I didn’t know whether to stay or slip away quickly so Moose wouldn’t have to face up to the embarrassment of me having witnessed it all. But I just stood there in the end, until he came up to me and pretended to smile, the wind gone from his sails and his cocksure attitude trampled to dust.
‘Where ya gunna sleep?’ I asked, hoping he wouldn’t ask to stay at mine.
‘Probably round Ellie’s, ey.’
I knew this was a lie. Her old man would never allow it. Moose wasn’t going to ask to crash the night at mine, and for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to offer. I wanted to go home and have a hot shower and sleep in my warm bed under a roof where, in my family’s odd and terrible way, I was loved much more than Moose was loved in his home. I didn’t want to share it, and I didn’t want him in Unit Two with me bloodied and angry. But he wouldn’t have come even if I’d offered. He’d lied to save face about staying at Ellie’s, and he was too proud to show up on my mother’s door like a beggar. No, he would sleep the cold night in the grandstand at the footy oval. I knew. We both knew.
We walked back towards my house, Moose under the pretence of staying the night at Ellie’s. But when we rounded the corner at Pentridge and were cutting through the park out front the YMCA on Bell Street, Moose said he was going to wait for Ellie there. ‘She’s gunna come pick me up.’
I didn’t question it. We were fifty metres from the stadium, on the other side of the aquatic centre, and for the second time that night I was getting ready to leg it back to The Compound for that warm shower.
Looking at Moose, I peeled off my jumper. The sweat had dried after training.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘In case Ellie’s late or some shit.’
‘Nah, I’m right.’
‘Take it, Moose. Keep warm. I’ll be home in, like, two minutes.’
Reluctantly, he took the windcheater. His teeth were practically chattering, but he didn’t put it on right away. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
I had this sudden, odd compulsion to offer Moose more than the jumper. I wanted to offer him my body for warmth. But I didn’t know where this thought sprang from, and I quickly left it in the backwaters of my mind, where I’d left my night out with Will.
It was very dark in the park by then. A little bronze statue stood at one end, and the big British trees made it kind of spooky. I turned away from Moose, about to head for the bluestone lane behind the old public high school that connected all the streets back to my house. The school had been shut down for years and was a seamy sight of boarded-up windows, graffiti and the debris left by occasional squatters.
‘We could’ve died,’ Moose said, before I’d moved out of earshot.
I turned back to him. He was stone-faced yet still flushed with the fidgety adrenaline from the joyride and the beating.
‘But we didn’t,’ I said. ‘Who cares?’
I was certain that in our survival of Moose’s 140-kilometre-an-hour rampage through a suburban street, I’d been bestowed with proof of God’s protection over me, proof that He was watching always. God, or at least something, had always protected me, and He/it was what allowed me to go on, seamlessly, leading double, triple, maybe even quadruple lives split between the country and the city, between Coburg and Toorak, between rough and posh, drinking and violin-playing, horny perv and altar boy, sinner and saint, carer and wannabe murderer. He/it hadn’t let me die in the darkness of a country highway with my father drunk behind the wheel, after all, and I had come to believe that perhaps I was bulletproof. But this didn’t explain the fear that never went away … Ken, I thought. What Ken had done had broken me. But it hadn’t killed me. Not yet.
Moose was smiling at me beatifically as he slipped my jumper over his head. Despite the swelling on his face, he was back to being as smug in the knowledge of our survival as I was. ‘You’re fucken insane, Ford. Ya know?’ he said. ‘I reckon you’re crazier than me sometimes. And you’ve got everyone fooled, don’t ya?’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I reckon.’
‘Fucken violin cunt,’ he scoffed. ‘Not me, but. Ya don’t got me fooled.’
‘Take it easy, Moose,’ I said.
It was freezing and I practically ran to the lane.
Shit
When I entered the house, all the lights were off. There had been no message on my phone when I checked it walking back from the YMCA. And Mum hadn’t waited up for me, which I was thankful for, though together these facts were unusual. It wasn’t like her not to worry, and I’d well and truly overshot my expected time of arrival.
I took my shoes off in the laundry, took my footy boots out of my backpack and stepped briefly outside to leave them on the top step overnight, and then, back in the laundry, I peeled off the rest of my clothes, damp with cold sweat, sheets of freezing fabric. My naked skin was tacky and covered with goosebumps, and I walked quickly across the kitchen tiles and then through the living room and down the hall, desperate for the hot shower that awaited me at the end of the corridor.
In the pitch dark, as I walked down the passageway – there was not even the faintest light coming down the stairwell from where Mum lived upstairs, meaning that not even a bedside lamp was burning – my right foot went cold. The soft warmth of the carpet had been replaced, in an instant, with a thick moisture, a heaviness that caused me to assume that somehow this patch of carpet was waterlogged.
I continued down the hallway, hopping on one leg with my hand out against the plaster wall, all the way down to the bathroom, where I opened the door, stepped onto the pale blue tiles and switched on the light.
When I looked down, I knew immediately what it was, what had happened. There was no denying or second-guessing it. My right foot had trod in a pile of – not waterlogged carpet – shit. The shit had filled the spaces between my toes and was beneath my toenails, too. Thick and tan-coloured. It wasn’t mine, we didn’t have a dog – it was my mother’s shit. An undeniable fact.
I sat on the toilet lid and scrubbed my foot with toilet paper, removing hunks of faeces from between my toes, like clumps of sticky dirt. Sticky dirt, I thought and not ‘mud’. When I’d gotten most of it out, I twisted the paper into a knot, creating a fine point with which to excavate the poo from my toenails. And in the ice-cold bathroom, as I looked at the shit, staring into the grey-brown matter, flecks of digested food visible still, the smell caught up to me and my ears burned as strongly as my cheeks, until my face was flushed red with seething anger, an anger I didn’t know had been living inside me all this time. The anxiety, the guilt, the panic, the sick trouble in my gut from Moose and the joyride and the violence I had witnessed on the lawn outside his house were all gone, subsumed by this mad, irrepressible anger.
I screamed inside the bathroom. Screamed so loudly I thought my throat would split. Screamed until a sharp, searing pain in my neck forced me to stop. My anger was born of humiliation. Defeat. Insult. All the humiliations and defeats and insults I’d accrued with time: the stupid chef’s hat, Queenie’s financial ownership of me, Noonie’s constant managing of my appearance, my father’s utter bullshit, and Ken, Ken’s very essence had reduced me to nothing.
I felt so terribly abused by this small incident that I couldn’t even conceive of how to soothe myself within the cold confines of that pale blue bathroom in which, over the years, I’d done so much of my secret crying. Secret tears there and in my room and by the creek and out by the dam and in that dark bedroom in Seymour. Always crying.
‘YOU FUCKEN STUPID CUNT!’ I screamed, exiting the bathroom. The doorhandle knocked against my elbow. Why did it have to do that? Why did it have to hit me while I was humiliated? I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t having some inanimate object having a dig at me. So, I slammed my fist into the door, leaving an indentation in the wood. My knuckles came away red and bleeding and I continued back down the hall to the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’VE JUST STEPPED IN YOUR SHIT! YOUR FUCKEN SHIT, FOR FUCK’S SAKE! YOU’RE SICK! DO YA HEAR ME, YA SICK BITCH!’
&nb
sp; I climbed the stairs quickly. I didn’t know what I would do when I reached my mother … murder her? I’d never lost it like this before, but after years of not screaming at all the adults in my life I’d been let loose. I would murder my mother and then Noonie and Pop, and then I would drive out to Shepparton and set the old house on fire. No, I would need to murder Craig and Dad before leaving the city, and after I’d set fire to the McCullen manor I would hunt down Ken, wherever he was, and settle the score for setting those demons under my bed and for all those rituals he’d taught me. I would murder him before the police dragnet closed in.
‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!’ I shouted, shoving Mum’s bedroom door open and flipping on the light.
But she wasn’t there. The bed was perfectly made. She made her bed every single morning before work, better than what any hotel maid would do. The bed was immaculate, a mound of pillows precisely arranged in the centre with a teddy bear lying to one side, the same plushie she’d owned since childhood. This wasn’t my mum’s room, it was my sister’s room, I acknowledged. And if she wasn’t in our unit then I’d need to go next door and fetch our father – Pop – because that, really, was the dynamic. And so, who the fuck was I? Just some cunt witness in all of this? Some bystander who’d gotten caught in the crossfire of a family that never properly formed?
It was eerie standing there. Were my grandparents even home? Had they abandoned me as I often feared and hoped they would? Maybe they’d followed Noonie’s grand plan and fucked off to Perth. I imagined myself riding the streets with Dougie forever. Perhaps there would be nothing beyond what I knew of the world in that moment, no change, no better life. Maybe that would’ve been freedom.
From my mother’s ensuite, I heard a creak. I took two steps over from the bed and slid the door across. In the bathtub, my mother was lying naked. In the light coming from the bedroom, I could see that her eyes were glistening, but not like she’d been crying. She looked groggy and disoriented and very far away, and she was staring at nothing, far beyond the walls of the room. She’d possibly been lying there for hours.
‘Mum?’ I asked in a whisper, edging closer to her.
There was no water in the tub. It seemed there’d never been.None was collected by the drain as it normally did, and Mum’s skin was not wrinkled from lying in a bath too long. Her hair was dry. Her bush was dry, too, and long streaks of shit ran down her thighs. Some of it had been pressed onto the white tub.
‘Mum? Are you awright?’
I wanted to cry when she didn’t answer, when she just looked beyond me.
I took a towel from the rack and told her to lift up her leg. It was impossible to tell if she heard me. I lifted her ankle all the same and wiped her legs down. I thought of how she used to wipe the mud and grass off my shins on Saturdays, before Dad came to take me away.
I found her dressing-gown and wrapped her in it, and with effort got her out of the tub and onto her bed, where she flopped down and lay as a lifeless fleshy mound.
I went next door to get Pop, after putting back on my cold training gear in the laundry. He and Noonie were on the couch watching telly and looked as though they were about ready for bed. Still, Pop was in his suit and drinking a port. But he looked tired.
‘Ya need to take Mum to the hospital,’ I said to Pop.
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘I don’t know, but you need to take her. Tonight. Trust me.Please.’
‘If you’d just explain properly, Ford,’ said Noonie, ‘then we could help.’
‘Jesus Christ. Okay. Fine. She shat herself and then I found her in the bath all glassy-eyed and she’s not responding to anything I say. It’s like she’s on drugs or something.’
‘Your mother doesn’t take drugs. Don’t be silly,’ said Noonie.
‘I didn’t say she did. I said it’s like she has.’
‘Well, she is entering menopause, Ford,’ Noonie continued.
‘Sometimes women can be a little incontinent when —’
‘Can you please just take her to hospital or call an ambulance or something? Please. I think she needs to be under, like, observation or whatever.’
I could tell Pop was listening, but Noonie was having none of it. She didn’t want an ambulance coming over – the neighbours would notice.
‘And tell them what?’ she asked. ‘That Deidre had an accident? We don’t rush toddlers off to the Emergency Room for such reasons, I don’t see how —’
‘Quiet, woman! Awright, Ford. I’ll come next door and have a look.’ Pop put down his glass of port and stood up from the couch. An old episode of Midsomer Murders was playing quietly on the telly.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Cheers.’
After Pop and Mum left for the hospital, I went back into Unit Two and removed my training gear for the second time. And then I had my shower. My glorious, piping-hot shower. My skin turned bright pink and the haze of steam filled the bathroom, covering the mirror. If I lathered my foot in soap once, I must have lathered it a thousand times beneath that forceful stream of scalding water.
FIVE
Anger Management
H is for Hospital … and Hanks
That Saturday morning Pop woke me up to go swimming over at the YMCA. It seemed even earlier than usual, but he had a lot on his mind and I got the sense he hadn’t slept the past few nights.
As we hopped over the dog turds in the lane, he started in with the story. ‘Your mother’s strong, ya know, Ford,’ he said.
‘Ah-huh.’
‘Ya know, right after your father left, she got called into court …’
Pop went on. I wasn’t in the mood. My speedos were really cutting into my thigh, in that little pocket between my balls and my leg, and I had to keep yanking them down beneath my trackies. I was tired and the birds weren’t even up yet and I just wanted to get hit by that warm chlorine waft on the pool deck before slipping into the cold blue water, where my mind could drift off once more.
After our swim, and after Noonie had cooked us some eggs, Pop and I drove out to collect Mum from the hospital.
In the morning light, the leaves on the plane trees lining Royal Parade and Princes Park were sparkling, and the city appeared more expansive to me than ever before. There were always people in cars and on bikes and running around the track, and their lives were likely filled with family and relationships and confusions and memories of strange moments. But I couldn’t imagine they were anything like mine.
We parked underground and got out of the car. I could recall only a handful of trips to the hospital; except for when I’d broken my arm, these trips had been to visit my paediatrician Dr Smythe. I had fond memories of playing with wooden blocks and those figurines that collapse when you keep your finger on the button underneath, sagging into a pile of limbs before you release the button, when they go back up again to normal.
But as Pop and I walked through the carpark toward the lifts, I reminded myself that I hadn’t come to see my old paediatrician, and, as Pop reached out to press the elevator button, his shirt collar moving slightly so I could better identify the clot of blue varicose veins on his neck – a sight that, for the first time, offered little comfort to me – I wanted nothing more than to stay in the subterranean hideaway of the carpark. I liked it there. I liked the way tyres screeched whenever they turned over the smooth concrete. And I liked that concrete very much. The concrete was perfect, I thought – buffed and shiny and painted with thick yellow lines so people didn’t crash their cars into one another. It stood for order. The doctors had their parks, and the visitors had theirs, and the parks nearest the lifts were assigned to people who couldn’t walk very far. Everything was in its right place, all in neat, uniform rows.
When we arrived in her room, Mum looked strange. Different somehow. Muted.
‘Hi,’ I said, when she made eye contact with me.
She was sitting on the end of the bed, fully dressed, waiting to be released. She did not say hello back but only smiled,
dimly, and I felt terribly embarrassed for the reasons she was here, for having found her in the tub, for our shared past that I no longer wished to acknowledge. How many times had I seen my mother seated at the edge of an unfamiliar bed? All those times along the coast when I was a boy, waking up in motel rooms and wishing the trip would end. Hoping she tired of playing lovers or siblings or whatever we were.
Soon a nurse entered the room and Mum was discharged, and Pop and I walked with her back down to the car. I didn’t speak. I trailed behind them, listening to Pop inform Mum about who was in and out of Carlton’s starting line-up on Sunday against Geelong. When people had nothing to say, they talked about football. Few people had anything to say, it seemed, or couldn’t find another means by which to bridge the spaces between them.
When we got home, Noonie was doing her best to pretend that everything was normal. She’d arranged it so we’d spend the weekend together as a family and had gotten me to call Dad and cancel any plans I might’ve had with him. I’d found his number in Mum’s address book in the study and told him I wouldn’t be coming round for Saturday night dinner because of a family thing. He hadn’t asked questions, only made some vague remark about Craig missing me, which sounded like bullshit.
Noonie wanted me to spend time with Mum, believing this would somehow resolve the issue she was having. But I lived with Mum, and more time alone together in Unit Two wasn’t going to change anything. Still, Noonie was insistent on this; she’d gotten it in her head that we needed to refortify ourselves as a microcosm. So, we were going to attend Mass together that night and then on Sunday we would sit together and watch the footy and eat sausages. And then Mum was going to take a few weeks’ leave from work.
After a cuppa, Mum and I went back to Unit Two. She was still muted and vague, and I asked what she felt like doing, if maybe she wanted to watch a movie. She nodded.
Everything in its right place Page 13
