by Nick Earls
I take the box into the lounge room and I put on the radio.
Below the knitting are two Entertainment Centre programmes that I think used to sit on the bottom shelf of the phone stand. Torville and Dean, whose show, she told me, was the best thing she’d seen for at least thirty years, and the World Junior Snooker Championship, from which she was ejected for giving loud and unsolicited advice. She’d been a fan of snooker since at least the days of ‘Pot Black’, but in snooker, as in anything else, she wouldn’t stand for rubbish. So when my mother took her to the World Junior titles for her birthday, she treated it the way she treated snooker on TV. She shouted at it, mainly detailed advice about shot selection. Go for the blue. Why isn’t he going for the blue? Until the officials spoke to my mother and explained that it would really have to stop. It didn’t, and by the middle of the next frame they were out, my grandmother complaining that it didn’t look anywhere near over to her.
Beneath these is an assortment of pens and notepads and the several close-typed sheets of airmail paper of her Christmas card list. She sent only the overseas cards last year, early and surface mail, with calendars. But still some cards arrived from people closer to home who didn’t know she’d died. My mother told me the Christmas card list must be somewhere, and when she found it she’d write to the people and tell them.
The Christmas before last, my grandmother, working her way down the long list, said to me, You’d think by ninety you wouldn’t have to send so many. Some of these people, I’m sure they’re just hanging on to give me more work to do at Christmas. You get nothing back from them. Just a card. And I type every last one of them a blasted letter.
I should call my mother and tell her I’ve found the list. I’m counting the names when I realise the sheet is ruled up some way ahead, names and addresses on the left and a grid on the right with columns for the years, with ticks for all living card recipients until 1993, and some for 1994. And enough columns ruled to take her to her hundred and second year. I’m beginning to wonder if she would have complained about the telegram after all.
For now I’ll keep the list, and maybe I’ll write the letters to these people.
This box must be one of my grandmother’s last, packed by my mother in her haste to tidy things when my grandmother died. And we just let her go to it, even though it all looked pointless. This anguished, flurried, unstoppable woman, boxing up her mother’s things and moving them aside, achieving nothing.
Then, some time later, leaving the boxes to me. Telling me it’s easy, all you have to do is take it one box at a time.
It’s eleven o’clock. I realise I’ve forgotten to go to the party.
30
Jeff calls mid-morning.
So what happened to you last night?
Domestic duties.
The lost art of renovating?
No, that’s still a lost art. Just boxes. How was the party?
Good. Really good. That friend of Veny’s from Sydney was there, asking after you.
Which friend?
Fiona. The one who thinks you look like Roddy McDowell, remember?
Yeah, great. And that is how I want to be remembered, as a Roddy McDowell impersonator. I wish she’d never said that. What does it mean, that I look like Roddy McDowell? What kind of a taunt is that? Anyway, which Roddy McDowell? Which Roddy McDowell look am I supposed to have? Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I have a crisis of identity, and I’m some incarnation of Roddy McDowell, but I don’t know which.
There’s always Planet of the Apes.
Thank you.
After I get off the phone I realise that my mother, in telling me I only have to take it one box at a time, never really made it clear what I was to do with the contents. I suppose I’m to throw some things out and do something sensible and tidy with the rest.
But I can’t throw any of this out. It looks like junk, but I can’t let it go. It’s the clearest picture I have of my grandmother, at least of her last few years. I want to tell my mother we need more of this, not less. Older boxes that tell me things I don’t know.
Just a few months ago I listened to the rhythm of the knitting in this house, the black jumper beginning. Stood here for measuring and for the nearly-finished front to be sized up against me, held up against my chest by my grandmother’s bony hands as the air squeezed noisily in and out of her slowly flooding lungs.
I didn’t come here enough then. Every time I visited she’d thank me for coming and I knew I should visit more often. But even in her nineties, even when her heart failure worsened, it didn’t occur to me that time would run out.
This is the floor I raced cars on when everyone else watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. This is the place where I was looked after when I was sick and couldn’t go to school (and my mother got annoyed with my grandmother for peeling grapes for me, saying, He’ll only expect it at home now you know). This is the place with the best birthday presents, the bottomless lolly jar. The only place I was ever paid five bucks for just being nice.
Sometimes it’s still so much her house that I expect I’ll walk into another room and find her there and get the chance to ask her any questions I like.
31
On Monday, Renee from the Westside Chronicle calls.
I’m the Neighbour of the Month. I have performed the act deemed most neighbourly in the inner-western suburbs in the preceding four weeks. She wants to feature me in the last February edition. She wants to talk to me tonight. I feel powerless to stop her.
Perhaps the 1950s was the age when Neighbour of the Month would have been a good thing. It has Good Old Fashioned Values written all over it. In the nineties it is not a prize to covet. It is not in any way a Late Millenium concept.
Hillary sticks her head round my door. Things ready for Sydney?
Sure.
Have you lined up someone to feed your cat?
No.
Don’t say I’m not looking after you.
I don’t say that I’m Neighbour of the Month either. And how would it make my grandmother feel? The woman who spent, and I do this in my head, about eight hundred and fifty months in the neighbourhood and went unrecognised. I move in, pull up a tree, and in a few weeks I’m a hero. It’s a harsh world, our neighbourhood. Fuck it, she’s a grandmother. She would have been proud. I’d have said, It was nothing, and she’d be sure it was false modesty. But I read about you in the paper. And she would have cut it out and shown it to people.
Renee is there with a photographer when I get home.
I apologise and tell her the bus got stuck in traffic.
So you catch public transport? Is that a decision made on environmental grounds?
Sure I tell her, thinking she’s kidding.
No. She writes it down. She’s going to make me a greenie as well as a hell of a neighbour. Of course, I can’t go back on it now. I can’t say I don’t do it on environmental grounds. It’d seem as though I have some problem with the environment.
So what exactly did you do for Mister Butt?
I pulled up a tree stump.
And did he ask you to help him with it first?
No. I just went over and did it. With him. He’d started on it and I saw him and I went over. It probably seemed like a more manageable task than renovating the house I’m living in.
All this goes down in shorthand. She must hate doing these loser stories, surely. She must hate it when her working day drags on into the evening because a few weeks ago a guy dug up a tree stump.
Are you a Christian?
What?
Are you a Christian? Was that your motivation?
How do you mean?
Was this an act of Christian charity?
She’s getting me again. This is like catching the bus home. What can I say? I suppose it could at least account for my hundred and ninety-seven days of celibacy. Renee, I’ve decided to wait. No. There must be no hint of mockery. I must treat this with earnestness and caution, and declare no affiliations.
It just looked like something that had to be done Renee, I tell her, and she nods, as though this is very quotable. Even though it sounds more like John Wayne talking about something that involved a gun and a lot of bullets.
Now, she says, we thought we might get a photo with Mister Butt. We’ve spoken to him on the phone, so if that’s okay by you, Richard …
Sure.
As in, sure, why not? Sure, this is already totally beyond my control, so why stop now. Let’s go for the cheesy photo too.
And cheesy it is.
Kevin’s grinning when we get there, as though he’s done me a big favour, or at least repaid a substantial debt in full. And he’s wearing his Akubra and a gingery cowboy shirt buttoned right up to the top. I note his guitar is nearby. Kevin is an old pro and never likely to miss a chance for publicity. And he appears to have soaked his dentures in some whitening agent overnight, as they gleam quite incredibly whenever he speaks.
Let’s get the photo first, Renee says to all of us. Jack’s got another job to go to.
The photographer nods, looks around at the light, fits a different lens. Okay, he says. Now I figure we want both of you. And the stump, is it still around?
No, Kevin says. I didn’t know I should keep it.
That’s okay.
But I’ve got my guitar.
Kevin insists on the guitar, probably well aware that this is all that gives him the leverage to be described as a Retired Country and Western Performer, rather than just a non-specific old codger. The photographer, accepting that the guitar is not negotiable, says it’s good that I’ve still got my work clothes on. It creates contrast. He suggests I roll up my sleeves to show the muscles that pulled up the stump. I roll up my sleeves. This is going to be awful. I can see this on the front page. This oozes human interest, or at least oozes.
Um, don’t worry about it, he says. Just try rolling them down again.
I’m not sure how to take this. Renee straightens my tie and Kevin, his guitar swinging around him, is instructed to take one of my hands, which I am to make into a fist, and to hold it up as though I’ve just won a title fight. And we all know that this pose will be the one. Jack takes about a hundred and ten photos, says, Great, with huge sincerity, then goes off to his next job.
Okay, Mister Butt, if we could just have something from you, Renee says. About Richard and the stump, how it made you feel, that sort of thing.
Righto. Well, I think the country needs more like this lad, and you can quote me on that. I was struggling away and he was over the fence in a flash. He had his own things to do and his own life to lead, and he gave up a whole day of it to help an old bastard like me. Hang on a tick. You’d better put veteran country and western star, or something like that. He should be given a bloody medal on Australia Day or something, I reckon. He wouldn’t have known me from Adam, and he just jumped on over and worked all day like a bloody black. And Renee and I exchange a glance that says that’s one remark that’s unlikely to find itself in a Westside Chronicle feel-good story. We could do with more like him, that’s what I say. You hear a lot of bad things written about the young people of today, but if they’re half as decent as young Richard, they won’t go far wrong. This sort of lad’s our hope for the future.
And it doesn’t stop there.
When I leave with Renee, Kevin tells me that feeding the cat while I’m away is, The bloody least I could do.
When we’re back at my place she says, You’ve got a fan there, but in a disturbingly genuine way.
She asks me a few questions about the house, and says it’s really interesting that my grandparents built it in the twenties and now I’m living here. Maybe the Westside Chronicle really is her territory. Maybe she believes in this suburban journalism. I don’t mention the letter.
She gives me my prizes and says it’s a pity Jack isn’t around to take a few shots. Anyway, we got some great ones with Mister Butt, didn’t we? And still, no irony at all, or an incredible gift at underplaying it. There’s a medallion too, but it’s not engraved yet. We’ll give you a call when it’s ready, and we’ll take a few shots of you wearing it to use as a promo for next month. Drum up a few more entries.
So, should I ask you how many entries there were this month?
She smiles. Well, there were several, but Mister Butt was very persuasive. You tipped out a woman with a Neighbourhood Watch story. She’d copied down a number plate when a car with suspicious people in it drove away from a house with most of its appliances. They were actually robbing it. Usually those stories are just people helping friends move house. And there was a guy who intervened to settle a boundary dispute concerning a mango tree.
What did he do?
Well he basically said that, in an amazing mango season like this one, there are so many mangoes, there’s no reason for a dispute at all.
The wisdom of Solomon.
In the very moment I am saying this, I realise its biblical allusions, and that it may not be a good idea.
The wisdom of Solomon, she says, looking at me closely. Yes.
Fortunately, she has things to do. She leaves me with my prizes.
My prizes. My selection of prizes from local businesses, interested in supporting neighbourliness. My choice of two bags of tan bark or a hose from a gardening store. My twenty dollar boutique voucher. A free wheel alignment and lube job. And the big one. Dinner for two, Le Chalet.
As if the notion of dinner for two isn’t cruel enough by itself.
I call Baan Thai. Usual order for Hiller.
There’s a storm coming, picking up in the west and pushing in over Mount Coot-tha. Rain starts to fall in big unhurried drops as I park the car. The cicadas go crazy in the gardens near Park Road.
The storm breaks as I leave the restaurant. I stand barefoot in the shelter under the mock Eiffel Tower as ten minutes of astonishing rain thrashes all around me, pounds the bushes and the awnings, overflows gutters, runs warm over my feet.
At home I divide the meal into its two portions and I put Wednesday’s into the fridge.
32
As arranged, Hillary turns up in a cab around seven-thirty in the morning.
She’s not quite her usual self, not quite as I’d expected her to be. She’s not looking great. She’s pale and wearing dark glasses and a big leather jacket, as though she’s off on some adventure, or maybe flying to face the Red Baron one to one. And she seems to be in a strange mood. She keeps calling me buddy.
I try to recall if she’s been like this when we’ve flown before. Then I realise we haven’t flown before. It’s usually only one of us who goes, and she usually leaves it to me, telling me it’ll be good for me, good exposure.
In the cab I think I notice the smell of bourbon. The cabbie talks on and on and the smell doesn’t go away. When we’re stuck at lights and he turns around to crap on, as he invariably does, I try to catch the smell of it on his breath. He’s starting to slur his speech, I’m sure of it.
I think the cabbie’s been drinking, I whisper to Hillary. Bourbon.
Fuck, she says. Him too?
There is a strangeness in her eyes and the smell of bourbon as she speaks is overpowering. And I can see a silver hip flask in one of her pockets.
At the airport she says, I think I should warn you. I get a bit tense when I fly.
So she paces, and slurps bourbon nervously by holding the pocket up to her lips and tilting it. She probably thinks it’s discrete.
It’s a very small plane, she says, breaking out in a sweat as I buckle her into her seat.
It’s not. It’s a 737. It’s quite big. It’s at least mediumsized. And it’s a good plane. The 737 is a good plane. No-one ever got killed on a 737.
How do you know that? You’re making it up.
Well, probably very few people have been killed on 737s.
What? People have died in these things? You’re taking me up in this thing people have died in?
No. No. This is fine. No-one died. I read it
on the weekend. I remember now. Okay? In an aviation magazine somewhere. No-one died.
No-one?
No-one.
Was it a reputable aviation magazine?
The best.
Good. That’s good. I feel better now.
And she grips the arms of her seat, squeezes her eyes shut, gnashes her teeth and hyperventilates.
When we take off she goes crazy. Totally crazy. Crazier than a cat in a flea bath.
She bites her pillow and screams into it. She cries. I try to help her and she accidentally lashes out, drawing blood from my left cheek. And she vomits and vomits and vomits, all with her big jacket over her head. She uses her sick bag, and mine, depriving me of its advertised opportunity for cheap photoprocessing (but then, my life isn’t exactly filled with photo opportunities). Other passengers seem to form a human chain to deliver sick bags to us, and the flight attendant takes them away in a bucket. Several people in our vicinity decline breakfast. This is something I have never seen on a plane before.
Hillary goes quiet. I pat her on the back. I rub my hand on her back in slow, soothing clockwise semicircles. I don’t know why. It seems the thing to do.
Are you okay? I ask her.
I feel her head nodding under the jacket.
She surfaces somewhere well beyond Armidale. She looks very bad now, and she gives me a white-lipped smile. She has a small chunk of vomit on her forehead, just below her hairline. I make her sit still while I remove it with a tissue. She thanks me. Perhaps past events have made us more comfortable with her vomiting, though how she manages to get a chunk of it on her forehead is beyond me.
Was that a problem do you think? Did a lot of people notice, or am I okay?
I’d say you’re okay. A couple of people might have worked out that things weren’t easy for a while, but no-one made a big deal out of it. And it’s probably better to have got rid of that bourbon too.