by Ron Elliott
Amis coughs to disguise his laugh. Teddy is praying. Amis looks at the ball. It’s starting to slow, tired, ready to drop. Amis hears a whimper. Across the room. Amidst all those people. Teddy is begging the ball.
Pop, the ball drops. Clicketty click, it hops and jumps and stops dead. Red. Teddy stares at the ball. Standing in a time-stopped blank buzz as the chips are raked and the winning bets are paid.
Amis is tempted ... Amis is always tempted ... to pass behind Teddy and to say, ‘Bad luck’ and be gone before Teddy can turn. But he might see him. Might recognise. It’s too soon for that.
Teddy gets into his BMW in the underground car park. The BMW is leased. About to be repossessed. On the back seat are bits and pieces from Teddy’s office. A framed business certificate. Boxes of papers. A calculator. A briefcase. A stack of business papers on the front passenger seat has spilt to the floor. Amis’s favourite object, of the flotsam of Teddy’s washed up life, is a plastic Charlie Brown toy with Best Boss on the little plaque.
A passing brakelight makes things glow red. Teddy rests his forehead on the steering wheel. He’s crying.
It occurs to him to show himself now. ‘Happening by. Are you okay?’ He steps out from the concrete pillar.
Teddy turns. Grabs something from beside him. A gun barrel. Amis stops. Should he dive? But Teddy puts the barrel under his own chin. Boom. The roof of the BMW erupts with a spray of goop. The car fills with red mist. A car alarm starts wailing. Teddy’s brain matter drips down from the low concrete roof.
Amis grinds his teeth, tasting the metal of an old filling. Where did the gun come from?
***
Daniel woke, a hand clamped over his mouth.
‘Don’t move,’ said Helen.
The clock radio showed 5.28.
‘Don’t move,’ said Helen again. ‘Until I tell you. Then move a lot.’
She took her hand away and Daniel turned. She looked stern. She ordered, ‘Take off your pants.’
Daniel was about to say, ‘What’s gotten into you,’ but Helen said, ‘If you talk – you’ll die.’
Daniel took off his boxers. The radio came on with the 5.30 news.
‘If you touch that clock, I’ll kill you.’
He kissed her. She was naked already. She pushed him onto his back. She grabbed him in the way that made him instantly hard. She climbed onto him, around him. She was already wet. He reached up and gently squeezed her nipples. She purred. She moved. He moved.
***
She lay in bed watching him as he came out of the walk-in robe and took his watch from the bedside table. She smiled, still getting a thrill out of seeing him in a suit. Very dashing. Very successful.
He saw her watching and came around the bed and bent to kiss her. A quick peck.
‘Love ’em and leave me, huh?’ she said.
He grinned, still smug from getting lucky. ‘I’m that kind of man. And late!’ He pointed an accusing finger, but didn’t mean it. Much. ‘Although the wake-up call did have a lot going for it.’
He headed downstairs.
Helen called, ‘Don’t forget the wedding rehearsal!’
No reply. He would forget. She’d phone him later. She lay in the warm musky smell of their lovemaking, allowing herself to inventory the parts of her body that were still warm, still tingling. Another news started on the radio. Six-thirty. Time to get the kids up. Christmas soon! ‘My god,’ she said to the ceiling.
***
Bradley was standing by his car looking at the river when Daniel drove up in his ute.
A Hearth & Home truck was already by the fence. It was a good time for the river and a good time to look at the outside of the hotel, the sun catching it low, making a feature of the upstairs verandas.
‘Mr Bradley,’ called Daniel. He noticed the bank man didn’t have his tie on and he pulled at his own, rolling it and shoving it into his shirt pocket. ‘You should see the river from the second floor. Beautiful.’
‘Mr Longo.’
They shook hands.
‘Come on in. Looks like some of the lads from the workshop are here.’
Daniel led him through the gate in the building site fence and up towards the old hotel. The yard was strewn with piles of bricks and stacks of white-ant-chewed wood.
‘We’ve redone all the foundations. Re-concreted under and new limestone.’
Bradley took care where he put his shiny shoes.
‘Built in 1897, it was offered to the governor of the time. He declined the gift. Now there’s a story. Anyway it became a hotel in the 1920s. And it was used as the Australia II training camp in the ’80s.’
‘Yes, yes. And your father acquired it after that and began to restore it.’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel, losing his smile. He led Bradley into the huge room at the front which had once been the main bar.
A new rosette quivered in the air as it was winched up towards the centre of the ceiling five metres above.
Daniel yelled to the ceiling. ‘How ya going you blokes? Heavy enough?’
‘Gidday boss,’ came a strained voice. It was Hua, one of the more experienced men from the factory.
Daniel said, more quietly, ‘That’s a Hearth & Home reproduction. Special cast for this one.’
Bradley looked to the dusty windows overlooking the river. The walls had plaster missing in great chunks.
Daniel said, ‘We’ve sorted the structural problems. Now it’s onto the more obvious signs of the restoration. The sexy stuff.’ Daniel went over to where a long dropsheet hung on a wall and lifted it to expose an ornate jarrah fireplace surround. He stroked the wood, watching Bradley in one of the inset mirrors.
Bradley looked up at the rosette warily as it gave another big hop and clunked to the ceiling.
‘They’ll bolt it in now. Also tie it off. We’ve replastered all the ceilings. Do the walls before we get onto the floorboards.’
Bradley looked at Daniel like he had dust in his eye. He folded his arms. ‘You realise, Mr Longo, the bank doesn’t buy real estate. Well, not individual lots.’
‘I’m not selling it.’
Nadif, one of the apprentices, came through an upstairs door and hurried down the stairs. He saw Daniel and blurted, ‘I forgot the bolt.’
‘Well, hurry mate,’ called Daniel.
Bradley said, ‘Ahh, while I am the Loans Officer, we use valuers – professionals – to ascertain collateral. It’s really nothing to do with me.’
Daniel said, ‘I don’t want another loan, Mr Bradley. I am not my father.’ Daniel closed the distance between them. ‘I wanted you to see.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Nadif!’ called Hua from in the ceiling.
Daniel repeated the call. ‘Nadif! Hua wants you.’ He said to Bradley, ‘I don’t want it to just be a file number.’ Daniel opened his arms to the fireplace, windows, soon to be replastered walls. ‘I want you to see what we’re building here. Get a feel for it. See what it is going to be.’
‘Watch out,’ called Hua, agonised.
Bradley looked up.
Daniel too. It was coming at him, the whine of wire playing out getting faster. Daniel dived, his arms out in front of him. There was a crash of splintering wood and shattering plaster.
He heard Hua yell, ‘Is everyone all right?’
He heard Nadif say, ‘Oh fuck,’ with no trace of Somalian accent at all.
***
Rosemarie’s mother attacked the keys of the organ with concentrated anger. Helen thought it sounded most like ‘Candle in the Wind’.
Russell, a kind of trendy young minister in jeans and a t-shirt, stood up the front with Brian and Rosemarie. He read quickly. ‘For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health.’
Frances squirmed on Helen’s lap in a front pew, her eyes fixed on the full-sized nativity scene that had been created near the pulpit. Helen had promised she could touch the baby Jesus when the grownups had finished practising.
&nb
sp; Russell said, ‘To love, cherish and obey, until death us do part.’
Rosemarie nudged Brian and Brian said, ‘Ah, Russell?’
He looked at the couple with a dopey smile.
Rosemarie said, ‘That’s the wrong one, Russell.’
‘Oh, yes. Quite right, Rosemarie. The new one.’
‘Yeah,’ said Brian. ‘No obeying apparently.’ He looked around at Helen, raising his eyebrows. Rosemarie elbowed him again.
Russell seemed flustered. ‘Well, looks like I need these rehearsals as much as anyone. Let me see. To love and to cherish, until death us do part. According to God’s holy law.’
They were a good couple. Brian, Daniel’s business partner, had been going out with Rosemarie since high school. They fitted. Like Brian and Daniel. Good team. Helen checked up the aisle. Rosemarie’s father sat in a pew. Her girlfriends milled. But no best man. His mobile was switched off.
Rosemarie’s mother finally found a particularly cruel combination of false notes and slammed her hands down on the keyboards in defeat. ‘You’ll have to get someone else. I can’t do it.’ She was near tears.
Rosemarie went over to reassure her, her father joining the pep talk.
‘Now?’ said Frances, very patient for a four year old.
‘Yes. But don’t pull anything off.’
Brian came over.
‘Sorry Brian.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry, Helen. Say the word and I’ll call the whole thing off for you. There’s still time.’
Brian always pretended to flirt with Helen, but she sometimes wondered about the pretend.
‘I don’t know why he missed the rehearsal. He’s usually so...’
‘Reliable? Yeah, well he had a meeting at the old ruin this morning.’
‘Perhaps if you held your wedding there or at the factory ... you might be able to get him.’
Brian gave her a raised eyebrow and Helen felt embarrassed, the nagging wife.
He smiled. ‘If you want, I’ll send him home early. Tell him he can’t play with me today.’
‘He’d just sulk. And Hearth & Home and maybe half of Europe would come crashing to a halt.’
‘That’s not a joke.’ Brian looked towards the organ, where everyone including the minister now consoled the distraught organist. ‘Maybe she can do “Jingle Bells”.’ He headed over.
Helen looked to Frances. She was standing before the stable scene, bending to look at the baby in the manger, nearly but not quite touching. They needed to be off, to get something for dinner and pick Samuel up from school.
***
Daniel turned the ute into his street, driving one-handed. The Christmas light decoration thing was definitely getting competitive. The twenty-house cul-de-sac was starting to look like Las Vegas. The old guy at the top had his whole house festooned in pinks and greens with a neon Santa coming out of his false chimney. It animated up and out, only to disappear and repeat the process. It was the only chimney in the street of air-conditioned double-storey brick and tiles.
Daniel turned into his driveway and coasted towards the garage. His house was modern too. As Brian admonished, it was not a good advertisement for Hearth & Home Restorations, rather advertising the ‘bulldoze and concrete pour’. But Helen wanted ‘things that just worked’ and they’d signed the mortgage when Frances was crawling, and watched interest rates climb steadily and house prices fall.
Daniel felt his shoulder again. They’d eventually strapped his arm at the hospital, once the car accidents and day drunks had been patched. He’d dodged the masonry but twisted his shoulder in the fall. Bradley had been particularly concerned about the dust stains on his own trousers.
The dining room table was set for two. He heard bath noises upstairs and was on his way up when he glanced into the lounge. In a wooden tub in the front bay window was a leafless twig and taped to it, in Samuel’s best seven-year-old handwriting: Xmas Tree. He smiled, wondering if he should close the curtains and hide his shame from the neighbours. Another thing on his not done to-do list.
Helen was in the spare room upstairs. The bed was made and she was clearing out one side of the built-in robe.
‘Hi.’
She kept her back to him. ‘You missed the rehearsal.’
‘So, I’m sleeping in here?’
She turned, ready to be mad, but saw his arm.
‘A house fell on me.’
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘The phone copped the brunt. And I didn’t want to lose my place in line. I was the first non-bleeding conscious person they saw.’ He looked at the bed wondering if he really was sleeping in the spare room.
‘Rosemarie’s staying over after the wedding shower. It’s here. Or have you forgotten that too?’
It was going to be one of those nights. He said, ‘My shoulder came out of the socket. Doctor shoved it back in.’ It had hurt like hell. ‘Might be ligament damage.’
He went to the bathroom and found Samuel in his pyjamas playing with Frances who was in the bath. A complicated line of dolls, tea sets and plastic soldiers was set up around the edge of the bath.
‘Hey team!’
‘Dad!’ they said together in an incandescent blaze of love that wiped out everything else in his head.
‘You’re home!’ said Frances.
‘What happened to your arm?’ asked Sam.
‘Accident. I wasn’t careful.’
‘Wow.’
Frances said, ‘Did you fall over?’ She seemed to like the idea that he could fall over too.
‘Uhuh.’
Sam said, ‘Are we still going shopping tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? Umm.’ Daniel turned to see Helen now hovering in the hall, still on his case. He turned back to the kids. ‘I promised, so yes.’
Helen came in. Said, ‘Glad I don’t have to twist your arm.’ But she was smiling. She kissed his cheek and Daniel remembered 5.28 and he smiled too.
***
The store has set up the Wiis and Xboxes and PlayStations and connected them to big flat screens so all the kids and their parents can drool over the graphics on their way to Santa’s Cave. Trent is doing a pretty good job of tasting the games. He darts in to grab the throttle of a pathetic kid and takes a few turns, shooting shit. Sharp on the computer front for a ten year old.
Amis had to insist. Sharon had tried to invoke the restraining order, her emotions still confused. They’d get way more confused when she found out Teddy wasn’t coming a courting anymore. Amis had burned his file using Teddy’s gold cigarette lighter. A momento. He wished he’d taken the Peanuts World’s Best Boss toy though. Cheap plastic mass-produced emotion, like Edward Borthwick. RIP. No suspicious circumstances. Sharon would come around.
Amis focuses. Mums are yelling, ‘Hey!’ at Trent. A chubby man steps in Trent’s way. ‘No. You go and play on another game.’
Trent starts to go, but it’s a feint. He rolls around the back of the fat man and takes the toggle from the girl again. She squawks. The man grabs Trent’s hand. ‘You mustn’t touch.’
‘Don’t touch my kid,’ says Amis.
Chubby, with glasses and a possum-faced beard, blinking at Amis, a shit-eating grin starting.
‘Get your hands off my kid.’
He lets go of Trent. Trent pushes the girl out of the way and takes over. The possum man has a striped Rivers shirt, longish shorts, loafers with no socks. Official leisure wear. Mid-level public servant for the Water Board. Brings the oranges to T-ball.
Amis raises his voice. ‘Don’t you ever touch my kid.’
Shoppers stop. Mothers shield their litters. A man in a Penguin shirt watches, not hiding it.
Possum says, ‘He was spoiling Nancy’s game.’
Amis smiles. Fun maybe. He copies Possum’s whiney voice. ‘He was spoiling Nancy’s game. You look like a bit of a Nancy to me.’ Amis moves forward. Gets in front of his face.
He blinks, looks down, backs away. ‘I ... look, I don’t want any tr
ouble.’
Shame, thinks Amis. Says quietly, ‘Run along now.’
Possum looks around. Realises everyone thinks he’s a pussy. But he can’t meet Amis’s eyes. He shuffles, grabs the girl’s hand and walks away, internalising another failure to feed his cancer or heart condition.
Amis says, ‘There you go, Trent. Don’t say I never do anything for you.’ Trent plays.
Amis turns. The Penguin t-shirt is standing next to his kids at the next console, looking. His left arm is in a sling.
‘What you looking at?’
The man looks back. No blinking here. He lets the look linger before turning to watch his boy playing.
The little girl says, ‘What’s wrong with that man, Daddy?’
‘Very grumpy, darling.’
Doesn’t try to lower his voice. Worker’s hands. Fit. The girl’s in Osh Kosh. The boy’s wearing a Quicksilver brand surf t-shirt. World their oyster. Penguin watching the kid’s game, not a care in the world. Amis now forgotten, a glitch, wrong channel, tuned back out.
Amis says, ‘Hey, Trent, let’s play this game.’
Penguin says, ‘When we finish.’ Still not turning. Physically strong maybe. Cashed-up bogan? But no suntan.
Amis says, ‘Looks like you got one of your wings clipped.’
Now he turns. ‘We’re just here to find Christmas presents. All right?’ Not afraid. But not wanting it.
‘Excuse me. But you see, I’m just here.’ Amis brings one hand up in front of him to illustrate his point. ‘And you’re just here, too.’ He brings up the other hand. He touches his fingertips together. Then apart and together more forcefully. ‘We’re both just here. And there isn’t room for both in the one spot. All right?’
Penguin nods. Can see the inevitable. He turns away and takes the girl’s arm and pushes her gently to the other side of the boy, who’s stopped playing now and is watching the men. He comes back to Amis. He changes his stance, spreading his feet, balancing his legs. When he’s set he says, ‘Fuck off.’ Smiling. Broken arm and all.
Amis smiles back. He says, ‘Come on Trent, we got things to do.’