Fridays we do takeaway when we can, and tonight we definitely can. And I’ve gone the full family-size takeaway deal, first time ever – three large pizzas, two bottles of Coke plus garlic bread for twenty-four ninety-five (more for home delivery).
When I’m stopped at the lights I can lean over and breathe in the aroma of Meatosaurus pizza, but I hold myself back from eating. Not even the end piece of garlic bread between now and home.
It’s bought for sharing – for Mum, Wayne and me to eat what we want and as much as we want because we can. Not every night, but tonight we can because I’ve been bumped up to a level two at work and it means a bit more money. So, just this once, I’ve pushed the dinner budget up ten bucks to let us celebrate.
It’s for Wayne, partly. Wayne always wants to do all-you-can-eat, but it costs a lot and it only ever works out financially if you want to eat a lot of those bacon bits. And Wayne only ever really wants to eat pizza anyway so this should be ideal. We’ve never done all-you-can-eat, not since I was a kid. Maybe we’ll do it when I get to level three. That’ll happen one day.
They’ve left the outside light off at home, as always, but it’s only just getting dark and it’s not as if I don’t know the front steps pretty well by now. I park the bike under the house and I pile dinner in my arms and I find myself singing the old Domino’s ad about having the hots for what’s in the box with the dots. There were some pretty cute girls on that ad. Student girls in a city somewhere, probably down south.
Upstairs there’s TV noise, the six o’clock ‘Simpsons’ repeat, and heavy footsteps heading down the hall. Slow, heavy footsteps, a door shutting with a bang it didn’t need. Mum’s already been at the rum, obviously, and that makes her a bit unco.
I duck under the beams and past the broken lattice and the creeper that’s sending skinny wavy tendrils out across the steps. She’s talking to herself down the back of the house, probably in the bathroom. I can hear her. She talks a lot when she’s been drinking – about things gone wrong, the lack of fairness in the world, and good things too. Loyalty, and her two good sons. It could be any mixture of that right now. I can’t make out the words. But sometimes when she’s talking she wanders down the back of the house and when you do that it puts you in the bathroom.
It’s dark inside, with just the flickering light from the TV. That’s how we like to watch it when we can. It’s economical and it’s also atmospheric, particularly for SBS which tends to have more nude stuff. Wayne hates watching nude stuff in full light. It totally shatters the illusion. He’s fine with subtitles though, and most of the nude stuff on SBS does have subtitles. In some ways, he’s more sophisticated than a lot of people think. He’s become pretty nifty with accents, not that he’s found a lot of use for that yet. But he has a good ear and he likes nothing more than a few naked ladies, so SBS works for him pretty often.
I ring the doorbell to create a sense of occasion. Tonight calls for that, at least at the start. There are footsteps inside, Wayne-size, then a head-shaped shadow low down on the louvres. The corner of the curtain lifts up by about the width of a human eye.
‘Hey, it’s only you, doofus,’ Wayne says when he opens the door. ‘Why didn’t you use your key?’
‘’Cause I like seeing you peep through the curtains, in case I’m a scary Mormon come to tell you about the evils of your personal habits, or someone come to terrorise you with a hot new mobile phone deal. Woo, Wayne. Woooo, watch out for the scary doorbell ringer. Sign up for our new prepaid one-dollar deal with a free phone plus huge monthly bills that you can’t possibly pay and then we’ll come around and give you a kick in the nuts every thirty days. Woo-ooo. Even if you don’t use the phone at all, we’ll still kick you in the nuts. Woo-ooo. Every thirty days.’
‘Dickweed. Ghosts don’t sell phones, so you can quit the stupid noise. Hey, that’s pizza. A whole stack of bloody pizza.’
‘You bet. And it’s okay, Wayne. It’s okay to check who’s ringing the bell. I can tell the difference between respectable caution and downright fear.’
‘Yeah, well. That’s right.’
‘So how are the pants, Wayne? Are the pants saying caution to you, or fear? Will there be laundry?’
‘Dickweed. That was years ago, the last time that happened. And it was surprise, not fear. And there’s a huge difference between those two and you know it. I was just caught out for a second. It could have happened to anyone, that’s what Father Steele said. Anyone who hadn’t got round to asking where the facilities were, and then got a bit of a shock of some kind.’
‘Sure, mate, no worries.’ Some days I’d like it if it was slightly harder to suck Wayne into getting totally defensive, but it’s still pretty good value. ‘If Steelo said it, who am I to doubt you?’
‘Anyway, pizza. Pizza, dude. And is that Meatosaurus?’
‘You’ve got a fine nose on you, young Wayne.’
There’s noise further back in the house, then the big shape of Mum, looming up out of the dark, swaying from side to side in the twitchy blue TV light as she makes her way along the corridor.
‘Late home, Kane?’ she says, like it’s the only thing she’s noticed.
‘Yeah, but only slightly. Only slightly later than usual. It’s only just dark.’
‘Oh. Oh, righto.’ She looks around, towards the windows as though they’ll give her a better idea of exactly how dark it is and that’ll make things right.
‘And, you know, I had that meeting today, that work meeting with the big boss. And it was pretty good, so they bumped me up to a level two and that’s more responsibility.’
‘Oh.’ She hasn’t had a good day, I can tell.
‘Yeah, level two, Mum. So that’s . . .’
‘Have you got pizzas there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Boxes and bloody boxes of pizzas? Are we having a party and I didn’t know?’
‘Well, not a party, but it’s the level two that . . .’
‘How many pizzas is that? Is that three pizzas? Three pizzas and three of us? What are you doing, Kane?’
‘Well, it’s the level two . . .’
‘What do you think this is? Bloody Christmas? No, that’s right. If it was bloody Christmas you’d’ve come home with another CD you’d been wanting to listen to and then you’d give it to me and borrow it back.’ She takes a mouthful of drink and puts her hand against the wall to steady herself properly. ‘Powderfinger. When did I ever ask for Powderfinger?’
Wayne’s looking at me. He wants me to pick her up on her lousy musical tastes, like usual. Tell her I was only trying to educate her, stop her getting out of touch. But not today. It’s not the time for it, and she’s got this wrong.
‘Look, you don’t understand. The level two – you’ve got to let me explain.’
‘I look in front of me and I see three pizzas when two would do and that’s not like you. We’re on a knife edge here, mate, and you can’t go doing things like this. You can’t go getting big ideas. You can’t order three of something, plus garlic bread, when two would do. That’s where the rot starts. Things like that.’
‘What do you mean? There’s no rot. It’s perfectly all right. It’s perfectly all right to do this in the circumstances. I got bumped up to a level two. It’s a big deal, right? Well pretty big, anyway. I’m going out after with the guys from work . . .’
‘Going out? Going out? Jesus, Kane. Not to one of those places with pokies?’
To the surf club at Mooloolaba.’
‘Definitely pokies,’ Wayne says.
Thanks Wayne.
‘Ever since Christmas,’ she says, and we’re back to that again. ‘Ever since before Christmas . . . It’s that girl. It’s that girl. Is that bloody girl going to be there tonight?’
‘Tanika? Yeah, hopefully. She’s my girlfriend. Why wouldn’t she be there?’
‘What is she trying to do to you? This is what I hoped would never happen. Hoped it and hoped it. Look at yourself, Kane. This is how it always starts. Look at you. Fornication and gambling and reckless behaviour. This is where it starts, but where does it end? Where does it end?’
‘What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. That thing before Christmas is totally sorted out. We did our time. We’ve got clearance. We’re semiofficial. And you can’t blame her for anything. And so what if I’m going somewhere with pokies? It’s not like I was planning to play them. And even if I was you should trust me. You don’t even know what this level two means.’
‘Trust you? Trust you? I’ve been through that kind of talk before and that’s a mug’s game. And don’t you go shouting at me about your fancy level two. I don’t even know what it means. All I know is that all of a sudden we’ve got you buying stupid amounts of food and coming in here and big-noting yourself and setting off for a night on the town. And don’t you dare go telling me not to worry about that. Not to lie awake all night worrying about that.’
‘It’s cool, Mum,’ Wayne says. This is Kane. We can always trust him. It’s only pizzas.’
And she’s still leaning against the wall and breathing noisily through her nose and not really looking anywhere. Taking a few words in, maybe, holding her glass low down by her side at an angle, but it’s practically empty. ‘The Simpsons’ comes back on after an ad break. There’s a thousand things to say, but I’m saying none of them. There’s not one’d get into her head right now and do any good.
‘Which one’s the Meatosaurus?’ Wayne says, and then he works it out by smell and slides the box out and takes it into the lounge room.
Mum goes after him, but for no particular reason – it’s like she’s just drifting along and that’s where things are going – and I go down the hall and into the kitchen. I get us three plates. It was supposed to be a special occasion, bugger it, they could at least eat off plates. I serve us each a slice of the other two pizzas, and I pour three Cokes. No more rum for Mum while I’m here tonight, if I can help it.
She doesn’t look away from ‘The Simpsons’ when I set her plate down in front of her. She just stares ahead at the TV, and Mum doesn’t have a clue about ‘The Simpsons’.
‘Good on you, mate,’ Wayne says when he sees I’ve given him a couple of big bits. They never cut pizzas evenly, so there’s often a debate about who gets what. ‘What’s a level two?’
‘It’s a promotion.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. And it’s not an automatic one either. It’s an earned one. And not one you usually get when you’re eighteen.’
‘And more money?’
‘Yeah. And training. Maybe a truck licence. Maybe heavy vehicle. Or maybe something to do with plants.’
‘Well . . . well, good for you. And lucky for us, hey? Lucky for us that Kane’s on the job.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Thanks.’
Mum’s still hearing none of it, even though I said it loud and clear. Wayne and I both look at her, she stares at ‘The Simpsons’.
Mum’s been different since the incident before Christmas when Tanika and I got involved up the back of the bus. That’s what occurs to me when I go into the kitchen to get my plate. With all the other things that’ve been different, that’s the one I didn’t notice. And now that they’re all coming good, it’s there to see. I’m working hard and, the harder I work, the edgier she gets. It’s been a lesson in consequences, all of that, even though it didn’t really have to have any. There was all this talk of how we’d ‘strayed’ but, when we worked it through with Father Steele and he knew our feelings, he said everyone at the Blessed Virgin could get used to it being us ‘getting involved in a manner that was briefly inappropriate but now totally above board’.
The pizza boxes are next to the phone. I call Tanika. I’ve got to get out of here.
‘How was today?’ she says, straight up. ‘How was your meeting?’
‘Good, pretty good really. I didn’t get an increment this time. I got put up a level.’
‘Put up a level? That sounds good.’
‘Yeah. It’s better than an increment. It’s a good result.’
‘Excellent. And no surprise, might I add.’
‘Well, thank you. So a few of us were thinking about going out for a couple of drinks in a little while. Up to the surf club at Mooloolaba. And Steve was reckoning you should maybe join us, if you’re okay hanging out with our lot from work.’
‘I reckon I can handle them. What are they like?’
‘A cut above our lot at home, I can promise you that. ’Cause that’s not promising a whole lot. So, I thought I might have a shower and get on up there.’
‘Okay. I’d pick you up but I’ve still got a couple of things to do. How about I see you there in an hour?’
‘Yeah, no worries.’
‘And that’s good about the level two, hey? You should feel pretty proud about that.’
That’s better. Just a bit of that wouldn’t have gone astray earlier, a bit of that a little closer to home. That’s what I’m thinking when I’m in the shower, washing off all the sweat of the day and telling myself I’m washing Mum’s shitty attitude off with it. Standing under the shower with cool water powering down on my head, because I can’t face picking up my plate full of pizza just yet and going back into the lounge room where I’ll want to get angry.
And I’m telling myself to forget it, forget it, she has her bad days and her other days, and on one of the other days we’ll talk about the level two and I think she’ll be proud of me. But tonight I’ve got to get out of here. Tonight shouldn’t be working out this way.
Me, Tanika Bell, a drink or two, and maybe some time when it’s just us. A walk on the beach, a look up at the stars, no guys from work, no nothing. That could be soon, not much later tonight, and it’s so much better than this.
That’s when Mum comes in.
‘You don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘I’m in the bloody shower. That much I understand for sure. I’m in the bloody shower, right?’
And with the water in my eyes and looking out through the fogged-up glass, this first full-colour picture of Mum for tonight is blotchy and blurry, and her voice is blurry too with the water pounding on my head and on the walls of the shower.
She’s got the TV remote in her hand and she’s standing in the open doorway and saying, ‘No, Kane, you don’t understand.’
‘And you don’t even listen. Get out, Mum. I’m in the shower. I’ll talk to you later. Get out and eat the bloody pizza before it gets cold. I bought you bloody pizza.’
‘Mum.’ It’s Wayne’s voice from back in the lounge room. ‘We have to change channels. You’ve got to get in here. It’s bloody “Neighbours” now.’
Then she’s gone, with the door still wide open, the door forgotten like the last stupid idea that entered her head and then left while she wasn’t looking. I shut it when I get out. There’s a lock on it, but it’s been broken all my life. We give people privacy in the shower, that’s a rule here. You don’t just barge in on them. If the door’s shut and the shower’s running, that’s all the information you need.
I dry myself and I get dressed, and I go back to the kitchen to get my plate. I feel spectacularly clean. That’s what I tell myself – spectacularly clean, and with a collared shirt and long pants and shoes that aren’t work boots. I’m already participating in the night out beyond this stupid house. That’s what I’m telling myself.
Mum’s in the kitchen, waiting for me, and her face is red and she’s leaning on the bench. ‘Look, what you don’t understand is my life.’ That’s what she says. ‘That’s what I meant before.’
‘Yeah, well I couldn’t tell that because I was trying to tell you something about my life. Something good about my life that happened today.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t understand. That was my point.’
‘What point? Understand what?’
‘It’s this stuff you’re getting into. This life. This spending money and the business with the girl.’
‘Yeah, so what? If you’d listen, you’d know the money situation was okay. And part of my news, but you don’t listen. And you’d know the situation with Tanika. You should really know that a lot better than you do. One thing went wrong two months ago, particularly in the eyes of certain people, and we haven’t put a foot wrong since. We’ve been playing by a bunch of other people’s rules and we haven’t broken one of them for two bloody months, so everybody else is now starting to cut us a bit of slack.’
‘There’s no “but”. There’s no “but” to that. The people – people you respect – people who get out of their houses and do things during the day and see what the world’s like are starting to cut us a bit of slack.’
‘“What the world’s like?” What would you know about that? What would you know about the world? You’re eighteen and you can’t know anything about the world, and you’ve gone and got yourself all these big ideas. And that’s when it started. It started two months ago, and I dread to think where it’ll end.’
‘It could end somewhere good. How about that for a possibility? It might not end at all. Did you ever think that there’s just the remotest chance that things might keep getting better? That one day, they might add up and amount to something? Did you ever think that?’
‘Jesus, Kane . . .’ She shakes her head, as though I’ve just said the stupidest, most dangerous thing I could.
‘And did you ever think that what’s happening between me and Tanika might mean something. That it wasn’t just an impulse? That it’s lasting a bit longer than that, and still getting better?’
‘What are you saying? What are you saying, Kane? You scare me with talk like that. Nine times out of ten those things end in disaster, those kinds of thoughts. Love’s a luxury, Kane, a complete luxury. If love’s the kind of word – kind of thing – you’ve got in mind. It’s never played a part in my life, not that kind of love anyway. You and your fancy ideas. I blame TV. That morning television’s full of opinions, and it’ll do you no good. Do you know how much they pay those people? They aren’t like you. If you want love, mate, if you want any kind of choices, you’ve got to make a mess of nothing. That’s why what you did in the bus scared me. What you did with Joe Bell’s daughter before Christmas.’
‘What about Dad? What about Dad? At least back ages ago? Things with you and him, back when they started.’
‘That wasn’t love, Kane. And when did anyone tell you otherwise? Love’s for TV, and maybe for people who are planning not to wreck their lives and who don’t have their lives wrecked for them. We messed up, I got pregnant. If you’re going to be the man about town – the man with the ladies and spending the money – you should know those things now. I was stupid and young. He was kind of suave and my friends reckoned he was excellent. That’s more like how things happen. And you end up as a thing they call a de facto or a common-law wife and you don’t get that big fairytale day with the white dress and all that.’
‘With you, Kane. With you.’
And it’s as blunt as that. The feeling of hunger in my stomach changes to a feeling that I might be sick, the feeling of my stomach falling away from me, out of me.
‘So that’s why I worry,’ she says, as if the new information puts all the right on her side. As if it makes any sense right now. ‘Things can happen so easily. But don’t get me wrong. You’re the good part of all that. I went through a lot of crap, but you were always the prize at the end of it, remember? You, and then Wayne.’
She’s really drunk now, properly drunk as far as I can see, but maybe she has been all along. She’s slurring and looking past me, looking all over the room. There’s no point going on with this.
‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got people waiting for me. People from work. I’ll be careful. Really careful. No pokies. We could talk another time about this, maybe.’
I don’t want to cry in front of Mum, or anyone in fact. I can’t take this like a kid, because I can’t be a kid. I bring the money in here, most of it. I go out, I work hard, I get promoted and I very rarely make mistakes. Because we can’t afford it, and no one knows that better than me.
She shouldn’t be telling me stuff like that. I bet it isn’t even true. Not really, not completely. She’s bad on her bad days, very negative. It makes her say things. We were a good family once, when I was very young. I’m sure about that. I remember good times. They must have been real.
I’m on my bike going down our street, and maybe it’s Mum’s voice shouting something out behind me, maybe it’s not, just someone else’s TV up too loud. It’s someone shouting, back that way I don’t know who. I just keep pedalling and I block it out, every word. My hair’s still wet and I’ve got a piece of Meatosaurus in one hand, the biggest piece. Wayne gave it to me on the way out and I told him things’d be okay. We’d had a minor misunderstanding in the kitchen, Mum and me, and that was pretty much it and now I had people to meet and I was already late. So I’d see him later. And he should keep her away from the rum, or at least try to.
I’m steering with one hand, but it’s no problem. I can ride with no hands if I need to. I’m stuffing Meatosaurus pizza into my mouth, losing pieces of meat of three types all over the road. It’s worth the extra buck sixty-five, undoubtedly, but best not eaten on a bike.
I get as much into my mouth as I can and then I throw the crust to a crazy dog that chases me all along its fenceline.
I can’t believe there was never love involved, just bad luck. I can’t believe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that. Me, on this bike, turning right at the lights and taking my place on the Nicklin Way between two cars. I can’t believe that Meatosaurus is so excellent but so hard to swallow, and I might not keep it down at all.
But I paid good money for those pizzas and I’m not going to bring it up now. Not just because of her and the things she says because of the rum.
I don’t want to go to the surf club. It’ll be too bright and too busy. And it turns out my parents might not have meant a lot to each other after all. It wasn’t that things went wrong. It’s more that they were never right. That’s the story, the true story. The version that comes out on rum, true or not.
There’s too much in my head right now, whizzing round. Too much. But I’m going to see people soon, work people and Tanika Bell, and I have to lift my game.
I focus on the ride, on the wind blowing my shirt back and blowing into my face, on avoiding parked cars. It’s all too much, for sure, but it boils down to one simple idea: the whole world has changed since the day began. Even if it hasn’t changed at all.
Suddenly, there’s shade. My skin burns less. There’s a cloud between me and the sun. Not for long, but there are one or two more blowing in.
I stop for a water break and I crouch down beside the truck to keep the sun off me for a while at least. Cars pass at seventy or so, people cruising by in air-con, talking on phones, shouting at the kids in the back on the way home from school.
Then it’s into action again with the Whipper Snipper, whacking the weeds down to ground level, keeping it interesting by pretending I’m one of those old buggers with a metal detector, checking the beaches for whatever it is they check for. Or that I’m out on the World War Two artillery range sweeping for shells, for ordnance. What is about the old signs that say ‘ordnance’? Ordnance sounds like something you could do with at a council meeting, or in court. Not much like bombs. The new signs say ‘ammunition’, I think.
On the other side of the fence, the new canals are going in. They’re cutting back into the old swamp and piling the dirt up high for houses. So, there’ll be more roads with weeds for us to deal with soon enough.
There’s another cloud, a bigger one this time.
They did a story on clouds on the ‘Today’ show this morning. Clouds and skydiving. There’s a law that says it’s illegal to skydive into a cloud, and I didn’t know about that. Wayne was making his breakfast at the time, so I shouted out to him about it, something like, ‘Hey, Wayne, did you know that for skydivers they make laws for clouds?’
It’s long been a view of mine that we should talk through current affairs in the mornings, or there’s not much that’ll get Wayne ready for the world beyond school.
And Wayne said, ‘Laws for clouds? How do you make laws for clouds? And why should the skydivers care about what the clouds are supposed to do?’ Okay, maybe I wasn’t totally clear with my presentation, and Wayne’s known for being a bit of a slow waker in the mornings, but . . . ‘How do clouds understand that kind of thing? They’re just water, aren’t they? And, like, what if the clouds were really bad? Would you set the law on them and chase them all around the country and put ’em in jail? How do you lock up a cloud?’
‘That’s a fair point, mate. I don’t think you do. You know those little packets of crystals you get that stop bags getting mouldy? You just blast a few of them up their way and that pretty much nukes ’em. Sucks the clouds right up and then they just hit the ground like a bag of wet socks.’
‘But I like clouds. People like clouds, Kane,’ he said. ‘They’re in poetry, and that.’
I set him straight, of course, the second he said, ‘Come on, Kane, what’s it really about?’ But I kind of like the idea – laws for clouds – even though it’s actually to do with the skydivers. We both preferred the other version – big huge lawless clouds, drifting over us, doing whatever they want, maddening people by raining too much or not enough. And not even listening to the weather forecasts, let alone rules and isobars and the southern oscillation index.
There were three good stories in that half hour on the ‘Today’ show. First the clouds, then a space guy talking about Mars (but a space guy of the beard and brown pants and big telescope variety, not the astronaut type), then a shark they’d pulled in up north that had a human thigh bone in its stomach. Wayne had to finish his breakfast on the verandah – moaning away and going, ‘I think I’m going to gag, Kane, I’m thinking about the bone’ – but it was a good story.
‘Think about the poor bloody shark,’ I told him. ‘Think how it’d be if you were the shark, trying to swallow that. A full-on human thigh in your mouth, with the knee bumping away at your tonsils, and then suddenly you’ve got this hook in your cheek as well.’
So he spewed his Vegemite on toast up into the garden, but I made him a fresh batch and we both got to have a laugh about it in the end.
Actually, the Mars story came then, after the shark story, when Wayne was having his second shot at breakfast. Something about a NASA mission looking for signs of life and how, if you’re a very early riser, you can see Mars right now coming up in the east, a while before the sun.
I’d quite like to see that. I’d quite like to see Mars because you’ve got to wonder if the redness is overrated, but no way could I get up that early to do it.
The ‘Today’ show’s good for information, even if not all of it’s useful right away. There’s quite a bit of political commentary, and I’m going to need some of that this year since I’ll be getting to vote for the first time. There was a phone call a couple of weeks ago at home and they said it was a survey company and was I over eighteen? Yes. Was I eighteen to twenty-four and male because that’s what they needed in my area? Yes. And did I have five minutes to answer some important questions? And I gave that a big Yes too, thinking it’d be political, but it turned out to be only to do with which brands of cleaning products you’d heard of. But I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t eighteen, and maybe it’s no bad thing not to start with questions about the government straight up. And I am the guy in the house who buys the cleaning products, so I had it pretty well covered.
Okay, I’m a bit bored with the Whipper Snipper-ing, but it’s fine if your mind drifts onto other things as long as you don’t totally forget and run the Snipper over your boots. Not that it gets all the way through to your toes, or anything, but you do look like a bit of a dickhead.
We’ve made the morning news a regular habit at our place. Wayne and me at least – Mum’s not always up in time. It’s best when it’s all three of us, all three of us at the table, striking up a conversation about tax reform or murder or a house that burned down somewhere during the night.
If you look at a lot of TV shows that feature good families, you’ll often find that they have breakfast together. Usually with a newspaper, but we go for the televised version instead. It’s totally up to the minute, updated every half hour, and it costs you nothing.
You see the same kind of families in ads as you do in the shows. Better versions of them, even. Smarter, a bit more beautiful, and really together. We don’t exactly push the beauty aspect in my family, but it’s not the most important. Vanity is a luxury we can’t afford, Mum says. And she’s right. We can afford the essentials, and Mum has a card that covers medical creams and lotions. Which are nothing to do with beauty, but are really your only chance when a bad rash gets truly set in and it’s summer. That’s what Mum says, and for her it’s rash season about nine months of the year, but February’s the worst of it so there ends up being more rum drinking to take her mind off it.
‘As long as it doesn’t go to pus in the chafed areas,’ she says, and if she says it at a meal time there’s a fair bet we get to see some reverse stomach action from Wayne. And if we don’t I can always come out with a line like, ‘And you know the pus is really bad when it makes that sticky noise between your thighs when you walk, hey Mum?’
So, we’re not exactly your cereal ad family. Maybe, if they ever got round to making a cereal called Very Unspecial K, it’d be us they’d come to. But the message from the ads – apart from the obvious: ‘buy our cereal, it does wonders for your bowels and makes you beautiful and happy’ – is that the family breakfast, with some sort of news input, is a good thing. Cereal companies wouldn’t do it if people didn’t see it as good. And why wouldn’t they? If I had my way, I’d do it all, right down to the chopped strawberries on the cereal and the blue-and-white stripey milk jug. The three of us sitting there, neat and tidy and charming, talking through the cloud story, the shark story, the Mars story.
My father went up north a while back. Ten years or so ago. And he went crewing fishing boats up there so it’s hard not to wonder, at least for a second, when you hear a story about a shark being pulled in with a thigh bone inside it. But he did other things too. He picked bananas and mangoes, he worked on the roads, he even packed parachutes for a skydiving company. And that’s not so much co-incidence – it’s just that, eventually, he got to do every job going. But he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever get so attached that he’d hear about the finer points of any of them, the precautions you’ve got to take, the laws for clouds and things like that. He never liked detail. Detail held him back.
Mum put it another way, as she would: ‘He’s a reckless bloody bastard who never listens and never thinks things through and only ever thinks about himself.’
Dad put it down to detail. I asked him some questions in a letter once. He said he wasn’t suited to answering to people, and when they crowd him out with stuff (which I’m taking to mean excessive facts, responsibilities, a long-term view) he can’t stomach it and he has to go. That’s just him, not us. That’s what he said. ‘You’d be worse off if I was around, mate.’ That’s what he actually said. That’s the quote, though he said the other stuff too, all of it in a few lines written small on the back of a card with a view of a sunny day in Innisfail.
But it’s been years since I last got anything from him, and I always wondered if one day there’d be news. Thigh-bone-in-a-shark’s-throat kind of news. He’s not the sort of guy we’d hear about in a normal way. No one’d ever go, ‘Hey, your dad, he’s mayor up this way now,’ or ‘Sure, he owns two Maccas and a servo, he’s a pillar of the community.’ No, it’d be the cops coming to the door, telling us guess who they just pulled out of some big fish.
So I had that second when I wondered if it was him, but I know it wasn’t. It was just a thought. And Mum was up by then but not properly awake, and she was staring at the screen – at the guy reading the prepared statement – and I knew it was a thought that no one but me was having, and that I wouldn’t be taking any further. Not with Mum just sitting there gazing at the screen kind of bug-eyed, like a shark with a gobful of thigh, and taking nothing in.
‘How’s your day looking, Kane?’ she said when she noticed me looking her way. She’s good when it comes to asking about people’s days and how they might be.
How’s my day looking? Pretty damn fine, to be honest, as it’s turned out. Sure, it’s hot out here buzz-cutting the roadsides back to something respectable, but the day’s had its moments. Moment One: 11.15 a.m., ‘Performance, Planning and Review’ talk with Steve, my boss on the road crew, and Tony, the unit manager. Tony’s quite senior. He doesn’t wear a tie, but the next guy up does.
I have to say it went well. Tony even said we could get some coffee in, but I settled for water. And it seemed to send the right kind of signal. It’s a council that respects a sensible attitude to hydration among its outdoor workers.
We do PP&R once a year. Everyone does it now, to identify strengths and weaknesses (which are actually ‘opportunities for further development’). I wasn’t sure how I’d go, since I didn’t get the job I went for in Parks in December, but they said that was down to the bozos in Parks. Well, okay, they didn’t quite say ‘bozos’, but I can read between the lines. ‘Their loss, our gain.’ That’s what they said.
And how did it go? I got an upgrade. I was a level one before, now I’m a level two. That’s significantly more senior, and way better than increments. Up till now I’ve just had increments, which is a small increase you get each year as long as everything’s going okay. And they said it was pretty rare for an eighteen-year-old to make level two and ‘there’s a future for you here, if you want it.’ And maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but it’s good that it’s there. Not that I get stressed by the idea of taking a long-term view but, when I take one, I’m not totally sure what I see there. I’m pretty sure that’s a different thing, and all it means is I don’t see myself spending my whole life with a Whipper Snipper in my hands.
But Tony and Steve are good guys, and they know all that. And they said that, now they’d bumped me up to level two, I was up for some training if I wanted it. Maybe a truck or heavy vehicle licence. But since I get around on my bike and I don’t even have a regular driver’s licence, they said maybe I could start with that. And that’d be a step up in the world.
And they asked me if there was anything else I’d be up for and I said, ‘Plants. I could do a course that’d teach me a thing or two about plants. For verges, and that.’
‘That’d be horticulture,’ Tony said. ‘No worries.’
And he wrote it in my file, so it’s on the cards as well.
And then, on the way out, Steve said maybe we should have a few drinks tonight. It’s not every day you make a new level.
Yeah. We walked out of the council offices, past the potted palms and the typing noises and the phone calls, and I wanted people to ask me about it. To get up from their desks and ask me. Just go, ‘Hey, how were things with your PP&R? Some of them don’t go so well. How was yours?’
But they didn’t, and I knew they wouldn’t.
I also wanted to stop on the way out and borrow one of the phones and call Tanika. She’d get it. She’d know this counted for something. My guess is Mum and Wayne mightn’t but Tanika would. Mum might get the bit about it meaning more money, but that’d be it.
Then Steve talked about drinks, and he said, ‘You could bring your girlfriend, if you want. If she’d be okay hanging out with our lot.’
Our lot. It’s a fair point. Look at our lot. Laszlo, who’s a big bugger and not always polite and who doesn’t have the full complement of fingers, courtesy of work safety practices once being not as good as they are now. He’s known as Lurch to the others, because of some old movie or TV show and because of the strange way he moves. He’s like a series of lumps in a permanent process of rearrangement, but he says his wife Tina just puts it down to him never having found clothes that do much for him.
Then there’s Benno, who breeds kittens and reckons he hates cats and who trains his mates’ greyhounds in his spare time. And Trev, who lives to fish and who said they should make a bumper sticker that goes, ‘Live to Fish’. He once got so excited about a trevally that he caught, that the two of them did a video together – him and the fish (by then a bit dead ‘cause he couldn’t find a camera fast enough) – and he sent it in to the local TV stations, in case it might be the start of something.
‘I’m gunna wear ’em down, mate,’ he said to me once. ‘Every time I pull in a big ’un, they get the video within forty-eight hours. And I’m not stopping till I’m their fishing dude, hey? Till I’m the guy at the end of the news telling youse all what’s what about the tides and what’s bitin’ and that.’
Good on you, Trev. Good on you, Trev, for having aspirations.
‘This is Trev Neale with a stonking bloody big trevally, doin’ it for WIN News on Bokarina Beach, hey? So youse all get out there, slap a few yabs on your hooks and get on to it. They’re runnin’, and they’re runnin’ right bloody now.’
Enthusiasm’s got to count for something, so who knows?
‘Your girlfriend’ – that was the best bit of the conversation with Steve on the way back to the road. It was maybe the first time someone had said ‘your girlfriend’ and it had made sense straight away, sounded right. Sounded like the way it is. So, we got to sit in the truck on the way to Bokarina and talk a bit about Tanika Bell, me and Tanika Bell. The happening thing. Two people, going out. Me, and my girlfriend who’d probably be up for a quiet drink or two this evening.
And I wound the window down and the air blew in on my face, and it was hot but it didn’t matter because I could say to myself ‘This is the life’ and it felt true.
‘Yeah, she’s pretty good,’ I said to him. ‘Pretty good.’
And I said her parents’d be away for the weekend and Steve said, ‘Wah-hey, over to the chick’s place for a bit of the old horizontal dance of love, then.’
And I had to say, ‘Well, maybe not quite. It’s a complicated set of circumstances.’
Which was when Steve showed that he’s a good bloke, ’cause he didn’t say anything more than, ‘Oh, right,’ and then he let it go. ‘So, what does she do, hey?’ I think he said next. ‘Work-wise.’ Something like that.
‘She’s in real estate. Working for a bloke called Bob Kotter.’
‘The Most on the Coast?’
‘That’s the one. She’s the front office person, Tanika. The first one the public sees when they walk in off the street. Responsible for first impressions.’
And you can bet she’s good at that – that’s what I didn’t say. I’ve seen Tanika dressed for work, and she looks very business-like. Bob Kotter likes the idea of a skirt on his front office person, and skirts work out pretty well for Tanika.
Steve played one of his tapes after that. Shania Twain, I think it was, and he sang along to the bit about not being in it for love and the wind whipped in off the new canals and the wet dirt and the fallen trees, smelling musty and rank. It’s the perfect weather for growth and decay, both at the same time. It steams and rots and germinates and propagates till the weed plants grow so high they’re pulling on the branches of trees and bending them. Then making flowers – blue, yellow, red.
I’ll call Tanika when I get home.
We’re okay with Mum’s rum supply at the moment, so I figure we can go for a pizza splurge to celebrate my level two. I’m up for an extra forty-two dollars a week, back-dated to last pay, so I think it’s okay just this once. We usually go for the fourteen-ninety-five two-large-pizzas deal (pick up only), but tonight we’ll get the top-of-the-range family deal: three large pizzas, two bottles of Coke plus garlic bread for twenty-four ninety-five. Sure, there’ll be leftovers – we’re not the biggest of families – but that garlic bread’s special and today’s special, and we can heat up anything left over tomorrow. I’ll even go the extra buck sixty-five for Meatosaurus on one of the pizzas.
On the way to Domino’s, I can practically taste it. Meatosaurus – there’s nothing meatier. A selection of meats set in tomato sauce with a chewy pan pizza base, topped off with handfuls of mozzarella cheese.
Lucky Mum likes to eat early.
I’m at Domino’s by about six and there’s only a few people waiting so, in about fifteen minutes, I’ve got the boxes clipped to the back of my bike and I’m heading for home. Set to deliver a feast, and ready to watch them eat themselves sick. Because we can, because I’m level two and that’s worth noting. Worth a splurge, just this once.
Steve says we should get a jug, a jug or two of Fourex or maybe VB, but I tell him that I reckon I’ll just stick to lites, maybe a couple of lites, just pots. ‘Drinking doesn’t always work out so well in my family and, you know, there’s that thing about it being in your genes.’
‘Oh, righto.’
‘So I’m kind of careful. If that’s okay.’
‘Sure. But you like beer, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. That’s not the issue. Who wouldn’t like beer?’
‘Yeah.’
He tells the guy at the bar we’ll have a jug of full-strength and a jug of lite and he says, ‘Gives everyone a choice, hey.’
The guy gets the pouring started and leaves the jugs sitting there to fill. The girl next to us orders two rum and Cokes.
‘Better make it rum and Diet Cokes,’ she says, and the guy says, ‘No worries. Diet Cokes it is.’
She’s by herself, I think, so maybe they’re both for her. Or maybe she’s got a friend off ordering food. She looks at me looking at her, and I hadn’t expected that. I think I felt invisible, not quite in the room yet, without Tanika here. I don’t want to be here like this, just me and the guys and beer. It’s suddenly clear. And the girl with the rum and Diet Cokes looks at me as if I might be checking her out, and all I’m thinking is I wish Tanika was here. I’m looking right through her.
There’s harness racing up on six screens, maybe from Albion Park in Brisbane. I’ve never really got harness racing – men on buggies hanging off the back of horses – but there are a few old guys standing round under the screens holding tickets, so they’re obviously into it. What with that and all the pokies, there’s quite a bit of betting going on in here tonight. The pokies built this place, probably. On the walls they’ve got photos of surf clubs before pokies – black-and-white photos – and they’re just old shacks and a few muscly guys with messy hair and one boat. Not now. This place has high ceilings and exposed beams and a long restaurant overlooking the sea, a carpeted floor – good carpet – and bars made of expensive timber. And uniforms for staff and a dress code applying to all three types of acceptable patrons (members, guests and bona fide visitors).
Mum knows that a lot of that’s got to be down to pokie money, and that’s partly what she’s on about. The money comes from somewhere, and some of it comes from people a bit like Dad, who didn’t mind a wager on whatever was going. And none of it – none of it – comes from me, and she should know that. And she shouldn’t get stupid about it because she should just know.
Steve and I each take a jug and a few glasses and we go back to the table. His fisherman’s basket’s arrived while we’ve been at the bar, and he sticks a few chips in his mouth as soon as he’s put the glasses down.
He starts pouring himself a full-strength beer and I pour myself a lite and he says, ‘Our young Mr Level Two’s pacing himself. Probably figures he’ll have more fun watching you blokes get pissed and stupid than if he got too far that way himself.’
‘Always been a thinker,’ Laszlo says as he goes for Steve’s jug and pours himself a glass. ‘Good on you, Kane.’
‘Pours better than you too, Lurch,’ Trev says. ‘Are you planning to drink that or use it as an aid to shaving?’
‘Ah, you’re all bloody comedians, aren’t ya?’ Lurch says, in a way that’s not exactly happy ‘And so bloody funny that you do verges for a living. Any bloody funnier and they might even let you stick bitumen into holes in the road.’
It’s a joke, but a little obscure. Not to worry. That’s Lurch for you.
The others are all having burgers – Lurch, Trev and Benno – but I told them I’d eaten at home so I’d just have a couple of beers. The way things went at home, I couldn’t spend any more money on food tonight. Plus, that piece of pizza was just about enough.
Steve says he doesn’t like calamari, but he can never talk them into extra prawns instead so he’s got a couple of calamari rings going if I want them. Sometimes people trash calamari in the deep fryer and the rings are like little white car tyres inside the crumb coating, but these ones aren’t bad.
It’s hard to believe what Mum said. And I can’t remember the exact words any more, so maybe I’m not getting it right. I had such a clear plan for this evening. It had been such a good day, so maybe I didn’t want to listen to anything that’d spoil it. That’s all I thought was going on – the usual crap at home, the crap that’s become usual – and then it took a turn. All that stuff started coming out and it seemed to be about my life and the time when it began. I’d always known it hadn’t been the best of circumstances, but I thought they must have been good times anyway Good in some respects, at least.
Like before Christmas, like the last two months or so – the best summer of my life, and some of the worst days I’ve had in ages.
Tanika turns up when Lurch is off getting another jug (full-strength). She looks like Kylie Minogue to me, or as good as you get round here. Kylie Minogue from round about the time of ‘Locomotion’, but with much more original teeth. And she’s dressed up for this, for tonight, because she wants to let me know my level two’s a big deal. And I appreciate that.
Suddenly, she realises we’re all watching her walk across the room and she gets embarrassed, but the guys don’t stop watching. There’s this thing about going the group perve when you’re working on a road. Everyone expects it, and there’s got to be some perks with the job. They watch her all the way to the table, and Trev pulls up a stool so she can sit between him and me.
‘Hi,’ she says to me, and she puts her hand out and touches my side as she pushes herself up onto the stool.
It’s all just part of the hello, but it’s also taken in by the group perve, and I’m kind of ready for them to stop it now. This is Tanika we’re dealing with, not passing pedestrian traffic, and we’re not on the job now. She’s got a midriff top on, and my hand goes on her bare back, just as a reflex because she touched me.
‘Introductions wouldn’t go astray,’ Benno says, so I do the honours.
Tanika says it’s good to meet them and that she’s heard a lot about them, though I’m not sure she has. She’s got lip gloss on, and big earrings, and she’s blow dried her hair so that it’s bigger than usual, big and frizzy. With the short skirt and the midriff top, it’s a hot combo. And Trev’s perving her right up and down at close proximity and then giving me a look that says I must be the luckiest man around, and what did I ever do?
Good question. She’s just in from outside, so her back is warm under my hand, like the evening out there. Her skin often surprises me. Mine’s always dry and rough, and it’s not helped by sun and work and sweat, and I thought skin was just skin until I met her. Tanika’s skin is always soft and smooth.
I am to turn these thoughts, Father Steele says, into an appreciation of the wonders of nature. And I truly appreciate the fact that nature is under my hand just now, even if it comes along loaded with improper thoughts.
‘Hey, I picked Harbo up from the hospital this afternoon,’ she says to me, and then she looks around at the others. ‘Harbo’s this old guy we help out sometimes. He’s kind of sick. They thought he had cancer for a while there but it’s actually TB, a sort of chest infection. He’d had it a long time ago and it was coming back. Anyway . . .’ my turn again to get her attention ‘. . . they’re pretty happy with him. He’ll be on the tablets for a while, but they reckon they’re doing the job.’
‘That’s good news. So we’ll have the old bugger round for a while yet.’
‘Well, probably. Not that you’d think that to talk to him.’
We don’t give them the whole story. We know what the whole story is, just the two of us. Harbo only heard the word cancer when the doctors talked through the possibilities, and he walked out of that hospital thinking he should get his affairs in order. We made him go back there, and it took some pushing. I told him he owed us a favour for the work we put in on his boat, and that was it – go back to the hospital one more time and get everything properly looked at.
‘Wouldn’t mind a drink,’ Tanika says. ‘You wouldn’t have a spare glass so I could pour myself a beer?’
‘Jeez, we’re a rude mob,’ Trev says. ‘I’ll get you one. You’re sure you’re right with beer? You don’t want spirits or anything? A Breezer or something?’
‘Beer’s good.’
He slides off his stool, and looks past her at me. ‘And she thinks beer’s good. Jesus, Kane, where does a bloke get himself one of these?’ And he rolls his eyes and sets off for the bar.
‘He’s a bit of a dag,’ Tanika says, smiling about it.
‘He’s a lot of a dag,’ Lurch says. ‘He’s the whole arse end of the sheep if you ask me.’
‘Hey, did you get that dickhead on the door with the “no trainers” rule?’ she says, and she swings round to give Benno and Lurch a look at her shoes.
And therefore her excellent legs. They perve mightily, like two people with a lifelong passion for footwear. We probably won’t be seeing these guys again socially, that’s what I reckon. At least not until a time of year when there’s a fair bit less flesh on show.
‘They’re not trainers,’ she says. ‘Are they? You guys’d agree with me, wouldn’t you?’
Steve leans over and says, just to me, ‘I reckon she could say they were clogs and those guys’d agree with her. What do you think?’
‘I told him they were a fashion shoe,’ she says to the other two, and it’s become a bit of a performance. ‘And if he didn’t know the fashion that shouldn’t be my problem.’
Too right,’ Benno says. ‘Do you want me to hit him for you?’
And he could be serious, but we all laugh. The rest of us laugh, then Benno laughs too.
‘I might tidy up a bit of that drool around your mouth first, but, Benno,’ Steve says. ‘And maybe stop the tongue hanging out. You don’t want to go belting people while you look like your mind’s on other things. It could be seen as impolite.’
‘And . . .’ Lurch says, and then he remembers that only Steve makes jokes about Benno, so he stops. ‘Nothing. They’re not trainers, but. Obviously. They’re a fashion shoe. Hey?’
Benno isn’t smiling. He doesn’t have to. Benno will never get caught up laughing at something he doesn’t definitely think is funny, and that’d include nothing that’s at his expense. But we know how it is and, if you can get a laugh out of Benno, you know you’ve done well.
Trev comes back with a glass and pours a pretty dodgy beer for Tanika.
‘Fetch me a bloody razor, someone,’ Lurch says. ‘Mr Neale’s up for a shave.’
‘It’ll settle,’ Trev says in a shitty kind of way, and Lurch just laughs.
Tanika holds up the glass and it’s more than half-full of foam and she says, ‘Yeah, and any time you want to pour me a beer to go with this, that’d be fine.’
And she gets a laugh out of Benno with that. There’s a lot to admire about Tanika Bell, always, even if I could have done without her driving my pervy workmates crazy with that performance about the shoes. It’d actually not be that hard to get them talking for an hour or two about a fine pair of tits or a great arse, or whatever, so it’s not a huge accomplishment really to fascinate them with your obviously excellent legs.
‘Well, now that we’ve all got a glass,’ Steve says, ‘a toast to young Kane and his accomplishments. One of the hardest young workers for Caloundra city, and a guy who’ll go far, hey?’
And we clink our beer glasses together over the middle of the table, and even Benno gives a nod while the others are saying, ‘Good on you, Kane,’ and ‘Go for it, Kane,’ and things like that. It’s a good moment, a good moment in a strange, strange day.
There’s talking after that, but I’m not much into it. It’s my mother I need to talk to, but probably in the morning.
Steve says something about plants, my interest in working with plants, and they all start talking about TV gardening shows, particularly the backyard makeover type. No one’s interested in the quieter kind any more, the kind where there’s just some old guy with a lisp talking about plants as though he’s a bit excited. Now they have to rip your yard up to make it look like anything worth watching, and they always finish the job with only seconds to spare.
The guys talk about ‘Backyard Blitz’ and we all know every one of them’s totally hot for Jody but it’s Trev who actually says it first.
‘She knows so much about plants and how they’d do in different parts of Australia,’ he says, in awe of something (and it might be wisdom, I suppose, but it’s probably not). ‘She knows more about ’em than they’d ever put on the tag that you get on them when they’re at the shop. She’s good. She gets real dirty too. Specially on the wet jobs. Real dirty I love an episode of the Blitz when you see the clouds rollin’ in on the Saturday morning and they’re knee deep in dry dirt already and you just know Jody’s going to be getting all muddy. And that’s when you wish there was another chick in the crew as well, and they’d have disagreements on the wet days, really bad ones, and . . .’ And that’s the moment when he realises he isn’t in his lounge room at home, talking to himself. ‘Christ. More beer?’
‘You’re the saddest man in the world, aren’t you, Trev?’ Lurch says. ‘I’m not sure I was totally aware of that till now.’
‘Hey, it’s . . . So, ever watch the Blitz do you, Tanika?’ It’s the first time Trev’s said her name, and it makes him edgy and he has to look over her shoulder at the oars mounted on the wall behind her. He’s not gifted with the ladies, they say.
‘Oh, sometimes,’ she says. ‘I’ve watched a couple. It’s on Sundays, isn’t it? We usually keep pretty busy on Sundays. But I don’t mind the skinny Pommie guy, ’cause his jokes are pretty bad and his accent’s funny’
‘Not Jamie then? He’s the Manpower one, the one who runs the show and used to be a stripper. Stripper or a dancer, but I think semi-nude. Maybe even more nude than semi.’
‘Nah, I’m not so much into the fully professional gym body. You know, the buffed and oiled thing. I don’t mind a bit of muscle but, once a man’s gone around getting money poked down his jocks for a living, you know . . . it’s not my thing.’
‘Sure,’ Trev says. ‘I know what you mean. Every muscle on this body’s au naturel, hey? Made out of sheer hard work.’
Lurch laughs and chokes on his beer. That’d be at the weekends would it, Trev? Round at your place or something? Not Monday to Friday, that’s for sure. What a line – “every muscle on this body’s au naturel, baby”.’ He pulls up a sleeve and shows us a bit of bicep, swivelling his wrist round and stroking his muscles as though we should all be wanting them bad. ‘Let us know when you’re using that line on a chick who isn’t taken, Trev. I’m pretty sure we’d all want to watch.’
‘Nah, you’re being a bit harsh,’ Benno says. ‘There’s that muscle in your finger that you use for the TV remote – Trev’s got one of those that’d get a fair bit of a work-out. It’d be pretty fat, I reckon.’
‘I’ve got cable,’ Trev says to Tanika. ‘And some people don’t. If you get my drift.’
‘Sure,’ Lurch says, figuring it’s his turn again. ‘I’m jealous as hell. We all are. Of most of Trev’s life, actually. Trev needs that channel that gives you the weather in three hundred cities around the world, ’cause he could find himself in any part of Caloundra on any given day.’
‘There’s movie channels, prick. And more sport than you could poke a stick at. And an unbelievable range of documentaries. Just last night I was watching one about these Americans in search of a frozen woolly mammoth in the permafrost of northwestern Siberia, and they got out of their truck with about sixteen coats on at this nomads’ camp in the snow. And there’s this nomad there, just standing there, chatting to ’em, hey? And you know what he’s wearing? A bloody T-shirt. And I just thought, you, Siberian man, are one tough mother.’
‘You see,’ Steve says, leaning across in front of me and talking to Tanika, ‘this is why they have a girl in the crew on those TV shows. They need a kind of moderating influence. See what I have to deal with every day? These guys’d argue about anything. Next up, Lurch or Benno’ll start saying something uncomplimentary about the Siberian guy, and Trev’ll take it personally.’
‘Hey. Bullshit. I was just saying . . .’ Trev realises, just in time, that he’s taking it personally ‘Anyway, why can’t we have a chick in our crew, Stevo? A chick who humps plants around and gets a bit of dirt on her. I’d be up for that. I could do with meeting a lady like that. As a colleague, and stuff.’
‘Colleague, mate? Sounds like you work somewhere pretty flash. Would you be talking about that other part-time job of yours with your colleagues on the board of BHP, or something?’
Trev gets shitty when we all laugh. If he was at BHP, he’d be the only guy on the board with a seventies rocker mo and hair going past the collar of his Motorhead T-shirt, and the knee out of one leg of his faded jeans in a way that makes it clear it’s not a design feature (not a fashion hole). He must have given the dress code of this place a fair shake on the way in.
‘Hey, rack off,’ he says, having maybe had enough of being the butt of the jokes, but picking his time badly, as ever, since I think the others are only getting started. ‘This is just equality I’m talking about. Chicks have got as much right to hump plants and get dirt on ’em, hey? They shouldn’t be excluded.’
‘Yeah, mate,’ Lurch says. ‘And then you’d be saying we should set up some team showers and you’d be responsible for soap.’
Trev glares at him, and then he decides to laugh along. ‘Well, I like to think of myself as a team player, yeah. And you know what they say, mate. At the end of a hard day on the unisex work crew, cleanliness is next to excellent.’
Steve changes the topic of conversation.
‘Hey, I’ve got a photo of my boy,’ he says. ‘It came back today.’
He can never quite stop being in charge of the crew, even when the only thing that’s going wrong is excessive smutty talk in a public place. But being in charge is something he handles pretty well. Maybe there’s something for me to learn there. Maybe that’s the kind of job I could do some day.
He opens his wallet and he pulls out the photo of his new baby, his son who’s six weeks old.
He shows Tanika first and she says, ‘Look at him. Look at him and his little round face and his red cheeks. What’s his name?’
‘Ewan,’ said in a proud-father way, and Tanika looks at the photo one more time before handing it to Benno. ‘The wife’s got a bit of a thing for that actor, Ewan MacGregor. But I s’pose if she doesn’t take it any further than this I can be okay about it. He’s married anyway, apparently. Seven pounds five-and-a-half ounces he was, so that’s not a bad size. There’s a bit of heat rash or something on those cheeks, but you get that.’
I get the photo last and I look into Ewan’s eyes to see what he knows. To see what you know, that early on, about the world you’ve got. In his case, two parents who have only ever seemed happy to me. But he doesn’t even know the camera’s on him, doesn’t even know what the camera is. He’s looking right past it, but probably not at anything.
And he’s so small. I want things to work out for him, I really do.
I give the photo back to Steve and I want to tell him he’s got to look after that kid. That little round-faced red-cheeked kid. Stick around and give him the best kind of life. Steve’s a good guy. Why would he not stick around? But will he? Can you ever tell? Can you ever know what you’re really like until you’re put to the test? Can you know what the test will be? Can you ever really know what you’re going to have to deal with when you’re starting out? Debts and disagreements and a boat going down in a storm. And no love there in the first place, I’m now told. Eighteen years on, that’s where you can be. A working adult, getting promoted, finding out the truth when you’re on your way out for a beer.
Was there ever a night in a place like this when my father passed around a photo of me, and looked glad to have it in his wallet and told his friends how much I weighed and things like that? I can remember his face, and some of the things he said and most of the things we did, but I’ll probably never get to ask him about that. I can’t remember him ever having the expression Steve had when we started handing the photo round, but the baby in the photo never gets to see that anyway. Someone should tell Ewan about that expression, but it’s a story they should save up for some shitty day in his future, because we all have those. And that’s when they can tell him he was wanted from the start.
I can’t get into this evening. First, there was Tanika stirring up the guys, then the TV backyard show talk, then the baby discussion. It’s easy to limit it to two beers because that’s more than I want.
It wraps up pretty early. Steve’s been missing out on sleep because of Ewan. Lurch says Trev’d surely have to be heading home soon anyway, for a bit more Siberian T-shirt spotting on Foxtel. Then Trev says – in a poke-that-where-it-goes kind of way – that he’ll be watching a full-on Star Wars marathon, actually, and Lurch says if he buys the beers can he come over?
Benno stops at the door guy when we’re on the way out and he gets so close to him that they’re practically nose-to-nose and he puts on a look that’s nearly a snarl and he says, ‘The lady’s shoes, pal. They’re not trainers, you dumb prick. That’s a fashion shoe you’re looking at there.’
And the guy looks a bit confused, and Tanika says, ‘Actually, there was a different man out here earlier.’
And Benno says to the guy, in the same tone of voice as before but with his face just a bit further away, ‘Well, I think you get my drift.’
Everyone but the bouncer laughs. He still looks like he feels a bit threatened. ‘I wasn’t looking,’ he says. ‘We don’t actually check shoes on the way out.’
‘He’s quite a kidder,’ Steve says to him, since Benno’s still standing a bit too close and the line between joke and straight out mean is often a fine one for him.
Trev can’t stop laughing all the way down the stairs.
‘Hey,’ Benno says, ‘At least I didn’t hit him. That could have been embarrassing.’
When we get out onto the street, we go our separate ways. Or at least the others do, and I stand at the door with Tanika.
‘Does anything embarrass Benno?’ she says.
‘Not that I’m aware of so far. But I’ve only known him a couple of years.’
I unchain my bike from the railing and push it along beside us as we walk to the church bus. Tanika’s parked it a street or two away, the nearest she could get. This is the part of the evening I wanted. This is the part of the day that I wanted all day. There’s a night breeze coming in off the sea, blowing Tanika’s hair around and, finally, it’s only the two of us. No Mum, no baby photos, no stupid talk.
It’s all crowding around in my head at the moment, and I want to stop here and think about it. Just stand still, and say nothing and think. There was too much noise in there, inside the surf club, too much going on. Dumb jokes about nothing and Tanika playing up to it all, messing around with the guys and I’d rather she hadn’t but I don’t know why.
‘You’re quiet tonight,’ she says.
‘Yeah, well, there was enough bullshitting going on in there without me needing to chip in.’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘Why would something be wrong? There was just too much bullshit, and you were showing off your legs and fooling around with them and . . .’
She stops, pushes the hair back out of her face. ‘And what?’
‘What do you mean, “And what?”?’
‘What? What was I doing wrong? I just wanted to create a good impression with the people you work with. And you always said they like a joke. That’s all it was. What did you think I was doing?’
She’s right, obviously right. I’m not thinking straight. She was just playing along with what was happening.
‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m an idiot. And I’m pretty sure you created a good impression. There’ll be a fair bit of talk about you during the Star Wars marathon at Trev’s place. Talk about how lucky that young Kane is, a level two and a girl of that sort.’
‘That’s more like it,’ she says, and she takes hold of my free hand.
We walk along the path not saying much, tree branches bending down over us in the breeze, people walking past heading the other way, going out for a few drinks at a bar or maybe to see a band. Backpackers, from the accents. Backpackers from Europe, with dark tans and sandals and hippy clothes. I think the pubs have a different dress code for them.
‘How about that baby of Steve’s?’ Tanika says when we get to the bus. ‘Funny looking thing, but kind of cute. I never really know what to say about babies.’
‘Yeah.’
‘He’d be a good dad, Steve. Don’t you think?’
‘Yeah. He’s a good boss, anyway. A good dad? He probably would be. But I don’t know about that.’ And it hits me again, like a fist in the guts. What’s got into me tonight? ‘I don’t know about that stuff. I never had a good dad, did I? I don’t know how I’d get to know about that stuff, about who’d be good and who’d be bad. About who stays and who leaves. I don’t know if you can ever know, anyway. Not for sure. I don’t know what Steve’d be like or what anyone’d be like. This level two – I can take that responsibility. How would I be if I was in Steve’s position? That could happen one day.’
‘You being the boss?’
‘No, the father. I’m being totally theoretical.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. Nothing, really. Like I said, it’s all theoretical. Way, way in the future, hey, but you wonder sometimes. I had this kind of fight with my mother. She said a few things. Some about Dad, some about me. How do you ever know when you’re ready for that kind of responsibility? Ever. How do you know you’ll take it on and do it well and keep doing it well? It’s so easy to make a mess of things.’ She nods, but she doesn’t say anything. ‘Look, it’s easier for you. Look at your family. You couldn’t understand. You get the paper at your house, delivered every day, right? Even though no one really reads it and your mother always says there’s nothing in it. You told me that. She’s said that your whole life about the paper. But you still get it, and you get it every day, and you sit at the breakfast table and you can talk about anything. All the news, anything. You and your family, like a TV ad.’
‘What? What are you saying? Why shouldn’t we be like that? We’ve . . . What are you saying? You have no idea about my family, about . . .’
She stops there, pulls it to a stop and gives me a hard look. I’ve done something wrong. I don’t know what it is. I’m doing a lot wrong tonight. She takes a big breath in, lets it out.
‘I’m not totally sure what you mean,’ she says, in a calmer voice. ‘Why don’t we go and see how your mother is? See if some of that can be sorted out . . .’
We get into the bus, and I fit my bike in behind the first row of seats.
‘Anyway,’ she says as she starts the engine and the doors shut. ‘Maybe we could talk about the paper at breakfast time, but we don’t. And we don’t get to watch TV either. That’s a rule of Dad’s. He prefers the quiet. You do that at your place in the mornings, don’t you? Watch TV?’
‘Yeah. Generally. For the news and stuff. It’s not bad.’
We pull out from the kerb, Tanika turning the big steering wheel like she’s turning a ship around. And I’m sitting right behind her on the front passenger seat, watching the streetlights shine in on her bare thighs and her forearm muscles – more wonders of nature, working smoothly away to swing the bus out onto the road.
‘Do a lot of people watch TV in the mornings?’ she says. ‘What do you reckon? Maybe I could drop into your place some day at breakfast time. Do they have it on a weekend, breakfast TV?’
‘Sure. Well, Saturdays they do.’ I’ve been an idiot, and Tanika’s the kind of person who can make that apparent in a second, without ever having to tell you directly. Without even meaning to tell you at all. Just in the name of peace, getting on, turning a conversation somewhere better. I want to lean forward right now and kiss her on the mouth, but we’re driving at fifty and the road’s pretty narrow. “That’s “Today” on Saturday. There’s a whole different program on Sunday.’
‘“Sunday”. I think they make the names easy ’cause it’s early in the morning.’
‘Well, I could come over.’
‘Sure, that’d be good. And maybe we could make it a bit different to usual. You know, special breakfast food, like pancakes with maple syrup and strawberries. And cream from a blue-and-white striped jug.’
‘Maybe even tomorrow.’
‘Well . . . maybe some other time. We don’t even have the jug yet. It’s a good idea, but. Let’s see how Mum is first.’
She caught me there for a second. She had me thinking about her coming over for breakfast, just the way I’d like it to be. She made me forget, and had me dreaming of a better life. She didn’t mean to. It’s how she looks, how she is, what she does. It’s just her, au naturel. She had me dreaming of a better life, a better life where pancakes happened. Maybe some day. Maybe some of that level-two wage could go on a pancake date at my place. I might have to have a couple of goes at it with just Mum and Wayne first, to get the recipe into shape before we do it. Maybe it comes in packets. That’d be good.
All the lights are off when we pull up outside. The TV’s flickering away in there, but the volume’s down and there are some other noises going on.
‘Is that your mother?’ Tanika says. She sounds worried. ‘Can you hear that? Does she ever have trouble breathing?’
‘No, I think that’s something else.’ I take my keys out and I give them a good shake. One of the louvres is open a crack and I put my mouth up to it and shout out, ‘Pants up, boy. Visitors.’
There’s a lot of panicky shuffling in there, and some throat clearing, and the noise of static as the channel changes to anything other than video.
‘Wayne doesn’t mind the occasional international film,’ I tell Tanika. ‘And he gets rather involved. I think he tries to treat the subtitles as an opportunity for self-improvement.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Tanika says, and she laughs.
That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. Or sticking to something, at least.’
The truth of course is that, whenever he can, Wayne goes halves in $2.15-weekly porn videos with Les, the neighbour out the back. But the less said about Les the better. He’s a bit more hard-core than Wayne, who’s perfectly happy with just nudity.
Wayne says Mum’s asleep. She’s been in bed for an hour or so, maybe two hours. It hasn’t been such a good night. He’s been in there a few times with glasses of water or to sort her curtains out and stop them flapping around, things like that.
‘Not the best video night,’ he says. ‘I’ve been working that pause button. And her timing hasn’t always been good.’
‘She likes fresh air,’ I tell Tanika. So she likes the windows open wide. But the curtains in there get noisy on windy nights. And if the moon’s out and shining in on them, and they’re waving round and you’re half-asleep . . . you know the way that kind of thing gets into your dreams?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Sure.’
‘There was other stuff,’ Wayne says. ‘Other stuff too. She was talking.’
And he’s saying it to me, looking right at me, but he keeps twitching his eyes over Tanika’s way. The TV’s fizzing and crackling with static, with the static of being between channels, and the light from the screen is coming out of the lounge room in a hazy glow and lighting one side of his face. His cheek and his hardworking eyeball, trying to let me know that there’s some kind of secret going on.
‘It’s all right, Wayne,’ I tell him. ‘We don’t keep anything from Tanika.’
‘Well, okay then. Okay. It’s Mum. You got her kind of worried. I think it’s to do with a lot of stuff happening at once. It’s kind of to do with you becoming the family success story. What with the new level at work and with . . .’ He turns to Tanika. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way . . . with, um, friends with jobs in real estate and who drive buses, and that. And who ended up not in the nativity play.’
‘Wayne . . .’ It’s time for my calm big-brother voice. ‘You might have to get a bit more precise about the actual issue. And, also, I’ve got a few years on you, remember? You and Mum forget that sometimes. There’s room in this family for more than one success story.’
‘Yeah, righto. That’s good. Um, well, it was to do with the level that you got today at work, and you going out a bit and getting a licence that’d let you drive long-haul trucks and stuff.’
‘I’m more likely to go for the horticulture, actually. That’s the plant part of the training.’
‘Yeah, but that’s just how it starts, she reckons. Ideas that aren’t so big can get big pretty quickly. And then you’d be out of here, which is the main worry. If you got to travelling you might see places better than here and, you know . . . girls in different towns, and gambling. And that’d be that.’
‘But that’s stupid. I don’t want a girl in a different town, or even a different girl in this town, and if I wanted a look at places better than here I could take a quick trip next door, either side. Did you talk her out of it all?’
‘Well . . . I didn’t know what to say. You’d just had that fight with her, and then you’d gone out. I can’t read your mind.’
‘Doofus. Next time what you say is, “Kane’s not leaving.” Something like that. Keep it simple. “For Kane, this is home.”’
‘She was worried because of Dad.’
‘What’s he got to do with this? That’s the past. You know that, don’t you? It’s long ago. I can’t remember much about Dad, and you can’t remember anything, so what’s he got to do with it? We’ve got our own thing going now. Have had for years. And it’s on the brink of getting better. That’s what’s happening now. Right?’
‘Right.’
There’s a noise from Mum, coming from down the hall. It’s like one side of a conversation. She’s talking in her sleep again and it starts off making no sense and then she’s going, ‘What? What?’ as if the conversation’s turned on her.
‘Okay, my go,’ I tell Wayne. ‘Leave this one to me.’
Tanika’s standing there, saying nothing. Which was fine till Mum started making noise. Now I’m not so sure. She hasn’t seen this side of things before, not close up, but there’s no point in hiding it from her.
The light’s glowing in her hair and on her face. I reach my hand out to her, and she reaches hers out and takes it.
‘Is this okay?’ That’s what I say to her because I want to say something but I can’t think what it’d be.
‘Yeah. Of course.’ She smiles, to make the situation seem closer to normal than it is. ‘Go and talk to her.’
Mum’s voice is louder now, back there in the dark. Angry or confused – the two get mixed up sometimes.
‘I’ll wait here,’ Tanika says. ‘Wayne can tell me about the movie he’s watching.’
‘Or not,’ Wayne says, looking a bit tense. ‘It’s very . . . European.’
It’s darker the further you get away from the lounge room, but I don’t turn any lights on. Lights freak Mum out when she’s stuck in a bad dream. I open her door, and she’s lying across her bed at an angle, with just a sheet over her. A sheet with the moon on it, making shadows like a hillside, the huge body of my mother rising up out of the landscape.
‘Wayne,’ she says when she realises there’s someone there. ‘Wayne,’ in a murmury, rum-heavy voice. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘It’s Kane, Mum.’
‘Kane . . . Kane.’ Said the first time almost like a question, but the second like reassurance.
‘Yeah.’ I go and sit on the bed, round the far side – the window side – down around knee level so that she can see me in the light and I’m not casting a shadow on her face. She doesn’t like that. ‘It’s me, Mum. I’ve just been out for a few hours, but now I’m back. Simple as that, and same as always.’
‘Oh.’ She’s still half asleep. Her mouth moves into the O shape a while before she makes the sound to go with it, then the sound comes out slowly.
‘We got our wires crossed a bit earlier on. That’s all that happened.’
She opens her eyes, and looks at me. She reaches out and squeezes my hand. ‘Good boy,’ she says. ‘That’s my boy. My young man.’
‘Yeah. But still here, right? We’re getting somewhere, Mum. That’s all that’s happening. But it’s us. Not just me. See? That’s the idea.’
‘You came back tonight.’
‘Yeah, like every other bloody night.’
‘Yeah.’ There’s enough light coming in that I think I can see her smile. She nods her head without lifting it off the pillow.
‘So everything’s like it usually is,’ I tell her. ‘Just a little better. I’m doing well at work, Mum. I’ve been promoted. That gives us more money and it means that I’ll get training opportunities. That’s what I was trying to tell you.’ There’s a snuffly noise, which turns into a snore. A one-off loud snore, then more snoring, slowly, steadily. ‘So everything’s fine.’ She’s asleep now, her mouth half-open and her eyes closed and noisy breathing passing in and out of her. ‘Even tonight, I think it still stacks up as the best summer of my life.’ A gust of wind blows in, flaps the edge of the curtain up, then drops it down again. She doesn’t stir. ‘And Wayne’s had a good evening. He’s watched a European movie, so there’s culture involved. And he’s been kept busy performing unholy acts on his middle regions, of course. But that’s our boy. Never bored while his hands are free and his pants are loose-fitting. And in the morning we’ll talk about Dad. You and me. In the morning or some time soon, when it’s early in the day and it suits us both. Okay? And we’ll talk about you. If you want.’
More snoring, but the snoring of someone lost far away in sleep. I slide my hand out from under hers and I stand up and go to the door, as quietly as I can. On my way out, I shut it behind me with hardly a click.
Meanwhile, Wayne, not Caloundra’s greatest conversationalist, has taken Tanika into the lounge room. He’s got her sitting in Mum’s chair and he’s on the couch and they’re watching David Letterman with the volume down low, still in the dark. He’s leaning forward, staring at the screen and pointing the remote at it too, as if he’s ready to try for a better option the second Tanika says she’s bored. He sees me in the doorway and nearly says something, but then he doesn’t.
‘Good work, Wayne. You sure know how to entertain a guest.’
‘No worries,’ he says, as if he’s just copped a compliment. ‘Mum okay?’
‘Yeah. Fine. Everything’s fine. Just a few wires crossed, and we’ve sorted it out now. So Tanika and I might head out again for a while. Give you a chance to watch that video of yours all the way to the end. Does that sound okay, Tanika?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘And, Wayne, could you not use the tissues with the aloe vera in them? They’re kind of expensive and we got them because some of Mum’s skin’s pretty fragile, remember?’
‘Um, yeah, sure. She must have brought them out here earlier, or something. I’m just watching TV.’
The sound of heavy on-screen breathing is back before we get to the front door, just for a second or two, and then he mutes it till we’re down the stairs.
‘I’ve got to tell you a bit more about all of that,’ I say to Tanika. ‘Everything that’s been going on. It’s been a funny sort of day.’
‘Yeah. I thought it might have been. Are you hungry? I know it’s the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t mind some pizza. How about that?’
‘I think I used my voucher already. But we could reheat the leftovers in the house . . .’
‘Fresh pizza’d be better. And it’s my shout. It’s a special occasion. And I hear it didn’t go so well earlier. Wayne told me a few things. I think it’s still a bit confusing for him, though.’
‘Back there with his video? Yeah. He’ll be fine. You’ll probably need to explain some things to him some time, though.’
‘Yeah. I will. But there’s still some things I’m only just finding out about myself.’
She drives us to Domino’s and when we get out of the bus she says, ‘Meatosaurus, isn’t it?’
It’s bright in Domino’s, fluoro bright, and there’s a crew of them in there still at work, rattling trays and folding boxes and scooping up pizzas when they come out of the oven. Tanika orders and pays and they tell us it’ll be ten minutes maximum.
In the car park we talk a bit about what’s been going on. Two delivery cars turn up and then go again, but there’s only us waiting and the car park’s mostly empty. Tanika leans against the bus door, and I walk along the white line that’s marking out two parking spaces, then off that line and onto the next. And I tell her. I tell her I thought the problems had started for my parents when I’d been around a while, but that’s not how it is. And I knew I’d come along a bit early, but I didn’t know I hadn’t been meant to come along at all. And that’s a different situation, and it’s kind of hard to take. He used her, that’s what I reckon now. He was older by a couple of years and she was our age or, in fact, younger and not at all ready for a man like that. A user and a scumbag and known all the way along to be reckless, even though he came across as suave and interesting. That’s how I put it – as tough as I can make it, because I think she has a right to know and to hear it in the most direct of ways.
‘And I could be like him in some respects,’ I tell her, also because I have to. ‘I look like him. I’ve seen the photos of when he was young. Mum doesn’t know that. They’re under the house and she never goes under the house.’
And the speaker on the wall outside Domino’s says, ‘Bell, Bell. Pizza for Bell.’
And Tanika says, ‘That’s okay, you know. He’s your dad. It’s no surprise you look a bit like him.’
‘And that doesn’t worry you?’
‘No.’
‘Pizza for Bell,’ the voice from Domino’s says again. ‘That’d be you two, wouldn’t it?’ And the guy who took our order is at the microphone, and he’s waving to us, shouting about us all across the car park in a crackly electronic voice. ‘Yep, you two. Don’t want to interrupt, or anything . . .’
‘We should get the pizza,’ Tanika says. ‘This is all fine. So your dad was a good-looking man. So what? Let’s get the pizza.’
We go inside and the guy says, ‘What were you doing out there? Solving the world’s problems?’
‘Well, it’s got a few,’ Tanika says. ‘So we thought we’d make a start.’
And we take the pizza and drive to the beach, Tanika at the wheel of the bus again, me just behind her with the box on my lap and the steaming meaty aroma of Meatosaurus rising up through the holes.
We park and the door opens and I can hear waves breaking, just over the dune. The sand is cool under my feet and the breeze is cool too, finally, and still coming off the sea. The dune’s off-limits for revegetation, and we walk around the fenced area and the tide is in, waves breaking and breaking, silvery grey in the moonlight. Breaking and piling up and thinning out and running to nothing, up the sand and shells, ending in a rush, disappearing in that last noise, like a long breath out.
The moon’s up high and behind us, and the sky’s completely crowded with stars. And I told Tanika most of what I needed to, I think, and it seems to be okay.
We sit in the sand and eat pizza and this feels much closer to the night I wanted, though it took a while to get here.
‘Would that be Venus?’ she says when we’ve talked some more. ‘That one over there?’
And she’s pointing to a star or a planet that’s just coming over the horizon in the east. And it’s not white, the way Venus would be, the way Venus was when we first paid attention to it, back two months ago. It’s red, kind of red but not red really, more a glinting kind of rusty orange.
So I tell her, ‘I reckon it might be Mars,’ and I tell her about the ‘Today’ show, what I heard on the ‘Today’ show back on a day that was long ago now, as far ago as yesterday.
And she says, ‘Mars. I don’t know that I’ve seen Mars. But I must have, I guess, without knowing. It’s not like they just invented it. God, what a sky it is tonight. But maybe I just don’t look up often enough. There’s a lot out there. Who knows what? Hey, remember the music of the spheres? Did you do that at school? It’s from Shakespeare. It’s about how there was once this idea that planets and stars made noise. You know, put out a kind of music. And you look at them tonight, and you think maybe they could. I don’t even know what play that’s from. That’s the only bit of it that stuck in my head. We saw the movie at school, and I remember that bit, but the teacher said it wasn’t particularly important.’
She moves in closer to me, and I put my arm around her. We slide the pizza box under our bent knees with the lid three-quarters down to stop the last two slices getting any colder.
‘Everyone finds things out, you know,’ she says. ‘People are always hiding something from you, waiting for a better time to tell it. So you end up finding out in a way you’re not supposed to, and it makes you feel like bringing up your tea. I know how it goes. It’s always a pretty foul kind of surprise when you hear that way.’
‘Yeah. I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
Her hair’s blowing around again, and she pushes it out of her face. ‘I’ve got to get this cut,’ she says. ‘It’s driving me nuts. My family . . . they’re an example of the things you find out, you know. And you can’t tell anyone this, okay? Not anyone. But my Uncle Barry, a guy you don’t know – and a guy I don’t know, so how would you? – he’s actually . . . well, he actually started out as my father. Technically So that’s kind of one of those things as well. They were about the same age as us too. When Mum got pregnant to him, I mean. You’ve got to wonder what was going on back then, all those kids coming along. Didn’t anyone ever tell them how it happens and how to make sure it doesn’t? Anyway, Barry did a runner, as soon as he found out. And Dad, who was about five or six years older, thought that was a really bad thing, bad for the whole family. And he kind of liked Mum – not that he’d met her too often – and he was training to be a priest at the time. But he said he figured it must have been happening for a reason. He said it was a sign that he was being called to do something else. Not that they got around to telling me. I found out a few years ago, when Nanna was going off her nut, and not the best with secrets any more. She thought I was Mum, and she started having a go at me for fooling round with Barry, and I didn’t even know who Barry was. I spun out, like you’d expect. They should have told me. Dad put it in a better way once he’d had time to think about it. That’s when he said I’d become his calling. Even before I was born, the most important thing he had to do was see me right. It’s special in a way, but not the way you’re expecting.’
‘Which sort of explains how he was over Christmas. I thought that was a bit intense.’
‘Sure it was intense. And maybe I should have told you then.’
‘Well, you have now. And there was that month when you weren’t allowed to talk to me . . .’
She nods. ‘Yeah. Good on you, Dad.’ She takes another bite of pizza and she chews it, looking out to sea. ‘So they didn’t choose the relationship either. It’s all a question of circumstance too. Or, at least, Dad made a choice, but a choice about me, not so much a choice about Mum. They’ve never . . . loved each other in the regular way. As far as I’m aware. But we make it work, most of the time. You know how it is. And he was going to be a priest anyway, so . . .’
‘Yeah.’
And she tells me that, despite all that, and despite my father and how he handled things, she still holds out some kind of hope that it doesn’t have to be that way. That there’s better luck going around, and sometimes it goes to people who deserve it. And she says she believes not everyone’s like my dad or her Uncle Barry. She really believes it. That I’m different and her dad’s different, and he annoys the crap out of her sometimes, but he’d never let her down.
‘You’re like that, I think,’ she says. ‘Not the annoyance part, that’s not what I meant.’ She laughs. ‘People can depend on you. Even if they freak out sometimes. You’re probably not like your father, even if you’ve seen the photos. Some people think about other people. Some people don’t. Some people make the most of what they’ve got, others’ll toss it away in the hope that something better’11 blow along. Or they drift along themselves, in and out of things, and they don’t play by the rules.’
Like clouds. That’s what I’m thinking, as she keeps talking and I keep looking up at the sky. Like Wayne’s misunderstanding about the ‘Today’ show, and the prospects of making laws for clouds. Though I’ve been more like one of the sky divers today, falling and falling until I hit this sand. Hitting clouds and pockets of clear air, one after another, all the way down. It’s like that cartoon, that old cartoon with the coyote, falling off the edge of some canyon and punching holes in the clouds all the way to the ground. Holes like they’re punched by a cookie cutter, like gingerbread men. Mum used to make those once, when we were younger. They’d have Smarties for buttons. We have to do something about Mum.
It doesn’t make sense to jump into clouds, if you look at it from a practical point of view. How would it feel to fall through a cloud, without a clear idea if it had a bottom or not? What if the last part of the cloud was fog all the way to the ground? You’d never even know.
The last I heard from my father was a couple of letters from north Queensland, where he was crewing fishing boats, mainly.
I tell Tanika a bit about that – Dad going up north and the shark story that came on on the ‘Today’ show before the Mars story.
‘I wrote him a long letter once, care of the Post Office at Babinda, but I never heard back. That’s when the letters from him stopped. Or postcards, really. He’d send postcards, and I’d send postcards too. That happened a few times. Then, that one time, I sent him a long letter. I wracked my brain about that afterwards, obviously, about my letter and anything I might have put in it. But you don’t know, in the end. That’s what you’re left with. A lot of not knowing. When we had that boat, the Stormy, a lot of things got a lot clearer. Particularly when she sank when Dad shouldn’t have been out in her at all. Mum goes on about Dad taking risks. She’s always afraid of risks but, the thing is, he’d take them all at once. There was the money issue with the Stormy too, not just the problem with him taking her out that night. That’s how he lived. How he still lives, probably. So I notice those kinds of stories like the one on the ‘Today show. Shark stories. And I always thought one day we might get the call – the call to say he’d been off doing something mad or stupid and they only knew because they’d found him years later in some gully somewhere and the dental records matched up. That sort of thing. And that’s why there’d never been another letter. Or postcard. Except I don’t know if he ever went to the dentist. It’s not really his thing. So he’d probably just be some mystery guy.’
But who knows? Who ever knows? I’ve wasted a lot of energy on that one over the years. You brace yourself for that kind of call, and now’s the time to stop.
Some people take other people into account, others don’t. And you probably can’t make them. And you probably didn’t have anything to do with them being the way they are. Whenever you came along, however you came into the world, whatever you did to whatever plans they might have had. As Father Steele’s always said, you’re pretty much guaranteed of being innocent at birth.
And you might have done your best since then, as often as possible, and that won’t make them come back or change the way they are. It’ll do other things though, some of them good. That’s what you have to hope for.
Some people stick by rules, some people duck and weave and live outside them. And make millions or hurt people or go to jail (always feeling as if they’ve been treated unfairly) or leave their bones on hillsides or in the bellies of big fish, showing where they ended up and the last thing they did. But even the people who stick by the rules can get tipped from their boat by a freak wave. The guy missing up north – the guy whose thigh bone they think it is – he never took a risk. Not that kind of risk. He was a regular guy, with two kids or three, and not a bad word said about him all the time he’s been gone.
But you can only do what you can do. And some people will do far less. And expecting my father to live by any rules is like making laws for clouds, the way Wayne thought they meant it.
Mars gets higher in the sky, the night ends. There are lights out to sea – container ships, trawlers – and they become less distinct as the land takes shape around us and starts to take on colour, and the sky goes kind of purple on its way to blue.
It’s TB that Harbo’s got, not cancer, and he’s getting better now. We made him go back to the hospital, and now he’s getting better. But he keeps telling us he won’t be round for ever, and there’s a boat in it for us when he goes. As long as it’s not the gas stove that takes him out, of course. Harbo can’t stop himself making jokes about his own death, now that he probably won’t be up for it for a while.
‘I’ll be careful with the cooking now kids,’ he said a few days ago. ‘Don’t want to leave you nothing but splinters and an oil slick in the water.’
The sun comes up, and Tanika goes down to the edge of the sea and goes in up to her ankles. I walk along the beach a little way and I pick up a stick and start scratching in the untouched sand left by the going-out tide. First the tightest perfect spiral that I can, growing out and out. Then something that becomes a letter T, dressed up like iron lace-work on a balcony. You don’t get that here, but you get it in Sydney. I’ve seen it on TV.
Then I scuff it up and hide it, press it flat with my feet, and I move on. I draw a planet, a bone and a cloud. Then another letter T, chunky and strong this time, not so ornamental.
And Tanika shouts out, ‘What are you doing?’
The water’s up to her calves now.
And I tell her, ‘Nothing much. Just thinking. But I’ve probably thought enough for now. I should stop while I’m thinking that things are pretty good, shouldn’t I? And that a lot of stuff that mightn’t be as good doesn’t matter in the way I thought it did.’
‘That’s getting complicated,’ she says. ‘But it’s probably right. Come over here. Stop thinking. Come and we’ll get wet. I want to swim, and the morning’s the best time.’