by Alex Shearer
“I guess the separatist politics must have gone wrong.”
“I’m not seeing her.”
“Louis, where are you going?”
“Walking,” he said. “In Wales.”
“Louis,” I said. “You can’t just run off and disappear and leave me to deal with a woman who’s traveled six thousand miles or however far it is to have your babies.”
“Watch me.”
“Louis, it isn’t fair.”
He paused in packing his bag.
“Remember the school bus? When you got arrested?”
“Maybe, Louis. But who’s the delinquent now?”
“Blood’s thicker,” he said.
“Louis—”
“It’s your turn to do me a favor,” he said.
“Louis, I’ve done you favors. You’ve spent the whole winter in front of my portable gas fire and my girlfriend sewed your trousers up.”
He zipped the holdall and squared up to me. He was no taller than I was, but he was maybe twenty pounds heavier, and it wasn’t fat, it was muscle. Though when it came to a fight we were fairly equal, for though he was the stronger, I was the more desperate man. I think I had discovered that when we were children. And the reason I was more desperate and fought more ferociously was because I knew I was the weaker.
“It’s little to ask from your only brother. It’s little to ask. I’d do it for you.”
“You wouldn’t, Louis. You’d tell me to face up to my responsibilities.”
“I’m going walking in the Black Mountains,” he said. “I’ll be back Thursday or when she’s gone, whichever is sooner. I’ll call.” He hustled me out of the boat and locked it. Then he had a thought.
“You want to come with me?” he said. “You like walking, don’t you?”
“Louis, I have to go to work. And how come you can take time off?”
“They owe me holidays.”
“Louis, what am I going to say to Chancelle about your babies?”
“Tell her I had a vasectomy.”
And off he went. He had a little trouble getting the car started and almost suffocated the both of us with all the black smoke. But that was Louis for you—Louis and his vehicles. If they didn’t burn oil and belch out fumes and break down regularly, he wouldn’t buy them.
* * *
Chancelle turned up that evening and was nigh inconsolable. She had put on a lot of weight and looked as though she were expecting babies already, quite a few of them, or at the very least twins.
She sat and sobbed and sobbed, but I had to be hard and I told her it was over and there was nothing anyone could do, as Louis had gone off to the Black Mountains and he didn’t want to have babies with her at any price.
Iona held her hand and I made some tea and then we sent out for a pizza. She stayed the night on the sofa, and when I explained that Louis had spent the winter there, she seemed comforted slightly.
The next morning she got a bus to London, and that was the last we saw or heard of her.
Louis rang the following evening and asked if it was safe to come home.
“Louis,” I said, “when you say ‘home,’ where do you mean exactly?”
“Where the heart is,” he said.
He could throw me like that sometimes by coming out with the completely unexpected.
“I’ve met someone,” he said. “With blond hair.”
“What? In the Black Mountains?”
“She’s a backpacker from New Zealand. I’ve invited her to stay on my boat for a while.”
“I hope she doesn’t feel the cold then, Louis.”
“No way,” he said. “We’re tough.”
6
Old Black Dog
It’s easy to think that you know where and when the rot started. With the so-called benefit of hindsight. Always presuming it is a benefit and not the opposite, some kind of handicap or millstone thing around your neck.
I was eleven years old and Louis was twelve and our father was dying upstairs in a room we were no longer allowed to enter on the grounds that he wanted us to remember him as he was. The flaw in this prohibition was that he hadn’t looked so great the last time we had seen him, and if I had to remember him in that condition, then I could equally have remembered him in his last few days and been no more the traumatized.
He’d been suffering from lung cancer due to twenty to thirty hand-rolled cigarettes a day for years and years.
Whenever I see these tobacco company executives in their nice suits and white shirts and sober ties, as they make their justifications and announce their profits and explain how they are opening up fresh markets in the new world, I think the sons-of-bitches should be boiled in oil for all the suffering they have caused. And I wonder if they smoke, or if they would want their own children to smoke, and I firmly believe it’s the last thing they would want, to find their own offspring hanging out of the bathroom window with cigarettes in their mouths.
Anyway, he spent his last few weeks getting increasingly yellow and burning holes in the sheets, to our mother’s fear and dismay, for he carried on smoking right to the bitter end—and it was bitter. She was afraid he’d set fire to the bed and the whole place would go up, and then we’d all die of smoke inhalation together.
So it wasn’t a question of if, just when. And I came home from school one afternoon to find Louis waiting at the back of the house. For the front door was a thing we never used except for visitors, or when the police came around to talk about the rhododendron bush.
Louis had been waiting for me to return, for though we were at the same school, we were in different classes, and he always took the high road home, whereas I took the low road, with its many distractions, and so I rarely got back before him.
“He’s dead,” Louis told me.
I shrugged, for we were tough.
“That so?” I said.
And we stood there awhile, and then we went inside, and our mother was in the kitchen, and the rest is pretty much of a blank.
After the funeral we came home, the three of us, to our sad, shabby, rented home. I wouldn’t say it reeked of poverty, but there was certainly an odor of the stuff around the place, and opening the windows and letting the air in didn’t ever make a huge amount of difference.
Our mother began taking her best and only jacket off and started in on the tea-making, which was her recourse in all contingencies.
“Well, Louis,” she said. “I guess that you’re the man of the house now.”
I don’t blame her for what she said in her grief and loneliness, but to this day I’m convinced it was the beginning of at least half of the trouble. It’s a hard job to have to take on, being the man of the place at twelve years old. But Louis had to shoulder the burden. The corollary of that, of course, was all the resentment it created in me. I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut, but inside my heart was boiling, and I thought, No way is my brother going to be my father, and I was stubborn ever after, and went to the bad for a while, and took up attacking rhododendron bushes.
* * *
What brought it all back to mind was when I first got to Louis’s place in Australia and walked in through the door and saw him in his beanie hat with a quarter of his mind gone, and the next thing I saw was his kettle—which deserves a digression of its own at another time—and I clapped my eyes on his fridge.
There were things living in that fridge that even medical science didn’t know about. Its age was incalculable. They didn’t make fridges like that anymore. Maybe they never had and Louis had constructed it himself out of old spare parts and tree bark.
But it wasn’t just the mold, the grime, the gone-off food, the brown grapefruit, the rust, the smell, and all the rest. It was the fridge magnets. There were half a dozen of them, all of them rusty too, and they bore messages saying: Depression—you are not alo
ne. And they had phone numbers on them of people you could call and talk to. But whether Louis had ever called and spoken to anyone, I never asked. I just thought that, well, the old black dog was back, or maybe it had never gone away. I knew that Louis had always had it snapping at his heels. But maybe it had got him by the throat lately, or even now was hiding in the house somewhere, under the bed in the deep, deep dust, or growling down in the basement. Or maybe that was it making noises up in the attic. Only when I later asked Louis about the attic noises that were keeping me awake, he said it was possums.
So I asked why he didn’t get rid of them, but he said they didn’t bother him too much, so maybe he liked their company. I asked him what they were doing up there that made so much noise.
“They’re having a root,” he said. “They’re rooting away, making more possums.”
“Louis,” I said, “what use are even more possums to you? You can’t even cope with the ones you already have.”
But he just shrugged and wouldn’t do anything about them. And I didn’t want to buy poison or anything, for I drew the line at poisoning possums, though had it been rats, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So we just had to put up with the racket, but it left you feeling tired in the mornings, and maybe it made the possums feel tired too.
“Why can’t they have a root before they go to sleep, Louis?”
“That’s how they are,” he said.
“But you know what it’s like when you wake up in the morning when there’s two of you.”
“Farts and bad breath and stale alcohol,” Louis said, for he was always one to cut to the chase and never mind the niceties. “But you do it anyway. Though in a possum’s case, there maybe isn’t the stale alcohol.”
“Louis,” I said. “Are you all right?”
And I meant regarding the fridge stickers. But some things, even when we reached out for them, we never really grabbed hold of. You know that famous painting in the Sistine Chapel called The Creation, with God and Man reaching out for each other but their hands don’t quite connect? That was how we communicated.
“Let’s have a drink,” Louis said.
“What do you want?”
“Cuppa tea,” he said.
“All right. Sit down and I’ll make us one.”
That was when I noticed the kettle.
“Louis,” I said, “what’s the deal with the kettle?”
“What do you mean?” he said. “What’s wrong with it?”
* * *
Louis lived inside but really he was camping out.
On his grease- and leftovers-encrusted gas stove stood a blackened kettle. It was one of the old-fashioned kind that you boil over a burner, not an electric one. Louis did have electricity, but it didn’t extend as far as his hot drink requirements.
“Louis,” I said, “this kettle has no handle.”
“Broken off,” he said.
“When did the handle break off?”
He gave another of his shrugs. He had square, solid, powerful shoulders. If you’d been thinking of a fight with him, you’d think twice.
“I don’t know. Few years ago.”
He went and sat in his Salvation Army armchair and opened up his blue cooler bag and fished out some eyedrops for his glaucoma.
“Louis, how do you pour the water out when the kettle has boiled?”
“Tea towel,” he said, with annoyance in his voice, as if I were being deliberately obtuse.
“So let me get this right. You have lived for unspecified years with a kettle with no handle that you have to wrap a tea towel around to pour the water out of?”
“I’m doing my eyes!”
“Louis, how much is a kettle?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“I’m going to buy one tomorrow.”
“Don’t waste your money.”
“Louis, a kettle with a handle will make life easier, right? If you make your own life easier, you’re not wasting your money. You’re just spending it on improving your situation, right?”
“We don’t need handles on our kettles, we’re—”
“Not having a handle on your kettle doesn’t make you tough. Being tough has nothing to do with kettle handles. Scott of the Antarctic went to the South Pole, Louis. Was he tough?”
“You’d need to ask him.”
“Louis, I’ve seen pictures of Scott of the Antarctic and his men in their hut at the South Pole, and I swear to God that they had a handle on their kettle. They might even have carried a spare handle, for all I know.”
“Are you making the tea or aren’t you?”
So I made the tea. I had to scour the mugs first. They were stained a deep tannin brown inside.
“There you go.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m buying a new kettle tomorrow, Louis. While you’re at the hospital, I’m buying a new kettle.”
“Don’t waste your money.”
But I didn’t listen to him and I did what I wanted. Who did he think he was anyway? My father or someone?
* * *
We ended up with two new kettles. One electric, and one for the gas stove—with a handle. I edged the old one out of the house gradually. First I left it out on the veranda. Then, when Louis didn’t notice that, I carried it down the stairs and left it in the garden. After a week I moved it next to the trash bin. The following week I put it in the bin. Then, on the Tuesday, I put the bin out for collection.
On Wednesday, when Louis was back from his radiotherapy, he began mooching around the kitchen.
“You lost something, Louis?” I asked.
“My kettle,” he said. “Where’s my kettle?”
“Right there,” I said, pointing at the electric one plugged into the wall. “Or did you mean this one?” And there was the new and shiny blue one on the gas burner.
“No. My kettle. My kettle.”
“You mean the old burnt black and crusty one with no handle?”
“My kettle.”
“Louis, I didn’t think you wanted it anymore. I didn’t think we needed it. Since we have these nice new kettles. So I’m afraid—it’s gone.”
“You threw it out? You threw out my kettle?”
“Louis, it was dangerous, you could have scalded yourself, or set fire to the place, you had to wrap a tea towel around it. It was a liability.”
He just looked at me through his milky eyes, now filled with infinite reproach, and I felt like some kind of murderer for what I had done.
“Louis, I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I thought it was just an old kettle.”
Without another word, he turned his back to me, and he went to his room and lay down on his bed. The mix of chemo and radiotherapy was very tiring and he spent a lot of the day asleep.
I felt bad. I realized what I had done. It was part of Louis I had thrown away. For years Louis had been the man with the kettle with no handle. People had come over and he had made them coffee or tea or an herbal something. And he had poured out their drinks, first carefully wrapping the dirty, scorched old tea towel around the body of the kettle. And they’d watched him do so, and everyone knew that Louis was the man with the kettle without a handle. And so it had been for many years. There had been talk and conversation and many a long hour of putting the world to rights, there in that choked and cluttered kitchen that had seen neither floor cloth nor mop for a decade.
But that had been Louis. That had been part of who he was.
“You know Louis, don’t you? The guy with the beard and the kettle.”
Now he only had the beard left and that had been to the barber’s.
I felt bad, like a tyrant, like one who had taken advantage of vulnerabilities. But I couldn’t bring the kettle back. It had gone to the dump and even if I searched I would never find it. It was there with all the ot
her long-gone and inadequate domestic appliances. True, I had bought him a new one, but what use was new when it wasn’t what you loved?
I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life, but here’s my gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favors. Nor yourself either.
7
Fried Fish
Louis had a friend called Halley who was one of the bohemian types and who lived up in the hills forty minutes from the city, with trees for company and scrub turkeys and wallabies, and what sounded like perpetual wind chimes but which turned out to be bellbirds—a kind of myna bird with a piercing call that would drive the overly sensitive to insanity in under a week.
Halley made a living from picture frames and he lived in a shed that he had built himself on some land he had bought. This wasn’t like a European shed; it was an Australian shed, a far larger and more substantial thing. Louis had put the roof on it. Close to the shed stood a barn, which Louis had also put the roof on, and which contained timber of all sorts—at least, all sorts suitable for the making of picture frames. The frames were fine and artistic things, skillfully crafted. But it was a hand-to-mouth game. Halley said his profits were small and his hours were long. He too drove a ute, but it only had a fifth of a million miles on it, so it was almost in showroom condition.
The track he lived up was so steep and lacking in bite on a wet day that you would need someone to sit in the back of your truck to put weight over the rear axle, otherwise you’d be skidding back down again in a hurry or ending up in the ditch.
Like Louis, Halley was also a man of some education, interesting CV, and varied and floundered relationships. He was also one to whom the odor of the nine-to-five smelled unpleasant, and he would work eight to six or even longer to avoid getting tangled up in it.
They’d met up at a craft market where Halley sold his frames and where, for a time, Louis had gone into the handmade jewelry business. He spent the week threading beads and the weekend selling them. But it made so little money that the nine-to-five and the factory walls closed around him again. Louis had degrees and a fine mind and could solve problems others couldn’t even understand, but he always had trouble making a living.