Elsewhere in Success

by Iris Lavell

  Watching the dawn service at Gallipoli he feels a wave of emotion come over him when they get to the ‘Age shall not weary them’ speech. The night sky gradually lightens throughout the ceremony, former foes come together in a spirit of mutual respect and friendship, and the dead are appropriately honoured for the ultimate sacrifice they made. Louisa has returned to watch with him. She is standing in the doorway.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t go to Vietnam,’ she says. ‘It was awful for the soldiers when they returned, and for their families. Just awful.’ Her voice is measured and her face is turned away from him. ‘They were just young boys sent to the slaughter. Vietnam was another pointless war,’ she says, ‘a product of poor decision-making and simplistic thinking. Greed, power, mistakes, politics. Just like Gallipoli. What kind of damage does that do to a person?’

  She is talking about herself, of course, and about Victor. So he keeps quiet. He could say that one bad apple doesn’t necessarily ruin the entire barrel, but he won’t – not today, of all days. He doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. He reaches out his hand, but she’s gone again. His eyes drift back to the screen.

  Now he’s thinking about his years on the planet. He’s wondering how his own life might measure up to the best of the unlived ones of those fallen soldiers. This leads him to reflect on his life as a series of non-conclusions – careers, army service, marriage, parenthood – all terminated before he could see where they’d lead. And really now he thinks it wouldn’t have taken all that much. If he could have taken what he learned in Nashos and pushed a bit harder, then he’d be in a very different place now.

  Finally, as the sun rises in the Gallipoli sky, Harry thinks about women, how they sap your strength, how they make simple things more complicated than they need to be, how they are cold when you would expect them to be emotional, and they cry over trivial matters. Then he wonders whether it’s just him, and if he was meant to be alone, an old salt or an old prospector. Men like that have always been around. There have always been hermits living in their hermit caves. That’s who he was meant to be all along: just him and Buster against the elements.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Louisa has gone to visit her mother. By the time she gets home, Harry plans to be in the garden pruning trees and bushes to prove he hasn’t been wasting his time. The garden will grow back. He’ll prune it again. It’ll grow back, and so on, the story of his life. He’ll have the radio on. He’ll be focused on the here and now. The local footy-tipping competition. The list of jobs still to do, stuck on the fridge with the magnet advertising the veterinary hospital. The list has barely diminished since Louisa put it there three or four years ago. He’ll see if he can cross something off, and when Louisa gets home she’ll give it a big tick. Day will lapse into evening, he’ll walk the dog, watch the news, then something funny, this and that, go to bed.

  The rain has stopped and a weak sun had found its way through restless cloud. Harry turns up the radio and goes out to the shed to find his gardening gloves and secateurs. Buster is lying in a sheltered hollow that he has dug under the zamia palm. He appears to be sleeping with his eyes half open. His chest rises and falls in a slow, steady rhythm. Harry starts work on the hibiscus.

  The radio is much of the same. Nothing holds his attention. As he snips, his past circles. He could distract himself with a drive to the beach and a walk. He could call Louisa to tell her he’ll take her out to dinner later, then go on the computer to search for BYO restaurants. Given his last look at the joint account, he probably won’t.

  Money – the not so well-kept secret to freedom and a better kind of life. And superannuation. They make such a big thing of it these days. He hadn’t thought about it when he was young. He thought about money in general, of course – had fantasies of making it big, with everything that brings. Nice cars. Recognition. Justification for the risks taken. The alternative seemed to be a steady, boring kind of life, gradually accumulating assets, and an early, comfortable retirement, if you played your cards right. As it turned out, he’d done neither.

  If he’d stayed working at the Chemistry Centre he’d have a reasonable payout by now. He wouldn’t be with Louisa, of course. He’d have a different life, a different car, his wife, daughter, and a son by now. They’d have been great mates. The son would have fixed his car for him and they’d have all gone fishing together – him, Yasamine, Bella, and the son. The girls would scream and protest when someone caught a fish. He’d pretend to chase them, teasing. The son would join in. It could have happened. He could have made it happen.

  In a way he’d had a son of course – Louisa’s boy – but he hadn’t taken enough time to really get to know him before it was too late. At the funeral he’d stepped up and been consort and comfort – an outsider playing the part of an insider. He’d held himself strong, never wavering, not allowing the pain of that day to penetrate. In truth, he felt like a bystander who’d forfeited the right to grieve. He’d stood by as a world collapsed, realised in retrospect that it’s possible he’d seen some signs, and done nothing. So he did what he could to salvage what was left over. He’d stayed. He’d been there for her, even when she retreated from him, which was better than nothing from a man who’d never committed to anything. She stayed too – he’s not sure why. Because it was the line of least resistance. If he’d taken another path he might have raised his own son with Yasamine, and they might all have fared better. Tom might still be alive. Everything a person does shifts the future, just a bit.

  After they had Bella, Harry told Yasamine he’d need to find something that he liked, something that he’d be able to do for a long time, before they had another one. He knew even as he said it to her that it wouldn’t happen.

  A normal father would have bonded with his daughter. If he’s honest with himself, he’d probably have to admit that he’s always felt more bonded to his dogs. He makes an effort and focuses on Bella, a memory of a memory. The little girl that she was back then doesn’t exist any more.

  He wonders whether the person she turned into is all right, if she’s married now, what she looks like, if she’s an interesting person, what she’d do if he turned up on her doorstep, if he’s got any grandkids. He thinks all this in a detached way. He guesses his detachment is some sort of psychological protection. Louisa would probably be only too happy to tell him if that’s right – she’d talk it over with Lucy, and then tell him. He wouldn’t ask her anyway, because she’d take it as an invitation and move in to the buffer zone that he’s constructed around himself. What he feels, or doesn’t feel, about Bella, or anything else, for that matter, doesn’t need endless explanation. It’s just the way it is.

  It’s different when he thinks about Yasamine. She still exists for him, even more clearly than Louisa does. She has grown older with him. In his imagination they have come to understand each other perfectly. She has forgiven him. There is still raw feeling there, something that he avoids naming, and desire. He feels loyalty towards her, towards her memory, and knows that his avoidance of closeness with Louisa is partly to do with his loyalty to Yasamine.

  And partly to do with his need for space, lots of space.

  Harry has had enough of the pruning. He peels off his gardening gloves and puts the long-handled secateurs away. Buster is still asleep in his hollow, eyes closed now, snoring lightly. Harry has the house to himself. He turns off the radio, washes his hands, splashes water on his face, stares at his reflection in the mirror, sees that he’s still not bad-looking in that particular light, heads out to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He waits until it boils then decides that he doesn’t want a coffee. He could probably do the dishes. He might have a lie-down first, and make the most of his time alone, guilt free. He stretches out on the lounge-room floor and conjures up a picture of himself and Yasamine in the kitchen, his arms around her. She’s pregnant. Next thing she’s pushed him away and they’re arguing.

  It might be a different argument he’s recalling. It might have been the time he a
ccused her of trying to palm someone else’s kid off on him. He never seriously believed it: it was just something he said. As soon as he saw the pain in her eyes he was sorry, but it was too late to take it back.

  That was just before they split up. He was thinking of the money. He was hurt. He was young. He was a bloody idiot. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

  Still, it was understandable. Back then he was exhausted and constantly on edge. Bella cried for the first three months with colic. His wife cried too. He pictures her face. He pictures her crying, tears running down her face. He feels nothing. He has pictured it too many times before. It has lost its meaning. A beautiful face, nevertheless; the gift of her particular heritage – her father had been Greek-Irish and her mother was from the Torres Strait. Her parents had moved to live in Cyprus by the time he met Yasamine. She’d stayed on in Australia to be with her friends, and to make her own way. He met her folks when they came back for the wedding, and again when they came to see Bella when she was two. They kept in touch occasionally, on birthdays and Christmas, but pretty much left them to their own devices. He didn’t hear from them again, after the separation.

  Harry pours himself a drink. He picks out the particulars so that he can call up the sensation of being with her. Yasamine, with her smooth, olive skin, curly hair, dark eyes, long legs, small breasts. She was moody – up and down all the time; she had a temper. There was a quirky dimple at the corner of her mouth on the left side of her upper lip. As he thinks of it now he gets an odd feeling, a mixture of pain and joy ... and something else. Love, he supposes. The French probably have a word for it. Like melancholy.

  ‘Melanchol ie.’ He says the word out loud with a pseudo-French accent. ‘Melanchol ie.’ The word seems to echo in the empty house. Harry’s voice sounds strange when he hears it back like that. He switches the radio back on to catch the Dexter Gordon Quartet playing ‘Autumn in New York’. He smiles and shakes his head. His band used to play that back then, when Dexter Gordon was his gold standard.

  Yasamine was indifferent to jazz, but he only found that out afterwards. In the end, she didn’t like him playing his sax. One day he came home and found it in the outside rubbish bin.

  ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘I hate the bloody thing! I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Do you know how much it’s worth?’ He didn’t care how much it was worth, but he’d been wounded. Music was who he was. ‘Do you have any fucking idea of how much it’s worth?’

  ‘How much am I worth?’ she said. ‘How much are we worth, Harry? Hey? What? What?’ Slapping him around the shoulders, getting hysterical. ‘You bastard!’

  He cleaned the sax and played all night to prove a point. Then he put it away. He had hardly picked it up since.

  At first it was to demonstrate how hurt he was. It wasn’t long before they separated. Then she left him, and it became a sort of thing to punish himself. As his anger subsided it stopped mattering. He’d changed. He seemed to have lost his drive. He could take it or leave it. Occasionally he’d pick it up, have a blow, put it down. Nowadays he doesn’t even try, probably out of habit or something. Apathy. But he’s never stopped listening.

  The band had a big line-up with a couple of horns, a double bass and drums and Sassy out front on vocals and keyboard. They’d got themselves a regular gig in Fremantle on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. That first night, Yasamine was there with a group of girls, all giggling and elbowing each other in the ribs, except for her. She looked straight at him the whole time. She was drinking some sort of pink or blue cocktail with a silly umbrella and staring at him while she sucked on her straw.

  He tries to remember the colour and decides it was blue. No, it was definitely pinkish. It could have been a tequila sunrise. Not that it matters now. He can’t remember her liking a particular cocktail over the years that followed. They would drink the odd glass of beer together. Still, back then she was a complete mystery to him. She outstared him with her mouth around that straw. He wondered if she recognised him from an earlier encounter, but he was sure they hadn’t met. He would have remembered her for sure, with those eyes and that mouth.

  She was shameless, not worried about how her staring looked to anyone else. It was unnerving, but kind of sexy too. Every time he looked back she was still looking at him. He was dating Sassy at the time. Sassy was amused at first but after a while she started to get annoyed, and it showed in the act. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because it gave them an edge that changed the feeling in the room. People stopped talking and started to take notice, trying to work out what was going on.

  Yasamine came back the next night by herself, and the night after, so he went up and talked to her. At first it was just to keep Sassy jealous, but then there was something about Yasamine that started to grow on him and he knew it was going to be serious. She became a bit of a groupie. After Sassy found them making out at the back of the toilets she pulled the plug on the band so they lost the gig. They got another singer and another gig at another pub, and Yasamine followed them.

  Back then she said she thought the saxophone was the sexiest instrument around, but after the baby was born she changed her tune. He thought later that it was the idea of it that she liked, not the music itself. She started buying Madonna records just to annoy him.

  Still, she was cute all right. When she laughed he found that dimple of hers distracting, and he used to tune in and out as she talked, jazz abstracting through his mind the whole time. Now it occurs to him that he used to joke about it, that silly dimple at the corner of her mouth, just to make her smile so that he could see it come and go. It made her mouth look lopsided. Her mouth was slightly lopsided. It was his favourite thing.

  If he’d stayed at the Chemistry Centre and they’d had another baby, things would have been better and Yasamine would still be there with him. She’d have kept her figure. She’d still look a bit like Cassandra Wilson. She’d have aged well. Her hair would be long and curly, with some grey. They’d have a life now with their kids and maybe a grandkid. They’d have a caravan and a four-wheel drive; they could afford the petrol. Or they’d have some sort of classy hybrid, good for the environment. They’d have great friends – someone to mind the dog when they went away. Or the cat. She always preferred cats.

  Harry goes to the filing cabinet and pulls out a box wrapped in a grey plastic shopping bag. He takes out the photographs. He doesn’t know how long he has been sitting there when he hears Louisa pull into the drive. Her return comes as something of a reprieve. He’s wallowed enough today. He stashes the package and when she comes inside he is waiting by the kettle with two cups and coffee.

  Louisa gives him a kiss, kicks her shoes off and puts her bag away. He hands her a mug of coffee.

  ‘Good day?’ he asks.

  ‘We went into the city, had tea at the Barrack Street Jetty. And a muffin. We watched the rain on the water. You couldn’t see to the other side, just the ferry suddenly appearing when it was only a few metres away. It was like looking at a painting.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Oh you know. Okay.’

  ‘I did some pruning.’

  ‘I noticed. Well done. You’ve made quite a big pile.’

  Harry seems pleased that she’s noticed. He meets her eyes, glances down at her dress. She finds it hard to read the gesture.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘You look nice. I’ve always liked that dress. You should wear it more often.’

  ‘Thanks. I like it too. Are you going to have your coffee?’ It sits untouched on the bench.

  He takes a sip or two and tips the rest down the sink.

  ‘It’s awful,’ he says. He has an idea then, and he puts it out there before he can think it away. ‘I don’t suppose you feel like going out again today? It’s a while since we went out. It looks like it might be clearing up.’

  ‘Does it? Where?’


  ‘I don’t know. We could have a meal and catch a movie. Or catch a movie and have a meal. It would be a shame to waste that dress.’

  ‘We could do something,’ she says.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I’d like to go somewhere with music.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘I don’t mind. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Okay, leave it to me,’ he says. ‘Music sounds good.’

  Harry searches the ‘What’s On’ section of the local paper and finds an obscure production, touted as ‘an improvisational musical’: Antigone Crashes on the Beach.

  ‘Looks like a student production. What do you think?’ he asks her.

  ‘I’m game if you are. It’s not actually on the beach is it?’ she asks. ‘It’s a bit cold.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He looks. ‘No, it’s at Kidogo in Fremantle, you know that little building on the other side of the railway line. Hey, we’re in luck. It’s the last day! Oh, it’s a matinee – starts at four. Hopefully they’ll still have tickets. There’s a mobile number here.’

  Harry disappears into the next room, rings, and comes back to tell her it’s all arranged.

  ‘He sounded surprised to get a call, like he was just waking up. It doesn’t augur well. We might need to grab a stiff drink beforehand,’ he says. ‘Just to take the edge off.’

  She laughs. ‘It’ll be good for you,’ she tells him. ‘It’s about time you got a bit of culture.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The production is highly stylised with papier-mâché masks, figure-hugging lycra, projected images and an obscure storyline. They arrive just as the lights are going down, and are ushered in by a flustered young woman wearing black. There is a scattering of empty seats – not enough of an audience to beat a quick retreat if the production becomes unbearable, Harry whispers to her. The acoustics are good and the venue is small. A woman, who Louisa imagines to be the director, or producer, overhears him, glances across, and coughs. The music is experimental too, but over dinner Harry tells Louisa that he thinks this has been the show’s saving grace. He says it reminds him of when he used to mess about with the guys trying to create a new musical genre. ‘We tried something we called “punk-rock jazz!”’ He laughs. ‘The things you do!’