Okay, Brett, we’ll talk about your lawyer friend later, but let’s go and see the family friends and nail some sales! Let’s do it, baby, let’s do it! I’m hyped, are you hyped too, Brett? Well then, show it, man, show it!
St Georges Terrace was cold, a wind tunnel. They trudged to the accountancy office in one of the medium-rise buildings the resources-obsessed businesspeople of the city sold as progress, as worldly. Brett had never liked the accountant much and really didn’t care what he thought, but as it turned out he wasn’t in the office, and though Paul tried to flog a set to the secretary at the front desk, she said, We can’t buy anything like that, I’m afraid, and pointed to a No hawkers sign. Paul smiled and said, You’d think an accountant would respect the spirit of free enterprise, and marched out, with Brett, huge bag of desk sets slung over his shoulder, shuffling behind. Any message for Mr …? asked the secretary, as Brett reached the door. No, not really, have a nice day.
They also struck out at the shoe shop, which had a To let sign in the window. Sorry, mate, I had no idea it had closed. Given the look on Paul’s face, Brett felt the need to state the bloody obvious. I don’t keep in touch with my family, and especially my family’s friends these days, he mumbled. Different paths. Paul was going to pop. Well, you’re not showing much energy or enthusiasm … not much I can say that will be positive in my report. Brett gave a surprisingly nervous laugh – he simply wasn’t himself – and said, I might get some points as a personal servant, and then half dropped the bag to the pavement, before thinking better of letting it go completely. After all, his dole depended on his making a ‘genuine effort’ to seek employment, especially when the CES had lined up this horror ‘job’ and wanted to see results. Okay, let’s reset, Brrrrett! Now, how about your lawyer friend. It wasn’t a question.
I shouldn’t have even mentioned him, sorry, mate. He wouldn’t be interested. We’ve lost contact. I’ve been in my own world.
Your own loser’s world, Brett. Now, now, none of that. We’ve got to follow all leads. Find some oomph, mate. Find some zip. Some get-up-and-go!
Again, Brett was outside watching himself. He was trying to explain as he would to a friend, to someone who might have empathy. He was pissing into the cold winds of St Georges Terrace and it was blowing back on him. You see, I was going to be someone … he was twenty years older than me and successful, a big-shot lawyer, and he kind of took me under his wing and mentored me, and took me to plays and the opera and bought me books and records, and thought I’d be something special. I ate with his family every Friday night and we had season tickets to the theatre. We went yachting on Wednesday nights and though I didn’t sail much, I watched the orange sunsets over the river. And then I kind of went off track.
Paul Rise snaked his arm over Brett’s shoulder, slightly reaching up to make the height, and said, Well, Brett, now you have me as a mentor. You follow my example and you’ll lift yourself out of the shit. If that lawyer had really been looking out for you, he would have got you back on track. It’s time for him to pay up now, right his wrong. You’re making something of yourself now – you’ll see, he’ll be proud of you. Brett viscerally shuddered, but didn’t throw Paul off as he might. Drunk, he would have yelled and spat and abused the sanctimonious bastard. He felt the arm slithering away.
Paul was so hyped on this new hope, this way out of the shit of nothingness, that he was going the whole hog with it. They owed it to themselves and the ‘company’. They had to bring this lawyer down to reality, to the real world of commerce. I am the man! Paul yelled to the Terrace. No one took any notice. I am the one to rip the muddy carpet out from under your posh mate’s boots. When we’re done, we’ll be able to buy your old mate a hundred times over. We’re making the business, we’re generating the money. We’re what the country’s built on.
Okay, let’s go, said Brett.
Peter ‘Biff’ Carson was a big fella around town. Brought up in the elite of Perth society, he sold himself as a real Aussie bloke. Culture and sports, etiquette and fucking, all met in his superbly conditioned person. He was an excellent barrister, in high demand. He had defended some of the most notorious criminals in Perth, and had won when he probably shouldn’t have. He had fêted Brett as the next great thing, and Brett, not having a lot of money with his mother a sole parent and all that, lapped it up. They even went skiing at Mount Buller, with Biff footing the bill and saying, You just go out into the world and reach your full potential and I’ll be repaid in full. The words were ringing in Brett’s snow-sharpened ears.
Again, a secretary. And a secretary who knew her worth and the reputation of her chambers. A No hawkers sign wasn’t needed here; though criminals came and went, they were criminals with money and dress sense, even manners. Paul had few manners and looked like the zealot he was starting to become. The secretary didn’t recognise Brett, though she’d seen him dozens of times during the intimacy between him and her boss, years back. How can I help you boys? she asked. Paul took the lead: My friend here knows Peter Carson and is wondering if we might see him. The secretary registered who Brett was, sighed, looked over her glasses, and rang through to Biff. Mr Carson, you might want to come out … that old university friend of yours is here. No, no, not him – from when you went to university for leisure a few years ago. Yes, that’s him – Brett. He’s here in the waiting room with another youngish man. He’s carrying a large black bag. No, I don’t know what’s in the bag – shall I ask?
And then Biff was suddenly with them, all smiles and open arms and hugging Brett, then stepping back and saying, Let’s take a look at you … a bit stiff, but it’s you, it’s still you. Before Brett could explain, Paul was on him. Sir, can we interest you in a desk set, or maybe even a set of desk sets for your office? Paul was unzipping the bag on Brett’s shoulder, and pulling a sample out, and twisting the planet Earth, and wiggling the pen holders, and saying rapid-fire that if the office took ten they could give a fifteen per cent – not the usual ten, but fifteen per cent – discount. Biff ignored the pitch and shot a deadly court-room witness box stare at Brett, who listened to the silence, the roaring mental whisper of What have you stooped to? He half opened his mouth to explain about the baby and addiction and the unemployment rate …
Biff said nothing to Brett, just turned to his secretary and said, Buy one set and give it to the op shop, and then walked back to his office, slamming the door behind him. Brett noticed that Biff had added three tennis pennants to his collection on the wall; one was a runner-up’s red instead of a winner’s blue. Paul handed over a set and took the money, which he fumbled pushing into his pocket, reddening as he bent down to collect the small change. He looked up at the secretary, and said in a shaky voice which he quickly corrected, I can never understand why they don’t just round up to the nearest dollar.
Brett followed him into the lift, and when the lift doors closed, Paul said, It’s a start! Now, think hard, who else do you know in the city …? And in coming days we’ll take a suburb from the list and work that from one end to the other. As the lift slowed to a stop, Brett watched Paul check and recheck the change in his pocket with a tic-like action. The hand was sweaty and splotchy and agitated. Paul wore an agonised smile.
*
Reaching the outer limits of the orchard, Brett heard the old man calling. Though he didn’t feel up to a long confab, he changed his trajectory and made for the tin shed. The orchardist was peeling a mandarin, which he offered to Brett. Take, eat … good and juicy. Brett briefly thought about the toxins on the hands proffering the fruit and then thought, Ah, fuck it, and ate. Good, eh? Yes, it’s good. I am getting too old – my son wants me to sell the orchard and move in with him and his wife. I had no idea you had children. One child – a son. He hates me, but I am sitting on a million dollars’ worth of land. Wow, shit. Yes, they’ll clear the trees and plant houses. Surely you didn’t raise a child in this shed? Ha, no. We owned that big stone house down on the edge of the river. Our son was raised there. When
my wife died, I sold it and gave the boy the money so he could get started in life. Now he wants the orchard … the land. Do you know how much I make for a case of mandarins? How many cases I sell a year? Enough to hold my ground here. I was born in the mountains of Dalmatia, he said. And I grew up on land my grandfather had tended. And his grandfather. I will die here and then I will be buried in the city cemetery. None of me will be left here – not even my ashes, because my son won’t do that. He will refuse. My ashes will go into a box and be posted in concrete in the middle of the city. That’s my fate for eternity.
Brett listened, wondering why he was hearing all of this now, today. He listened in the early twilight, rubbing his arms to keep warm, thinking it was time to get home to his own young son, to his partner who would be wondering how it went. He no longer felt the urge for a drink or a bong. He wondered what kind of rehabilitation this was part of, or whether it was the calm before a storm, or if none of it meant anything at all.
MOTHER’S DAY
I overheard a very old woman telling another very old woman this story on a cruise ship. I was working as a shipboard entertainer, a magician, in fact, with plenty of time on my hands during the days sailing the Aegean and the Mediterranean. I have Greek ancestry and though my parents were both born in Perth, family ties remain strong. I spend at least two weeks a year on Samos not thinking about the gods or wars, but thinking about Pythagoras because that’s the way my brain works, drinking the island’s wine and staying awake on coffee. I do card tricks in the ‘family’ cafe to keep in tune. I am a visitor who is not a visitor.
Anyway, the woman wasn’t telling her story in a clandestine or secretive way; I wasn’t straining to hear it. She spoke English with an accent impossible to pinpoint. Might even have been Australian, but the name of the boy and a few digressions into other subjects here or there suggested a mountainous German-speaking country, though I am pretty sure there was no trace of a German accent. That bit’s probably to do with me – always searching for an illusion when plain facts will do.
The subtle horror of the tale didn’t strike me at the time, but it has eaten away at me for years, and I relay it to you more as catharsis than as a need to pass this time we so unfortunately have on our hands. In some ways it’s a story about time, but time as an aside – or maybe the loss of time. It’s a story about a lot of things that don’t really add up in my mind. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t suppose I understand it now. Maybe it’s the cold that’s brought it on, though when I heard it, it was in the height of summer, the world drenched in sunlight, and the sea as wine-dark as the great poet would have us believe. But the old woman created such a cold and foreboding picture that the decks became like ice and the sky as it is before snow, that flat calm that will close off all escape routes, keep us housebound for weeks.
I now realise that she spoke in a monotone, though at the time her voice seemed full of inflection and menace. With the seagulls having their say and the yells and laughter coming from the nearby games deck, it was unsettling. And her eyes – she just wasn’t there, on the deck; she was within the hidden world, the secret compartment of her story.
She began, When my son was seven he was asked by his schoolteacher to write a story about Mother’s Day. He sat and wrote a story about snow that sat on the needles of the pine trees surrounding our house in the mountains. Now I can look back and see the anxieties hidden in such a tale – that it might well have been about me, his mother – but then, I couldn’t see it. My husband was a deeply religious and conservative man, and in our household Freud was spoken of with disdain. Ten years after the incident, having decidedly become a nonbeliever and my second husband a psychiatrist, I grasped the reason behind the boy’s story. Which is not to say I can make sense of what followed, but at least it’s a beginning.
We express our anxieties over and over as we pass our stories on, so perhaps that’s what I’m doing now. It is very sweet of you to listen to me, as I’m sure deck quoits would be far more entertaining, and the young man who directs the deck activities cuts a much smarter figure than I!
So my son handed the story to his teacher, who took a quick glance and loudly rebuked him in front of the class. How dare he make a mockery of his own mother! Franz, my son, protested his innocence, though he gave no explanation, simply insisting he had done nothing wrong. The teacher sat him in the corner of the room, facing away from his classmates, and insisted he do the assignment again. This time Franz wrote about trains, and the teacher threatened to speak to me, his mother.
I regret the nature of the relationship I had with Franz, my eldest. There were ten years between the birth of Franz and that of my second child, by which time the household was by comparison liberated. I had learnt from my earlier mistakes, and was able to form a bond with my second child. Don’t misunderstand me, I loved Franz, and I believe he doted on me and even his father. Although his father would not allow Franz to touch him – even me only rarely – and his rules were near-draconian, he only wanted what was good for the family. He was hardworking, and as strict on himself as he was on others.
Franz was terrified by the teacher’s threat. He felt sure she’d humiliate him in front of his father and me, and also bring some punishment too awful to contemplate. He ran out of the schoolroom, not stopping until he reached home. Bursting through the door, he called to me that something special had happened. Something incredible and wonderful. God had called him. He said that he’d been in his classroom and heard the voice of God calling him to his side, to do the work of God.
I trembled with excitement. Two of my long-dead sisters had been nuns, and I had half wondered if I had a vocation myself. My husband would feel that his ways had been vindicated, and that a great blessing had been placed on our house. And in one so young, so very young. Without asking for an explanation I hurried Franz out the door and down to the local priest. The priest, short of applicants for the seminary that year, as he would always joke without smiling, was as overwhelmed as I. This is remarkable and wonderful, he said. Everything was wonderful. He questioned Franz, but not too strongly. Did he hear God speak? What did he say? How did he feel? Franz, shaking and ecstatic, answered everything as he should. It was as if in running home, something had overtaken Franz’s original fear and supplanted it. He was convincing himself that God had spoken, that the Mother’s Day story was a test.
Juniorate, seminary, orders. Franz went right through. We saw him rarely, and he didn’t take to my second husband, who insisted Franz was being brainwashed and should be freed. Psychiatry was quackery, Franz said. And don’t think for a moment Franz and the priests who mentored him were past a bit of anti-Semitism. They had their ways of intimating and suggesting. It wasn’t far below the surface. Franz’s father’s death seemed to have brought him out of his shell somewhat, but he retreated again after a few months. Every now and again I visited him. Because his was a teaching order, there were no problems with that. He taught mathematics – he liked things to be precise.
I believe I woke with the first spark – before the calls from inside and the flames lit up the night and the stench of burning and its companion smoke rolled through the valley. Before the bells and the cold movement of water from the pumps and the river. It was such a cold place, even in spring. The thaw ate into your bones and was unhealthy for the mind. Things are slow to change because of the cold – it’s to do with viscosity, a lack of flow in the blood. In a litany of absurdities, my new husband, Franz’s stepfather, was called in by the Church to speak to him. My husband made a bleak joke: The Church calls on the very Jew it shunned to help exonerate it for taking in a child so young. You see, it was a town consumed by cold and prejudice.
My husband told them that Franz didn’t believe in God, had never believed in God. It was all a ruse, a sham. God was what you wanted to hear, he told them, and Franz dished God up in buckets. Franz had burned the Virgin, and the draughts through the centuries-old monastery spread the flames through cloth and i
nto the timbers. It was a natural and logical process. God wouldn’t be angry, because he couldn’t smell or see the flames. The burning of our blessed Mother was done on a whim, just a simple pleasure. It wasn’t the first pleasure he’d had or the first Virgin he’d burnt. That’s what he said to my husband, though my husband told the authorities that Franz was suffering from schizophrenia and had heard voices since the age of seven. The Church verified this; sadly, they said, some vocations were simply mental illness, and it was hard to confirm authenticity. They did point out that modern methods were being increasingly employed, and something equivalent to a spiritual polygraph was on the drawing board. And the Church had places that would accommodate Franz, and help him find the God he had lost then misheard.
When I spoke to Franz in his cell, his police cell, I learned the truth of the Mother’s Day assignment, and his fear. He seemed quite in possession of his faculties. Anyway, I didn’t see him again. He died not long after, from unrelated causes, as they say, though my husband and I knew he’d taken his life without any hindrance from the authorities who believed him to be possessed. My husband identified the body. It was a closed casket. I never even saw the body, the grimace on his face. No mother wants to see that.
You know, we never went to speak to the teacher who had been so offended by the assignments. They only came to our attention because the teacher had written asking why Franz was out of school and mentioning that there’d been some upset about the Mother’s Day piece. She told us what happened but not why the essays had caused such outrage. We didn’t really care – Franzi had found God, and that was all that mattered.
My second husband did speak to the teacher, but in a professional capacity. He never revealed what the teacher told him, but he hinted in dark ways, and our relationship clearly suffered because of it. He could barely bring himself to touch me. I asked him what was wrong, and he burst out: You disgust me! I naturally assumed Franz had written of something inappropriate happening to him and that I was part of it, though how such an idea tied in with trains I had no idea. But then it came to me. It was to do with a birthday, my birthday, maybe three years before this all happened. I was being given gifts and Franz threw a jealous tantrum, saying, Why isn’t it my birthday? She’s had too many birthdays. I want a train set! For this outburst my husband – my first husband, of course – took Franzi, tore down his pants in front of all the gathered guests, and beat him over his bare buttocks until they glowed red. And then, suddenly, my husband hurled the boy to the floor, and yelled, Dirty little beast. Out, everyone, out, he screamed, and the guests vanished from the room without looking back. But I stayed and helped the boy to his feet. He had an erection, which he was trying to cover with his hands. I hitched his breeches up and kissed him on the head and said, Don’t worry, darling. I will buy you a train set for your next birthday.
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