I warned him that I would be waking him at nine. ‘I’ve got a chapter of chem to do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the SAC on Wednesday. What happened to the “commitment to study” lecture?’
I was at the sink, cleaning up from the meal I’d just cooked; the one he had just eaten. Wiping suds from my hands, I glanced at my reflection in the darkened window. Smiling to myself, I mumbled, ‘Kitchen sink dramas.’
‘What?’
I had spoken the thought as it flittered through me. I hadn’t meant to and I was in no mood to explain. ‘Do your homework now instead of playing games and you’ll have plenty of time to see your grandmother. Who, by the way, you haven’t seen in months.’
‘It’s all a joke to you, isn’t it? But you wouldn’t know, would you, cause you haven’t asked. I’ve got friends waiting for me. We’re a team. They’re depending on me. You think it’s a joke – you’re the fucking joke.’ He grabbed a box of Savoury Shapes from the bench and shoved a kitchen chair aside as he crashed his way to his room, slamming the door behind him. I went after him to have the final word. Reaching the door, I thought better of it.
We’d had these arguments before, when I’d raised my concern about him filling his imagination with violent military fantasies. ‘You don’t think it matters that you and your mates spend all your time pretending to kill people?’
‘It’s a game. Didn’t you ever play war games?’
He knew the answer because I’d told him many times before how Russell Neale and I had spent countless hours hunched over pretend Tommy guns, dodging bullets, throwing hand grenades in among the mullock heaps behind the factories in Victoria Street, taking on the Hun and the Japs, though strangely never the North Vietnamese, a people with whom Australia was actually at war. Also, we used to pinch Russ’s dad’s Commando comics and pore over the pictures, fancying ourselves as paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines. One time, catching me reading one in bed, Marj flew into a rage and lectured me about the realities of war, what it did to people. ‘Forget the millions who are killed. The lucky ones, the ones who survive, are buried in the mess of what’s left of their lives.’ She was thinking about her father, who had fought in New Guinea and never spoke about what he had seen and been forced to do.
What Noah didn’t realise was that I was sympathetic to him in a way that no one had been to me at his age. I didn’t want to ban him from playing those games – I believed in sublimation – I just wanted him to have some balance, to develop his sympathetic imagination as well as his vengeful one. Back then I had said, ‘We did other things, too: played sport, rode bikes, hung out at the tip. And I read books, drew pictures. I’m pretty sure I’d finished playing war games by your age.’
‘Good for you. Times have changed.’
You might think an ability to remember my own adolescent anger and frustration – that confounding mix of torment and torpor – would help. But our roles seemed fixed, and mine was to be the object of his disdain. I could accept that without being obliged to like it.
By the time I woke Sunday I had already prepared a salad, carved the cold chicken, made a thermos of coffee, and put cups, crockery and cutlery into a shopping bag. As a peace offering, I took a cup of coffee in to Noah. The room smelt sour, gamey. Morning light squinted from the edge of the blind. ‘Time to get up,’ I said, touching a hand to his shoulder, trying to connect the man-shaped mound before me with the little boy I used to cuddle to sleep. I balanced the cup on the pile of papers on his bedside table. ‘I’m going to get some rolls for lunch. We need to leave here by ten – in forty-five minutes.’ As I scrolled up the blind, he shrank further under his doona. ‘Don’t go back to sleep, you hear?’
He emitted a groan, which I took as assent. Of course, when I returned from the bakery he was still in bed, the coffee cold on the table. Fuming, I tore back his doona. ‘Don’t do this, Noah. You can do it to me, but not your grandmother.’
I was in the kitchen when he shuffled towards the bathroom, shaggy-haired, half-naked. ‘Chuck some clothes on and grab a banana – I’ll meet you in the car.’
Sunday was doing her make-up in front of the bathroom mirror, and before I’d made it to the front door they had started in on each other. I couldn’t hear the actual words, the accusations, just the tone of mutual contempt. I called out that I was leaving in five, and carried the picnic gear to the car. Sunday soon joined me, claiming the front seat. Noah, his hair still a mess, slouched into the back but made a point of saying that it was his turn in the front. When he got nowhere with that, he changed tack and asked if he could drive because he needed to clock up more hours on his Ls. I said he could drive on the way back, which seemed to satisfy him. Soon after, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw him dozing: head slumped sideways, mouth agape, eyes jammed against the light. Sitting beside me, Sunday fiddled with her phone, selecting songs, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram.
Just beyond the Woodend turn-off I saw a hawk quivering above the road. Touching Sunday’s arm to get her attention, I pointed at the bird. She lifted her gaze from the screen and peered out the window and smiled. ‘Cool,’ she said, prodding the phone back to life.
That prodding action and the fact that my bladder was full and pressing on my thoughts led my mind to a recent trip to the doctor. Despite my father’s history of prostate problems, for the usual reasons of embarrassment and fatalism, I had neglected to have mine checked when I turned fifty. My old inability to stop the tap from dripping had worsened, so it now felt like the tank was never empty, no matter how often I tried to drain it. The tipping point came with an ad in the sports pages that listed lower back pain as a symptom of prostate cancer. My lower back had been griping me for months.
Only a few years older than me, Ivan had been my doctor for twenty years. His parents had migrated from Poland after the war, and when I first met him his hair was snowy blond; over the years, as it’s gone grey, the difference had been one of tone rather than colour. We both barracked for North, and our consultations invariably began with a discussion of the team’s prospects. Shuffling into the waiting room, he’d smiled when he read out my name. Lifting his head from the file, peering over the reading glasses propped daintily on the end of his bulbous nose, he spotted me in the corner. As he ushered me into the consulting room, holding open the door for me to step over the threshold, the lights went out. ‘That’s going to make it difficult,’ he said, letting out a laugh.
I found a seat in the aquarium glow of his computer screen, which ran, it seemed, off a different circuit. ‘It’s fine,’ I joked, ‘this is more a feel thing, anyway.’
When the receptionist appeared at the door to announce she had rung the facilities guy, Ivan was leaning over the bed against the far wall, trying to find the switch on the inspection lamp. Flicking it on, turning the beam towards the wall, he said, ‘That’s better. Now, how can I help?’
I told him my symptoms and how I worried I had inherited Gil’s prostate problems. He said he needed to do a rectal examination and told me to loosen my trousers and step up onto the bed. As I undid my belt, I said, ‘At least we’ve got mood lighting.’
Ivan gave nothing. Not even a snigger. He had heard them all before, from a thousand men like me: men afraid of the impending pain, terrified they might enjoy it.
Facing the wall, drawing my knees to my chest as instructed, I heard the squelch of the lubricant as he squeezed it onto his glove. ‘So, what are we doing in the trade period?’
By the time I had twigged that he was talking football he’d wincingly inserted his finger and was feeling round, moving turds to one side to find the target. ‘Is that tender there?’ he asked, prodding at something deep inside me.
‘A little,’ I said, thinking it all felt tender. He withdrew his finger and wiped my bum – something no one had done for me in fifty years.
He pulled off the gloves and dropped them in the bin. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about. We’ll take some bloods just to make sure, and I’ll
give you some antibiotics. You might have a low-grade infection down there. The main thing is the prostate’s soft, and not too big. You haven’t got your father’s problems.’
Noah slept the whole way, waking only as we pulled in to the drive. Mum appeared at the front door before I had even turned off the engine. She was wearing a hat, and carried a rug and a cake tin. She must have been sitting inside waiting. ‘Give her a hand, one of you.’ Sunday had jumped out before I’d finished the sentence; Noah didn’t move.
Meeting Marj on the porch, I kissed her on the cheek and explained I needed the loo.
I had thought we would go to the botanical gardens, which were close by and had picnic tables, but Marj insisted we go to Mount Alexander, on the other side of Harcourt. ‘I want a change of scenery,’ she said, buckling herself in. ‘I’ll bump into people if we go to the gardens.’
Unlike nearby Mount Macedon and Hanging Rock, the undeveloped summit of Mount Alexander was largely overlooked by visitors. We parked near the transmission tower and took the picnic stuff from the boot. Marj led us to a clearing in the trees where a platform of flat-topped boulders made for a perfect place to spread the rugs and set up a folding chair. Leaning against the warm curve of a rock, I sat and stared towards the horizon, over dung-coloured paddocks embroidered with stands of darker trees; the green-rimmed eyes of farmers’ dams blinked back the sky’s pale blue. Nothing moved. The lack of motion made a myth of time and I had the sense, a bone-felt knowledge, that people had been looking out from this ledge for millennia.
Age hadn’t diminished Marj’s appetite. She thanked me twice for the chicken salad. Nearly finished, she leaned back in her chair and sighed. Addressing the three of us, she said, ‘The perfect way to spend my birthday. Thank you.’
‘And you haven’t even got your present yet!’ I levered myself up from the rock and hobbled towards the car to retrieve the gift. When I returned, the three of them were laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen Marj really laugh, her whole body heaving, rattling with it. I suspected the joke was on me but I was happy for them.
‘Sorry about the wrapping.’ I proffered her a strangely shaped object shrouded in a sheet.
‘You should save your money. I’ve told you, I want for nothing.’
I had given her a gardener’s kneeler which, inverted, doubled as a stool. ‘To keep you from becoming compost anytime soon,’ I said.
‘Dad!’ Sunday protested, leaning in to give Marj a hug.
Mum closed her eyes and breathed her in, before returning a more awkward embrace from Noah.
While Marj and I had a coffee from the thermos, me trying out the new stool, Sunday goaded Noah into a rock-climbing competition, hassling him until he abandoned his phone. Watching them bound about as they made their way to a huge boulder that jutted vertically from the rest, I saw them as they’d been as kids and wondered where all that had gone. They didn’t need me now, not really.
‘They’re good kids, Mick.’
I didn’t respond. I thought it was probably true, but wished I knew what part exactly I had played in them turning out okay. I wondered if I’d been a good kid myself, and if so, whether it was mostly because of the love and time my mother and grandmother had put into me, or if it was due to a desperate desire to please born of Gil’s empty promises.
‘What does Noah want to do?’ she asked. ‘Work-wise?’
‘He’s not sure. Something with computers maybe.’
Mum made some remark I didn’t catch, preoccupied as I was with recalling my own struggle with work and vocation. I had once believed that, like my father, I must have been called to do something, been marked for some kind of greatness. For years I had tormented myself over failing to find a vocation, then realised that this was the problem – thinking a vocation was something you found, rather than something that found you. The whole idea of a calling was medieval: life as fate rather than choice.
Gil agreed. He and I had exchanged emails about it, Gil saying how proud he was to have come from a time when talent did the choosing. ‘In my day there was a sense of grandeur in feeling you were one of the elected few. Now every second person thinks they can enrol in a writing course and, like a plumber learning to lay pipe, master the art of writing. They think they can choose to be talented. I’m all for self-expression, but a lot of singing shouldn’t get beyond the shower curtain.’
For Gil’s generation, fame was about ability or beauty, preferably both. Nowadays everyone’s a celebrity, curating their online personas with photos of cute cats and porno poses, garnering Friends and Likes to plump the dented pillows of their downsized Hollywood dreams. Democracy of a sort, I guess. Not quite the Storming of the Bastille.
Before becoming a father myself I would sometimes defend Gil’s abandonment of Reuben and me on the grounds that every child hopes that they will be the one to do something extraordinary in the world. And that if you are that child, the chosen one, the precious fruit that makes sense of the whole family tree, then surely you are entitled to be free of the constraints and obligations that condemn the rest of us to our ordinariness. With rhetorical flair, I would ask, ‘Do any of us really wish Nelson Mandela had been a better parent?’
What, though, of those of us who follow the golden harvest? What about us? How are we to live our shadowed lives?
I didn’t share any of this with Marj, who I knew had no truck with Gil’s claims to greatness. She would have heaped scorn on the Mandela analogy; scolded me for even thinking it. Still, I suspected she wished I was a little more like my father, had inherited his direction and passion, if not his success.
The sun had come out and the dry earth and warming oil of the fallen leaves gave off a smell of peppery heat. Peering from beneath the brim of her hat, Marj was staring at the shadow play of clouds on the fields below. I made to look past her, in the direction of the kids’ ghosted voices. ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Losing Munro Street. That house was yours—our family’s. Now it’s Nat’s.’
‘You think so?’ Mum genuflected a fly from her face. ‘It’s still the kids’ house, they’ll inherit it.’
‘As long as she doesn’t sell.’
‘I doubt she’ll do that, and if she does …’ Her voice trailed off. She turned her gaze to the shifting sky. ‘Your grandmother used to say houses are built of bricks but homes are made of memories.’
This sounded more like Marj than her mother, whose life had been governed by more practical matters, like securing the loan for the house I had now lost. I contemplated a quip about greeting card wisdom, then, as if divining my thoughts, she said, ‘It’s corny, Mick, but it’s true – no one can sell off our memories. Not even our exes.’
It is impossible to pinpoint the moment of Rosalia Morales’s transformation from being Madigan’s housekeeper to his live-in companion. After his prostate operation in 1994, Madigan employed people to cook and clean for him. A sequence of short-lived appointments of young female travellers ended in October the following year, when he engaged the 48-year-old Salvadorian refugee to become his resident housekeeper.
In 1984, when Héctor Morales and nine other Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) sympathisers were disappeared by a US-backed government militia from their village near Sensuntepeque, Cabañas, Rosalia and her son Jóse fled El Salvador via Honduras and, after a brief stay in Montreal, sought asylum in the United Kingdom. Quickly absorbed into the small Salvadorian community in Brixton, for ten years Morales worked the night shift cleaning offices, leaving Jóse with her friend and neighbour Alejandra López.
Long impressed by her meticulous cleaning of his tenth-floor office in Canary Wharf, the film producer Malcolm Creeley one day asked Morales if she was interested in earning additional income by cleaning his home in Crouch End. Within six months word had spread among the Creeleys’ social set of Morales’s excellent services, and not long after, she left the security of her office-cleaning job a
nd began working for herself. It was the Creeleys’ good friends Harold and Emma Beason who recommended her to Madigan, an action they and many others of the Creeleys’ acquaintance later regretted when she began working exclusively for the famous novelist.
For the first eighteen months in Madigan’s employ, Morales travelled on the tube between Brixton and Hampstead six days a week. When in July 1997 José left London to study at the University of Leeds, she accepted Madigan’s offer of rent-free accommodation in the flat he’d had built in the property’s old stables. From the outset, Morales and Madigan had an obvious affinity. Where one might have imagined a power imbalance in a relationship between an older, highly celebrated male author and an under-educated female former peasant, the dynamic between them was far more complex than such assumptions allowed, it being more reflective of affection than hierarchies of status and domination.* Even before they were a couple, old friends of Madigan’s commented on Morales’s hold over him. Never before had they seen their friend so readily defer to the advice, and often bald directives, of another. Peter Kessler recalls a memorable dinner party at which a well-lubricated Madigan was in full flight, standing on a chair extemporising ribald limericks, when Morales entered the room carrying a tray of coffee cups. Placing the tray on the table, she cryptically announced, ‘Some boys never grow legs in their trousers. You, Gilberto, are one such boy.’ Madigan’s mouth slackened into a smile.
‘You see,’ he said, petitioning those gathered round the table. ‘How can I compete with that?’
Morales poured him a coffee and, like the Statue of Liberty brandishing her torch, handed it up to him. ‘For you.’ Her employer obediently accepted the cup. Taking a sip, he gingerly stepped from the chair, being sure not to spill a drop.
The consensus among his friends was that Madigan had finally met his match, and not only in terms of moderating his more extreme behaviour.º In matters of politics, too, Morales often publically disagreed with him, taking him to task for his support of Tony Blair: ‘He’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and you know it. The what … las ovejas … we know it. Only the goats are fooled, because goats will swallow anything. A goat, is that what you are, Gilberto?’
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