Everything in its right place

by Tobias McCorkell

  The way Joel said this, I didn’t quite get it. But it worried me for the fact it seemed so open to interpretation. He probably just meant that Dad and Craig were aware of whatever trouble he was in. But it made me wonder. I’d never considered my father or Craig capable of perceiving much of anything. Not about me anyway. But if they could, what had they concluded?

  Craig drove us out along the freeway and over the West Gate to a pub in Footscray. I only ever travelled west to play sport – out to Altona and Sunshine – and it was always a shitshow because they were some of the toughest teams and you’d have to be leery all match what with everyone spoiling for a fight.

  The pub was crowded in the bistro, but we managed to find a table. Mostly, I just wanted to smoke Dad’s Winnies and lose myself to the white noise of a full Saturday dining room. I could hear the pokies past the bain-marie, and a bunch of old blokes were watching rugby.

  Craig didn’t have to ask, he knew that Joel would want a parma, so he was quick round the table with our orders.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting someone?’ Dad said as Craig was about to head over to the counter.

  ‘Oh, gosh. That’s right. Joel, is Milly close by? Would you know what she’ll have?’

  Joel just shrugged.

  ‘We can wait and have a round of drinks first,’ Dad suggested.

  Just as Craig knew his son’s food order, Dad knew my drink, and a moment later he was setting a pint of lager on the table in front of me, and I was feeling a lot better about myself, the weekend, and the dumb mistake I’d made. Dougie wouldn’t tell, I convinced myself. Surely not.

  I was nearly finished my beer when a fresh-faced young woman with shoulder-length blonde ringlets approached our table and waved a hand. She looked out of breath, all red-cheeked and embarrassed. The next I knew she was taking up a seat beside Joel, and I don’t recall being introduced; if I was, it was a fast introduction, and she wasn’t keen on talking anyway.

  Craig asked her what she felt like eating.

  ‘I’ll get the calamari and chips,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  All through lunch, I tried not to look at her too much. I wasn’t hungry and just wanted another beer. It was boring with the blonde there, because Joel was all stiff and quiet and not like himself, and I had to keep reining in my impulses to pinch him or kick him under the table as we normally would’ve done.

  When lunch was over, they left together, and Joel waved me the lamest goodbye.

  ‘See ya,’ I said.

  The dirty plates and leftover food looked vile.

  I turned to Dad. ‘Can we go out in the beer garden or something?’

  Craig was looking kind of pale. ‘Why don’t we just go home?’ he said.

  That night, back at the Southbank apartment, I learned that Milly was pregnant and had decided to keep the baby. I hadn’t even known Joel had a girlfriend. Considering his recent arrest and the fact he hadn’t finished high school, I wasn’t sure starting a family was the best option. His recent job application to a remote mining site had been rejected, and he was about to start as a baker’s apprentice far outside the city limits. This would involve an unbearable early start, with the mornings made worse by the long commute, Joel’s lack of transportation, and the advent of a new mouth to feed.

  On the balcony, taking another cigarette from the open packet of Winfields on the table, I quietly raged to my father. ‘But they have no money!’ I protested. ‘This will be – is – a nightmare.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said, taking a long drag.

  We were both several Scotches down and, in a rare moment, feeling utterly terrible for Joel and the migraine-inducing predicament that was his life, I felt free and righteous enough to speak my mind. ‘Be responsible then. Get involved. Talk sense into them.’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘Then make it your fucken business. Craig’s clearly not gunna say something. That thing should be aborted. You can see that. The baby will only cause problems for them.’

  My father smiled weakly, placing his cigarette in the crevice at the side of the glass ashtray. He went back indoors to refill his empty tumbler, away from me. I looked out at the police stables behind the Arts College. I’d been speaking out of fear, I realised. I saw my come escaping from the opening between Ellie’s legs. At first it had looked closed.

  In his own dim way Craig was upset about what was happening to his son. And Dad, unnoticeably drunk, was angry at Craig for being a downer on a Saturday night. Craig had gone for a shower, but he’d been in the bathroom for hours. When he joined us on the balcony, my father, wanting to salvage the night and steer clear of the downbeat mood and difficult conversation his own son was insisting on having, suggested we go and do something fun.

  ‘Like what, Robert?’ Craig asked distractedly, sounding exhausted.

  An hour later, Dad had driven us to a bowling alley in the suburbs, somewhere off the freeway. I welcomed the prospect of some friendly competition and the endless rounds of beer being supplied to me.

  We played a few rounds and sank a bunch of booze – Dad and Craig on the Scotch-sodas and Scotch-colas respectively, me putting away stubbies of Tooheys. Mostly they were interested in smoking in the carpark beneath the entertainment complex with the security guard who worked there, some South-East Asian guy they seemed to know quite well. I wondered why this was and how often they came out here, such an odd place – if maybe this was some weird love triangle. Who are any of these men? They’re so obscure to me. When I asked Dad, he said that Angeev was a refugee new to Melbourne and that Dad and Craig were helping the guy out a bit, to find a place and settle in. It sounded suss to me because I’d not known my father to be charitable, so I didn’t pry.

  I took the car keys off my old man and asked if I could take the car for a spin in that empty basement parking lot. I was drunk, of course, but he didn’t mind, and for the next thirty minutes I raced the Commodore station wagon back and forth between the cement pylons, taking it outside once or twice to attempt a burnout. The three of them stood around the emergency exit out the back of the bowling alley watching me, laughing while they chain-smoked their durries, the thick plume above their heads accentuated by the flickering fluorescent lights. The vapours of Joel’s torments had wafted away from Craig, it seemed.

  When it was time to leave, Dad drove the Commodore back outside and completed the doughnut that I could not, before racing back to the onramp to join the freeway, Angeev waving a goodbye as we roared off. My father was an excellent drunk driver, I thought. The older I got, the more I admired this ability. And when I was drunk, I wasn’t scared either. I’d been wrong to be so afraid as a child; I was in safe hands. Well, I was in hands. And they were someone else’s. And that was life. Through the haze of whisky, he got us back to the apartment promptly and without incident.

  When I went to bed, I thought of Joel and how he didn’t come round for weekends as much as he used to now that he was technically grown up. (I found it hard to think of Joel as an adult.) I thought of all the pranks he’d pulled on me when we were first forced together, when we used to fight over what movies to watch and what games to play. I considered how lucky I’d been to have known him. He could’ve been a psycho. He could’ve been really mean to me. He could’ve tortured me, bullied me, shat on me while I was sleeping. But he hadn’t. He’d just been a solid little friend for me to play with, and he’d been kind to me, generous even. He’d taught me stuff and exposed me to things; he’d helped me divest myself of some of my childish innocence, but only ever in a way that needed to be done. Like an older brother seeing how his younger sibling simply needs to know something in order to save face at school.

  I cried into my pillow, just like I had when I was a child after Pop had spoken about him in the shed.

  Do ya reckon Joel doesn’t have a future?

  It probably won’t be as bright as yours. No.

  I didn’t understand anything about my life. My father and Craig we
re like grey sludge thrown against a beige wall, and the two had merged into a terrifying and unknowable nothingness. Everything was melting, breaking down, oozing out and away and away and away. Where were the solids? Where were all the colours?

  Before I fell asleep, my phone glowed and buzzed in the dark. I didn’t recognise the number, but I knew who it was from.

  STOP TELLING EVERYONE WE FUCKED!

  Some News

  At breakfast, Craig was hungover and so was I. Dad was not.

  They were presently engaged in a diet of some sort, and so I was served microwaved eggs on what would most easily be described as multigrain toast – but this would be speaking too plainly of something far more sinister and complex. Sitting in the centre of my oversized porcelain plate, the items that technically constituted ‘food’ resembled some jelly-like alien substance balanced upon dried sheets of cork-like matter. They called it ‘eggs on toast’.

  Between the hangover, the hateful food and Ellie’s text message, I didn’t feel well. Sunlight hit the windows of the apartment, making the skyscrapers harsh and sharp and golden. The outside world seemed terrifying. But when Dad was preparing to give me a lift back to Coburg, although Melbourne and the prospect of travelling through her frightened me, I wanted most of all to be by myself.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I was gunna just take the tram. I kinda feel like it.’

  ‘Oh, okay. But there was something I needed to talk to you about. I thought we’d get a chance to speak in the car.’

  ‘Can’t you just tell me here?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Dad made coffee, and we went outside to smoke on the balcony.

  ‘Your grandmother’s sick, Ford. When you’re finished with school, we’re gunna need to go see her.’

  Queenie’s sick? ‘Is it bad?’ I asked.

  ‘She won’t really say. But I think she’s dying.’

  There was no tell on Dad’s face, it was just blank. It occurred to me that we weren’t talking about my grandmother but instead his mother, and that we both knew this.

  ‘Oh, ah, I’m sorry,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if he was upset or if I should be upset or if we were meant to hug or I was supposed to put a hand on his shoulder or back or … knee? Or whatever.

  ‘That’s awright, son,’ he said. ‘These things happen. But we should get a trip up to Shepp in before the worst.’

  ‘Yeah. Awright.’

  I finished my coffee and left. As I crossed the living room and walked out to get the lift downstairs, Dad and Craig shouted and waved goodbyes to me.

  ‘Bye, Mr Motor.’

  ‘See ya next time, Rascal.’

  This was either my family or it wasn’t. I didn’t know.

  I walked north through the throngs outside the NGV and the market next to the Arts Centre, past the old man playing his erhu and across the St Kilda Road Bridge, where I took the tram outside Flinders, up Swanston Street, up past the tall buildings, past David Jones, the Bourke Street Mall, Myer, Melbourne Central, and then past the universities and into Carlton and around the corner onto Elgin Street, and then left onto Lygon and past the flats, the large bland brick towers of commission housing, and past the expansive cemetery that connects Lygon to Princes Park, filled with old gravestones and dead colonists, city founders, and all kinds of native and feral wildlife, a sanctuary sheltered from the urban sprawl, and then on past the cottages in Carlton and across Brunswick Road and into East Brunswick, where the signs of change Steven had predicted were starting to show – a new bar, the carpet factory closing its doors, signs marking development sites, building permits – and through the tricky S-bend, past the McDonald’s, past the pizzeria, past the fish and chip shop, and over Moreland Road, where I was born in the hospital not far from the tramline, and as I came up through all this, the city, my neighbourhood, edging further north, still further north, closer to home, The Compound, I felt, suddenly, very far away, because it’d now changed for me and it would only continue to, and as I realised I felt more anxious than I had before leaving my father’s apartment, my phone sounded again, another text, this one worse and from Moose: Meet me on the bike track under the bridge. NOW. We need to talk

  Followed seconds later by: If u don’t show I no where u live

  When I stepped off the tram at my stop, I didn’t bother peering out to check for traffic. I hoped some mad courier might rush past and take me out. I felt so unlucky to have attracted Ellie’s attentions last Thursday afternoon, so terribly, dreadfully cursed in all my actions and inactions and desires.

  When I reached the pavement, I walked down to the intersection and crossed over the sweeping grey arc of Bell Street that sent Sunday traffic outoutout to the east and west, to the freeway, to homes and family barbecues, knowing that I wasn’t free, because of consequences. And when I reached Moose below the bridge on the bike path by the Merri, where we’d reunited a year before, my heart sank as I braced myself for what was to come. I could endure almost anything so long as he didn’t go for his knife. I’d been beaten up before, and it was fine after a day, after the swelling went away; it was only the mental scars that stuck. I wasn’t going to lock horns either – no, I wasn’t going to struggle, was just going to take what I supposed I was due.

  Once I’d dipped my head and shrugged to signal get it over with, Moose barked some stuff at me that I wasn’t listening to, the usual stuff I’d heard before, before that kind of thing. Then he came at me, quick and bleary-eyed and mad beyond all doubt and reason.

  Dougie, you cunt, I thought in the brief second I had. (I’d find out later that Dougie had gotten drunk on Saturday night with his co-workers from the leisure centre at after-work drinks and told everyone my business, and seeing how everyone in my neighbourhood knew everyone else either from footy or high school, well … But I knew it was really my own stupid fault. I hadn’t even liked bragging to Dougie and, stranger still, I thought that I was maybe even in love with Ellie. At least, a little.)

  I didn’t bother with a plea as Moose moved in close, didn’t say anything, just stood there and took the first punch, just as he’d done outside his house that night we’d gone for the joyride. What would there have been to protest anyway? Life was getting punched in the guts sometimes, and there wasn’t much you could do about it when the time came.

  I doubled over. I thought I might retch, he’d hit me so hard.

  He slogged me again, a good one across the face that would blacken my cheek. The third one put me on my knees, and my head was ringing then. I worried a fourth was coming, then I thought Moose was going to kick me while I was down, which would have been a bit low. But he didn’t kick me. Instead, he wound up and launched himself at the tree a few feet behind me, just off the bike path. He booted it hard, bark flying off in a shower of wooden sparks. It brought me a small measure of joy as he railed against it – bang, bang, bang with his shoe. Better the trunk than me.

  It occurred to me, kneeling on the lawn that verged the track, that Moose might’ve really upset my look. I brought my hand up to my mouth and my fingers came away wet with blood. My beautiful face! I panicked. The pain-sting from Moose’s last punch was coming on in a slow wave, and my cheek and gums were thudding and pulsating in this most peculiar way. What if I’m disfigured? I couldn’t bear the thought of looking like a Caravaggio boy no more.

  When Moose was finished with the tree, he said something else to me, but my ears were hot and tingly. Still, I understood the gist of it: we weren’t mates anymore. I wondered if we ever really had been – then I wondered if such a thing as mateship existed.

  For a long time after Moose left I stayed down by the creek, taking up position in my favourite spot: that steep-sloping embankment covered in long grass, which overlooked a ford of large stones. I sat back and waited and thought hard about the things in my life and what exactly I was going to tell Mum when I got home.

  After several hours, I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I left.There hadn’t been a platypus this
time, only the murky creek water.

  I walked back up the bike path and past the gaol and then up the rise back to my house. I stood outside the front fence a while, making up my mind to go through the gate. I thought of all the times Dad had picked me up from beneath the gum trees on the nature strip, all the times his Commodore had pulled away from the kerb; all the times I’d come home and leaped the fence; and how, when I was little, Noonie and I would come outside on rainy days and place leaves in the gutter and watch them drift off down to the stormwater drain – ‘boat races’, we used to call it.

  Inside Unit Two, I tried to sneak down the passageway without being noticed, but Mum shouted a hello from upstairs.

  ‘Hey,’ I called back, hearing her weight sink into the floor, meaning she’d gotten up from the couch.

  Worried she was coming downstairs, I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I studied my face in the mirror. It was obvious what had happened, and I got the same hot feeling in my guts as when I’d been in Seymour and Ken had entered my room. All I wanted was to bury my shame and not be noticed by anyone.

  A moment later, Mum knocked on the door. She wanted to know about my weekend with Dad, she wanted to know how I was, if I was alright. I was seventeen and didn’t want her to ask me that question, because I didn’t want to tell her the truth – it would make me vulnerable, and needing to be cared for made me feel cowardly and weak and pathetically unmanly. It saddened me to know that perhaps all she wanted was to have the answer to this one simple question. I didn’t understand that, but I was humbled by it.

  ‘Ford, I’m watching Bond,’ she said. ‘Wanna come up? It’s a Roger Moore. The voodoo one.’

  ‘Ah, yeah, ah, maybe give me a sec.’

  I composed myself. There was no make-up in the bathroom cabinets, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway. So, when I walked out to face Mum, I just smiled as best I could, hoping it would distract enough from everything else about my appearance.

  She gasped. ‘What happened to you?’