Kitty came every week. And so did Heather, though she never liked hospitals and she’d fidget and scratch as though it was she who had the bed sores. Debbie came once or twice, and even Charlotta. I never asked her why she didn’t warn me of the impending doom. There seemed no point challenging her beliefs - and she’d have probably said you can’t change the future anyway so why turn your life black ahead of time? She had answers for everything.
In hospital I did a lot of hallucinating. Some might have said I was turning into a true prophet, receiving psychic advice, messages from the other side. In truth, I was in pain, on drugs and troubled by visions of Garth the Neanderthal. And also of my father.
The parental nightmare happened so often that it got me thinking about my father in real life. I recalled how he used to polish his new Humber Super Snipe. He’d lean over the bonnet and make that thing shine like it had just come out of the showroom. Then he’d just stand and stare at it. From our window I would see the back view of him, his arms folded, feet apart and I’d watch him just planted there for what seemed like hours. Then he’d disappear, leaving the car shining on the driveway. It was parked there because he had a bed made up in the garage.
At The Prince of Wales I even hallucinated that he might one day walk right into the ward. What would he look like, what would he say? In my imagination I had him turning into a really decent man with tears of regret for not being there for us and saving our mother from the quagmire of her life. It was all fantasy and bore no relation to the truth. Of course, at that time I knew nothing of the depths to which the man had sunk.
About a month after the accident I awoke to see a strange suited figure leaning over my bed. I could tell he was no doctor.
‘Mr Smythe?’
‘Yes.’
‘David Gresham, Jack. May I call you Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very sorry to hear about your accident, Jack. Terrible thing; truly terrible.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’re in line for a big payout, young man. Do you think you’d like to be compensated?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s get on with it - I don’t beat around the bush, Jack. And I’ve got all the forms right here. If you want to retain me, I’ll see to it that you get quite a sub-stantial settlement.’
In a flash he had a wad of papers on the bed and a fat shiny pen hovering before me.
‘How much, do you think?’
‘Hard to say, but I’m going for somewhere around thirty grand. Think you could use thirty grand?’
In less time than it takes to blink I had half of it spent. I signed the forms; here, here, here, here and here.
It seems there were two eye witnesses to the accident, a woman and her partner, who heard the crash as they were passing. The man happened to be a solicitor, and he alerted David Gresham, a city lawyer. David arranged for photos to be taken of me in traction. And true to his word, he won me $38,000 in legal damages - $30,000 to me. In the early seventies it was enough to buy a house outright.
But once I was out of hospital it felt like no compensation at all - I was suddenly alone and bed-ridden in a little flat with nothing but a bank account. Lisa and Chris were eight and six and at school. All day I lay in bed wondering what everyone else was doing: Kitty, the kids, Heather, the rest of the world. Despite my resolve to do otherwise, I examined my palm, but of course I found nothing. I heard people on the street, planes going over, car doors slammed and horns. I heard our neighbours through the party wall and got to know their every movement, when they showered, went to the toilet, cleaned their teeth, cried, argued, watched televi-sion. The man’s pet hate was cleaning the barbecue, the woman’s was towels on the floor. The children’s names were Brett and Sarah. Sarah had learning difficulties and wore braces. Brett barracked for the Swans, played baseball and hated his English teacher. I never met any of them.
It took a world event to change things: the Apollo 11 moon landing. In my room I saw it on TV, two men stepping down in The Sea of Tranquility. I made detailed notes: Command module - Columbia. Landing module - Eagle. The Eagle has landed. Armstrong and Aldrin left behind a plaque for posterity. It referred to Men from the planet earth first setting foot and We came in peace. It struck me like a brick (not literally this time) that people generally believe we are not alone in the universe.
When it came time to leave the moon, one of the men - I think it was Aldrin - accidentally broke the switch that would fire the engines. It meant the astronauts could be stranded on the lunar surface and the mission would become an historic catastrophe.
They used an ordinary felt-tipped pen to activate the switch and it saved the day. And over the next week that felt-tipped pen kept reappearing in my thoughts. Surely it was a lesson: even the smallest and most insignificant thing can achieve remarkable results. I could do it, I decided … I could write a Theory of Everything.
I asked Heather to bring home books and magazines that had something to do with science or the universe. I dumped Advanced Palmistry, Chariots of the Gods and The Third Eye. If Heather brought nothing new, I reread what I already had, and over that long six months cooped up in the flat I began to think about how things work - of course based on Milo’s rejection of The Big Bang. I concocted many ideas about the universe, I thought of many possibilities for existence, I made folders of notes. But try as I might, in all that time, no coherent theory squeezed its way onto the page.
When I was well enough to go back to work I learned that Jeff Burgess had hung up his brushes for good. I got a job at Braithwaites, a big company employing twelve signwriters. I did a lot of the preparation and clean-up but it suited me fine while I was building strength in my legs. Meanwhile, Heather used some of the money to open a beauty salon; she had a lease on a shopfront in Davis Road. And Kitty made another upward career move.
‘I’m a PR manager now,’ she said, grinning. She was outside Braithwaites sitting astride her Harley.
‘PR?’
‘Public Relations. For the hospitality industry. They stuff things up and I help them put it back together.’
I smiled and thought of the two of us. Me in my paint-smeared overalls, Kitty in her tight jeans, high boots and red denim jacket - all labels.
‘So what’s your plan, Jack? For the future?’
A lot of things flashed through my mind but for some reason I said, ‘First I’m going to write a new theory of the universe. Then, who knows.’
Kitty looked at me askance.
‘Why, Jack, why are you doing it? What’s the point?’
‘The point?’
‘Yes; the point?’
‘The point is … the point is …’
I knew there was one but it was hiding right then.
‘Remember Milo?’ I said.
‘Milo?’
‘I think Milo was right. We need it - the world needs it. And it’ll make me famous! Don’t you want a famous brother?’ I grinned at her.
Kit’s clear blue eyes were trained on me.
‘Milo was just a drifter, Jack, that’s all.’
The words surprised me. I’d always thought we were agreed: the man meant something; his life meant something. Kitty stared a moment longer and then turned her bike and rode off towards her new career. I watched her go, thinking about her words. Suddenly, I realised I was carrying an empty paint drum under each arm. I took them back inside.
In truth, Heather and I didn’t make the decision to move back to Melbourne - it was made for us. Two things: I needed some more surgery - there were complications - and Heather was offered a partnership with a beauty clinic in Carlton: facials, exfoliations, waxing; top to toe - literally. By the end of the year we had our own house at 141 Harrow Street, West Brunswick - bought the place outright - and we had the kids enrolled at Brunswick North Primary.
Of course the thing to miss was Kitty. But she had no time to miss me, she was on her way to the top and that takes effort. But before the year was out
she’d quit PR and moved into the entertainment industry. She set up her own arts management agency and booked the likes of Split Enz, Rasterfield and the Gettysburg Philharmonic. She was always offering me free tickets to this show or that but I can’t remember ever taking her up on it.
I did not find work in signwriting. Instead I landed a job with a house painter. I grew a beard and bought a Labrador, and so we began a simple life in the suburbs - simple in the sense that Heather had her life and I had mine. In plain terms, she shopped and I fished; she headed for the city and I went bush. I wasn’t interested in fighting my way through Myer or David Jones and she wasn’t interested in pushing through the scrub to the banks of the Barwon in the hope of landing a trout. But neither of us complained, and each weekend, as we headed out in opposite directions, I assumed things would continue this way forever.
5
I have taken to wearing a peaked hat or ‘baseball cap’ as it was once known. It has Reward Your Curiosity stitched onto it, though I haven’t the faintest what it means. Found it in one of my boxes; I think it belonged to Chris or one of his colleagues. It helps to hide my bad haircut and differentiates me from the remainder of our enfeebled populace.
Sitting at this little table I am constantly reminded that I have three or four warts on the back of my hands.
Senile warts, I have been told. They look relatively young to me. At what age does a man suddenly sprout senile warts rather than ordinary ones? Two others have also appeared near my temple and one near my left cheekbone. I might have to see about some sort of treatment before they outweigh the rest of me.
Senile: Incident to or showing the characteristics of, old age. Oxford p. 762.
Around 1978 Heather and I ran out of conversations - or perhaps more truthfully we stopped talking. We just lived in the same house like two bats in the one cave, coming and going, almost completely oblivious to each other. I knew it couldn’t go on like that and one night on my way home from work I bought two tennis rackets and a box of second-hand balls.
Heather’s mouth dropped.
‘What the fucking hell are you going to do with those?’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We can practise on the court at the back of the church in Grey Street.’
‘Tell you what, Jack. You practise and get your skills up and maybe it’ll inspire me.’
And so I did - but not on the asphalt court. I walked around to the big brick wall of a factory on St Phillips Street and whacked the balls against it until it was too dark to see. It was the best my legs have ever felt and I dropped the medication completely. For a few weeks I practised nightly and only stopped when every ball I owned was lodged in the factory’s gutter 50 feet up.
I bought Heather a chess set for her birthday. She, in turn, gave it to our neighbour for minding the dog. I bought The Joy of Sex which had just come out, a fully illustrated manual for loving couples - the guy on the cover even looked like me. Heather loved the book and promptly took it to work. Slowly I began to see that no matter what anyone did, it would not repair our marriage; it would not stop Heather’s resolve regarding our future together. Yet it still took years for her to call it quits. I think she was waiting for a better reason - and finally one day, it came.
She got sick, very sick: ovarian cancer. After her initial treatment and recovery, she suddenly announced that she ‘wanted her life back’ and having it back meant shedding the one she already had. For a while she was out most nights, and at all hours strange men and women would suddenly appear in our lounge and I’d find them still staggering around the kitchen in the morning.
‘There isn’t room for all of us,’ Heather said one day, and it seemed I was to be the first casualty.
‘It’s not necessary, Heather. Chris and I can share a room. Then I can look after you.’
‘I don’t want you to look after me - that’s the whole point; I don’t need looking after; I want to be seen as a vital woman; I want to be loved.’
‘I love you, Heather.’
‘Well that’s too bad, Jack. It’s not enough.’
And so I packed my bags. I left Heather to address her mortality and moved into a tidy room at the Ceswick Hotel.
Chris rang again last night. Very pleased to learn that he’s feeling ‘centred’, as he calls it. He has been through so much and not the least was his mother’s long illness. He was sixteen when it happened and Lisa was eighteen. She seemed to handle it - she wasn’t home much anyway - but Chris decided that all of us had suddenly abandoned him. He was probably right.
Before my bed went cold a new bloke moved in with Heather, a man I’d never met, and no doubt The Joy of Sex finally had its practical application. Unfortunately the two must have had no more than a year of it, working through the chapters, before Heather got sick for the second time. Her new bloke took off immediately, shot out of there faster than a change in the price of petrol.
And that’s when Heather realised that Chris was the most important thing to her which, amazingly, he cheer-fully accepted. Lisa by then was already pregnant, yet she had no intention of marrying her man. ‘That’s not important these days,’ she told me. ‘Why would I want to end up with a nightmare like the one you and Mum created?’ She had a point.
It was soon after that I suddenly had the urge to visit my own mother. I’d turned forty, a horrible age for a man, maybe for a woman as well. It’s the halfway stop, on the way to eighty and a place like this. For a short while, until you turn forty-one, it feels like you’ve reached some peak and now you’re coming down the other side - not a crisis as such, just a sudden realisation that you’re not young anymore, never will be. I spent my fortieth in my room at the Ceswick. I cannot remember where Chris and Lisa were. I tried to ring Kitty on the payphone but it just rang out. When the coins fell out I took them to the bar and bought a stubby of Fosters, went upstairs and drank it sitting on the bed. I realised then that I was perfectly happy with my own company.
But I started thinking about my mother. In all the time Kitty and I were gone, I hadn’t once wanted to visit her. Kitty even asked me once if I thought I’d ever go back. ‘No,’ I said, almost immediately, ‘no chance’. I had no need of it. But after the split with Heather a space seemed to open which became occupied with thoughts of the woman who gave birth to me. She wasn’t dead, I knew that much. But what did she look like? I tried to imagine her in the flat. Was she still on the mattress? Did she still have her faculties, her health? Not that I really cared. It sounds terrible, I know, but for the life of me I had no more feeling for her than the bloke who sweeps up the butts outside this window - I just wanted to see what she was like, through adult eyes.
I caught a cab to the end of our old street in West Preston and got out there. I wanted to walk the length of it, I wanted to think about what I might say, but also to see the street itself, to see what I might remember of it - it was twenty-three years since I had last walked along there. There was a block of flats I’d never seen, just a concrete box with a lid on it, green glass in the windows, towels hanging off the balconies, letterboxes piled up. It was built on what used to be a weed infested block, our shortcut to the track beside the stormwater which led to our school in Coburg.
I did not recognise Aris the Greek’s old house. It looked new again. When we were there, a six-foot-high chicken-wire fence enclosed the front yard and behind it tomatoes on stakes grew higher than our heads. It was well known that Aris the Greek refused to pay water rates. He had a big water tank at the back of the house - illegal in those days - and he claimed it supplied all his needs and kept his vegetables growing all around the yard. His letterbox was forever stuffed with junkmail so the postie used to put his letters in the fork of his lemon tree. There was no lemon tree now.
I walked on and two boys about the age I used to be came walking past, swearing like troopers - f this and f that. They didn’t notice me. Their parents would have been babies when we were there, when Kitty and I, fifteen and sixteen, turned our backs on th
at tired old street and marched towards a different life.
Our flat hadn’t changed at all. Same colour, same green-and-white checked tilt-a-door on the garage, same narrow strip of lawn crowded with pink and blue hydrangeas. How could they still be there twenty-three years on? I tapped on the flywire door. For a moment I hoped she wouldn’t be there - it meant I could leave again, assured that at least I’d tried to make contact. Then the glass door opened and through the flywire I could see the outline of a stooped figure.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘It’s me, Mum, Jack. I’ve come to visit you.’
For a moment she stood quite still and then she un-clipped the flywire door. She turned and walked down the passage. There was a distinctive smell. Nothing unusual, just a general sense of oldness: something from a bygone era but nothing like we have in this place - a cocktail of deodorisers. It was a smell that was somehow unsettling, infused with sadness and melancholia.
I was surprised to see that the lounge actually looked like one, no double-bed jammed in, no pine chest spilling clothes, no coat-stand invisible under a mountain of garments. We went into the kitchen and it looked like a kitchen, clean and tidy. From the outside the flat looked the same but inside it was a completely different place.
‘Want a cup of tea?’ She went to the stove and put the kettle on. I had forgotten how tiny she was - and thin, like I am now. And her hair used to be permed-out and bottle blonde. Now it was short and grey. How come I still have mostly dark brown hair? A mystery. I wondered if she was still drinking. There were three wine casks lined up on the fridge.
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