Everything in its right place

by Tobias McCorkell

  We went upstairs and sat on the couch. Pop had scrubbed the ensuite the night he’d gotten back from the hospital, and it was all fresh smelling from him going overboard on the cleaner.

  ‘Whaddaya wanna watch?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘Whatever you feel like, Ford.’

  ‘Well, I mean, do you want action or comedy or … do you want a Tom Hanks?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe a Tom Hanks?’

  Mum loved Tom Hanks, and it seemed like the day for a Tom Hanks to me. His films made you a bit drowsy, but warm inside, too. I sifted through the pile of VHS tapes on the shelves under the telly. I didn’t feel like sitting through Turner & Hooch – I couldn’t deal with what happens to poor old Hooch at the end. ‘Why don’t we do You’ve Got Mail?’

  ‘Fine.’

  I popped the tape in the VCR. We’d seen You’ve Got Mail at the cinemas in Rosebud the summer it came out, and Mum loved it because it combined two of her favourite things: Tom Hanks and New York City.

  I wasn’t sure how many boys watched romance movies at the cinema with their mothers, but I had accompanied mine to a lot of them. But I didn’t mind too much. So long as the acting was decent and the plot was cheesy but satisfying and there was a good setting, then you had a pretty decent movie on your hands. And Mum wasn’t a captive of taste the way some people are – she liked most movies. For every rom-com we went to, we watched an action film; I probably saw Sean Bean getting murdered by the likes of Harrison Ford or Pierce Brosnan just as often as I saw Mr Hanks smooching Meg Ryan. Mum might’ve wanted some romance in her life, but she also seemingly wanted to fire off a large machine gun, too.

  However, movie watching was far from the extent of our relationship, and while I didn’t mind sitting on the couch with Mum after the hospital, I had to acknowledge that I was pretty burned out. The older I’d got, the emotional impositions her condition had necessitated or taken from me, the more shut down toward her I’d become. I was worried I would run out of sympathy entirely.

  It isn’t easy being counted on for companionship by a parent; it can be really exhausting. The stress of knowing your mother is alone can be like a mirror reflecting back a future you don’t want for yourself. I’d always taken her unhappiness personally, feeling I was obligated to correct it, just as Dad had been selected in order to rectify the absence of baby Alex inside that large weatherboard house at the front of the orchard.

  *

  For a while after Dad left, Mum and I had taken all our holidays and down time together. We would sometimes leave Melbourne for weeks, travelling to low-key destinations along the coast, or up to New South Wales. In these places we spent every second together – eating, going for walks, visiting attractions, swimming. And we slept together, too.

  Mum would ask for rooms with a double and a single bed, but nobody would sleep in the single. If we were given a twin single room, we would push the beds together, pull out the covers from the middle and tuck them in so we could lie comfortably together without the crack buffering one body from the other. In the mornings I would wake with my meagre erection pressed against my mother’s hip, and she would say nothing of the matter, neither to acknowledge it or reassure me that it was alright.

  I’d all but blocked out my shame and embarrassment over these encounters, and how our sleeping arrangements had continued inside The Compound far longer than they should – through wet dreams, through flickers of having used my mother’s hip for sexual gratification.

  But it was ordinary and justified, we convinced ourselves. Without this arrangement, I’d experienced night terrors that found me waking in my closet, screaming, thrashing against the coathangers, my cheeks slick with tears. I once woke up blocks from The Compound in the dead of night and in my pyjamas. Unless Mum and I were together, my head was a storm, and my objective was to flee.

  What tipped the balance inside me? There is a blackness I think of and in which I search to find an answer, whenever I think back to those weekends in Seymour. I am convinced, in part, that my mother knows an answer to this mystery and that this answer is the key to her unhappiness as well as my own. But she has never shared this answer with me. I believe that people know something about me that I do not know about myself.

  What tipped the balance inside me? My mother’s suffocating love. My father’s neglect.

  The Two Pillars of Worship

  That evening, Noonie, Pop, Mum and I walked over to Church. I blessed myself with water from the font and left my family to find their pew, taking off to join Father Vito and Thomas and John in the sacristy.

  ‘Ford, there you are!’ said Father, when I entered the small stone chamber.

  ‘Hello, Father,’ I said with a grin.

  The other boys were in their robes, and they laughed at my grin. At the back of the sacristy I opened a frail wardrobe that housed dozens of same robes and red cinches in many sizes, along with other vestments. It was an optimistic selection. Except for the occasional newbie who might join us for one of the big shows – either Christmas or Easter, the guilt gigs for lapsed Micks – only Thomas, John or I served Mass at our parish.

  After I got changed, John and I lit our candles and Thomas picked up the crucifix and Father Vito said a little blessing before we emerged from the sacristy. When we stepped out onto the tiled floor of the church, a bell was struck, and the congregation rose in silence as we weaved around the pews and led Father down the aisle, where we stopped before the altar and genuflected. Then us boys split off to one side of the altar and Father to the other.When he’d taken position behind the pulpit, everybody sat down, and Mass commenced.

  I took my seat and combed the crowd. The Jacketts were in attendance for a change, and Dougie, seated beside Ned, gave me a big wink before popping his tongue out a bunch of times in a grotesque imitation of cunnilingus. I stifled a snigger and winked back.

  Mass went by pretty quick. Soon, everyone was shaking hands and saying, ‘Peace be with you’, which I always found a bit culty. Thomas took my hand and squeezed Christ out of it, while looking me dead in the eye; I couldn’t match his grip and felt like my fingers could break. ‘Peace be with you, ranga,’ he whispered.

  ‘And peace be with you, cocksucker,’ I whispered back.

  John just stood by, trying not to laugh. Fortunately – or unfortunately, because the three of us were present – nobody got caught out by the tampered-with bells during communion, and the shenanigans were a light affair this time round.

  After Mass, Father Vito went outside to talk with parishioners. It was a nice night; the weather was even and the sky was clear. Thomas, John and I packed up, and while I was up at the altar putting out the candles, Dougie came over to say hello. ‘You look like such a wanker,’ he said.

  I laughed. Hitching up my robe, like it was a dress, and presenting myself, I said, ‘Wanna root?’

  He laughed. ‘Hey, ya hear about Moose?’

  ‘Nah. Why? What happened?’

  ‘Cunt got arrested,’ he whispered.

  ‘What? Really?’

  ‘Yeah, man. For real.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Got done for assault, I think.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s what I heard. Steven’s mad as fuck about it, apparently.Moose’s lost it, mate.’

  ‘Shit, man. That’s bad.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I wanted to ask after Ellie. I had the sudden, desperate urge to know if she was okay – I don’t know why. But I didn’t ask, not after Dougie had told me to watch it.

  ‘Anyway, nick us a bottle of wine, would ya?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’ll see.’

  When I’d been putting on my robe, I’d looked to see if Father had stocked up the vino, but he seemed to be running low so I wasn’t sure I could risk it.

  ‘Awright, man. Catch you at training Tuesday night,’ said Dougie.

  ‘Sure, man. See ya then.’

  ‘Sucks we got a
bye this weekend,’ he grumbled. ‘Later, dude.’

  When Dougie had cleared out, and I was putting the chalices in the sacristy cupboards and was about to change out of my robe, a hot sting whipped the back of my neck. ‘Ah! Shit!’ I turned round to see Thomas and John cacking themselves. They’d scooped up the wax left over from the candles and flicked it onto me. It was a common thing for us to do, and I began laughing as the wax seared the back of my neck.

  Later, my family and I walked over to Sydney Road for coffee.

  The Greek cake shops near the mall behind the footy ground,just round the corner from the Turk’s, were open late on weekends and full of families coming back from functions, dressed in suits and dresses, including the kids, the boys with gelled hair and fat Windsor knots in their spangly ties.

  The endless glass cabinets were flooded with light and displayed countless types of biscuits and cakes and sticky baklava, oozing in syrup and covered with crushed nuts. Pop and Mum always ate baklava, and Noonie would get a small crumbly biscuit with an almond flake set on top in its centre. I always got a little round cake with a thin layer of coffee icing in a spiral on top and custard in the middle.

  We sat together in a booth, drinking cappuccinos as we ate. It had been a long time since we’d passed a Saturday night in this way and, for a change, this didn’t seem like such a burden. It was nice. It seemed as if all the strangeness of the past few days could be forgotten. But I knew better than to count on it.

  On Sunday, Noonie had the snags under the grill when Mum and I came into Unit One to join her and Pop for the game.

  As a kid, I’d hated going to the footy. In fact, I generally hated football. Everything about it was pressure and tension, and it’d played a large role in the culture of our house. Football was central in how Mum was managed and in how we engaged with her after the divorce. It was her outlet and presented an opportunity for us to gather around in collective support. But Mum would internalise the pulsing violence that broiled away beneath the surface of each match, before spilling it all back out, purging herself of repressed anger in streams of venomous invectives, as she abused opposing clubs and screamed her lungs out for victory.

  It scared me to accompany my family to the games. I couldn’t stand watching Mum once she’d taken a seat in the grandstand, the way she rolled up the record tightly, wringing it until the paper tore and the ink stained her hands. And the way her hands were always clasping, always flushed red, strained, often squeezing my wrist or knee if the game was close, or slapping the seat in front of her for a dropped mark or missed goal.

  At those matches, I worried equally if Mum was finally going to snap and whether or not the Blues would win, because if Carlton could snare another game then sitting through Chinese dinner afterwards – always in the same restaurant on Rathdowne Street across the road from the commission flats, where we ate fried dim sims, black bean beef and roast pork with vegetables over special fried rice – would be so much more tolerable. Come on, Kouta, ya cunt. Kick another bloody goal, I’d think. We can’t lose. We can’t.

  In Unit One I trekked through the kitchen and across the technicolour carpet, giving Noonie a kiss on the cheek before joining Pop on the living-room couch.

  On the telly, Eddie Maguire was interviewing one of the Cats’ first-year players, some kid in a blue polo shirt with the club’s crest over the breast. Footy players always looked bored and never had much to say, and I wondered why people cared to pay them any attention when they weren’t on the field.

  ‘Fancy a beer?’ Pop asked the room.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Mum, who’d taken a seat in the living room too.

  Pop got up, took some beer from the fridge, then headed for the drinks cabinet in the study, where the little door was hanging down like a tray. I watched him, in a large mirror mounted to the far wall of the lounge, as he poured out a couple VB stubbies into tall, narrow glasses for Mum and me – if you drank beer with Pop, you always had to drink from a glass. He came back and distributed the beer, and he and Mum talked footy predictions and compared their scores for the round. They did tipping, but only against each other, and with fifty dollars on the line each year. Mum usually won.

  ‘How on earth did the Lions lose to Essendon?’ he grumbled.

  ‘They’re not in form,’ said Mum. ‘You’re just barracking for Fitzroy.’

  ‘No. I’m making my selections like I’m trying to win the bloody thing.’

  ‘Based on what criteria?’

  ‘I have my methods,’ Pop said with a grin.

  ‘Don’t encourage him, Deidre,’ Noonie shouted from the kitchen.

  I said, ‘You’ve gotta tip with your head, not your heart. Like the commercial says.’

  ‘I am!’ protested Pop. ‘But tell me, how on earth did the Lions drop a game up at The Gabba?’

  When the match started, Noonie brought the snags out on a plate and placed it on the coffee table, along with bread rolls and sauce and a bowl of fried onions. She’d even cut the rolls open for us. I filled one and sank back on the couch. Of all opponents Geelong made me most nervous, and whenever a little trepidation set in, eating was always a good distraction.

  In 2001, we’d been at the Carlton/Geelong match when Darren Milburn had laid a big hit on our premier fullback, Stephen ‘Sos’ Silvagni. Silvagni had been running with the flight of the ball, his eyes up in the sky and arms out to receive a mark, when Milburn had lined him up and run at him head-on, charging his hip into Silvagni’s exposed face and knocking out the star defender in one motion. Carlton’s favourite son was out cold by the time his head hit the ground. This occurred right in front of me and my family, and the crowd surged in an angry frenzy – as Sos lay prone on the earth, his chest heaving in deep, disturbing convulsions – and Mum was right in the thick of it. She’d gotten swept up in the vitriol and left our gate to walk round the other side of the ground, attempting to get near the bald lads in their parkers who were hurling abuse at the Geelong bench and tapping on the flimsy plexiglass shelter that housed the rival players. Some rows back in the aisle Mum was giving it to Milburn, and she was also giving it to that traitor Justin Murphy, who was sitting beside Milburn, stone-faced, trying to ignore the crowd behind him. Mum really had it in for Murphy because she thought he ‘shrunk’ around the ball, got pussy-footed when the heat was on.

  This incident was the closest I’d seen to a soccer riot at a footy match. The two coppers who prowled the boundary line outside the Geelong bench – both of them stodgy, potato-faced men – looked mighty lonely in their navy bomber jackets.

  Geelong had been getting thrashed up to that point and still were, but the hit on Sos gave everyone a good reason to ignore the scoreboard. It was the last game of the season, a Saturday afternoon at Princes Park, and the last game of Gary Hocking’s career. The whole ground was spoiling for a good melee between the clubs, wanting and waiting to see who’d be in first at the siren to give the Cats what-for. Would it be the old stalwarts, Hickmott or Mackay or Christou? Or would it be scrawny Lappin, who played with my number, number 12?

  But I shouldn’t have worried. Things were different now, and Carlton were rubbish, and there wasn’t even a player worth caring for. We lost.

  At least I got to eat my fair share of snags, and Mum didn’t flare up. School was tomorrow, and I hadn’t had to visit Dad. In a way, things were okay. Noonie might’ve been right about our weekend together.

  Another Time Trial, More Tears

  With Mum on leave, and with Steven no longer volunteering lifts, she’d suggested that she would drive me and Dougie over to Princes Hill for our cardio sessions.

  ‘What about Moose, Ford? How’s he gunna get there?’

  ‘Nah, he’ll be right. Don’t stress.’

  I didn’t want Moose in Mum’s car. Ever since the joyride, despite the sympathy I’d felt for him that night, I’d had it in for him. He’d put me in danger. He’d scared me. And then there were thos
e rumours I kept hearing about him being arrested. It didn’t make sense to me, nor did it seem fair he got to have Ellie on top of it all. And I couldn’t figure her out either. Why was she with him? She had so much going for her. But she was locked into the same hierarchy of cool as everybody else, I supposed. ‘You just get so distracted here,’ she’d said to me outside her house the night of the Party Bus.

  Mum tooted the horn out front of the Jacketts’ place, and Doug bounded out his front door a second after, grinning like an idiot for some reason as he jumped in the back of the car. ‘Hi, Mrs Mac.’

  ‘Hello, Douglas.’

  ‘What are you so happy about?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell ya later.’

  ‘Private men’s business, is it, Douglas?’

  ‘Something like that, Mrs Mac.’

  Mum wound through the streets in Coburg and then through Brunswick along Sydney Road. It wasn’t as fun as being in Steven’s car with Moose in the back. She pulled into the carpark outside the footy ground and Dougie and I hopped out.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Mac.’

  ‘Awright, Douglas. Ford, I’m gunna pop down the street for a coffee, when do you need me back?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too long. Maybe half an hour?’

  ‘Awright.’

  Dougie and I started walking over to where the other boys were crowded together on the lawn between the bike path and the running track.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what did you have to tell me?’

  ‘Notice anyone missing?’

  I scanned the group quick as we approached. Dom, Vince, Ange and Gibbo were all in jumpers and shorts and pretending not to look at any of the girls who ran by, and next to them was our coach, looking over his scoresheet at our times from last week. I knew Steven wasn’t coming anymore, but I soon felt guilty for not allowing Mum to pick up Moose.

  ‘Where’s Moose? I asked.

  Dougie was grinning again. ‘That’s just the thing. No one’s seen him for a couple days.’

  ‘Whaddaya mean?’