‘What?’ Charbel said.
‘I don’t know. What?’
‘What?’
Francis didn’t say any more; that was about all he had for now. They were back to silence. Jesús picked at his chips and yawned. Francis poured a bit of VB into his waxy Burger King cup and sipped it. He picked up his whopper and shoved it in his mouth.
Jesús had fallen asleep at the table. His arms were folded across his chest. The only way Francis could tell he wasn’t dead was because of his snoring, just loud enough so that he could hear it when the kids at the table next to them stopped screaming. Charbel always looked so awake, as if his big round eyes might pop out of his shaved head and move across the room if he had to keep sitting there. He never seemed to get tired. He was slurping down his VB like he didn’t care who was looking. He didn’t look at Francis. He looked around the restaurant. He was busy surveying the scene. Francis looked beyond his head to the woman at the table behind him who was reaching into her handbag over and over again and pulling out handfuls of the odd crap women keep in their bags, lipsticks and tissues and breath mints. She dropped it all onto the surface of the table.
Charbel looked up at Francis and gave him an oversized smile. He held a couple of chips covered in tomato sauce in his fat hands in front of his face. ‘So what’s up with your fuckin’ dad?’
Francis wasn’t sure where to start answering that question, and, to be fair, the two of them had been having the ‘what’s up with your fuckin’ dad?’ talk for years. Each one of their dads was the most fucked up, depending on the time, the year, whatever they were doing to piss them off. Jesús never talked about his dad. They all knew he was probably dead. They all knew it had something to do with politics and Chile and why he had grown up here with his mum and no one else, but none of them knew how to talk about it.
And anyways, Francis was tired of this conversation. He’d had it too many times with his sister who was always calling up demanding answers, as if there was some sheet of facts he was hiding from her.
‘Don’t know. Same old shit I suppose. Or different shit but same shit anyways.’
‘My dad says he saw your dad on CCTV throwing rocks at Lot 185.’
‘Yeah, that’s probably him.’
‘Serious. Only didn’t report it on account of you and your family and plus he feels real bad for your dad about everything that’s happened but you gotta get ya dad to stop doing it, he’s got enough problems, right? Doesn’t need any more.’
Charbel looked at Francis, looked at him hard. Not in an aggressive way but in a way that said he meant business. It was a warning from Charbel’s family to his. Sometimes Francis thought everyone’s just the same, like in high school, where Charbel got to call all the shots because he was so loud and so confident and Francis only got to be that guy who followed him around all the time waiting for some of that slickness, that easy way of being in charge, to rub off on him a little.
‘No worries. I’ll just do something about that. Don’t know what but somethin’. Embarrassing shit, that is.’
‘What?’ Jesús was suddenly awake. He licked his lips, pushed his thick black hair behind his ears, wanted to know what they were going on about.
‘Francis’ dad.’
‘Yeah, I know. Rock-thrower. Remember how pissed he was when he had to pick us up from the police station that one time, back ages ago, when we was in school?’
Francis was hoping that Jesús would stop there and he did. He got distracted by a blonde in hot pants slinking by their table. Jesús stared at her for a while. He nodded slightly at her and smiled his boy-band smile whenever she turned slightly his way. Charbel looked at Francis and they smiled a half-smile at each other that said they both knew the other was still pissed.
Francis was glad that Jesús didn’t go any further. He didn’t want him to say anything to Charbel about watching his dad last night. Francis had decided not to talk about it with anybody. He and Jesús had watched it silently, and then walked on to Collectors without talking about it afterwards. And besides, they were drunk and maybe it wasn’t what it looked like. After his dad had walked out of the house, his mum had turned up the music and Clare had grabbed their retarded uncle and started to dance. That’s just what those two were like, but Francis couldn’t stand it, all that fakeness, so he’d left too, out that same back door his father had left through, and then Jesús had followed. They’d all followed each other because none of them ever really knew what to do next.
Charbel picked his cigarettes up off the table and they followed him outside. They sat on a bench near the arcade and smoked. There were two small Chinese girls with pigtails and dresses that were too pink and had too much lace. They looked something like four and six. It made Francis dizzy, watching them passing a ball that lit up and sparkled back and forth, back and forth. He looked at Charbel, lying against the bench, surveying the scene, like he owned all the concrete he was looking at. He probably did. His family had been steadily buying up the neighbourhood for years now. It was starting to get on Francis’ nerves, just like it got on his father’s. He couldn’t say exactly why it bothered him so much.
Jesús inhaled deeply on his cigarette, leaned his arms against his thighs and let out a heap of smoke. Five feet away from them, an old woman sat on a milk crate outside a two-dollar shop like someone had washed her and set her out there to dry.
Charbel rolled up the sleeves of his thin black cotton blazer and looked at his big-arse metal watch. Francis wondered where he had been all night. Everyone he hung around, including his father, was living a kind of half-life and you never knew which half you were seeing. They kept smoking and Francis waited for both of them to say they had to piss off somewhere. Francis was always the last to leave. He had a thing about it, about staying till the end. It made him feel like he was better than everyone else in some way, like he had this kind of commitment to things, even things that meant nothing and no one else could match it.
‘Gotta head,’ Jesús said and Charbel nodded and looked at his watch again.
‘Same.’
Charbel was probably off to have Sunday lunch with his family but he’d never admit to doing ordinary things that everyone else does. Both Jesús and Francis nodded at him, slowly, like everyone in the room knew he wasn’t any more important than shit, then Jesús was off too, following not so far behind him, and Francis was left on the bench still smoking the same cigarette.
He just sat there, looking, trying to shake the fog out of his head. Francis hoped his mum wouldn’t be home when he got home. He didn’t want to have any kind of real conversation with anyone today. Clare would call him later. He would make a point of not answering until she’d called him for a few days in a row, and then he’d make up some kind of excuse neither of them would find believable, and everyone’d just get on with it.
For a few minutes, while he was looking, he thought he saw his dad in front of the chemist. There was a man with the same kind of navy-blue slacks and long-sleeved collared top his dad always wore outside of work. He had the same thinning grey hair on the back of his head and he was leaning against a cane, looking at the specials in the window. He knew though, knew absolutely that it wasn’t his father. After watching his dad last night he knew better this new shape of his. He knew which way he leaned into his cane, how he paused for a long time before he made any moves. He’d realised, for the first time since the accident, just how different his father’s body had become. Even as he got older, his father had always been such a strong man, his body shaped by many years of hard labour, he still had muscles in his arms that made the sleeves on his shirts look slightly too tight. Francis didn’t know where all those muscles had gone now, they seemed to have melted back into his skin.
He didn’t even know if his father knew they’d been following him the night before. They hadn’t even tried to make it look like they weren’t behind him. Francis and Jesús had stopped every block or so, sat on someone’s fence, had a smoke, while his da
d stopped and looked at a house. It had gone on like this over and over again: his dad walked slowly, looked at every house like he’d never seen it before, stopped for a little while at some, for a longer time at others, just stared and stared. Some of the places had seemed to piss him off if he looked at them too long. That’s when he’d start having a conversation with no one they could see, not loud, just low and quiet like he was conspiring or maybe he was just talking to himself, who knows? And sometimes, something had pissed him off so much he’d get to destroying things. Not much, a rock thrown at a window, a paling on a wooden fence kicked until it cracked. The thing was, watching his dad, you could tell he was trying to fuck something up in a serious way but he couldn’t move so fast anymore and even though the cast had been taken off his arm he couldn’t really throw anything with much force, it had all just made him look kind of pathetic and that was really what made Francis feel empty – not that his dad wanted to fuck things up, but that he couldn’t do it properly. That was kind of tragic in itself.
9.
Early Sunday evening. The neighbourhood smelled of meat roasting over coal barbeques. Rose was standing in the back of Lucy’s garden at the far left edge of the yard near where Lucy had, years ago, built a discreet gate into the fence between their houses and Antonio had, after much debate, agreed to let it stay there.
Rose watched as Lucy painted the guttering of her house in a pale blue. She had watched Lucy build her place for years, watched it grow slowly from one room to five, watched its colour palette expand from white to include the creams and blues she used now. Lucy was the only woman Rose had ever known who never got married, who used a tool-belt, who just was who she was.
Blue. Cream. White. Lucy had gotten better at things over the years. Flecks of colour no longer ended up in the blades of grass on her lawn. Antonio could no longer find as many reasons to be critical.
Rose looked at Lucy and thought that in some other life she would like to be her, or at least to inhabit her skin for a little while. They had been at some point like half-lovers, the way that women can be when they are young. They had lived together way back when they both started working at the hostel.
For two years then, they’d shared a one-bedroom flat in a brown-brick rectangle of an apartment block behind the hostel. The walls had been white, they’d had a Bunsen burner, a kettle, a couple of mattresses and chairs, Rose’s prized poster of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. They used to go to the dance halls in Fairfield on Saturday nights and they’d hung out with Lucy’s relatives at the Polish Club on Sunday afternoons. There’d been no place in the world more exciting than where they were.
Back then, Rose went shopping and ate dinner and gossiped and did everything with Lucy while she waited for a blinding and furious kind of love to arrive, like women always had in movies. She hadn’t met Antonio by accident: she’d moved all the way to the outskirts of the city so that she could be found like Cary Grant found Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
The first time she met Antonio he was standing out in the yard of the hostel.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
Rose had watched him hold words in his mouth until he let them come out fully formed. She’d liked the sweet formality of his speech. At first she’d thought he was one of those men that meant nothing by their talk but later she’d understood that he was reserved, that living in hard places had taught him to hold things back.
But now, she watched as Lucy climbed halfway down the ladder and paused to look up at her work from another angle. After all these years, Lucy still had hair the colour of butter, still wore it in a ponytail drawn tightly at the back of her head. She wore a loose collared blouse over grey slacks and petite brown loafers. Next to her, the house looked enormous.
When she got to the bottom of the ladder she turned around and looked at Rose as if she’d expected to see her standing there all along. She gave Rose the kind of weak smile you give another person when someone they know has died, and then said, ‘Right, come in.’
Rose followed her through the back door and into the kitchen where Lucy went through the same motions she always did. She got the black tray from the side of the fridge, filled a pot with tea and placed several biscuits onto a plate. Then they walked in silence from the kitchen to the front living room. Lucy still had that newspaper article sitting framed by the front door. She had pointed out the child she once was to Rose, but Rose couldn’t remember her amongst those masses of children smiling and waving from the deck of the ship. What a different person Lucy might have been back then, when she was a nervous child in a new country, a resident of Villawood Migrant Hostel herself long before she had worked there.
They sat out on the plastic chairs on the small verandah where they could watch the main street. This was how it went. They needed to talk, but talking always happened outside of houses. They sipped their tea, waited, watched those women with the knee-length skirts and the handkerchiefs on their heads walk their children down to worship at the empty house down the street.
‘He’s gone,’ Rose said, and Lucy nodded her head, shrugged her shoulders, took another sip of tea. Her gestures said this was expected.
On the street, a grown man rode a child’s BMX past them. He looked enormous and awkward on such a small thing. His bony legs extended like chicken wings with the meat eaten off on either side. Lucy looked at the man on the bike like he might have an answer and said, ‘Do you think there’s something else wrong with him? You know, like, more wrong than his usual wrong?’
Lucy had never hidden the fact that she thought Antonio was slightly unhinged. It had never bothered Rose that Lucy thought this way. It just made Antonio more attractive to her. It gave him a bit more of an edge. But the kind of edge it gave him wasn’t nearly as attractive in his older age. Not when you were looking forward to things finally becoming slower. Now it just made him surly and pensive the way he resisted going softly, giving in to age.
‘I don’t know. Retirement? It’s that thing that men go through, you know, when they don’t feel useful anymore.’
‘Hmmm…’ Lucy tapped her nail against the edge of her teacup and nodded. ‘But what about you? No good for you, him taking off in the middle of the night.’
Truth was, Rose still wasn’t so sure where he was, but she was sure he wouldn’t be that far away. These days, he just orbited the neighbourhood, he was out driving the streets or walking around the shops, or he was at one of the clubs or the library. He never invited her.
‘But what am I supposed to do?’ This was the question that no one seemed able to answer for her.
‘Talk to him.’ Lucy said it like it was that simple and then looked out to the street where the lights had just gone on and shrugged her shoulders at no one. Talk. They both knew Antonio wasn’t that sort of man. It was probably why Lucy and he had never gotten along very well. They both were who they were, and there was no talking them out of it.
‘Or you could move in with me.’
Rose had already done that a few times over the years. It always felt like going backwards. She looked away from the street and back into Lucy’s house through her front window to where the television she had left on silent was beginning to throw a weak coloured light against the lounge room walls. In the corner of the room Lucy’s image of the Black Madonna hung there staring at the television set. As soon as Rose forgot that Lucy had come from some different country, there it was again, same as the one that hung in the hall at the Polish Club where they had danced all those years before.
‘Look, look,’ she heard Lucy say, quietly, almost in a whisper. When Rose turned her head back to the street, there he was, Antonio, on the other side, walking slowly, leaning his good arm on his cane and pausing every once in a while to look off down the street. He didn’t look their way, not even for a minute.
Rose watched him walk in a diagonal across the street and to their house next door, watched him search his pockets for the key, same way he’d done for the last thirty
years. He finally found it and opened the door.
Lucy and Rose just sat there on those plastic chairs until the sun had set, until the neighbourhood had settled itself for the night. Across the road, the red glow of lanterns came from everywhere and nowhere. The sky was almost full up with moon. This time of year the nights were meant to be getting shorter, but it felt like the nights out here got longer all the time.
‘I suppose I should go home.’ It wasn’t clear if Rose was asking a question or making a statement.
‘Up to you,’ Lucy pulled her legs up onto her chair, wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘I’m going to go inside though, make some dinner, you’re welcome to join.’
Really, Rose didn’t want to do anything. Mostly, she’d just like to sit there and not have to make any decisions about anything ever again.
‘No I suppose I should go home.’
Lucy got up, walked herself back into the house and Rose followed her through to the back garden. It was something of an unspoken habit that they both always entered and exited each other’s houses through the gate in the backyard. Lucy, with one hand on Rose’s back, opened the gate for her. ‘You know where I am,’ she said, and kissed Rose on the cheek before Rose walked through, silent and alone.
In her own backyard Rose looked at the house she had known for such a long time and thought that it looked unfamiliar. The back porch light she always kept on was off. The blue light that seeped out between the small cracks of the venetian blinds said that he was watching television.
There was the smell of overripe tomatoes in the garden. The watermelon vines were wrapping themselves around the lettuces and choking them to death. When the heat came there would be too many flies.
When she entered through the back door he was sitting on the recliner. The back of his head just slightly above the top of the chair, his left arm hung over the side, he held a bottle of beer loosely by the neck. Rose announced her presence by letting the screen door slam shut.
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