ I said, nodding as the paper was pressed into my hand.
I ran it over to the neighbours’ house a kilometre down the road. The girls had grown up and moved out, but Glenda was still there with her husband Francis, who never moved from the couch in the front room.
Glenda was all smiles to see me, and asked after my new school and after Dad. I didn’t want to talk. Sweat was soaking into my jeans. When I was about ten years old I’d watched Glenda drown a litter of kittens in Queenie’s washroom, where the stone troughs were as smooth as porcelain on the inside, buffed shiny from decades of water erosion. She’d come round that day to gather up the cats that had run feral off her property, and ever since I could always picture their tiny paws with claws scratching against the smooth stone under all that cold water. Glenda’s daughters never could have pets after that; some lesson about responsibility, I recall. Whenever I looked at her face, I saw sad little animals – then I thought of all those yabbies I’d caught, dead in the kiddie pool under the sun. Things died out here.
‘Give my best to Kirsten and Rach,’ I said, turning to walk the kilometre back.
It was me and Dad’s last day, and all I could think about were the weeks in the city ahead of me, riding my bike round with Dougie and trying out for the footy team and maybe catching up for a drink with Will. But the drive back would feel slow, so I steeled myself, taking my time walking through the cleared blocks of land.
I remembered watching all those trees get chopped down, the way the air was filled with the sound of chainsaws and splitting wood. When the orchard had been felled there was flat brown as far as the eye could see, and before long the mulch was writhing with cicadas whose wispy husks drifted across the earth, caught by the random gusts of dusty wind that whipped over the plains. There was something beautiful about the land being cleared. Something painful and ominous, too.
Before Dad and I left, we drove out with Queenie for the obligatory cemetery visit.
The graveyard was at the edge of town, and it wasn’t a nice one, not like those you passed on the roads in the goldfields, around Macedon way, green and quaint and peaceful-looking. The one outside Shepp was too large, and it looked crowded and angry; you could imagine the ghosts getting up in the dead of night and shouting at a neighbour to keep the fucking noise down. Not my scene, not for dead me anyhow. And it was always dry and dusty – like all of Shepp – wheat-coloured and drab, land that time had forgotten.
Dad pulled the maroon Mercedes up to the verge beside a row of graves, and we got out. Queenie insisted on driving the new car to visit Callum – it was the one he’d chosen, so maybe she figured he’d notice. We ambled up the rise between the gravestones to where all the McCullen plots were laid out. I didn’t know those people. My family? No, no, no. Dad’s adoption lent a cruel legitimacy to my protests – I wasn’t related by blood, I reminded myself constantly.
As we stood over Callum�
��s grave, Queenie made some comment to the effect that her dead husband would’ve gotten a real thrill out of the way life was going for us all. But I found it hard to buy. The man I’d known seemed like the type of bloke to pull the thrill out of a decent lay. I made a nodding motion as I read the inscription: Dearly beloved husband of … Cherished father to … The same thing they all said. A contextless footy score between two bush league amateur teams would’ve been of more significance: Bunella 67 – Swan Hill 19.
After a minute, Queenie walked back from the tombstone to the Merc. She sat in the passenger seat with her door open, watching as Dad plucked the weeds around his father’s grave before wiping down the marble top with a wet rag. I stood by, useless, my hands in my pockets, and looked out past the graves and the car to the bushland, dry and foreboding.
When Dad was finished, we hopped back into the car. ‘
Wasn’t it good to see your grandfather, Ford?’ Queenie asked. ‘The grave looks lovely, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It looks great.’
My grandfather? I didn’t think so. My plot was waiting for me back in Fawkner, right beside the spot where my real granddad would be buried. There was nothing out here for me.
FOUR
Footy and Complications
‘The ocean is full of subterranean monsters, Lieutenant, and I wanna blow ’em all to hell!’
It was nearing the end of the school break when Coburg consolidated their roster for the upcoming season. Moose and Dougie had been pestering me to try out, and Steven had even gotten my number from Moose and given me a call, saying he’d put in a good word for me. I hadn’t played since I’d broken my arm, and I knew there wasn’t a lot of room for newbies, not after they’d won a premiership the year before. But after Steven’s call I had no choice. Fortunately for me, a back pocket had sprained his ankle so they were looking for a replacement fit enough to get through the preseason matches.
I showed up at the ground, introduced myself to the coach and fell in line for the next couple hours of relentless warm-ups and drills and scrimmages. It became apparent that no one in the playing group wanted me there, and even Dougie and Moose were pretty standoffish. But that was to be expected of tryouts, when everyone was angling to make the cut.
By the end of training I was covered in sweat – it streamed in a continuous wave down my face – and my arms were covered in red welts that would eventually turn blue. I knew my body would be tender lying in bed that night. I knew it would ache getting out of bed the next morning, and the first shower would rain like bullets. But I liked all of this, the feeling of being inside a body. I could sense my skin. Everything was heightened as my heart rate began to slow, and the coach’s voice became clearer with each word. I liked playing sport in the same way I liked drinking and taking drugs – I liked breaking myself down. And I felt terrifically broken standing on the grass in the centre of the oval, while the coach reminded us of the training schedule and the likely match-ups for the preseason games ahead.
I didn’t know whether I’d made the team yet. A couple of the older boys tried to shut me out of the huddle, but I pushed in between their bodies like I was a part of the group, battling for even this small piece of inclusion. The seesaw of conflict put a smile on my face. It’s how it went – you were hated until you weren’t, and I was fine with this.
Some captain-material type made a quick speech, and the huddle broke. Training was over.
When the boys went to the benches to cut the tape off their ankles and pack their bags, the coach took me by the elbow and led me toward the goalposts at the far end of the ground, out of earshot. ‘So, ya think ya can play here?’
‘I don’t see why not. Why? I mean, what do you think?’
‘We liked what we saw from you today. The boy who’s out, Tim, his ankle’s stuffed, won’t be able to come back into the line-up until, aww, at least four weeks into the real season. And then we don’t know what we’re in for …’
‘Yeah. Okay. Well …’
‘Things get a lot harder. The matches are tough. We’re gunna be in a very competitive division this year. Ya need to be assertive like ya were today. No fucken about. Just hard, okay? Awright?’
‘Yeah. Of course. I just play hard, ya know. That’s all I’ve got. I mean …’ I thought about what I was saying, figured I’d continue, ‘I mean, I really don’t like fucken losing, ya know?’
‘Ha.’ The coach gave me a hearty slap on the arm. ‘We’ll see what you’ve got. First game’s in Altona. I won’t start ya, I can’t. We can’t lose that game. But you’ll play. You’ll get minutes. Just be ready when you’re up, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Yes. Of course. I don’t like losing. I don’t lose,’ I reminded him.
After training, Dougie, Moose and I were left hanging around the ground. I took off my boots and banged them on the concrete to get the blades of grass out.
‘What’re youse doing now?’ Moose wanted to know.
‘Nothing, man. You?’
‘Catch up with Ellie, I guess. But she doesn’t get off work for a bit.’
‘Yeah?’ Dougie said. ‘Ya know, my olds are away. Maybe have a drink or something?’
‘Sounds good.’
We changed into our dry clothes, no deodorant, and rode round to Doug’s place. His mum and Ned were away on holiday in Bali, and nobody was about. I rarely got a chance to step inside his joint these days, so it was a shock to see how all the antiques had built up to line the hallway.
‘Fucken hell, mate. It’s like a museum in here.’
‘Tell us about it. But I got something to show you guys.’
Moose and I left our bags inside the front door and followed Doug into his room, where he took out a bottle of spirits from the recesses of his closet. It was our stash from a couple days before I’d left for the bush for Christmas, but Moose was welcome to our grog. We followed Doug up the hall into the kitchen. He poured out the drinks and we slammed them, then he poured more.
‘So, what’re you showing us then?’ asked Moose.
‘Awright. Come with me.’
We took our drinks back down the hall to his parents’bedroom. Inside, there was a four-poster bed and too many pieces of furniture. Nothing matched. And everything was covered in a thin film of dust. Ned had lost it. He’d gone right over the edge with those antiques.
Moose and I watched as Dougie reached into his parents’ closet. Deep inside and hard to find – unless you were Doug and had spent an afternoon trawling through places you weren’t supposed to – was a small leather bag, and then a soft leather case, thin and about the length of a golf club.
‘What’s all this?’ I asked, as Dougie placed them on the wooden floor before us.
‘Loot, mate. Fucken loot.’ He unzipped the small bag first. Porno tape after porno tape was stashed inside, along with a couple magazines.
‘Jesus fucken Christ,’ said Moose. ‘Your old man’s a filthy bastard, ey.’ He picked one of the tapes off the ground; its cover displayed the jizz-spattered faces of smiling pubescent girls. Cum Addicts 3, it was called.
‘Fuck,’ I said, and picked up another.
Turned out old Ned had something of a fetish for BBC – big black cock – videos and black women, who featured heavily in the magazines. I’d known the guy was a fucking nut, but this …this was something else entirely. Something that didn’t quite gel with all those comments he made about ‘bloody nig-nogs’ and ‘bloody curries’ nicking everyone’s jobs. According to Ned, they didn’t know how to drive a ‘bloody taxi’ very well either.
‘I thought your old man was a racist,’ I said, trying to stir Dougie.
‘He’s a fucken hypocrite.’ It was the worst he’d said against the man. ‘Now, check this out.’ Dougie picked up the soft leather golf club case and proceeded to unzip it. Inside was no golf club, but a bolt-action rifle. Another antique, I presumed.
Moose and I stood awestruck, admiring its lethal power and beauty.
&nbs
p; ‘How long’s he had that?’ I asked.
‘Dunno.’
‘Is it loaded?’ asked Moose.
‘I dunno.’
I took the thing from Doug and turned it over before slinging it across my shoulder. Doing a quick about face, I goosestepped out the room and up the passageway, hearing Moose and Doug cackle like mad behind me. I’d always wanted to hold a gun. It was glorious.
‘Come back, ya cunt.’
When I was in the living room, with Moose and Doug behind me in the hallway, I spun around quick and brought the rifle up into firing position and trained my sights on them as I crouched behind the couch.
‘Ya fucken dickhead. Stop!’ shouted Dougie.
‘Freeze motherfuckers!’ I screamed, laughing as they cowered at the mouth of the passageway.
‘Stop! Don’t fucken do that, ya cunt! What if it’s loaded?’
‘Let’s find out,’ I suggested.
Moose looked to Doug, who seemed to be regretting what he’d unleashed.
‘Come on,’ said Moose. ‘Let Ford fire one off. What are ya, a pussy?’
In the backyard I aimed the rifle at the tiny pond by the back brick wall – I figured the bullet would lodge beneath the water – and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
‘It’s not loaded,’ I said. ‘Where are the bullets?’
‘Don’t you have to do something first? Pull that thing back.’Moose pointed at the bolt, which I retracted.
I aimed at the pond again and pulled the trigger, but again nothing happened. ‘Fuck. Where are the bullets? I wanna fire this thing.’
Everything in its right place Page 9
