‘I reckon it’s more exciting to get them that way anyway,’ the father said.
As he and his son worked on the invitations it occurred to Gavin that he’d have to talk with his wife about who took what of the array of computer gear. When Dylan carried the prototype invitation back to the lounge to show Freya, and Gavin had turned everything off, he stood for a moment in the darkened office, with just a slab of indirect light through the doorway. He could hear the fountain of leaves outside in the night, and the voices of his wife and son in another room. There was a rich glimmer on the brass umbrella stand that had belonged to his mother’s grandfather, and that he used as a wastepaper basket. His mother said her grandfather had owned coal barges in the Midlands and had been a rich man.
A few nights later they talked about the prizes and presents — not those for Dylan, but those for the other kids. That was the way these days, said Freya. Everyone got a loot bag to take home. They spent quite a lot of time talking about the possible contents and pricing them. The birthday party raised no issues causing pain, or bewilderment, or accusation. Freya said you didn’t want all lollies after a big birthday tea. Better to have items the kids could play with. ‘What about that two-dollar place?’ said Gavin.
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Freya. So they took Dylan there one Saturday morning, and guided his choice of a number of little junk purchases that he was delighted with. They placed a limit of six dollars each for the loot bags, and the boy enjoyed making them up at home. The chocolate frogs remained his favourite, despite his parents’ views.
Freya watched as Dylan and Gavin taped up the bags, and the small presents that would be discovered in the treasure hunt, or won during pass the parcel. How open and easy was her husband’s smile when directed to his son. She had brothers, though, who could be good role models and companions, and male colleagues. And anyway, she’d told Gavin she was happy for him to have as much part in their son’s life as possible. There was nothing of harm in her husband. It was just they didn’t find each other essential any more. Paths divide in life, the counsellor had said.
Freya thought a lot about the party, and talked with her friends. Even kids of seven can get scratchy late in the day after a lot of excitement. Better to start at one, have the food at three, and all the guests away home by four. And there were a couple of younger children, siblings of Dylan’s neighbourhood friends, who would be heartbroken if they were left out.
She and Gavin talked about the birthday also. It was an event full of small decisions on which they could entirely agree and support each other. They realised that their determination to make it a wonderful party was partly guilt, but neither of them mentioned that.
On the day itself the weather was fine, and they were able to have the treasure hunt and some games in the section. No permanent damage was done: just a protea broken down, a red plastic ball lost over the fence in the Harris’s garden, and Zeb Riley struck in the face with the half-size cricket bat. He cried a lot and his mother came and took him away just in case his nose was broken. Despite his injury, Zeb had the presence of mind to ask for his loot bag before he left.
Gavin was in charge outside, while Freya and neighbour Susan Munro prepared the party food. Sue had two children at the birthday and was happy to help. Of all the women Gavin knew, she was the hottest, and had something of a reputation. She liked a joke with innuendo, kissed easily, but he’d never tried it on with her. Maybe it would have been easier for Freya and Gavin if that had been the problem: one of them falling for someone else. Something clearly identified and therefore surely subject to remedy, or clear cause for parting. Personal growth is sometimes at the expense of existing relationships, the counsellor said.
The kids loved the food. There were fifteen of them in all, counting the two younger ones and leaving out Zeb. Gavin had picked up pizza and chicken pieces, but Freya made all the cakes, sandwiches and fudge. There were old-fashioned jellies: a sort of motionless cordial. The chocolate birthday cake was in the shape of a Mississippi paddle steamer. ‘I don’t honestly know how you do it,’ said Susan. ‘How you manage everything so perfectly.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Gavin.
Dylan coped well with the excitement until almost the end, when he had a meltdown about sharing some of his presents. The super transformer actually, that Patrick Leask said he just wanted a look at. Gavin had to carry his son from the room for a time out in the bedroom. Dylan had one of his self-induced coughing fits and brought up his share of the paddle steamer over the pale rug, but he was reasonably okay again by the time parents began turning up at four o’clock to take their children home.
Despite Dylan being sick, the party was a success. It’s a relief, though, for parents when a child’s birthday is over. Gavin was surprised how little usable food was left. There was a lot of it on the table and some elsewhere, but most of it had been gnawed a little, or disfigured in some way. The paddle steamer was unrecognisable and bereft of the pebbles and sliced jubes that had adorned it. Over the next two days Gavin and Freya found bits of food secreted about the rooms, and two treasure hunt prizes that the kids had missed.
Dylan took most of his presents to bed, heaping them up at his feet. ‘We’ll go in when he’s nodded off and move them,’ said Freya.
‘Absolutely,’ said Gavin, and later he went into his son’s room, removed the heavier things and stood for a time watching Dylan as he slept. The night light showed his smooth forehead and open mouth, the easy and silent breathing. The smell of sick lingered in the room, but Gavin didn’t care about that. He sometimes thought there was only so much happiness in the world, and therefore satisfaction for any individual must be at someone else’s expense.
He wondered how different it would be coming to visit his son in the house they had all lived in together: a place utterly familiar and bearing the evidence of his rather mediocre DIY skills. He imagined that his conversations with his wife would be much the same — they had learnt to avoid painful topics — but he had a great fear that Dylan might be lost to him in some way.
As Freya and Gavin worked together to tidy up after the party, they talked about their own birthdays when children: how their families had dealt with such things. Gavin’s recollections were the more pleasant, for Freya’s father had been a discontented man who had wanted an academic career, and ended up a success in business. Money disguises failure, but never compensates for it, she said. It was a conversation in which both of them fully engaged. They were able to talk quite freely about the past.
When all was tidy, when the signs of another passing year in Dylan’s life had been smoothed away, they took glasses of chardonnay outside to the patio, and sat there in the glow of solar lamps Freya had placed on the garden edge. The night was quiet: easy laughter could be heard from the house two over where students flatted.
‘We shouldn’t blame ourselves,’ Freya said.
‘No.’
‘And if we’re both in the same city he shouldn’t miss out on much at all. Some kids’ parents are working just about all the time anyway.’
‘Can we manage things without the bloody lawyers?’ asked Gavin. ‘At least at the beginning, I mean, until we see how it goes. The whole world doesn’t have to know, does it.’
‘I’m okay with that,’ she said.
She was sitting forward in the wooden chair, her arms resting on her knees and her hands clasped. He could see the shimmer of tears on her cheek, but knew there was no response that offered solution. The distanced laughter of the students drifted in the dark air. ‘Actually I’m pooped,’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s been all go.’
‘You think he had a great time, though?’
‘He’s a lucky kid,’ said Gavin.
‘It’s important we see a lot of each other while he gets used to us being in separate places,’ she said. ‘Nothing abrupt at all, don’t you think?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Gavin.
SEGUE DREAMS
‘I R
EMEMBER NOTHING THAT HAPPENED WORTH RELATING THIS DAY. HOW MANY SUCH DAYS DOES MORTAL MAN PASS?’
Diary of James Boswell, Thursday, 21 July 1763
‘Would you like to make love?’ Graeme asks his wife.
‘No,’ she says, and goes into the bathroom for her shower. Where the bedroom curtains don’t quite meet he can see a strip of sky, and it’s all cloud. He enquires loudly if his wife expects a busy day, but there’s no reply: not because she is out of sorts at all, but because the plumbing is particularly sonorous when the shower mixer indicator is at that one point of the 360 which delivers water at the desired temperature.
An inconsequential dream is fading; something about mountaineering and the crevasse death of a fat boy who bullied him in Standard One, and whom he hasn’t given a conscious thought in forty years. He remembers now how the mud used to cake on the bully’s big knees in the winter playground, and how his pink gums showed when he sneered. When Graeme pulls the curtains he sees from his neighbour’s dogwood tree that the wind is southerly and therefore cold.
‘So, you’ve got a busy day?’ he asks his wife at breakfast.
‘Absolutely flat out,’ she says. ‘And then there’s the meeting tonight to organise the thingy.’ His wife is a school dental nurse, and the thingy is a conference on fluoridation. ‘How about you?’ she says. He could tell her that the futility of his existence gapes before him, that he was bullied in Standard One by a fat boy, that the lustre of the world is now quite worn away.
‘The Mycenaean kingdoms at eleven, Ionian cities at three,’ he says. They are lectures he has given many times, and he feels a twinge of guilt that yet again he hasn’t got around to updating them. The Ionian lecture, in particular: there is new material on the influence of the Persian satraps which needs to be included.
‘Would you mind going round to that Powys street address sometime today? I won’t have a chance,’ his wife says.
‘What address?’ he asks.
‘Where they advertised the used bricks. I told you we should consider them for the barbecue surround.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t make a decision on the spot. Just see what condition they’re in, and if there’s still mortar sticking to them.’
There is time after his wife has left for work and before he must leave for the university, for him to get some of the satrap material into the computer, but he doesn’t do it. Without a conscious decision he makes a cup of coffee instead, and reads the newspaper. There is a story about a Nigerian faith healer who made a woman parade around him naked while he sprinkled her with camel urine and recited incantations to increase her chances of receiving immigration papers for England. Female nakedness is always newsworthy: nothing else in the story is of the slightest concern. Prurience has taken a trivial incident from African obscurity and placed it on the breakfast table of the world.
Cicero, a terrier with hair like the bristles of a worn toothbrush, whines behind the door. He is let in and impatiently waits to be fed from the Doggie Woggie Giant Roll with heart and kidneys. Graeme talks to him, draws fingers through his sparse coat, but Cicero has become self-absorbed and depressed with age. No longer does he display disinterested affection, bring in the paper or hold up his paw in a greeting. Only his appetite and body odour are undiminished. Domesticity and abject loyalty have palled for Cicero, and his joints grown stiff. ‘Good fellow, aren’t you, yes,’ says Graeme, ‘and you like that Woggie Woggie don’t you just, old fellow. Yes, you do.’ Cicero says nothing.
Graeme has a glimpse of the red-jacketed postie passing, and stops talking to his dog to concentrate on a new distraction. Letters and emails are moments of possibility in his day. The air is cold on his bald head as he walks to the gate, and the daisies on the lawn, rather than having a wildflower allure, remind him of yet another duty. Yet, there is a good handful of mail, and he resists the inclination to check it out until he’s back in the house, seated by the window and upwind from Cicero.
All, however, is winnowed away without leaving solid grain or gain. The rates demand, the 134th issue of the Ancient History Review, a credit card statement, a slip announcing the milk round has changed hands, with apostrophes twice missing from abbreviated it’s, a note from a former colleague, now in the States, saying she has married an evangelical preacher from Alabama, seven multicoloured advertising circulars, and a donation envelope from the support group for those with clinical flatulence. What more did he expect? But he did, of course — he yearned for a gift unsolicited and undeserved, a lightning strike that would galvanise his world. ‘Cicero, old boy,’ Graeme says, ‘I cannot believe the earth is not flat.’ Cicero doesn’t bother to reply.
His eleven o’clock lecture is in Room C25. It’s a long time since Graeme has visited Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos, and years of reading and conferences have dulled that bright immediacy. He makes an effort with the PowerPoint display of the burial treasures, but the majority of students are impassive. Yet the lecture is well attended and a good many students stay after its conclusion. The reason for both occurrences is soon disclosed: the third assignment is almost due and half the class want extensions. The applications are more statements of entitlement than requests for clemency. He listens to their trite justifications and allows all their requests from weariness rather than goodwill.
In the staff club he lunches with Brendon Connor of Linguistics and a visiting Fellow from East Anglia who is an expert on the economic consequences of war. They talk of rugby, the naked African woman and the loss of savouries since the new caterers took over. ‘I used to have curry wontons two or three times a week,’ laments Brendon.
‘Not even a sausage roll now. Jesus. It’s not right. Who makes these decisions on our behalf is what I want to know,’ says the East Anglian Fellow. Graeme thinks he may say something about the demise of pinwheel pastries with bacon and corn, but instead gazes at the full cloud cover clamped over all the campus. Everything seems on a small scale, and shrinking further.
In his room, J47 on level four of the Humanities Block, he works on a departmental submission to the university library, which has decided to reduce its subscriptions to academic journals on classical antiquity, then has a session as supervisor with Carl Lemms, who is preparing a PhD thesis on the rise of equestrian political influence in Rome during the second century BC.
Lemms is a toiler who twenty years ago would not have been given the opportunity for a doctorate: a glum, uninspired and prodigiously determined young man, with hair like dry pine needles, and sprouting ears that threaten to ramify. Graeme knows the future for Lemms and others of his increasing tribe — a rotation of lesser, untenured academic appointments and the final bitterness of expectation unfulfilled. In the present, however, Lemms scratches in his dry hair and looks about Graeme’s room with a stolid avarice. His glumness is a contagion, and Graeme feels its emanation.
The afternoon lecture is poorly attended, perhaps because no assignment is due, and there is a flickering fluorescent light close to the lectern, which is unpleasant. Also Graeme has no PowerPoint display to bolster his unrevised Ionian notes, and a commonplace boredom drifts in the still room. He is aware of the lack of animation in his voice, but cannot manage even spurious enthusiasm. No one waits to ask anything of him concerning Cyrus the Emperor, or the city of Miletus, and a tall, young guy leaving with others slaps his open hand to his temple in what Graeme takes to be mockery of the time spent in the lecture.
As he drives home Graeme remembers the advertisement for used bricks, and finds it in his case. Powys Street is in the older part of the city, and Number 189 is a weatherboard house, but despite that there is indeed a large dump of bricks on the tufted front lawn. No one answers his knock at the front door and then the back, so he goes to the brick heap and makes an appraisal. Most of them seem to be damaged in some way, and most have an icing of mortar. Graeme scrapes one brick against another to check the grip of the mortar, and judges it difficult to remove. He then stands for a moment, a bri
ck in each hand, in the grass of a stranger’s unkempt section and wonders what he’s doing there. No one comes, no neighbours are to be seen.
Where have they come from, these used bricks piled outside a wooden house? What disintegration of dreams do they represent? Who owns them, yet doesn’t bother to be there for a customer? Why on earth would he and his wife wish to corral their barbecue trolley with old bricks? When does the world end?
He’s about to leave when a small and battered car pulls into the unsealed drive. A woman gets out, waves and then ducks back into the car to retrieve a bag of groceries. A tall, rather gaunt woman wearing tracksuit trousers with a yellow stripe, and what looks like a man’s corduroy jacket. ‘The ad for the bricks,’ says Graeme, in explanation, and gestures towards them.
‘Come inside, come inside,’ she says boisterously, and leads the way through the front door with hardly a pause.
Down the burrow of a narrow hall they go, and into an old-fashioned kitchen with a table in the middle. The woman dumps the groceries on it, and whirls disconcertingly towards him with a hand outstretched. ‘Sally,’ she says. ‘Some call me Sally Army,’ she adds with a barking laugh.
‘Graeme,’ he says, and is surprised by the strength of Sally’s grip. ‘I was just having a look at the bricks, but I don’t think they’re quite what I’m after.’ He feels he’s inside the house, has been greeted with familiarity, on false pretences. ‘Sorry.’
‘They belong to the former tenants. The landlord said if they hadn’t collected them by last week, I could sell them off. They’re a bit of an eyesore, aren’t they.’
Sally Army looks like a man. She has a lined face of character, without make-up and with bristling eyebrows. Her hair is long, grey, parted tautly in the middle and held at the back by a blue band. ‘Forget the bricks then, and give me an honest opinion,’ she says.
‘Pardon.’
Living As a Moon Page 4