Happy as Larry

by Scot Gardner

  The police cars and the ambulance weren’t at his home; they were at the playground next door. His parents were part of a small crowd looking on as a gurney bearing a body – like that boy taken from the wreckage of the Kobe earthquake – was loaded into the ambulance. But the body on the trolley wasn’t dead: it put up a hand from beneath the sheet to shield its eyes against the clinical glare. Larry only got a glimpse of that face, darkened with blood and bruising, but he recognised it.

  Guillermo.

  Denise had been crying. ‘Larry?’ she yelped, sweeping him into a hug.

  The embrace caught Larry off guard and he hugged her back.

  ‘Thank God you’re all right,’ she breathed in his ear.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Guillermo,’ she said. ‘Someone beat him half to death.

  Right here. In our park.’

  They broke apart and Mal moved in, looked Larry up and down then hugged him quickly.

  Torchlight was suddenly in their faces.

  ‘Larry Rainbow?’ someone called from behind the light. It was a deep, unfamiliar voice.

  Larry shaded his eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Senior Constable David Tomlinson. Could I have a word?’

  Larry was led by the elbow to a place where the light was better. The policeman clipped his torch to his belt and took out a pen and notepad. ‘Where have you been for the last hour or so?’

  ‘Running. Down the breakwater and back. Before that I was at home.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  Larry nodded to the driveway behind them.

  ‘Do you know Guillermo Perez?’

  ‘Of course. He’s my friend.’

  ‘When was the last time you spoke with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Last week. Maybe Thursday.’

  ‘Tell me what you saw.’

  ‘Saw? I saw nothing. I just told you, I was running. What’s going on?’

  The policeman wrote notes and, for a moment, Larry thought he hadn’t heard his question.

  ‘We received a phone call earlier this evening from Larry Rainbow. He said he’d just witnessed an assault in the park.’

  Larry swallowed hard. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.

  He realised he was playing chess with Clinton. If he told the police what he knew and they fronted Clinton, the story of their fight by the jetty would come out and somehow Clinton would be the one they believed. Clinton could lie so convincingly that he could give Larry a plausible motive, a history of violence.

  ‘He’s my friend,’ Larry pleaded. ‘I love him.’

  The policeman stopped writing and stared.

  Larry could feel him searching his face, looking for the meaning behind his words.

  Finally, he nodded. ‘We’ll need to talk again.’

  The interrogation continued behind the closed doors of sixteen Condon Street.

  ‘Did you phone the police?’ Mal asked.

  ‘No,’ Larry said.

  Mal was searching his face.

  ‘Did you have an argument?’ Denise said.

  ‘No! It had nothing to do with me.’

  He stomped from the room and slammed his door as a full stop. He climbed onto his bunk but couldn’t lie still. In a minute, he was pulling a jacket on and heading for the door.

  ‘Hey! Larry? Where are you off to?’ Mal snapped from the couch.

  ‘To the hospital.’

  ‘It’s late. You can go in the morning. I’ll come with you.’

  His mother stepped into his path.

  Larry stared.

  Maybe she felt the fi re. Maybe she could see the heat of the confusion and rage he was feeling. In that moment he saw the fabric of his family: three pale threads, each strand spun from the past, plaited together by their memories. It used to be so neat, so tight.

  Denise grabbed his shoulder. Larry twisted and his jacket ripped. He grabbed his mother’s wrist and their eyes met.

  Larry’s grip tightened, and Denise let go. He dropped her wrist and left, with his father shouting at his back. He broke into a run. There was no way Mal would catch him.

  There was a nurse in Guillermo’s room. She smiled when Larry entered.

  ‘Is he okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Bit worse for wear, but we think he’ll live,’ she said. She patted Guillermo’s hand. ‘You’ve got another visitor.’

  He was on his back. One eye was bandaged; the other had swollen closed. The swollen eye opened a slit and he sat up in a panic.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Larry said. ‘It’s me.’

  Guillermo’s mouth had been beaten out of shape. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘Get away from me.’

  The nurse grabbed him. ‘Whoah, it’s okay. Calm down, Mr Perez. Calm down!’

  She scowled at Larry and he backed from the room, straight into Guillermo’s father.

  Larry apologised but the man’s eyes blackened with anger. He dragged him from the room by his jacket and slammed him against the wall, lifted him off the ground until they were eye to eye.

  His words were an assault in fierce Spanish. Larry didn’t understand the words but he didn’t need to.

  The nurse with Guillermo shouted and soon there were others running along the corridor. Guillermo’s father dropped Larry to his feet. Larry dodged and weaved; people backed from his path as he fled the building at full tilt.

  He walked the long way home; his parents were waiting. At the sound of the front door, Mal got up off the couch. Denise looked on, expectant, from the kitchen. Larry took no notice and strode through to his room.

  ‘Larry? Stop! Come here. Right now!’ Mal ranted.

  Larry was deaf to his rage. He didn’t fear the man. At that moment, he didn’t even respect him.

  The house shook as Mal propelled himself after his son. Larry had the door shut and a shoulder wedging it in place when Mal arrived. Mal gave the door all he had and it creaked, but Larry held his ground.

  Mal’s fury kicked into another gear. ‘Open the bloody door! Right now!’

  There was another shove and tussle. Larry bared his teeth.

  Mal stopped pushing and started banging, each blow angrier and harder than the last.

  Larry could hear his mother shrieking. ‘Mal! Stop it! Leave him alone!’

  The bashing stopped abruptly. There was a burst of movement, then his mother screamed.

  The silence that followed made Larry’s head ring. He fought the urge to open the door.

  The couch creaked. ‘I want the truth,’ Mal said, to himself as much as to Larry. He was trying hard to be conversational but he sounded stricken. ‘Is that too much to ask for? The truth?’

  Larry knew then that the world would eventually eat his family alive. They wouldn’t survive. Their triangle wasn’t going to be blown apart by some great calamity; the termites of mistrust had done the work, consuming them from inside.

  Love had become a foreign language.

  The couch creaked again. The front door shut heavily. He heard footsteps on the garden path that faded into the night.

  Larry could hear his mother sobbing. He opened the door a crack and saw her scurry past to her room. She carried no obvious wound; there was a look of decision on her tear-glossy face.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ he called.

  ‘No, he didn’t touch me,’ she snapped.

  Larry sighed, his body suddenly limp with resignation. To understand this hell you had to see forever in all directions – stolen fathers, broken childhoods, dead dogs and neighbours.

  WEDGED

  LIKE ART

  LARRY STAYED IN bed that Saturday morning, shifting and twisting.

  He could hear the news blaring from the TV and his mother in the next room. Drawers slid, cupboards clunked; it was over.

  Denise opened his door but didn’t enter his room. ‘I . . . have to go,’ was all she said.

  There was none of the high drama of a commercial release or TV soap, but it sat him up in his bed.
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  Their family had slumped like a candle in the heat.

  Larry nodded. His mother shouldered her bag. He didn’t hear the front door close.

  He didn’t hear much at all for the next hour except the sound of his own breathing and the roof ticking and creaking, contracting as the sun hit its zenith. At some stage, he slept, and when he woke he dragged himself to the toilet. On his return, he could hear Mal weeping.

  His father was standing in the kitchen, head bowed. He held the bench, elbows locked to keep him upright. There was a red-and-white checked teatowel over his shoulder, and as Larry approached a tear dripped off his nose into the empty sink. He made no effort to conceal his sorrow when he sensed Larry.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he sobbed. ‘Sorry for everything.’

  Larry looked at his tears and felt no sympathy. He shrugged.

  ‘They’re like ghosts, you know,’ Mal began. ‘My parents. They’re whispering doubts to me all the time, telling me how useless I am. I reckon I can hear them laughing when I mess up. I want to blame them. I want to blame them for the drink and losing my job and your mother leaving, but they’re ghosts. It’s been my life for a long time. I’ve been driving this bus for years.’

  ‘Judge a man by his actions,’ Larry said.

  Mal frowned. ‘Yeah. Thanks for the support.’

  Larry could feel the legacy in his veins. There were things his father’s parents had handed to him that Larry would pass on to his own children. Some of it was in his genes, but some of it was learned. There were probably things that shaped his grandparents’ lives that had been passed on to them by ancestors who spoke another language and knew nothing of electricity. Family was a continuous film, each frame coloured and shaped by the frame before it, a dance of light and shadow in which each person played overlapping parts.

  ‘Your mother died on the twenty-second of February last year,’ Larry said. ‘The photo you sent her . . . the photo of me, it was framed and on display in her lounge room when she died. She told her friend Amy that I was the reason she stopped drinking.’

  Suddenly Mal was breathing hard through his nose. ‘You had no right to . . .’

  Larry shrugged again.

  Mal flashed his teeth involuntarily.

  ‘Judge a man by his actions,’ Larry said. ‘You’re an alcoholic slob. That’s why Mum left.’

  Fury spiked in Mal. It leaped from his darkest memories and surged through his fist into his son’s mouth.

  The force of it sent Larry staggering across the lounge. He cracked against the plaster wall and dropped to the floor-boards. His eyes fell on the rubber handle of the golf club he’d given Mal. He lifted it from its hiding place behind the couch, felt its brutal weight. He got to his feet and swung the thing over his shoulder, squaring up against his father.

  He swung the club. It missed his father’s cheek by a calculated inch and ploughed into the television screen. The explosion was bigger than he’d imagined, the shower of glass peppering his shirt and skittering and tinkling across the floor. When it was done, he saw the club wedged like art in the perfect centre of the screen.

  He felt power redirected. He felt the surge of control. There’s nothing wrong with anger; it’s what you do with it that counts.

  Judge a man by his actions.

  Mal stared, eyes wide with a mix of fear and relief.

  Larry collected his pocketknife from his underwear drawer and left while the heat was still in him.

  On the other side of Villea, in Anita Ward’s air-conditioned lounge room, Denise felt she was turning to water.

  Anita had a hand on her back and plucked her a fresh tissue every couple of minutes.

  A CNN report on the TV showed footage of a trailer park in Southern Indiana. A tornado had rearranged it. Twenty-four people died.

  ‘Of course it’s going to hurt,’ Anita said quietly. ‘There’s a lot of history there. A lot of shared experience.’

  Denise could barely remember a time before Mal. Didn’t want to remember a time before Mal. Getting together with Mal was when her life started to feel real, when things got good. He was home. He was the reason they had Larry.

  A heavy stone of realisation plonked into her stomach. Maybe her heart didn’t feel right if it wasn’t aching? Maybe the death of her mother and then the death of her father had imprinted a pattern on her life that she felt compelled – without thought, without conscious action – to repeat? She’d been betting on a calamity that never came about. She’d been holding her breath, feeding off all the heartache in the world, just waiting for the news.

  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose one more time. ‘You know what I hate most about the world?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That sometimes you have to break something before you realise how beautiful it is.’

  ‘Stay,’ Anita said, and shifted closer. She kissed Denise’s cheek with an unexpected tenderness, the tenderness of a mother. ‘Stay as long as you like.’

  Denise held her cheek as if the kiss had been a slap. Suddenly a great chunk of her life made sense. Anita – childless but maternal – had been mothering her for almost fifteen years, and it had taken that entire fifteen years to work it out. Denise had a mother. She was dead.

  She saw too that Mal probably drank to forget; that one of the biggest things they had in common was a stunted and deformed childhood. Freedom didn’t come from forgetting those things; it came from remembering. You couldn’t hide from your past; you had to get in there and know its every twist and turn, watch it frame by frame until it made some sort of sense. Not necessarily a spoon-fed Hollywood sort of sense, but an understanding that pain can be part of a happy ending, that a scar can make a character, and that the death of a hero is a valid plot device.

  Denise hurriedly got to her feet, wiped at her face.

  ‘What is it?’ Anita asked.

  ‘I have to go,’ Denise said.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Home. I just remembered something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just remembered who I am.’

  FIERCE-EYED

  LARRY WAITED BEHIND the bush at the back of the park for almost an hour. He opened and closed the blade of his knife and simmered. There was no movement at the house across the road, no signs of life at all. He’d never really noticed the rusted remains of the guttering hanging above the front door. Never really taken the time to look. The front window wasn’t level. It was as if the house had begun to sag in the heat.

  It was the memory of his Christmas telescope that spurred him on. The fact that Clinton had been in the shed, seen the box, and the only thing he’d chosen to steal was the surprise. Stealing the surprise seemed to give Clinton more joy than Larry had experienced when he actually received the gift.

  Larry walked confidently across the road and pushed through the shaggy grass on the driveway. He crushed a path into the back yard, stepped around the rubble on the verandah and tried the door. It opened noiselessly. He left it ajar for a moment, and squinted into the gloom. Nothing. He opened it further and took a step inside, recoiling at the assault of smells. It was a cocktail of mould, stale cigarette smoke and decay. It smelled like Clinton, he realised, and his pulse went up-tempo. He extended the blade of the knife and gripped the red handle.

  The back door opened into the laundry, where piles of dark clothes carpeted every available surface. He stood on stained underwear and made his way into the kitchen, where the clothes receded and piles of used plates and bowls covered the benches. There was a pile on the floor beside the sink. A large packet of budget-brand rice puffs had hit the linoleum and spilled. Larry could see shoeprints in the mess.

  The kitchen led onto a short hallway, clad in dark-painted ply board with rooms off either side. The curtains were closed and the gloom made the doorways feel like hungry mouths. Larry stood on the threshold of the first room and let his eyes adjust. Boxes. Stacks of moving boxes and a chair with the stuffing coming out of its arms. Th
e second room was a bathroom, the floor snowy with talcum powder and the sink tap dripping straight down the plughole with a hurried fluck fluck fluck.

  He held his breath and narrowed his eyes against the darkness in Clinton’s room, fi st tight around the handle of his knife. He glanced down the steel, and the strangeness of the situation swamped him. What am I doing here? I have a knife in my hand. How did it come to this? What would I do if I found Clinton hiding behind the door? Would I slash or thrust? Would I turn and run?

  Clinton wasn’t behind the door. Larry could feel his heart beating in his lungs. He exhaled as quietly as he could.

  Someone coughed.

  Larry jolted. The floorboards beneath him creaked.

  More coughing, all dry and hard like a guard dog. The fit lasted a full minute and Larry used the sound as cover to steal his way to the lounge-room door.

  Pink slippered feet and an oxygen bottle.

  This was Clinton’s mother?

  The barking stopped abruptly, and Larry felt exposed. The snapshot of the feeble woman in the lounge was like a bucket of iced water on his rage. Somehow Clinton made more sense. He backed away from the door and quietly folded his knife. He tucked it in his pocket.

  Thumping and banging. Before Larry had a chance to react, the front door burst open.

  It was Clinton.

  They both gasped. Clinton turned and ran.

  Larry was after him, clearing the steps in a single leap.

  Clinton sprinted with the power of a wild thing, hurdled the front fence and galloped down Condon Street.

  Larry closed the gap between them. He set his jaw and had time to imagine the tackle that would bring Clinton to the footpath, the satisfying crunch and grind as he rammed him to the concrete.

  Clinton sensed the end. The desperation appeared as white foam in the corners of his mouth and grated in his throat like a premature death rattle.

  Larry launched.

  At the absolutely last moment, Clinton veered into a stranger’s driveway.

  Larry glanced off Clinton’s shoulder and overbalanced. He was upright for three steps – long enough to know he was going to fall and long enough to change course towards the relative sanctuary of the grassy verge – before his momentum toppled him. He crashed to the grass on his knees and slid.