A few days after his return, he drew you to him. ‘I’m not doing that again. I’m sick of touring, and I’m happy here,’ he said. ‘With you.’
You were concerned about the pause before he added the last two words, but it was enough for you to decide to let it lie.
But he knew you knew.
And he knew you’d chosen not to ask.
And ever since, all through the years, there have been times when he’s been moving inside you, about to climax, you haven’t been able to stop yourself from thinking, Unfaithful bastard.
And what about the way he’s been behaving lately, the drifting, this improbable glasshouse venture of his, the endless fiddling about in his studio …
Haley
Where to start? The first time I see him? Or maybe the job comes first. Cos in a roundabout way that’s what leads me to him. And also, when you think about it, it isn’t really an ordinary sort of person who answers my ad, and somehow that has something to do with it.
So like this: sixteenth birthday coming up in a few months, so decide I need a leaving-home fund and put a notice up on the supermarket board. Somebody texts a response. Get to the place and a man goes: ‘You’re the dog-walker?’ He’s standing there at his front door, a mini-maniac of a black-and-white dog jumping around his feet. ‘Righto. Good.’ Slight lift of his eyebrows. He balances on one crutch and thrusts his other hand out for me to shake. ‘Marty. Glad to meet you,’ he says. A ponytail, wearing a Crazy Horse tee-shirt. A bit fat, a bit balding on top, jeans don’t fit him very well. One foot in plaster, and no shoe on the other. Toes with black wiry hairs springing out.
Weird to do a handshake – his hand is clammy. Want to wipe mine on my cut-offs straight after. ‘Come in for a minute,’ he says.
Step across the entrance and he closes the door behind me, and for a minute think about how I hadn’t told anybody I was coming here. Remember the time this girl at school got lured behind the dairy and a man showed her his cock, and afterwards we had role-plays with our teacher, practising what to do in such a situation, ‘but without any actual exposure, thank you class’. The best solution had been not to get into that situation in the first place, but if you did then you should exit fast while screaming to attract attention. Sas got a look that day for saying: ‘Wouldn’t a kick in the nads do it, miss?’
Ranchslider at the side is open and I move to stand near it, figuring I can run out through it, screaming if I need to. Anyway, how fast can a fat man on crutches go?
House is crazy-arsed, chaotic. Front door opens straight into one big room with a kitchen bench in the corner. Overflowing bookshelf across another whole wall, and big bold movie posters tacked up on every available space, except where words are painted directly on to the surface in big lettering. Against the far wall, CDs and records are massed around a stereo, and in front of the window there’s a huge old desk with a computer and lots of messy piles of papers and an overflowing ashtray. All the surfaces of the kitchen bench are covered too, dirty dishes stacked into the sink. Anyway, you get the picture. Whole atmosphere is fuggy with laziness. The man obviously doesn’t have what Mum calls a ‘good housework discipline’, which she lets herself believe makes up for a lot of other flaws. Made myself see the mess as something else. Free or something.
‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Let’s negotiate for a sec.’ Take the seat at the table nearest the sliding door, on high alert. With a wave of his arm he sweeps a whole lot of clutter to one side, plates and jam and magazines and a dog lead and a hairy brush and empty cigarette packets and lots of other stuff I don’t care to look too hard at. Reckons he broke his ankle in an accident and is working from home for now but his dog gets restless in the afternoons and starts to bug him. Hoping, he says, for somebody to take the dog every afternoon for a long walk. Thinks he can stretch to about $10 a time.
Better than I’d expected: ‘Every day?’
‘That’s what I hoped. Has to be a decent walk, though.’
‘Even weekends?’
‘Why not?’
Works out to good money! Try not to let on how pleased I am. Look around the room – doesn’t really look like a household with loads of spare cash. But don’t want to make any judgements or anything. Squint at the spirally words on the wall and can make out: I used to crash parties and maseratis and I was evil Go places and blow faces and Jesus I was evil I never shook babies I never beat no ladies but Jesus I was evil.
Ask: ‘What is that from?’ thinking maybe crazyville.
‘It’s from a Darcy Clay song.’
‘Oh.’ Keeping my eye on the open door.
‘You’ve never heard of Darcy Clay?’
‘Um.’
‘He was an underground lo-fi cult figure who died way too early.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Nobody ever talks about that.’
‘Oh.’ What am I supposed to say to that?
‘I’ll put some on,’ he says, and gets up and works his way with his crutch over to the stereo. Even though the CDs look to be in a big mess, he knows exactly where to find the one. ‘This song is his punked-up cover of a Dolly Parton song called “Jolene”,’ he reckons, as he returns to his seat at the table.
Ask: ‘Are you allowed to do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Write on the wall like that. Won’t the landlord be mad?’
‘Fuck the landlord,’ he says, and laughs. Notice his teeth are nicotine stained, but he’s still friendly around the eyes. He adds, ‘For all you know I am the landlord.’
Don’t know how to respond. Ask: ‘When you work from home, what do you do?’ Voice comes out tight.
‘I write for magazines. Bit of online.’
‘What magazines?’
‘All sorts, I’m a freelancing at the mo. Mostly the trades.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that I work for money. Trade magazines. Not the most exciting, but constant, which is one thing.’
‘I’d like to be a writer.’ Exposing to say this out loud. Don’t know why I did it.
‘Really?’ He seems pleased. Leans back in his chair so that its two front legs lift off the floor. Mum hates it if I do that at home. ‘Read much?’
‘I try.’
‘What do you like?’
Put on the spot. Titles of all the good books float away. Can’t really say about the vampire romances. Have to think hard. ‘I liked it when we did To Kill a Mockingbird.’
He swings forward and his chair clonks down onto all four legs again. ‘Really, that’s a great book. So you really dug it?’
‘Yes. It had some words that I didn’t know at first, but I liked working it out.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, like …’ Can’t immediately think of one, but he stares at me, waiting. After a moment I say reluctantly, ‘Well, yonder was one. They say things are over yonder.’
He smiles slightly, a smile I don’t feel included in. Feel myself go red because when you work out what yonder means it’s stupid not to have known in the first place. Dumb. But anyway, I wasn’t the only one that had never heard of yonder before. We’d even discussed it in class, and afterwards me and Sas used the word yonder as often as we could for the rest of the day. ‘Let’s go yonder,’ we said at lunchtime, and walked behind the bike shed where we discovered a younger boy smoking a cigarette. ‘Give us a puff then, Snot,’ Sas said, and the kid obviously hadn’t heard anything about Sas before, because he looked for a second like he was gonna say no, so Sas clamped her teeth together and growled like a mean dog and he handed over the cigarette before running away. We laughed so much yonder became like a special code word.
That all feels like a long time ago now, though.
‘What’s your dog’s name?’
‘Rochester.’
Now it’s my turn to let a smile escape, just a small half-smile.
‘Know who Rochester was?’ he asks.
Shrug. A blue-bottle hovers o
ver the table, suspended in mid-air like it’s dithering, a bit like a drunk trying to remember what she’s looking for.
‘Haven’t done Jane Eyre yet then? Rochester was the great love interest of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. A deeply impassioned man with broody, Byronic good looks and a sense of mystery about him.’
Look down at the dog which is pawing at my knee, panting up at me with its greedy, desperado face. Say: ‘That’s a pretty weird name for this dog then.’ Hope it’s okay to say stuff like that.
‘Are you saying my dog doesn’t have Byronic good looks? Perhaps—’ Makes a playful move to slide the leash, which has ended up nearest me, back towards his side of the table. Go to grab it back, but our knuckles touch so I let go. ‘I didn’t name him actually,’ he says. ‘In fact I didn’t know who Rochester was either when I first got him. It was the breeder. She had a bust like a continental shelf and mad literary bent, and all the puppies from the litter had names like Darcy, Gatsby, Dorian Gray. Then I kept coming across little old ladies up at the park who would sigh Ahhh Jane Eyre whenever they found out his name.’ Makes a half-nod towards the dog and says, ‘Why don’t you take him there now. The off-leash area at the reserve. Let’s see if it happens to you too.’
Walk from his house with the dog, thinking I have an idea about Byronic, but not exactly sure.
Soon discover Rochester has particular habits. On the way to the park he strains at the leash as if he can’t wait to get there. Every time he gets to a new driveway, though, he pauses for a moment, with his front right paw bent, and looks up it. At first I think it’s as if he’s deciding whether he’d like to live there, but it only takes a moment’s loose grip on the lead to find out he’s really on the lookout for cats. Chases one poor ginger right through to a backyard, his lead trailing after him, and a woman comes out the back door with a broom and yells, ‘Bugger off, ya bloody mongrel.’ At first I think she means me.
Down the end of the entrance to the reserve there’s a grassy clearing where the dogs can be let off. Over the next few days I get to know Rochester’s other tricks. His main one is to run up to random dogs and try to get them to chase him. He doesn’t seem to understand the rules of fetch, and if somebody is throwing a ball he dashes up to it and runs off with it in his mouth. Total game-spoiler for all the other dogs. Rochester is mostly quite retarded. The people up there don’t seem much better, standing clumped together. I don’t stand beside them exactly, just hover nearby. They ask each other questions about their dogs: ‘What kind of dog is that?’, ‘What do you feed him?’, ‘What breed is that?’
Anyway, that’s where I first see Jed Jordan. He arrives, does his own thing, and all human heads swivel in his direction like some rare, special breed has come amongst us. Recognise him from some old music clip that once came on TV. That made Mum quite talkative for a change. She said he went to her old primary school and still lived in our area. Also said she went to see him play once. Remember it clearly cos that’s one of the few clues I’ve ever had that my mother might once have had a life. That, and my own existence which implies she must have actually had sex with somebody at least once. The forbidden subject. The unimaginable subject.
Seems like a bit of a dude. Still has the same shaggy hair, and a tanned face, but is older now. If you didn’t already know he’d been famous, you might suspect it just from the way he walks around, going about with an inward half-smile on his face as if somebody’s just told him a joke and he’s still running it over in his head. Kind of mooching about too, like he’s conscious people might be looking at him. And strong – when he throws the ball, it goes right into the long grass at the other end of the clearing near the creek, not like the lame-o throws the old ladies do.
Want to go and have a conversation with him, even if it’s just so I can casually drop it at home that I met him. Such a spaz about it, though. Go over and stand near him and can’t think of anything to say, so out of my mouth comes: ‘What kind of dog is yours?’
He gives a funny look. ‘Fox terrier. Same as yours.’
Oops. ‘Oh yeah. But I didn’t realise cos yours is sort of bigger.’
He laughs. ‘Are you calling my dog a fatty boomsticker?’
‘No … I …’ My face feels like it’s snap frozen.
‘It’s okay. He’s not really my dog, he’s my stepmother’s, but I bring him up here most days for a bit of exercise. You should see him wheezing his way up the hill, fat old pooper. Some days he just sits down on his lardy arse and I have to carry him.’
Like that he says arse. And pooper … ‘That’s not my dog either,’ I say. ‘It’s my client’s.’
‘Client’s …’ he says, and then makes a small whistling sound between his teeth. Feel dumb. Don’t know how to continue on. Then notice Rochester’s back arching, so have to go over and pick up his stupid do-do with a plastic bag. Have now maxed out my capacity for humiliation so give Jed a small wave and leave the park immediately.
Evie
Occasionally I heard the sound of a distant guitar, the strummed notes floating across the garden in a neighbourly way as if, I imagined, they were meant for my ears.
I’d been spending a lot of time out on the back deck, in the old armchair that my father liked to sit in. That thing had been out there forever, made of green vinyl, so weathered it was brittle and cracked, with foam threatening to escape out through the slits. It had wooden squares set into the armrests, perfect for placing a cup of tea, and during his smoking years Dad had kept an old scallop shell for his butts on the left side. I’d never sat in that chair as a child, and such was my sense of obedience that I’d always felt near hysteria whenever one of my friends parked themselves in it. A policeman once came to our house to discuss setting up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme following a series of burglaries. I remember very clearly that the policeman was insensitive to the fact it was my father’s chair, or perhaps he sat in it on purpose, and my father was forced onto one of the wicker kitchen chairs instead. He sat stiff and upright, and seemed robbed, that afternoon, of his usual power. Normally he was sunk into that green vinyl chair like the satisfied king of a minor planet.
I liked sitting in it now; it made me feel close to him. I hadn’t expected I’d miss my father so painfully, would be lonely for him. And now in the back of my mind I felt burdened by my failure to visit him often enough in the last few years. He must have sat here sometimes and felt lonely for me too.
He made it over to Australia only once after my mother died. Even that had seemed like a heroic effort without my mother to fuss over the travel arrangements, the passports and the money-changing. Mum had always arrived in Melbourne with an itinerary of shopping and shows she was determined to get through, but on his own Dad never really wanted to go out. He just padded around the flat, fixing squeaky doors, tightening pot-handles, making a herb garden for the window sill. One afternoon he went down to the local shops, bought a side of lamb from the butcher, and spent the afternoon carving it up and bagging it for the freezer. My flat reeked of raw meat for ages afterwards, but Dylan had been mesmerised by the process. He was eight, and had never had any reason to consider where meat came from before.
After that trip we decided, without really speaking about it, that it was easier if Dylan and I came over to him, but even that wasn’t very often. I’d resented using up my precious holidays on returning home to this small house, this remnant of my life, with its fake-wood cladding. But now I missed, so deeply, the simplicity of that relationship, the tolerance, the acceptance. Where would that come from again? Could Dylan change that much?
I tried to tell myself to put the manner of my father’s death to one side. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, and to dwell on that entirely would serve only to obscure the life he’d lived. It wasn’t easy, though, and it didn’t help to have growing concerns about Dylan pulling at me.
When he was young he’d loved the trips home. He’d follow Dad around all day, relishing time spent doing masculine things. W
e’d often celebrated Christmas over here when he was little, and the presents he was always excited about were the things that allowed him to mimic his granddad – plastic hammers, miniature rakes, a replica lawnmower, a plastic rotating drill. I’d been similar when I was little, although the tools I’d liked were plastic cake-mixers, miniature utensils and pretend ovens.
And now Dylan was attracted to much darker things. I knocked on his door last night to see if he wanted any dinner. He didn’t answer – not unusual. His room reeked of stale clothes, hormones and quite possibly old marijuana, and I saw that the window was ajar. Exiting the house that way involved an ankle-endangering leap to the ground and it really troubled me, his leaving by the window. What did it cost him to walk through the house and call out goodbye? I’d been inclined to think of his slouchy ill-temper as a phase, but now I was seriously worried that it wasn’t so much a phase as a development in his personality. I wanted to talk to him, but every time I tried to start a conversation he managed to make every simple question rebound like an uneasy interrogation. It had begun to feel like he was playing me, and that maybe he was the wilier one. Already some new friends had materialised over here, slinky and shadowy on their occasional appearance at the door, calling him Dude, not coming inside. He’d been arriving home with red-rimmed eyes, refusing to say where he’d been – but what could I do if he wouldn’t speak to me? Apart from kick him out? Or send him back?
This was all just part of the normal rites, wasn’t it? This attraction to loudness and speed, to dark imaginings, and the aggressive lyrics of metal and rap, and probably porn. There are many developments in a child’s life, when they go from one thing to another. When they no longer want to hold your hand, when they don’t want you to see them naked in the bath, when they won’t kiss you in public. There may have been some early signs of difficulty that I’d dismissed as something else. Even as a toddler there’d been those moments, intermingled with his general sweetness, when I knew we were in some kind of battle of wills. Maybe if I’d figured out how to handle it properly back then? My failing to do anything had allowed his attitude towards me to gradually sharpen, and now I was utterly helpless. Or perhaps my will had just wearied. I wished I could talk it all over with my father, though there was some part of me that knew that even if he was still alive I might not have laid it all out for him. I’d be reluctant to reveal myself, beyond what was obvious, as such a dismal failure, even to him. Perhaps especially to him. Every misgiving he’d ever had about solo mothers would be lurking in the background of that conversation.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 4