The Pause

by John Larkin

  There’s a part of me that understands he’s starting to feel the sand that remains in his hourglass running out at an alarming rate and he wants to recapture what’s left of his rapidly declining youth. So I kind of get it. But seriously, his midlife crisis is so clichéd he should be arrested for showing such a cavalier regard for stereotype. Still, at least he’s ditched the beige pants and Hawaiian shirts for the sort of smouldering black-turtleneck look that was generally the domain of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as they strolled along the banks of the Seine at dusk discussing existentialism, long cigars and Sartre’s belief that he was being followed by crayfish.

  Since their marriage went down the gurgler, I’m happy to spend time with Dad (even if we still haven’t been fishing), but I steadfastly refuse to waste one more second in the company of Cindy (Mindy, Bindy, or whatever the stupid-y she claims to be) – someone who, when she heard that Mum was a barrister, thought she worked in a cafe.

  ‘So your mind’s made up?’ asks Mum.

  ‘It’s too good an opportunity to pass up,’ replies Dad.

  ‘What about the kids?’

  ‘Well, Katie’s already looking forward to spending the holidays with us.’

  ‘You have a son, too.’

  ‘Really, Gabriella?’ replies Dad, applying the sarcasm with a high pressure hose. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’ Dad turns to me. ‘You’re welcome to come, too. You know that, Dec.’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you want to stay for lunch?’ says Mum, changing the subject and saving me because, seriously, I do not want to spend my uni holidays having Mindy play step-mum, especially when she’s closer to my age than she is to Dad’s.

  ‘I can’t,’ says Dad. ‘I have to go home and pack. And besides, Mindy’s waiting.’

  ‘You left her in the car?’ says Mum. ‘I hope you wound one of the windows down, or she’ll overheat and run around the back seat.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ says Dad with possibly the worst comeback in history. ‘It’s a convertible.’ Like that’s the important bit.

  ‘Seriously. Bring her up.’ Mum turns on the coffee machine. ‘We could always use a laugh.’

  ‘Okay, I’m leaving now,’ says Dad, ‘if you’re going to be mean.’

  ‘Mean?’ snorts Mum. ‘How old are you, five?’

  ‘It’s really unbecoming, Gabriella. You know Mindy has an economics degree, and yet just because she’s blonde … If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.’

  ‘Well, that’s me struck mute. No, seriously,’ continues Mum, whose muteness lasts about two seconds. ‘Bring her up. Kate probably has some old books. She could always do some colouring in while she waits for your hair to set.’

  I try not to snort but fail.

  ‘If you went bald,’ says Dad, ‘what would you do?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do,’ says Mum. ‘I wouldn’t stick a dead porcupine on my head and expect to be taken seriously.’

  ‘Bye, Katie Bear.’ Dad gives Kate a hug and marches off in a huff.

  Mum looks at me and nods towards the door suggesting that I should go after him.

  When I get outside, Dad is waiting by the elevator.

  ‘Have a good trip, Dad. I hope things work out.’

  ‘You seriously mean that?’

  I nod. ‘Yeah. With work, anyway.’

  ‘But not with …’

  ‘Cindy Doll?’

  ‘Mindy.’

  ‘Dad, it’s embarrassing. She’s young enough to be your daughter.’

  ‘She’s twenty-nine.’

  ‘Is that her age or IQ?’

  ‘I’m forty-six, Declan. You do the maths.’

  ‘Dad. She’ll want to go clubbing. And you dance like a praying mantis caught in a spider web.’

  We look at each other not quite knowing what to say. We’ve never quite known what to say.

  I have to admit, I’ve been grossly unfair on Dad with his midlife crisis list. Firstly, it was Mum who ended their marriage, not him, and not only does Mindy have an economics degree, she also has an MBA. Second, while they do have a red convertible, it’s actually Mindy’s not Dad’s. He still drives around in his clapped-out Triumph that belongs in a museum not a garage. And third, while he did get a Ken-doll hair transplant, it was a birthday gift from Mindy so he didn’t really have a whole lot of choice.

  ‘I know you blame me,’ says Dad, completely out of left field. ‘With Aunt Mary and everything. I didn’t know how damaged she was.’

  I hesitate. We’ve never had this conversation. The closest we’ve been to intimacy throughout the whole ordeal with Aunt Mary was his writing, ‘Get well soon, son’ on my cast. ‘I tried to tell you. Both of you.’

  ‘She left you in the car while she leapt off the cliff. I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like. How terrifying it was. The not knowing what was going on.’

  ‘That’s not exactly what happened.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I take a deep breath. It’s time he knew. ‘She tried to take me with her. That was her plan.’

  ‘How could you possibly know her plan? You were six years old.’

  ‘I was there, Dad. I stood on the edge of the cliff with her. She dragged me over the fence and she was squeezing my hand while she was summoning up the courage to jump.’

  Dad is practically speechless. ‘But why would she want to …’

  ‘To cover up what happened. With my arm.’

  ‘You tripped over, taking out the rubbish. That’s what your mother …’

  I shake my head. ‘She clubbed me with a rolling pin.’

  Dad is gobsmacked but it’s right he knows. Finally.

  ‘This guy – he just came out of nowhere. He intervened. Talked her round. Got her to let me go.’ I can still feel her squeezing my hand sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep.

  Dad looks stunned, as if he’s rethinking his whole life. ‘Why have you been lying to me all these years? Mum said you were in the car.’

  ‘That’s what she wanted you to believe. She …’

  ‘Protected me.’

  I nod.

  ‘I didn’t even understand it myself at the time. That night was just a blur. It was all jumbled up.’ I do remember the police taking me to the station, letting me turn on the siren. And I remember Mum and Dad picking me up from there – I must have known our home number.

  ‘It was only when I thought about it later, when I started having nightmares, that I remembered everything. I woke up screaming one night. Mum came in and rubbed my back and asked me what I’d been dreaming about. When I told her … she said to me she thought it might be best if you didn’t know.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She didn’t want you blaming yourself. Said that if you didn’t have any fond memories of Aunt Mary, then no one would. It wasn’t a conspiracy, Dad. It’s just how it was.’

  ‘But it’s just led to a lifetime of resentment. From you. From your mum.’

  ‘It’s not your fault Mary was out of her friggin’ mind.’

  ‘But you used to tell us that she hit you.’

  I start to choke up because I can see that Dad’s eyes are watering. I swallow the pain that Dad is feeling. I see now that it was wrong of Mum to keep this from him. Although I think she did it with the best intentions, it created a sense of us versus him and he never knew how to fix it, because he never knew why it had come about. I feel for Dad right now, I truly do. None of this is his fault. Mum instigated the marriage breakup, my suicide attempt was due to his aunt, not him. All he’s trying to do is stitch his life back together and I haven’t exactly been there for him.

  ‘That’s right. I used to tell you. Both of you. And I don’t resent Mum.’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘I don’t resent you, Dad. Never have.’

  ‘But you’re always laughing at me. Poking fun.’

  ‘That’s because you used to do – and still do do – some pretty dumb stuf
f, and that’s how families work. We take the piss out of each other.’

  ‘I’m sorry I let you down, Declan.’ A single tear runs down Dad’s cheek. He doesn’t try to hide it.

  ‘You didn’t let me down, Dad. I just work better with Mum, like you do with Kate. It’s just one of those things. It’s no one’s fault.’

  We stare at each other, not quite knowing what to say or where to go from here. Dad’s good with accounts, not words.

  I break the silence. ‘I reckon we’re going to work better as adults.’

  Dad wipes his eyes and holds out his hand. ‘Deal.’

  I look at his proffered hand. I don’t want to leave him hanging, but still. ‘What is this?’ I say. ‘The nineteen-forties? Come here.’

  I pull Dad to me and hug him. Really hug him. It’s the first time we’ve hugged in as long as I remember. His body wracks with sobs. I leave my tears on his shoulder. But even though we’re father and son and there’s so much left to say, we still can’t quite carry off the hug and after a moment it descends into one of those back-patting deals.

  We pull apart and look at each other.

  ‘If you come to New York, I’ll buy you a beer.’

  ‘When I come to New York, you’ll buy me a slab. And you’ll tell me how you managed to get a hot chick like Bindy.’

  ‘Mindy.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  The lift door dings open and Dad steps in.

  ‘See you, Dec.’

  ‘Later, Dad.’

  The doors start to close.

  ‘And don’t forget,’ I shout after him, ‘you still owe me that fishing trip.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ he yells through the door.

  ‘And shave your head,’ I call back.

  From the depths of the elevator shaft comes a distant, ‘Bite me.’

  We celebrate our first full night in our new home with Thai takeaway and a bottle of Moët. Even Kate is allowed a small glass, which she pronounces disgusting and, despite Mum’s yelp, tips down the sink and replaces with some lime cordial. Philistine.

  We’ve swapped the burbs for the inner city so it’s closer to Mum’s work and to Sydney Uni for me. Kate has a forty-five-minute train ride to school and back each day but she’s okay with it and she and Mum are talking about her spending six months here and then six months at school in New York, which Kate finds as exciting as Mindy (Cindy, Bindy, Windy) won’t.

  ‘So tell us about Kim,’ says Mum out of the blue.

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘She called your mobile a couple of times while you were lugging boxes up from the garage; I thought I should get it for you. She sounds nice. And she’s certainly keen. You meet at uni?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s studying commerce/law. Though she wants to be a humanitarian lawyer.’

  ‘Good for her. So you and Lisa …?’

  ‘We email sometimes. But …’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘We’re in different hemispheres, Mum. How’s that supposed to work? Besides. She’s seeing someone. They met through her church. He’s a bit older than her. Works in finance. Probably a total douche.’

  Lisa and I were good together. We’d both been abused – she more so than me – and we helped each other heal. But things pass. We learn. We grow. We move on. We just have to avoid killing ourselves over pain that will pass. Though I do miss her. I miss her smile. I miss her subtle sense of humour, too. I miss her.

  ‘She’ll be right with Susanne looking out for her.’

  I’m not being entirely truthful with Mum about Lisa. Yes, she is seeing someone, as I am. But we still email and text each other about eight or nine times a day. With Maaaate enrolled at some private college in Perth studying business, and Chris backpacking around Europe with his ‘friend’, and despite my growing relationship with Kim, Lisa has long since become my best friend. I miss my best friend. And I miss what might have been.

  A phone call at four in the morning never brings good news. When that phone call occurs at four o’clock on the morning of your wedding day, it’s only ever going to bring disaster. And I’m not about to be disappointed. Actually, I am going to be more than disappointed with both the news it brings and the subsequent ramifications.

  Kim stirs in her sleep but my ringtone is soft enough not to wake her. I’m happy to let this call go through to the keeper. It’ll probably just be Chris or Maaaate still whining about the fact that I didn’t want to kick on with their bucks party/pub crawl last night, preferring instead to bail around midnight for home and bed with Kim.

  ‘It’s bad luck to sleep with the bride the night before the wedding,’ said Chris as he saw me into a taxi at the end of the night.

  ‘It used to be bad luck just to see the bride the night before her wedding,’ offered Maaaate, as he stood on the side of the road, tucking into an ill-advised service-station kebab. ‘What’s next? Bad luck to sleep with the bride and the bridesmaids the night before her wedding?’

  I wound down the window. ‘Maaaate. That’s my fiancée and her friends you’re talking about.’

  Maaaate buried his face into his road-kill kebab and then came up for air. ‘No it’s not. I’m not referring to Kimberly; I’m just talking hyper … hoperthetical-l-ly … hi-i-iperthotical-l–’

  ‘Pathetically?’ suggested Chris.

  ‘I’m out of here,’ I said. ‘Come round early tomorrow for breakfast. I’ll make eggs benedict with smoked salmon and industrial-strength coffee, then we’re going to go for a morning surf and do blokey stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Chris. ‘Play darts and dress up as lumberjacks?’

  ‘If that works for you,’ I replied.

  And so I ditched them on the side of the road with Chris, my best man, looking forlorn, and Maaaate staring into his kebab, perhaps wondering if its contents were in fact fit for human consumption.

  Now it’s the morning of my wedding. My phone rings again, but this time Kim does stir. ‘Declan. Your phone keeps ringing.’

  ‘Sorry, babe. I’ve been trying to ignore it.’

  ‘You’d better answer it,’ she says. ‘It might be important.’

  ‘Maaaate’s probably eaten an entire Krispy Kreme franchise and is now in the emergency liposuction ward.’

  Kim doesn’t laugh at my joke. Kim thinks Maaaate (or ‘Simon’, as she insists on calling him, even though he has asked her not to) is deeply sad, which is why he eats so much. When in actual fact Maaaate’s one of the happiest people you could ever meet and he eats so much not because he’s deeply sad but because he’s deeply fat and absolutely loves food just about as much as he loathes exercise, which is why he opted out of the corporate world and is now a trainee chef.

  I pick up my mobile but I don’t have my glasses on so I can’t make out who it is. ‘Just a sec.’ I take the phone out to the kitchen and sit at the breakfast bar, not wanting to disturb Kim.

  ‘Hello.’

  I was right. When your phone rings at four in the morning, it brings nothing but bad news. The worst kind, in fact.

  After I hang up, I walk back into the bedroom and stare at Kim’s silhouette, knowing that our lives are about to change. Mine already has. I want to let her sleep a while longer, to put it off, but I can see that she’s aware of my presence.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘There’s been an accident.’

  Kim sits up in bed. ‘Oh, my God. Who?’

  ‘Lisa.’

  ‘What happened?’

  I sit down on the bed. Kim crawls over and hugs me.

  ‘Susanne, her mum, was pretty vague. She was hit by a car.’

  ‘Is she …?’

  I shake my head. ‘She’s in a coma. It doesn’t look good, though.’

  Kim pulls away and stares at me. ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’

  Guilty as charged. ‘I have to. I need to. Sorry.’

  Kim nods. ‘You should. She is your best friend, after all.’

  I don’t think Kim means
it as a criticism, but I still feel a slight stab to the heart. I take my travel bag out of the wardrobe and start throwing in a few things.

  ‘Thanks for being so understanding. Not everyone would.’ Who am I kidding? ‘No one would.’

  ‘We can get married any day,’ she says. ‘I mean, let’s face it, we’ve been living together for two years already. Today is – was – just the official ceremony.’ Luckily we opted for a small, civil service in a park with only a few guests and a small party at a restaurant afterwards. Still, I feel guilty that Kim will have to do all the ringing around to reorganise things.

  I take my passport from the bedside drawer.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ says Kim.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How many people would you drop everything – including your wedding – for, to fly halfway across the world to be with?’

  ‘Only one,’ I reply, without even thinking. ‘Just Lisa.’ As soon as it’s out there I realise that I can’t take it back. I could seriously kick myself. ‘And you, of course.’ But no matter how nonchalantly I put it, the ship has sailed. I realise now that the ‘of course’ made it worse. Kim doesn’t look shocked or even surprised. In fact, she looks like she’s known this for some time.

  ‘Declan. I need to be with someone who would drop everything to be with me. I can’t be anyone’s “and”.’

  I sit down next to Kim and rub her back. ‘It was just a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It’s when we don’t plan what we’re going to say that we’re at our most honest and our most vulnerable.’

  I try to pull her to me but she tenses up. ‘Why are you so suspicious, anyway? She’s married.’

  ‘I can’t be your consolation prize, Declan. I’d be your wife but Lisa would still be your best friend. I need to be both.’

  ‘You are. You will be,’ I say, but I don’t sound too convincing. I change tune, Susanne’s words hitting me again. ‘Let’s not do this now,’ I whisper. ‘Lisa’s dying.’

  I give her a hug and pick up my bag. She doesn’t say anything. ‘Thanks for understanding.’

  I walk towards the door.

  ‘Declan.’