The Good Son

by Greg Fleet

  ‘Well, I banged my shin on the bed this morning. Really hard. Does that count?’

  She had him on the ropes and they both knew it. ‘No, James, that doesn’t count.’

  ‘So no Endone for me?’

  ‘No, James, no Endone for you. But you can have some more watermelon, and get me another coffee.’

  ‘God, you are mean,’ he said petulantly, rising to do as she’d said.

  ‘I know,’ said Tamara, smiling so much that James had to smile too. ‘It’s all part of my mysterious charm.’

  James realised that nothing he said was going to make her laugh so he went to plan B. He collapsed. He lay on the floor as though he was dead. People in the restaurant looked over at him, panicked. Then James opened one eye and glanced at Tamara. A smile slowly spread across her face before bubbling into laughter.

  ‘Yes!’ cried James from the floor.

  Tamara was applauding gently. James stood and bowed.

  ‘It was a bit cheap,’ said Tamara, ‘but yes, you made me laugh.’

  They were smiling at each other, but under James’ smile was the pulsing feeling that something terrible was going to happen.

  And, of course, it was.

  After an elaborate breakfast, James and Tamara were ready to go see Baylor Petersen. On their way out to the car James said, ‘Eighty-one. There were eighty-one.’

  ‘Are you been deliberately obscure, James? Eighty-one what?’

  ‘Eighty-one different things to eat for breakfast on that buffet.’

  ‘You counted them?’

  ‘Yes. Eighty-one, and that’s not including drinks.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s rather obsessive?’ asked Tamara.

  ‘No, I don’t. I think it’s observant.’

  ‘It’s obsessive,’ she replied.

  ‘You say potato, I say observant,’ said James as he opened Tamara’s door for her.

  As he got in behind the wheel James realised for the first time how beautiful her outfit was. Tamara was obviously making an effort for Baylor. This lent a certain vulnerability to her and made an already fascinating woman even more so.

  ‘I just noticed how fantastic you look,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, James. That’s very observant of you. Perhaps you would have noticed earlier if you hadn’t been counting every available food option in the restaurant.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’ he asked.

  ‘About seeing Baylor? Absolutely not. I don’t think I ever have been. And you don’t have to be nervous about being around him either. You’ll see what I mean when we get there.’

  ‘Where is there?’ said James as he switched his phone over to Google Maps.

  ‘He is in Bangalow, the next town over. I know the way; I’ll give you directions. Use your phone for something useful, like music.’

  ‘Should we stop and get something? Like wine or whatever? What does he drink?’

  ‘He was drinking cask white wine when we started seeing each other. And I never tried to talk him out of it and he never changed.’

  ‘All right,’ said James as he pulled the car up on the main street near the bottle shop. ‘Cask white it is. I’ll just be a second.’

  As he got out of the car Tamara called to him: ‘Be sensible. I mean there’s cask white wine and there’s cask white wine.’ She was smiling. ‘I know this is an oxymoron but just get the best wine you can that comes in a cardboard box.’

  ‘I thought it decorous to get a two-litre cask,’ James said, getting back behind the wheel. When the best thing you can say about a wine is that it comes in a big container, it’s probably not going to be winning many awards . . .’

  ‘Other than the award for most wine,’ suggested Tamara. ‘In any case, two litres is plenty. Baylor doesn’t drink like he used to.’

  After driving out of the township for a few minutes, they pulled off the freeway onto a side road that soon turned into a dead end. There a few cool, individual houses were grouped together, facing out over a beautiful hillside and what was clearly a very old church and cemetery.

  ‘Wow, when was this built?’ asked James as they got out of the car and began strolling towards the cemetery.

  ‘I’m not sure exactly,’ replied Tamara, ‘but at least a hundred years ago. Have a look at the headstones – some of them are from World War I. I know it’s a cliché but years ago, before Baylor built his house out here, he and I used to have picnics in the cemetery. It was terribly romantic.’ She paused for a moment, shutting her eyes and remembering. Then quite suddenly she added, ‘As well as being very beautiful, the cemetery is also segregated.’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘It’s segregated. Look, see the signs? There’s the Catholic section, the Protestant section. Over there is the Jewish section. There is even a mysteriously named European section. That’s Baylor’s favourite bit: Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and the little-known religion – European,’ said Tamara. ‘And this is my favourite bit.’ She started walking towards a dozen or so graves without a ‘grouping’. ‘According to Baylor this is the “heathen section”. He and I have both got a plot and, when the time comes, we will be buried here together, with the rest of the heathens.’

  ‘Which one is Baylor’s house?’ asked James, looking over at the group of six homes across from the cemetery.

  ‘The green one,’ she said. ‘We designed it together.’

  ‘It looks great. Let’s go meet him! God, I’m quite nervous. I’m about to meet my pretend mum’s cool guitar-playing, dog-rescuing boyfriend. What if he doesn’t like me? Oh god, you haven’t told him about me pretending to be your son, have you?’

  ‘No. Not yet. I’ve told him virtually nothing about you. I haven’t really had time,’ she replied.

  ‘Great, that means he doesn’t hate me yet,’ said James, visibly relieved. ‘That would have been an extremely shit way to meet: “Baylor Petersen, the love of my life, meet James Rogers. You remember, I told you about James – in the week I’ve known him he has brought me enormous pain by pretending to be my long-dead son, and further discomfort by trying to emotionally blackmail me into leaving my family home and moving into a retirement village . . .”’

  ‘When you put it like that,’ said Tamara, ‘you do sound like a bit of a prick. Fortunately you are a good driver and a better cook.’

  ‘Let’s just go up and meet him,’ said James. ‘This feels like it could spin out of control at any stage.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Tamara. ‘But let’s have a wine first. Open that awful cask!’

  ‘Shouldn’t we at least call Baylor and invite him to join us?’

  ‘That is sweet of you, but he will be lying down. Every day between eleven and twelve-fifteen he has a nap. Bring the cask, James. Live a little – god knows no one else here can,’ Tamara said, carefully lowering herself down on a grave and taking two wine glasses out of her bag.

  ‘Is that cool? Sitting on the graves. I mean, I don’t object, obviously, I just don’t want you to get in trouble or anything,’ said James, opening the cask and bringing it over to her.

  ‘This is my plot. Baylor’s and mine. We bought it seven years ago,’ she said, handing James a glass to fill. ‘I’ll be moving in here one day, so I may as well get a feel for the place.’ James was struck by the ease and seeming delight Tamara felt sitting atop her own grave.

  Then she produced a third wineglass and handed it to James.

  ‘I’ve already got a glass,’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘I know,’ she replied, smiling. ‘As do I.’

  ‘Who’s the third glass for, then?’ he asked, filling it and handing it back to her.

  ‘Absent friends,’ she said lovingly, before upending the glass over the grave next to her.

  ‘Go easy,’ said James, startled.

  And then he saw it.

  Tamara had been leaning with her back against one of the tombstones of the double plot. Now, as she stood and raised her glass in a toast, James could se
e the engraving on it. It read:

  BAYLOR PETERSEN

  1945–2015

  Fisherman. Lover. Idiot.

  It took a couple of seconds for what James was seeing to sink in.

  ‘. . . Baylor is dead?’

  ‘I know he is, James. Come here,’ she said, standing up and taking his hand in hers. They stood together like that for quite a while, silently staring at the grave of a man who, up until about twenty seconds ago, James had been very much looking forward to meeting.

  ‘James Rogers, this is Baylor Petersen. Baylor, this is James. I wish you both could have met under better circumstances.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said James. ‘What better circumstances are there than sharing a two-litre cask of room-temperature white with a dead person in a racist cemetery? Surely this is how most great friendships are born.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, James.’

  ‘Oh, really? Well, Tamara, so am I. But the question remains – why? Why didn’t you tell me? You told me everything else about him. Letting me know that he had died wouldn’t have changed that much.’

  ‘I know. I know that, and you know that, now. But you didn’t know it then. When we were planning this. If a couple of days ago I had said, “I am perfectly happy to leave my house and move into the Peggy Day Home for what remains of my life, but on one condition. I have one demand that must be met before I agree to anything. And that demand is that someone I don’t know must drive me from Armadale to Bangalow where I will pour a glass of cask wine over the grave of a man I loved.” If I’d said that, the general consensus would’ve been that I was quite mad and that any requests I had were not to be taken seriously.’ The look on her face was not one of bitterness, but more sorrow. Sadness and regret at the lack of humanity that humans continually felt the need to display.

  James reached out, put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘I wish I’d met him. I’m so very sorry for your loss. He sounds like a wonderful man.’

  ‘He was, James, and I’m sure the two of you would have got on very well indeed,’ she said, pulling him in closer as they stood over the grave. ‘It’s still hard to accept that he is gone. He had such boundless energy and ideas. He was always inspired, every day, in every way. In the studio, on the street, reading the paper over coffee, making dinner, making love.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure that you had great sex. You don’t have to go into the details,’ said James.

  She clinked her glass against the headstone. ‘He wasn’t always this docile, you know.’

  ‘Ugh! Stop it!’

  Smiling at each other, they both raised a glass to the great man and drank.

  ‘You know, if it makes you feel any better, you are the only person from Melbourne that I’ve told about Baylor’s death,’ Tamara informed James.

  ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, only Catherine had ever met him. And I just didn’t tell her when he died. To be honest, she was never really taken with him anyway . . .’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said James. ‘We’ve already established that your daughter is more taken with herself than she is with anyone else.’

  Tamara laughed. ‘In any case, you’re the first to hear it from me. I hope you feel flattered.’

  ‘I do,’ said James, and then, ‘Let’s go out tonight and celebrate his life. Your life, together. There will be eating and drinking . . .’

  ‘And dancing on the beach?’ asked Tamara.

  ‘Fuck yes, there will be dancing on the beach!’ said James, proving that he must be a decent human as there were very few things he enjoyed less than dancing on beaches.

  ‘That, James, sounds like a splendid idea,’ she said.

  As they got ready to leave, Tamara left the wine cask in the shadow of Baylor’s headstone with two glasses.

  ‘Baylor’s next guest will join him in a glass,’ said Tamara. She assured James that, even nineteen months after his death, every day Baylor received plenty of visitors who would come for a drink and a chat with their old friend. James didn’t doubt it for a second.

  ‘Maybe I should have gone for the four-litre cask after all?’ he said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ replied Tamara philosophically. ‘“The Big Wine Cask”. The most Australian of all the “big” things.’

  At around this time, Cash’s private investigator friend Ken Rosalind had got in touch with a 46-year-old man called Laurence Murphy and told him a story about an old lady and a tree. Three hours later Laurence Murphy was going through some papers in the attic of the house he had grown up in.

  ‘Where is it exactly?’ he had demanded of his father.

  ‘It’s up there in one of the boxes,’ his father replied. ‘But leave it there. It’s only going to upset you.’

  ‘You should have told us, Dad. We both love you, but you should have told us,’ Laurence said before heading up the narrow stairs.

  After looking through his family’s junk for an hour and a half, he finally found what he had been searching for. An old handwritten letter with two names on it, one of them his. It was from someone claiming to be his mother. A woman he hadn’t seen or heard from since he was a baby. Laurence read the letter and then carefully folded it up and put it in his inside jacket pocket. He stood silently in his father’s attic, among the boxes, old toys and detritus of his childhood. He breathed in deeply and then exhaled slowly three times before he took out his phone and called his twin sister.

  That night Tamara and James bought takeaway from a little Thai place and took it and a bottle of wine (that’s right, a bottle) down to the beach for the celebration of Baylor Petersen and all things good. Most people had packed up for the day and they had the beach pretty much to themselves. They laid out a blanket and took in the majesty of the ocean.

  After they ate they went for a walk out along the beach and on to the rocks where waves broke all around them. Eventually they wandered back to the blanket where James hooked up a small speaker to Tamara’s phone and suddenly the sound of The Doors mixed with the waves. Tamara held her hand out to James. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s time to dance.’

  James did as he was told and very soon the two of them were slow dancing on the sand, like a scene from a movie. James had thought that he would feel awkward or self-conscious but he didn’t. Something about the combination of Tamara’s surety and a day of wine that varied radically in quality made him relax.

  ‘How did Baylor die?’ asked James.

  ‘He just went to bed and didn’t wake up.’

  ‘I guess that’s good?’

  ‘It’s not ideal – dying rarely is. But if you have to die, and we all do, yes, it wasn’t too bad.’

  ‘What does that feel like?’

  ‘What? Knowing that I will die soon? It’s not terrifying, if that’s what you mean. It just feels kind of inevitable. And who knows, maybe we all meet up again.’

  ‘Do you believe that? That there is something else after this?’

  ‘I don’t know. In some ways I don’t really care. If I get to hang out with Baylor and my son and everyone else I ever knew, that would be great. If there is simply nothing after this, I won’t care because I won’t know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said James, ‘I guess you’re right. You know, I’m so glad to have done this. This trip, to get to know you. And when you’re at the Peggy Day, I’ll come to see you all the time.’

  ‘I’m sure you will. I’m a very charming woman.’

  ‘That you are,’ said James as he stopped dancing. ‘I have to go sit down. I’m not used to cask wine combined with surprise deaths and dancing on beaches.’

  As James sat, he watched Tamara. She was dancing with Baylor Petersen, and it was beautiful. A few minutes later his phone rang.

  ‘Is that Sophie?’ called Tamara.

  ‘Hi, Tamara,’ shouted Sophie.

  Tamara walked over and took the phone from James, before walking away back down towards the water.

 
‘Where are you two going?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s none of your business. It’s time for some girl talk. Relax, we’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  Tamara wandered off down along the beach, chatting into the phone and looking genuinely happy. As the sun set, James watched her laughing and splashing in the shallows as she spoke to Sophie, who was over 1000 kilometres away and yet right there with them. He was struck by the mystery of life. These remarkable women were without a doubt two of the most important people in his life, and yet only a couple of months ago he hadn’t met either one of them. Tamara said goodbye to Sophie and started walking back over towards him.

  ‘How was Sophie?’ he asked.

  ‘Wonderful. She is a wonderful person. It’s not surprising that you’re in love with her,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t say that I was in love with her.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. It’s obvious.’

  ‘Oh shit. How do I make her feel the same way?’

  ‘What makes you think that she doesn’t already feel the same way?’

  ‘Because if she was in love with me, she would’ve said something by now. If someone is in love with someone else, they say something.’

  ‘James, have you ever told her that you are in love with her?’

  ‘Not yet. I don’t want to scare her off. And what happens if I tell her that I’m in love with her and she feels completely differently?’

  ‘She doesn’t feel completely differently.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because she told me she likes you. A lot. It seems one of the things you two have in common is your habit of telling everyone except each other how you feel.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to tell her. I’ll tell her exactly how I feel the next time I see her. You are my witness. The next time I see Sophie, I’m telling her that I love her. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  They lay back on the blanket drinking wine, listening to the waves and looking up at the stars as they talked about the future and the things the three of them would get up to at the Peggy Day Home.

  ‘When will we go back?’ asked James.

  ‘I suppose we’ll head back in a couple of days. We’ve done what we came to Byron to do.’