Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘I’m the seventh shortest in my class,’ I said.

  I had moved up from sixth shortest in February, although opinion at school was divided as to whether I had grown a centimetre or Little Jack Binder (widely known as ‘Horner’) had shrunk.

  ‘And what is your academic position?’ Maurice asked me.

  ‘I’m sixth from bottom at English,’ I said.

  Maurice looked at my shoes, then at my forehead.

  ‘But what is your best subject?’ he asked.

  ‘English,’ I said.

  I had lost interest in lessons and fallen below the average height for a boy of my age, and yet I seemed to be growing a moustache.

  Maurice clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Jimmy examined his hands.

  ‘So, how’s retirement, mate?’ asked Maurice. ‘Finding enough to keep you busy?’

  ‘I’m happy,’ said Jimmy. ‘How’s the pharmaceutical trade?’

  ‘Pharmacy is a profession,’ said Sylvia.

  There was a silence filled with shuffling and snorting and knuckle cracking.

  ‘Let’s go into the yard,’ Sylvia said to Jimmy. ‘I’d like to see what you’ve done with it.’

  ‘I’ve paved it over,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Show me anyway,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘It’s just flagstone,’ said Jimmy. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  But Sylvia took Jimmy by the elbow and marched him out the back door.

  Through the kitchen window I could hear Sylvia telling Jimmy it was time he started to think about what was best for Frida. They were both growing old. He wasn’t looking after the house. Everything leaked or sagged or smelled. (‘Like me,’ said Jimmy.) They needed a caretaker, a handyman. They should have a nurse on call. And Jimmy’s chest sounded bad. Had he even spoken to a doctor? Their house wasn’t a home for old people. It was a builder’s project. The land was worth more than the cottage. They could sell the place to a developer, and have enough money to stay in sheltered accommodation for the rest of their lives.

  Jimmy spat on the flagstone. It made a sound like a pebble hitting a wall, as if he had coughed up a fragment of rib.

  *

  It was midafternoon before Jimmy got to his shed to collect a hammer and nails. He carried his tool bag into my bedroom, which Mum and the others had shared with Deborah Who Lives in Israel before Jimmy had built her the extension and Deborah had gone to Israel, and sat on the blanket box looking at the wardrobe. As his bony buttocks met the weak wood, dampened by decades under an open window in warm Bondi rain, the lid of the chest collapsed under his weight. His knees jackknifed to his chin, and his body folded into the box, like a child in a nightmare, trapped in a toilet bowl. I rushed to pull him out but, as his thighs cleared the box, he tore his pants on a rotten plank.

  Swearing something about wood lice, he changed into a pair of paint-splattered King Gee stubbies and announced, ‘Smoko.’

  We sat on the front step, where Jimmy wet his yellow thumb and coaxed a cigarette paper from a packet of Tally-Hos. He dropped in three pinches of tobacco then massaged them into one fat worm, and rolled the paper around it in two tight twists. He pulled out stray flakes of White Ox like he was plucking hairs from his nose, then tapped his rollie against a box of Redhead matches to settle the tobacco. He took the cigarette in his mouth, lit a match, touched the flame to the tip, closed his eyes and breathed in. He held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, then let it out slowly, and smiled as he watched the genie vanish in the air. It made me wish I could smoke.

  He coughed softly and laughed, then he coughed harder. His throat began to rake and roar. He choked like the brakes on a bus, he spat green and black and red, then suddenly he stopped.

  He glanced at the blobs of blood and phlegm.

  ‘Better out than in,’ he said, and persevered with his smoke.

  Barry Dick the frummer wished us ‘good Shabbes’ and said he hoped we weren’t planning on working today. ‘Commandment number four,’ he said. ‘Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.’

  Jimmy nodded.

  ‘Would you like to lay teffilin?’ asked Barry Dick.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Jimmy, ‘but I’d like to buy one of those vegetarian recipe books you used to sell on George Street.’

  Barry Dick ignored him.

  ‘Would you like to lay teffilin?’ he asked me.

  ‘What’s the point?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a commandment,’ said Barry Dick.

  ‘What number is it?’ I asked.

  ‘There are more than ten commandments,’ said Barry Dick. ‘In fact, there are six hundred and thirteen. But on Shabbes we must rest, because in six days He created the heavens and the earth and everything in it, and on the seventh day He rested.’

  I had been wondering about this.

  ‘So, did God create dinosaurs and people at the same time?’ I asked.

  ‘He did,’ said Barry Dick.

  ‘So why aren’t there any dinosaurs in the Torah?’

  ‘The Torah,’ said Barry Dick, ‘is a holy book. It is not a book about dinosaurs.’

  ‘How come Tyrannosaurus rex didn’t eat Adam and Eve?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps he was a vegetarian,’ said Barry Dick.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘Tyrannosaurus rex was a meat eater. Brontosaurus was a vegetarian.’

  ‘Brontosaurus wasn’t even a dinosaur,’ said Barry Dick. ‘It was a misclassification of the apatosaurus.’

  ‘So you do know about dinosaurs,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve read a book about dinosaurs,’ said Barry Dick, ‘but it wasn’t the Torah.’

  ‘Was it the Bhagavad-gita?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Good Shabbes,’ said Barry Dick, and went off not to turn on any lights or drive his car, plant trees, till soil, bind sheaves or reap or thresh corn.

  Jimmy decided to try to fix the wardrobe again, and now he had to repair the blanket box too. I waited in the kitchen with Grandma, who was rinsing chicken livers and sprinkling them with salt. She asked who my friends were and which games we played, and if I’d ever smoked a cigarette or kissed a girl. She had started to remember her schooldays more clearly as they drew further away. She sang a skipping rhyme and told me about a boy who had taken her into the bushes and shown her his thing. She said she was always grateful to Jimmy because once they married she didn’t have to work at Brievermann’s House of Lace.

  She was dozing off in the living room when Jimmy screamed, and the skin on my arms raised like a forest. I ran to my bedroom, where Jimmy was crying and throwing his arms about, and I could see he was blind and mad and I had to dodge his fists and his feet, as he crashed his head against the wardrobe door, which splintered and split and worked at the deep cut in his forehead sending blood flowing behind his glasses and into his eyes.

  He was an old man screaming like a baby then whimpering like a dog. His body was shaking, from his feet to his forehead. White spit gathered like beer foam in the corners of his lips.

  ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘No!’

  Grandma came into the room slowly, looked around at the smashed timber and the mirror that lay broken on the floor, and at Jimmy, who hugged his elbows while he bounced on his toes.

  Across the rail in the wardrobe hung a thin black tie.

  ‘He’s there!’ he cried, jumping and pointing. ‘Take him down! Take him down!’

  *

  There was more screaming at night, and calls for help, a cry like a man falling. I woke and slept to the pulse of Jimmy’s dreams. Sometimes he howled out names. I heard him thrash around in bed, thumping and banging against the mattress, rocking the headboard into the wall.

  The next morning, I rang Mum and told her I wanted to come home.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Mum.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ I said. ‘I think Jimmy’s going mad.’

  ‘He’s just on his way out now,’ said Mum, ‘but I’ll tell him. Thanks for asking.’

  I waited until I hear
d the Dark Man kiss her lips – ugh! – and push his stupid bike out of the front door and into the corridor.

  ‘Why won’t you just let me come home?’ I asked.

  ‘Christian and I are going through a delicate time,’ she said. ‘We need our space. It hasn’t been easy, the past year, you know. Christian gets tired of having to be on his guard.’

  ‘I’m not going to attack him, am I?’ I said. ‘He’s about three years older than me.’

  ‘Christian is twelve years older than you,’ said Mum. ‘And it’s your comments that upset him.’

  Jimmy walked past and glowered at the phone. He didn’t really like anything that wasn’t made of wood.

  ‘If you’re so worried,’ said Mum, ‘why don’t you go and stay with your father?’

  ‘You know Dad’s got to work,’ I said.

  I heard her take a deep breath.

  ‘So he can’t look after his son for one week in the year?’ asked Mum.

  ‘He probably wants to,’ I said, ‘but she won’t let him.’

  Normally Mum would say, ‘Who’s she? The cat’s mother?’ But not when I was talking about the Woman in White.

  ‘Look,’ said Mum, ‘we just need a little more time. Can’t you just stay another week? Please?’

  It was a long, sweet ‘please’, the kind that comes with a gift attached.

  ‘It’d be a lot easier,’ I said, ‘if I had a Nintendo.’

  ‘If you can make it until next Friday, you can have a Nintendo,’ she said.

  I could see there might be a catch.

  ‘Not as part of my birthday present?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you’ll get a totally different birthday present,’ she promised.

  ‘Will that present cost the same as it would’ve cost if you hadn’t bought me a Nintendo?’

  ‘It’ll come out of a different budget,’ she promised. ‘I’ll use the money I’ve put aside for palliative care in my old age.’

  BONDI

  SUNDAY 22 APRIL 1990

  Jimmy asked if I wanted to go to the beach.

  ‘The beach?’ I said.

  ‘Big crescent of sand at the bottom of Bondi Road,’ he said. ‘You’ll recognise it once you see it.’

  He never went to the beach.

  ‘What’s at the beach?’ I asked, suspecting a bar.

  I was happy to go out, but I didn’t want to walk. Old people loved walking. They didn’t seem to see that it was a waste of time and energy, and probably the main reason they were tired all the time.

  Jimmy kissed Grandma goodbye as we left the house, which was something I’d never seen him do before.

  We passed under the shadow of the electricity substation. I lingered at the bus stop, but Jimmy kept on marching, past the kosher supermarket and the WIZO charity shop, all the way down to the beach.

  I was a swimmer, a body-boarder and a wave jumper, but that morning the water was too cold for anyone but the surfers. The wind chewed my cheeks and Jimmy held onto his cap as we walked towards Bondi Pavilion, a Roman temple looking out over the flags. The face of the pavilion was a troop of arches, and I imagined them guarded by a centurion and legionnaires. In the cloister, at a row of squat concrete tables, Jimmy found Myer sitting with a chess set, facing a fat man wearing a pork-pie hat.

  The old fellas liked to come here on warm days, to talk and play cards in the fresh air. Myer used to say he was a chess champion when he was younger, although I suspected he was only champion of the PCYC ‘D’ team or something, since he could never win a game without cheating.

  ‘It’s Slim Jim,’ said the fat man.

  ‘G’day,’ said Jimmy, ‘Slow Eddie.’

  I thought of waves flowing lazily past half-submerged rocks.

  ‘They don’t call me that any more,’ said Slow Eddie. ‘Not since Fast Eddie died.’

  Slow Eddie took a box of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and a lighter from his hatband.

  While Slow Eddie fiddled with the flame, Myer pocketed his rook. When Slow Eddie looked back to the board, he moved a pawn forward and left his queen undefended. Myer chased her with a knight and cornered her with a bishop, and Slow Eddie tapped his king on the crown, knocked it onto its side and resigned.

  Slow Eddie’s scowl made Myer smile like a sphinx.

  ‘I’ve got deals to make and hearts to break,’ said Slow Eddie, standing up and brushing dust from his pants. ‘G’day.’

  ‘G’day, Slow Eddie,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘G’day, Slow Eddie,’ said Myer.

  ‘G’day, Slow Eddie,’ I said.

  ‘Youse’re a hatful of bastards,’ muttered Slow Eddie, and he hiked across the grass to the car park.

  ‘Have you ever tried to make one of these?’ asked Jimmy, pointing to the chess set.

  ‘Surprisingly, no,’ said Myer, ‘being as I’m an optometrist.’

  ‘They’re a bugger to get right,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Myer. ‘It’s just as well you can buy them in the shops.’

  A cloud passed over the sun.

  Myer opened his newspaper while Jimmy and I went into the pavilion to look at a frieze of photographs of Bondi in the black-and-white days, when the esplanade was clogged with touring cars. Bow-lipped beach girls watched beefy lifeguards flex their biceps like circus strongmen under an inky sky.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Jimmy. ‘Between the wars.’

  Jimmy had three stories about growing up in Bondi. There was the one about boxing in the street, when he got knocked out by a girl; another where he shot the coalman; and a third in which he tried to swim to New Zealand but ended up in Botany. His parents, the Bobbe and the Zayde, were poor – but, said Jimmy, everyone you knew was poor in those days so it didn’t matter. The Bobbe worked in a cigar factory. The Zayde was a returned soldier who couldn’t settle down. Sometimes he sold shmattes from door to door, or waited on tables at a restaurant. After Jimmy shot the coalman, the Zayde delivered coal.

  My grandparents kept one photograph of the Zayde, looming tall and stern over the Bobbe, who wore a dress laced up to her throat. He had a moustache shaped like a magnet, and dull, frozen eyes.

  Jimmy was only comfortable talking if he was drinking, working or walking, and I could tell he wanted to say something because he kept shuffling backwards and forwards in front of the frieze.

  ‘What was it like in those days?’ I asked.

  It looked boring.

  ‘It was harder,’ he said.

  I wondered what he meant by hard.

  ‘Did you used to get into fights?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone did,’ he said. ‘People were tougher then. We had the Great Depression, we had the memory of the war. We didn’t expect to live forever. The Zayde served under Monash with the 3rd Division in France. He had his ear shot off. Did you know that? The Zayde had only one ear.’

  He cupped his own intricate ear with one hand.

  ‘You used to see returned men begging in the streets,’ said Jimmy, ‘with no legs, with no hands, with scorched tissue where their eyes used to be. I wanted to get shot too, to take a bullet, to joke about it with my mates. I felt jealous of the Zayde for only having one ear.’

  I wouldn’t’ve minded being shot either, provided I didn’t die. There was a kid at school who’d been run over by a ute and it had made him twice as popular.

  ‘The Zayde used to march on Anzac Day,’ said Jimmy, ‘behind a banner and flag, with his medals all in a row. We had the day off school to watch them, all the fathers and grandfathers, strutting and limping to the war memorial and back. When it was over, the old men went drinking and we ran down to the beach to play in the sea. So I thought war would be a holiday too.’

  Jimmy wasn’t looking at me. He was speaking to the photograph, to the women in bathing caps and the lifeguards in hooped costumes, the sunbakers from the days before everything.

  ‘All the Zayde’s friends were from the army,’ he said. ‘He still played poker with the blokes who’d fou
ght with him in Flanders, and he laughed louder with them than with anyone, because they’d shared something that set them apart. Because they were laughing, I thought it must be something good.’

  I wanted an ice cream, even though it was cold.

  ‘But you couldn’t ask the Zayde about the war,’ said Jimmy. ‘He was good with horses. That’s all he had left from the army. And he kept a rifle under his bed. Sometimes he’d take me out to shoot rabbits. One night when he was drinking with the diggers, I stole his gun, and the next morning I shot the coalman. I did it because I thought he was a thieving gypsy, and when the Zayde found out, he belted seven shades of gonif out of me.

  ‘The next day,’ said Jimmy, ‘the Zayde apprenticed me to a cabinet maker named Aaronson. He was missing a finger, but that was because he had sawn it off trying to make a table. He’d never been to war, and I thought less of him for it and I think the Zayde did too.’

  I imagined the Zayde, ancient or ageless, his moustache trembling with fury.

  ‘I didn’t much like being a cabinet maker’s boy,’ said Jimmy. ‘I fancied myself as a singer, or a boxer. Then I got knocked out by Rebecca McGilligan – I think I’ve told you about that – and decided to swim to New Zealand and start my life again. But the Tasman Sea’s a big bugger, as I might’ve known if the Zayde’d let me finish school. There didn’t seem any point in starting a new life in Botany, so I caught a bus and a tram home, and the Zayde walloped me into next week.’

  I wondered if he had brought me to the beach to tell me this.

  ‘I came down here because I wanted to look at the ocean,’ said Jimmy, ‘because the ocean’s where it all started. We left by sea, and we came back the same way.’

  Jimmy gazed at the water then suddenly lurched forward and pointed.

  ‘Do you see that?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t see anything but waves.

  ‘A swimmer,’ he said, ‘way out there.’

  There was nothing.

  ‘It’s him!’ shouted Jimmy, and pushed me aside. He ran onto the beach, dropping his cap, splattering sand up his legs. He sprinted to the water’s edge, shouting words I couldn’t understand. I chased after him then, when I realised he was going to run into the ocean. I tried to cut in front of him. He crashed into me, tripped, but kept on running, like a forward pressing towards the line. When he reached the sea, he kicked off his shoes and waded in, waving his arms above his head and calling out, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’