The Good Son

by Greg Fleet

  You ready?’

  ‘I guess I am,’ said James, feeling that special combination of thrilled and terrified that only trying to pull off something like this can make you feel. ‘He’s in his room? He knows Finn is coming?’

  ‘He sure does. It’s all he’s been talking about for the last day and a half. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so excited.’

  They left the office and started walking towards Dr Harvey’s room. To James this was like the pregame ritual before a big football match. The office was like the dressing room, and walking the corridor was like moving down the tunnel and into the race. Entering the patient’s room was like emerging from under the grandstand and out onto the MCG: once he was in there he just had to hope that he played smart and played committed. He had to give 110 per cent. James loved sport but he found that the numbers thrown around by football people often bore very little resemblance to actual mathematics. He recalled reading about a famous American football coach who had once said that football was ‘75 per cent mental and the other half physical’. In any case, James was ready to give his all for the team. A very small team of two. If he was the star player, Sophie was his super coach, and for them to win they both had to play their parts.

  They reached the door to Dr Harvey’s room. Sophie put her hand on James’ shoulder and then gently brought it up to his cheek. ‘You all good, champ?’

  James turned his face away from her hand, feeling suddenly flushed. ‘I’m good, coach. Just put me in the game.’

  With that Sophie opened the door. It was showtime, folks.

  When they entered his room, Dr Harvey was propped up in bed doing the crossword. Sophie announced, ‘Dr Harvey, your son is here.’

  The old man put down the newspaper, and looked up towards the ceiling or possibly the heavens, almost as though praying, or hoping for something, and said, ‘He certainly is. Finn . . . Just look at you.’

  ‘Hi, Dad. How do I look?’ asked James.

  ‘I don’t know, son, I can’t see you. It was rhetorical. How do you look? Are you wearing a hat?’

  ‘No. I was going to wear a beret but I thought that might look stupid.’

  ‘It certainly would have. Hats are for idiots and berets are for fools,’ replied Dr Harvey. ‘Finn, my boy, I am dying. I am a very old man and I have done pretty much everything in my life that I’ve wanted to do. But there has been one thing that I wanted more than anything else, and that was to speak to you. There are many things that I’ve wanted to say but we have so little time so I will just tell you the important things.’

  James and Sophie exchanged glances. This was going perfectly.

  ‘Oh, Dad, there are so many things that I’ve wanted to tell you as well,’ said James.

  ‘Let me finish. We have a lot to discuss, you and I, and here, today, I’d like to deal with that. To clear the decks, as it were. For my own sake, I would like a fresh start. Or a fresh finish.’

  ‘Of course, Dad.’

  A strange look came over Dr Harvey’s face . . .mile but kind of a cruel smile.

  ‘A fresh start,’ repeated James. ‘That’s what I want too.’

  ‘Oh shut up, Finn. I don’t care what you want. Did you come because you wanted to resolve our long-running mutual hatred? Or was it simply because you knew that I was dying and you wanted me to leave you my house and my money?’

  ‘No, Dad. I don’t wan—’

  ‘Shut up. Don’t talk. You are just going to stand there. You are going to stand there and you are going to listen.’

  For a second James thought the old man might be joking, but not Sophie. She somehow knew straight away that he was being serious. Deadly serious.

  The train had gone suddenly, unexpectedly off the rails and James couldn’t even catch Sophie’s eye. It was as if she was hypnotised, staring at Dr Harvey, compelled by what he was saying and by how chilling he had become. There was no contingency for this. Dr Harvey clearly believed that James was in fact his son, but the old man was raining hellfire down upon him, and seemed to be enjoying it very much. James had no choice but to carry on and see where this led.

  ‘You get nothing, you vacuous leech. My house and my money I have left to this place. The people here, including this young woman –’ he looked to Sophie ‘– treated your mother and I with dignity and grace. But that is not why I am leaving them everything. I am leaving them everything purely so that you cannot have any of it. In this last year the only thing that has excited me about dying, aside from the inherent mystery of it all, is knowing that my death would not benefit you financially in any way. That you would get zero. Nothing. Or, as they say on The Price is Right, “Bah-bow”.’

  ‘That’s Family Feud,’ said James, rapidly losing patience with the old man.

  ‘Shut up, Finn! You are a coward and an embarrassment, and that’s all you’ve ever been. I never waste time wondering what kind of a son Michael would’ve been if you had died in the crash instead of him. He would’ve been a better man than you. Far better. Stronger. Smarter. Braver. He would have made your mother and I —’

  ‘Fuck you!’ James exploded, shocking himself with the outburst. ‘I’m glad you’re dying. I don’t want your money; I never did. I just wanted a father!’

  The train had not only left the tracks, it was now engulfed in flames. This time it was Sophie who couldn’t catch James’ eye. He was unreachable.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Dad,’ he went on. ‘Have you got any idea what it was like growing up with you? Have you got any idea what it was like after Michael? Mum was great, but you? You were a 24/7 horror show of self-indulgence, with your tedious Korean War stories. You know what? Fuck you, and fuck the Korean War. Fuck M*A*S*H. Fuck Hawkeye. Fuck everything!’

  Dr Harvey began a slow handclap from his bed. ‘Oh bravo, son, bravo. Now that is the Finn I have known and grown to despise.’

  Sophie jumped in (far too late if you ask me, but she did finally jump in), opening the door and trying to push an enraged James back out into the relative safety of the corridor.

  ‘Okay, gentlemen. I think that’s enough for today. Everyone is getting a little heated . . .’

  But Dr Harvey wasn’t done yet.

  ‘Get out, Finn,’ spat Dr Harvey. ‘You are no longer my son.’

  ‘You know what, old man? I never was!’ shouted James as he was bundled out of the room.

  Sophie was now between him and Dr Harvey, pushing hard on James’ chest. As she pulled the door shut behind them James managed one last ‘You old fuck!’

  Suddenly James found himself back in the corridor, back in the tunnel, heading back to the change rooms. The game was over and he was pretty sure his team had just lost.

  When Sophie spoke it was with barely contained rage. ‘Meet me in the office in three minutes. If you go back into Dr Harvey’s room, I will fucking kill you.’ With that she stormed to the end of the corridor, never looking back, and disappeared around a corner. Seconds later James heard her office door open, then slam shut and her scream the solitary word ‘SHIT!’

  If James had been wearing a tie, at that moment, he definitely would have loosened it.

  As the narrator I feel it is beholden upon me at this point to tell you that, while James and Sophie were good at what they were doing, this whole ‘pretending to be other people’s sons’ thing was an unproven science. There was no textbook for what they were doing. And because of that, things wouldn’t always go the way they expected them to. Sometimes it would be a cakewalk. Everything would fall into place as though it were the easiest thing in the world. But of course the reverse was also true. Sometimes something completely unforeseen would happen, and, as it had with Dr Harvey, very quickly the whole thing would go off the rails like a massive steam train in an old western movie. The shrieking of passengers and the rending of steel girders – never a good thing. This was the kind of screw-up that would make less committed people think about abandoning the whole project.

  I know I’m only the
narrator, but I think my train crash metaphor is a good one. And like an actual train crash, James and Sophie didn’t know whether to look, or to look away. In any case, let’s crack on, shall we?

  Toot-toot, all aboard.

  James opened the door to the office and stepped inside. Sophie was looking out the window and her shoulders seemed to be heaving.

  ‘Soph, are you okay? Are you crying?’ he asked, horrified.

  ‘No, James, I’m not crying. I’m just fucking furious.’ She turned around to look at him. When he saw her face he immediately wished that she was crying. Causing Sophie to cry would have been a terrible thing, but causing Sophie to be this angry? That was a whole new level of hell.

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘I wish you were crying,’ whispered James.

  ‘What?’ said Sophie.

  ‘You saw what he was doing, heard the things he said – he is a fucking maniac! He only wanted to see Finn so he could say vile and fucked-up things to him. And I don’t let anyone talk to me like that!’

  ‘He wasn’t talking to you, idiot. He was talking to Finn.’

  ‘Well, no one talks to Finn that way. Not while I’m in the room. Finn is a good guy!’

  ‘How do you know that, James? We know nothing about him. For all you know Finn is a serial killer or a rapist.’

  ‘He is not a rapist! He sometimes wears a beret. Rapists don’t wear berets.’ But from the look on Sophie’s face, now was not the time to try being funny about hats . . . ‘Look, Dr Harvey was being a complete arsehole and I responded the way a son would respond in the real world.’

  ‘But this is not the real world, James. That’s not what we are building. We are walking in their worlds, their lives, not our own. It’s not about us, about you – it’s about them. If we make them feel great and they love us, hooray! But if they, for whatever reason, get dark and angry and hateful? We have to eat that up too. We’re here to give them what they need. If they need to be angry, you tolerate their anger. If they need to hate you, you tolerate that too.’

  They stood facing each other, taking each other in. James looked suitably chastised, and was ready to fall on his sword. He knew he had fucked up. His sudden explosion at the old man hadn’t just taken Sophie by surprise; it had shocked him as well. James usually kept a lid on his anger but he was starting to see that maybe that lid was very poorly screwed on. Cash Driveway had often remarked that in a crisis loud, shouty people were relatively easy to handle. You knew, very clearly, where they were coming from. It was the seemingly cruisy, happy people who were the real wildcards. When shit went south, which it sometimes did, you had no way of predicting just how loco they would get.

  ‘Sophie,’ said a contrite James, ‘I swear that will never happen again. Okay?’

  She came towards him and took his hand, holding it in both of hers.

  ‘Oh, James, I know. I know it won’t happen again. And you know what else I know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was a complete shit in there,’ smiled Sophie.

  ‘He certainly was,’ said James. ‘He was Shitty McShitface the third.’ They were both smiling now.

  In the next chapter, something unexpected happens. It’s not earth-shattering but it is unexpected. Try to guess what it is . . .et you can’t. This little bit of narration is designed to make you read on. You know, ‘One more chapter before bed’. That type of thing. My publisher told me to do it and, frankly, I think it’s a good idea.

  The morning after the Dr Harvey fiasco, James dropped in to Cash Driveway’s house. They were drinking coffee in Cash’s kitchen and telling each other stories; James about Dr Harvey, Cash about the difference between the colours burnt orange and sienna. Cash told James about a study that he’d read where in an American maximum-security prison the authorities had painted all of the walls pink. The colour pink, it seemed, had a very relaxing effect on the inmates; inmates who had previously been what Cash described as ‘extremely stabby’.

  ‘Maybe I should come down to the old people’s home and paint Dr Harvey’s walls burnt orange,’ suggested Cash.

  ‘Maybe,’ said James. ‘How do you think that would affect him?’

  ‘I have no idea. It would probably make him demand more citrus fruit. I’ll give it some thought.’

  It was then that James noticed the boxes. It was not unusual for Cash to have boxes, or anything for that matter, scattered around his house. But these boxes seemed to James to be filled with things that used to be on Cash’s walls or on his desk or shelves.

  ‘What’s with the boxes, Cash?’ asked James, prepared for virtually any answer.

  ‘I’m packing up,’ said Cash. ‘I have to leave. It would seem that all adequate things must come to an end.’ Cash was exuding a legitimate sense of regret, something James was not used to from him. He also looked tired, and that was definitely not something that Cash ever showed, or, as far as James knew, ever even felt.

  ‘But why? Why do you have to leave?’

  ‘There was an issue with the rent. Apparently I didn’t pay it.’ Using words like ‘issue’ and ‘apparently’ made it all sound like a big mistake; which, strangely, it was.

  ‘What? Didn’t pay it for how long?’ James asked.

  ‘As near as I can work out, about seventeen months.’ Cash looked so casual as he said this, he may as well have been saying, ‘Oh, six days.’

  ‘What? Cash! Seventeen months? Why not?’ If Cash wasn’t going to panic about this, James certainly was. He looked as though he had been slapped.

  ‘I think I just forgot. I forgot, and no one reminded me, so the whole thing just kind of snowballed. But snowballed very quietly . . . Anyway, early last week the real estate guy came over and told me that I owed them $28 900.’

  ‘Twenty-eight . . . What? What happened? What did you tell him?’

  ‘Well, for a start, the guy was really surprised that I was still here. I think they assume that if somebody racks up that kind of bill, they will have already split. And aside from the shock of me still being here, when he told me how much I owed, I think he assumed that I would either make a run for it or just fall over and start weeping.’

  ‘Did you? I would’ve gone for the weeping.’

  ‘No. Strangely, for probably the first time in my life, I have that much and more in the bank. I just told him, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve been really busy and I totally forgot to pay you. It was $28 900, yes? I can transfer that to you now or if you’d rather we can go down to the bank and I’ll pay you in cash.”’ Cash Driveway could announce that World War III had commenced but say it in such a way that anyone hearing it would think that everything was going to work out just fine.

  James was amazed by this conversation, but at the same time he was amazed that he was amazed. These were the kinds of things that his friend did. This was 100 per cent classic Cash Driveway.

  ‘So what did the guy say?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Cash. ‘He seemed a little freaked out. But in the end he told me that it was too late. So I had to pay them the money and I have to move out by the end of this week.’

  ‘Where are you going to go?’ The realisation that he and Cash had slowly and unintentionally become best friends very much surprised James. And now the idea that his friend could be taken away flattened him like a large man in a leotard jumping off the top rope of a wrestling ring. With everything changing so quickly – his mother dying, meeting Sophie, all the stuff they were doing at the Peggy Day Home – the idea of losing Cash was quite simply unacceptable.

  ‘I have a big place. I’ve got a spare room. You’re moving into my flat. This is not a discussion. The decision has been made,’ said James.

  ‘Will you remind me to pay the rent?’ asked Cash with a smile that said a thousand thank yous.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cash Driveway, ‘that, my friend, sounds like a plan.’

  Watching Cash’s expression change from lost to found, from
evicted to invited, felt to James not like he was giving but rather that he was gaining.

  And the next day, Cash was living at James’ place.

  (That was the unexpected thing I told you about.)

  Hey! Relax! How many times do I have to tell you that Cash Driveway is not some kind of maniac? He is an artist and has an artistic temperament, that’s all. Cash does a hell of a lot more than just smoke dope. He paints. He lectures. He gives away clothes and possessions and money to people who need those things. Cash is a good guy. He is kind, he is smart, he is empathetic and he loves animals. Charlie Girl was one of his best friends. Seriously, Cash Driveway moving in to James’ apartment is not going to become a problem in this story.

  I think you may be on to me, but let’s crack on.

  Something that I, your narrator, only found out about years later when talking to Sophie was ‘the curse of sundown’. Each day towards early evening at the Peggy Day Home, something quite heartbreaking would occur. At around five or six p.m. many of the women would start fidgeting, fussing about and getting quite anxious. As though there was something that they should be doing. Something quite important and yet something that remained just out of sight, shrouded in the fog of memory. You see, it was dinnertime. The time when, for most of their lives, they had prepared the evening meal for their loved ones. And now that the simple function of providing that had been taken away from them, a strange kind of free-form frustration would descend. An almost audible tension, like a low-level hum, would rise among the patients.

  The staff at the home had various ways of dealing with this. One of their preferred methods was for an orderly to tell the patients, ‘Tonight we are making you all a special dinner which will be followed by a concert! So, please, everyone, put your feet up and relax. Tonight, let us look after you.’ Those patients who were cognisant of the fact that the staff prepared dinner every night, and therefore that it was not actually a special occasion, were also aware that this minor charade was being performed to ease the anxiety and discomfort of some of their fellow patients. That it was a simple kindness. Those lost in their own history, or too far gone to recognise this sleight of hand, were simply pleased that it was happening.