Ethan felt around for the light switch to the basement before he remembered that it wasn’t inside the door (as logic might dictate) but at the bottom of the stairs.
Just a couple of steps down and he could smell it, the treasured dirt, the musty gold of a childhood tomb. For an instant he remembered the rush when he and his schoolfriends closed the door behind them, the possibilities . . . Perhaps it was then that he overstepped, in a surge to recapture his youth: overstepped and failed to regain his balance, stumbling forwards and swiping the stand of garden tools before landing on the stone floor on outstretched hands and one knee, the other foot grounded with a straight leg, like a sprinter at the start of a race—in which position he remained to assess his injury (inconsequential) and, as the objects around him emerged out of darkness, to ruminate briefly on how the fall slotted into the week’s trajectory.
Somehow, even in those few moments before the light came on, Ethan sensed there was more to it than a slump from bad to worse. Even in the dark of the basement, Ethan maintained a flickering faith in his ability to come back from the brink.
When he’d returned to the office after the hotel yesterday, Sally had left for the day, and this morning she had called in sick. Ethan had kept his lunchtime appointment with the counsellor and had talked about his frustration with his accountant’s file management system. He had left early to get home so he could surprise Finn by picking him up from skipping training. The only thought he had allowed himself in relation to Sally was to plot her exit, assess the minimum amount of time after which she could hand in her resignation without raising suspicion. There would have to be another job offer, but that shouldn’t be a problem, not with a résumé like Sally’s and a rock-solid reference from the firm.
Now it was a Wednesday dinner at Mum and Dad’s, and the wheel kept spinning . . . The honey cake was the best he could remember, but the dinner hadn’t ended well, no argument there, and through no one’s fault but his own.
After his second piece of cake Finn left the table, giving Laini the opportunity to tell Maggie about his trouble at school.
‘Finnegan threw a rock at a boy and it hit him in the head, just missed his eye. A dozen kids saw it and said it came out of nowhere; the boy was just playing handball with his friends.’
‘Oh, I don’t believe that,’ Maggie said. ‘I just don’t believe that.’
‘The school is making a big deal of it,’ Ethan said. ‘It’s like he planted a fucking bomb in the toilet.’
‘What did Finny say?’
Ethan smiled. ‘You know what he said? He said the boy’s a little criminal.’
Throughout the conversation Martin had been staring down at the glass in his hand, a world away, but on hearing Ethan’s last words, he suddenly looked up. ‘Who is a little criminal?’
Laini repeated the story. When she had finished, Martin shook his head and said firmly, knowingly, ‘There is a back story to this.’
When Laini asked him how he could be so sure, his response was short and final: ‘Because in my experience, there always is.’ And without taking further questions, he excused himself so that he could find Finnegan to start their game of UNO.
‘Christ, Mum, this must be a nightmare for you,’ Ethan said once his father had left the room. It was only then he saw how tired she looked, almost frail. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She rubbed the papery skin around her eyes. ‘It’s been a hard day, that’s all.’
Laini asked if she was working on a portrait. ‘I just finished something. It is being framed.’
‘A commission?’
‘Of sorts,’ she said, then changed the subject. ‘How is work, darling?’
‘It’s okay. I’m jumping through their hoops.’
‘What sort of hoops?’
‘Oh, you know—any kind, any shape . . .’ Tonight Laini was driving, so he’d had more to drink than usual. That was the only way he could explain how he let the next sentence dribble from his lips. ‘Then I go see my midget counsellor and tell her when I stopped wetting the bed . . .’
Mother and wife, one over the other with a demand for particulars: What was he talking about? What counsellor?
In the name of diplomacy, he answered the wife first. ‘I told you, babe, I’ve been having a crap time. That was what was crap about it.’ And to his mother: ‘Like I said, it’s just a hoop. The managing partner set it up. I don’t really want to go into it.’
Laini said that was his problem: he never did; that was why they wanted him to see a counsellor . . . ‘Blood out of a fucking stone, I swear.’
The best he could muster: ‘There isn’t much to tell, alright? I’ve forgotten how to say hello to people in elevators. Apparently there is an art to that.’ He was hoping to leave it there but when Laini’s face started to blotch up he sensed a better idea would be to try to explain. ‘Max says I am not nice to people. And he wants me to see a counsellor to work out why. It’s alright. It’s just stress. I’ll sort it out.’
‘Sweetheart,’ Maggie said quietly, ‘you need to listen. You really need to listen.’ She looked worried now. He didn’t mean to do that, make things harder.
‘Please don’t worry, Mum. We’ll take a holiday. I promise! Okay, leave it.’ And to Laini: ‘Please, babe, I’ll talk to you later, I will. Let’s just leave it now.’ He put his arm around her and gave her a kiss on the forehead. ‘Let’s book Fiji.’
Laini served herself another helping of cabbage salad as he talked about the best month to go. When he was done, Maggie looked from her plate to her glass, then to each of their faces: ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.
It was the night, it seemed, to lay it all out on the table.
‘I went to see Iris again today, this afternoon.’
‘Oh, you are good, Maggie,’ Laini said. ‘With all you’ve got on.’
Maggie’s smile was patient. ‘I don’t go to see Iris because I am good. I go because she is my friend.’ She loaded a fork then left it resting on the plate. ‘When you asked before about the portrait, the answer is that I was painting Iris.’
There was silence. Ethan poured himself another glass of wine.
‘Sorry,’ Laini stepped in. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’
‘No, I know you didn’t. I just want you to understand she is not my charity case.’
Maggie had been keeping up the visits. Every so often she would tell them something about Iris, something she’d said or something that’d happened over at her place. Ethan had tried to see it Maggie’s way: she was a bleeding heart and felt bad about the dog, fair enough. Once she took over paints and canvases for some kids. In the context of what was going on with Marty, the visits got Maggie out of the house, and they made her feel good. No harm done, he’d told himself, and it wasn’t as though they were going to continue ad infinitum . . . But somehow these people kept conning her into going back. And now the portrait: odds on it would end up winning a bloody prize and be worth fifty grand and then some. Did she really think the old lady would hang on to it then? Someone had to start asking the questions.
‘So I’m guessing there’s no commission on the painting,’ Ethan said, ‘and I don’t remember you saying she put up an argument about taking any of those art supplies.’
‘Iris has had eleven children in her care, Ethan. She was in no position to argue.’
‘I think it was lovely—a lovely thing to do,’ Laini said. ‘They need all the help they can get.’
Maggie nodded. ‘I quite agree.’ And again, a pause as she looked from plate to glass, then to Ethan. ‘So I drove over today in Martin’s car . . . And I left it there, as a gift.’
‘What, the painting?’
‘No, not the painting.’
Ethan leant forwards so that his face was just inches away from hers but in spite of it—or to spite it—Maggie held his gaze. ‘The car. Tomorrow I’ll get the papers to transfer it legally.’
The car.
‘It isn
’t worth that much,’ she went on. ‘You’ve always said it was a heap. We have no need of it. Dad can’t drive it anymore . . .’
The table went silent, and in the silence, he could feel it shift: this was no longer a story about what was happening to his mother, but part of the week’s plan, part of a week gone wrong.
‘That is a fucking cracker, that is,’ he said softly, but still felt better for saying it, like he was warming up, and with that giddy warm feeling spreading into his face, he slapped the table and cupped his head with the same hand and, with eyes half closed, he began to paint the ugly picture as he saw it—not a portrait but a landscape of syringes and welfare checks and, in the middle of it, his mother, duped by her white guilt into giving away her possessions. ‘From the day you turned up at her door, this is what they’ve been working at . . . It would’ve been quicker if they’d just smashed the window and hotwired the fucking thing.’
Throughout, Maggie remained calm, and only when he started to slow down did she interject to ask if he was finished.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Can I speak?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘These people, as you call them . . . Please, Ethan, look at me.’
He looked.
‘These people have asked me for nothing beyond a pair of shoes. Iris travels for miles around the state—there isn’t a week she isn’t getting herself to a funeral or a bedside or a new baby. She is seventy-four years old and she has chronic diabetes; she catches trains and buses and her legs swell up like water balloons . . .’
‘Okay, Mum, that’s all well and tragic, but I’ll tell you what will happen now.’ Ethan stood up from the table with his fork in his hand and heat rising into his face, not the warm giddy kind. ‘They’ll sell the painting and the car, and you know what they’ll do with the money? They’ll drink it, or they’ll shoot it into their arms, any way to piss it up against a fucking tree.’
As he finished, Finn appeared at the door with Marty behind him.
‘What is all the shouting about?’ Marty asked, on his face a misplaced smile.
‘I’ll let Ethan explain,’ Maggie said, then turned back to her son. ‘Maybe you are right in what you say, Ethan. Maybe. Or maybe Iris gets a car. In the meantime, let’s see if your counsellor can work out where all this bile comes from. God knows, your mother never could.’ She rose from her seat, and when Ethan tried to say more she stared him down like she did when he was twelve. And she started to clear the plates.
So, no, dinner hadn’t ended well.
And rewind further back, to yesterday in the hotel room.
It isn’t what happens; it is how you react. For a moment he tried to imagine the events as they happened, minus his input: action without reaction. There was no argument—tonight with his mother, and yesterday with Sal. It looked a whole lot better.
And here he was, in the dark basement, at the bottom of the stairs, with enough time having passed for his eyes to adjust. He let the straight knee bend to the ground and, kneeling, checked his wrists, then stood to put weight on his knees, and to brush himself off.
It was only now that he thought back to what he had said to Sal, to the way he had said it and what lay behind it . . . With distance, he hoped, with time . . .
Finally he found it, there on the wall next to the stand for the tools: the light switch.
When the room came into view, savoured memories stirred again.
This was a place he used to come as a boy, by himself and with his friends. The door was on the side path to the clothesline so they could meet without having to come into the house. They’d never locked it because there wasn’t anything worth stealing, but one time he remembered someone got in there and made a mess rifling through the boxes. For Ethan and his mates it was even better after the thief had been, a better atmosphere. One day they heard a scratching sound behind boxes and they thought they were going to bust the bloke for sure, but turned out it was just a baby possum thumping its tail on dried leaves. Ethan’s friend Johnny tried to pick it up (bloody moron) and got the crap scratched out of his arms. Other stuff they did in the basement was suck helium and do séances or swap shit they’d nicked. They hung a red scarf over the light and sat knee to knee on their beach towels because the floor was a dust heap, and in the trusted sandstone of the basement it was cool even on the hottest days of summer.
The room was smaller now, not just because of the passage of time but because it was filled with more boxes, many with his name on them and a year or a description. He would have to pull some of this stuff out some time, show Finn. On the ground leaning up against the wall was a framed Star Wars poster—Darth Vader. The glass was cracked clean down the middle of his mask, cutting his cape and his light sabre in two.
On the back wall, on the top shelf, just like Maggie had said, there was a green box. When he reached for it, the cardboard was soft and damp in his hands. He carried it down to the trestle table, imagining all he would find would be photographs ruined by time and neglect, but when he opened it he found a plastic container, and in the container, within a foolscap envelope, the photographs, layered in between sheets of paper, in perfect condition.
And just as he began to lay them out, he heard the footsteps coming down the stairs.
Ethan turned around to see his father standing over the tools strewn at the bottom of the stairs. He explained the fall, and his father stepped closer, looking at the pile on the table. ‘What have you got there?’ Martin asked, and without waiting for a response: ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’
Ethan laid out the first four images and with his arm ushered his father in closer to the table. ‘We’ve got to get them out of here, Dad, get them framed. I could hang them at home.’
As Martin passed over each of the images, he nodded his head. Boys screaming in the subway, a man at the end of a tunnel of light, a boy on a mattress on a fire escape. The SoHo skyline. Then he returned to the first, and picked it up in his hands.
‘I need to keep this one. I sold it, you know. This lot—’ he pointed to the boys on the subway ‘—they said, “Yeah, man, go ahead, take the photo,” then they screamed like monkeys.’ Martin put the photo down and looked around the basement, to the pile of boxes and the slabs of stone. ‘I need a darkroom now,’ he said, and with an uncertain smile and the politeness of a stranger: ‘Are you someone who could help me with that?’
When Ethan did not answer him, the ageing man held his gaze. ‘I’m sorry, is that why you are here? Did Maggie make the appointment?’
This room stored memories, but it could not store all of them. The cold of the basement suddenly leeched inside his bones and with it the rage of the forgotten son in a house minus a father. His mind flooded with signposts, all the reasons Martin should remember, a sea of blurred history. Please, not this.
Please, he wanted to scream, don’t do this.
His father’s smile faded, and Ethan could see now that his lips were trembling, like a child on the brink of tears who had found himself alone in a place that was not known.
When the words came, there was no rage. Ethan’s voice was weak. ‘I can’t see why not . . . I’ll ask Mum.’
And just as quickly as Martin had lost his place he seemed to find it again in a flash of recognition, as though he were just now opening a door to greet him. ‘You look so worried, Finny,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them bully you.’
‘Marty, it’s Ethan.’
Martin cupped his cheek in his hand and smiled. ‘Of course it is.’ But behind the smile was the wreckage of what was lost—if not yet, then when? And that was where Ethan was left, sinking . . . He leant his weight on the table but it did not hold him; his knees came down to the floor, and there he was again and somehow it was better to be there, down with Vader, safe and low in a place where he had cried the tears of a boy.
When he looked up, the silver-haired man towered over him, smartly dressed in his collared shirt, blue eyes staring down in constern
ation from a broad, tanned face. He pointed a finger at Ethan, though all the while kept his eyes on the photographs on the table. ‘The boy on a beanbag in a striped shirt . . .’ The voice was deep and mellifluous, and between each pronouncement he paused as though to make certain of the next. ‘In his lap there is a bowl of popcorn. Maggie reaches down to switch off the TV and introduces me as Marty . . . And you, four years old, you put your bowl down on the carpet and climb off the beanbag to stand up as tall as you can, and you smile and you hold your salty hand out so that I can shake it.’ He smiled, long and warm. ‘Do you remember it?’
He did, in part, not the shirt or the popcorn, but he remembered sitting on a beanbag and looking up at the man his mother had brought into the room.
‘There was an agreement of sorts between us, you and I,’ Martin went on. ‘Like father, like son . . .’ An agreement of sorts: a conversation in a bedroom about getting away with lies, and a sighting in a grungy pub where his father sat in a darkened booth with a woman with wavy hair. Neither of them had ever spoken of it, not until now. ‘All that ducking and weaving,’ Marty said. ‘I’m not so sure, Ethan; I don’t think you can live like that anymore.’
As he began then to pack the photos away, Marty turned to his son to make sure he was still listening, an old man at his workbench, working with all that he had left. ‘The second hand is the one to watch,’ he said. ‘The rest of it doesn’t much matter . . . And even then, it plays its tricks.
‘This one,’ he said suddenly, pointing to the photo on top as though stopping a spinning wheel. It was a man in a subway tunnel with a tiny light at its end. ‘This one I took the day before I met your mother.’
‘Are there any of the day she came?’ Ethan asked.
‘You know, I didn’t take a one. Isn’t that a funny thing?’
As he followed Marty back to the basement steps, Ethan stopped to pick up the garden tools on the ground. There were two rakes—one fan-shaped and made of green plastic, the kind he used to rake the lawn with for his pocket money, the other a flat bar with metal tines. It was lucky, he thought to himself, he hadn’t landed right on top of the thing . . . a passing thought, and it almost got away, but right at the last, he snapped down: if he had landed on top of it—the metal tines piercing into his arse, like fingernails . . .
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