Having turned the footy oval into a crazy patchwork, Arnold knew it was time to quit. With Helen’s departure, what once seemed utterly pointless had now become utterly unbearable as well. He simply couldn’t mow lawns any more.
Now it was midday and he was slotting old fence pickets under the kitchen table, a task he might have enjoyed but for his current troubles.
The pickets, packed in tightly, lifted the table from the floor and jutted out either end. Arnold liked wood. If Helen had been here she’d have shouted at him to get the fence pickets out or gone into a smouldering silence. But she wasn’t here, and he missed her, even missed her blade-like tongue. He’d found the note, and stared at it for a good ten minutes before putting it away. She could have said a little more, he thought, or was that asking for too much.
He put the last of the pickets neatly into place before settling the kettle on top of the stove. Feeling restless he moved around the kitchen: a kitchen made tiny by the pressing in of stuff.
He seized upon his tambourine collection. Picking one up and drumming the grey-skinned surface, making the cymbals jingle, he smiled in remembrance of Leif, who, as a toddler, would laugh and clap at the sound of a tambourine. Leif’s name meant ‘love’ in Dutch. Helen had singled it out of a book of ten thousand names for babies. Out of all those names she had picked Leif. Arnold’s smile began to weaken. He lowered the tambourine.
Leif had died. His lungs, tired of fighting for air, had surrendered to the inevitable. He had lived a mere eight years.
In the city hospital Helen and Arnold had sat by Leif’s bed bewildered at the sight of their son’s motionless body. Helen wept inconsolably while Arnold held her tight, vice-like, as if squeezing the grief out of her.
Had she blamed him for Leif’s death? After all, he could pinpoint the time, the day when he had felt her first turn away from him. It was the day Leif died.
It was unfair. He had gone through the same nightmare as she had — the constant rounds of doctors, treatments, and sleepless tormented nights. The winter that brought a common cold to their son’s respiratory system and took him from them.
Arnold tapped again at the tambourine, begging the image of his son to reappear. He was rewarded. Grateful, and with all the strength he could muster, he held the memory of Leif laughing,
He sat by the stove holding the tambourine, looking at its grey surface, searching for answers. And he knew there never was any reply, only an unbearable pain which stretched back for twenty years. With Leif’s death it was like he’d swallowed cement. It had made its way to his chest and set into concrete so hard that no sledgehammer could ever break it. Not the sledgehammer of time, or of work, or of trying to think it out.