Happy as Larry

by Scot Gardner

  Before Mal could finish his sentence, Larry’s body bucked and a fountain of beery fish-curry vomit erupted from his rosebud mouth. He vomited until there was nothing left in his stomach.

  His parents stared, open-mouthed.

  Larry burped, grinned, and toppled sideways.

  BIRTHDAY

  WHILE THE MONTHS of the pregnancy had felt like an eternity to Denise, Larry’s first birthday seemed to arrive on wings. He’d taken his first unassisted step at the age of eleven months and four days, the very day the South African parliament repealed its apartheid laws. By his birthday, his record was thirteen unaided steps in a row – the full width of the lounge. His party was a rowdy affair attended by a surprising number of church ladies and postal workers. They sampled Mal’s latest home-brew and polished off all the fairy bread and cocktail frankfurts. Mr Montanetti from next door and Dominic Evans, the hairdressing postman, turned the rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ into an operatic extravaganza that had one of the church ladies swooning and calling for more beer. Stan Ward (postie) and his wife Anita arrived just after the cake had been cut. They, like all the others, had brought gifts, and Larry went from owning one stuffed rabbit to owning a veritable ark of stuffed animals, a toy piano and a red plastic tractor with blue wheels. Red-headed Anita Ward looked familiar to Denise but it wasn’t until she started talking about her work as a manager at the local supermarket that Denise realised why.

  While leaving her son behind had been a significant moment in Denise’s life, it seemed not to figure in Anita’s consciousness. She showed no glimmer of recognition. She did talk passionately and knowledgeably about international cinema, however, and Denise found herself agreeing to attend the next meeting of the Villea Foreign Film Club.

  When the guests had left and little Larry was asleep, Mal and Denise slumped onto the couch and held hands. Denise’s sigh said it all. It may not have been a significant moment in the history of the world, but Larry’s first birthday felt to her like a huge milestone. They had food on the table and money in the bank. They’d started to count Larry’s life in years, not months. They’d all survived.

  CLEAN

  WHITE

  TEETH

  ON WEDNESDAYS, WHEN Denise went to film club, Larry and Mal would play hide and seek, chasey and pillow-fights until bedtime. One particular Wednesday, when Larry was two, slipping around on the polished wooden floor in bedsocks evolved into a kind of toddler bowling. Larry, in pyjamas, would be cast by his father the length of the lounge room on his belly, only to be dashed against a foam couch placed in front of the wall. He laughed so hard and so long after each impact that he would see stars.

  But from every riotous game there was a descent into calm, a brushing of teeth, a retreat to the nursery and a story before sleep. There was a full bookshelf in Larry’s room, but he only liked one book: Maurice the Mower. Again and again.

  Shortly before Larry’s fourth birthday, while Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, the Rainbows’ world took an unexpected blow.

  Larry woke in the night, as he occasionally did, and instead of putting himself back to sleep, he slipped out of his big-boy bed and felt his way along the darkened hall and into his parents’ room.

  ‘Mal?’ he whispered. ‘Daddy?’

  His father snored on, but Denise sprang like a mousetrap at the sound of her little boy’s voice. She almost toppled the bedside lamp, grabbed it by the neck and lit up the room.

  ‘What is it? Oh my God,’ she cried.

  ‘What? What is it?’ Mal jerked awake.

  ‘Fire,’ Denise cried. ‘There’s a fire.’

  The hall danced with an orange glow.

  Mal threw back the covers and ran low to the doorway. Denise swept up her son and was about to follow when Mal slammed the bedroom door shut and herded his family to the window. One kick with his bare foot removed the flywire.

  From another part of the house came the sound of breaking glass. Mal lowered his wife and son safely into the garden, then scrambled through the window himself. Running in a low crouch, with Denise gripping Larry tight, they made their way to the middle of Fishburn Street and turned to see the rear of the house seriously ablaze.

  Mr Montanetti was with them in a flash. He’d seen the flames and called the fire brigade.

  ‘Okay? Everybody all right?’

  The Rainbows, pyjama-clad and huddled together in the middle of the street, assured him they were fine.

  There was an explosion like a cannon.

  Mr Montanetti swore in Italian, and apologised.

  By the time the trucks arrived, the curtains in the front window had melted, sheets of roof tiles had plunged through the ceiling, and the whole street had come out to watch.

  It was a still night, and most of the smoke and flames went straight up. The firemen moved to protect the adjoining houses. Mr Montanetti dashed back to his own home and Denise spotted him later, still in his threadbare woollen dressing-gown, spraying the fence and the fire with the garden hose.

  Larry squirmed in his mother’s arms and called for Mal, who was talking with a man in yellow coveralls wearing a hard hat glowing with reflective tape.

  ‘Dad! Dad!’ He wriggled so much that Denise finally lowered him to the ground.

  Larry tugged urgently at Mal’s pyjama pants until the snow-white curve of Mal’s bottom appeared from the waistband.

  ‘What?’ Mal barked, a little more sternly than he’d meant to.

  Larry began to cry.

  Mal hoisted him up and kissed his soft cheek.

  ‘We’re okay,’ he said. ‘We’re all okay.’

  ‘He woke me up,’ Denise said. ‘Larry woke me up.’

  ‘Did you?’ Mal asked. ‘Did you wake Mum?’

  Larry said, ‘We forgot to brush our teeth!’

  His mum and dad laughed but the look they exchanged was both sombre and proud.

  Larry had saved their lives.

  They accepted Mr Montanetti’s offer of a bed and bunked at his place that night. Mr Montanetti didn’t have a pet, yet the spare room reeked of wet dog. And smoke. Larry slept on a nest of cushions on the floor while Mal and Denise spooned together on the single bed. They didn’t sleep. Firemen shouted to each other intermittently until the early hours. The house next door smouldered and creaked and hissed like a living thing. They hugged and Denise thanked the Lord. They whispered of the changes the fire would bring. All Mal’s work uniforms had perished; in fact, the clothes they were wearing were now the only ones they owned. All the photographs of Larry as a baby, Maurice the Mower, the film-club videos, the box of Denise’s dad’s 16 mm films, their wedding album. They’d all gone.

  Denise twisted her ring on her finger. ‘So much that can never be replaced.’

  Mal squeezed his wife. ‘They were only the imprints of the memories. We still have the memories.’

  ‘But what if I forget? What about Dad’s films?’

  Mal was silent for a moment. ‘Do you think you’ll forget Augustine now you don’t have his films?’

  ‘Well, no, but Larry never knew him.’

  ‘The pictures were just pictures. Give him what you have. Give him the stories. Paint him a memory.’

  Denise grew very still. She seemed to have stopped breathing. Then it all came out in a blustery sigh and Mal realised she was crying. There was nothing he could do. The pictures were gone. Everything was gone.

  No, not everything. The garage was still standing. The beer was still brewing. The mountains of junk, the bags of fishing gear, the freezer full of yesterday’s catch had not surrendered. Denise found a garbage bag full of winter clothing that had been propped in the roof trusses for storage and promptly forgotten.

  There were photos taped to the wall. Fishing photos mostly, but Larry was there in his little blue backpack, wearing his signature grin.

  Patrick Taylor – the landlord – arrived just before nine o’clock. Mal had called work to let them know what had happened and almost burst into
tears on the phone. When Patrick hugged him, he did cry. It was a dessertspoonful of grief they shared and it was over in seconds, but some part of Mal, some child smaller than his own boy, was suddenly making itself known, suddenly hungry.

  YOUR HEAD

  IS NOT A HAMMER

  LIVES ARE SOMETIMES in a hurry to change. On 17 June 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested under suspicion of killing his wife, and the Rainbows’ lives jump-cut to their own home on Condon Street. Their own home: a fifty-year-old newly renovated brick Californian bungalow, one street closer to the jetty than Fishburn. It was close enough that all the contents of the Fishburn Street garage could be transferred to the new garage using Mr Montanetti’s wheelbarrow – all, that is, except the freezer full of fish, which Stan Ward offered to move with his furniture truck. Mr Montanetti offered to give them the bed they’d been using at his place since the fire. Denise happily declined.

  The insurance money was more than they’d expected. They’d realised – in one flutter-hearted moment – that when combined with their savings it gave them enough for a deposit on a home of their own. The bank practically threw the loan at them, and while they wouldn’t have much change for furniture, Denise made sure there was money for new beds and linen – a luxurious new queen-size for Mal and herself, and a bunk with a desk underneath for Larry.

  The rooms echoed at the beginning of the housewarming, but word had got around about the fire. When Stan and Anita Ward arrived in the furniture van, horn blaring, there was more than the old freezer in the back. The team from the post office had put together a house-lot of old furniture between them – a couch and two cracked leather armchairs, a colour TV, boxes of kitchen essentials, a set of aluminium pots with red anodised lids, cutlery, crockery, towels, an old washing machine and a plastic shopping bag full of crocheted coathangers.

  The guests feasted on barbecued fishand the last salad from the Fishburn Street garden. For the first time since he’d started making his own, Mal was cleaned out of home-brew.

  Along one side of the Rainbows’ new house was a park. The festivities roused the interest of their neighbour on the other side. A head of silver hair and a pair of unapologetically blue eyes peered over the fence.

  Mal stepped up and extended his hand.

  ‘Get down, Vincent!’ Mal heard. It was a harsh whisper, almost a growl, coming from the other side of the fence.

  ‘Get down,’ came the voice again. But Vincent, he of the blue eyes, leaned further over the fence and reached for Mal’s hand.

  ‘Vince Hammersmith,’ he said.

  ‘Mal Rainbow.’

  The flyscreen on the neighbours’ back door slammed and a little dog began yapping and snarling at the palings. Mal knew dogs. A postman’s intuition. He could hear little claws raking at the timber and the picture in his head was of a mutt slightly less ferocious than a Christmas beetle.

  ‘Get down, Betsy,’ Vince said.

  ‘Would you like to come over and meet the family?’ Mal asked.

  At the sound of the postman’s voice, the dog lurched into a snapping frenzy that had all the intensity of a junkyard mongrel – a junkyard mongrel that had been sucking helium.

  Vince frowned, and seemed to kick out. The dog let out a single surprised yelp and stopped barking.

  ‘Vincent!’ came a muffled yell from inside the neighbours’ house. ‘I saw that.’

  ‘It was just a tap,’ Vince shouted. ‘She was getting a bit excited.’

  ‘Bring your wife?’ Mal asked.

  Vince frowned again. ‘I think Muriel is . . . already engaged.’

  Vince – a retired surveyor – was a good head taller than Malcolm, a stately gent, fit-looking and probably over seventy. He shook hands with Denise and little Larry, refused a glass of wine but accepted Denise’s offer of a tour of the house.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Mal said. ‘The barbecue calls.’

  Larry took Vince’s hand and dragged him through the small crowd to the laundry door.

  ‘Be gentle with him, Larry,’ Denise said, and followed them inside.

  The tour turned into a sideshow as the little boy, demonstrating his new bunk to the visitor, slipped off the top rung of the ladder, cracked his head on the desk and finished up bent over the chair wailing. Denise scooped him up and shushed in his ear, but an egg had already begun forming on his brow. Vince disappeared, returning a few minutes later with a packet of frozen peas wrapped in a teatowel. He placed it on Larry’s head and the boy promptly vomited sour fish and red soft-drink soup on him. Vince took a step back and caught most of the mess in his cupped hands. They frog-marched Larry to the bathroom and cleaned the vomit splash at the sink.

  ‘I think he may be a little concussed,’ offered Vince.

  Larry’s face was pale and the lump on his forehead had the purple smoothness of a river rock.

  ‘Nice introduction,’ Denise said. ‘Welcome to the house of Rainbow.’

  Vince gave an affable laugh.

  The moment ended as Anita Ward and two other maternal types crowded at the bathroom door. They clucked and moaned in sympathy at sight of the egg on Larry’s head.

  ‘Do you want a lift to Casualty?’ Vince asked, his voice cello-warm amid the women’s violins.

  Denise looked at Vince and again at her son. Suddenly the bump on the head seemed serious. As she waited for Vince to bring his ancient and rust-pocked white Peugeot to the nature strip in front of the house, words like ‘brain damage’ and ‘blood clot’ and ‘haemorrhage’ fanned her mounting sense of urgency.

  Mal appeared beside her. ‘What is it? What happened?’

  Denise put on a brave face. ‘It’s nothing. Larry bumped his head.’

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ she bluffed, as Vince’s car bumped the gutter. ‘Vince is taking us down to the hospital. Just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘I’ll come. I should come,’ Mal said. He opened the car door and it creaked like a haunted house.

  ‘No. It’s fine, Mal. Larry will be fine.’

  Denise felt his hand covering her head as she ducked into the passenger’s seat with the sniffling Larry on her lap. The door groaned as he shut it. He made the shape of a phone at her through the window. She nodded.

  The waiting room at Casualty was surprisingly empty and a doctor called Denise’s name less that a minute after she’d finished filling out the form.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ Vince said.

  Denise had only known the man for minutes, but he had the welcome presence of shade on a hot day, and her look implored him to come.

  ‘Of course,’ Vince said, with a smile.

  The doctor hoisted Larry onto a bench and examined him deftly.

  ‘You were lucky, Larry,’ he eventually said. ‘Just a bump.’

  He spoke to Denise and Vince as though they had equal share in Larry’s wellbeing, and Vince listened and nodded and played the part.

  In quiet reflection that evening, both Denise and Vince – in their separate houses – admitted to themselves that they seemed to be neighbours by design rather than happy coincidence. The transition from not knowing each other to knowing seemed so smooth and effortless, as though the spinning cogs of their respective worlds had drawn together and meshed with perfect synchronicity.

  Vince thanked providence.

  Denise thanked the Lord.

  Vince had found his daughter and Denise her father, and for them at least the jump-cut made sense.

  GRASS

  ON MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 1994, two things happened in the world that whispered of greater changes to come. A light aircraft crashed into the White House, and Mal Rainbow got a licence to drive a car. At thirty-two years of age, Mal was the oldest learner-driver his instructor had ever taught, though he assured Mal that colleagues had groomed sixty-year-old and seventy-year-old beginners. Mal knew the instructor was trying to make him feel better, but all he succeeded in doing was evoking a sickening feeling of inadequacy.
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br />   Mal passed his test but almost passed out when he was asked to parallel park.

  He didn’t want to own a car; he wanted opportunities. Stan Ward had invited him to drive his furniture van on Saturdays, making deliveries of whitegoods for Stan’s brother, and Mal jumped at the offer. The romance of owning a new home had faded and Mal found himself looking for ways to supplement his income; looking for a bigger hammer with which to chip away at the loan. Besides, being able to drive a car or a small truck made him infinitely more versatile as a postman.

  Denise couldn’t see how a licence would make her husband more versatile. She did see, however, that her man was less available for her and her father-hungry son.

  Denise and Larry made a ritual of spending the best part of Saturday mornings in the park, when the weather permitted, playing with the other kids from the neighbourhood. Denise recognised one of the park mums as someone from church. She brought her four kids to the park every Saturday morning, arriving before eight and leaving after a picnic lunch. She nodded to Denise but then buried her face in a magazine. The children, on the other hand, wasted no time in getting to know each other.

  Larry played with all the children, but soon found enduring friendship with two of the Saturday-morning regulars – Jemma, the second eldest of the church mum’s brood, about the same age as Larry, and Clinton, who lived opposite the park.

  Clinton was Larry’s height but chunky, with a head of dandruffy black hair. Denise decided that Clinton either had a very limited wardrobe or dressed himself on Saturday mornings, or both, because he always wore the same sauce-stained yellow T-shirt, tracksuit pants and little red gumboots without socks. Clinton played at the park unsupervised all morning and invited himself to dine at the church mum’s picnic every week. The church mum had tried to reason with him, and then tried shooing him off like a stray puppy. In time, she began to pack an extra cheese-and-tomato sandwich for the boy. It was Clinton who, inadvertently, broke the ice between the church mothers.

  It was the Saturday after an earthquake in Japan (4 October 1994) and the park had been shorn. The clippings of the unruly spring grass had been left in long windrows, and after Clinton had tired of throwing them at the other children, Jemma and Larry made a huge, sweet-smelling pile, then dug seats on the top. The pile of grass became their house.