The Apology

by Ross Watkins

  *

  Adrian found the letter tucked into the pages of The Stories of John Cheever.

  It was late. He was in bed with the lamp on when he reached over, picked up the book and saw paper wedged inside. His initial thought was of Alex – that Alex had made contact, that he’d penned another story, only his delivery method had changed, for obvious reasons. But anyway, it would confirm that Alex still wanted him – was still watching him, even, the proof being that he’d somehow gained access to the house while no one was home. But then the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he assumed incorrectly: that this was a different kind of story altogether – a hateful story, a story of regret. Perhaps this was the severing of what they’d held between them, the cutting of a cord that was tenuous in any case. One final story to undo what had been done. A goodbye fable.

  He looked across at Nguyet lying on her side, facing away from him. There’d been no progress with her, with them; it would take time and a gentle rhythm to return them to each other’s arms. Adrian should have shown her, of course – should have told her from the very beginning – but full disclosure requires a careful tongue, and well-timed execution.

  He looked back at the book and butterflied it open to see the letter, and instantly knew this wasn’t the hand of Alex. No, godhand was not at work here. This was something else entirely. And upon seeing his brother’s handwriting – that clumsy scrawl he could recognise anywhere – a precise knowledge came over him about why the letter was here at all: why Noel would choose to write to him, such an uncharacteristic thing for him to do.

  There could be only one reason why, and Adrian was intelligent enough to work it out without reading the letter. In fact, he felt a strange rising of defiance. Noel hadn’t changed at all: he was still finding ways to impress himself on Adrian’s life, despite his shifting to Perth, despite their carving out separate families and careers and ways of thinking about and acting within their lives. And in that moment he didn’t care whatsoever whether Noel was resurrecting their sad and intimate tale just to further underline his ability to control, to dominate his little brother, to exercise force, or whether this was some bizarre apology, that Noel’s remorse had slowly built up over the years, and the recent events in Adrian’s life had pushed Noel beyond a tipping point, that he finally felt strongly enough and had either the courage or the stupidity enough to come out with it all and face what were now only phantasms, breathing words into those visions of a past to bring them into the light, to make them real, to make them felt all over again. Tangible. As tangible as the folded paper packed into his book.

  Fuck him, Adrian thought. Fuck him and his words, whatever they say.

  But at the same time he was grateful that the letter was there, that he had the letter in his hands – in a book, of all places. It was a gift, after all. Noel had gifted him acknowledgement, and in that acknowledgement – which Adrian had forever wondered, at least from his early teenage years, whether he’d ever receive – Noel had also gifted Adrian a sense of control, of authority. In writing The Apology, Noel had also given authority to Adrian’s memories, to his concept of self – as muddled and affected and misguided as that concept sometimes was. Yes. The letter represented a small but magnificent victory – small because it was his and his only, but magnificent because of what it meant for him, Adrian Pomeroy.

  And so he didn’t read the letter right away. He left it folded into the book’s pages. He said to his wife’s back that he was too tired to read, and then switched off the lamp so it was dark. Dark enough to curl into his mind and close in on his thoughts.

  *

  When Adrian read the letter the following morning, he cried. He cried in two ways: as the six-year-old boy he was, and as the thirty-six-year-old man that boy had led into that very moment.

  And he was thankful, because now he could begin a new process. Now he could finally let go of the grief of not knowing, and understand the relief of confession.

  *

  Adrian can still hear his brother’s battle cry: ‘I will protect you!’

  The bush cubby was the place to play attack and defence games. Noel and his mates would go down there with Adrian in tow, the younger brother who always ended up being the hostage while the older boys skirmished through the bush with sticks for guns. Adrian thought it was the best thing to hang out with the older boys and do rough stuff, and he felt a surge of pride at witnessing his brother doing anything to protect him: liberating him from the bindings, cutting the imaginary rope with an imaginary knife, picking him up from the cubby floor and running off into the bush with him to declare victory.

  When the boys got tired of imagining they went to the next level, stealing real rope from Connor’s dad’s garage and a paring knife from Glenda’s kitchen drawer. Then the games really began. Adrian could recall with clarity the grit and grain of the cubby floorboards against his face as he lay there hogtied one day, unable to move, watching the bush through the open doorway, waiting for movement, occasionally hearing the snap of a stick as Connor scoped the cubby perimeter, on the lookout for Noel.

  And on this day Noel had taken Connor by surprise, jumping from a tree and knocking Connor on the head as he landed. Connor had screamed and stormed off home in tears. Next thing Noel climbed the ladder and stood in the doorway, looking down at Adrian. They could hear Connor crunching up the path and away.

  ‘What happened to Connor?’ Adrian said.

  ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s a sook. Can you move?’

  Adrian wriggled. ‘Nope. He tied it good this time.’

  Noel looked out the window. ‘Good.’

  And just when Adrian thought Noel was going to untie the rope, he felt Noel’s hands around his waist, his fingers in the hemline of his pants, pulling down.

  That wasn’t the first or last time.

  *

  Adrian bit the bullet and told Nguyet he had to go see Noel, so he dropped her at work and headed to Parramatta.

  As he drove he tried to rehearse what he’d say, but he couldn’t think clearly. He felt emotionally stable, but he also felt the familiar heat coming up from the pit of his stomach. But he figured not knowing exactly what to say might be better – perhaps then they’d just talk like two brothers, without pretence. The more he thought about this, the more he trusted the idea.

  He parked out front of the hotel, then went in and asked at the desk for Noel’s room number. The receptionist handed over a slip of paper. He thanked her and took the lift up to the right floor. The room was just a couple of doors along. Standing outside, Adrian looked back at the lift, then at the door. He took a deep breath, reminded himself why he was there, and knocked.

  No answer.

  He waited, then knocked again.

  ‘Noel,’ he called, leaning into the door. ‘Wendy – are you guys there?’ He looked at the slip of paper again to check he had the right room.

  He then knocked again, harder this time, with more knocks. It sounded like urgency, desperation. Insistence. He realised all three applied.

  ‘Noel,’ he called again, then waited again, before turning away.

  He sat in the car while he considered what to do. He still had no phone, but he figured there was a good chance Noel might be at their parents’ place. And if not, then at least Glenda might know where he was, or they could try calling his mobile. He started the car and pulled away.

  When he arrived, Glenda was watching a movie.

  ‘Have you heard from Noel lately?’ Adrian asked her.

  Glenda shook her head, said she’d asked him to dinner last night because Wendy and the kids had left him on his own while they went to Canberra, but he had other plans. ‘I asked him what kind of plans but he said he had to go. Why?’

  Adrian shook his head as if it didn’t matter. He looked out the window to the back yard, where his dad, in his old workshop coveralls, was fiddling with
an engine part. Adrian hadn’t seen him in those coveralls for a long time. A tarp was spread across the lawn and bits of the kit car sat on it.

  ‘Is he finally going to finish that thing?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Who knows? Whatever keeps him from drinking for a while, I say.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Adrian said. ‘Listen, do you mind if I use the phone?’

  He tried Noel’s mobile but it went straight to message. He then phoned Wendy. He hadn’t spoken to her since the family dinner and the pot, and it occurred to him that maybe Wendy taking off had something to do with all this.

  ‘Wen, is there any chance you’ve heard from Noel today?’

  ‘No chance,’ she said, ‘and I think it’s better that way, to be honest. A bit of distance can only be a good thing right now.’

  ‘That bad, huh. Is it because of the other night?’

  She sighed. ‘It’s bigger than that, I’m afraid. Why do you want him?’

  ‘Just a bit worried. I think I should talk to him but I can’t track him down.’

  ‘Save yourself. I’m sure he’ll turn up soon enough. You know what they say – you can’t keep a good man down.’

  *

  Over the following two hours Adrian’s anxiety increased, and it began to rub off on his mother. Noel still wasn’t answering his mobile, so Adrian called the hotel and asked them to pass on a message when he came back.

  Wendy called back to say she still hadn’t heard from him, but that she had checked their banking records and he’d hired a car. She dismissed the suggestion that there was an issue, and said again that Noel had been disappearing like this a lot lately, but he always turned up. She said she’d let Adrian know if she heard from him.

  Glenda tried to distract herself in the kitchen, but Adrian heard her mumbling about things turning bad, about how she’d known something was going to happen. As though this unease had triggered some prophecy in his mother.

  They mentioned it to Mal but he didn’t say anything. Occasionally he’d come into the house and stand there listening – present, but not fully.

  After a while Adrian decided to drive back to the hotel, but he knew that was useless – it was more an excuse to keep moving, to keep himself from thinking that the letter wasn’t only an apology but something greater, the kind of letter loved ones never want to read. The kind of letter that provides more than one sense of closure.

  No luck.

  He waited in the hotel foyer for a while, but when he tired of that he returned home and phoned Noel’s mobile again. This time he left a message: ‘Noel, just wondering where you are. Everyone is. Call me as soon as you get this.’

  He went to the bedroom and got the letter out and read it again. He looked for clues to what he dreaded, but found nothing giving that impression.

  He called again half an hour later and left another message: ‘Noel, I’d really like to talk. I’m sorry about what happened the other night with Wendy, and you shouldn’t be angry at her. Anyway … just call me when you get this, okay.’

  The phone rang as soon as he hung up, but it was Glenda. She was getting herself fully worked up now. She said she’d called the police but they told her there wasn’t much to do at this stage except log the call. She told them Noel was a police officer but that didn’t help. ‘Then he should know how to find himself,’ the officer said.

  She asked Adrian what he thought – about what might be wrong, about whether they were overthinking things and there was nothing wrong at all – but Adrian didn’t say what he feared. He maintained optimism, casualness even, regardless of his distrust for the words coming from his own mouth. All his thoughts had become edged with a sense of threat.

  A third message, a short time later: ‘What are you doing, Noel? I mean, seriously – what the fuck?’

  After he hung up he looked at the letter in his hands and asked himself where Noel might go. Out of the whole of Sydney, where would Noel go?

  And then Adrian realised. No, he knew.

  NOEL

  After delivering the letter Noel set about getting decently stonkered in the hotel room, doing nothing except watching TV and drinking whisky – until he passed out, he hoped. But it didn’t quite go that way. First was a phone call from Glenda, inviting him to dinner, but he put on his best sober voice and tried not to say too much except that he had something on. He thought about phoning Wendy to see how they were getting on, but realised that hearing from him was the last thing she’d want. He’d pretty much done his dash there, he figured.

  Soon after, he got to watching a movie he’d heard the name of but never seen. It was about four kids who did a foolish thing and ended up in a youth reform centre for over a year. In that time a guard perceived their weakness and set about exploiting it, getting them to suck his dick and probably some other stuff too. It wasn’t shown. The movie then skipped to when the boys were men, and two of them were at a bar for a drink and a meal. Things hadn’t been that great in their lives – drugs, violence, prison. One of the men got up to go to the toilet and on the way he saw a guy sitting in a booth, eating. He knew the guy – there was instant recollection, the kind you can’t mistake. When he came back to the bar he got his mate to check the guy out and confirm what he’d seen – who they’d seen. They had guns, these two. They walked over and sat opposite the guy, and there was some vague talk and the guy had an attitude because he just wanted to eat his meal. They had to remind him who they were, who he was to them. One of the men held a gun under the table aimed at the guy’s crotch. They talked a bit more, telling the guy it was his last meal, so it was a shame to see what he’d ordered. Then the trigger was pulled.

  Noel turned it off then. He couldn’t bear to see any more.

  He screwed the lid back on his bottle and put it aside, then turned off the light and tried to sleep. The room wasn’t as black as he was used to at home, and there was traffic noise and occasional shouting from the street below. But these things didn’t affect him. If anything, they were welcome distractions, if only he could focus on them, allow them to lull him to sleep. Instead, he could only see the guy’s face from the movie – his horror at realising who the two men were, those boys who he’d made to suck and fuck, and what they now appeared as before his death – dressed in black like his death had already occurred, and in mourning for the death of the thing inside them, a death he was responsible for, all those years ago. And even though his hair was longer and he was no longer in his shiny uniform, it was as though no time had passed at all. Their deaths were as fresh as today, and would continue to be fresh tomorrow, until an end could be found – their own ends, each and every one of them. Especially his.

  As Noel lay there this horror seared his mind, and although he knew there were no men sitting opposite him with guns and there never would be – Adrian would never have what it took to point any type of weapon at him – he also knew that his letter was an invitation to sit at the table, to talk, to face each other and face off the little death Noel had delivered in their youth. And he didn’t know if he could endure that confrontation. Looking down the barrel of what he’d done. Sometimes planned, sometimes just taking advantage of opportunity. But always perpetrated by him.

  Yes, this guy’s horror was Noel’s own horror. But Noel’s was worse, because there was no bullet in that movie gun, and that blood wasn’t real. The other guy was only acting. Not like what Noel had done. Noel had no such easy way out.

  *

  He woke the next morning with remarkable clarity of mind.

  He showered and dressed, then ate breakfast over a complimentary newspaper in the hotel cafe. He returned to his room, tidied his things, then grabbed his backpack and put the newspaper, bottle of scotch, cigarettes and lighter inside, and finally his hire car keys.

  He headed north this time. Kellyville was only a half-hour drive or so, and in the Sydney of his memory Kellyville marked the end of
the urban area and the beginning of farmland and scrubby bush tracts, stretching all the way to Windsor. There had to be plenty of places for a burn.

  As he drove, he smoked and thought about not much at all. Everything was screwed to the bullshit so there wasn’t much use in thinking about anything but the houses and pedestrians he passed, on the side of Sydney he had always liked best. He recognised the streetscapes for the most part, but as he drove further he began to feel dislocated. New estates had erupted from pockets of land, crammed like tins on a supermarket shelf. And it was the same when he got to what he guessed was Kellyville: whole new residential and commercial areas stretched across the landscape, well beyond recognition.

  He shook his head but drove on. It had to finish sooner or later – the sprawl couldn’t go on forever. Yet the further he drove, the more it seemed that way, so he pulled into a side street and drove through an estate, looking at the gleaming houses, partly because he didn’t want to turn around and go back just yet, but also because he hoped he might reach a margin, that somewhere on the other side of this suburban nightmare there might be his burn time. And he did find a place, though it was more like a nature corridor, a strip of bush bordering a creek.

  He parked and got out to take a look. Houses were nearby – way closer than for any other burn he’d done – but the road between the bushland and the houses was fairly wide so he figured it would be safe enough. The biggest challenge was not being seen.

  He grabbed his backpack and headed along a concrete path, which soon became gravel, then gave way to a dirt track. The creek was dry, and there wasn’t much understorey vegetation except for dry grass here and there. None of it would suit. He kept walking until he came across another track. He saw flashes of colour through the trees, meaning he’d just about hit the other side of the corridor. Beyond that was more of the estate. He soon found a section of the creek that was lower, where the trees were thinned out and there was a good bed of long grass – wetter, but dry enough for a decent burn.