The fresh, bright intensity was gone, replaced by the faded and familiar resignation. The mention of Bevan brought the immediate flooding back with a pang. Bevan: the microwaved dilemma that had overtaken the drawn-out pressure cooker problems of our family. We walked on.
“Besides son,” he added, puffing by now, “I’m sure Charis meant well.” He was started to work up a sweat in all this humidity.
“What did you think of the wedding?”
“It was nice. Vicki seems a nice girl.”
So that was it. Charis had meant well. Vicki seemed a nice girl. Dad couldn’t possibly know enough to know if either of those things was true. Maybe he was playing his usual role - peacekeeper, when what the situation required was a peacemaker. Again without saying anything we turned the corner - the hospital loomed, steam pouring from the air-conditioner ducts on the roof like smoke stacks on a steam-ship. The SS Death. We lapsed into a silence, punctuated by Dad’s breathing.
“My asthma - gets to me on days like this.” He took out his puffer and inhaled. “My car’s over there,” he gasped between puffs, “Think I’ll keep going.”
“Not coming in to say bye?”
“Yer jokin’.”
“Course I am!”
He laughed – a bitter laugh – then coughed. “See you son. I’ll come in and see Bevan this week.”
“Let me know when.”
“Aye, will do.”
He walked off still wheezing. I watched the car suck in his short frame, then walked back towards the hospital, past the smokers’ second shift, and on into the foyer. Mum was coming out. We stopped near the doorway.
“Charis?” I asked.
“Gone home.” Her voice was flat and tired. “On the bus. A while ago. I’ve just been up to say goodbye to the happy couple.”
“I was coming back you know.”
“She wanted to catch the bus. Your father?”
“Gone home too.”
“Home is where the heart is.” A simple aphorism - but deadly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Lauren and Jesse.”
Mum looked too tired to care. Her face was worn. I noticed the beginnings of a hump on her back. Age and hurt had ramped up the PSI of the air surrounding her until the pressure had become too much.
“Charis filled me in - on everything.”
“Everything?”
“Robert,” she said quietly, moving to the side of the door as a group of teenagers walked in, one with a bloodied nose and a cut face, “Do you think for one minute I’d want our Bevan to owe his life to one of them?” It was a strong voice from a strong place. the same place that had propelled her over the edge of a dark flowing river to save me all those years back. “Do you think I want the very life I created with him tainted with the life he created with her? Can’t I have something that he can’t take away from me?” She wasn’t even close to crying.
“Gracie wasn’t happy about it either.”
“Why would she be? Heaven forbid her happy little life gets interrupted!”
“But what if the transplant doesn’t take?”
“Then we’ve tried our best. I’ve tried my best. I’ve tried my best for all of you. For Bevan, for Chris, for you, even for Stuart - though goodness knows he’ll never thank me for it.”
“We all know that Mum, we’re grateful.”
“Then maybe you should act grateful, instead of treating me like someone you tolerate.”
The sudden explosion of a stray rain-shower scattered the smokers outside, drops drumming like stones on the foyer overhang. Orderlies and nurses poured in the doorway like they were on their way to an Ebola outbreak, staining the air with expletives and smoke from their interrupted drag.
“I’ll come over tomorrow morning Mum.” I had to talk loudly over the noise, “Come to the hospital together.”
“Aren’t you working with Chris?”
“I’ll cancel.”
“You don’t need to, I can come in on my own.”
“Accept it Mum, just for once in your life.” I immediately regretted my cheap attempt to take back the high ground. She didn’t bite.
“Okay, Robert, come over. Around ten-thirty, I’ll make you a cuppa.” I gave her a kiss goodbye and she hugged me, patting the same shoulder Dad had put his hand on. Mingled DNA. Mingled or tainted.
Mum walked through the doors and was gone. I went back towards the cafe, before changing my mind and scooting down a stairwell and out another entrance onto Wellington Street. I ran a red light and then on into Northbridge, where the same smell of rain that had purged the air of sex, vomit and beer, purged the day’s toxins from my brain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Day Fifteen was the day that we found out that Bevan was going to die. Day Fifteen. Fifteen days from the day of the bone marrow transplant. The day of the transplant is Day Zero. More like Ground Zero. Bevan’s body had been subjected to medicine’s scorched earth policy. All traces of leukaemia gone. All traces of immunity gone. A tabula rasa; blank, exposed, and expectant.
Day One is a mingling of grief and optimism. It is the President’s Address to the Nation. It is the start of a New World Order: It is the descent into anarchy. The doctor had told Mum that the next two weeks were critical.
“This time next week and you’re cell count will be up,” Vicki had said, her voice as shiny as the wedding band on her finger, “You’ll be getting out of here in no time.”
“I still feel like shit,” Bevan had said.
In the fortnight till that point Mum and Vicki had been tag-teaming at the ward. Dad had come in once or twice when he was sure that Mum had left and Vicki’d taken over. He looked a chastened man. If I was there when he came we’d talked, but not like on our walk. Chris and I worked hard to finish a house.
“I want it done in a fortnight,” said Chris the day after the wedding. I’d spent a large part of the time sanding new flushing, the fine talc making me choke even with a mask. Each day I’d come home and blow the white clag out of my nose, wiping my tear ducts clear of the powder.
“Why a fortnight?” I’d asked, “Owners moving back in?”
“No, I just want it done in a fortnight.” We worked grimly, clanging and cursing with the radio off. We put up cornices and painted walls, the building equivalent of eye-liner and concealer. Someone came and sanded and polished the floorboards.
Day Fifteen, we were finished. The early forties professional couple were really pleased. Everything was how they wanted it. Everything was going to be how they wanted it for a long time. Life was going to be better now. They were going to be better now. They were going to be able to do the things that their small forties house with its old crappy green kitchen had never let them do. Their home had improved. They had improved.
Day Fifteen. We were packing the last of the ladders on the Hilux’s roof-rack when Chris’s mobile phone rang. He walked away from the car. He spoke softly. The owners were still telling me how good it was. How good we were. How it was what they’d always wanted. I was watching Chris.
“Fuck,” he’d said quietly, putting his phone back into his pocket, and coming back over. The man gave Chris a cheque like Chris’d won it.
“28 thousand,” he said proudly. His wife stood next to him like some game show chick.
“Good to do business with you,” said Chris, shaking his hand. He never said thank you. He said it was demeaning. “Why should I thank ‘em? They’re not doing me a favour,” he’d always say.
“Fuck,” he muttered getting into the car. “Fuck,” he said, smiling and waving at the happy couple as the engine’s torque trembled under our seats.
“Bevan?” I asked. It had to be.
Silence. The radio moratorium extended to the car. At least it meant no inane comments or lame jokes from inane, lame DJs. Chris pulled into my place. He switched off the engine and we sat in the driveway a while. Silence.
“Whose going to bloody fix houses with me now?” he said eventually.
He stared out the window. “Fuck!” He made it sound like grief. Tradesmen can make it sound like anything. Surprise, anger, humour, amazement. This was grief.
“I’ll help you out when I can,” I said, not adding the “after.” I wondered what after would look like. Chris managed a grin.
“Not hurting your feelings or nothing, mate, but you can’t give me the type of help I need.”
“You’re as useless as tits on a bull,” Chris or Bevan would half- laugh, whenever I stuffed something up on site, coming over to inspect the damage. “Bull-tits” they sometimes called me. They say everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, but Chris and Bevan never felt the need to test that theory on me.
I knew what Chris needed; someone who instinctively knew to measure twice before cutting; someone who knew the angle a roof beam needed to be; someone who could measure a quantity and haggle over prices when ordering wood. I didn’t fix houses. I could only help someone who did. Chris fixed houses. Bevan fixed houses. And in the future Chris would have to fix them without Bevan.
‘Who’s going to fix houses with me now?” Chris leaned over and put his arm around me; a very unChris thing to do. “Fuck,” he whispered, the quietest, most mournful expletive I’d ever heard: a zip-drive concealing a gigabyte of emotion.
* * *
Day Fifteen. The day that I decided to phone Charis. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since “The Unfortunate Incident at Hospital Cafe.” She’d phoned me at home a few times and left messages. Benny said she’d been round once or twice, but I must have been out. Why I held out on her I have no idea.
“She’s a great chick,” Benny had said once, after I’d listened to one of her messages, “Snap her up again before someone else tries to.”
Before you try to, I’d thought, looking at his crocodilian eye pulsing in time with the answering machine’s red light. But even the thought of Benny trying it on with Charis didn’t push me to contact her. It took Day Fifteen.
I’d walked inside after giving Chris a sort of half-hug which had broken the spell. He’d sat up and wiped his arm over his eyes before driving off to wash up and go to the hospital. I assumed Mum was already there. I went inside and phoned Charis. She knew.
“Hi Charis, it’s me.”
“Bevan?”
Silence from me.
“I’ll come over.”
I lay on my bed waiting. The phone rang. I let it. Mum.
“Rob, if you’re there, pick up. Hello? Listen love, I’m at the hospital. If you want to come with me, phone me before five.” Her voice was love and grief and stress.
* * *
Day Fifteen felt like bits of different days cobbled together to make a twenty-four hour period. I lay on my bed waiting for Charis to turn up. Ivan Ilyich plagued my mind. Could Bevan be thinking like Ivan? Was Bevan asking himself, “Can it be true, that it is death?” Did Bevan ever think like that? Does anyone think like that? Did Ivan Ilyich even ask that of himself or did Tolstoy just put words into a dying man’s mind; words that a dying man would never think? How could Tolstoy possibly know since he himself was not dying when he wrote it? Did Tolstoy ask that of himself on his death bed or did he just curse and demand morphine? There is an aloneness to death that those who are not dying have no right to infuse with meaning.
I lay there, memories tumble-weeding through my ghost-town mind. I remembered Skylab. Dad once took me to the museum to see a piece of the American space station that had crashed in Western Australia in the late seventies. Skylab was in a glass cabinet; a huge chunk of blackened twisted metal. A heavenly body lying in state in a see-through backlit coffin, surrounded by obituaries: charts and articles from newspapers from all over the world.
“Everyone knew about Perth that day,” Dad had said, as we paid our respects. I remembered talking about it at school for weeks before it crashed. Skylab had started to die. It had lost its orbit and NASA had alerted the world that it was in a terminal trajectory and that it was going to crash over the water somewhere near WA. Maybe even in WA itself. We’d all had been very excited and nervous. Songs were written about Skylab. People placed bets on where it would land. A lot of it burned up on re-entry of course, but bits of it made it through. Bits like that crumpled, burnt Coke can in the museum had burst through the fiery furnace. They’d showered the city in a celebration of bright shrapnel, before hurling themselves, spent and exhausted into the fallow paddocks out in the eastern wheat-belt.
“A farmer found this one,” Dad had said, “He won a prize for it.”
* * *
The doorbell. I woke from a doze. Still Day Fifteen. It must be Charis. I got up, still in my work clothes and smelling stale. She hugged me on the doorstep. We stood there, her Red Door smell overpowering the building site.
“I’m sorry.” she said, and I knew she meant she was sorry for everything.
“So am I,” I said stepping out in faith, stroking her hair with my work-raw hands. She held on. She knew I meant for everything too.
“He’s got days,” I said.
She kissed my cracked lips.
“Hector and Doris say hi.”
“How’s Doris?”
“Getting there. She says you can’t kill a weed.”
“I’ll get over to see them soon.”
“I’m doing their shopping tomorrow. You can come with me if you like.”
It felt normal again. Domestic. As if the last few weeks of non-contact, and all the crap about Dad and Gracie was distant and remote, merely the memory of pain long after the pain is gone. I felt a surge of guilt at the relief. Here on Day Fifteen, the day Bevan’s trajectory had become terminal, some things dared to still seemed good and right and true.
“Want a cuppa?” I asked, letting her go as we both went inside.
“Got my green tea bag,” she smiled, dangling it like a lure.
“Hippy tea? When’d you get onto that?”
“Recently.”
Recently meant in the interim. The small period of down-time in which construction of Charis still went on, but I’d had no say in the building material. It’s a wonder that people get together at all. Twenty to thirty years of preparing our own site works is abandoned as someone else comes in and says “How about we do it this way?” There was a whole foundation ready for a completely different type of building before Mr or Miss Right came along. A break-up is like a wrecking ball that reduces the building to rubble, leaving the foundations painfully exposed. That’s why some people take off for that year in London they were always going to do, or if they can’t afford that, cut their hair short, or throw out their entire wardrobe. “I’m putting up my own building now,” is what they’re really saying.
“Can Mum come in with me to pray for Bevan?” Charis asked, straining the tea-bag out with a spoon and putting it in the sink.
“In English?”
“Of course in English,” she smiled, “What did you expect? Swahili?”
“You know, with your Mum.”
“No,” she said, as if taunting me to say it.
“The funny speaking thing.”
“Ah, the tongues of men and angels. Tongues is for private edification only,” she said, as if she were reading it off a pamphlet.
“She’s done it with me.”
“She knows you.”
“What’s she saying when she does it?” I sipped my coffee and looked at her over the top of the cup. Charis looked at me evenly over the top of hers.
“I don’t know Rob. What I do know is that God is taking those words of hers and making sense of them, applying them to whoever Mum is praying for.”
“You really believe that, do you?”
“Course I do.”
“Maybe she should pray in tongues for Bevan then, get God to do something for him.”
“What if what God wants for Bevan is different to what we want for Bevan?” She straightened up and put her cup down on the draining board, as if signalling how serious she was about it.
/> “What’s that supposed to mean? That God wants Bevan to die?” It came out really angry. Day Fifteen hit me across the back of the head. Charis came over and held me again. This time the perfume mingled with my work smell, souring with it rather than overpowering it.
“I don’t seem to know what God wants anymore,” she said quietly.
“Who knows what he wants, maybe Bevan’s just pissed him off or something.”
“If God thinks like that then we’re all in trouble.” She pulled away slowly enough to let me know it wasn’t because of what I’d said. “You need a shower. Can’t go into the hospital smelling like an armpit.”
“I need to get some food too.”
“I’ll make you a sandwich,” Charis opened the freezer and took out the bread, setting two frozen slices up against each other like a little tent. “Toasted ham and cheese?”
Benny was leaning on the breakfast bar talking with Charis when I came back out. He had a beer in one hand, and my toastie in the other.
“Charis is making you another one,” he said, washing down a mouthful.
“Has Charis told you? We’re on our way to the hospital. Bevan’s transplant didn’t take.”
“Yeah Charis said. Shit mate, that’s terrible.” He said it the way a golfer says it when his playing partner misses a short putt. What else do people like Benny say in the face of death? So much his energy and focus is spent on life; his life. The rest of us are like dogs and should content ourselves with crumbs from the master’s table. Benny was being as sorry as he could be given who he was and what he was like.
“Anyway, we’d better go.” Nerves squeezed into my stomach, making my heart pound. I grabbed my keys and wallet off the kitchen bench. I wondered what might happen in our lives before I got to put them back down there again. It’s these rituals we take for granted; picking up keys, turning them in the door lock, starting the car. We never know when we will do these things for the last time, or at least for the last time in the world as it has been. Before some seismic shift turns the world on its head.
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