After January

by Nick Earls

  It’s a joke, I tell her. Because of you, because of you and your ridiculous mind.

  And she breathes like a person who has just escaped from something, and she laughs at the same time.

  Alex, you weren’t supposed to tell Fortuna that.

  It’s all right. I thought it was funny.

  I didn’t mean to offend you.

  I’m not offended.

  These things do happen. I see them all the time.

  Is Alex always the father?

  My mother laughs and looks at me. Not always. I’m sure he’s very careful. I’m sure he listens to his mother.

  I think Fortuna has to go now, I say very clearly. She has things to do.

  I like that girl, my mother says after she’s left. She’s really quite sophisticated. I was never like that when I was her age. I could never have spoken to a boy’s mother that way.

  Does it bother you?

  No. No, I think I’m impressed. And you’re such a cute couple.

  And she only says this, surely, because she knows how much I’ll hate it, because she feels she can’t let it end with unqualified approval.

  thirty-seven

  In the morning I show due regard for my mother’s comfort with routines. I go out to buy the paper. But when I come back she is ready to go to the markets. I tell her I’ve bought the paper and she says she’ll look at it later.

  There’s never anything in it anyway.

  I think I would quite like it if she went back to Brisbane. I don’t know how to negotiate my way through a life that involves both my mother and Fortuna. I feel like a shuttlecock, like I have even less control of things than usual.

  And I know I have no chance of talking her out of going to the markets. I foresee a debacle. I am tempted to return to much earlier days of school refusal and rush into the toilet and induce vomiting. I really don’t want her to go to the markets, but I have no inclination to vomit either, and I got over the school refusal when I was seven or eight. I can’t even remember why I was refusing.

  She finds a sun hat with a white-spotted navy band and a bag that will accommodate many purchases and we go.

  She meets Fortuna’s family and things seem fine until she invites them to dinner. I can’t believe she’s inviting them to dinner. I assumed she’d go home after lunch, like every other Caloundra weekend. But no, dinner. And they accept. Cliff even says Can we bring anything? and offers home-made wine. His family shouts him down.

  During most of this I am a spectator, as is Fortuna. And I don’t feel quite like any of these people, bits of all of them maybe, but not quite like any of them. I don’t fit in with this interaction. I suppose I had expected that I would, that I knew just how this would be, that I was the common element, that there would be a small amount of talk, much of it about me, and then we’d go. This feels like it’s nothing to do with me. It suddenly looks like the yuppie woman dealing with the hippie people, and then a friendly adult to adult interaction, and then dinner. Watching it, it all seems very reasonable. I’m not sure why I’d expected it to be different.

  My mother takes me on a patrol of her regular stalls. We even buy satay sauce for tonight.

  I think I’ll get a couple of jars, she says, and we’ll have Len and Hazel over too, if they’re not doing anything.

  thirty-eight

  So what do you think of this family thing? Fortuna says on the phone later.

  I don’t know.

  Neither do I.

  Just after six the family thing begins.

  Despite everyone’s advice, Cliff has brought a selection of his beers and wines, with the ’93 lychee present among them. The Boits have brought wine made from grapes, and I can tell Len is not at all sure about Cliff’s crate of unlabelled bottles. Within minutes, though, they are both drinking something that suits them and they’re deep in an intense discussion about their mutual dislike for development. This is a conversation that lasts more than an hour, and I make sure I visit it occasionally to see how it’s going. I still feel like the host, and that seems like a host’s job, checking to see that long conversations don’t involve at least one party being bored senseless. But they’re firing. Len’s talking about his parents’ honeymoon for a week just near here, when the options for travelling from Brisbane were by boat up the coast to Military Jetty, or a long and arduous journey over unmade roads, with patches of sand that could take a winch to get you through. And they’re talking about action, about protest, about badgering the council and anyone else appropriate. The last thing we want up here’s bloody canal developments with streets like Lady Bloody Di Boulevard, Len’s saying and Cliff’s going Too bloody right and other offerings of rebellious affirmation.

  And I notice they’re drinking beer from unmarked bottles, and their voices are getting louder.

  It is a bit like Guinness, I hear Len say. Isn’t it?

  Gail and Hazel and my mother are talking and I walk up to see if any of them needs another drink.

  No, I’m only going to have a couple, my mother says. I’ll be driving back later, remember? She turns to Gail. I really don’t think I’ll be trying Cliff’s lychee wine. Is that going to be a problem? It seems important to him.

  Gail laughs. He’ll be okay. His life is full of disappointments. He’ll survive if you don’t try the wine. Most people don’t. I just tell him I can’t because of my medical problems. Just mentioning that sort of thing makes him uncomfortable. Once I told him what a kidney biopsy was like and he went white and fell over. So I don’t have to try the wine now. He made Alex drink some the other night, and Alex was so nice about it. People usually spit it out, but Alex drank it.

  It’s really not that bad.

  It’s awful. It’s all right to say that it’s awful. Deep down Cliff knows it.

  At the far end of the veranda, Cliff has a wine bottle open. Len is holding a glass of clear liquid up to the light and speaking quite earnestly about it. I can only catch an occasional part of his verdict. Lychees, who’d have thought it?

  Fortuna, I think, is watching all this the way I am, but to a less neurotic degree. Both of us feeling that the combination of people is a little unlikely, both of us hoping it will work.

  Skye and Storm stick with each other, sitting in a dimly lit corner drinking water, whispering and smirking as though they know something that confirms the rest of us as idiots.

  Dinner is ready and my mother declares it to be a help yourself sort of thing. The satay tastes great, and having helped her to make it it now seems really quite easy. She waves her empty glass at me and sends me downstairs for more wine, more of the holiday red that she keeps under the house in the box it came in. Each summer a dozen cheap reds and a dozen cheap whites, kept down there where it’s far too warm and they won’t last. But they’re not supposed to. They’re for nights like this, nights when people drop over and wine seems a good idea. My father, who believes he has taste in wine, brings his from home when he comes up here, from the shelf in his garage he refers to as his cellar. And he bores me about each bottle and keeps them in the bedroom cupboard, where he says it’s cooler. And when my mother turns up with her two dozen he sucks his teeth and shakes his head and says, Tessa, don’t you have any friends who actually like wine?

  When I get back upstairs Cliff is lounging in a bean bag in an almost horizontal position, drinking precariously and talking about music. He declares Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ album to be one of the top ten of all time. Only I know what this means. It means my mother becomes excited, shouts Yes! Yes! and sends me back under the house to find the old seventies turntable and records. When I carry these inside she’s sitting on the edge of Cliff’s bean bag, drinking red wine and joining him in singing a medley from the album.

  Play it, play it, play it, she says to me, flapping her free hand to speed me up.

 
I play it, she sings along, Cliff sings along, Gail sings along. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe my mother is part of this scene too. She can’t sing at all but she’s shouting along and I think she’s drinking quite quickly now.

  What about going home? I say to her. You were going after dinner.

  She flaps the hand again to shut me up and in an instrumental passage tells me she’ll go first thing in the morning. As though this is nothing. As though she does that all the time.

  Len, having had a few drinks and usually keen for a bit of a sing, picks up the album sleeve since it has the lyrics on it, and joins in.

  Fortuna, seeing I have been stalled by this madness, comes and sits next to me and gives me a glass of wine.

  Parents, she says, and shrugs her shoulders. What would they know about music? She laughs, and I don’t know if she’s mocking me or them.

  I’m past caring, or understanding. I drink the wine.

  Cliff persuades my mother, now in a more experimental frame of mind, to try the ’93 lychee. It puts a confused look on her face as she works out how to respond once she’s tasted it, but then she goes and gets ice-cream from the freezer and a large bowl and several spoons, and everyone is invited to try it as an ice-cream topping.

  And I think we’re all shouting now, shouting and not listening. All except the twins, who find this incredibly boring. They come and talk to Fortuna, but I can’t keep track of what they’re saying. She’s nodding. They go to my room and I don’t see them again. The singing goes on, long after we run out of ice-cream. I tell my mother I can’t go downstairs for more red wine, because I think I can’t. My bladder is very full and I go to the toilet and I am not confident when I get there, not at all. I sit down and the toilet walls move around me quite quickly. So do other things on the way back to the lounge room.

  I feel good, I feel really good now. I sit on the sofa and sag down into it in a state of great immobile comfort. Fortuna joins me and says, The twins have gone to bed. They figure nobody’s going so they’ve gone to bed. Is that okay? In your bed? Is that okay?

  The complex broken jigsaw of a smart answer bumps across the edge of my mind but I end up just nodding.

  I think I hear the Boits on the stairs. I think our parents keep singing. I think Fortuna moves in very close to me and kisses my left ear and then falls asleep partly on me but in a way that restricts my breathing only slightly.

  thirty-nine

  It’s light when the noise wakes me. The thumping of drawers in a different, closed room.

  Fortuna’s arm is across my chest. We seem to be locked at the ankles. My head feels quite untidy and I think I have had difficult dreams.

  I disentangle my feet without waking her and move her arm to her side. She breathes like a person deeply asleep, face down with her head turned away from me, her crumpled shirt pushed part of the way up her back with our slow slide off the spongy sofa. For a while I just watch the bare skin of her lower back.

  The thumping goes on. I hear my mother’s voice as she talks to herself in the bathroom, and several squirts of a nasal spray. She emerges looking quite tired and with two Beroccas in her hand. She sees I’m awake and she signals me to come over. She pours us each a glass of water, but the Beroccas both go in hers. She swirls them round and watches them fizz, and seems to forget I’m there. I stand next to her drinking my water, wondering if I’m supposed to speak first. She keeps swirling, leaning on the bench with her left index finger supporting her pale, furrowed, uncomfortable brow and swirling. When the Beroccas have dissolved she signals me to follow her outside onto the back veranda.

  She leans on the railing with her free hand and looks out through the trees to the sea. She doesn’t look at me. She talks quietly.

  Remember years ago, that talk we had. Do you remember? Well, if it’s time to do the things we talked about, in that talk, I’m not saying you have to do anything, or that you have to not do anything, cause it’s not up to me, but I’m just saying, do you remember? Do you remember what I’m saying? What I’m saying now.

  Yeah.

  This is not the moment to point out that she has a serious tense problem. This has the look of another one of those parent things, where they just can’t get to the point, all metaphor and memory and mutual discomfort.

  And when she says that talk, I can only assume I know which talk. I can only assume she doesn’t mean the talk that began with, I’ve thought about it and I want you to know that if you told me you were gay I could come to terms with it. When your mother has no idea about your sexual orientation, and you certainly haven’t been trying to hide it, you must be on a pretty bad losing streak. I also decide she doesn’t mean the talk that began, I went to an Adolescent Medicine seminar today and one of the speakers said that if your adolescent child is alone in their room with the door shut they’re almost certainly masturbating. It took an effort to adjust to studying with the door open, but I managed.

  I expect the talk from years ago to which she refers is one of the girl–boy talks.

  And she’s still going while I’m half-listening, still rambling around it, whatever issue it is that’s troubling her.

  Well, probably all that I’m saying is that, you know, I know what happens. I know how things work, okay? And if you have any questions, or anything, I hope you can ask me. I hope you can feel okay about asking me.

  Yeah.

  You feel okay about asking me? If you have any questions?

  I feel okay about asking you. At the moment I have no questions, but I’ve got your number, if that happens to change.

  Good. And other than that, I suppose, there’s not much to say, is there? She pauses. I have no reason to contradict her. So have a good week, or however long you’re here. Please come home soon, or sometime, whenever you’re ready, but hopefully fairly soon. Talk to me, phone me sometimes and talk to me, and we’ll all be hoping that whatever’s in the paper later in the week it’s okay by you. And other than that, other than that, it’s probably important to bear in mind that you should buy the ones with the lubricant and with the semen reservoir at the end. We’re both looking out to sea now. Neither of us has any hope of surviving eye contact while my mother talks about my intimate bodily fluids. I can’t even tell her she’s missing the point. And with nonoxynol-9 because you can never be too careful. That sounds awful, but it’s only the responsible thing to do, to be careful, and there’s no need for anything flash, no fancy colours or ribbing or anything. But the main thing is to make sure it goes on early and goes on properly. Freeing her right thumb from her glass and rolling her left thumb and index finger down it, but in a way that seems subconscious, like she’s done it a thousand times. But maybe only with that very thumb, as an unnecessary demonstration to one nervous student after another. And make sure there’s room at the tip. Okay?

  Okay.

  Good. She smiles now. The ordeal is over for both of us. She’s great isn’t she? She’s great.

  We go inside. She finds her purse and gives me fifty dollars.

  This is for, well, all that, she whispers, pointing back out to the veranda and then doing the thumb thing again. To help with being careful.

  I think with fifty bucks I can be incredibly careful. What do you think I’ll be doing for the next few days? Do you think I never get outside?

  I have to go now, she says. I have to go to work.

  I’m not really happy about you driving like this. You don’t look well.

  I’m fine. I’m just a bit tired, but I’ll be fine.

  Call me when you get to Brisbane, okay?

  She smiles, as though this small display of caring makes her very happy. She obviously has no idea how bad she looks.

  forty

  She goes before anyone wakes.

  I decide I can clean up some other time and I lie down again ne
xt to Fortuna and she stirs only slightly, says Hi and sleeps again.

  I think we all sleep for another hour or so before the twins wake us.

  You’re still being very boring, Skye says, jabbing an index finger between my ribs while I’m still in a dream. You were very boring last night and you’re still very boring now. My sister only likes you because she’s very boring too. Get up please.

  She and Storm each take one of Cliff’s arms and lift him off the bean bag. He looks around this unfamiliar place as though he has been carried somewhere in his sleep.

  Oh, Alex. Hi, he says, and sits down again.

  Dad, Skye says in a way that should be making it clear to him that he too is boring her.

  What, there’s no hurry is there?

  So the day proceeds without hurry.

  Gail wakes with the noise of people moving around and a little more dignity than the rest of us were allowed. No finger in the ribs, no twin on each arm. Fortuna starts toasting bread and I boil water for tea and we sit out in the cool breeze on the front veranda with our breakfast, not saying much. Soon the twins agitate to go home.

  I might stay, Fortuna says.

  So the others leave in the ute, and as they go Cliff calls me over to the window and says, She’s great, your mother. Bloody great, isn’t she?

  And they drive away.

  So now it’s just the two of us. Just the two of us and maybe the whole day, and I’m really not feeling well.

  I think I need to lie down, Fortuna says. I think I need to be somewhere not too warm and not very bright and where I can lie down.

  So we open the front and back sliding doors and shut the curtains and the screens and turn on the fan and we lie back down on the sofa in the calico-filtered light. And the fan blows old smells of satay and wine and warm air and the curtains flap up from the doors and fall back again, and it’s too warm. Too warm today to feel well, too warm to feel well on a saggy seventies sofa when every part of your body seems to be succumbing to a degree of seediness.