‘Fuck,’ Simone said, twisting her blond hair into a knot on top of her head. ‘I’d have a short list of twenty.’ She stood up and walked to the bathroom. Through the hiss of the shower, she shouted an inventory of all the patients who’d made complaints about her over the years. But it was little comfort to Deepak. Simone was one of the top orthopaedic surgeons in Australia. Last year she’d won a prestigious women’s leadership award. Simone could easily rebuff such an attack. Deepak, on the other hand, was a junior consultant. He had failed his oral exams three times—when he was stressed he had a stutter.
Deepak picked a strand of Simone’s hair off the pillow and draped it over his palm. He’d never been with a blond before. Growing up, he’d joked about it with his friends at high school—other brown-skinned boys who confused screwing a blond with screwing white imperialism—but they were fourteen at the time and none of them had done anything with a girl other than pashing. He wound the hair around his finger, watched his fingertip swell with blood. Here was the hair spun of gold he had read about, as a child, in fairytales. If he said this to Simone, she would baulk at his sentimentality, tell him it was all ammonia-based chemicals. Even so, Deepak couldn’t quite believe he shared his bed with this woman. She had grown up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, spending holidays surfing at Anglesea or snowboarding at Mount Hotham. Deepak had spent summers with his best friend, Prakash, stealing porn magazines from the local milk bar.
Simone emerged from the shower, pink and smooth and sleek. She towelled off in front of him. ‘Don’t worry about the poster,’ she said.
‘I’m not.’
‘Just some nut case.’ Her perfect breasts jiggled and bounced. ‘It’ll blow over.’
Once she left, Deepak got dressed. He’d promised his parents he would visit them. The air outside was crisp, and he put on the beanie and scarf he kept in his car. He left Simone’s warehouse apartment in Fitzroy and drove to his parents’ house in Sunshine. Deepak’s mother loved telling her family in London she lived in a place called Sunshine. Never mind that it was an old industrial district, or that the nearest beach was fifteen kilometres away. In twenty years her English relatives had never paid a visit.
Deepak’s father was out the front of the house, pruning the roses. He covered his ears with his hands as his son parked in the driveway. ‘I could hear your car all the way from the Ring Road,’ he said when Deepak got out of the Porsche.
‘That’s what I paid a year’s salary for.’
His father shook his head and turned back to his rosebushes.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Cooking.’
Deepak went inside. He let the smell of roasting spices and the ‘meadows and rain’ air freshener his mother had been buying for years waft over him. His mum was standing at the kitchen bench reading New Idea before a backdrop of bubbling pots and pans.
‘Smells good.’
‘Did you know that Norah Jones is half-Indian?’ his mother said, putting down the magazine and turning her attention back to the stove. ‘She was born Geetali Norah Shankar.’
Deepak laughed. ‘I’d change my name too if I was called Shankar.’ He lifted the lid of one of the pans. His mum slapped his hand.
‘Shankar is a very common Indian name.’
‘Yeah, I know. But it sounds the same as chancre, which is a genital sore caused by syphilis.’
His mother shook her head. ‘When did you get so dirty?’
Deepak opened the fridge. He took out the orange juice and drank it straight from the carton.
‘They divorced, of course.’
‘Who?’
‘Norah Jones’ parents.’
Deepak threw the empty juice carton into the box his mother used for recycling. ‘Who the hell is Norah Jones?’
‘A singer.’ She turned away from her cauldrons and looked at Deepak. ‘Mixed marriages never work. Too many cultural barriers.’
His parents didn’t know about Simone. Once, his mother had asked him about the pretty blond on his Facebook page, but she seemed satisfied when Deepak said she was a work colleague.
Secrecy was convenient for Simone, too. People will talk, she said if Deepak grabbed her bottom when no one was looking. I’m your boss. But Deepak wondered if it wasn’t more than that. Simone’s father was a member of the Melbourne Club and the owner of a racehorse called Pink Diamond. When Simone showed Deepak pictures of her family and friends at the Melbourne Cup, he couldn’t spot a brown face among them.
For years Deepak’s parents had been setting him up on blind dates with successful Indian women. Deepak played along, because sometimes it was quite fun and deep down he really did want to please them. Lately, though—presumably because of the advancing age of the women he was being set up with—the meetings felt less like bonding sessions about crazy Indian parents and more like interrogation. Nowadays the women had sharp nails and pursed lips. They knew what they wanted in a man, and they were determined to find out, over a three-hour degustation, if Deepak had it.
Simone was fascinated by these introductions and spent hours grilling him about the details. While Deepak knew he should be grateful to have such an open-minded girlfriend, in truth, he was disappointed. Just once, as he described an encounter with one of these prospective partners, he wished he would see a hint of jealousy in Simone’s eyes. But he never did. They were always cold, blue, bemused.
* * *
Tony had tried to do the right thing. He’d contacted the hospital complaints officer, who advised him to send an email. He got Luca to help him set up an email account. He chose the name TonyBulldogs after his favourite footy team. He wanted TonyFerrari, but it was taken. As was TonyFerrari_1, TonyFerrari_2, TonyFerrari_3 and so on. There were, as his grandson had pointed out, a million Tony Ferraris in the world.
The next night Tony got Carla to help him compose a letter. She wrote his words in her elegant cursive hand and their son Mario typed it into the computer. Tony was happy with the final result. It was polite without being pathetic, firm without being rude. When Tony pressed the send button, he felt a satisfying swell of accomplishment. That’s how you have to deal with these people, he told himself. You have to play them at their own game. He knew from his years of working at a big organisation that management couldn’t ignore a written document. There were certain procedures that had to be observed.
But weeks had passed and Tony’s email inbox remained empty. ‘These things take time,’ Carla said when he complained, which just infuriated him even more. It suddenly struck Tony that his wife was an observer of life rather than a participant in it. Lately, the calm and patient temperament he had once so admired in her only served to exasperate him. For the first time in forty years, Tony fantasised about how his life might have turned out if he’d married feisty Gabriella from high school.
He thought of Luca’s poster. He remembered the way the family had shut Luca down, how Mario had scolded his son for being antisocial and aggressive. At the time, Tony had agreed with them, but now he saw that his grandson was the voice of reason. Ever since he was three years old, Luca had been calling injustice as he saw it. That’s not fair! he would scream when he didn’t get his turn on the swings at the playground, and Tony would promise him an ice-cream if he would just let the obnoxious kid with braces have one more go. But his grandson was right. They could all learn something from the boy’s fearlessness. Tony recalled the expert way Luca had gutted a garfish on their last fishing trip to Queenscliff. He hadn’t stopped until the dirty job was finished—hadn’t even flinched.
* * *
A couple of weeks after the poster incident, Simone called Deepak into her office. He wasn’t worried—the last time she’d summoned him like this, she’d kissed him violently against the filing cabinet. But this time when he walked through the door, Simone had a serious face.
‘There’s been a complaint,’ she said as he pulled the door closed behind him. She sat down and pointed to a document on her desk.
‘It’s dated the eighth of March,’ he said, flicking the paper back across the desk. ‘Why am I only seeing this now?’
‘You know what HR’s like,’ Simone said and shook her head. ‘There was Easter, and then Anzac Day. They’ve been sitting on this thing for weeks.’
Deepak sat down in the chair opposite her.
‘I pulled the file,’ she said. ‘All you’ve written is: Query nerve damage. Trial Lyrica. Discharge from clinic.’
Now he remembered. The guy had sustained a tibial fracture after falling off a broken ladder. The X-rays looked great, but he’d developed chronic pain from a nerve injury. Simone’s face was poker-like, professional.
‘Do you think it’s him?’ Deepak asked.
She raised her eyebrows. She had forgotten. Already.
‘The poster.’
‘Oh. That.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘God, I don’t know. Probably.’ For once she looked tired. Older. ‘You’ll have to write a response. Acknowledging without apologising.’
Deepak groaned.
Simone sat up tall and taut again. ‘We spoke to some of the nurses who were at the clinic the day you saw him.’
Now it was Deepak’s turn to raise his eyebrows.
‘It’s protocol,’ she said.
‘And?’ Deepak felt confident of his relationship with the nurses. He was always respectful and courteous to them.
‘The unit manager said you were patronising.’
The blood drained from Deepak’s face.
‘But she acknowledged it could be cultural.’
That night Deepak sat down at the dining table in his St Kilda Road apartment to compose his letter. He swirled the scotch in his glass, savoured the crisp tinkle of ice cubes. He put the glass down and stared at the computer screen. After five minutes he leant back in his chair and poured himself another shot. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Shrine of Remembrance glowed gold.
Deepak had bought the apartment from the parents of a doctor friend. It had been a private sale, without agents, conducted over a meal of salmon and champagne. After dessert, his friend’s father, a jeweller, had shown Deepak his briefcase of diamonds. There was still an industrial-grade safe bolted to the floor of the walk-in wardrobe, empty now except for Deepak’s watch and passport.
Deepak looked around the room. With the help of his sister, he had made the place inviting. A Natuzzi couch, an impractical coffee table, a couple of tastefully mismatched cushions. Friends who’d bought their own places had assured Deepak that when he found his future home he would just know. It was like love, they said, all heart and no head. Deepak had convinced himself he loved the apartment, the opulence of it: the soft-closing drawers, the black timber joinery, the luxurious Italian carpet. But the more time he spent at Simone’s place, with its hand-picked art and fresh flowers, the more he thought his flat looked like an apartment for rent on Airbnb.
He glared at the blinking cursor. What was it Simone had said? Acknowledge without apologising? Dear Tony, he wrote and immediately felt a sharp pang of resentment. It wasn’t his fault the old man had climbed up a broken ladder, or that he’d developed chronic nerve pain as a result of his injury. If Deepak had been rude that day in outpatients, it was probably because he’d been working straight through since the night before without a break, or because his registrar had called in sick, or because he’d had to plough through the thirty-plus patients the nurses had squeezed into an overbooked clinic.
Mr Ferrari, he typed. Life sucks. Shit happens. This time it happened to you.
* * *
Once, a while ago now, Tony had held his head high like the doctor. He’d been proud of his success. Everything he owned, from their four-bedroom bungalow to the antique jewellery in Carla’s dresser, was a direct result of his sweat and hard work. God knows how many hours he had spent chatting footy with people he hated as he made his way from factory worker to line manager and finally to operations director. But it was worth it. The day he got that promotion was still one of the best days of his life. He would never forget the delighted looks on the faces of Carla and the boys when he brought home four air tickets to the Gold Coast.
But it hadn’t lasted. And though Tony took credit for every step forward he’d taken, he didn’t feel like he’d played any part in his own downfall. After the global financial crisis, the board sold the company to a multinational. Tony and all of middle management were made redundant in the restructure. Tony’s position had literally vanished before his eyes—one day his name was in a little yellow box on the company’s organisational flow chart, and the next day his name and the little yellow box were gone. He was three days shy of his sixtieth birthday when he filled a cardboard box with pens and photo frames from his desk. Sixty was a terrible age to be looking for a job. Especially for Tony, who had worked his way up through the ranks at a time when experience and street smarts trumped a university degree. People in the company had looked up to him, even admired him, but that meant nothing now.
Tony lasted ten minutes in the queue at Centrelink. He had expected junkies, people with tiny pupils and needle marks on their arms, but in reality there were a lot of middle-aged men who looked just like him. Depressed. Despondent. Defeated. He felt sick. He walked out through the sliding glass doors and never went back.
Instead, he started doing odd jobs for his neighbours. Old women, mainly. He mowed Miss Howard’s lawn. He installed Ikea cabinets in Mrs Ferragamo’s laundry. Tony was good with his hands and the work was satisfying—and the undeclared, tax-free cash didn’t hurt either. He and Carla even managed to get away to Daylesford for a long weekend, which was something they’d never done while Tony was working. By the time the redundancy money ran out, they’d almost paid off the mortgage.
Tony was feeling positive about the future the day Mrs Jackman asked him to clean her gutters. It was a cloudless day in February, the sun bright overhead. He’d completed three jobs in the morning and his wallet was fat with cash. Mrs Jackman was ninety-two. Everything in her house was old and broken. Tony should have known better than to use her ladder to climb up onto the roof, but she had caught him on his way home, and he was in a hurry—Carla had asked if they could have lunch together at the shopping centre that afternoon.
Mrs Jackman’s tabby hissed ominously as Tony leant the ladder against the wall. He only made it to the second rung before the whole thing collapsed beneath him. When Tony heard the snap, he couldn’t be sure if it was the sound of the ladder breaking or his leg. He soon found out that it was both. Mrs Jackman called 000, and the ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes.
The doctors said it was a straightforward fracture. A crack at the top of his shinbone, just inside the knee joint. If he were younger they might consider operating, but at Tony’s age a cast would do. Six weeks, they said, and he’d be right as rain. Worst-case scenario, he might need a few weeks of physio.
The first month went according to plan, but during the fifth week the foot sticking out the bottom of the cast had swelled to the size of a small watermelon. The pain was unbearable. When the emergency doctor sawed off the plaster, Tony winced at the sight of his leg—a foul-smelling log of maroon flesh.
The doctors couldn’t explain it. At first they suspected a blood clot, but the ultrasound of Tony’s blood vessels was normal. Unable to walk or drive, Tony had no option but to lie in bed and watch the telly. Over the next few months, in spite of multiple X-rays and CT scans that proved the fracture was healing, Tony’s condition deteriorated. When he looked at his leg—fat and useless and propped up on a mound of pillows—it looked like it belonged to someone else. Someone fat, ruddy, unhealthy. The unhealthiness was like a cancer, spreading from his one sick
appendage to his entire body, until one day Tony didn’t recognise the sad, bloated face in the mirror.
‘You’re depressed,’ his GP declared, as if she had cracked a puzzle. Tony nodded. The GP gave him options, but Tony wasn’t in the mood for making decisions. In his melancholic state, every road seemed like a dead end. Eventually, after many awkward consultations, he had agreed to a plan. He would start a low-dose antidepressant and try a few sessions of counselling.
The counsellor was like the GP, kind and well meaning. Sometimes Tony said he felt better just to spare himself the disappointment in her lovely eyes. But nothing helped. The medication made him feel weird, empty. He took ten tablets before chucking the rest in the bin. He continued with the counselling because it felt good to speak to a pretty girl for half an hour once a month, but it was like a massage for the soul and, like any massage, its effects were not long-lasting. As soon as he walked out the door, his leg burned and throbbed just as badly as it had before.
When summer rolled around again, the heat made the pain worse, and when Tony wore shorts to the supermarket people gaped at his pink hairless leg. Rather than go out, he spent days drifting in and out of sleep on the couch. In January the occupational therapist recommended that Tony use a walking stick to help with his balance. Carla picked up extra cleaning shifts at the nursing home to pay off the last of the mortgage. And then, on the anniversary of the accident, something in Tony snapped.
‘Did you know it’s been exactly one year since I fractured my knee?’ he said, chucking the newspaper across the table.
Carla, sensing a storm on the horizon, continued washing pots in the sink. In a way she was relieved. She’d been waiting months for this to happen.
‘A year today since I agreed to clean Mrs Jackman’s gutters.’ Tony got up and limped around the kitchen. ‘She never even paid me. Never even sent a card.’
Carla said nothing. She certainly wasn’t going to point out that Mrs Jackman couldn’t write after her stroke, or that Tony had never actually started the job, let alone finished it. She kept on with the washing-up.
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