by Steve Toltz
The only thing of value I did was read books to Lionel, whose eyes were irrevocably damaged, and one rainy afternoon I almost lost my virginity to Caroline, an event that precipitated her leaving town in the middle of the night. Here’s how it happened:
We were trying to read a book together to her father, but he kept interrupting to convince himself that his life had changed for the better. Lionel was doing his best to take blindness in his stride. “Judgmental faces! Condescending eyes I’ve felt on me since the day I moved into this rotten town! I’ll never have to see them again! Thank God—I was sick of the sight of them!” Lionel was finally letting loose on the people’s automatic antipathy to him as though his personality were an extension of his bank balance. They didn’t want to know him or his story. They didn’t care that two years before moving to our town, Caroline’s mother was discovered to be hoarding a basketful of inoperable tumors growing like plums in her insides. They didn’t care that she had been something of a cold, neurotic woman, and the process of dying had not turned her into a sweetie. They didn’t believe that a man with so much money could have human qualities worth sympathizing with. He was up against the smelliest prejudice in existence: wealth-haters. At least a racist, a man who hates black people, for instance—at least he isn’t harboring a secret desire to be black. His prejudice, while ugly and stupid, is at least thorough and honest. Hatred of the well-off, from those who would jump at the chance to swap places, is a textbook case of sour grapes.
“Hey—I’ll never have to see another disappointed face either! Now when I let someone down, if they don’t say, ‘Awwwww,’ I’ll never be burdened with it! Fuck disapproving eyes! I’ve escaped!”
Eventually he talked himself to sleep. While Lionel snored as if he were all nose, we crept silently into Caroline’s bedroom. She had decided to forget all about Terry, but she talked about forgetting him so much, it was the only thing on her mind. She rambled on, and as much as I loved the sound of her spongy voice, I just had to switch off. I lit a half-smoked cigarette I’d found in a puddle and dried in the sun. As I sucked on it I felt her eyes on me, and when I looked up, I saw her lower lip curl a little, like a leaf when hit with a single drop of rain.
Suddenly she lowered her voice. “What’s going to happen to you, Martin?”
“To me? I don’t know. Nothing bad, I hope.”
“Your future!” she gasped. “I can’t stand to think of it!”
“Well, don’t.”
She ran over and hugged me. Then she pulled away and we looked into each other’s eyes and breathed into each other’s nostrils. Then she kissed me with her eyes closed—I know because mine were wide open. Then she opened her eyes too, so I shut mine quickly. The whole thing was unbelievable! My hands went for her breasts, something I’d wanted to do even before she had them. Her hands, meanwhile, went straight for my belt, and she fumbled to undo it. For a split second I thought she wanted to hit me with it. Then I got into the swing of things, and reached up her skirt and pulled off her underpants. We crashed on the bed like fallen soldiers. There we struggled together, laboring to rid ourselves of unwanted garments, until she suddenly pushed herself from me and screamed, “What are we doing!” Before I could answer, she ran out of the room crying.
I lay bewildered on her bed for half an hour, smelling her pillow with my eyes closed, engrossed in the spectacle of a lifelong dream slipping away. When she didn’t return, I got dressed and went to sit under my favorite tree to think suicidal thoughts and tear up weeds.
I avoided Caroline for the next week. Since she was the one who went hysterical, it was up to her to find me. Then on Saturday, Lionel phoned me in a panic. He couldn’t find his toothbrush, and while he might be blind, that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of gingivitis. I went over and found it floating in the toilet bowl, specked with feces. I told him I was very sorry, he’d have to kiss that toothbrush goodbye, but not literally.
“She’s gone,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning and there was a strange person breathing in my bedroom. I can recognize a person by their breathing patterns, you know. It gave me the fright of my life. I shouted, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Shelly was her name, a nurse Caroline had organized to look after me. I shouted at Shelly to get out, and she left, the bitch. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m afraid, Martin. Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.”
“Where did Caroline go?”
“Damned if I know! Still, I’ll bet she’s having fun. That’s what you get when you give your child a liberal upbringing, I suppose. Liberation.”
“I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” I lied. I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I always knew Caroline would vanish one day, and finally that day had come.
Over the following months we received postcards from her from all over. The first was of a river in Bucharest, the word “Bucharest” stamped across it, and on the back Caroline had scrawled, “I’m in Bucharest!” The same kind came every second week from Italy, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris.
Meanwhile, I visited Terry often. It was a long journey, from our town by bus, through the city by train, then another bus to a poor outer suburb. The detention center looked like a low-rise residential block. Each time I signed in, the administrator greeted me like the patriarch of a distinguished family and took me personally to the visiting room, through a long series of corridors, where I felt physically threatened at all moments by young criminals who never stopped looking furious, as if they’d been arrested after crossing the Himalayas on foot. Terry would be waiting for me in the visitors’ room. Sometimes he had fresh purple bruises around his eyes. One day I sat down with him to see the imprint of a fist on his cheek, which was only slowly beginning to fade. He looked at me with great intensity. “Caroline visited me before she left, and she said that even though I blinded her father, she’ll always love me.” When I didn’t respond, he talked about his crime of blinding Lionel as a one-way ticket into a criminal life. “You don’t burn your bridges with normal society,” he said. “You blow your bridges up.” He spoke quickly, as if dictating in an emergency. He was eager to justify, to confide, to seek approval from me for his new plan. You see, he was picking up the pieces of that suggestion box and with it building the story of his life. He’d fit the pieces together into a pattern he could live with.
“Can’t you just keep your head down and apply yourself to studying?” I pleaded.
“I’m studying, all right. A few of us, we got big plans when we get out of here,” he said, winking. “I’ve met a couple of blokes who are teaching me a thing or two.”
I left wringing my hands, thinking about detention centers, boys’ homes, prisons; it’s through these punishments that up-and-coming criminals get to do most of their schmoozing. The state is always going about the business of introducing dangerous criminals to each other; they plug them right into the network.
If my father had an idea of how to accelerate his own deterioration, taking a job at a pest extermination business was it. For the past few years he had become the town handyman, mowing lawns, fixing fences, doing a little brickwork, but now, finally, he’d found the perfect job for himself: exterminating vermin. He breathed toxic fumes all day, handling poisonous substances such as bug powder and lethal little blue pellets, and I got the impression he was delighted by his own toxicity. He’d come home, his hands out, and say, “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! I have poison on my hands! Quick! Someone run the taps!” Sometimes if he was feeling especially mischievous, he would run at us with his poisonous hands outstretched and threaten to touch our tongues. “I’m going for your tongue! You’re done for!”
“Why don’t you wear gloves?!” my mother screamed.
“Gloves are for proctologists!” he’d say back as he chased us around the house. I deduced that this was his bizarre way of dealing with my mother’s cancer, pretending she was a sick child and he was the clown called in to cheer her up. She’d finally told my father the bad news, and whil
e he had become compassionate enough to stop hitting her when he was drunk, her cancer, treatment, remission, and relapse cycle had made him increasingly unstable. Now, as my father threatened us with his poisonous hands, my mother would stare at me long and hard, making me feel like a mirror that reflects death back on the dying.
That’s how it was in our house; with my mother fading, my father becoming a carrier of lethal toxins, and Terry going from mental hospital to prison, what had previously been a poisonous environment only metaphorically became one literally too.
When at last Terry was released from the detention center, for no good reason I had renewed hope he’d be rehabilitated, and might even want to come home and help with our dying mother. I went to an address he’d given me over the phone. To get there I had to travel the four hours to Sydney, then change buses to ride another hour to a suburb in the south. It was a quiet and leafy neighborhood; families were out walking dogs and washing cars, and a newspaper boy pulled a yellow cart up the street, casually tossing newspapers so they landed with admirable accuracy on the doormat of every home with the front-page headline facing up. The house where Terry was residing had a beige Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. A sprinkler languidly watered an immaculately manicured lawn. A boy’s silver bicycle rested against the steps leading up to the front porch. Could this be right? Could Terry have been adopted by a lower-middle-class family by mistake?
A woman with rollers in her brown hair and a pink nightgown answered the door. “I’m Martin Dean,” I stammered with uncertainty, as though perhaps I wasn’t. Her kind smile disappeared so quickly, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined it. “They’re out the back,” she said. As the woman led me down a dark hallway, she threw off the rollers with the hair too—it was a wig. Her real hair, tied up in a tight bun and fastened with bobby pins, was flaming red. She dropped the pink nightgown too and revealed black lingerie hugging a curvy body that I wanted to take home as a pillow. When I followed her into the kitchen, I saw there were bullet holes in the walls, the cupboards, the curtains; sunlight streamed through the tiny perfect circles and stretched diagonally across the room in golden rods. A plump half-naked woman sat at the table with her head in her hands. I stepped past her and went out into the backyard. Terry was turning sausages on a barbecue. A shotgun was leaning against the wooden fence next to him. Two men with shaved heads lay on banana chairs drinking beers.
“Marty!” Terry screamed. He strode over and gave me a bear hug. With an arm over my shoulder, he made enthusiastic introductions. “Boys, this is my brother, Marty. He got all the brains. I got whatever was left. Marty, this is Jack, and this timid-looking bloke over here is Meat-ax.”
I smiled nervously at the powerfully built men, thinking an ax was rarely necessary when cutting meat. Looking at my vigorous, muscular brother, I automatically straightened my back. Sometime over the last few years I had become conscious that I’d developed a slight hunch, so I looked, from a distance, approximately seventy-three years old.
Terry said, “And now for the grand finale…”
He removed his shirt and I reeled in shock. Terry had gone tattoo mad! Head to toe, my brother was a maze of crazy artwork. From visiting days, I had already seen the tattoos crawling down his arms below the shirtsleeves, but I’d never before seen what he’d done to his body. Now I could make out, from his Adam’s apple to his belly button, a grinning Tasmanian tiger, a snarling platypus, an emu growling menacingly, a family of koalas brandishing knives in their clenched paws, a kangaroo dripping blood from its gums, with a machete in its pouch. All those Australian animals! I never realized that my brother was so horribly patriotic. Terry flexed his muscles, and it appeared as though the rabid animals were breathing; he’d learned to contort his body in particular ways to make the animals come alive. It had a frightening, magical effect. The swirling colors made me dizzy.
“It’s getting a bit crowded here in the old zoo, isn’t it?” Terry said, anticipating my disapproval. “Oh, guess who else is here!”
Before I could answer, a familiar voice cried out from somewhere above me. Harry was leaning out an upstairs window, smiling so widely, his mouth seemed to swallow his nose. A minute later he joined us in the yard. Harry had aged badly since I saw him last. Every hair had turned a gloomy gray, and the features on his tired, wrinkled face looked to have been pushed deeper into his skull. I noticed that his limp had gotten worse too: he dragged his leg behind him like a sack of bricks.
“We’re doing it, Marty!” Harry cried.
“Doing what?”
“The democratic cooperative of crime! It’s a historic moment! I’m glad you’re here. I know we can’t coerce you to join up, but you can be a witness, can’t you? God, it’s wonderful to have your brother out. I’d been having a shit of a time. Being a fugitive is lonely.” Harry explained how he eluded the police by phoning in anonymous sightings of himself. There were patrols conducting street-by-street searches in Brisbane and Tasmania. Harry exploded with laughter at the thought of it. “The police are so easy to throw off the scent. Anyway, I was just biding my time until Terry’s term was up. And now here we are! It’s like the Greek senate! We meet every afternoon at four by the swimming pool.”
I looked over at the pool. It was an aboveground number, the water a snaky green. A beer can floated in it. Democracy obviously had nothing to do with hygiene. The place was a sewer. The lawn was overgrown, there were empty pizza boxes strewn about and bullet holes in everything, and in the kitchen I could see the whore sitting at the table listlessly scratching herself.
Terry smiled at her through the window. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Can I have a word with you?”
We walked around to the other side of the swimming pool. On the brick barbecue the sausages had been incinerated and were withering in the sun.
“Terry,” I said, “what are you doing? Why don’t you give up crime, go get a normal job somewhere? The cooperative is never going to work, you must know that. Besides, Harry’s mad,” I added, though I knew I wasn’t convinced. The truth was, as I gazed at Terry’s wild eyes I began to suspect that my brother was the real madman and Harry just an old goat with strange ideas.
“What about you?” Terry asked.
“What about me?”
“What are you doing with your life? I’m not the one trapped in a cage—you are. I’m not the one living in a town I hate. I’m not the one ignoring his potential. What’s your destiny, mate? What’s your mission in life? You don’t belong in that town. You can’t hang around there forever. You can’t protect Mum from Dad, or from death. You’ve got to cut them loose. You’ve got to get out of there and live your life. My life is mapped out, more or less. But you—you’re the one sitting around doing nothing.”
That struck me cold. The little bugger was right. I was the one trapped. I had no clue where to go or what to do. I didn’t want to get locked into some grind, but I wasn’t a criminal either. Plus I had made that unbreakable bond with our mother, and I was beginning to strain against it.
“Marty, have you thought about university?”
“I’m not going to university. I didn’t even finish school.”
“Well fuck, mate, you have to do something! Why don’t you start by leaving that shit hole of a town?”
“I can’t leave town.”
“Why the hell not?”
Against my better judgment, I told Terry about the promise I had made. I explained that I was stuck in no uncertain way. Viciously and immovably stuck. What could I do? Leave my mother alone to die with my unfeeling father? The woman who read to me while I lay in a coma all those years? The woman who had risked everything for my sake?
“How is she?” Terry asked me.
“She’s OK, considering,” I said, but that was a lie. Impending death was having a strange effect on her. Occasionally she crept into my room at night and read to me. I couldn’t stand it. The sound of a voice reading a book reminded me of that other prison, that rotten living
death: the coma. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep I was woken by a violent shaking. It was my mother, wanting to make sure I hadn’t fallen into another coma. It really was impossible to sleep.
“What are you going to do?” Terry asked. “Stay there until she’s dead?”
It was an awful thought, both that she would one day die and that I’d made this vow that was now strangling me. How could I go on in this way without succumbing to the ugliest thought: “Hey, Mum. Hurry up and die!”
Terry discouraged me from visiting his house again. At his insistence, we met at either cricket or rugby games, depending on the season. During these games Terry filled me in on the democratic cooperative’s antics: how they changed their modus operandi all the time, never doing the same job twice, or if they did, not doing it in the same way. For instance, once they did two bank jobs in a row. The first was at the end of the day, and they all ran in wearing balaclavas and forced customers and staff facedown on the floor. The next job they pulled at lunchtime, and they wore gorilla masks, spoke only in Russian to each other, and made customers and staff hold hands and stand in a circle. They were fast. They were successful. And above all they were anonymous. It was Harry’s idea for the gang to learn a couple of languages—not the whole thing, but just the kind of vocabulary you’d need in a robbery situation: “Get the money,” “Tell them to put their hands up,” “Let’s go,” that kind of thing. Harry really was a genius at throwing people off the scent. It was a mystery how he’d spent so long in jail. He also found a couple of police informers and fed them misinformation. And the one or two enemies they had to deal with from Harry’s old days, they attacked when they were most vulnerable: when they had more than two items on the stove.