I open the gift of Spanish champagne and pour us both an unbreakable glass full and hold my unbreakable glass high in a toast and say, ‘Well … champagne,’ and my mother holds hers out just a little and up just a little and says, ‘Yes … champagne.’
We eat a dinner of canned spaghetti on toast and a thawed Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake while I surreptitiously dwindle Quincy Roberts. He’s boasting out of the last of the bakelite radios about how Fidel, a shrill nine-year-old with about two dozen English words and no parents, has found God. ‘God has enrich my live,’ Fidel says. Quincy Roberts compares him to Columbus in the finding and discovery stakes. Because where the great navigator did it with a level of ignorance and rustic brass equipment that made coming up with the Americas all the more amazing, so Fidel found the Lord after picking rubbish off Smoky Mountain to keep himself alive these past five years. Found God with only that terrible experience of life to guide him. What navigation.
What a little fucking theological Columbus this Fidel is. I have a vision of him rooting around barefoot for tin and plastic on his mound of bacteria and broken glass. Up pulls a white man in a white, chauffeured Cadillac with spare room on its back seat and tells one-and-all he’s working for the Almighty. Hands up who couldn’t navigate a little discovery of God to get on that back seat.
Whenever my mother goes for the fridge or the kettle or the stove I reach back and take hold of the bakelite volume control and dwindle Quincy Roberts by another degree. By the time we’re into the blueberry shortcake he’s an international priest making no more noise than a bottled mosquito.
She stares at me through the meal. Wanting me to speak. Drinking the champagne slowly while the bursting bubbles spot her glasses. Finally she asks me what it is I actually do in Victoria. Not because she wants to know what I do, but because she wants to know how I live with myself. I tell her about Jean and me and how we live by the sea with all Jean’s money. ‘In sin, in luxury, in sloth,’ I confess.
‘All fairly orthodox, apart from the luxury,’ she says. She purses her lips at me and stares. Doesn’t stare and doesn’t purse her lips for the life of sin or for the life of sloth or for the luxury but for the same old reason. Because I’m deaf to commandment one.
‘I sell real estate now,’ I tell her. ‘Beach houses.’
‘Beach houses,’ she tells me back. ‘Beach houses,’ she tells herself.
The sun goes down and the iron of the land starts to pulse heat into the cooling air. The noise of machines dismantling buildings stops with a last truck working up through eight gears out the road south. Sometimes raised voices drift to us.
She takes the warm dregs of the tea out to pour on the roses. I watch out the window as she squeezes her bony hand into the top of the teapot and scrapes the tea-leaves out with her bent fingers and spreads them around the base of a rose bush as mulch. ‘They know about Molly’s ashes and Frank’s ashes,’ she tells me in through the flywire. ‘I didn’t tell them, but they know.
‘They sent a woman horticultural engineer round,’ she says. ‘Girl with a man’s haircut that didn’t do anything for her. She pulled at their leaves and pulled at their trunks … without asking if she could, I might add. She says they’ve got good roots. And went ahead and said to me she’s eighty-five per cent absolutely certain they’re relocatable. Maybe can be planted in a more attractive star pattern. Down south somewhere. With a nice pebble-mix border and a drip system to water them.’
‘So?’ I ask. ‘You weren’t happy with the odds?’
‘Not happy. No. I told her there are some things that aren’t relocatable. Some things are a hundred per cent absolutely certain unrelocatable. I told her that some things didn’t look good in a star pattern and some things couldn’t survive in a pebble-mix border. I think I might have even told her to let her hair grow.’
For a time they weren’t in love – my father, who is the ashes that make the roses sacred now, and my mother, who waters them. But his diagnosis woke them up to the fact they weren’t in love. And his diagnosis put them in love again. Her love for him got stronger the closer he got to death. She set about proving that love with care. She went from telling him, when he came home drunk in greased overalls, to unfreeze his own dinner because she was off to bingo at the church hall with the girls, to the Japanese art-meals she took all day over after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Meals that were delicate and tiny and bright like lures to bring some rare species of fish to the surface of a mountain stream.
Then there was the blended stuff of his later, non-verbal stages she made for the syringe that was pump-driven through the night into his intestines. She’d take hours over that. She’d add extra pinches of herb and mineral-supplement to the syringe to make it the perfect food for life. Working hard with the Bamix to blend it down to magic. Sometimes adding ten mils of vodka to prove he could still do the things men do.
She hasn’t stopped with his death. She’s still feeding him. Has taken it beyond death. Is out there now pinching tea-leaves onto the roses. And in the morning will rise early and hunt aphids and smear white oil onto their trunks and tighten the shade-cloth and spoon subtle fertilisers and composts into the soil.
I lie in my old bed in Adrian’s and my old room. The room of my boyhood nights. Even air travel, seven-eighths of a bottle of champagne and two rancid cans is not enough to put me to sleep in this room. So I lie there and light up a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette, which is a name my father and I got for joints from my headmaster the day I was caught smoking one at high school and was called into his office where he was pacing in his short sleeves and shorts and long white socks and thin moustache. And my father was sitting smoking a Lucky Strike, wearing overalls covered in the thick grease that lubricates giant machines, and had been called in from the mine and didn’t like it. Had made a joke to my headmaster about how, on first inspection, I still seemed to have all my limbs and so what was the big deal here? Had told my headmaster, ‘I got man-hours disappearing on me back at the Ore Truck Workshop.’ And my headmaster had told me, ‘Go on, tell your father, lad.’ And when I didn’t speak had told my father himself how I’d been caught smoking a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette.
‘Fifty-fifty marijuana?’ my father asked. My headmaster nodded with his chin low. ‘Fifty-fifty marijuana?’ he asked again.
‘I’m afraid so,’ my headmaster said. The lad tried to swallow it, but I made him spit it up. Fifty-fifty marijuana all right.’
‘So … what was the other half?’ my father asked. And he looked down at my headmaster’s long white socks. Stared right at them. Blew out a Lucky Struck breath that boiled up around them. Flat-out disgusted that this is the sort of thing the educators of the young saw fit to get themselves up in these days. ‘Must’ve been some wild and dangerous shit to get a man emergency-paged at work about … this other fifty per cent,’ he told my headmaster.
When I’ve smoked my fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette I stub it on the flywire screen purchased in the run on flywire of 1972, when the reservoir was completed and was filled by cyclone Clarice and our water no longer came up from the aquifers and mosquitoes came into the area for the first time. The flywire isn’t needed any more because the reservoir is blown and flowed out over the desert and sunk into the desert and vaporised up off the desert and the mosquitoes are relocated like the men and like the women and like the children they banged themselves into the flywire for.