‘I fell,’ I said, amazed by how quickly bad clichés can come to a person.
Something big and small passed across her face, and she swallowed a question, saying instead, ‘Come here.’
For once, there was no panic in her voice. Nothing tense at all. And I let myself walk into her arms, there in the corridor, outside the bathroom door, where I could sense my feet, what felt like my entire body, relax into the soft carpeting. It occurred to me that this was the person Pop kept reminding himself existed whenever he recounted the story of her court appearance: the person who stood by her mates. And I was Mum’s best mate – I had been ever since all those trips along the coast after Dad pissed off. It didn’t matter that maybe some lines had been crossed, that in hindsight our closeness might not have been so healthy. What mattered was that any closeness was there at all, that this was love and that we’d cared enough for each other to have lived the past fourteen years together in our small house, like siblings, like close friends, without ever truly falling out. Every relationship is of its own nature, and ours was just that, ours.
I followed her upstairs, where we sat on the couch in front of the telly. Live and Let Die was running on a commercial station, and when Bond came back after an ad break he was duking it out in New Orleans and the Caribbean, caught in a blaxploitation voodoo nightmare that had him battling witchdoctors, alligators and venomous snakes, jumping his speedboat over a highway in Louisiana, shagging Jane Seymour, and exploding a man with a compressed gas pellet.
As I sat there watching the onslaught, Mum ran her fingers through my hair. ‘You’re getting pretty shaggy, mister,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Here, sit down on the floor.’ She dropped a pillow onto the carpet, and I sat in front of her. Her fingers pressed into my scalp, ran through the strands of my hair. We’d clung fiercely to each other after Dad left, but since that time I’d recoiled from her touch. Really I was recoiling at the memory of my past self – the fact I’d been so vulnerable and afraid disgusted me. But now I let myself go, in front of her, let myself disappear into her hands on my head, and the odd tension that so often occluded my mind seemed to gently break.
When the film credits were rolling – white words ascending a black-and-red screen, a skull mask on fire, Paul and Linda McCartney belting out the theme – Mum spoke. ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Ford.’ Her voice was soft, and it lulled me into an acceptance of the words that followed. ‘Noonie, Pop and I have some news. About the future.’
‘Yeah?’ I said, my head feeling light and warm as her fingers traced over it a final time.
Gently, she tilted my head to face her, her palms like a delicate vice either side of my sore cheeks. ‘We’re selling the house, Ford. After summer. We’re gunna move in together over at Dawson Lakes.’
‘What? But that’s a retirement home.’
‘It’s what we want. It’s what I want. Noonie and Pop were always gunna go once you graduated, and I’ve decided to join them.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You’re gunna turn eighteen in a month. You’ll be independent.It’ll take a while to sell the property, so you can live here until then. And when it’s sold, we’ll help you find somewhere if ya haven’t already.’
‘But …’ I wanted to say ‘I’ve lived here my whole life!’ or ‘This is insane! You’re too young for a retirement village!’ but the words didn’t come, and instead I quietly accepted this news knowing that, as ever, there was nothing to say, nothing I could do to change anyone’s mind.
SEVEN
The End of Things
Summer
After our final marks for Year 12 had been released, each boy was assigned a follow-up appointment with Ms Lee.
On a sunny day in December I passed beneath the giant Australian flag in the school quadrangle. It was flapping in the breeze and casting a wide shadow over the chapel entrance and across the few steps that led up to the doors.
I sat waiting in the passageway outside Ms Lee’s door in an uncomfortably narrow chair beside Alasdair Chenoweth, the school track star, whose appointment fell after mine. Alasdair had arrived very early, in much the same way he’d been quick to all those finish lines on all those aths days that I would no longer have to endure. We made polite chitchat, and he informed me that his schoolies week in Byron Bay had been ‘off chops’. I hadn’t gone on schoolies but made no mention of this.
When my time came, and Ms Lee’s door opened, Will walked out. He noticed me in my narrow chair and beamed. ‘Hey,’ he said, ignoring Ms Lee’s parting words, and strode in my direction.
‘Mr McCullen,’ Ms Lee announced, like a doctor speaking disinterestedly across a waiting room.
‘I’m up,’ I said, getting out of the chair. ‘Wait around for me if you can. Shouldn’t be too long.’
Will nodded and gestured toward the quadrangle, indicating he’d meet me there.
When I took a seat to one side of Ms Lee’s oak desk, no one was on the river outside her office window, only the gums blown east on the bank.
‘You do fairly well,’ she said, when she’d laid my transcript out before her. ‘One, two more points would have been better. I’m not sure you go to Melbourne University. You still want to study Arts?’
‘Ah, um, yeah.’ I cleared my throat. ‘What do you mean I should’ve gotten another point? You mean, you think I should’ve gotten a higher mark?’
‘Well … to be on the safe side. I’m not sure you get into Melbourne University now. La Trobe, definitely. But Melbourne … maybe.’ Ms Lee seemed certain the only tertiary institution where a person from St Anthony’s should want to study was Melbourne University, but all I cared about was that I’d done well enough to get into uni at all. And besides, studying at La Trobe in Bundoora would be fine as far as commuting went, given that I didn’t plan on moving out of the north.
‘But maybe you go. Depend what mark they set entrance for Arts next year. You still want me to put Melbourne as first choice for you?’
I’d never suggested that I did.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Chuck La Trobe down second.’
‘La Trobe? You don’t want Monash?’
‘Why would I, Ms Lee? I don’t want to travel out to Clayton should I decide I want to read books. I could just do that from home.’
Ms Lee gave me a hard look. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘We put down ACU, third choice; La Trobe, second choice; and Melbourne, number one, but with fingers crossed for you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Any questions you have?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay, Mr McCullen, I see you maybe want to go now. Have a nice day, okay? Good luck.’
‘Thanks again, Ms Lee,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done. Did I really need to travel all the way into school just for this?
I walked back outside and met Will in the quad.
‘How was that?’ he asked.
‘Dunno. She reckons I can’t get into Arts at Melbourne. She even bagged out my mark a bit, said I shoulda got one or two points higher.’ I started to laugh. ‘I mean, ya finish exams and the first thing they tell you is, Not bad, but it could’ve been better. Fuck off.’
‘What did you get anyway?’
‘I thought we weren’t gunna do that.’
‘Yeah, but it’s kind of impossible not to ask, isn’t it?’
‘Why? Do you wanna tell me yours? Do ya wanna brag, is that it?’
‘No. I’m just curious. I mean, one or two points off getting into Melbourne, you must have done alright.’
‘Why? Didn’t think I would?’
‘Well, it’s not like you were a prefect or a member of the debate team or any of that shit.’ Will laughed. ‘I didn’t think you cared.’
I was embarrassed of my mark, and I didn’t care for any type of reaction to it. It’d taken a lot of coaxing on Noonie’s part for me to reveal it to my family. But it burned me a bit, the way no o
ne seemed to have expected me to do anything other than ‘alright’.
‘Just tell us what you got,’ he said.
I was embarrassed but bursting with a cynical pride. ‘Ninety-two point three,’ I said.
Will took a step back, clapped his hands together. ‘Bullshit!’
And there it was, just about the same reaction Noonie’d had.I was irritated. I had a fluke for writing essays, was all. The skill didn’t come in handy often, nor did I put much stock in it. Will’s reaction only confirmed what I already knew, what people really thought of me. Parents prayed for their children to score in the nineties, but when I did they went into a tailspin and no one could make sense of me.
‘I shit you not, my friend,’ I said.
‘Nah, come on,’ he said, getting serious. ‘Tell us what you really got.’
‘Ninety-two point three.’
I saw Will, then, as I did in my darkest contemplations of him.To him, I was from the wrong side of the river and liked nothing more than drinking myself into oblivion. The divide between us was unbridgeable.
‘For real, you got 92?’ he asked.
‘…’
‘Congrats, man. I only got an 80. And only just.’ He laughed again, and the laugh was immediately disarming. I could never maintain a bearing on him.
‘That’s a good mark,’ I said. ‘You should be happy.’
‘Tell that to my father.’
Yeah, well … My old man hadn’t so much as called to find out how I’d gone, and the summer ahead, with its trip to see Queenie in Shepp, suddenly seemed immense, like it might swallow me whole. The stinking heat – those long months of drinking, bushfires and drownings. Australia ate you up in summer.
‘Hey,’ Will said, ‘what are you doing now?’
I’d brought a change of clothes because with school over I couldn’t contemplate riding home on the train in my uniform, and because I’d been pondering going for a pint in the city or Brunswick first.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘I’m free. Was thinking of maybe getting a beer somewhere.’
‘Me, too. Do you want to hang out?’
‘Yeah, sure. Let’s do something.’ I was suddenly excited.
I still didn’t know where I stood with Will. He’d been so close and so standoffish in recent times, and then with school ending we’d simply lost touch. People talked of high school friendships being important, ones that lasted, but it was like I’d missed that part of my life, and I got a pang in my stomach then – I didn’t want to miss out.
Will had brought a change of clothes, too, and we stripped down to ride the 12.16 into Flinders, him taking off his shirt and tie to reveal a Pink Floyd t-shirt and me changing into jeans and Volleys and rolling up my uniform into my small gym bag. I wanted to burn that fucking uniform.
We agreed to go a couple rounds together in the city or else take some grog down to the river, up from Fed Square, and kill the afternoon.
‘Hey, so I got a surprise for you,’ Will said, when we’d gotten on the train.
‘Yeah?’
He showed me the palm of his hand, where two pills were encased within the plastic of a tiny baggie, chalky discs each etched with a miniature smiling face.
‘What is it?’
‘Pingers,’ he said. ‘Ecstasy.’
I nodded.
‘Here. Drop one now. They take, like, forty-five minutes to kick in.’ He split open the baggie and plucked one out with index finger and thumb. I did likewise, holding on to it as I watched him swallow his down with a gob of spit. I had an image of an anonymous, writhing body as I held on to my pill a moment longer. The body was seizing. There was the noise of a hospital monitor flatlining. The drug would pull my mind down a plughole. It’d fry my brain and I’d die.
Then, I dropped, doing as Will had, and we smiled, laughing as the train came into the city.
On ecstasy, nothing mattered. After a couple drinks, we decided to take the tram back to my house to sink beers and smoke cigarettes, the heat of the drug coming over us. We wanted to be away from all the people, alone together to talk in the intimacy of our high, and Mum and Pop and Noonie had almost finished moving into Dawson Lakes. I had The Compound to myself.
There was nothing beyond the experience of inhabiting my body. I was soon profoundly aware of my flesh, every sinew and muscle, and I felt both intensely alive and enormously aroused.I kept retreating to the bathroom to examine my eyes, all wide and taking in too much light, my pupils dilated to enormous black ponds, like the dam out behind Queenie’s house. I worried they might stay that way forever, but this fear was outweighed by the mad rush of love coursing through me that made me hope they actually might. Soon, Will’s spidery body and unhandsome features were all I craved, and I was shot in the gut with a belief: maybe life could get good, really, really good.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Will asked, coming in behind me, before becoming transfixed by his own reflection too.
‘This is amazing,’ I said, chewing nothing, my jaw fixed in steady motion – masticating, sucking, nothing.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ he said, sitting on the floor.
I got down to join him. I liked sitting on the light-blue and navy and white tiles. They were the colours of the Carlton Football Club. They were the sea. I ran my hands over the floor, taking in the crevices between each square and rectangular tile. There were so many tiles, all of them small and smooth. I wanted to go inside the floor, beneath the tiles. I wanted to have sex – with Ellie again, only it would be different, less awkward, and with Will, and with everyone I knew. I wanted to go back and have sex with Ken, the muted and unrecognisable figure, whose face I could no longer conjure in memory. I’d never acknowledged this, not even to myself, but I’d often eroticised those horrible, fearful moments from my childhood, had thought, madly, of being taken by him, little me being half fucked to death, blindly aroused by my debasement.
Will edged his body closer to mine on the ocean of that floor. We’d never broached the subject of how our night in the city had ended, what had happened right before he’d brought up a stomachful of bile. I’d wanted to make mention of it but hadn’t found an angle. That was what drinking and drugs were for.
Will looked at me and his eyes were empty, and they told me I could do whatever I liked. I placed my fingers on his forehead and ran them up through his hairline, brushing against the skin and then the follicles. His hair was short and brown, and I liked the sensation at my fingertips as they passed from his forehead to his scalp. I repeated the motion, pushing back his hair, pushing back his hair. Repeated it again, pushing back his hair, pushing back his hair.
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ he asked me, later.
We were still lying on the bathroom floor, and I was trying hopelessly to roll a joint.
‘I’ve gotta go to the country to visit my grandmother, up in Shepparton.’
‘Really? You always do that.’
‘Yeah, I know. But I think this might be the last time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s dying.’
‘Oh, sorry. That sucks.’
‘Nah, it’s okay. It’s a good thing.’
One Last Time
Dad picked me up on the morning of Christmas Eve. We’d never gone up to Shepp for Christmas before, but he’d spoken with Mum about it over the phone to see that it would be alright. He’d confirmed, given Queenie’s condition, it’d likely be the last time.
Mum was always surprisingly amenable regarding Robert’s mother. In fact, since I could remember, they’d regularly spoken on the phone, usually on Saturday mornings after I’d left with Dad. Queenie often called to see that her son was putting in face time with her grandson, and the scholarship to St Anthony’s was her way of making up for the missing child support payments in prior years. I knew, deep down, that when she croaked my father would no longer have reason to stay in touch with me.
I spent the early part of the morning, prior to Dad’s arri
val, unwrapping presents in Unit One with Noonie, Pop and Mum as we usually did Christmas Day. We’d decided not to celebrate the occasion in Dawson Lakes but at The Compound, one last time. And as they usually were on Christmas Day, Pop and Mum were early into the port, discussing Carlton’s possible roster for next year, who would and should be traded, the pros and cons of the Blues’ coaching staff, and why it was the AFL no longer cared to host matches at the old home grounds like Princes Park.
Noonie was disappointed that I wouldn’t be serving at Midnight Mass this year, and as I unwrapped her present (the pair of woollen socks I always received, plus a bottle of aftershave designed by that British cunt David Beckham – my mind drifted, fleetingly, to the warm interior of Ellie’s bedroom that I would never see again) I had to admit that I was also a little disappointed not to be part of the traditional celebrations. I’d miss John and Thomas and Father Vito and their banter in the sacristy.
‘I don’t see why everything should change just because that woman’s feeling unwell,’ said Noonie. ‘We’ve spent a lifetime at her beck and call.’
‘Oh, Mum, stop. Don’t dredge it up, this is just how Christmas will be this year.’
Mum was onto her second glass, and Noonie pouted before sinking back into her recliner, where she cracked open a walnut and began extracting the food from the shell. After a moment, she said, sombrely and almost inaudibly, ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten what Robert did to this family.’
‘Mum, for God’s sake. I think about it every day.’
‘Well, I think about it every second.’
After Dad arrived and we’d loaded into the station wagon and set off, we stopped in Nagambie. Over jelly slice and a milkshake, Dad said, ‘You might get a shock when ya see her, son.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. But, ya know, there’s nothing to be too alarmed by. It’s just the way it goes. You’ve never seen someone really sick before, have ya?’
I thought of Callum McCullen on his deathbed in the hospice,and me playing the violin for him as Mum had instructed. The nurses had all gushed and cooed. Dad hadn’t been there that day. I thought of Nan with her emphysema mask. I thought of the dead old lady Craig had shown me. I thought of Mum, lying in the tub.
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