Her body was too weak to fight. She had lost so much weight that her jeans hung from her hips. Maybe that was another thing she could add to her ‘Advice for Living’ list: ‘There is such a thing as too skinny’. She lost her hair, her eyebrows, her lashes. She thought she resembled an egg. No need to get a Brazilian, she laughed with her friends. She didn’t tell them that her labia, so droopy and exposed, looked like a collapsed flower.
* * *
When you are sick, reading becomes too difficult. Not just the weight of the book, or the words that shift and dance before your eyes: without a sense of a future, there’s no desire to turn the pages. That’s why she relied on the television to fill her days, to allow the endless loop of shows to buffer her from the spreading boredom.
She tried to sort out her cupboards, fuelled by the desire to have her life neatened and organised so that even strangers would later marvel at how clean she was. In her dining room cabinet she found all the precious things kept aside for special occasions: cake servers still in their original gift boxes, the Noritake wedding crockery, champagne flutes, an unburned pink-petalled candle. Another thing to tell her children: ‘Never wait for special occasions’. She found old boxes of 21st birthday cards, and cards from friends she hadn’t seen for years, with those funny comments that now made no sense, being long removed from the source. ‘Absence does not make the heart grow fonder’.
She couldn’t bear to think of Christmas, when those glittery green Seasons Greetings would begin to pile up on the kitchen table. She snapped at her husband when he tried to discuss plans about planting drought-resistant tagasaste, or wondered whether spring lambs would reach $100 a head.
At night they slept in separate bedrooms, and when she couldn’t sleep, she roamed the house like an unwelcome guest. She opened and closed the fridge, unable to decide how to cut the nausea that rose hotly from her belly. Strawberries had the right acidity, but black tea was astringent, more like a remedy. Summer nights melded into days. She wore the same cotton nightie, and sweated into the fabric while her husband walked the boundary fences. She learned how to chase her pain, dip under it and fly beside it until it fitted her body perfectly.
Once she came to his bed, crept between the covers without saying a word. She wanted to feel his hands on her body, feel that desire in his mouth, and have it cover her entire skin. But she was too brittle. She could come apart in his hands. It seemed there was nothing left of her for him to touch or to hold.
She whispered, ‘Graham, I think you should remarry.’
‘Not this,’ he answered, letting his hand lightly tremble at her shoulders.
* * *
‘It can be disappointing to return to the place you once lived’. She needed to tell her children that. The house will look smaller than how they wished to remember it, and shabbier, like their old ginger cat with its half-licked fur. It will have an echo, like those holiday places people pass by on the way to somewhere better. This was how it was with the old workman’s cottage, their first home now set up as shearers’ short-term accommodation. She walked around the yard like a puppet in her boots, picking up one foot after the other to pull herself over the sods of earth. The garden had died back to a rough border of natives, except for a leggy pelargonium. Everywhere, it seemed as if the world was shrinking away from her: lizards rustled under leaves, birds startled away from the fence. She walked to the edge of the garden bed, where the outside bath-tub was once hidden under a private bower of green. Their secret retreat from the world of farming, from her husband’s family popping over unannounced. This is where she laughed as her husband poured water down her back, and then, as she settled into their nakedness, allowed him to slip on top of her in the tub, so that her breasts were pressed out, floating like white buoys on the water.
She could imagine the woman he would eventually come to marry. Someone he could slip easily on to, into.
* * *
‘Morphine can make dying a beautiful thing’. She began to slowly unfold. She lay on the hospital bed and listened to the world vibrate: the metal instruments on the trolley tray, the rustle of the plastic sheet beneath her, the tractor’s hum in the treeless distance. Someone put a sponge in her mouth and it tasted of the laundry trough. Her mouth was now a desert cave. She thought she spoke out loud, Can I go swimming? and a cool black hand came to rest an answer on her brow. She dreamed of a green, clear lake. A lake that freezes over in winter. She had once read about fishermen in Minnesota using ice augers to cut rough holes in the thick ice, dropping simple lines into the waters full of bream and walleyed pike.
Imagine if someone fell through the ice and couldn’t find their way back, she had told her husband, frightened by the thought of someone like a small child being trapped under an immovable weight.
It wouldn’t matter, he replied. The cold would kill them outright.
But it seemed as if he was wrong all along. First, there is the head-over-heels surprise and plummet, falling through chinks of chill-green; then the descent into the deepest waters. And the temperatures were after all bearable. Survivable. She swam the length of the whole world under this great expanse of ice, dipping in and out of air pockets like a white-skinned porpoise, trying to find its way back to the pod.
HAPPY DAYS
Six Degrees
That’s the textbook angle for getting a strike, according to the Australian Federation of Bowling. It’s all in the way you curve your wrist, arcing the ball towards that magic place between the centre pin and the one to the right. One two three four steps as you enter the approach then release the ball, almost touching the white clasp of your ankle-bone.
Ollie tries to do this; I can see him closing his eyes as he visualises that moment when everything finally lines up: his body, his mind, the planets. But he falters at the line, loses his courage, does a strange twisting motion with his wrist and gets the dreaded 7–10 split.
It’s Monday night league and I’m minding the kiosk again. Technically I should be home studying for my Year Ten exams, but Ollie is really good at getting his own way. Hey Josh, you don’t mind, do you? Letting your ol’ uncle have a chance to unwind? If he unwound any more, he’d be lying on the floor.
When Ollie first decided to have a go at bowling he joined the only team who would take on the risk: The Ebowlas. Ollie was convinced he could still run the kiosk and play at the same time. But this league eats and drinks the most out of all of them. I should know: I spend the night running back and forth to the fridge, to the fryer, to the counter, moving faster than the balls themselves.
I shouldn’t complain. Each league has a particular vibe, and this one is probably the best of the lot. The bowlers are less worn out, have a particular upswing in their step, unlike the Wednesday night bowlers with their droopy, sad bums. It’s those bums that I always remember. Monday night puckered apples, or flat, drop-down-to-the-ocean Wednesday ones.
The lanes are roaring fast—there is a rumbling energy like rush hour at the train station as the balls thunder down the polished wood and crash into the pins, and then the clickety clack return of the ball, a never-ending smash-and-crash cycle. I swear I’m going deaf: there’s no escaping the noise of the balls, the flying pins, the excitable, superimposed chatter. It’s impossible to study so I decide to redo the Specials board, try and make a difference with some coloured chalk. It’s been the same ‘Special’ for weeks now: Happy Days Chilli Dog, which is really just a hotdog with a squirt of Heinz chilli sauce. Happy Days Café—that’s the name Ollie came up with as he tried to rebrand the kiosk with a retro fifties theme. He bought some vintage Coca-Cola mirrors from an auction and tore out some pages from an old calendar featuring women wearing frilly aprons, pearls and frosted smiles. The pictures are pasted around the walls above the prep area, some tatty at the edges and spattered with brown gobs of oil, and it has the grubby look of a teenager’s room from the fifties. It doesn’t work—but then it doesn’t matter what Ollie does because the rest of the bowl will a
lways be a dump. Things are beyond his control: the dandelions sprouting like triffids from the potholes in the car park, the battered balls and shoes which haven’t been replaced for years, and the dated electronic scoring system from the nineties with the flashing animations of a fox going Kapow! every time there is a strike.
There has been talk of a buy-out lately, something about the AMF wanting to take over one of the last independent bowling alleys left in Perth, but this is only a ten-lane affair and you need at least fourteen lanes to make a go of it. Gary neither confirms nor denies the rumour. I hate his guts. Not just the way he has lied to Ollie about the business, locking him into an up-front seven-year lease, but how whenever he sees Ollie walking towards him he takes out his iPhone and pretends to be deep in conversation. And then there are the times he collects the change from the pinnies and the ball polishing machine, and the sound of falling coins reverberates through the building, giving everyone a false sense of hope.
Gary owns the bowl and has the easy-to-stretch smile of a con man. He still has the ponytail from the days when he worked as a bouncer at Pinocchio’s Night Club, and twenty kilos later there he sits in the side office, the tattoos swelling like monsoons on his forearms as he stuffs the week’s takings from the safe into cream calico bags. Lee, his offsider, works beside him and they’ve always got their heads bowed together as if they’re conjoined twins.
I watch Ollie and he’s trying to fit in with the other bowlers. He’s doing something weird with his lips, testing out a smile and showing too much gum like a mare. I recognise it because Mum does the same thing when she’s around people she’s not sure of. Smiling and all gums, and everyone thinking she is really nice when in fact she just has low self-esteem. It reminds me of the time when I was eight, and Ollie and I were walking through the bush on one of our prospecting trips and we found a stray dog. Its brown mangy fur was missing in patches and its ribs radiated out through the skin like the blue whale skeleton at the museum. It was covered with kangaroo ticks, black and plump. Riddled, Mum said, and that word sounded so thrilling to me because gangster bodies were always riddled with bullets. But she wouldn’t let us keep it, organised for the council ranger to come and collect it from our laundry the next day. The dog’s eyes were filmy and yellow like a lizard’s, and when I stared into them to communicate my love for it, to let the dog know how much I cared, its lip curled back from its teeth in a soundless warning. I find myself doing the same thing when Gary comes to the counter, his hair greasier and more grown out than usual. I’m baring my teeth in an allgum smile. It’s a warning, the kind given by cornered prey: You better back off, or else.
Doing an Andy Varipapa
It’s not impossible when you have a 7–10 split, if you put enough spin on the ball so that the power and force ricochets one pin across the deck, to collect the remaining one on the other side. I know that Ollie is going for it but I can’t bear to watch, so I pretend to be rearranging the pyrex cups stacked on top of the coffee machine. There is a roar from the bowlers and I know he has failed.
When Ollie first took over the kiosk he would invite me over to his place in Kelmscott, a small boxy unit in a large group near the railway line, and I would weave my way past the bundles of newspapers, the boxes from the blind auctions, and sit in a small clearing he had made in the kitchen, where we would watch old black and white newsreels of Andy Varipapa. Papa Varipapa—looking more like a Brooklyn pizza parlour owner than a two-time All-Star American champ. Ollie would replay the famous tricks: the scatter shot, the drop kick, the double hook, the bank shot, and my personal favourite, the Sunday driver—where Ollie and I would laugh more at the American voice-over than the erratic ball: A fellow drives all over the road, even on the left-hand side. The man’s voice was old-fashioned and measured and I felt like I was watching something of historical importance, like a space mission. We sometimes ate while we watched, putting our plates on one of Ollie’s many boxes, and the heat would soften and buckle the cardboard. Sometimes I feared our food would disappear, like cars falling through the earth’s crust during an earthquake. Ollie was the happiest during those times. His eyes would fixate on the replay of the shots, and the superimposed lines that tracked the pathway of the ball, revealing the hidden mystery. It’s all to do with physics, Ollie would say, and I would nod and remember to pay more attention during Mr Przywolniek’s science class at school.
It was the same happiness Ollie had when talking about the ring. The Andy Varipapa commemorative ring for the perfect 300. Twelve consecutive strikes over two games. No-one at the bowl had ever got one, and Ollie became obsessed with checking fingers if anyone new joined his league. I found myself doing the same thing. Whenever a customer came to the counter I would do a quick once-over of their hands, hold my breath whenever a ring was squarish and chunkier than usual. Sometimes I would do a voice-over in my head: A fellow comes to the counter and is wearing a ring. It’s chunky and gold, and there could be a number 300 in black lettering with a little chip of diamanté, but—wait, folks… no need for concern: it’s just a skull and crossbones set!
Dead Wood, Dead Wood
Lee calls it out over the PA system, and I look up to see that Ollie’s attempt at the 7–10 split has left a remaining pin on the laneway, which the mechanical arm has failed to sweep away. Ollie starts walking down the lane, lightly pressing his bowling shoes on the polished wood as if trying not to leave imprints on wet cement, and then Lee’s voice booms out like an angry god. ‘Get off the fuckin’ lane, Ollie.’
All the other bowlers titter and grin, and Ollie slips and slides as he starts running back. I can see that Lee’s latest girlfriend has brought in bags of Chinese takeaway and has spread out the containers on the console like a picnic. I strain to see whether there are bottles of Coke as well. I have suspected for a while now that Lee has been nicking the buddy bottles from our fridge—he always denies it, but I sometimes see him slipping something beneath his flannel shirt, and whenever I walk over to check the bookings diary to see whether there are any birthday parties lined up for the weekend, there are telltale damp circles on the open pages.
Lee’s girlfriend is wearing a lime-green midriff top and her belly button piercing sticks out like the ring top from a can. She reluctantly lifts up the hinged flap of the console, so Lee can walk along the back of the lanes to sweep away the stranded pin with a broom. At most I give this relationship four weeks. Lee’s relationships are getting shorter and shorter and I think it’s because the bowl no longer has the pull it used to. Being an average-looking guy with a set of alley keys isn’t enough any more, but he reeled her in, in the way he always does with his girlfriends. He led her by the hand over to the ball racks, whispering, You need a ball about a tenth of your body weight, let his eyes slowly travel the length of her body, then picked out a shiny five-kilo Black Beauty. And she was hooked.
Lee has been working at the bowl for years, and before that his dad worked there in the glory days when it used to be a carpet warehouse. One time when I couldn’t find Lee and Gary at the front desk, I wandered down the back end, past the dust-coated crap: old balls chipped like moon craters, oily rags, bolts and crank handles rusted in one-arm salutes, and the broken fifties-style monitors with their grey outer-space hoods. It was like entering another world, and as I went deeper into the darkness, imagining I was a deep-sea diver in the murky unfathomable depths of the ocean where only bottom feeders lurk, my eyes suddenly adjusted and I saw the huge rolls of industrial carpet stacked high to the ceiling like limp bodies. I never told Ollie this because I know he’ll want to go down the back to check out all the junk for himself.
In real life Lee’s voice sounds weak and reedy, but over the PA system it transforms into something deeper, like the wizard in the movie The Wizard of Oz, though whenever he says a word beginning with a ‘p’ it sounds all girly again, a tiny marshmallow pouff. I would like to hear him say ‘Papa Varipapa’. He’s quieter during the league, but on a Saturday evening whe
n it’s Rock ’n’ Bowl Lee doesn’t stop talking, as if he is a radio DJ and everyone has turned up just to listen to him. His one true gift, though, is matching the music to the bowlers, choosing the Rolling Stones when the Baby Boomers come in for a social game, Taylor Swift for the ten-year-old girls’ parties, and for the local footy club wind-up—his own personal favourite, ‘Fun with Farts’.
Some weekends it’s only him and me; Ollie hasn’t turned up, there are no bowlers and we are in our separate zones on opposite sides of the room. All we can hear, while we stand there eyeing each other off in silence, is the dull sound of a drill from the back lots pushing its way into the empty space. There was this one time though on a Sunday afternoon, only a single lane going, and the glass doors suddenly swung open and a group of hipsters walked in and it was like an alien invasion—the guys with gingery-brown bushy beards and wearing skinny jeans and bomber jackets, the girls dressed in skater skirts with pastel-coloured shirts knotted in at their waists. They circumnavigated the bowl, checking out everything with knowing looks, giggling like Japanese schoolgirls beneath their palms. And when they finally left without playing a single game Lee turned on his microphone, spat out the word Wankers! And that was the only time I ever came close to liking him.
FLO
Most of the league bowlers have their FLO—a habit, a ritual, a superstitious set of tics or dance moves they have to complete before a game. Some cross themselves, kiss a stuffed toy, or in Ollie’s case, rub the glossy folds of Buddha’s belly. Between his games Ollie comes over to the counter to recharge his luck on the Buddha we have standing on the counter next to the straw dispenser. He is proud of that golden statue (the best thing he has ever got at an auction), and its shiny, chuckling face is so different from the concrete one with the formless features in the garden, the one Mum bought as a reminder of a holiday in Bali—though I hate to be the one to tell her that Bali’s a predominately Hindu island.
Fabulous Lives Page 3