Celia took him on long riding tours, even as far as Hepburn Springs for a spa retreat. That’s when he went into detail about his marriage break-up. But he didn’t talk about trust. He just rubbed sandalwood oil onto her smooth, pale back, and she rubbed the same sweet smelling goo into his chest.
Celia moved into his apartment after a year together and they had a party to celebrate. A drunk brunette called Lilly, one of Jayne’s old friends, more hers than his, who Peter couldn’t even remember inviting, bailed him up in the corridor. Her hair was still wet. It was pissing down outside. Like her monologue.
She wouldn’t stop telling him about his ex-wife. Peter knew Jayne had a new partner, but he hadn’t met him. And he didn’t want to. As long as she delivered his son every second weekend as arranged, she could do whatever the hell else she liked.
‘Peter, listen to me. You’ll want to hear this.’
Her breath was Sauvignon Blanc and cold prawns. She had a wet hand on his arm.
‘Her new house, you’ve never seen anything like it! Views of Fairhaven Beach from the top of the hill. There’s a pool in the house...in the house...and a Japanese garden...’
‘Wow, that’s great,’ he seethed. He knew Jayne had a house down there. So shut up, Lilly.
Peter looked around for Celia. She was at the kitchen bench pouring wine and laughing. He tried to catch her eye, but no luck. She looked gorgeous in her black dress.
‘Jesus, Peter!’ Lilly said, swaying. ‘I didn’t know you had that much money between you...’
It was no business of Lilly’s, but he gave her the rough figure
Jayne had received. He’d had more than a few cabernets.
‘Must be her new man,’ he told her.
Peter pictured a muscly marketing exec doing laps of the indoor pool. Because he’d be too shit-scared to try the moun-tainous surf.
‘No, Peter. He’s a scraggy looking poet guy. Can’t even sell a book. Not a dollar to his name... Well, he’s got a few now! And do you know Jayne’s stopped working at the top end of town? She’s started an Aboriginal art business. Sells the paintings... Some people think they’re fake but I just think they’re jealous of her...’
Whatever else she said he didn’t know. Her hold on his arm got stronger and he pulled away. Lilly’s wine glass wobbled in her other hand. He wanted to rip it off her and throw it at the wall. He excused himself, said he needed to go to the bathroom, but he headed to the balcony.
The party was rocking inside and it was too wet for anyone to brave the outdoor furniture. Peter sat on a sloppy wooden chair. He remembered the sunglasses on Jayne’s face in the Salvo’s car park and her blank expression. How he’d been too embarrassed to do anything but catch his taxi and get the hell out of there.
The MCG light tower lit up sheets of rain. It got heavier but Peter didn’t notice it or Celia shaking him until the rain was in his eyes and down his face.
9. Trevor Randall
Trevor Randall had been unsteady on his feet since his early teens when he was king hit at a bonfire. He stood now on his Westmore nature strip, tensing his decaying muscles in the winter chill. He put a blue plastic lunch bag into his adult son Anthony’s cold hand. Anthony smiled back through his shaggy beard and motioned for his father to hug him. In their heavy coats, Trevor and Anthony embraced. Anthony was a mute and intellectually disabled, but Trevor always knew what he was saying.
Don’t watch me, Dad. You know I can do it.
Anthony began to cross Fryall Road. He waved back at his father as he went. Trevor was a lollipop man. Out of habit, he squinted up and down the foggy road. No traffic, he thought, Anthony’ll be fine.
But the Holden Calais that turned quickly from a side street onto Fryall hadn’t had its lights on. Trevor had turned his back and he was about to open his low iron gate when he heard tyres screech and metal thump on flesh.
The Calais’ door flung open. The driver sat shaking on the edge of his car seat. Anthony was face down on the nature strip across the road, the blue plastic lunch bag beside him. Trevor hobbled across the road to Anthony and found his son was still breathing.
A few weeks later, Trevor pushed his breakfast bowl away and opened one of the envelopes on his kitchen table. It was a card with a picture of flowers in a vase and the words Thinking of You on the front. A primary school kid had scrawled, I hope your son will be ok. And come bak to the schol crossing SOON in red pencil on the inside. Trevor took the card to the lounge room and placed it with the others arranged on the tile mantelpiece. They were lined up next to the framed black and white photo of Pamela, sitting on the beach at Ocean Grove, cuddling Anthony when he was a boy. She’d died nine years ago.
At the kitchen bench, Trevor spread margarine—not too much—on four pieces of white bread. Then he cut the crusts off. Outside, trucks rumbled and horns blasted, long and threatening.
Trevor had worked for twelve years as a lollipop man at Westmore Primary School, a few streets from his house. Children would always say hello to him where he stood in the middle of the road in white pants and overcoat, a beardless Santa blowing a whistle. He’d say G’day to the kids, but when parents greeted him, Trevor felt like a boy making sandcastles at the beach and watching waves knock them over. He nodded or sometimes offered a muffled ‘hi’. He had to concentrate on the cars.
The kettle bubbled and Trevor poured hot water onto a teabag. He gathered lettuce, cheese and tomatoes and put them on the bench with the buttered bread. He couldn’t break the habit of making lunch for Anthony. Beside the hospital bed in which Anthony lay in an induced coma, a nurse had explained why Anthony didn’t need food.
‘You see those, Mr Randall?’
Trevor had nodded at the thin tubes in his son’s nose and mouth.
‘They’re feeding him. He can’t eat any real food because he’s in a very deep sleep.’
But Trevor still made the lunch. In the early days after Anthony’s accident, before the school decided he needed to take a holiday, Trevor took the lunch to the crossing in his coat pocket. When he got home from the afternoon shift, he stored each lunch in a cardboard box in the garden shed. The smell was terrible. He hoped it wouldn’t waft across the fence and into his neighbour’s yard.
When Anthony was little, doctors and other experts had offered all kinds of advice.
‘If we can just keep working on Anthony’s ability to recognise and react to facial expressions, it will really help…’ one specialist had told Trevor’s wife.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Pamela had said. ‘I’ve been trying. But it’s hard, it’s just…’
The specialist had glanced at Trevor. Pamela had looked at her husband too. ‘I’m doing me best,’ she’d said, and the specialist had nodded.
Anthony’s communication didn’t improve. But after Pamela died, he at least got better at crossing the road. Eventually, Trevor didn’t need to hold his hand or arm. He wondered whether Anthony might eventually help him cross the road.
A man from the City Mission, another man from Human Services and a nurse had sat in Trevor’s lounge room. They had decided Anthony could live on his own. So he had been moved to 27 Forrest Street, just around the corner from Trevor, with three other men. The house was clean, and the longhaired man from the City Mission and the nurse in her white Corolla had both visited Anthony regularly. They sometimes visited Trevor too, and told him Anthony was going well.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Anthony was picked up in a bus and taken to work at the Brotherhood of St Laurence Ware-house. But before the bus arrived, Anthony walked to Trevor’s place to collect the lunch his father had made.
Trevor put slices of cheese on top of the processed chicken meat, which already sat on top of the lettuce. The phone rang, shrill, like a hungry seagull. Trevor held the sauce bottle above the two sandwiches and listened to the phone screech. He dripped the sauce carefully across the cheese slices—just how Anthony liked it—then shook pepper on top.
The phone stopped ringing. T
revor cut the sandwiches in half and parceled them in cling wrap. He found a banana in the fruit bowl that had just enough black and yellow, and an orange, a firm one. The phone screeched again, but Trevor watched it until it stopped. He went to the drawer, pulled out a blue plastic bag and wrapped the sandwich.
News about Anthony’s accident had got around Westmore Primary School quickly. Some parents had stopped in the road and asked Trevor how he was going. Others had ignored him and rushed their kids over the crossing. At a school council meeting, Trevor’s employment future was Safety Agenda Item 4 (a). After the meeting, the principal told Trevor he might be asked to take a break from work for a while. A couple of weeks later a vote narrowly favoured Trevor keeping his job. But Trevor decided to take a break anyway. Now he wasn’t sure how long he’d been away or whether he would go back. He might be able to find work at another school. But he wasn’t sure.
The lunch made, he sat at his kitchen table and looked at the other envelopes. He picked one up, felt it. Another card. He didn’t touch the two letters near it with the Westmore Primary School emblem stamped on them.
When the phone squawked again, Trevor got up, took it from the hook and looked at the receiver. He slowly brought it to his ear.
‘Mr Randall, hello, are you there?’
Trevor grunted.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Randall, but, as you recall, yesterday we told you that you’d have to come to the hospital and sign the forms... I’m really sorry to have to remind you of this...’
Trevor was silent.
‘Are you there Mr Randall?’
He grunted again.
‘So we’ll see you at eleven?’
Trevor didn’t reply. The caller paused, waiting for Trevor. ‘Mr Randall? Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ Trevor said.
‘See you at eleven?’
Trevor hung up. He took his coat from the hook, put it on, walked to the front door, and then turned around. He went back to the bench, picked up the lunch and carried it outside. His wheelie bin was open on the nature strip from the morning rubbish collection. Trevor dropped the lunch into it.
10. Simon and Terry Stevenson
They were with their mates outside the Westmore Hotel nightclub. Lining up to get in. A bloke in the front bar window with a yellow surf top accidentally caught Simon’s eye.
‘What’re you lookin at, fuckwit?’ Simon asked by way of introduction.
The bloke inside was wiry with blonde hair. He was probably a tradie from one of the beach towns outside Westmore. The bloke lifted the window.
‘What was that?’
‘You heard me.’
Simon slurred his words and almost lost his balance. The surfie wasn’t impressed. Or worried.
‘Go home mate.’
The surfie’s crew, hair gel and rainbow shirts, were all laughing. Even the girlfriends. With sunnies stuck to their foreheads, as if it was going to brighten up tonight. Simon steadied himself against the wall, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. His black shirt lifted up so everyone in the line got a view of his chubby, white gut. Simon rounded on Terry.
‘That bloke’s fucked,’ Simon told his brother.
‘If we get in.’
Simon dragged on his cigarette.
‘We’ll get in,’ he nodded. ‘Don’t you worry.’
They’d been standing in the line for half an hour and there were still twenty bodies in front of them. Terry knew that, down at the Eureka Hotel on the river, Harmsy would be on the door. He’d let them in there. Didn’t matter how pissed they were, or what they were wearing, he always let them in. But now they were outside the Westmore, with every other trendy who’d come into town. So Terry gave Simon the third degree.
‘Told you we should have gone to the Eureka!’
Simon sent his cigarette flying to the concrete.
‘Get fucked,’ he laughed. ‘I told Pete to meet us here.’
Their big brother who’d moved to Melbourne. Years ago and now he was married, too, to a sexy chick called Jayne.
Simon gave Terry a smack on the shoulder and he accidentally bumped into Brooksey behind him. He said, Sorry Brooksey, and stupid Brooksey laughed, flicked his thin hair and said, Don’t do it again, wanker. Simon called Brooksey a wanker too. A major wanker, without a dick.
It was all fun and games. Until someone got hurt. That’s what their father always told them. And if they kept fighting he’d belt them himself.
Despite the surfie having a go at him, Simon was pretty chirpy. It was his bucks’ night and he was full of grog. He reckoned he was going to dance when they got in, so he must have been more drunk than he looked. They didn’t play Metallica in there. All you could hear for miles around was doof doof doof.
There were only four of them left on the crawl. Terry, Simon, Brooksey and Thommo, Simon’s footy coach when he was in under eighteens. Ron had gone home but his mate Thommo was still there and he’d said, ‘I’ll look after your lads,’ before Ron had headed home. The big bloke was high up in the trucking company, higher than Ron ever got. Thommo was CEO of the whole Westmore business arm and Ron was one of his managers. Thommo looked like a wrestler, but wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless the fly was a pain in the arse that wouldn’t leave you alone. He always said he had a black belt, then he’d lift up his shirt and show you the leather one round his pale blue jeans.
Simon pointed down the line at a group of Bell Park Hill footballers. Terry knew one of them, Stringy. He waved and Stringy waved back. Simon summed up the situation. Like he always did. Because, as Peter had always told him when they were teenagers, For someone who knows nothing, you know everything.
‘They’re letting those bastards in, so we’ll get in.’
Stringy was in a pair of stretch jeans. And he was stagger-ing. Terry wasn’t as confident as Simon that Stringy, or anyone in the line, would get in. And he was even less confident that Peter would be in there already, having one of what Simon called his ‘poof beers’. But he couldn’t tell Simon that. Because when Simon got on a roll there was no telling him anything. Especially when it came to Peter. Their elder brother was either the devil or Jesus incarnate, and Simon decided which, no one else.
Peter had finished doing his Fine Arts degree at university in Melbourne. Simon never knew what his paintings were supposed to be. Just colours splashed every which way with stuff sticking out of them. So you could have knocked him over with a feather and tickled him while he was down when Peter sold a few. His brother lived the life. With that curvy Jayne and a big house. Only because she made good money. And she didn’t like Peter getting loose with his brothers, no way.
The other two couldn’t work it out: Peter would come to Westmore and hang around with them, even go out and have a beer, but Simon and Terry thought he never looked like he was having a good time. Still, Simon had invited him to the bucks’ night and, according to Simon, Peter had said he’d be there.
Ron’s theory was that Peter only ever came back to see if his brothers had changed. No luck there, he told his younger sons. But Terry and Simon told him, what would you know, old man, you only saw us on weekends when we were teenagers, if you saw us at all. Probably scared we’d be belt you back for all the times when we were kids. And Ron would lie and say I can’t remember that.
Terry hardly spoke to Peter. Even when they were little. Not because he didn’t like him, just because Peter was older. Always off doing his own thing. But Simon, no. Whenever Peter came to town, he was with him as much as possible, hanging shit on him, calling him a poof, saying he dyed his hair, having a go at him about his dick size. Peter ignored him, usually, or said, ‘That’s big coming from you, Simon. You can’t even tell the time.’ And he was right. Simon couldn’t do it unless it was on a digital watch. After Peter had shaken their hands and gone back to Melbourne, Simon would huddle in a pub corner with Terry and whoever else would listen, dripping on and on about how much he loved his brothers. Especially Peter.
‘He’s got
it all, that bastard.’
They were nearly at the front of the line. Almost in the face of the slinky woman in her black catsuit and her two beefy mates in black singlets. They both looked like Arnie Schwarzenegger after a workout. Simon told Terry and the boys to clam up. He grinned and stuck a finger over his mouth and whispered, Shhh. Funny thing was, it worked. If they shut their mouths long enough bouncers let them in, no matter how pissed they were.
In the foyer between the bar and the dance floor, it was doof doof doof no matter which way they turned. Simon didn’t know what to do first: go to the back bar and have a look for Peter, or head to the front bar and see what was going on with the surfie and his mates.
Terry had known since they’d had their steak and chips at the Cremorne Hotel that night the bucks’ party would end up in a fight. And he was worried because when Simon was skunk pissed he could only handle one bloke himself. If that. So it meant Terry would have to cover at least two. Then hope Simon’s stupid mate Brooksey was up for a tangle. And he could never tell. It depended on whether the boss had been on Brooksey’s case at work during the week. Then he’d fight a grizzly bear. Thommo was good for a bit of push and shove. He’d drag a few blokes out of the box-ons.
Terry moved from foot to foot. Edgy. His father had told him it was alright, it was a good thing to be nervous before a fight. If you were going to get in one. Because Bernie, Ron’s old man, had said that before the bombs hit in World War II, blokes shat themselves in the trenches.
Why did I ever tell them a thing about their grandfather? Probably trying to make them proud of me or something stupid like that.
Simon yelled at Thommo over the doof doof and pointed to the dance floor.
‘Go and see if Pete’s in there, will ya?’
We. Are. Family. Page 10