Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  As shown clearly on the plan, the bathroom was to be ten foot by ten foot, and the present bathroom, six foot by six foot, would be the entrance area with washbasin. I came back to find Max had got the ten-by-ten part right; the problem was he made the bath ten-by-ten. All hand-moulded, shaped, and cement-rendered, ready for tiling the next day. He was so proud of the mini swimming pool he had created. ‘What about the shower, and where can we walk?’ I asked. He got an inkling that maybe he had made a mistake, and immediately switched to the ‘I no understand’ mode.

  Well, space was one thing we weren’t short of, so we removed a few more walls to provide the walking space, and shower, and ended up with a very large bathroom. I think the bath has only been full a few times in twenty years. Well, let’s face it, if you want to swim, you use the pool: it’s already full.

  We had friends visiting, and their two children went into the bathroom for a shower, came rushing out to tell their mother that we had an indoor swimming pool!

  From then on I had to be an on-site supervisor, or at least check hourly. Max was a tiler by trade, and working in bathrooms, it was okay for him to indulge his passion for tiling. But I had to watch him carefully on any other job because he was likely to put tiles anywhere. If you let him, he would tile a bedroom!

  It was highly stressful having Max working in the house, because of the alcohol problem. For peace of mind I put the liquor under padlock, but this still didn’t help.

  One day Max was working on a sandstone wall near the kitchen, right under my nose, so I thought all would be okay. The wall was solid sandstone and progress was very slow. He was approaching the top of the wall after four days, and had to erect scaffolding to enable him to finish the top. It was afternoon tea time, and I was about to make the tea. Max had been very chirpy most of the day, which was unusual; usually he had constant complaints about something—the stones were the wrong colour, or too small, or too large, the cement too old, too wet, drying too fast, and so on. But not this day. I asked him if he would like a cup of tea. He said he would—and then walked straight off the end of the scaffolding and landed face-down with a sickening ‘splat’!

  Silence followed, after I dropped the cup of tea and let out a scream. I stared at the motionless, spread-eagled shape on the cement floor. He had to be dead!

  I rushed over and called his name; no response! I felt the pulse in his neck: it was thumping, his wrist was even stronger. So he was still alive; how, I don’t know. I carefully turned him over, and this seemed to rouse him. The alcohol fumes overwhelmed me as he muttered, ‘Whas-sa-madder?’ He was as drunk as a skunk! I reeled back in shock. My eyes went straight to the store room door: the oversized padlock was still in place. I helped Max to sit on a stool, but he kept falling off because he was so intoxicated. I tired of helping him off the floor, so the next time he fell, I let him stay there. At least he couldn’t do himself any more damage.

  Soon some of the stockmen arrived and carried him down the flat to his room in the staff quarters, so he could sleep it off. Whatever ‘it’ was, I still had to discover. I opened the padlock on the store room door, and went to the liquor shelf. The alcohol was kept on the very top shelf at the back, so you had to climb a ladder to reach it. This was because it wasn’t past Dick to ask if he could look for a special washer he needed among the miscellaneous parts stored in the store room, and take a few quick nips of any bottle he could lay his hands on. He knew it embarrassed me to have to stand guard all the time he was in the store room, and it was equally embarrassing to keep going in and out pretending I needed something for cooking.

  So I climbed the ladder, and above the liquor shelf I found a neat hole cut in the ceiling. One half-gallon flagon of rum was all but empty.

  All day, it appears, Max had been crawling across the ceiling and drinking at will from the top shelf. No wonder he didn’t hurt himself when he walked off the end of the scaffolding! He wasn’t capable of coordinating any muscles, so was completely relaxed when he fell.

  A patch was nailed over the hole and the liquor moved down to the next shelf. Not that this move stopped them trying, or solved the problem. The portion of the wall built that day would put the Leaning Tower of Pisa to shame. When sober, Max was most upset that he had built a crooked wall. He was a perfectionist about his work, and wanted to knock down the top half of the wall, and rebuild it.

  ‘No way!’ I told him. It stayed. I didn’t mind it being slightly out of line; it was a thick, double wall, and only the very top was crooked, so I figured once the ceiling went in it would be hardly noticeable. But every now and again I will see a man sitting in the kitchen trying to decide if he has had a bit too much to drink, or if, indeed, the wall he’s looking at is leaning!

  We had some funny times with our dedicated drinking mob! Well, maybe they are funnier when you look back; at the time they usually were exasperating, and often a lot of more explicit words could be used to describe my feelings.

  We had not seen Max for quite a few years when we decided to go into the tourist trade; it was around 1989. We needed some improvements to our guest rooms if we were thinking of having paying guests. So I started sending out feelers to track Max down. It wasn’t hard to find him; he was seldom far from Darwin, or a pub, except when he came to Bullo. It was arranged for a friend driving to Kununurra to pick Max up at the appointed pub, and bring him to Bullo. Max smoked more than he drank; our friend didn’t like cigarette smoke in his car. There was an exchange of hostile words; the friend felt he was doing Max a favour driving him five hundred miles to our very door. And Max’s attitude was that the man was his chauffeur—which didn’t go down too well with this particular friend. Max went back to smoking and drinking at the bar, and the friend travelled to Kununurra alone.

  I arranged a second attempt to get Max to Bullo, and he just didn’t show. At this point he seemed to vanish. I couldn’t track him to any of his regular haunts, so I left messages everywhere, knowing eventually he would surface. We had five or six months’ leeway, needed when dealing with Max, so if I didn’t find him in the next three months, I would have to make other plans.

  About right on the deadline, I received a telephone call asking me if I knew a person called —; I cannot pronounce the name without three or four attempts, and wouldn’t even try to spell it. I told the caller, very definitely, no! He went on to say this man had worked for me. I assured him if someone of that name had worked for me, I would remember. We hung up. He called back the next day very determined to convince me that this man had been in my employ. I was tiring of this situation, and asked him who he was, and what was his purpose in establishing this fact.

  He was a doctor at the Darwin Hospital, and the second call was to say that this man, whose name with all the letters of the alphabet arranged in the most difficult combinations, was known to me as Max! No wonder he called himself Max! So that was how I found out where Max had been for the last three months, and why he didn’t arrive at the second arranged pick-up place.

  The night before, he had been drinking in a bar with a mob of mates, and a fight broke out. One man called another in the group a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, in a relatively friendly manner. Because of the man’s customs and beliefs, this remark was considered an insult to his mother! Unfortunately for the man who made the remark, and eventually for Max, the insulted man was the size of a bear; he ripped the leg off a nearby table and thumped the man who had insulted his mum over the head with it. After he thumped him a second time, Max stepped in and said he shouldn’t do that, so he thumped Max on the head. Well, this is the story Max eventually told me! Whatever did happen, the result was that Max and the other man both ended up in hospital. His mate had more serious injuries than Max. Max received a steel plate in his head, replacing the shattered bone that was once his cranium.

  The doctor had called me because Max really needed to be in a home, to be looked after. His hospitalisation was over; they could not do any more for him. The problem was, the hospital had to
discharge him into a convalescent home, or into someone’s care. Max wouldn’t go into a home, and suddenly all his friends didn’t seem to be around. So he told the doctor to call Bullo and say he would live there. I travelled to Darwin to see Max.

  The doctor carefully explained Max’s injuries and I was bracing myself to see a vegetable sitting in a room waiting for me. The doctor had said that most of the time Max didn’t know who he was or where he was, didn’t know things like what day it was or what month, and couldn’t do simple tests like putting pegs in the right holes, couldn’t read newspapers—the list went on and on. I seriously doubted if Max would be able to come back to Bullo with me.

  I asked the doctor if he could feed himself, bath and dress. This wasn’t the problem by a long shot. It seemed that Max was quite capable of shinnying down the drainpipe from the second floor each night to go on a drinking bender, and return to the hospital in the morning to sleep off his hangover! This sounded more like the Max I knew. He was starting to be a complete nuisance at the hospital, ordering the nurses around, and generally treating the place as a hotel.

  The doctor on the one hand wanted to tell me all about Max’s dreadful behaviour, and on the other hand, not divulge too much because he wanted to discharge him into my care. So he was in a quandary. Little did he realise, nothing, absolutely nothing he cared to relate of Max’s behaviour would surprise me. I was concerned about his injuries, though, and told the doctor I would sit and talk to Max, and see if I thought we could look after him at Bullo and work out a programme that would keep him busy and occupied, in a reasonably happy state of mind.

  I braced myself to meet this new Max. The doctor directed me into the room. There sat Max, thinner than I had ever seen him; his thick unruly mop of silver-white hair had been shaved off for the operation on his skull, so he looked strange with only an inch or so of hair in the old Kramer hairstyle. His usual dark suntan had faded to a pallor which increased his look of being unwell.

  His dull, bored eyes brightened as he recognised me. He ushered the doctor out of the room in a fussy intolerant manner, closed the door, and started talking ten to the dozen; he was still going strong an hour later. I got the fight in the bar in vivid detail, many times, along with various stories about ten thousand dollars in cash that he had in his pocket before being thumped, and didn’t have when he came back to consciousness. The story was never the same, but somewhere in the variations, there was always a woman who could only be described as a cross between Lucrezia Borgia and the devil. Where she came into the sequence of events even Max couldn’t tell you, but she was there in every version, and she, as far as I could comprehend, took the ten grand. Most of that first hour he spent telling me to go and get his money back. No words could convince him that if he didn’t know who she was, or where, in his long journey from Darwin Hospital to Adelaide for an operation, and back, he had encountered her, that I couldn’t be expected to find her. Especially with the description Max gave me! This character would only hang out in the house of horrors.

  I finally got him to stop raving about her, and at that stage I agreed with the doctor about his mental condition: he appeared very seriously disturbed. I steered him onto a more peaceful subject, I thought, by asking him about his stay in the hospital. Well, off he went again!

  ‘Idiots, all idiots! You gotta get me outa dis place!’ He became very confidential: ‘E-e-e-a-a-r-rr, you see dat one I push outa the door, see him?’

  I nodded, knowing he meant the doctor.

  ‘’E mad! Every day ’e say, “Who me?” The first few days, I say “You doctor”. He never remember! Next day ’e ask, “Who me?” I get sick of telling him who ’e is, so I say, “Don’t know, go ask someone else!”’ He continued, ‘’E so bad, they pin ’is name to his shirt! Y-e-r-r! You look next time!’ He sat for a few minutes staring at the wall, tired from continuous chatter, but pushing himself because he had to tell me all.

  ‘They are all mad here, all ask “Who me?” Most of them have to have their names on their shirt.’

  ‘Dis one,’ and he acted out a pushing motion, ‘he says “What day?” I tell him. Next time I see him, “What day?” I get tired of silly question, so I say to him “Don’t know.” Stupid man, has to be told ten times a day, what day it is!’

  ‘If he don’ ask the stupid question, he wan me put sticks in holes all day. ’E ask if he can puta the square wood in the round hole. Stupid! I tell him, y-a-r, go ahead. You can do it.’

  ‘’E not the only one, they all mad, all play with those sticks. ’E tell me to read papers, but no have the glasses; how to see without glasses!’

  All this chatter cleared up the doctor’s assessment of Max’s severe brain damage. He was the same as he always was, stubborn, intolerant, impatient, and refusing to take orders from someone younger than himself.

  I fought to keep a serious expression while listening to Max’s tales of woe. I wanted so much to burst into laughter. Here was the same rascal, slightly vaguer than before the accident, but still very much the same Max we had always known.

  When the doctor asked me how I found Max, I said, ‘Much the same as he always was, before the accident.’ The doctor protested and said surely not; how would he fail all the tests? When I told him Max’s reasons for giving stupid answers or not answering at all, and said that Max was angry because the doctor expected him to read without glasses, the doctor wanted to know why he didn’t ask for glasses. Max’s reply when I asked that same question had been, ‘’E’s the smart one; ’e should know!’

  The doctor walked away shaking his head, thankful he didn’t have too many like Max through the system. And hoping against hope he could discharge him into my care!

  We took Max home to Bullo. He soon realised he couldn’t play on his illness with pleas like, ‘I sick, I need lotsa beer’, which were received in stony silence. And threats of, ‘I leave’ were met with, ‘Go ahead, I’ll call the hospital and tell them to expect you.’ He finally settled down to being his normal impossible self.

  We started work; it was then I realised I didn’t have the Max of old. He could only do a few hours a day. I told him to take it slowly, and he gradually built up his strength. The vagueness was very evident when working, and I almost had to be his constant supervisor/assistant. He would put a tool down and forget where. In the middle of working, he would walk off and not come back. But we persevered, and he slowly improved. He was keen to get back to his old self; he would even come and ask me what job he was doing, if he had a memory lapse.

  One of the funniest situations was when we were ready to tile the new bathrooms. If he was doing the same thing each day, he could stay on track fairly well, but switching jobs was difficult. It took a whole day to get him off the plastering track and onto gluing the tiles on the wall. But eventually we made progress.

  I gathered the tiles, tools, various buckets needed for the job. He demanded bags of powdered glue, tile spacers, tile cutters, grouting, all the things he needed to tile the walls. After all the equipment was assembled he checked for the hundredth time, before he was satisfied. I thankfully departed, knowing that to Max tiling was a natural reflex, he didn’t have to think. Just put him in front of a wall, give him the tiles and tools, and he would start tiling.

  He was at my side in the kitchen within ten minutes. He was most upset; it seemed the glue was no good, and he could not stick the tiles on the wall. He didn’t like the glue.

  In vain, I told him the glue was new, only bought one week ago; I showed him the invoice and date, but to no avail. ‘No good the glue’ was all I could get out of him. I finally told him I would get more glue in a few days; in the meantime, go away.

  The next lot of glue arrived—with the same result. ‘No good the glue!’ I finally worked out the problem. The glue was okay; he didn’t like the brand. The twenty-kilo bags had a picture on the front; the brand he liked only had printing. He had spent three days objecting to a picture! We had to buy more glue and grouting of the ri
ght brand; when he finished a bag of the approved brand, I swapped the glue and grouting from the pictured bags into the other bags. I thought I had solved the problem …

  ‘No good the glue!’ What now? I wondered. I followed him into the bathroom he was tiling. I could see us years down the track still tiling the four bathrooms.

  The problem this time was that he was trying to stick the tiles on with a mixture of grouting powder, not glue powder. But again, in vain, I tried to get this across to him.

  ‘You no tella me how to sticka the tile on da wall!’

  ‘I’m not! I’ma tellin’ you, you’re usin’ the wrong stuff!’ Now I was talking like him.

  ‘You don’ know nothin’!’ he shouted.

  ‘Ditto!’ came my reply as I stamped out. I was ready to give up. He was just too hard to work with. It was impossible to get a simple fact across.

  Then an idea came to me. I had swapped the bags because he didn’t like pictures; why not again? For some reason known only to Max, he suddenly had decided that the grouting powder was the tile glue, even though the word ‘grouting’ was clearly printed on the bag. Why waste time appealing to logic? I would swap the bags again. I gave Max a beer to keep him occupied, and told him to go and sit in the sun and have a cigarette.

  I emptied the twenty kilos of grouting out of its bag onto some paper, emptied the glue powder into the grouting bag, and quickly shovelled the glue into the grouting bag. Put everything as it was, then went and found Max. I told him I had found another bag of good glue this time, to come and try it.

  ‘I’ve beena thinking.’ Oh no! I thought, I don’t believe it! I looked at him in horror. Yes, it had finally sunk into that brain.

  ‘You right, I use-a the wrong bag!’

  And with that he picked up the glue bag, now filled with grouting powder, and said, ‘I now use this bag, tile stick very good.’

  My mind went through the horrors of trying to explain to Max what I had done, or better still, find a story to cover what I had done! I took the easy way out. ‘Have another beer, Max.’