I took another look around the room. The decor was always changing. I tried to spot what was different since last time. The crystal dining set? The bureau beyond the kitchen table? The kitchen table?
Craig handed me the Scotch-and-cola across the marble counter. I took it and a few Pringles from the ramekin, then washed them down with a large mouthful of the drink as I crossed the lounge, following him out onto the balcony.
Joel was wearing a giant hoodie with a skating logo and baggy jeans, the heels worn thin and fraying under his old Globes. When he saw me, he grinned. ‘Hey,’ he said, cigarette smoke streaming from his nose.
I gave him a knowing wink. ‘Can I bum one of those?’
Dad picked up the packet of Winfields sitting open on the little table between the two deckchairs he and Joel occupied, and held it out to me. I drew one out, pulling it up by its orange-brown butt. Joel passed me a light, and I sparked it and drew the flame into the thin roll of tightly packed tobacco and watched the end of the cigarette glow before turning to ash.
‘So, what’s been happening with you?’ I asked him, exhaling, satisfied. The smoke and the Scotch set my body right after a gruelling game in Fawkner that afternoon. My toes curled in my boots with delight, and I forgot the pain in my side that had been dogging me since a hard tackle in the third quarter.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘You? Still playing that violin?’ Joel was grinning mischievously, as I’d seen him do so many times before. It was his great pleasure to taunt me, and mine to receive it.
*
Joel and I had been forced together as odd step-siblings when I was ten and he was thirteen, though I’d never thought of it in such terms when we were kids. I’d grown to like Joel over the years. A lot. He had a way of talking that cut clear through the shit we seemed immersed in, and I may have even come to love him as a brother in my own way. I dreamed frequently of becoming filthy rich and giving half my money to Joel, and some to his brothers, Dan and Malcolm, and their mother. Is that love? I wanted for them to ascend to a station above the one Craig and fate had dealt them. Because of my father, I felt complicit in their family’s betrayal and subsequent circumstances. Guilt. Always guilt. It had such long fingers, capable of stretching far into the deepest crevices of my mind.
When I was thirteen, after Dad and Craig had moved to Southbank, Joel and I would roll our eyes at each other whenever new friends of our fathers were introduced to us at social gatherings. These partnered friends were always introduced as ‘housemates’. Who did they think this would fool? We’d retire to our shared room to laugh about it afterwards and to continue whatever little project we were working on. We enjoyed affixing garbage bags to toy soldiers and parachuting them down the thirty-storey stairwell of the apartment building, then spitting thick globules after them, missiles that would chase the paratroopers to the bottom.
‘“Housemates”?’ Joel laughed. ‘You know what they really do, right?’
‘I think,’ I said. ‘My grandad says it’s called buggery.’
Pop had taught me what the word ‘bugger’, which he used a lot, really meant: stuff between men, like the stuff that happened between a man and a woman.
‘Yeah, but do you even know what that is?’ Joel pestered.
‘I think so.’
‘You do not.’
‘I do! It means stuff. Like between men.’
‘Okay. What stuffthen?’
‘…’
‘You don’t know, because I’m gunna tell you now, and you’re gunna pull that face you get. Ya get stiffies, right?’
‘…’
‘You do, because I’ve seen you in the morning.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘So, anyway, they take their stiffies and they shove ’em up each other’s arse.’
‘…’
‘See! Knew you’d pull that face!’
Joel and I were bonded not only by fate, but also by the extreme boredom we shared in during weekends spent driving out to nurseries, swap meets and craft markets in the bush. It was little wonder that by the time Joel was fifteen, he’d begun a pattern of absconding in the middle of the night. The first place Craig and Dad lived in together, directly after his years in Seymour, was a ground-floor flat in the burbs (before Queenie’s real estate money started streaming in), and Joel would disappear out the window.
‘Where are you off to?’ I asked one night, after waking up in the dark to find Joel dressed and tampering with the window.
‘Home,’ he said.
‘How are you gunna get there, though?’
‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Walk, I guess.’
I understood. I’d seen their mum from the back of Craig’s car when we’d gone to pick Joel up one Saturday. She was a small lady. She looked blindsided and too thin. But tough, too. She looked like she gave good hugs. I wanted to be brave like Joel and fuck off.
‘Do you wanna come with me?’ he asked.
‘Yeah?’ I said, surprised and excited.
But Joel looked scared. He must have been worried about how he would get me home safe to my mum. I understood that, too – there were things you wanted to do but just couldn’t, no matter how much goodwill you had, no matter how much you desired it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but it’s okay. I’ll get home tomorrow afternoon anyway. Don’t worry. I won’t give anything away in the morning.’
I stood by and watched Joel climb out, and I kept watching until he’d vanished into the surrounding streets.
Why can’t I bring myself to go out the window too? I’d wondered.
I’d often thought this on those summer nights in Shepparton, lying on the fold-out. The billowing lace curtains were always teasing me. In my mind, those curtains formed a jury. All the windows I’d not had the courage to pass through did. The verdict: Coward!
*
Sometime after seven, after several rounds of drinks, Joel, Craig, my father and I retired into the apartment for dinner.
Dad had gone to the trouble of putting together an Italian-inspired feast from the South Melbourne market. Nothing he had to cook from scratch: antipasto and bread and pasta and pasta sauce. It was better than Ken’s rissoles, and certainly better than the time Dad had force-fed me salt-reduced Heinz spaghetti from a tin, cold, when he realised he’d gotten too pissed to organise dinner one Seymour weekend. That experience had done me in for tinned spaghetti forever – it was like slimy white worms coated in blood-red snot.
Dinner was always a fiasco with Joel, regardless of what we were eating. I think Dad had it in his head that life in Southbank was to be more upmarket though, and he’d developed the habit of turning part-tutor at the dining table.
Joel, who didn’t like anything except chicken parmas and chips, looked frightened by the oily artichoke quarters and olives and sun-dried tomatoes in the centre of the table. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, poking a segment of off-white artichoke with his fork.
‘Artichoke,’ said Dad.
‘Yeah. But, what’s that?’
Dad looked confused, embarrassed, annoyed.
‘It’s veggies,’ I said. ‘It hardly tastes like anything. It’s just pickled – err, I think – and covered in oil to preserve it, I think. And they’re tomatoes,’ I added, pointing at the sun-dried tomatoes. ‘They’re sweet and taste a bit like that sauce on a parma. Ya know, under the cheese. And then the olives are, like, really bitter and probably have pips, so don’t bite into ’em.’
I wanted the discussion over before it could get started. Joel would go on asking questions, sceptical, as if our fathers might be conspiring to poison him. And our fathers would relish the opportunity to educate the uncouth Joel, whom they sometimes treated like a specimen.
‘Cheers,’ said Joel, skewering a tomato with his fork and taking the most exaggeratedly small nibble from its edge. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, a second later. ‘It’s sweet, you’re right.’
I didn’t know how he could taste it given the sample size, but he popped
the rest into his mouth nonetheless and began to chew.
Why the fuck do I know the names and flavours of everything on the table? I often felt that, generally, I knew far too much. But I never asked questions, not the way Joel did. I couldn’t stand the vulnerability of them. At school, I’d once been informed by a teacher that I needed to ask more questions, any questions at all, because, for one, that would apparently demonstrate my ‘engagement’. The teacher must’ve assumed I had many questions to ask. In a fit of unspeakable anger, I’d retorted, ‘Questions are for people who can’t figure the answers out for themselves. And I’ll never be one of those people.’
But why? I wondered then, sitting at the table as my father brought out a dish from the kitchen. The plate was loaded with bruschetta: thick slices of crusty white bread covered in tomatoes and basil leaves and salt and a thin drizzle of olive oil. Why do I hate questions and the people who ask them?
‘What’s that?’ Joel asked again, beginning to parrot himself. ‘Brus-keta,’ my father said, exaggerating the pronunciation for maximum impact.
‘What?’ Craig guffawed.
‘Brus-ket-a,’ Dad intoned.
Christ, I thought.
‘That’s bullshit,’ said Craig. He was getting drunk. ‘You just say bru-sheta. That’s how ya say it, isn’t it, Ford?’
I shrugged. ‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘Swearing,’ said Dad.
‘What? You’ve never pulled me up for that before.’
‘Well, maybe I should.’
‘And maybe you should stop pretending you’re from fucken Tuscany,’ I said.
That got Craig laughing. I felt kind of bad.
‘It’s pronounced, when pronounced properly,’ Dad said, ‘and I’ll admit it is not often pronounced correctly in this country – but, technically, it is pronounced brus-ket-a.’
‘And no one says it that way,’ said Craig. ‘And if no one says it that way, then how’s it proper?’
My father lowered his head into his hands and raked his fingers through the thinning crop of brown follicles.
This bruschetta bullshit could go on all night. What wasn’t being talked about, what could not be addressed, was the fact that Joel was out on remand. He’d gotten done for armed robbery, when he and a mate had stuck up a convenience store with a knife, because his marijuana habit was so extraordinarily bad that he’d bottomed out of high school and spent part of the previous year living on the street – smoking billies, hanging round skate parks after dark, bombing trains and shoplifting. But thankfully Dad and Craig were there to teach him the difference between fettucine and linguine, and the correct pronunciation of bruschetta. Christ knows where he’d have been otherwise. The problem for Joel was that his life reflected back onto his father something that Craig was incapable of confronting,something that neither of our fathers wanted to know: there was collateral damage; there were sons left rudderless.
As always, I said nothing. I ate. And I drank. And I drank a fair bit more than I ate, which people had been letting me get away with more and more, something I was tremendously thankful for.
‘Can I get another?’ I asked, lifting my empty glass to Dad.
‘Of course, Mr Motor. Help yourself.’
If we were on the same page about anything, it was that a stiff drink could remedy any situation. I got up and poured another Scotch, a double.
*
Pop hadn’t really set me straight with his definition of ‘bugger’. However, where it concerned Joel Downing, he’d been less ambiguous.
During the year when Joel began absconding from Dad and Craig’s home, I’d come to learn that he attended a TAFE. I wasn’t attending St Anthony’s yet, I was twelve, and I didn’t really know what a TAFE was – but I had a sneaking suspicion, from the way I’d overheard it discussed by Craig, that it wasn’t such a prestigious thing and, as a result, I’d been led to believe that Joel wasn’t as academically inclined as I was, that a stigma was associated with his schooling.
When I asked my grandfather what a TAFE was – was it bad? – he sighed and said, ‘Usually the kinds of kids that go there don’t have lots of options.’
‘Whaddaya mean?’
‘Well, their lives aren’t always great … not necessarily, though.Look, it’s just, it’s just not very good.’ He paused, before adding, ‘But having a fucken father that walks out on you isn’t gunna help anybody’s chances in the world.’
‘Do ya reckon Joel doesn’t have a future?’ I asked, scared.
‘It probably won’t be as bright as yours. No.’
It was so blunt. This truth. About a person. Their future.About a boy.
Pop and I were having this discussion in the shed, and I remained composed as I walked into Unit Two under the pretence of mixing a glass of cordial for myself. Instead, I ran off to sob into my pillow. There was more to be scared of in life than your mortality. And I felt guilt, too, because I hadn’t asked for my privileges and it wasn’t right that some people didn’t have them.
I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was worse than finding out about Santa.
I had already grasped that Joel was what people called a ‘fuck-up’, which is partly what had prompted my question about TAFE. I’d known in my guts what Pop’s answer would be. I’d pieced it together: Joel’s threadbare clothes, their reek of marijuana, and how he wasn’t able to pronounce or spell the tricky words I could. I was a great speller, but still, he had three years on me and should’ve been wise to February’s r.
Despite the problems inside The Compound, everyone there was protecting me from getting lost in a society that, despite its espousals of egalitarian bliss, was relentlessly unforgiving. It chewed up and spat out anybody who strayed, even slightly, from a straight and narrow path. I was crying because I was coming to the realisation that you could – and people did – look at a child and predict their future. I didn’t want to be part of a world like that.
Literal Wankers
Will was waiting for me by the steps outside Flinders Street Station, when I crossed the river over the St Kilda Road Bridge. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I had dinner with my father. Lost track of time.’ I lit up one of the half-dozen Winfields I’d pilfered from Dad, the smokes sitting snuggly in the top pocket of my flannelette shirt. If I looked down on them, they resembled a panpipe.
I took a long drag as I observed the wide, anxious grin spreading across Will’s face. That face made me feel good inside; I was a leader of men. Will was too scared to get a fake ID, but his mum had given him lots of money to go out ‘to the movies and dinner after’, and so we’d agreed to trade my gumption and guile for his financial backing.
I led us over to Bourke Street, then up past Allans Music and JB Hi-Fi to Market Lane. Before we rounded the corner, Will touched my wrist. ‘Are you sure we won’t get busted?’
I wanted him to touch my wrist again.
‘We either get in or we don’t. There’s no “busted”.’ I laughed, pleased that his nervous face would look to mine for reassurance. ‘Seriously, there’s nothing to worry about, man. What’s the worst that can even happen? We get knocked back, big deal. You’ve gotta stop stressing out. We’re gunna get pissed and have fun.’ I strode down the lane and up to the bouncer outside Ding Dongs.
‘ID,’ he commanded.
‘Oh, yeah. Sorry, mate.’ My little act was that I was surprised to be asked and then had to pat my jeans to locate my wallet. I fished out the ID and handed it to the bouncer.
He turned it over, bored, before handing it back. ‘Yours, too,’ he told Will.
Will took out his wallet and began searching through the compartments like someone sure to find what they were looking for. Then he furrowed his brow. ‘Sorry,’ he said, looking to me.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t have it on ya,’ I said, laughing as I lit up another smoke. The panpipe only had four notes left. ‘Oh, Will, mate, not again.’ I wrapped him up by
the shoulder. Turning to the bouncer, I said, ‘This is my cousin. He’s down from Brissie. Can ya believe, he did this same thing last night? You clumsy fucker.’ I laughed again.
‘Well, sorry boys, but ya can’t come in without ID.’ The bouncer stared at the two of us, but he wasn’t interested in his job.
Guile, I reminded myself. Gumption and guile.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘We don’t intend to stay here. In fact, we’re meeting our mates in an hour – that’s just two drinks and then we’ll be on our way. But I promised Will I’d show him this place before he went back to Queensland. Like, look, I know you don’t have to do it, but I’d really appreciate it, ya know. Two drinks and we’ll be out your hair.’
The bouncer thought about it, probably trying to judge our ages. According to my ID I was twenty-two, and Will looked older than me. He’d attempted to grow his wisps of stubble into a goatee, and his cheeks were defined and accentuated under the streetlamp. He looked comfortable in his old Iron Maiden t-shirt and cracked leather jacket.
I said, ‘Just two beers. We’ll be back down here at 9.30. I just wanna show Will the bar. He’s only here for the week. I can vouch for him. His ID’s back at the hotel. We had to take it out to fill out those forms for the hire car.’
The key to lying, I’d discovered, was pretending there was nothing at stake. When I bullshitted, I got into character. Only someone who wasn’t supposed to be where I wanted to go would stoop to pleading, and so I never pleaded. I just told a story.
The bouncer rolled his eyes, glancing over his shoulder and up the staircase that led to Ding Dongs. ‘Ya better be back here by 9.30, or I’m coming up there looking for youse.’
‘Trust us, 9.30. Thanks, mate.’
I walked past the bouncer with Will trailing behind. I was showing cousin William the rock’n’roll bar where I’d promised to take him on his visit to Melbourne. I was a good cousin. I would’ve been a fucking excellent brother, I thought. I remembered sliding around the streets in Steven’s Skyline earlier in the week. I wished he was my brother, not Moose’s.
Everything in its right place Page 11
