by Ian Wedde
‘How is Fay?’ says Nancy, still looking at me. Her top lip dabs a smidgen of Irish and she holds the vapour of it in her mouth with her lips pursed.
‘She’s in Bali,’ says Geordie. ‘Frank was just telling us. There’s this organic resort on top of a mountain, with monkeys.’
‘They add value, you, ou.’
‘The monkeys?’ says Nancy. ‘Now that’s novel. Round here it’s the double glazing. So I hear.’
I open the paper, very slowly for dramatic effect, to page two.
‘With an ape on the inside,’ adds Nancy for good measure.
I take a sip myself. I can feel that endorphic pulse between crop and gut starting to find the beat.
My role at the School is to tell stories. Geordie’s is honesty, Frank’s is cynicism, and Ratchet’s the savant. Nancy’s there from time to time to tell us we’re all full of shit.
‘Let me tell you about the man who built this fucking house.’
Because I’m not going to tell them about the piano, nor about my mother’s hair, I tell them about the time my father, Martin Klepka, the well-known interior and landscape designer and sometime architect, took his clothes off and jumped into the sea at Point Jerningham at the turn-around point in our leg-stretch, saying he’d race me back to the band rotunda, me on land, him swimming. Off he went, those wiry arms smashing furiously into the water ahead of him, a churning wake flying up behind him, but with little enough forward movement. I loitered about on the footpath to keep an eye on him but also to give him the chance to beat me.
I wasn’t a kid anymore, I’d have been sixteen going on seventeen. I was old enough to know there was something wrong about my father’s crazy energy and old enough to match it with what was happening to me, which was sex. The jaw-churning way my father ate, how he reached for more food to put on his plate, the greedy way he leaned into conversations and consumed them, the high colour that lit up his face, his protruding eyeballs, not to mention the mad zest with which he mowed the rectangular lawn at the back of the house, getting the nap into straight light and dark tracks and then sitting with his legs spread drinking a beer with his stringy bag of bollocks hanging out the leg of his shorts—he might as well have been fucking all the time. He didn’t embarrass me because I was his favourite and I didn’t care what he did. But there was no way I was going to bring a girlfriend home. I saw him trying it on once with one of Sandy’s in the back of a minibus going out to a big barbecue wedding in a Wairarapa vineyard. I saw the look on Sandy’s face—the ridges across his forehead made him look as if he was clenching his brain.
‘So who won?’ asks Nancy, thinking she knows the answer.
‘Hard to tell,’ I say, sidestepping the image of Sandy’s anguish. ‘He had a heart attack. Mine’ll be the fishburger thanks, Nancy, go easy on the tartare. And I’m still in the house.’
There’s an ahem kind of silence while Ratchet corrects the coasters and Nancy heads for the kitchen with umbrage stiffening her shoulders.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ says Frank, taking a pull on his beer. It disappears down his throat into the jungle below and he looks at me with an expression that says he’s not.
‘Oh, he didn’t have it then.’ I enjoy the dishonest moment. ‘The heart attack, though we had to fish him out.’
‘“The Red Cube” cube, ube,’ yells Ratchet suddenly. He’s quoting the newspaper article, disrespectfully, given that a moment’s silence for my father would be appropriate. But he gets agitated when the world and his line of inquiry are out of phase.
‘He packed it in about a year later. Only sixty. Then was the time to check the odds-on winners. In the Red Cube stakes, you might say.’ I want to keep this light but I’m feeling some pressure, not as much as Ratchet but even so. The Red Cube aka Der rote Würfel. Farkas Molnár project for a single family house, 1922. It had yellow and blue bits as well though this aspect of the concept didn’t get as far as Mount Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand. I already know that Farkas barely rates a mention in the article my brother ventriloquised through the compliant DomPost arts reporter, because the dishonest, revisionist piece of shit spoiled my breakfast earlier.
Funny thing about history. Marty never minded admitting most of his ideas came from ‘the empty telephone exchange’, though not in Molnár’s case because he was never there. But big brother Sandy feels a need to transform my father’s provenance indifference into sentences in which the word ‘original’ is repeated with guilty frequency, as if writing it often enough is all that’s needed to establish the Martin Klepka brand and with it the Martin Klepka fucking brand-value and with that the social distinction and cultural capital of those who bought into Marty’s shtick. And with that the resale value of the highly original Red Cube, not referred to in the article as Der rote Würfel because as my brother the distinguished cultural historian knows very well that would light a quick fuse all the way back to ‘the empty telephone exchange’, which wasn’t empty at all. Not at least until it was emptied that day in 1933 when a bunch of people were rounded up but not Sandy’s highly original father Martin Klepka.
‘Der rote Würfel,’ I say, hearing it come out aggressively. I see Ratchet’s brain come within a hair’s-breadth of making him lose it and start shouting ‘Cunt!’ or something. But he hangs in there and repositions his glass on the coaster. I see Frank put two and two together but not get a figure he can make sense of.
Maybe I should have flagged lunch today.
Geordie puts his finger on the picture of my red house on page two of the paper. It already has the tell-tale ring of a wet glass on it. I look at the bony finger and then at him until he says what he’s thinking.
‘They want you out.’
They?
I fill their glasses. Pretty steady hand considering. ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Here we are, quality minds meeting for lunch and conversation, and you’re behaving like a pack of hyenas circling something dead.’
‘But is it true?’ says Geordie. ‘Just tell us, and we’ll talk about something else.’
‘But what?’ says Frank. ‘Can you think of anything? My mind’s gone blank.’ It hasn’t of course. It’s putting the red house on page two into a matrix of location, Government Valuation, Consumer Price Index and buyer profile. ‘And what’s a verfel in plain English?’
‘Würfel-el-el,’ says Ratchet in what sounds like a correcting voice, but he’s only chasing the word into his brain.
Frank is looking peevishly at the tube of Ratchet’s mouth shaping the foreign word. He’s deciding to wind him up. The atmosphere at our table has soured.
I feel close to Ratchet. We’ve known each other a very long time. At high school he was mainstreamed and tormented. His torment-name was Rat Shit but the protective rage of his crew turned that around. Now it describes accurately what makes him special. His neurotransmitters rattle straight to overdrive. I know what that feels like, for a different reason. And most of what I know about brains comes from Ratchet’s.
What Ratchet mostly does is read. I’ve watched him in the public library, a place we both like though for different purposes. He sits at a table with three or four books to his right and one open in front of him. The finished ones end up to his left. I don’t know what kind of hell it is that makes him need exact calibrations of distance between himself and the left and right books, but in between them is a heaven of equilibrium. Ratchet positions a book in line with the direction of his gaze and then begins to turn the pages with his left hand while his right hand keeps the book steady. This is because he just turns the pages one after another. If you sit opposite him and watch his eyes, you see that they shift from left to right taking in whole pages without traversing the lines. Ratchet can get agitated if the book shifts while he’s scanning but mostly he keeps it together. Every so often he’ll say some words, from the page in front of him you’d think, in a funny robotic voice.
I hear the robot voice today in the Cambridge Sports Bar when Ratchet suddenly shouts, �
�Der rote Würfel-el-el!’ Of course it’s in that impossible brain. He just needed a few seconds to track it down. Then some kind of synapse link flared up like a match struck in a dark room or in an empty telephone exchange for that matter and he had it or had something, what exactly who knows. Ratchet mostly reads maths and physics hence his obsession with supersymmetry. It would be a short path from there to the symmetrical arrangement of cubes by the likes of Farkas Molnár. If their concepts are anything to go by most of Farkas’s modernist cronies weren’t many clicks away from Ratchet in the obsessive stakes.
‘Christ,’ says Frank, looking at Rachet with exaggerated pity. ‘Not you too.’
Ratchet’s staring at me and blinking in sets of three. He’s found a short piece of detached string, not the knotted-together answer to everything.
‘Würfill, fill, ill,’ he says in his normal voice. The clue’s a dead-ender.
‘We hear you,’ says Geordie.
Then there’s a silence. We hear that too. I close the newspaper. Geordie opens it again and taps the house. Ratchet positions our glasses on the corners of the page. Up on the TV monitor the drone of a race commentary accelerates, crescendos and diminuendos. Nothing of consequence, not yet but later, and then the question of who’s a winner and who isn’t will be front and centre.
Just to shut the fuckers up.
‘When my father died everything went to my mother. She didn’t want the business and sold it. That left the house and money in a trust. When she died her kids all had the right to stay in it but the last one out had to sell up and divvy the proceeds. Has to.’ I raise my glass. ‘Still half full.’
‘One third-ird-ird,’ says Ratchet, always on to it.
I’m going to have my work cut out getting back on side with Nancy. She delivers our plates of lunch and leaves again without banter. The School eats its food glumly, eschewing the usual conversational cut and thrust. We make the small talk we have a cast-iron rule against. It’s the house on page two that’s responsible for this dullness.
‘The last time I remember a spring this wet was in . . .’ Frank can’t remember when it was this wet so he fills his mouth and chews ponderously, as if ruminating a great conceptual cud.
‘Two thousand and eleven-ven-en,’ says Ratchet, arranging his fries.
‘And it’s playing havoc with the house market again.’ If this is Frank trying to open a line of conversation, I’m going to have business elsewhere.
‘Would that be supply-side or demand-side, Frank?’ Geordies’s eyes duck out from under his eyebrows for just long enough to see me glance at the TV monitor.
‘Nancy’s daughter’s up the duff again, it was a bloke on a bike,’ I say, and unless anyone else can match that it’s the conversation stopper. But then, just for good measure and because the mention of bad weather makes me think of him, I add, ‘Doesn’t stop that retard I told you about, the one with the toy mower.’
‘What doesn’t?’ Frank hates losing command of the narrative.
‘The rain, Frank,’ I say. ‘The unusually wet spring. Nor does the poor little bugger much concern himself with real estate.’
Ratchet has his fries in groups of three and is concentrating on polishing them off in an orderly manner.
In the distance (but not too far away) I can glimpse the lights of my triumph. They resemble the warm interior lighting tones of The Honeysuckle, the warm skin tones of Native Bush, and the warm sounds of words like shabu-shabu, yaha, lovey dovey and meow meow. Now that’s what I call wet weather.
But first things first.
Frank wipes his mouth and throws the napkin on the table. His work’s conveyancing and he gives me a long look before deciding to leave it at that.
‘“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”, William Blake. Good afternoon, gentlemen.’
‘Yep-yep-yep,’ says Ratchet. I’ve no idea what he has to get away to—the library probably. He’ll be looking up the Würfill-fill-ill. He and Frank head for the door. Geordie gets up too but goes to the bar for another jug.
‘Come off it, Mick,’ he says, topping us up. ‘Stop being a spoiled brat. What’s eating you? You’re twitchier than a . . .’
That’s when I see the TV monitor above us run the field and the current odds for the Trentham 5.45. I’m giving it my full attention. Geordie’s knuckley hand lands on my arm a bit heavily.
‘Sell the fucking thing,’ he says. ‘Move on.’
Move on.
Final Touch, Xanadu and Burgundy are still lit by that secret glow, the tiny burning Bibles, my prophet’s cheeks collapsing on the intake of the oracular smoke, a hiss of tyres on wet asphalt as some things stay put and others move on, and the trigger in my chest fires again as I pour the whole glass down and look Geordie in the eye.
‘Christ, Micky, you’re not. Tell me you’re not doing another cross-green putt.’
I forgive Geordie his mixed sporting metaphor and I forgive him his impertinent solicitude. He plays golf for small change and keeps fit. But I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of saying I’m not wrong this time. Nor inviting him to stay in the pub drinking on me until they run the Trentham Telegraph at 5.45 just so I can say, See?—and fall down drunk with righteousness. My afternoon nap is calling but there’s something I want to say to Geordie first.
‘Let me tell you about the man who built that house,’ I begin again.
Geordie looks at me patiently. His eyes are only a bit watery with beer. He’s in great shape even though he looks like a strip of biltong. Of all the members of the School I know he’s the one who can understand the difference between what happens when you excite the brain by running and when you bewilder it with so-called rational thought and all those appurtenances that rational thought utters such as Marcel Breuer fucking chairs—just to settle on the example that comes quickest to mind. He and I both understand that anything worth knowing comes from old places in the brain that we whip into obsession and that reality is nothing of the sort.
‘Steady on, Micky,’ says Geordie, though I haven’t said anything yet.
‘Okay, forget it,’ I say. ‘Tell me something interesting.’
He looks at me for a wee while. He knows where I’m headed. But he doesn’t know about the tidal pull of whatever dream I might be having when I finally get back to the house for my afternoon nap.
Geordie opens his mouth.
‘No, hang on,’ I say. It’s true I’m grinding my teeth and want to punch someone but there’s only the wiry little bloke across the table from me and I like him. ‘Let me tell you something about the man who built that house.’
Geordie shakes his head slowly from side to side. He’s leaving his glass alone but I down mine and pour another.
‘The man who built that house liked what he called his afternoon nap. Us kids knew about it on weekends. When we were old enough we understood that it meant fucking. Our mother of course but apparently not always. In our house. There was a fair bit of that sort of thing went on in those days.’
‘Not where I come from,’ says Geordie. ‘He’d have had the back of a frying pan across his head. What, didn’t your mother mind?’
‘She didn’t leave him. Didn’t belt him with kitchenware either.’ Of course that doesn’t answer the question. Nor does it answer the question Geordie’s decided not to ask after all.
‘“Why, all at once, this renewed interest in your father?”’ I mimic Geordie’s Scouse accent.
His head goes on one side, like a wee bright-eyed parrot. ‘You tell me.’
The bar’s filling up with the punter crowd, newspapers are folded open to the racing pages, there are betting slips and copies of Best Bets getting wet on the tables and a steady procession of coughing and hacking smokers is going out the door and back in again. What are the triggers that set us off on trajectories that, most days, we have little enough trouble talking ourselves out of? I don’t even like how this goes down yet here I am plugged into the mainframe.
‘Okay, let me guess,’ says Geordie patiently. ‘It’s that newspaper article, no?’
‘It pisses me off.’
‘And that’s all it takes for you to chuck, let me guess, quite a lot of money down the drain? You’re a stupid fucker, Mick. What is this, revenge? Let it go, man.’
Revenge.
‘No,’ I say. Being cared about is one thing, being patronised another. ‘It’s about opening up limitless possibilities of action. Intelligence without thought.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ says the little squirt opposite me. His watery eyes have slitted up.
I put my glass down carefully and walk out into the hissing of tyres on wet asphalt, a baggy grey gaberdine sky, that gritty wind from the north lifting plastic bags into the air. What a dreary shithole this is. I know what I need and I also know that I’m going to have to wait a bit longer for it. The little green man turns red at the lights and I cross at the half-trot just as the traffic gets moving. Horn honks and at least one angry ‘you stupid what the fuck’.
One little blue Zopiclone will give me three hours’ sound sleep. They say you don’t dream but that’s bullshit. I have time to spot a good lungful of smoke too before I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror looking at the skinny, hairy guy with his big purple knob in his hand. His face clenches in a grimace that could be from pain or disappointment, his come surges sluggishly into the handbasin, and when I turn away and head for the bedroom there’s a strange event like a toothache in my left temple and an upward surge of nausea in my chest.
I like this room because it faces the back of the house and the bare space where the lawn used to be. The concrete that’s there now was screed off to a slick surface that shines after rain, as today, and drags in warmth when it’s sunny as will be the case again sooner or later, and the only maintenance required now that the grass has gone is an occasional hose-down which I like to do with no shoes on, the concrete warm on the soles of my feet and the water cool on their tops, the idle pleasure of directing the jet of water at leaves blown into the yard from the neighbouring houses and the dusty muck that accumulates out of air that seems to be falling down all around me rather than just filling up the space everything’s in, even the stuff that’s not here anymore.