He works hard at the job, harder than if he was getting paid to do it. He rolls up the carpet as he goes; by the time he is at the front door, the roll is three feet in diameter. As he pulls away the last foot of carpet, he sees a piece of yellowed paper with old-fashioned handwriting and a thumbprint on it in a rich blue ink.
I laid this carpet in good faith, trusting that the people who walk across it will be worthy friends. I trust that they are. To you pulling up this carpet, I send you good cheer and wish you well.
Johnny Oatley
Lukewarm’s dad found a note like this one when he pulled up their lounge room carpet. He said it was a practice that people used to do in the olden days, leave notes under carpets for people in the future to read. As he reads the note, Jim feels a rush of gratitude towards the grandfather he never met. It is a message that no one else in the family will ever read, as if it was written specifically for him.
‘Thanks, Grandfather,’ Jim says aloud. ‘Everybody who crossed this carpet was a worthy friend. Except for one . . .’
He returns the tools to the shed. He decides to leave the carpet rolled up in the hallway for the night rather than put it out the front on the veranda.
Flying home on a crowded 707, it was easier to believe that his parents were no longer around. But here in this house, where the air is thick with their memory, where the scents of the rooms are the scents of both of them, and where the sounds of their voices are soaked into the walls, it isn’t as easy.
He pulls the front door shut behind him and walks down the street towards the Choppingblock Hotel. It seems as though he hasn’t been hungry for a long time but tonight he might actually have an appetite. He stands at the bar and drinks a glass of whisky while a waiter rushes past him to prepare the hotel dining room for the evening rush. The waiter starts to yell to someone in the kitchen but stops mid-sentence, evidently realising that his words will roll out into the main bar, drift into the ladies lounge and even echo to the bottle shop.
But Jim prefers it when people yell. He feels comfortable with noise and is unnerved by whispering. He tosses back the last of his drink, walks into the dining room and is escorted to a table. The sound system has been turned up to partially drown out the panicked voices in the kitchen. His table is next to a window and he watches as the sun disappears. Some workers are purposefully striding home; others are dragging their feet, truly beaten by the day. People are also beginning to appear in groups, walking at a more leisurely pace. Going out for the night. Three of the groups have entered the dining room by the time Jim has finished his chicken. He pays and walks out into the night.
The house has no place where he can sleep. His bedroom feels as if it belongs to someone else. The television screen glares blankly at him and he selects a book from the bookshelf behind the lounge-room door. When he opens it, though, he sees that someone has torn out the first page. That doesn’t make sense to him. He lies down on the couch and looks at the ceiling. He listens to the ghosts in the next room reciting their prayers. Sometime after the informal drag races have stopped out on Choppingblock Road, he walks out into the hallway, lies down on the bare floorboards, calls out once to Mai, and falls asleep.
In the morning, Jim marches across the front yard to his parents’ car, parked facing the garage, opens the door and sits in it without starting the engine. It is stuffy inside and smells of perspiration. Not the same as the inside of a troop carrier: that is more the scent of terror. But this is close. A shopping list is lying on the dashboard. He reaches for it but as his fingers touch the paper he withdraws his hand. He looks out of the car and watches a pigeon walking across the driveway towards him. It appears nervous even though there is nothing around. Jim is instantly a sniper again, watching and waiting for an ambush.
Something startles the bird and it flies off to another driveway, another world. Today, Jim wishes he could do that too. He has grown tired of encountering all these memories.
He leans over a little and looks out the rearview mirror. Lukewarm’s green and yellow car drives slowly up the road towards number fourteen. It coughs as it stops, just like it always did. Jim looks out the driver’s window and across Val’s front fence as his lifelong friend climbs out of the car and hitches up his jeans. Like he always has. Jim watches as Lukewarm looks at the church spire rising above the currawalli trees as if he hasn’t noticed it before.
Lukewarm is thin in a painful way. He looks threatened by the wind. He bends a little forward when he walks around the back of his car and down to number ten. He picks a piece of honeysuckle from the fence and tucks it into a buttonhole. It falls to the ground after he has taken two steps. His hair is dark and comes down to his eyebrows. He is tall but the thinness makes it unnoticeable until you are standing next to him. He smiles easily like a fool does, and the lines on his face show that he smiles a lot.
Jim opens the car door and climbs out.
‘I thought you’d be back soon,’ says Lukewarm. ‘Trying your dad’s car on for size?’
‘Sort of, I suppose. I was sitting here getting a grip on things. Wondering how I should start. Whether I should just sell everything and move away.’ Jim takes in the smiling face looking at him. ‘It’s good to see you, Lukewarm.’
‘You too, mate. Let’s go and have a cup of tea and see what needs to be done.’
‘There’s a lot, I’m afraid.’ Jim leads Lukewarm back towards the house.
‘Good. We’re just the pair to do it.’
‘You’re going to help?’
‘Yep. Nothing else to do. But I need a cup of tea first. I haven’t had one yet. The pot was cold when I got out of the shower. Mum is having one of her days in town going to the pictures and so she wasn’t there to make me a fresh one. Ah well . . . you got milk?’
‘Yes, got it yesterday.’
Lukewarm tries to blow his fringe off his forehead. Jim smiles to himself. It is something Lukewarm has always done. He looks at Jim and says, ‘I had to drive down to the shops to get something. But I got there and then forgot what it was that I had to get.’ He smiles. ‘That’s because I didn’t get a cup of tea first.’
The two friends walk into the house together. The only time they touch is when Jim holds the screen door open for Lukewarm and pats him on the back, ushering him through. Lukewarm’s hands and shirt are smeared with oil paint, a yellowy red colour. He must have been working on a painting this morning or most of last night. Probably the latter.
‘I’m sorry that I didn’t write to you,’ Jim says quietly.
‘That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to. I guessed that a pen isn’t the thing you’ve got in your pocket during a war.’
‘Well, there’s that. But really I was worried that I might send back a sense of some of the horrible things I was seeing and I didn’t want to do that to you. You’re not really the sort of bloke who should see what was happening over there.’
‘I saw some of it on TV. Mainly American news. I looked for you but I never saw you.’
‘No, I was a long way away from that sort of whizz-bang American stuff.’
‘That’s good. So . . . am I allowed to talk about your mum and dad being dead or do I have to be—what did my mum say—discreet?’
‘No. For fuck’s sake don’t try to be discreet. I don’t mind talking about what happened. If that’s what you want to do?’ Jim tries to keep his voice from sounding too serious.
‘No. I don’t want to talk about it at all. I just thought in the course of the day, little things might come up and I want to know whether it’s okay to plough through them,’ says Lukewarm quietly.
‘Thanks for being here, Lukewarm. I appreciate it.’
‘Good. You can thank me by coming to a family reunion with me.’
‘Is there no other way I can pay you back?’
‘Afraid not. You don’t have to come t
his week but you have to promise to come to one with me in the next few months.’
‘Okay. If I can’t get out of it.’
These reunions aren’t of Lukewarm’s family, but of strangers. Every Sunday in the Fitzroy Gardens, far-flung families meet up; more often than not, they don’t know each other and so Lukewarm jumps in and presents himself as a long-lost member of the family. One that no one can remember. According to him, the key is having the right colour-coded sticker on your lapel that says, ‘Hello, I’m . . .’ Lukewarm keeps a selection of different-coloured stickers in a case that he carries in the boot of his car.
Lukewarm likes being a stranger in a crowd of strangers who are all being nice to each other. He has always said that it is his vice and, compared to other vices, it is harmless. He started to attend these functions during his one year at art school with his new friends. He gave up art school, the friends, but not the family reunions. ‘Hey Jim!’ he calls out loudly as they both sit down at the kitchen table.
Jim recoils, and then laughs. ‘What?’
‘Welcome home. I was worried about you over there. With all those snakes and spiders and bullets.’
‘Thanks, mate. It’s still strange to be back. I suppose it’s going to be weird for a while.’
‘You must tell me one day what it was like. Did you meet any girls?’
‘Lots.’
‘Sleep with any of them?’
‘Most of them.’
‘Oh wow! I had sex with Lucy Ravenna.’
‘From school?’
‘Yep. In the back of my car.’
‘How is she going?’
‘Okay. I don’t see her anymore. Once was enough for her, I guess.’
The kettle whistles.
Luke Warne is the son of an almost-famous football player known for shaking the ball above his head whenever he marked it. His trademark. A man suited to playing sport but not much else.
Lukewarm is so called for obvious reasons and because of his lack of passion or excitement about most things. Lukewarm and Jim have been friends all their lives. They went to school together, climbed trees together, caught measles together, fell in love with the same girls, ate at each other’s houses, got to know each other’s family secrets.
Thanks to Lukewarm’s efficiency on the telephone, the cleaners are on the doorstep three hours later. Jim is glad Lukewarm is here to direct them because he is being paralysed by different levels of memories. He moves the tablecloth and sees the mark made by his dad’s beer glass. The tea towel next to the sink is the one that his mother bought when they went to Lorne. The edge of it caught fire when Jim was attempting to make pancakes for the first time. There is a bookmark in the middle of a Georgette Heyer novel, as though his mother had just put it down. These sudden memories mean he has to stop every few moments and rearrange his thoughts.
But when he looks up from sorting through what was inside his grandmother’s coronation mug, there is a pile out on the front lawn that rises to six feet in the middle and spreads from the black magnolia to the honeysuckle. It looks like garbage. He doesn’t want to look at it long enough to begin to distinguish things. They can throw it all away.
There are three cleaners and they know their job. A good team: two men and a woman who is the advance. She walks into a room first and begins to make a pile near the door. The men then transport that pile outside and throw it on the big one. She is cool and calculated. She doesn’t miss anything. Jim and Lukewarm have already put aside the things that they think Jim should keep. The wardrobes are untouched. ‘We don’t do clothes,’ the woman had told Lukewarm over the phone. The rest is disposable. From the past. Not needed anymore.
Before long Jim finds himself getting tired. He looks over at Lukewarm to propose they stop but he has his work face on and doesn’t notice. Jim decides to stick it out.
The cleaning takes two hours. At four thirty Jim walks down to the shops and returns with a Boston bun and they all stop for a cup of tea.
The cleaners leave as soon as their job is done. The tip truck out the front has been filled and the pile has disappeared from the lawn.
Lukewarm leaves as easily as he arrived.
The house is empty. The couch and armchairs are gone, the beds are gone, the rugs are gone, the lamps are gone, the glasses are gone, the cups and plates, the knives and forks, the pictures on the wall. The piano has stayed, all the wardrobes, the kitchen table and two chairs, the refrigerator. And everything in the shed.
Before the cleaners left, Lukewarm asked them to move each wardrobe into Jim’s parents’ bedroom. He then shut the door.
And now, the air inside the house is clean.
Jim feels as if something else other than the pile of rubbish has gone. Some shadowy part of his childhood that has been clinging to the furniture; and other, darker things that have been sitting like stale smoke in the back of the drawers.
Standing in the kitchen he hears a knock at the front door. He walks down the hallway, his footsteps ringing on the timber, and opens the door wide, his intuition sensing an odd difference in the air straightaway. On the veranda stands a long-haired young man with his cardigan buttoned crookedly and a t-shirt half tucked in. He looks like a fugitive from the previous decade. Jim has never seen him before. Thomas, the cat from next door, is circling his feet.
‘Welcome home,’ the man says, looking at Jim’s hand on the door. ‘I am a neighbour. I have brought you a magazine as a housewarming gift.’
Jim feels a cold wind. He accepts the gift—it looks like an electronics magazine—but doesn’t stand aside to let the man enter.
‘Thanks very much,’ Jim says. ‘I’m still getting settled. There’s junk everywhere.’ There isn’t any junk. Jim hears the danger in the silence. The long-haired man is tapping his foot to some music that must be playing in his head.
Jim is wary. He rolls back onto the balls of his feet. Ready to react. ‘Which house do you live in?’ he asks.
‘Number thirteen. Just across the street there. Next door to the priest.’
‘Oh. Been here long?’
‘Two years to the day. Two years goes pretty quick when you’re busy. My parents normally live there with me but they have gone to Poland. That’s where they come from.’
Jim looks closely at the face of the man but he can read nothing in his eyes. He says, ‘My parents lived here. I grew up in this house. I’ve come back to clear things up after what happened.’
‘What happened?’
‘You don’t know?’ Jim drops his hands to his side, alert and ready.
‘No. I keep strange hours. Often I am asleep or else I am somewhere else . . . if you know what I mean.’ He smiles a disturbed smile. Jim doesn’t know what he could mean.
‘You didn’t hear the gunshots or the police sirens?’
‘No, nothing. I generally work with headphones on so I don’t hear anything.’
‘I thought the police might have knocked on your door.’
‘If they did, I didn’t hear. Why would they knock on my door?’
‘Routine, I imagine. To see if you saw anything.’
‘What a shame I didn’t hear them knock. I see lots of things.’
‘Oh well. They might come back. What’s your name?’
‘Peter Alexis. I am from number thirteen—’
‘Yes, you told me . . .’
‘You are more than welcome to come over anytime you like. I will be up. I only sleep four hours at a time. If I don’t hear you knocking, it means I am either asleep, working with the headphones on or elsewhere.’
‘Okay. I’ll remember that.’
‘And what’s your name?’
‘Jim.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Jim. My name is Peter and I will walk home now,’ he says in a monotone.
‘That’s okay. I am trying to be a more outgoing person. Left to me, I would stay inside for years and never talk to anybody. But the priest says I should be forcing myself to be a member of the community. I go to the pub.’
‘Do you?’ Jim says in a steady voice, still alert.
‘Sometimes. Bye.’ Peter turns and leaves. He fumbles with the front gate and is unable to close it. Jim tells him not to worry and shuts the front door. Suddenly, he runs at full speed down the hallway, through the back door and up to the back fence. He turns, and without stopping he runs back inside again. Then he sinks to the floor in the hallway and begins the breathing exercises that Brent, his sergeant, taught him.
After three-quarters of an hour, Jim is back in the kitchen thinking about dinner. There’s nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboard except Boston bun. Still, he always liked a walk to the shop. He will think about what to buy on the way there. He turns right out of the front gate and begins to count his steps as he walks.
The Hendersons live at number eight. They are the perpetual newcomers to the street, even though they have been here for ten years. They have become known for a few things; noticed just as any new ripple in a pond is. At three o’clock one morning Mrs Henderson ran up the street in her nightie after a domestic screaming match. No one ever mentions it but everybody knows about it, even if they didn’t see it happen. The Hendersons know that everybody knows about it and they think that they have to work to keep it unmentioned.
But the fact is, the Hendersons don’t have to worry. No one will ever say anything. There are secrets that you keep inside your head, secrets that you keep inside your house and secrets that you keep inside your street. Mrs Henderson’s nightie-fluttering run falls into the last category; that’s why nothing will ever be said. Amid the Hendersons’ insincere attempts to be cordial and everybody else’s suspicion of the efforts they make, strange bonds and friendships are forged. Mr Henderson has become a person who can be relied upon to donate paper money to any child who knocks on his door with a charity can. Mrs Henderson has so little knowledge of how the women of the surrounding houses interact together and deal with the domestic business of the street that she is never included in anything important but always in something mundane or slight like a cake baking, or a group fitness walk, or cups of tea at the church.
Currawalli Street Page 15