Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t been talking to your mother?’

  ‘I take it she’s a bit more judgemental than you?’ I said.

  ‘She’s heard about a husband who’s got no head for drink and tends to peg out in the spare bedroom and a wife who takes the opportunity for a bit of slap and tickle. Last night Quinn was the beneficiary but if it wasn’t for the presence of forewarned and therefore eagle-eyed wives, I’m sure Doreen would’ve been spoilt for choice.’

  ‘How spoilt?’

  This was new territory for us. We’d never really discussed the facts of life, to use his generation’s euphemism. When I was twelve he took me to a fathers and sons night at the local church hall to watch a film apparently produced by Ministry of Agriculture veterinarians in the days before Technicolor. Apart from clearing up a few murky anatomical issues, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

  Questions were encouraged but not forthcoming. On the way home my father repeated the invitation. I gave him the answer he craved and we hadn’t as much as skirted around the whole fraught subject since.

  And now here I was, nineteen years old and thinking myself worldly on the basis of having watched a few French new-wave films and persuaded a few girls that sexual licence was the in thing, grilling this fastidious and reticent man on a subject he probably avoided with his closest friends.

  ‘Well, I can only speak for myself.’

  ‘So you and Mum are the exceptions?’

  He took his time refilling his teacup. ‘You know, I don’t hugely mind answering these questions as long as you answer a couple of mine first. Do you have any reason to think otherwise?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what’s prompted all this?’

  ‘Last night’s carry-on. As Felicity pointed out, their kids couldn’t imagine them behaving like that.’

  ‘Doreen and her husband don’t have children,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that’s part of the problem.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Tell me, Max, how do you see yourself at my age?’

  That was easy. ‘As a writer, living in Europe, in a relationship but not necessarily married.’

  ‘Children?’

  I shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Probably not. Not really my cup of tea, domesticity.’

  ‘And you think you’ll be completely fulfilled by writing?’

  ‘That’s how it works, Dad.’

  ‘Well, it sounds a little selfish but the object of the exercise is happiness and fulfilment and making a contribution, so if writing books does all that, good for you. But you’d be one of the lucky ones. For most people, even those with a real sense of vocation, their work eventually becomes the thing they do because they have to, in order to have the wherewithal to live in a modicum of comfort. If your job becomes a grind and a bore and your relationship doesn’t stand the test of time and you have no focus for your finer feelings — assuming you have any — then where does that leave you? Apart from very much looking forward to the weekend?’

  ‘What if your children turn out to be shitheads? Wouldn’t that make it worse?’

  He smiled thinly. ‘Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Anyway, to answer your question and close this discussion, your mother and I get along quite well enough to make me immune to Doreen’s charms, evident and abundant though they are.’

  ‘Felicity reckons Mum’s got a bit of a thing about Doreen.’

  ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you? I suppose I should be flattered, but on the other hand there’s an unmistakable implication that I’m not telling the truth.’

  ‘I don’t think that for one minute. I’m just wondering why Mum’s got this bee in her bonnet about Doreen. I mean, if it’s no skin off her nose …’

  ‘It doesn’t occur to you that she might disapprove of Doreen’s behaviour on moral grounds? Your mother’s a little more conservative in these matters than she likes to let on. It might also have something to do with the fact that we had one of our very occasional rows over this Dor the Whore business.’

  ‘Let she who’s without sin cast the first stone?’

  ‘Really, Max, I hope for your sake this cynicism is either a pose or a passing phase. Cynicism is the enemy of art, you know.’

  ‘That’s debatable.’

  ‘Everything’s debatable as far as your generation’s concerned. That’s because you don’t believe in anything.’

  ‘What are you talking about? We believe in lots of things.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got lots of slogans; I’m not sure that’s quite the same thing.’

  Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have let him get away with that but I suspected he was trying to change the subject. ‘One thing at a time, eh? You were saying?’

  ‘Such single-mindedness,’ he said. ‘A pity it’s not in a worthier cause. I objected because I happen to believe one should know all the facts before one starts pinning nasty labels on people. I don’t know all the facts but I’ve picked up enough to know it’s not black and white.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is, you’re very tolerant for a man whose study was commandeered for a sly root.’

  ‘You’re jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘Look who’s talking. Who sent me down here last night to get rid of the minge odour?’

  ‘You surprise me, Max; I would’ve thought a young blade like you was intimately acquainted with the workings of the female nether regions.’ He produced another quizzical smile. ‘You look baffled. Surely you’re aware that female sexual arousal and its physical manifestations can occur without intercourse taking place — or indeed without the minge coming into play, as it were. I used the term “slap and tickle” and I used it advisedly. As I understand it, Doreen goes so far and no further.’ He paused to savour having bested me at my own game. ‘The eternal mystery of women — now there’s a subject for a young writer to get his teeth into.’

  eleven

  I’m studying the expressions in a family photo taken at my father’s wake. What’s the appropriate expression for a wake? After all, the solemnities marking his death and our loss are out of the way. This shindig is to ‘celebrate’ the dear departed’s life, to swap fond memories with that happy band who also knew and loved him and to demonstrate through our wit, conviviality and, yes, bravery that we’re better people for having followed, in our different ways, his inspiring example. There will always be time to cry: all the time in the world. Right now, though, it’s time to put our best foot forward and eat, drink and be merry — because he would have wanted it that way.

  Can we be sure of that? Was there an empty, lucid afternoon when he realised his time had come?

  This old body’s like a besieged city, out of arrows and boiling oil and the will to resist. The enemy’s at the gates, battering away. Hit something hard enough, often enough, it’s going to give. And then? Well, this enemy’s different from the ones we’ve tangled with in the past; this enemy gives no quarter. It will put me to the sword and to the torch and that will be that.

  And, having got that far, did he give any thought to the hymns he’d like sung at his funeral or the budget for the wake? Was there any solace in visualising family and friends enjoying this event at which his non-appearance would be the major talking point? I doubt it somehow. My father wasn’t exactly a party animal and most of the guests — the retired schoolmasters and bridge-playing pensioners and their fragile or all-too-robust wives — looked all partied out.

  My mother’s putting on a brave face but the camera always has that effect on her. My eyes are hidden behind dark glasses secret-service style and there’s a moody cast to my mouth. Felicity, who now prefers to be called ‘Flick’, the dismal pet name conferred by her dismal husband, has a half-hearted, artificial smile, but she’s in sales and marketing so that might be her default expression. Husband Murray — he insists on ‘Muz’ or ‘Muzza’ but I’m a refusenik — looks aggrieved, as if the photographer didn’t give him time to fix his hair.
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br />   The only person putting on a funeral face is, paradoxically, the professional: the presiding cleric. You’d think he’d be used to it. He must spend half his working life in death’s shadow, visiting old folks’ homes and keeping sickbed vigils. He probably does one of these gigs a week. Professionals are meant to be immune to stuff that would make the rest of us puke or faint or go to pieces. Surgeons can banter as they fossick among glistening, pulsing innards; cops can debate All Black selection oblivious to the eviscerated corpse nailed to the floor; paramedics can swap holiday plans while cutting teenage joy-riders out of the concertinaed wreckage of a stolen car. It’s not that they don’t care, but experience has taught them that shit happens and will continue to happen whether they care or not. Experience has also taught them that the only things worth a damn they can give those poor bastards sliced and sandwiched in the sheet metal are drugs and cool professionalism. Pity is neither here nor there.

  But even though he’s an old pro, a veteran of the bereavement caper, Reverend Bert Logan looks the saddest of all.

  I took a bottle of red wine down to the study. The stacks of essays and exercise books had gone and a layer of dust had settled; otherwise it was just as I remembered. There were no more books in the bookshelves because all my father’s favourite writers were long dead and he wasn’t interested in extending his range. He believed that being widely read was overrated. Which was better, he would ask: to have read thousands of books once or a few hundred several times? You didn’t buy a painting to look at it once. If it was any good it revealed itself, layer by layer, over time. Books were the same: the first read was just to find out what happens, which was often the least important aspect.

  I was sitting in the swivel chair thinking that one more glass of wine would probably have me in tears when there was a knock on the partly opened door.

  ‘Pardon the intrusion,’ said Reverend Logan, ‘but I’ve got to be on my way.’

  I stood up. ‘Oh, right. Well, look, thanks for everything. Mum’s been telling me you were a very good friend to Dad towards the end there.’

  Logan was about sixty, a fatty and a baldy. He’d been a bit hangdog since the service but that seemed to cheer him up. ‘Nice of her to say so,’ he said, cheeks dimpling, ‘but it went both ways — Jerry was a very good friend to me. He was terribly proud of you, you know; recommended your books to everyone he came across. Wasted on me, I’m afraid. I’m not a fiction man — history and biography are more my style.’

  I’d heard this statement before (despite the wording — ‘I’m afraid’ — it’s not an admission, let alone an apology) and, as always, it bugged me. Why not keep quiet about it? Why advertise the fact that you’re a philistine?

  ‘Well,’ I said starchily, ‘as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said complacently. (And, yes, I admit it, I find complacency all the more unattractive in a fatso.) ‘I suppose that just makes your job more difficult: you spend all that time writing something without knowing whether it’s what the public’s after or not.’

  ‘I don’t write for the mass market so I don’t have that problem.’

  ‘Oh? I seem to remember your father saying you were writing a whodunit. I must’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

  This bloated God-botherer was getting on my nerves but I held my tongue. Telling him to piss off before my father’s ashes were cold was definitely not what the dear departed would have wanted. Besides, Logan had just poked his nose in to say goodbye, hadn’t he?

  Instead I said, ‘Well, whodunit’s a bit of a misnomer. Okay, it’s a mystery on one level but just because a writer employs some elements of genre, that doesn’t mean the novel has to conform to all its conventions and formulae or should automatically be classified as genre.’ He clearly had no idea what I was talking about. ‘I mean, just because there’s a murder and a narrative culminating in the identification of the murderer, that doesn’t necessarily make it an escapist yarn. There are plenty of murders in Shakespeare, for instance.’

  ‘Well, you’re the expert,’ he said with a smug half-smile; perhaps he’d picked up the tremor of desperation in the Shakespeare reference. ‘As I say, I stick to the stuff I enjoy — rather like your father did.’

  This bogus comparison also grated but I didn’t respond, in the hope that my sullen silence would encourage Reverend Lard to shove off as promised. But he hovered in the doorway. Nothing, it seemed, would be left unsaid.

  ‘Yes, Jerry was very pleased that you’d done what you set out to do. And a bit concerned, it would be fair to say.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I think he sometimes got the feeling that being a writer perhaps wasn’t quite as fulfilling as you’d expected it to be.’

  ‘What gave him that idea?’

  ‘Seeing you and talking to you. And reading your books, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah? The last couple of times we saw each other I got the strong impression he wasn’t taking a hell of a lot in.’

  Logan decided he had some time up his sleeve after all. He lowered himself into the old armchair in the corner where my father used to replay famous chess matches or pursue his futile quest for an opening gambit that would send the chess world into a tizzy.

  ‘Your father,’ he said with stagy emphasis, ‘was less … detached from reality than you — and others — seem to think.’

  ‘Maybe you should enlarge on that.’

  ‘It wasn’t depression that killed him so much as general wear and tear. What got him down, in the main, was not being very well. Add the fact that being chronically below par is a tiring business and it’s hardly surprising he wasn’t always a box of birds. If you don’t see much of someone and those odd occasions coincide with him being down in the dumps, it’s easy to assume he’s like that all the time. But he wasn’t. And even when he wasn’t particularly responsive, the brain was still working.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘It was all filed away up here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He told me. As you know, I saw quite a lot of him.’

  ‘Is it my imagination or do I detect a hint of reproach?’

  ‘You were overseas,’ said Logan. ‘You had your own life to lead. Your father understood that. As for me, well, it’s not my place to judge.’

  I’d had enough of this sanctimonious puffball, who’d obviously been itching to lay a guilt trip on me from the moment my father was pronounced dead. ‘You could’ve fooled me.’

  That pinged off the armour-plating of his self-righteousness. ‘Jerry accepted that he’d reaped what he’d sowed. If he didn’t blame you, why should I?’

  ‘Reverend, you’ve obviously got something you want to say so why don’t you just get on with it?’ I had an unnerving role-reversal flashback to the Doreen joust, my father trying to hustle it to a conclusion and me wanting to spin it out. ‘As you can imagine, it’s been a pretty draining few days. I came down here to have a few minutes to myself to remember Dad as he was to me. Not to you, or the others up there or anyone else. But I can’t do that because I’m stuck in this conversation which, frankly, I’m having trouble seeing the point of.’

  Logan rose with much heaving and huffing, like a lorry tackling a steep hill. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you; that certainly wasn’t the intention. All I really wanted to say — because your father fretted that perhaps he hadn’t communicated this as well or as often as he should’ve — was that he loved you and was proud of you.’ He paused. That was the good news. ‘I’ve wrestled with this a good deal and come to the conclusion that I owe it to him to also convey that he worried about you.’ He paused again. ‘He saw a lot of himself in you.’

  I took my time digesting this. Logan held my smouldering gaze. ‘Come on, Reverend, spit it out.’

  ‘He thought you shared certain traits and characteristics which, in his case, contributed to his state of mind. He felt that he’d let things creep up on him so that by the time he realised he had a proble
m, it was too late. Hopefully in your case, forewarned is forearmed.’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  He shook his head. ‘I think the process of thinking it through and working it out for yourself is really the key. It’s a matter of self-knowledge and having the will to act on it. Goodbye, Max, and good luck.’

  ‘So apart from being unwell,’ I said when he was halfway out the door, ‘what else made him unhappy?’

  Logan turned and gave me a long, expressionless look. ‘I can’t reveal what was said to me in confidence.’

  ‘He’s dead, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘And the world’s a lesser place.’

  He left me to my own devices, which boiled down to half a bottle of Hawke’s Bay cabernet merlot. I was right: it only took one more glass.

  Logan was the last straw. I’d endured my mother emoting like some soap opera matriarch hell-bent on testing the limits of her dramatic range. Lamentation (‘How will I get by without him?’) gave way to martyred resentment (‘It hasn’t been easy, you know. I could tell you things that would make your hair stand on end’). Hard on the heels of tender selflessness — ‘He’s at peace now’ — would come a self-pitying riff on the unalloyed bleakness of widowhood in a coupled-up world.

  Hysteria was never far from the quavering surface of these monologues. One minute she could be listing — and not without a faint buzz of anticipation — potential or even actual admirers (apparently a few old dogs had sniffed around during my father’s incarcerations); the next she’d be vapouring at the prospect of being paired off with every decrepit bore who’d managed to outlive his wife.

  And there was guilt, enough for all the family. She felt guilty about collaborating in my father’s solitariness because it suited her or she couldn’t be bothered nagging him back into circulation. She felt guilty about not doing more to alleviate his dark moods and her lack of resistance when they drove him to commit himself. She felt guilty about not looking forward to visiting him and then arriving late and leaving early when she did.