Duncan swung the car into my driveway.
“I had a really great time this weekend,” he said. “Thank you.”
We hadn’t spoken about his cancer after that night on the swing, a night that ended up with the two of us underneath a blanket Rose has brought down for us, Duncan further outlining his action plan, which mostly involved keeping his news from as many people as possible.
“Join us, Rose,” he’d said.
“No,” she’d answered, “I think I’ll just turn in.”
“God,” Duncan sighed, snuggling in beside me, “it’s just like being on Walton’s Mountain.”
We hadn’t spoken about it on the way home either; Jarrod and Jasmine were in the car and small ears did not need to hear such big stories.
Instead, we’d listened to the tapes he flicked in and out of his cassette recorder.
“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” Duncan had said again and again, rewinding the tape back to the beginning of the phrase, smiling to himself each time he said it.
On any other day I might have stopped him, snatched the cassette from its box, but on this day I let it go, not knowing how many other ones he had left to annoy the hell out of me.
“I’m glad you came,” I told him as he walked me to the door. “Though I think my mother has a little crush on you.”
“Well, she’s a woman, isn’t she?” he replied, and I knew then how we were to play it, like nothing had been said at all.
“See you at work,” he said, turning back to the car.
And for the next few weeks everything did go back to normal, at least on the surface, or normal if it was on cocaine. Duncan’s illness didn’t slow him down at all; instead, it seemed to me he was living his whole life on fast-forward, and with the volume turned up. If he was going, he was going kicking and screaming, caressing and cajoling his listeners from behind the microphone, and getting the best ratings of his career.
In the first warm days of the summer of 1990, no one could touch Duncan McAllister, who was at least four points ahead of his nearest rivals, and no one but me knew it was dying that had made him fearless.
He told the prime minister on air to “grow some, sir”; he started a petition to deport the entire South African cricket team on account of their “appalling accents”; and, in what he said was the proudest moment of his entire life, he was named Who magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year. He was dressed on the cover as a boxer—hooded gown, red gloves, swinging on the ropes as a platinum microphone dangled from the ceiling, The Champ emblazoned on his satin boxers.
“God, I am sexy, aren’t I,” he said every time he looked at it. “How you manage to work in such close proximity to me and not just erupt, I’ll never know, Lulu—you must have loins of titanium.”
But as weeks turned into months, his voice started to lose its rich honeyed timbre, growing hoarser, his breath more labored, his skin sometimes turning, I thought, an alarming gray beneath his stubble.
He asked for, and received, a three-day working week, belligerently telling management he wanted more time to go fishing, and they, desperate to keep him, had agreed. They also agreed I could reduce my days at the station—Duncan needed me, he told them, “to bait his hooks,” when in reality I sat outside the oncologist Dr. Patrick Stephenson’s door while Duncan underwent radiation therapy.
Surgery had been ruled out—Duncan didn’t like the odds—so instead we took a ridiculously complicated route, and a different one every time, to Dr. Stephenson’s office. We always went when the receptionist was on lunch, or on an errand, or wherever it was she went when she was pretending she didn’t know Duncan McAllister was her boss’s patient.
She must have known, of course—lots of people must have, especially as time went on and Duncan’s voice grew hoarser—but somehow we managed to escape detection for quite a while before the whispers grew into shouts.
After the radiation treatment, Duncan’s throat swelled and scratched, his energy levels plummeted, and we needed every one of the four days between his shifts to get him ready for the next round.
But somehow he managed to pull it all together for the three hours that made up his show, and only if you listened carefully did you hear the cracks in his voice.
He wasn’t well enough to attend my twenty-fifth birthday dinner, instead thoughtfully sending a male stripper dressed as a courier to the quiet restaurant where Ben, Simone, and Stella had taken me.
“Special delivery for Tallulah de Longland from Duncan McAllister,” the stripper called, bursting through the restaurant’s front doors and startling the waitstaff.
“Over here!” Simone yelled, pointing to me, while Stella blushed and Ben held my hand under the table.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered, then added, “How bad can it be?” just as my personal delivery boy stood in front of me, whipped off his shirt, pointed to his chest, and said, “Sign here please.” Then he pressed play on his CD player and began dancing to “It’s Raining Men,” glancing at Ben through the entire performance while Ben and Simone screamed with laughter and Stella stared, fixated, at his chest.
At the studio the next day Duncan walked in, grinning.
“How was your birthday?” he smiled. “Did you like your special package?”
“Oh, you mean the gay male stripper you sent me?” I asked. “He was great; I think he and Ben will be very happy together.”
“What? That’s not what I ordered—oh, never mind, we have far more important things to discuss. Such as this,” he said, flourishing a white envelope in his hand. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding it so close to my face I could have opened it with my teeth.
“A birthday card?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“A summons?”
“Very amusing, Lulu, no, this, my darling heart, is your ticket to Closureville.”
“Closureville?”
“Yes, you’ve never been there before, that’s why you may not have heard of it, but it’s by way of Time to Move On and Stop Being Such a Drama Queen Street.”
He opened the envelope, put the white card from inside its folds on my desk, walked to the door of my office, and added: “Might see you there if you can man up for it.”
He shut the door, and I looked down at the thick white card on my desk.
Enchanted, it said, an exhibition by Frank Andrews. And there, filling the edges of the card, were two gray-penciled little girls, heads close together, features blurred, expressions unseen but with their arms around each other, forternity.
I had no intention of going, not unless Duncan came up with some story about how it was his dying wish that I should do so—and I wouldn’t have put it past him—but in the end it was Harry who changed my mind.
He and Frank had become friends after Frank had moved back to the River House from Christa’s.
Annie had moved out—the fault lines between them caused by her affair with Fergus too deep to mend—and Annabelle was long gone, leaving Frank moving among his wife’s and daughter’s shadows in the house’s cluttered rooms.
How silent that house must have seemed as he walked its floors, and how loud his steps must have sounded without the jingling of Annie’s bangles or the giggles from Annabelle’s bedroom, falling like quavers down the staircase.
He listened to the radio out in the studio, where he drank instant coffee made with hot water straight from the tap and painted for hours, only venturing out for supplies, and it was on one such trip he’d met Harry.
They’d run into each other in a hardware store soon after I’d left for the city; Harry had been there to pick up some storm-water pipes and Frank some methylated spirits—“Don’t worry, mate, it’s not for me,” he’d said to Harry at the counter—and the two men had laughed their way into a friendship.
After their chance meeting, Harry and Frank had begun meeting up once a week in the Uxbridge Arms—Harry for a beer, Frank for the one glass of red wine he now allowed himself a week—and found they fitted each other “like a pair of old overcoats,” Harry said.
After they’d been meeting for a few weeks, he’d rung to tell me and ask if I minded.
“We don’t talk about you and Josh and Annabelle, Lulu,” he’d said. “That’s all past now, but I wanted to check with you if you had any worries with it.”
“No, Harry,” I’d said, and I meant it.
Harry had spent so much time plumbing the depths of excellence and looking after all of us, he’d never been the sort of man to go for a knock-off drink with the other tradies after work.
So I was pleased he and Frank had found each other among the hand drills and glue guns, although sometimes I wondered what the barmaids at the Uxbridge Arms made of them—Harry in his overalls and work boots, Frank in his paint-splattered singlet and fisherman’s cap.
I’d asked Harry once what they talked about, and he’d said sometimes they didn’t say much at all, just sat there, “letting the day settle.” Other times, he said, they spoke about Frank’s painting. Once, Frank had told him, “I can’t get the black right.” Harry had said, “What do you mean you can’t get the black right? Black’s black, isn’t it?” And Frank had answered, “No, mate, there’s all kinds of blackness.” And Harry, thinking of Rose, had understood.
Harry had rung a few days after Duncan had showed me the “Enchanted” invitation, and asked if I would go with him.
He wanted to go, he said, to be there for Frank, and because it was at Bloom, the local gallery, it meant he wouldn’t have to leave Rose too long by herself. Even though Rose had been doing well, we never really knew when her depression would make its appearance from behind a door somewhere, announcing its arrival in a shapeless beige dress and marathon bouts of baking. It would just begin, and sometime later it would end, and in between Harry hovered.
This time, although Rose was in the middle of a long stretch of good days, she wasn’t well enough to walk into a room full of people; instead, she said, she would send along a tea cake.
“Don’t make me walk in carrying a cake tin by myself, Lulu,” Harry pleaded with me.
“I don’t know, Harry—who’s going?”
“Everyone,” he’d answered, “the whole kit and caboodle.”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “I’m just not ready, I don’t think.”
“We never are, love,” he’d replied, “but it’s probably time.”
The day Harry invited me, I went home, and I told Ben about the exhibition over dinner.
“How do you feel about that, Lulu?” he asked.
He knew about Josh and Annabelle—when we first started seeing each other, we’d swapped edited versions of our previous relationships, Ben’s largely consisting of girls his sisters had maneuvered in front of him.
“No one really serious,” he’d told me, “before you.”
I had told him that since Josh and Annabelle, I’d had a few casual relationships also, which was, of course, not strictly true, but how do you tell someone you’ve been frozen in time since high school? Even to me it sounded ridiculous.
I poured us each a glass of wine. “I feel fine about it, actually,” I told him. “A bit nervous, sort of like going to a school reunion, I guess.”
Ben smiled at me. “You’ll be fine,” he said, “and I’ll be there, and your dad, and Rose’s tea cake.”
I smiled back. “Which is the only reason you’re going,” I teased.
“No, it isn’t,” he said, surprising me by coming around to my side of the table and kissing my neck. “I have to protect my woman.”
That night when Ben went for his run, I stood in front of our full-length mirror practicing being normal.
No, not normal, nonchalant.
“Oh, hi, Annabelle; hi, Josh.”
No.
“Hi, Josh; hi, Annabelle.”
“Hey there, you two!”
Hey there, you two?
What the hell was wrong with me?
“Annabelle, Josh, how lovely to see you.”
Better.
“It’s been so long, hasn’t it? I keep up with your travels—Ben and I subscribe to Gourmet Traveller, actually.”
Ben and I subscribe to Gourmet Traveller?
Clearly, I needed professional help.
Duncan was sitting at his desk in the studio, a pile of newspapers fanned out in front of him.
“I’m going,” I told him, not needing to explain where. “Harry’s going as well, and he needs me to go with him. And Ben’s coming too.”
Duncan looked up over his reading glasses and smiled. “And I’ll be there as well, so you’ll have a whole battalion of blokes there to protect you from the evil ones, a veritable army. Perhaps we should wear great knobs of garlic around our necks. . . .”
“Don’t, Duncan,” I said, “I’m actually a bit nervous.”
He nodded, waiting.
“The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to say when I see them. . . . I have nothing to say. They’ve spent the last seven years traveling the length and breadth of the planet, winning bloody awards and seeing the world, and I’ve been stuck here.”
“With me.”
“Oh, Duncan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t, Tallulah, but the truth is you have rather been stuck with me of late, and Barney, and all my children and my ex-wives. Then, of course, there’s your father, your mother, your friends, and Ben, all of whom, my dear, would be utterly lost without you.”
“Duncan . . .”
“Don’t stop me, I’m on a roll. Also, I am, in case you have forgotten, dying, and you can’t interrupt the terminally ill.” He smiled his watery smile at me. “Now, as I was saying, you’ve been stuck here quietly going about your business, which is, of course, to keep us all sane and out of prison, fussing over me, dislodging God knows what from Barney’s throat, babysitting Stella’s children, staying at Simone’s when one of her leso girlfriends dumps her, sorting out your father’s business, ironing your mother’s mad bloody dresses, attempting to make Ben more vigorous. . . .”
I smiled back at him.
“So who cares? Who cares where Annabelle and Josh have been, climbing the Andes or sailing the Amalfi Coast on some bloody boat. Anyone can get on a boat, Lulu, you just buy a ticket. There’re thousands of us out there flailing about in the ocean, but there’s not that many of you. You’re the one standing on the shore and shining the light, guiding us all in safely.” He picked up a newspaper and pretended to read it. “So fuck ’em,” he said.