He rings me that night. ‘Daddy, my Gameboy is in your car and I need it for tomorrow for a competition to beat Henry.’
I hear her Ross in falsetto in the background. ‘Please bring it round, Daddy. I’m only half an hour into a six hour whinge.’
‘I’ll be round soon,’ I tell Dan.
As I idle at red lights on the way to Helen’s I fiddle with his Gameboy. I press the button that brings up the boast sheet. Top score is ‘D.C. 52 000.’ All the top scores are by D.C. apart from third place, which is ‘H.B. 35 000’. H.B. has to be the Hermann Brandt H.B. of alleged war criminal status in our living room.
He’s snuffed 35 000 of the little shadows I’ve never been able to waste more than 12 000 of. His old trigger-finger still honed sharp. Him still knowing how far to lead any moving thing.
In an age where Gameboy-deftness is one of the few ways of getting admired by your son, Hermann has made me look inept. My only options now for Dan’s respect are to become a dreadnought full forward or a seven-foot black man able to slam-dunk in diving boots.
I have the TV on. Humphrey Bear with the sound down. It’s my man in Wellington’s twenty-ninth day. I get through to the Hilton in that city.
‘Room 516,’ I say.
‘You want the coroner?’ the receptionist asks.
‘Coroner? Room 516,’ I say.
‘That’s where the coroner is,’ she says. ‘There’s been a tragedy up there.’
‘What happened?’
‘Someone died up there. O.Ded. Anally or some vile new way. You want to speak to the coroner? Leave a message?’
The TV news breaks into Humphrey Bear’s mimed lust for chocolate cake. I hang-up on New Zealand without saying anything.
Men wearing cameras have Hermann and Ruth surrounded, herding them down the court steps. Other men are goading them with microphones and questions. They walk with chins high, tentatively, like they’re blind, expecting a pole or a wall in the face, feeling their way. Unaware of the hubbub of insult being danced around them. Ignoring the world.
Hermann is defiant in my worst tie. A tie Helen gave me for a thank you after a sexy, walls-aren’t-thick-enough weekend in a motel on the coast. A seventies width covered with insults of colour. I wasn’t sure if she was saying I was brave out there beyond fashion or I was the kind of Small-Town that just wouldn’t know. It was made in Italy like the girl I was seeing at the time, so I was too guilty to wear it. It not being the tie for the low-profile of a self-disgusted man.
I turn up the volume. Hermann and Ruth descend the steps as the voice-over announces a permanent stay of proceedings due to a terminal cancer of the accused. The voice compares his fragile lungs with the over-healthy, drawn-out appeal process.
They zoom in to Ruth. She’s staring straight at me. At me alone, as if other people’s sets are still on Humphrey and the problem of getting a puppet to eat cake. She ignores their questions and they cut back to Humphrey wiping his mouth with a napkin.
It’s what I’ve been wondering about all day. I go for the note I found on the kitchen bench and have read three times without understanding. I read it again.
Andy,
We weren’t going to take this route. We frankly believe it’s immoral. And certainly not the vindication Hermann needs in his heart. But when you moved Dan away we saw letting justice run wasn’t an option. The verdict was well-and-truly fucking-well in. Thanks, at least, for that.
Ruth.
I read it twice. It dawning on me a guilty man would have played his cancer card long before this to stay away from court and truth.
I want Dan back now. His living out there suburban with Helen being the sign of my faithlessness, I want him home. I need him sat TV-transfixed when Ruth gets here. My redemption. Ready to stab-pass his Sherrin into that concave sternum while it’s still overhung by obscene tie.
I call Helen. Manoeuvre her onto the phone by a secret ring Dan told me her Ross uses. Three rings, hang up, ring again.
‘Hi, darling. Any luck with those arseholes?’ she asks in a voice steamed enough by her mid-afternoon shower to get her naked in my mind.
‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘What arseholes?’
‘Oh … Andy? I thought it was Ross.’
‘No, it’s me. I’m coming to pick up Dan, if that’s okay.’
There’s a long silence.
‘It’s not. Not at all. I’ve just woken up to who’s living with you. I’ve heard Dan’s stories of kick-to-kick with your superstar Nazi. And he’s not going back to that, I can tell you. What’s got into you?’
‘There’s no Nazis here,’ I say. ‘There’s only Ruth’s grandfather. The first old person Dan’s ever liked, by the way.’
‘A famous Nazi,’ she says. ‘You irresponsible bastard.’
‘That’s just an accusation, Helen.’
‘It’s true, you are.’
‘Not the irresponsible part. The Nazi part. That’s just an accusation.’
‘I’ve seen the headlines, Andrew. And I’ve reconsidered what’s in Dan’s interests. I’m going to court for custody. Don’t come round here.’ There’s silence as she finds she has no threat to back up that demand, then she hangs up.
I know from men friends gone before me the family court will be a place of loss and disappointment. With her pointing me out as the man who came up with the ‘I smoke because I’m an in-your-face kind of guy’ campaign that put a deadly glitch in the falling graph on teenage cigarette use. And if she gets wind of my man in Wellington she could make that sound unsavoury, too. And as the finisher, with wet eyes she’ll tell the judge I’ve had Dan bonding with a big name in atrocity.
All I can counter her with is my theory that no kid should be brought up in the back half of a women’s magazine, working to an astrological schedule, suffering under three day diets, surrounded by mud-packed faces steeped in the lust to live as many lives as Liz Taylor.
It’s not enough.
Maybe it’s best Dan’s out suburban today. If he was here in a blue sky like this he’d be in our alley looking for the other end of a kick-to-kick partnership. And it couldn’t do him any good to see his father stalking the bluestone, calling up at sweatshops and warehouses and into cafe backs. Stunned by the sudden confiscation of his boy. Laying some blame.
Calling to the point of voice-break. ‘You prejudging turds. You conclusion-jumping fuckers. A knuckle-boner. You Hitler-yelling arseholes. A knuckleboner.’
Over and over. His vision starting to swim. Even in this desperate moment flattering himself this might be how God feels, trying to hammer home the message too late to save his son. Sobs opening up hiccup-deep in his shouts. People edging windows and doors closed. Staring down through glass.
T.K.O.
AFTER THE near-death experience we go to a pub for a few steadiers. We take stools at the bar. All we have left of the experience is its echo. Tyres yelping, mounting kerb and bouncing back across bitumen as he swears through teeth. And headlights. Headlights angling hard toward us.
We knock back two quick whiskies each before we can talk.
‘That was a near, near thing,’ I say.
‘The roads are death-traps today,’ he says.
It’s true. They are.
We were coming back from the Rollins concert and the ex-middleweight was driving. The photographer always drives. I was punching a five-hundred-word piece into my laptop, and trying to get some of the barbarity of a Rollins event into it when some speeding fool comes scything across onto our side of the road in a head-on promise of death. The ex-middleweight braked us sideways, took us round a lamppost, eased us back down off two wheels, tapered the fish tails, and hit top gear again within fifty metres. Space and time stretched and slowed to where he needed them to be.
I’m damned if I could have done it. But he’s been a good athlete. He fought out a forty-five, two, and four career as a middleweight. A record you could quote with your dying breath. And he hasn’t lost the old skills, the ability to
duck and to weave and to slit his eyes and cope. He can drive in a crisis, I’ll give him that.
It’s his driving that gets us out in the open. His making this only a near-death experience. Because with his perfect driving the ex-middleweight sees himself my saviour. And he feels in an elevated position where he can broach this subject we’ve danced around.
‘You know I’m doin’ Jane?’ he asks.
My breath shallows out and my stomach hollows. I’m silent for a long time with him watching me. Then I begin to get buoyed by finally knowing it’s him. And knowing Jane’s mind is way beyond anything his could offer. Knowing I only have to wait.
‘You know?’ he asks.
‘I know, Bryan,’ I lie. ‘She likes outings. She visits the zoo. What can I do?’
‘I’m not any zoo visit, Jack. I’m a safari forever. She’s as gone from you as she can be,’ he tells me. And he leans back and drains his whisky and points his Nikon at me and fires it into my face. I’m sightless with light.
In my blindness I tell him, ‘Bryan, I’ve hated smalltime sporting greats ever since they used to choose me last on the lunchtime scratch teams at state school. Your only redeeming feature is you’ve got no claim on women of substance. No claim at all.’
I open my eyes. The room is washed orange and he’s close. He asks me if I reckon the stuff he makes her say when she’s reaching her moment in the cot is not a claim. He asks me if that’s not claim enough. Or maybe I haven’t heard her speak in tongues, he suggests. Maybe she only loses her marbles for him. He leans back away from me.
The muscle that clicks on and off, pumping the tic at the left corner of my mouth is working overtime. A tiny, idiot muscle, dobbing me in for strong emotion.
‘Your face’s jumping, Jack,’ he says. He leans in close again, looking. ‘What is that you got happening there on your face?’ he wants to know. ‘Is that a mean motherfucker act?’
I smile because it’s the only way I know to stop my tic.
‘It was a mean motherfucker act,’ he says laughing. ‘It was. A mean motherfucker act.’
One hot night in our first summer Jane and I were driving up the Goulburn Valley Highway after I’d covered a late concert. Going to see my olds on the Murray. Nearing Tocumwal we came across an old cocky screwed into a redgum-wrapped Holden wreck. Lying there in near-delirium and near-sobriety, his hip turned into a bag of small change, and him crying to God and neighbours, but neither within cooee.
He was a dairy farmer weaving home from a late closer. He’d missed a turn in his late run. I left Jane comforting him in the cicada-dark and I drove on to get an ambulance.
When I got back to tell them help was on its way they were in hysterics. Laughter unbridled. Laughter a tide over all pain. Cicadas quelled by its tenacity. I could in no way break in on their little ring of hilarity. I put it down to the nightmare whiff of petrol in the air.
Later, when the emergency people arrived and outranked us and we left, she told me what had happened. He had been cracking brave little jokes to perforate his pain. And at one point she said, ‘You know, you’re a really funny man.’
He slowed his moans. ‘No. I used to be,’ he said. ‘Until tragedy struck … again and again … like a taipan.’
She started to laugh, and he found he had to follow — even twisted into his wreck and speaking of tragedy as he was, he laughed. Most people’s laughter wouldn’t have caught. But hers did. She’s a natural leader in matters of emotion. Others can’t help but catch her laughter or her tears. It’s maybe something to do with envying how deep she can get into an emotion. Wanting to get there too.
They laughed-off the death of his wife, his daughter’s thrice-broken marriage, milk scour, brucellosis, mortgage foreclosure, salination, and his car crash. All the time dragging in fumes through their unlit cigarettes. Him joking she should just flick him a light and run.
It was dark the whole time and he never even saw her. But he never stopped writing to her. Christmas cards, little farm-life bulletins from the dairy belt, corny jokes about finding an antivenene for the bite of the taipan that is life. Every time one would arrive in the mail it would remind me how she could blind a man. She did it to him in a car wreck in an hour. Imagine what she could do to a man who shared her bed night after night. Imagine what she’s done to me.
Her mind is one of her beauties. She is also a beautiful woman straight up, to the eye. That beauty’s how she landed the case of Lester Carlos.
She had a job with the Equal Opportunities Board. She was a catch for them, having topped the soft side of Law at Monash. She was working directly for the Commissioner. The first few months she left her hair unkempt and her face unmade and dressed like a lesbian. She’d march round-shouldered into court like a down-at-heel Hepburn. Either one. Trying like hell to give the women around her her opportunities. But there aren’t many truly self-deprecatory people in the world — Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa, maybe — and before long she felt the need to spruce herself up again. Collar-bones exposed, shoulders back, long limbs unsheathed.
The Opportunities people began to find her presence, her beauty, hard to take around the office after that. She was shouting in the face of their profundity. Pretty soon she and the Commissioner fell out over things skin-deep, and she left.
Not being able to deny her beauty she decided to use it to build a practice. She trailed her coat up and down the remand centre in the city. Wore high-heels that echoed in the heads of the prisoners hours after she’d gone. Men in there started using her just so they could get close to her. One of the first was the one-time middleweight contender, Lester Carlos.
Lester was accused of clearing a Fitzroy bar with his fists, which were then registered under state law as dangerous weapons. Her defence was that a hand can’t be made into a fist if it is holding anything of size, and as Lester was holding a pool cue two-handed at the time, he couldn’t be guilty of using his fists.
The police could see the sense in going for Lester with the pool cue charge rather than the lesser fist charge. They took the offered bait. They admitted that, yes, his hands weren’t made into fists. But when they went for Lester with the pool cue charge they found they couldn’t locate the said item, though they searched high and low. And without ‘Exhibit A’ they had no case.
Jane had ‘Exhibit A’ leaning against our bed head. A trophy. On drunk nights she’d fondle it and swing it like a Waugh twin before climbing into bed. Lester’s acquittal raised a lot of eyebrows into a lot of wigs around magistrates’ chambers off Russell Street. He threw a party for Jane in bewildered admiration of the low art of the woman. And his party, some years back, was where I met him.
I tell about Lester because he is the man I turn to now. Because I remember what he did to the ex-middleweight when they fought. I remember how Lester beat him so badly he never fought again. How it shouldn’t have been so. It absolutely shouldn’t have been so, given their career paths. But Lester just seemed to break his heart with a collection of unfocussed punches. Broke him for boxing and made him a photographer. How was it done?
I run Lester to earth in a pub in Richmond. He’s doing the stories-for-drinks thing, stories being the only currency he has left. He’s the debris of a feared man. I buy the rounds. I tell him my tale. I tell him I’m up against the same man he turned to mush. And I ask him for the mush-turning secret. I tell him I’m terrified of losing Jane.
‘Bryan Wigan with Jane?’ he asks. ‘I can’t believe it’s legal … let alone true. We’ve got to put our heads together in prayer, Jack. If you pray, and I pray, the both of us pray, our prayers will outweigh his and carry real freight with our Lord. And our Lord won’t give him a look-in with our Jane. He won’t get nowhere with her.’
I see it’s too much to hope for more from him than prayer. He’s on the wrong side of a hundred beatings. In the late twentieth century God’s taken just as many. They’re arm-in-arm at the bar in drunken commiseration. Lester can’t help me. I shout a lea
ving round. Raise my pot high in a disappointed toast. I shouldn’t have come here with hopes of magic from this man. But I’m a cuckold at the height of his bewilderment. Grasping at the straws cuckolds are known to grasp at.
As we drink he says, ‘Course, Manny Ghan helped me do him over.’
I ask him who the hell is Manny Ghan.
‘Manny Ghan is the bloke Bryan killed in the Territory, when he was fightin’ outta Darwin. An abo. Was the ref’s fault, not Bryan’s. Ref let him take beyond what a man can. Let Bryan give him too many unanswered shots. And old Bryan felt Manny die … right friggin’ there.’ Lester holds up his atrocious hands. ‘On his gloves. You never lose the feel of the punches that done that. So the night we fight, every time we clinch I whisper to him, “I’m the ghost of Manny Ghan.” Said it to bring the feel of Manny’s killin’ up front of his mind. “I’m the ghost of Manny Ghan. I’m the ghost of Manny Ghan.” And every time I said it I got stronger … or he got weaker, which amounts to the same. Every time I said it some muscle drained outta him and into me … till I was whackin’ him for the both of us. That Manny Ghan thing really breaks him down.’
This is the sort of magic I’d hoped for from Lester. I think maybe I’ll reincarnate this Manny Ghan. Because I know if I mention him to Jane as an innocent victim of her barbarian she’ll end the affair. She could in no way stand for sleeping with a killer. So I thank Lester for the chat and I store the ghost of Manny Ghan for when the time is right. The other thing I do, now that I know he’s killed a man with his hands, is start carrying a knife.
Jane’s first defence when she realises I know everything is to say we’ve always been an open arrangement, we’ve considered options is what’s made us feel so free. It’s true. We have considered, and spurned, options. The considering was only ever there because it made the spurning so righteous. It existed only for that.
There was a time our friends were tossing their car keys into the hat and driving each other’s partners home and wild. We didn’t toss our keys. We were too in love. Even peer-pressure mixed with lust and liquor wasn’t enough concoction to break us down. I could have had many a scenario if I could have stood the thought of her stripped down by a pair of lust-glazed eyes not mine. But if that game was back in fashion I still couldn’t toss the keys.
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