“Send them to your father,” she said killing the mood, “he’ll know what to do with them.”
The first year was tough. Everyone at university seemed to have duxed English, and not just at small local government schools with state housing catchments, but in the western suburbs private colleges, and those with special Drama departments. I was the young recruit watching hardened veterans swagger exposed in the change room. I struggled to understand post-structuralism and literary theory and got “C’s” with depressing regularity, while mature age students chatted with tutors about patriarchal texts and read their short stories about the first time they’d had sex.
I got through it and by second year was enjoying my Journalism major and making friends. We published a fortnightly paper that went out to the surrounding suburbs, lab-testing the skills we hoped would get us a job. We’d drink and watch bands together and go down south for weekends to the beach-houses of those who’d been to private schools. At home music was my wall.
“Switch that noise down,” Mum would yell, as The Cure’s Robert Smith caterwauled his anguish from my room. She’d re-mark her boundaries early on Saturday mornings with a spiteful hoovering.
I spent the summer holidays before my final year helping Mum renovate the front room, and returned to find I had been slow off the mark. Many of my friends had lined up jobs by volunteering at newspapers and radio stations over the summer. They’d speak in self-conscious pleasure of assignments they’d been given and staff parties they’d been to. Some became cautious and distant, squirrelling away job opportunities from predators, while a few who weren’t making the grade resigned themselves to a year’s teachers’ training and jobs in school English departments. As our day passed our solidarity mutated into scorn for the next crop of student journalists.
“Not a patch on us, we were a team” we’d swagger, like battle-hardened soldiers walking past their greenhorn replacements.
As graduation approached my old insecurities resurfaced and I realised that I was no more ready for work than I had been for uni. I knew I could write, even getting some album reviews published in the campus magazine. But I didn’t have the edgy confidence of those who could phone up state ministers or department heads and ask tough questions. Whenever I interviewed someone I sounded too impressed by them, like I was going to ask for their autograph when I’d finished.
I landed a newspaper cadetship seven hours drive away in a coastal town scoured of decent trees by the wind barrelling off the southern ocean. It had that the edge of the world feeling. Mum and the boys drove down to help set up my place, a blank unit in a row of three with a melamine kitchen, two odd couches and a cheap Renoir print.
“Feels like back in Ireland,” she said of the low skies and the green that sprinkler systems can’t match. “I could live here,” she threatened while scrubbing the oven racks. They drove off, leaving me to jars of cheap pasta sauce and a sweaty editor who’d given up on journalism and personal hygiene.
“Pongo,” the two advertising and administration girls called him behind his back.
“That’s Mr Pongo to you,” he’s said once when he overhead them.
The town suited me, the kind of place hard questions didn’t get asked. It suited Pongo for the same reasons. He’d been there ten years and didn’t consider himself a local. He still called them “them”. He gave me all the bread and butter stuff; shire meetings, talking to the police after fatalities, and interviewing farmers about rainfall. I made a few friends, sharing curry nights and birthday parties with the bank staff and school teachers doing country penance, people who shared the bond of blow-ins who know their place.
“You know what we’ve got down here, don’t you?” Pongo would grunt from his seat in the pub after we’d gone to press, “farmers, fishermen, and feminists.” The feminists were the women who drove the town’s arts community, farmer’s wives with strong faces, and old hippy ladies who were all patchwork and patchouli. They were good for a front page picture story and opening night drinks to break the winter monotony. The other “f” word was footy, a Sunday ritual assigned to me. I shivered on car-lined boundaries as hammy farmers’ grappled like drunken sumos, and stringy deckhands loped through the mud, grubbering goals and popping finger joints.
“Carn, carn, pass it arsehole!” they’d yell, all hope and hatred.
I stayed a year too long and left the day I turned 25.
“Happy bloody birthday,” said Pongo gloomily over drinks, handing me a reference and a gift-wrapped bottle. He said it like I was giving up the best thing that could ever happen to me. As I shook his flabby hand I suddenly realised that he thought that it was.
“I’ll phone you,” I lied, “to let you know how I’m getting on.”
I left my unit and the town the way I had found them and drove back to Perth, too scared to look in the rear vision mirror until I reached the turn-off on the coastal highway.
“Welcome home love,” said Mum giving me a kiss as I walked in, “I cleaned your room.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Now that I’d phoned Dad I felt like the dog who’d finally caught his tail but wasn’t sure what to do next. We spoke again the next week, but it felt more forced and cautious.
“Have you got a girlfriend?” he asked suddenly.
“Sort of, yeah,” I said guardedly, “we’ve been seeing each other a year or so.”
“That’s great Robert, what’s her name?”
“Charis.”
“Charis? That’s lovely, how’d you spell it?”
“C -H -A -R -I -S, it’s Greek for grace,” I said, immediately regretting the beachhead I’d given him.
“Away on! Gracie’s a Grace,” he said.
By the time I’d hung up Charis had been invited to dinner too.
Charis took it in her stride. “All the pressure’s on him” she said, “He’ll want you to be impressed by them and them to be impressed by you.”
“He’ll be trying to impress you too, he’s like that.” Dad was like that, he’d always tried too hard to make my friends think he was funny. And maybe he was funny to them I don’t know. They laughed at his jokes and stuff, but then again so did I and I’d heard them enough times for the funny to wear off. When I was a kid I always worried about my birthday parties and whether my friends would just think he was a dag. He wasn’t there at my eighteenth or my twenty-first, so even though old family friends gave me that “there there” look when the speeches came up it was kind of a relief too.
My main problem with contacting Dad was that once again I’d allowed myself to be a spectator at my own event, something I’d recognised in Dad. There I’d been; re-enforcing pressure points and completing safety checks, then realising too late that he was pulling me in like a planet. Not deliberately though. He’d never been the controlling type, more happy to let things happen to him, than take the lead. A mate of his had once offered to fund him his own picture framing business instead of working in the printing company he’d been in since coming to Australia. Dad was great at framing and he loved it, mostly doing jobs for friends. On Saturday mornings he’d stand in the shed listening to the radio, surrounded by prints, tapestries, and gaudy oil-paintings of Thai junks that people had brought back from Asian holidays. Stuart and I would sit watching, while he mitred lengths of frame and methodically greased wood-tacks through his hair before nailing. We’d drink Milo and eat cake, the Goon Show shrieking at us in the background.
“Yes he’s good, but Phil’s no businessman,” Mum would say to anyone who’d care to listen when the subject of the business came up.
“He is a great framer,” they’d offer, looking to Dad.
“But no businessman,” she’d repeat, with a sense of closure.
Dad would protest for a minute, then puncture, sinking back into his chair leaking confidence like transmission fluid. Mum didn’t so much as sow the seed of his doubt as tend what was already there, fertilise it and point it out to visitors like a prize rose. In a ra
re attempt to break out he set up the shed with all the latest equipment, printed business cards, sat back and waited. It took the best part of two years to prove Mum right. After he left she would unroll the dozen or so prints he’d meant to frame for her over the years, but hadn’t.
How’s the saying go?” she’d ask, holding them up, “The cobbler’s family is always the worst shod?”
* * *
“Maybe you should invite your Dad over here instead,” said Judith one night, “Then you’d feel like you were in charge.”
The four of us were sitting around the table drinking a box of red, filling conversation blanks asking Trivial Pursuit questions without the board or the pieces of pie. It was an old edition with stuff like “Under which name does Victoria Adams conduct her singing career?” And everybody knows its “Posh Spice”, but nobody cares anymore.
“I think we’ll eat out for that one Jude,” said Benny “Leave it to Charis and Rob.”
“Why’s that?” asked Charis, “You afraid?”
“Too heavy. Return of the Jedi and all that!”
“What?”
“Luke, I am your father!” laughed Benny, masking his mouth with a cupped hand and breathing heavy.
“Rob’ll do fine,” said Charis.
“Be serious for a change Ben,” said Judith.
“OK! Sorry...sorry mate, didn’t mean to offend.”
Benny never meant to offend, and that’s why he was so good at it. He bristled with blond hair, intellect and attitude and I’d met him at work. I’d cut myself out of the journalism loop a long time ago, but wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do anyway. Pongo’s ghost flitted through my mind from time to time, especially when a share house or job had fallen through and I’d moved back to mum’s for a bit and was running out of money. I’d nearly phoned him once or twice and asked about any openings. Only the memory of his fuggy sweet smell and the way it gripped deeper as deadline approached stopped me. After a few false starts, I’d finally found a job as a part-time copywriter in a PR firm, filling in for maternity leave. Benny had his own office opposite.
“You’re a bloke,” he said disappointed, as we shook hands.
“But I have feminine qualities,” I said, clawing back territory.
“Well that’s more than we could say for her.” He nodded at my chair. “She only crossed over to the feminine side when she got pregnant.”
“She’ll be back in a year,” I said neutrally.
“Don’t stress,” he said like he thought I was, “she won’t be back, colic and nappies will sort her out.”
Benny and Judith got together about four months after I moved into Benny’s place.
“The mortgage is killing me,” he’d said once, looking up from an ad he was writing “You’re looking to move out of home aren’t you?”
He and his ex-wife had built in a new development that had once been a trots ground in a pre-war suburb. Now it was over-run with all-wheel-drives and cashed up thirty-somethings who were into weatherboard and pickets on the outside, and stainless steel and double showers on the inside. It was as cramped as a starting gate, and just as competitive. The old ticket booth and sign had been incorporated into the development’s entrance, as if the developers were saying “Look everyone, look how we value the past!”
I came home one day covered in cement flecks and sawdust. Benny was standing in the hall with a slim black-dressed girl in her early twenties.
“This is Judith,” said Benny as I kicked off my boots at the door, “She’s studying law and she’ll be taking the third bedroom.”
“Just Jude’ll do,” she smiled, pushing her bleached blunt-cut from her face.
“Interest rates are going up,” announced Benny, walking off to show her the rest of the house.
I got up one Saturday morning and bumped into him coming out of Judith’s room. He straightened up, looking surprised. “Don’t worry,” he yawned, regaining his composure and scratching his stomach, “You can stay, you were here first.”
* * *
The first time Charis came over she looked out of place, like an odd piece of furniture. Benny and Judith were at work and she walked around like a tourist at the Vatican, her indie look and satchel at odds with the Italian tiles, precise steel kitchen and the white stone statue of a naked woman in the courtyard. For the first time I’d ever seen she seemed ill at ease.
“Very nice,” she said in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether she was being real or not.
“It’s alright, handy to everywhere anyway.”
“Very IKEA,” she said running her hands along the benches, “Everything looks like it was bought to put where it is.”
Benny had all the trophies in his cabinet, Playstation 2, flatscreen TV, Bose stereo. His bookshelves were being over-run by DVDs, arranged in military order.
Charis thumbed her way through some of the airport thrillers, all lurid colours and big print on the jackets.
“Benny’s a good bloke,” I said, suddenly feeling like I was defending him, “Smart.”
We drove back to her place. Our relationship always felt better at her place.
“Books tell you things about people,” she said later, as we were lying on her bed listening to music, “If you want to know what someone is like, look at their books.”
“What about their music, or their DVDs?”
“They’re for escape, books lock you in, make you do the hard work.”
“Judith’s studying law, she’s bound to read,” I said.
“To do better, or to be better?” she asked.
Charis had a point. It’s not like she was smarter than Benny or Jude. They were intelligent, well educated and going places. Benny only ever bought the national broadsheet newspapers not the local rag. “The West’s a piece of shit,” he’d say on the odd occasion he brought it home for the finance section. But you couldn’t help thinking that for Benny and Judith intellect was just another commodity. If you used it the right way it could get you stuff; a nice place, a good car, a holiday, just like their good looks could get them laid That’s why their intellect looked so anaemic beside hers.
“Charis is a smart chick,” Benny said to me once driving to work together, “She could do anything she wants.”
“She is doing what she wants,” I’d said, and he gave me that look he used to give when he’d been caught out, scornful and thoughtful at the same time.
CHAPTER FIVE
We were standing at Dad and Gracie’s door when it struck me that while I’d wanted Charis to be real honest with Mum, I didn’t want her to be anywhere near as honest with Dad. Mum always punched outside her weight division and needed the odd TKO to keep her on her toes, and Charis could certainly oblige. But I had no idea where Dad was at so I was hoping that Charis would have the sense to be careful.
The wind was cool and I shivered, although it might have been nerves. At my knock Dad was going to open the door to a man after having closed it to a boy twelve years back. Our relationship had been snap-frozen and tonight a great thaw was about to begin. That was the possibility at least. I wondered what would emerge from the ice. Would something come back to life or would we be left with the putrefaction of something that had died a long time ago?
“Here goes,” I whispered. Charis squeezed my hand and I knocked on the door.
It opened quicker than I’d expected. The smell of curry barged past us and into the night air.
Dad stood there. Balder. Smaller. Older.
“Hello man, this is my dad,” said the little girl standing holding his leg. Lauren.
He looked awkward in the way he always had. His handshake was gentle, not like a Dad’s.
“Hello son,” he said looking at me intently like he was checking to see how I’d aged, “And you must be Charis.”
“Hello Mr McEvoy,” she said kissing him on the cheek, and holding out the bottle of wine. “And this is Lauren?
“Lauren Penelope McEvoy,” she announced gravely.
“Beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” said Charis kneeling down to her level. I liked her even more for doing that. She didn’t have to do that, but she had anyway.
“Dad says I look like mum.”
“Come in, come in,” Dad said vaguely, as if he’d only thought of it.
We walked in and Gracie and Jesse were standing there like on parade.
“Smell’s good,” said Charis, handing Gracie the flowers.
“Welcome, I’m Gracie,” she said, leaning back as Charis went to give her a peck on the cheek. Her handshake was cool and firm.
“And Jesse?” Charis asked. He nodded wide-eyed.
“Drinks?” queried Dad drowning, “A beer? Wine? Orange?”
“So Robert,” said Gracie, “Did you find the place easily enough?”
“No trouble at all,” I said, as Dad handed me a glass.
It had been no trouble because I’d driven past their place about six times in the weeks leading up to dinner. On the last occasion Gracie and Lauren had been standing out in the garden and I experienced for just a second the stalker’s dilemma, brief satisfaction followed by that familiar insatiable urge. I only just resisted going round the block again. I’d remembered Gracie as slim that day back in court eleven years ago, but middle-age and kids had filled her out. Her blond hair was ashy and pulled back. Lauren was laughing and playing with a doll’s pram. Now in these first awkward exchanges I felt like the kid who pretends he’s surprised on Christmas morning, even though he’d sneaked a peek at his presents in the cupboard. I wondered how Dad had felt the first time he saw her, maybe like all his Christmases had come at once.
We ate three types of curry and bright yellow dahl with spicy naan bread. Each time I took something Dad kept looking to me, searching for responses. I’d nod or smile.
“Enjoying yourselves?” he asked.
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