by Tim Rogers
Being a Monday he allows himself until 3 pm to restore. That gives another hour and a half of mental massaging and self-recrimination. Mondays are the détente after the weekend’s typical resumption of hostilities. Weekends have to be shared with a general public and their family outings, auction biddings and dawdling walks along the streets swapping ice-cream cones. Mondays he can sit out, and at the very least feed his depleted imagination. The morning has no need for him.
Other items in his Brocade of Benevolence might include an LP to ease him through the morning’s torpor, like Blossom Dearie this very day, a Dorothy Parker poem, or that jacket he hasn’t worn in ages but which is woven of just the type of thin corduroy that can transform the shabbiest of appearances into the rumpled austerity of the college professor he once imagined himself becoming. Such tender regard from the previous night’s self could be both an affirmation of his belief that he is never too drunk to ignore the consequences of his actions and a mark of stubbornness. That he is just stubborn enough to go on.
He tried once to drink less, when she was still here, years ago. It wasn’t his attempt to save the marriage – he knew that even the soberest of attentions wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the lust for attention his wife possessed, or even to stop the persistent anal bleeding – he simply feared being an embarrassment to his little girl. One afternoon years ago he had gone straight to her kindergarten from the airport after spending the morning snorting crushed OxyContin thinking it the ideal hangover cure. One of her teachers, a young bright woman who was his daughter’s favourite, had accompanied the two of them as he took her home via the pub. He’d actually believed that the teacher was charmed by his louche, cavalier attitude and bonhomie. It was only months later when he was banished from the family home for the last time that he realised the teacher had been fearful for the girl’s safety in the care of a man whose pupils were pinned as if all hope was squeezing from his mind, and who was walking with the assuredness of a newborn giraffe.
The drip from the shower has developed a new rhythmic pattern, a call for renewed attention. It has gone from a primary school drum pattern to a confident, syncopated percussive motif worthy of a Steely Dan composition. With that, he wonders for a moment if his own recent recognition of The Dan’s lyrical and musical acumen is another sign that the much-lampooned (especially by him) tastes of a middle-aged man now fit him as snugly as comfortable walking shoes. And sensible footwear is a sure sign of giving up.
Only two weeks earlier he had called a local handyman to unblock his bathroom sink. Personal grooming was just too intimate a time these days, too many reflections, so he’d wondered what could be doing all the clogging. No doubt it was a thick whorl of long, dark hair, an artefact from pre-school grooming sessions when she was allowed to come and stay over, when no matter how tenderly he would try and brush her hair, her head would jerk to the side at the discovery of a knot and she would give a muted cry of pain as he apologised, each and every time.
He likes Hire A Hubby, and if she’d been with him he would have called them for sure. She would’ve seen the humour in it; even if he always wanted to appear strong for her, the opportunity for a grand laugh always won out. She loved it when he used the most ocker of words. Baaaaarbie. Streeewwwth. Hire A Hubby. The irony stung like ridicule. He’d been hired and fired. The logo for the service was a swarthy bloke in a pink polo shirt, chest thrust skyward. His would be a mournful-looking reproductive organ atop two exhausted sacks.
The smell of the apartment is mercifully free of decay or damp, but today there is a sickly sweet essence, like an overripe mango, at the edges of what he can sense. Despite his resentment at re-foresting a more everyday existence, he still cleans, and the pong of a stale sandwich or the sight of spilt beer can spark hours of self-flagellation. The fruity scent holds his attention until he realises that it smells like a two-dollar shop. That insidious assault of cheap plastic and toxins that also hints of children’s birthday parties: crude piñatas, newly discovered food allergies and the panic of forgetting parents’ names, occupations or secrets.
He remembers her fifth birthday party. To distract himself from worrying about how many more than the fifteen invited kids would show up at the park, he’d found some recipes for salsas – ones with mango, fresh and canned tomatoes, tomatillos, watermelon – and thought them the perfect party food. Then he’d combed a two-dollar shop for large plastic bowls, and trays for corn chips, hoping that the absence of gaudy chip packets would be well received by the grown-ups. He’d prepared well the day before, emptying the fridge of beer and condiments, and buying enough ingredients that his small kitchen resembled a country market barrow and not the neglected meal space of a then recently separated man.
The morning of the party he’d sprung into action early. Two pots of coffee and just three cigarettes as a flue for the grease in his mind, a soundtrack of country music plucked from the early seventies and chosen for the comfort it gives to those cast adrift, and a newly bought chopping knife to hack through spring onions, mangoes and chillies. Soon the brightly coloured plastic bowls were filling with rich syrupy salsas as pleasing to the eye as to the palate. This shit was easy! And kinda fun. There was the soundtrack, the artisanal mixing of food, the smell of fresh fruit overcoming the old school-library taint of a newly rented, thirty-year-old property.
And then the telephone messages began. Texts and calls. That his wife was questioning the appropriateness of the chosen snack food and the organic origins of the produce was a disappointing beginning; the denunciation of chilli as safe for children was a topic she warmed to. But the devolution of barrages that followed – five calls in eight minutes, all terminated with either party’s invective cut off mid-stream – although now lost in time, left him with one prevailing thought: couldn’t he have handled it all better? With a shrug? A methodical explanation of his reasoning? Was his swift ascent to teeth-grinding rage pure reflex?
He had turned the phone off rather than potentially ruin his daughter’s buffet. A few breathing techniques learned in a class for anger management in the same bleached brick community centre where he’d attended half an AA meeting had loosened the knot in his gut, but his gums ached from gnashed teeth.
Turning off the phone was undoubtedly a sage act – though the cacophonous way the bowls had leaped and spilled over the back of the car en route to the party showed that his party preparation skills were not similarly enlightened. Plastic wrap or aluminium foil were supermarket items often forgotten until moments of crisis. Coffee and toilet paper too.
The party had been a success of sorts, conversations with other parents reduced to quick exchanges as his desire to rid the car seats of their new effluvium energised him like a fifties housewife on Benzedrine. The withering stares from his wife (who was dressed more for a swingers’ party of a similar era) were barely acknowledged as swings were pushed, cake was sliced and a soccer game completed with only one minor injury. Negotiating a peace settlement between his daughter and her best friend, after the friend had shown too much prowess on the makeshift pitch, brought a little precious insight: he was the umpire for the match, and he’d noticed that his daughter was, perhaps, jealous that her best friend was playing so well in front of him. He even allowed himself to feel a little pleased that she would think competitively.
When the parents and kids were asked to go back to the family house for drinks, he demurred, to no great protest, and stayed to clean up the party mess. That night, using a dessertspoon and a soapy sponge to remove what pulp hadn’t become one with the back seat fabric of his car, he gulped down a flask of vodka and pineapple juice, took the plastic bowls back to the park and torched them with great malevolence until they resembled jellyfish stranded on a shoreline.
The origin of the foreign bouquet is only discovered when, after counting to eight, he swings his long legs off the bed while casting off the sheets in the manner of a matador, finally ready to begin the day. The smack of his feet upon wooden parquetry
is echoed as spatters of cold liquid vomit hit two corners of plastered wall, all before he is conscious of what he’s stepped into. He wonders what solids now form part of the Rorschach blottings dripping onto the floor. That he has chucked up in bed is no great surprise, but that he neglected to clean up immediately afterwards is. Cleanliness is, he feels, his resilient virtue. Dettol, mop and bucket are dispatched with the diligence of an automaton – to cover the short trail of spewy footprints and the shallow pool of dark regret.
Daylight reveals that the apartment is lightly coated in dust. Motes fuss over each other’s positions in the morning rays that streak through the blinds’ wooden slats. In the living room there’s a totemic pile of language books for courses he’s started but not finished: Cantonese, Serbian, Italian, Spanish and the obligatory French. Despite the biannual promise to clear her old room out and transform it into a functional space for the next big project (carpentry or maybe upholstery?), he hasn’t done much more than move her old toy bucket and an IKEA construction housing folded cottons to another corner, and place her boxes of drawings into the wardrobe along with her winter jackets, now long outgrown.
The decision to bundle up her clothes and take them to the Salvation Army thrift store only five blocks away is always thwarted by an old superstition that clearing the room of her baby clothes and kindergarten etchings will cause her harm in some way. As if, like some Haitian voodoo curse, the act of giving away her clothes and toys would transform the waves of tenderness that he sends out daily, nightly, into a swell of negligence that could place her daydreaming on a busy road, unaware of oncoming traffic. She is a dreamy kid after all. He used to catch her looking out the window of the car in his rear-view, mouthing sweet lil’ nothings. Songs maybe. She needs protection from the phone-watching fucktards out there.
If her absence only occasionally hits him like a sucker punch, he has to remind himself, often and while gulping down his self-pity, that he’s still in a position of care and guidance. She’s a teenage girl who is just very far away. And if it takes a village to raise a child, he’ll just have to be a distant, silent expatriate. Even if many of his actions are born from superstitions and neuroses, he’s almost sure that it will all add up to being a reasonable parent when the ledger is squared.
A friend once told him that squeezing a lemon into warm water every morning was excellent for the liver. It remains part of his regime, his one concession to health. He can still hear her voice in the morning responding to his announcement that orange juice will be prepared and that it will be fresh. ‘Strained?’ she would ask, being as resistant to pulp in juice as he was as a kid. He’d prepare a different retort each time: ‘No, darling, and today you’ll get rind as well,’ or ‘Yes, sweetheart, I’ve kept all the pulp and packed it into your sandwiches.’
It’s just the kind of dad crap that makes him wince, but he remembers being surprised how easy it was to fall into the role. For a while there he was a quip machine. ‘You get married today?’ when she was seven. ‘You in trouble, darlin’?’ – in a deep Southern accent – ‘You ain’t’ – whispering – ‘with child, are ya?’ when she was eleven. Anything for a smile. Attenuating any response to entendres and jeu de mots so quickly that he was annoying even himself, until her little smile would cloak him in a self-satisfied glow.
The thought that he fell into the role so swiftly because he could hear the clock ticking was a prescient one.
The morning he learned her mother was pregnant, he unpacked his suitcases and then took a bus into the city to get a haircut and buy a book on how to quit drinking. He’d packed his bags the night before because the fighting had reached such a pitch that it genuinely scared him. It seemed that physical conflict was the next logical step. His own disorientation frightened him almost as much as his wife’s temper. But when the test returned a positive result, and she burst out crying, he hugged her with genuine affection and then shaved properly for the first time in a decade. He was at least adaptable; he would have made a serviceable actor. (The shaving and haircut routine lasted until the third trimester.)
In a birth class just weeks before the event, he found himself staring out a window seriously thinking about circumcision, a topic that had been raised among the circle of tightly smiling couples in the room. Four minutes of genuine concern passed before he remembered he had known for months that his child would be a girl. Was he at all disappointed not to be raising a boy? To his great shame, he remembers a brief lull in enthusiasm at the news, based entirely on the idea of teaching a freckle-faced little oik how to play a cover drive with the bat he’d bought when he’d been a sports-mad kid of twelve. Then a few minutes of dashed daydreams gave way to jaw-slackening wonder. A little girl. He’d teach her how to play a straight drive with a lighter bat that he’d buy her for her eleventh birthday, then they’d paint their nails together. He’d meet her for a drink after work when she was twenty – the vision of it came so quickly after the news that it was like seeing his own future as a movie trailer.
He resolves not to do the twice-daily scour of social media for photos or tidbits about her. There was mention weeks ago of a trip out to San Francisco with her mother and any photos seen this morning wouldn’t provide any relief about her safety, just sadness and frustration that a few hundred ‘friends’ would have seen precious photos before he was even considered. He knows he can’t resist her all day, but to get through this first wave is important. To get some momentum.
It is a coffee and cigarette morning. He prepares the sturdy steel pot and enters into conversation with it, cooing how faithful and reliable it has been, how one day he’ll take it away with him in the suitcase, maybe to Adelaide! or Brisbane! He hears the drip again from the bathroom and refuses to let it irritate him any further, in fact it’s good to feel another presence in the apartment at last. The coffee is strong, a golden shade of brown. It is partnered with a lumpy cigarette. There is barely enough time for him to put another record on – the full-bellied yodel of Jimmie Rogers – before a grand toilet ablution, like a phalanx of gulls evacuating a tree at the rumour of impending danger. Thankfully, it removes the heaviness from his gut, his feet, his expectations. A sequence of events that is at least reassuring.
Perhaps he should try to call her before stepping out into the rest of the world? She had made the last one, and they’d talked of her ‘special friend’, a boy a year older and, from what he’d gleaned, a little more streetwise than her. When she’d asked, ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me, Dad?’ his heart had skipped a little, like a saucepan lid adjusting to a simmering heat. He’d understood, but had replied, ‘Oh, darling, there’s a lot of questions, but tell me . . . is he kind? Does he hold your hand even when his mates are around?’ She’d softly answered yes in a way that kept his heart buoyant for three days.
If too many days passed without contact and he spent too many hours on social media simply missing her, he would venture out into the streets like Bill Sikes, twitching with disquiet. At such times he’d mutter ‘Do not tempt misery, misery will find you’ to himself like a biblical incantation. It was a warning, and if repeated enough could drag his fever down so he wouldn’t bark at passing groups of laughing backpackers. He needed to work harder on his kindness. How else could he ask a boyfriend to be a marvellous human if he didn’t stop snarling at strangers?
He dresses mindlessly in a dead man’s suit that serves as an attempt at civility, and, once outside the building, leans leftward. This way there is no chance of running into any acquaintance as all busyness is to the right, to the magnet that attracts both tourists and locals. The left is strictly for purpose. He’d heard of a Spanish word – madrugador – which means those who walk the streets at daybreak or dusk. He much prefers the French word flâneur, but is playing with rhymes for the former for a limerick –
A madrugador wakes to plunder
While others waste mornings with slumber
Why wake to alarms
When into your arms<
br />
Leaps delirium and other such wonders
– when he comes across a large, elaborately framed photograph on top of a pile of hard rubbish. It appears to have been flung there, as the glass in the top left corner is shattered and the corresponding frame damaged. The photograph is of a couple, he guesses Taiwanese, in wedding attire, maybe from the mid-nineties given the gentleman’s hairstyle and the lady’s dress. A florid caption is embossed on the lower quarter of the photograph: Happily Ever After. And underneath that in bold black Texta is the observation: BULLSHIT. It takes all his strength to resist dragging it home.
His walk of choice today is the lake. It is manmade, has none of the crenulations that the bay and its beaches offered, but it is still a body of water, populated by black swans and water hens, and ringed by a five-kilometre walking track.
With the lake to his left, his thoughts soon drift to an old school friend whose second son had died of a rare neuromuscular disorder a year ago. The boy was three months old.
He had met the tiny, fragile baby for the first time after the diagnosis and remembers stroking his tiny palm with his finger. He’d barely been in contact with his friend since the funeral, even though he was godfather to the elder son, so they had recently met up for a drinking night, to deal with their grief the only way they knew how. The night had ended on the beach close to his apartment. They swapped teenage sex stories and other absurd juvenilia, and the silence after the laughter gave them an opportunity to talk of the dead boy. Never before had they cried together, not even at the funeral, and as they hugged like beach towels left entangled on the sand, he whispered to his friend: ‘You can’t hold on too tightly, man . . . Our beautiful boy is here and needs you not to hold on so tight.’