by Tony Birch
‘I’m sure of it. I don’t want to set you adrift, Curtis. You’ve been good to me over the years. But I’m done.’
‘You really been frightened off, yeah?’
‘I have been, near to death.’
‘What you going to do, then?’
‘Well, I’ve made a plan for myself. I’ve got a daughter up north. She’s married with a couple of kids I haven’t laid eyes on. She give me a number last time I seen her. She was down for the old girl’s funeral and she wrote a number on the back of a train ticket for me. I carried it around for more than a year and then I put it to memory because I was afraid I’d lose the piece of paper. You know, Curtis, I’ve been going over that number in my head most nights since. Scared I might forget it.’
He frowned and nodded his head. ‘That’s dedication, right there, Sammy. She’d be proud of you for that one.’
‘Maybe she would. And maybe not. I was a lousy father to her, you see.’
‘I never met a father who wasn’t lousy some of the time. Maybe you can make it up to her.’
‘That’s what I been thinking. Last week I gathered the coins I had sitting on my side table, turned the mattress over, got down on the floor and I came up with enough to call her.’
‘You spoke to her already? You should have let me know. That’s news, Sammy.’
‘Well, no. I got down to the phone box outside the boarding house, full of nerves, I was. I called the number and this woman answered.’
‘Your kid?’
‘No. Wasn’t her. The woman on the line tells me that they moved out, her and the kids and the fella, around a year back. He’s some sort of fixer-upper, and he got work at a caravan park just out of the city they were in. Fixing stuff.’
Curtis opened a warm bottle of beer on his back teeth and took a drink. ‘You get a new number for her?’
‘No. The woman didn’t know it. But she gave me an address and the name of the park. The Oasis. Sounds nice, don’t you think?’
Curtis closed his eyes like he could see it. ‘Sure does. There’ll be palm trees there, you can bet. You going to get hold of the number and call her?’
‘No. I’ve made a decision to head up there and see her. Since I’ve been off the grog, I’ve saved enough for a one-way ticket. I already bought it.’
‘One-way. You sure about that?’
‘Don’t have a choice. It’s all I could afford. You want to come with me? You could make a fair whack up there playing.’
‘Not me,’ Curtis said. ‘This is my place. I got a lifestyle here.’
I’d bought a ticket on the overnighter, leaving just on dark. I laid out my best pair of pants under the mattress the night before and rinsed out the cotton shirt I’d picked up at St Vinnie’s and hung it in the shower. I didn’t have a decent pair of shoes and couldn’t afford new ones. The best I could come up with was an old pair of boots from Arnold across the hall. I gave them a good clean with a decent dab of cooking oil. He even gave me an old suitcase of his so I could pack some things – spare underwear and socks and a second shirt.
I left my room the next morning and walked down by the market on my way to the railway station, hoping to hear Curtis belting out a number one more time. He wasn’t around. He’d most likely given the drink a hammering and was sleeping it off. I walked up the hill towards the park, the old suitcase knocking against my leg. I was breathing hard and felt a little tired all of a sudden and took to a bench. In one hand I held the piece of crumpled paper where I’d written down my daughter’s address. ‘The Oasis,’ I mouthed. I had my other hand in my pocket and could feel the train ticket. I watched as this young fella came by, bouncing his football. He walked by me like I was invisible. Not rude or anything. None of us can see what’s not there.
AFTER RACHEL
There was something up with rachel, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. It had been nagging at me for months. She was forever in a shit mood and got in late at night. She was drinking too. And then she was gone, without a word. The news was broken to me in a Dear John note scribbled on the back of a gas bill she hadn’t bothered paying, stuck on the front of the fridge door. I felt betrayed. The least she could have done was tell me to my face, I thought, as I sat at the kitchen table tearing the note into confetti before burning it in an ashtray.
I confronted her in the street, outside her office later that day after work. She tried telling me that it would be best, ‘in the long run’, not to tell me of her decision in person, as she didn’t want to upset me more than she had to.
‘Can’t you understand? This is best for you. You shouldn’t have come here. You’re only upsetting yourself. Don’t you see?’
‘No, I don’t fucking see, Rachel. And of course I’m upset. You write, I’m leaving, take care, and something about finding space. What fucking space?’
‘Lower your voice, Stephen. This is my workplace.’
She took her phone out of her bag and checked her messages.
‘I have to go. I’m meeting a friend for a drink.’
‘What friend?’ I grabbed her by the arm. ‘Another man, I bet.’
She pulled away from me.
‘Don’t touch me, Stephen. You’re behaving like a lunatic. It’s over between us.’
When I tried grabbing her arm again she slapped my face, turned her back on me and walked away.
I mistakenly thought I’d cope okay on my own. It didn’t take long before everything fell apart. I couldn’t sleep and stopped eating. One of the other attendants at the city car park I worked at, Swooper, noticed that I was chain-smoking and the weight was falling off me. He invited me for a beer after work, but I didn’t feel up to it. I hardly knew him and was in no mood to sit down for a beer. He insisted and eventually I gave in.
We washed up after work and headed for a crowded bar across the street. We downed a few beers and threw small talk around before he earnestly rested a hand on my shoulder, like some old mate.
‘You look like shit. I’ve seen this before, you know. The smoking and pacing around and the crash diet. Getting on the speed will fuck you up for life, my friend. Pretty soon your teeth will fall out and you won’t be able to shit.’
‘Speed? I don’t know what you’re on about. I’ve never had a go at the hard gear. Got nothing to do with drugs.’
‘Oh.’ He threw his head back, suddenly onto me. ‘It’s a girl. You’ve been fucked over by your woman.’
He slowly shook his head from side to side.
I downed a half a pot of beer, wiped my mouth and told him about how I’d woken in the morning, two weeks earlier, to Rachel’s goodbye note. He nodded knowingly as I spoke, patted me on the knee and said he understood what I was going through. He also claimed he knew a little more.
‘I’ve been through this shit. She wants her space, she wrote? Yeah?’
‘That’s all she wrote.’
‘You know that’s a code word, don’t you?’
‘Code for what?’
‘Rooting. I’d bet my last pipe she’s been fucking another bloke.’
The thought of Rachel sleeping with another man shocked me.
‘No. It’s not like that,’ I answered, a little surprised that I was so quick to defend her. ‘She just needs some time to herself.’
‘Whatever,’ he said, chuckling to himself. The drink was getting to both of us. ‘I’m telling you, a few months down the track you’ll run into her on the street, or in a café somewhere, and she’ll be with some fella, smooching like a honeymooner. It’ll be a bloke you already know. Or the face to go with the name of the fella she couldn’t stop talking about when she was having a feed with you, the lovely bloke always helping her out with stuff. You’ll front her and she’ll turn all red and bullshit to you that this thing between them has only just started.’
Swooper looked into the bottom of his gla
ss through one eye and spied a tall dark-haired woman who had just walked into the bar with the other.
‘Don’t fall for her crap. Nothing worse than a woman making a fool of you.’
He seemed to be talking from experience.
‘You got a girlfriend of your own?’
‘No, mate. I’m between women at the moment. Too busy playing the field.’
We had a few more beers before I left him mumbling to one of the barmaids. I walked to the train station through the rain. I got off at my stop and it was still pouring. I was wet through and felt miserable knowing that I had nothing to look forward to but an empty house.
Rachel had come back the weekend after she’d left me. She’d called the night before she came and ordered me to stay away from the house until the removal van she’d organised had loaded her stuff and driven away.
‘You can trust me, Stephen. I’ll only take what’s mine.’
Which happened to be almost everything we possessed between us.
I hid behind a tree across from the house and watched as the van was loaded, until Rachel spotted me and marched across the road.
‘I asked that you not be here, Stephen. This is harassment.’
I sulked away, embarrassed, and didn’t stop walking the streets until I suddenly realised that I’d managed to get myself lost. When I eventually found my way home and put the key in the door I could actually hear the loneliness of the house. As I walked across the bare boards of the hallway – she’d rolled up the fake Persian and taken it with her – my footsteps echoed through the rooms.
There were just a few sticks of furniture left in the house. Although I shouldn’t have been, I was shocked. I’d turned up at Rachel’s place two years earlier with a backpack stuffed with clothes and a cardboard box full of paperback novels under my arm. Before moving in with Rachel I’d lived in a share house in Richmond. The furniture in that house had belonged to other tenants, not that we had much between us. I’d been a literature student and had dropped out of university in the home stretch, before the end of third year. Others in the house were dropouts too, from one failed venture or another. We didn’t have a dollar between us, the house was a crumbling mess, we drank cheap wine out of jam jars and watched TV sitting on upturned stolen milk crates.
Rachel had rescued me from the chaos. We’d met at a seminar organised by the local Job Centre, where Rachel worked as a motivational trainer. While I didn’t get much out of the seminar itself, for reasons that are unexplainable now, Rachel and I hit it off. She told me that she had a strong feeling about me; that I had potential I was yet to fulfil. I didn’t doubt a word she said. I was also desperate to sleep with her, which we did within days of that conversation.
I thought about that first meeting, the great sex we’d started out with – and then the note on the fridge door. As I walked through the house, in tears, I did a quick inventory of what was left. Although the double bed had belonged to her, she left it behind for me, along with a clean fitted sheet, two blankets and a single pillow. Later that night I sat on the bed and hugged the pillow to my chest and pathetically thought how generous she’d been leaving it behind.
In the depths of loneliness over the following weeks, and on the back of my beer-fuelled chat in the bar with Swooper, I would wake in the middle of the night tortured by the thought that since Rachel had left her bed with me, logically she must have moved into a house where a bed was waiting for her. A bed she was most likely sharing with another man and, as Swooper had prophesied, a bed she was rooting in.
She’d also left the kitchen table, two wooden chairs, the fridge she’d stuck the note to, and enough pots and pans and knives and forks to get by on. Not that I’d done any cooking since she’d left, living on black coffee, cigarettes and toast.
There were a few pre-made meals in the freezer, casseroles and soups that had been lovingly prepared by Rachel before being labelled and neatly stacked away. She had explained to me that they’d come in handy on wintry evenings, after we’d got in late from a romantic walk through the park or along the river. We would warm one of the meals on the stove, cuddle up on the couch in front of the TV and watch a romantic movie.
Well, winter was on the doorstep, and the couch and the TV and my girlfriend were gone.
I did pull a frozen block of pea-and-ham soup out of the freezer one night, but couldn’t bring myself to defrost it, let alone eat it. I forgot to put it away and found the container on the bench the next morning sitting in a pool of murky water. I threw the meal in the bin, made myself a cup of coffee and lit another dart. Rachel had weaned me off cigarettes. I hadn’t been tempted at all until she left. Conning myself that I hadn’t returned to being a serious smoker, I fed my habit by buying the cigarettes loose, in twos and threes, from Ali, at the local milk bar. I’d usually smoke the first of three as we talked out the front of his shop, a second on the walk home, and the precious third and final cigarette sitting with a cup of coffee on the back porch as I looked over the ragged garden. Like the rest of my life, the garden had gone to the pack since Rachel’s departure. With the exception of an old olive tree that seemed to thrive on neglect, most of the plants had died.
I was on my way to the milk bar for more cigarettes one Sunday morning when I spotted a rickety wooden ladder leaning against the trunk of an olive tree that grew on the nature strip outside a block of flats at the end of the street. A yellow plastic bucket was sitting on the nature strip, beneath the ladder. I got closer to the tree and noticed a pair of legs, wrapped in thick woollen socks, and a scuffed pair of slippers perched on the top rung of the ladder. I looked higher and saw an old woman picking olives from the tree and throwing them down into the bucket. She looked at me and nodded. I nodded back and walked on.
At the milk bar Ali suggested I increase my supply of cigarettes from three to four, or even five.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m no pusher, man. But if you buy more each time, you will come back not so quick. It is better for you not to run so much. Come again. Back again. You kill yourself like that, man.’
‘Maybe, Ali. But I like the walk.’
As I paced the footpath outside the shop, puffing away like a madman, he stood in the doorway complaining about his son’s recent trip back to Egypt.
‘The bastard, he rings me, every time reverse. Reverse charges. I say “No”, but his mother, she is soft. Always, she takes his call. She talks, I pay. Look at me. Fucking idiot.’
A kid brushed by Ali and went into the shop. Although it was a cold morning he was wearing just a singlet, a pair of track pants and no shoes or socks. He was wired no doubt. As we talked Ali occasionally looked over his shoulder, keeping an eye on the kid. He came out a couple of minutes later, empty-handed. As he walked past Ali reached out and grabbed him by the neck.
‘The pockets, little thief. Empty the pockets.’
As the kid tried wriggling free a plastic bottle of tomato sauce fell out of his side pocket and bounced on the footpath. Ali released his grip, reached down and picked up the bottle of sauce. The boy ran until he reached the street corner. He turned and screamed out at Ali, ‘You fucken wog cunt.’
‘I’m not wog,’ Ali screamed back, waving the bottle of sauce at the boy. ‘I’m Arab.’
He laughed to himself as he studied the bottle of sauce.
‘Let me give you no offence, my friend. But this country has nothing. You know how many tomatoes in the bottle? Nothing. Like this country. It’s all shit now.’
‘No offence taken, Ali. I’ve got nothing myself.’
I lit another cigarette, said goodbye and walked homeward. Back at the olive tree the old woman was down from the ladder, collecting the loose olives that had missed the bucket. It was almost full. I’d reached my front gate when I stopped and headed back up the street. She looked up at me from her hands and knees.
‘I have a tree.’ I pointed towards th
e house. ‘In the backyard.’
She stared blankly at me. I wondered if she understood English.
‘I have a tree,’ I repeated. ‘In my backyard there is an olive tree, just like this one. I live at number thirteen. You can come and have a look if you like? It has olives all over it.’
‘Olives?’
‘Yep. Lots of big olives.’
She shrugged her shoulders, disinterested, struggled to her feet, picked up the full bucket of olives like it weighed nothing and walked off.
I wasn’t back home more than five minutes when there was a knock at the door. I immediately thought of Rachel and hurried to open it. The woman was standing on the doorstep carrying an empty bucket in each hand. An old man dressed in a checked flannel shirt, work pants and muddy boots stood behind her, leaning on the wooden ladder she’d been using in the street. She introduced him as her husband.
‘We come to see your tree,’ she explained. ‘We pick. Olives.’
I opened the side gate and escorted them into the yard. They smiled with delight as they walked around the tree, admiring the abundance of fruit. I went into the kitchen and watched them as they worked together, chatting away in what sounded like Italian, English and, occasionally, something in between. I made myself a coffee, went out into the yard, lit a smoke and watched them more closely. One bucket was already full. They bustled away, shaking the tree like a flock of birds feeding on the fruit.
I didn’t want them thinking I was spying on them, so I began tidying up around the yard. I picked up a broken terracotta pot but wasn’t sure what to do with it and put it down. I wandered over to the corner of the yard and stopped outside the wooden garage door. In the time that I’d been living at the house with Rachel I’d never been inside the garage. I forced the door open and looked in. The garage was empty except for a piece of furniture sitting in the corner, covered in dust and cobwebs.