SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Tomorrow’s the Moon landing, yesterday I turned fifteen, and in between Ashley and I dock our cockpit-sized Torana at my mother’s miniature, rouge-brick flat in Browne Street, New Farm. This is my first weekend sleepover here since we left New Farm for our new Edmondstone Street bedsit in South Brisbane, and only my fourth since the divorce. Booming through tie-dye curtains down their flat’s narrow side is the big-dipper chorus of the 5th Dimension’s ‘Aquarius’, my current favourite. ‘THIS IS THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF …’

I’m always in two minds about coming here, but the divorce laws say I’m stuck for the weekend. Things I’ll have to put up with: (a) My mother insisting my brothers would have been my match in swimming, had they kept at it. This is ridiculous, of course, because cuttings from all our club results are in our scrapbooks and not once did they qualify to compete beyond inter-club level. I don’t gloat over this, but let’s have the facts, please: my brothers are footballers, not swimmers. (b) If I go for another long run to escape my mother’s interminable weekend soirees, I’ll return exhausted and sweating, and risk her quipping sarcastically in front of her friends again, ‘You can’t be too fit by the look of all that puffing.’ (She knows as little about exercise as car makes: Alfa-Romero?) (c) My older brother being seemingly incapable of uttering to me the words ‘Dad’ or ‘our father’ in conversation, but only ‘your father’, even if he does think he’s kidding. That’s how much they miss him here. (d) Actually having to say goodnight. When I simply disappeared to the bedroom last time, my mother burst in five minutes later, turned the light on, and launched into a five-minute ‘how-dare-you-in-my-house’ rant. House?

Now she emerges from her dark front doorway in a tangle of sunlight and fly strips to greet me. And acknowledge my father. He, with no small talk at all, casually thrusts into her hands two packets of lima beans which Brad must have with meals for their remarkably high protein value (a day’s soaking, hours of parboiling, and frying in an equal mass of butter are needed to magic those beige stones into edible forage). ‘There’s enough there for everyone,’ he chirps. ‘The extra protein wouldn’t hurt the others either!’

She accepts the beans and condescension calmly, but as soon as we’re inside she hurls the beans in the bin with a garnish of bile, huffing, ‘Sorry, but I don’t take orders on your nutrition, you’ll have whatever’s going!’

In the afternoon, it’s her usual gathering of friends from all over. As they drift in, my brothers teach me the finer points of smoking in the laundry, but I can never do the drawback without a coughing fit. I’m sure my throat is too weak to ever be a smoker: even swallowing soft-drink fizz is like gulping tacks. And not just coughing now, but when my gullet clamps yet again, it’s all splutter and retch into the sink. I now decide smoking’s as clever as gargling petrol, and quit, telling my brothers I’ll never learn and that I’m glad anyway.

When the party’s in full swing, I watch her guests get drunk and drunker, the gags and jibes coarser by the swig. Now her long-time girlfriend, the brunette Dawn, leans across to slur to my brother that he’ll soon be old enough for her to ‘fix him up’ with one of her ‘younger friends’ — sly chuckles all round. She’s with another Saturday regular, the blocky building contractor who, when the talk turns to politics, will leap from his chair and march outside to fetch his Ayn Rand book from a ute glovebox.

Now my mother slips into her comedic staple: mocking her ex. She’s on a stool at the end of the servery near the dips, and everyone seems drawn to watch when she swivels a half-turn to glare theatrically at a new couple, as if to say don’t you dare miss this one. These newbies are not her typical guests. Stodgy is how she would describe their clothes, and their chuckles are more to themselves than the hearty head-jerking and leg-slapping of regulars. This time she’s parodying the nightly chin exercises her mad husband used to do in their early years together; apparently Ashley always wanted a lantern jaw like the Hollywood actors whose blockbusters he promoted in Singapore. (Even now, his routine putdown of other men is ‘chinless wonder’.) Most nights he supposedly sat at the foot of their marriage bed, robotically cranking his mandible in the dresser mirror to stimulate tissue and muscle growth. Several guests begin a low, bumpy chuckle as my mother’s face turns from its pretend Ashley reflection and inches back, neck tendons flared like a frilled lizard, adoring eyes still glued to her ‘image’. Suddenly she slaps her jowls, juts her chin, draws it back. More slaps. Jaw out, in, and out, pouting grotesquely at full thrust. Some are in tears she does this so well. ‘Stop it, Betty!’ old Queenie snaps in encouragement.

Now it’s the story I once found embarrassing, but which I’ve become used to: of the night I was apparently conceived aboard a cruise ship. My mother says she knew it was the equator when the deck crew ‘started with all that King Neptune buffoonery’. From the midst of those oaths, tridents, and crowns, my father supposedly whisked her off to their cabin to make love. Even so early in the yarn, my mother can hardly breathe, seems barely able to continue, she is laughing so hard. Are those tears? ‘And then, of all things,’ she whines, ‘get this: he says to me, “This baby will be the special one.”’ Turning to me, she gasps, ‘Sorry, darling, not mocking you, but can you imagine what was going through his head?’ Her newer guests stare at her uncertainly, then across to me, as a courtesy perhaps, as if not to credit what they’ve heard. ‘The special one!’ she groans, flopping against the wall with a god-help-us-all sigh. ‘Just like he’s channelling some, some … Tibetan boy-priest, for goodness sake, within seconds of the business on the equator.’

Suddenly her demeanour’s less trenchant, eyes evasive, as if she is momentarily rattled by the idea of her womb’s role in that supposed calling, or self-conscious for having fallen for some loony twice her age. Yet there’s still the odd giggle and laugh-weary sigh — nothing more — as we await the next twist. I’ve heard the story before, and would long ago have asked Ashley for his version but for the inevitable embarrassment. And it might also spoil things, because it’s fun thinking I’m meant to be something special, even in one crazy man’s mind or a bitter ex-wife’s skewed recollection.

My mother usually has sharp timing, even when tipsy; she can easily sniff the souring of a theme, as in this case with the new couple’s awkwardness at her seeming clash of satire and personal freight. She knows now to drop the hubby stuff for a while. Tapping her cigarette on the spring-loaded ashtray, her eyes flicker cunningly for a diversion: today’s fashion crime, a spilled drink, an empty glass — she’s onto it. The break in rhythm also lets me slip out unnoticed for my run. As I glance behind, her face tilts up again, features recharged to beam listeners back to the neglected present, her smile the quick ‘whee’ of a pigtailed girl leaning out from a carousel.

When I return an hour later, she’s circled back to familiar turf, regaling a chosen few with the circumstances of her marriage. ‘Well, I married my best friend’s father, didn’t I? And don’t think I haven’t been wondering how it happened ever since.’ She’s giggling now: ‘It must sound creepy, but it’s not as if my girlfriend was calling me Betty one minute and Mummy the next, though we naturally drifted apart.’ Now, when two guests stand within seconds of each other and cite reasons to be home under threat of death, the party begins to peter out.

So today I won’t get to hear of the night my germophobe father arrived home from a Singapore expat’s bar, drenched in faeces after disastrously mistiming his usual tipsy leap across the kampong sewer drain. Supposedly he’d slammed open our front door to stand distraught in his saturated sharkskin suit, barking, ‘Fill the bath with Dettol, I’m swimming in shit!’ (Dettol had also been handy on their Indian honeymoon. He couldn’t touch any surface beyond their motel room without immediately wiping his hands on a Dettol-dabbed rag.)

Or of the time he seized an antagonist’s scrotum in a Singapore nightspot to roar in mock surprise, ‘So you really are a man,’ or Mum’s visit to a soothsayer when she first fell pregnant: ‘that Chinese tealeaf reader’ who predicted three sons and a sporting champion in the family. Then her whimsy, at thirty, that the aforesaid champion was clearly her when she resurrected her teen tennis career on the Rockhampton ladies’ scene. (That she’d seen fortune-telling as light entertainment was shown by her determination to hold out for a girl; she blames Ashley for ‘ordering an end to the babies’ after the third boy.) And then there’s the story about my father taking his annual holiday to Australia with just one other family member — me, aged three. ‘He adored you and wanted to show you off to his old Sydney friends,’ she has often explained to me with crisp resignation. ‘He loved taking guests into your cot to hear you laugh in your sleep.’

Although I think she was pretty dumb to allow that silly bonding holiday for a toddler, I never comment because I’m too flattered to care. I have my own special memories of the trip anyway. First there’s a plane, recalled not as if I fully understand we’re preparing for flight, but as a night-time crush of impressions in circling fairy lights and beaming towers, smells of well-made things, noises of irresistible power, and a sense of vast beginnings in the bumps of a slow, wide circling. Then I’m on a steep footpath holding my father’s hand — I’ve never walked hills before — amid thrilling new building shapes in winding streets with chilling gusts; having my first taste of a musk stick; sharing a seat on a ferry in a fur-lined anorak; crying on a bed with persistent loud music when an adult enters to look me over before the door shuts again, the songs even louder.

Mum says when Dad and I returned from the Sydney holiday, I was a changed boy, now surly and taciturn. ‘It took a while to get you smiling again,’ she has often reminded me in that oddly accusing tone. ‘That’s when your temper started. Remember you used to tear up your brother’s exercise books?’ (How could I ever forget? Those moments of sudden mayhem were among the big thrills of my early life, even after deducting the cost of a smack and an apology.) I’ve replied once or twice that I also recall being badgered by Dad and her to smile in some backyard. Thinking they meant the breezy click-and-wink adult faces often shot at kids, I volleyed that, and was surprised when it made them laugh. Then I laughed.

We left Singapore for Rocky when I was four, and what it left me was smells and tastes, of Tiger Balm ointment, yeasty beer gardens, and pungent, jelly-like desserts. We must have dined out often because when I walk past restaurants now, there is often an exquisite waft, a fusion of heavily starched linen and fresh crust so intense that I’ve felt the odd momentary ache in my chest. It’s such a reminder of life’s fine things that it’s hard to imagine a life without it. Matching that memory heaven are vast and fabulous night-time establishments, where I wander between walls of glass made dreamy with unforgettable slides and bursts of light, shadow, laughter, music, and mingling, and I think if I have children I’ll take them dining as often as I can.

With only her most loyal or pissed friends left (her odd term for the alcohol-loosened is ‘tight’), it’s time for the mumbo-jumbo hour, when they huddle to debate puerile matters the sober and rational cringe at. If any sensible ones do stay — sticks-in-the-mud, she calls them, like smart-arse George with his engineering degree, and bone-dry, bachelor-grazier Bob — it’s just to scoff or poke fun. And the discussions proceed not in logical lines of argument, but in hyphen-strewn declarations, nods, and squeals of ‘me too’, spanning subjects from alien contact to adultery, though not yet in the same breath. My mother’s contribution today is to stumble through a recollection of the afternoon she rode the train from work as a young adult, scrutinising fellow commuters in some kind of awakening, when she ‘suddenly saw we’re all so unique — each face with enough information to start a new species — yet also identical — sounds ridiculous now — when I suddenly felt so free — a kind of grace — overwhelming — changed my life.’

‘And how exactly did it change your life, Betty?’ cow-cocky Bob yawns. My mother narrows her eyes, half a crease short of fuck off: ‘Not that you’d understand in a hundred years of hanging with Herefords, but from that day, I could no longer be shy.’ (I’m privately thrilled by her slap-down of this gangly crimson-faced redneck who recently confided in her that he found my handshake ‘unmanly’. He’s so goofy he doesn’t get that there’s no confiding in my mother, and that only masons, the mafia, and yokels like him think a male handshake is some golden mutual dick-squeeze.)

Mumbo-jumbo time is also the excuse for us boys to ride our bikes to New Farm Park before it gets dark. Within a minute of arrival, my younger brother is in a fight with a boy over nothing more, it seems, than a mistimed blink in an exchange of territorial glances. For fun, my older brother and I cheer on the other kid, who quickly succumbs to my brother’s manic windmill of arms resembling his old swimming style. In less than thirty seconds, the boy’s taunts dissolve to a sob begging to go home, and when his bike rounds the first flower bed he yells back, ‘Cunt.’

I arrive back at the flat before my brothers to find my mother sitting, now changed into singlet and ribbed sky-blue hot pants, on her new Welsh boyfriend’s lap on the kitchen settee (I’m stunned to see she really does resemble Virginia McKenna, the actress she was once hired to double for — only less horsey, as she herself has put it). His arms engulf her affectionately from behind, with more than a hint of compromise. When neither makes an effort to adjust things, I realise it’s one of those ‘damned if you do or don’t’ moments, and they’ve gone with the don’t to brazen it out.

My father would never be caught out like this: he still calls his current flame ‘our housekeeper’. Most Sundays she takes the train from the town where he once employed her, lobbing at our bedsit after our return from swimming club around noon. The first thing she does is run a duster over our dresser and bedhead in a nod to her cover, before pulling up a kitchen chair to drink with Ashley until he drives her back to the station. Who are they kidding?

While I wait to be picked up, my mother asks me to pass on a message to Ashley.

‘Tell your father I can do without his phone calls crowing about every swimming record you break, and asking me if my kids — MY kids, mind you — are still failing exams and running away from home, which he knows is utter garbage.’

‘Sure,’ I chirp, as I hear his car pull up. After a quick ‘bye, thanks’, I skip out to the car and we’re off, but I’m keeping mum about what she said.