by Tim Winton
‘What now?’ said Lockie.
‘She’s in hospital.’
Lockie whirled around and smacked the wall with his fist. A great crack appeared across the fibro panel.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, his knuckles throbbing.
The Sarge shrugged. ‘Looks better that way if you ask me.’
Lockie grabbed hold of his dad and smelled the leathery, whiskery smell of him. He felt the Sarge’s huge hand on the back of his head as they hugged hopelessly.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Lockie. His teeth hurt
from trying not to bawl.
‘None of us believes it. Not even your mum.’
Lockie pulled himself free. ‘She’s in a mental hospital, right?’
‘The local hospital.’
‘In the mental ward.’
The Sarge leaned on the ant-eaten verandah rail and sighed. ‘What did your mate Egg used to say? Don’t look at the uniform, look at the person. I liked Egg.’
‘Is she crazy?’
‘She’s depressed, Lockie. She’s worn out.’
‘This is a nervous breakdown then. This is what they mean.’
The Sarge shrugged. Big, wise-cracking, dumb-joking, loveable Sarge. Looking like a grey old man with no laughs left in him, his watery eyes so full of sadness.
‘I guess this qualifes as a breakdown, yeah.’
‘It’s like a bomb dropping. Everything suddenly smashed to bits.’
‘Well, it’s sure rearranged the furniture, Lock.’ ‘Will she be in there long?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What are they going to do to her?’
‘For her, you mean.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I don’t really know, Lock. They need to assess things.’
‘Can we visit?’
‘Soon. There’s a lot of things to figure out. I have to talk to Phillip.’
‘Oh, geez.’
The Sarge squeezed him again. Lockie felt five years old. He wanted to cry, to go running to his mum, to lie on the ground and kick and squeal until everything came back to normal again.
‘It comes to bits real quick, doesn’t it.’
‘Nothing’s gonna come to bits.’
‘But why’s this all happening? It’s our fault, isn’t it. Me and Phillip. We drove her to it. We wore her out.’
‘No, that’s a load of bollocks. It’s nobody’s fault.’
‘This morning she was crying like her heart was broken. It was awful.’
‘Well, we’ve seen you do the same, remember? After Vicki? You know what it’s like to have a broken heart.’
‘But this . . . this is different, like there’s no reason.’
‘Maybe,’ said the Sarge pulling back the screen door and wiping the rain from his face. ‘Maybe.’
After the Sarge went inside, Lockie stood a long time alone on the verandah. It was weird but it was hard to imagine his mum with a broken heart. Still he’d seen it with his own eyes. It was a shock, suddenly not knowing as much about your mother as you thought. Had he ever thought about her at all? Really thought about her? She was always so . . . together. His mum was an absolute brick. Man, she was rock solid. She was the kind of parent some kids must dream about. All that energy and optimism. Sometimes she drove him mad the way she cared so much. Oh, he remembered those sex talks last year when she kept talking about pubic hair until he wanted to just die. Whew, did she love a Deep and Meaningful or what! She was so conscientious she embarrassed him. Other kids’ oldies were so offhand, as though kids were just a pain they had to endure. He felt like a scumbag for taking all that love for granted. And now she was too busted up to even talk sense, too hurt to look after herself let alone anyone else. It just killed him to think of it.
After a while the screen door squeaked. Phillip came out and stood beside him. His face was shiny with tears.
This sucks.’
‘Yep.’
‘You cracked the wall.’
‘Yep.’
‘Does it get any worse than this?’
Lockie didn’t have an answer to that. But he had a horrible feeling about the possibilities.
ext morning the Sarge went back to the hospital to see how things were. Lockie looked after Blob and Phillip experimented with the microwave, trying to make icecream soup. When the Sarge got home he didn’t say much. A kind of quiet came over the house. It was Saturday and on the breeze you could hear Saturday sounds: kids playing cricket, some bogan tuning up his gas-guzzler in a driveway, a model plane with a mosquito whine. The rain had finally stopped and the sun looked like a half-squeezed lemon.
The Sarge started stuffing sheets into the washing machine. He really rammed it down the throat of the old Whirlpool.
‘Okay?’ Lockie murmured.
‘Nope.’
‘Anything I can do?’
‘Maybe you should get out for a while. Get yourself a bit of air.’
Lockie watched him shove in another sheet. Any moment now that washing machine was going to gag.
‘I won’t be long,’ he said, passing Blob across. The Sarge shrugged, his mind elsewhere.
Lockie grabbed his bike and racked off.
The fresh air ripped through Lockie’s hair as he rode. He pushed his old crate along until all he could feel was the breath burning in his lungs. He didn’t think about school or the town or the end of the summer holidays looming; he just powered down through the streets till he found himself outside the hospital.
For a long while he sat on his bike watching the sun on the joint’s tinted windows. With its flesh-coloured bricks and those airconditioners sprouting all over it like warts, the hospital looked like a great blind, ugly giant. Someone had designed this place and got paid for it. Lockie wondered how they slept at night, these architect blokes.
He rode round the wasteland of the carpark for a while, watching people come and go with wheelchairs and crutches and walking frames. How brilliant it must feel to have something simple wrong with you, to come out of that humming joint with a nifty little plaster on your arm knowing you’re all fixed and that’s that. To come out smelling the fresh air and hear the birds and know you’re alright and going home. He sat back and watched the main entrance for a while. Those big glass doors hissing open and clicking shut made his skin prickle. Lockie couldn’t even dream of what his mum might be feeling now. Maybe you needed to be mad in there so you could tell yourself you were somewhere else. Clouds slid across the tinted plate glass. Lockie shuddered and rode off. As he passed the entrance the doors whooshed open and he caught a nasty cold whiff of antiseptic, like mouthwash, yes, like Listerine, and it reminded him of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That smell gave him the creeps. He cranked those pedals and got out of there.
Lockie coasted through town towards the stink of the harbour. Families were doing their Saturday shopping and cars were double-parked all down the main drag. A couple of times he heard kids call out to him as he breezed past but he didn’t look back. He just couldn’t think of school life starting up for another year. More class gossip. Hundreds more laps of the athletics track. Another year in chains.
He glided under the hundred tiny flags of Streeton’s car yard. He most definitely didn’t look over in case he saw someone he knew he couldn’t bear to see, a particular someone of the female variety. Not today—he couldn’t bear it.
He got to the rotting boards of the town jetty and the dungsome stench of the harbour. The sewer pipes and factory outlets were stopped up for good now and there were Environmental Protection guys in white overalls on barges out there even now, but there was a long way to go before the harbour was clean again. That was where his summer had gone, now that he thought of it, into saving the harbour. Him and Egg. And his mum, of course. She was unbelieveable. She ran the whole campaign in the end. Angelus people started to call her Captain Planet; they didn’t care for greenies much around here. All those long days and nights on the phone hustling up sup
port, smoothing over eco-egos, screen-printing shirts and banners, taking the heat from local business types and rednecks. It felt great being in on all that, but Lockie knew that while he was wimping out and disappearing for a surf in the middle of the campaign, his mum was busting her buns to get the job done. It hit him then, thinking of the summer she’d had. It was no long hot season at the beach for her. She’d done it tough. And he’d been carrying on as though it was business as usual. It made him so ashamed he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t escape thinking about her.
He spun on his back wheel and took off, nearly collecting an old lady and a dog halfway back down the jetty.
In the end, Lockie arrived where he was always going to end up: at the beach. Mister Predictable. He rode up the grassy back of a dune and looked out over the bay. There was no swell and the water was bronze with sunlight.
Out in the distance the surface broke now and then. There were fish jumping like tiny platinum darts. Lockie watched them flash in the sun, leaping madly, turning and swerving. And then he saw a great splash in their midst and out of the water came a dolphin wriggling into the sky with a gobful of silver. The grinning dolphin crashed back into the sea and the bay was still.
Lockie rode back uphill with his head buzzing.
et’s face it. Just when you think nothing worse can possibly happen, when you think your bum is bouncing on the bottom of the barrel and you can’t go any lower, something always comes along to really rub your nose in it. As Lockie was soon to discover. Riding up the muddy driveway, Lockie still felt a little thrill from seeing the dolphin. He’d left feeling lower than a snake full of ball bearings, but now he wasn’t so bad. Phillip sat on the edge of the verandah and as Lockie swung off the bike he saw that his little brother’s lower lip was the size of a hot air balloon.
‘What happened to you?’
Lockie had a terrible thought. For a moment he wondered if maybe the Sarge had belted him one. But that was stupid. Their dad wasn’t like that.
‘Soof,’ said Phillip glumly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Souf. I vurnt vy lif on the souf.’
‘Do I get a translation?’
‘Icecreeb souf! Vicroway souf!’
‘Microwave? Oh, man. Icecream soup. What happened, did you blow up the machine or the icecream?’
Phillip shook his head. ‘It worked perveckly.’
‘So what about the fat lip?’
‘Icecreeb souf, Lockie. Hotter ’n it looks.’
‘Yikes. You need ice on that.’
‘Had it.’
The Sarge came to the door with Blob asleep against his shoulder. He was smiling at them but you could tell he was trying too hard to look cheerful.
‘Hey, you got a licence for that blister, Mister?’
Phillip rolled his eyes. You could hardly see his eyes behind that great swelling, throbbing lip. Obviously he’d been taking lip jokes for a while already.
‘Well, Sarge,’ said Lockie, smelling some unlovely announcement in the air, ‘what’s up?’
‘More lif jokes,’ said Phillip folding his arms. ‘Oh goody.’
‘That’s enough lip from you,’ said the Sarge lamely. None of them even cracked a smile. ‘We gotta make some plans, boys. With all this happening we’ve got to organise ourselves differently for a while.’
‘We’re coping alright, aren’t we?’ said Lockie, knowing it wasn’t strictly true.
‘Lockie, we need to get some help here. I can’t take another week off and I can’t afford to pay a housekeeper or nanny or whatever, so I’ve got some big problems.’
‘Sarge—’
‘Look, you blokes have done a great job and I’m really proud of you, but in a week’s time you’ll be back at school and there’ll be no one here for your sister. I can’t take her to work—she’d eat all the lino and frighten the crims. Gawd, there’d be a stampede in the lock-up. So, I’ve called your Nan and Pop.’ The boys gasped and looked at each other in absolute disbelief. ‘They’ve been very good about it. They’re coming down from Perth on tomorrow’s bus.’
‘Are you serious?’ said Lockie. ‘Nan and Pop? I’d rather go into an orphanage!’
‘You wouldn’t know an orphanage if it snuck up and bit you on the bum. Don’t be silly.’
‘But—’
‘I really haven’t got much choice, Lock. If I lose my job things won’t get better any faster. Think of what we’d lose. The huge paycheck. The mansion the government so kindly provides for us. All this high living will have to go. No more caviar and champagne, no more penthouse in the swamp.’
‘Very damn funny.’
‘Yeah, a scream. But I’m serious. If I’m unemployed we’re all in the poo. So, it’s the grandparents. That’s the deal.’
The Sarge took Blob back inside to lie her in the cot. That left the Leonard boys a few seconds to stand there and do their imitation of a pair of stunned mullet. Nan and Pop?
‘I think this is called from bad to worse,’ muttered Lockie.
‘Worst,’ said Phillip with some lip trouble.
‘Worstest.’
‘Worsterest.’
‘Worstedness.’
‘Worstatious.’
‘Now you sound like Egg. He’d call it complete worstatiousness. With a twist of lemon.’
Phillip laughed. It was a hopeless sound.
Brushing his teeth gloomily that night, Lockie opened the bathroom cabinet and caught a whiff of antiseptic. Phew, that smell again. What was it that it reminded him of? The stink of hospital. But he’d hardly ever been into a hospital in his whole life. Never had his tonsils out, nor his appendix. He’d never swallowed scissors or hacked himself open with broken glass. He sure as hell never had to go to Emergency to get his whatsit cut out of a zipper like Egg.
He went to bed and lay awake thinking back.
When Blob was born? Nope. Never went to the hospital.
Nothing. But it haunted him, that Listerine smell.
ow you’ll agree there are grandparents and there are grandparents. Lockie Leonard’s Nan and Pop played in a league all their own. In fact, all Lockie’s Nan and Pop ever did was play. They were golfers. Once upon a time they must have simply been keen golfers. This was obviously before they became mad keen golfers. Later they graduated to being mad golfers. But in all the years Lockie had known them his grandparents were straight-out hard-core single-minded completely nutso golfers.
After they retired from whatever it was that kept them from fulltime golf in their early years, they moved to a dinky retirement estate that not only had its own golf course but where the houses were more or less on the links itself. They could lie in bed and listen to the swish of a five iron at the first tee. They could sit in the spa and hear sweaty businessmen trying to hack their way out of the sandtrap that backed onto their house. At breakfast they could sit on their terrace and watch caddies getting brained by sliced shots and diving magpies. All of this probably made Nan and Pop think they’d died and gone to Heaven early. After all, they were golfers with genuine nutso status. If you were someone else, someone not exactly into golf, say Lockie Leonard for instance, it was enough to make you slip into a coma and never come back.
When he was a youngster and the family lived in Perth, Lockie used to visit them at Silver Links with his mum. The Sarge called it Missing Links and found ingenious excuses not to go. Whenever Lockie visited them, his Nan and Pop were always kind of distracted. They talked about handicaps and pars and bogies and buggies and hardly noticed he, their first grandson, was there at all. He could never imagine his mum as their child. Had she been born on the eighth hole in a severe cross wind at two over the card? Did Nan pull her shot, sky the ball and end up in the rough? Was the baby wrapped in a gym towel and stuck in beside the putter on the back seat of the motorised cart until the end of the round? Mrs Leonard wouldn’t even say the word GOLF and Lockie didn’t blame her. How did people so . . . well, so Nan and Pop-like produce such a daughter?
And now they were coming to stay. Yikes. Still, it was possible that this was the chance they might have been waiting for all these years to show how much they cared. Maybe Pm too cynical, Lockie thought next morning after breakfast. We need the help and they are family. I’m gonna keep an open mind.
An hour later, as his Nan and Pop got off the bus at the Angelus bus station, Lockie’s heart sank like a bunjee jumper with greasy ankles. The Sarge and him and Phillip stood there in the cold breeze to watch the oldies get off the bus in their checkerboard slacks and yellow cardigans. Lockie saw the two-tone shoes and bit his lip. Phillip looked as though lip-biting was out of the question. Overnight his fat lip had burst and now it was a black scab, like a cockroach parked above his chin.
The moment Lockie saw the golf bags being unloaded from the guts of the bus he knew in his heart that this would never work. Two huge tartan golf bags. Two teeny overnight bags just big enough to get a toothbrush and some denture glue into. Uh-uh, These people couldn’t be for real. A family crisis and they bring the golf goodies. The Sarge seemed to have the romantic notion that Nan and Pop would be staying a fortnight. Lockie gave it three days, max.
‘Lockie!’ said his dear old Nan looking straight at Phillip.
‘Ugh!’ said Pop. ‘He’s got herpes.’